The next two weeks were filled with vicissitudes. The idea was for Carl
to settle the little family in some rural bit of Germany, while he did
research work in the industrial section of Essen, and thereabouts,
coming home week-ends. We stopped off first at Bonn. Carl spent several
days searching up and down the Rhine and through the Moselle country for
a place that would do, which meant a place we could afford that was fit
and suitable for the babies. There was nothing. The report always was:
pensions all expensive, and automobiles touring by at a mile a minute
where the children would be playing.
On a wild impulse we moved up to Clive, on the Dutch border. After Carl
went in search of a pension, it started to drizzle. The boys, baggage,
and I found the only nearby place of shelter in a stone-cutter's
inclosure, filled with new and ornate tombstones. What was my
impecunious horror, when I heard a small crash and discovered that Jim
had dislocated a loose figure of Christ (unconsciously Cubist in
execution) from the top of a tombstone! Eight marks charges! the cost of
sixteen Heidelberg sprees. On his return, Carl reported two pensions,
one quarantined for diphtheria, one for scarlet fever. We slept over a
beer-hall, with such a racket going on all night as never was; and next
morning took the first train out--this time for Düsseldorf.
It is a trifle momentous, traveling with two babies around a country you
know nothing about, and can find no one to enlighten you. At Düsseldorf
Carl searched through the town and suburbs for a spot to settle us in,
getting more and more depressed at the thought of leaving us anywhere.
That Freiburg summer had seared us both deep, and each of us dreaded
another separation more than either let the other know. And then, one
night, after another fruitless search, Carl came home and informed me
that the whole scheme was off. Instead of doing his research work, we
would all go to Munich, and he would take an unexpected semester there,
working with Brentano.
What rejoicings, oh, what rejoicings! As Carl remarked, it may be that
"He travels fastest who travels alone"; but speed was not the only thing
he was after. So the next day, babies, bundles, baggage, and parents
went down the Rhine, almost through Heidelberg, to Munich, with such joy
and contentment in our hearts as we could not describe. All those days
of unhappy searchings Carl had been through must have sunk deep, for in
his last days of fever he would tell me of a form of delirium in which
he searched again, with a heart of lead, for a place to leave the babies
and me.
I remember our first night in Munich. We arrived about supper-time,
hunted up a cheap hotel as usual, near the station, fed the babies, and
started to prepare for their retirement. This process in hotels was
always effected by taking out two bureau-drawers and making a bed of
each. While we were busy over this, the boys were busy over--just busy.
This time they both crawled up into a large clothes-press that stood in
our room, when, crash! bang!--there lay the clothes-press, front down,
on the floor, boys inside it. Such a commotion--hollerings and
squallings from the internals of the clothes-press, agitated scurryings
from all directions of the hotel-keeper, his wife, waiters, and
chambermaids. All together, we managed to stand the clothes-press once
more against the wall, and to extricate two sobered young ones, the only
damage being two clothes-press doors banged off their hinges.
Munich is second in my heart to Heidelberg. Carl worked hardest of all
there, hardly ever going out nights; but we never got over the feeling
that our being there together was a sort of gift we had made ourselves,
and we were ever grateful. And then Carl did so remarkably well in the
University. A report, for instance, which he read before Brentano's
seminar was published by the University. Our relations' with Brentano
always stood out as one of the high memories of Germany. After Carl's
report in Brentano's class, that lovable idol of the German students
called him to his desk and had a long talk, which ended by his asking us
both to tea at his house the following day. The excitement of our
pension over that! We were looked upon as the anointed of the Lord. We
were really a bit overawed, ourselves. We discussed neckties, and
brushed and cleaned, and smelled considerably of gasoline as we strutted
forth, too proud to tell, because we were to have tea with Brentano! I
can see the street their house was on, their front door; I can feel
again the little catch in our breaths as we rang the bell. Then the
charming warmth and color of that Italian home, the charming warmth and
hospitality of that white-haired professor and his gracious, kindly
wife. There were just ourselves there; and what a momentous time it was
to the little Parkers! Carl was simply radiating joy, and in the way he
always had when especially pleased, would give a sudden beam from ear to
ear, and a wink at me when no one else was looking.
Not long after that we were invited for dinner, and again for tea, this
time, according to orders, bringing the sons. They both fell into an
Italian fountain in the rear garden as soon as we went in for
refreshments. By my desk now is hanging a photograph we have prized as
one of our great treasures. Below it is written: "Mrs. and Mr. Parker,
zur freundlichen Erinnerrung--Lujio Brentano." Professor Bonn, another
of Carl's professors at the University, and his wife, were kindness
itself to us. Then there was Peter, dear old Peter, the Austrian student
at our pension, who took us everywhere, brought us gifts, and adored the
babies until he almost spoiled them.
From Munich we went direct to England. Vicissitudes again in finding a
cheap and fit place that would do for children to settle in. After
ever-hopeful wanderings, we finally stumbled upon Swanage in Dorset.
That was a love of a place on the English Channel, where we had two
rooms with the Mebers in their funny little brick house, the "Netto."
Simple folk they were: Mr. Meber a retired sailor, the wife rather worn
with constant roomers, one daughter a dressmaker, the other working in
the "knittin" shop. Charges, six dollars a week for the family, which
included cooking and serving our meals--we bought the food ourselves.
Here Carl prepared for his Ph.D. examination, and worked on his thesis
until it got to the point where he needed the British Museum. Then he
took a room and worked during the week in London, coming down to us
week-ends. He wrote eager letters, for the time had come when he longed
to get the preparatory work and examination behind him and begin
teaching. We had an instructorship at the University of California
waiting for us, and teaching was to begin in January. In one letter he
wrote: "I now feel like landing on my exam, like a Bulgarian; I am that
fierce to lay it out." We felt more than ever, in those days of work
piling up behind us, that we owned the world; as Carl wrote in another
letter: "We'll stick this out [this being the separation of his last
trip to London, whence he was to start for Heidelberg and his
examination, without another visit with us], for, _Gott sei dank!_ the
time isn't so fearful, fearful long, it isn't really, is it? Gee! I'm
glad I married you. And I want more babies and more you, and then the
whole gang together for about ninety-two years. But life is so fine to
us and we are getting so much love and big things out of life!"
November 1 Carl left London for Heidelberg. He was to take his
examination there December 5, so the month of November was a full one
for him. He stayed with the dear Kecks, Mother Keck pressing and
mending his clothes, hovering over him as if he were her own son. He
wrote once: "To-day we had a small leg of venison which I sneaked in
last night. Every time I note that I burn three quarters of a lampful of
oil a day among the other things I cost them, it makes me feel like
buying out a whole Conditorei."
I lived for those daily letters telling of his progress. Once he wrote:
"Just saw Fleiner [Professor in Law] and he was _fine_, but I must get
his Volkerrecht cold. It is fine reading, and is mighty good and
interesting every word, and also stuff which a man ought to know. This
is the last man to see. From now on, it is only to _study_, and I am
tickled. I do really like to study." A few days later he wrote: "It is
just plain sit and absorb these days. Some day I will explain how tough
it is to learn an entire law subject in five days in a strange tongue."
And then, on the night of December 5, came the telegram of success to
"Frau Dr. Parker." We both knew he would pass, but neither of us was
prepared for the verdict of "_Summa cum laude_," the highest
accomplishment possible. I went up and down the main street of little
Swanage, announcing the tidings right and left. The community all knew
that Carl was in Germany to take some kind of an examination, though it
all seemed rather unexplainable. Yet they rejoiced with me,--the
butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker,--without having the least
idea what they were rejoicing about. Mrs. Meber tore up and down Osborne
Road to have the fun of telling the immediate neighbors, all of whom
were utterly at a loss to know what it meant, the truth being that Mrs.
Meber herself was in that same state. But she had somehow caught my
excitement, and anything to tell was scarce in Swanage.
So the little family that fared forth from Oakland, California, that
February 1, for one year at Harvard had ended thus--almost four years
later a Ph.D. _summa cum laude_ from Heidelberg. Not Persia as we had
planned it nine years before--a deeper, finer life than anything we had
dreamed. We asked Professor Miller, after we got back to California, why
in the world he had said just "one year in Europe."
"If I had said more, I was afraid it would scare you altogether out of
ever starting; and I knew if you once got over there and were made of
the right stuff, you'd stay on for a Ph.D."
On December 12 Carl was to deliver one of a series of lectures in Munich
for the Handelshochschule, his subject being "Die Einwanderungs und
Siedelungspolitik in Amerika (Carleton Parker, Privatdocent,
California-Universität, St. Francisco)." That very day, however, the
Prince Regent died, and everything was called off. We had our glory--and
got our pay. Carl was so tired from his examination, that he did not
object to foregoing the delivery of a German address before an audience
of four hundred. It was read two weeks later by one of the professors.
On December 15 we had our reunion and celebration of it all. Carl took
the Amerika, second class, at Hamburg; the boys and I at Southampton,
ushered thither from Swanage and put aboard the steamer by our faithful
Onkel Keck, son of the folk with whom Carl had stayed in Heidelberg, who
came all the way from London for that purpose. It was not such a brash
Herr Doktor that we found, after all: the Channel had begun to tell on
him, as it were, and while it was plain that he loved us, it was also
plain that he did not love the water. So we gave him his six days off,
and he lay anguish-eyed in a steamer-chair while I covered fifty-seven
miles a day, tearing after two sons who were far more filled with
Wanderlust than they had been three years before. When our dad did feel
chipper again, he felt very chipper, and our last four days were
perfect.
We landed in New York on Christmas Eve, in a snowstorm; paid the
crushing sum of one dollar and seventy-five cents duty,--such a jovial
agent as inspected our belongings I never beheld; he must already have
had just the Christmas present he most wanted, whatever it was. When he
heard that we had been in Heidelberg, he and several other officials
began a lusty rendering of "Old Heidelberg,"--and within an hour we were
speeding toward California, a case of certified milk added to our
already innumerable articles of luggage. Christmas dinner we ate on the
train. How those American dining-car prices floored us after three years
of all we could eat for thirty-five cents!