An American Idyll | Page 9

of overalls and odds and ends, using
the largest cooking utensil for boiling what was boiled, and all the food
tasted of Ivory soap for two days; but we did not mind even that. And
then, after three weeks, back to skirts and collars and civilization, and a
continued honeymoon from Medford, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington,
doing all the country banks en route. In Portland we had to be separated
for one whole day--it seemed nothing short of harrowing.
Then came Seattle and house-hunting. We had a hundred dollars a
month to live on, and every apartment we looked at rented for from
sixty dollars up. Finally, in despair, we took two wee rooms, a wee-er
kitchen, and bath, for forty dollars. It was just before the panic in 1907,
and rents were exorbitant. And from having seventy-five dollars
spending money a month before I was married, I jumped to keeping
two of us on sixty dollars, which was what was left after the rent was
paid. I am not rationalizing when I say I am glad that we did not have a
cent more. It was a real sporting event to make both ends meet! And we
did it, and saved a dollar or so, just to show we could. Any and every
thing we commandeered to help maintain our solvency. Seattle was
quite given to food fairs in those days, and we kept a weather eye out
for such. We would eat no lunch, make for the Food Show about three,
nibble at samples all afternoon, and come home well-fed about eight,
having bought enough necessities here and there to keep our
consciences from hurting.
Much of the time Carl had to be on the road selling bonds, and we
almost grieved our hearts out over that. In fact, we got desperate, and
when Carl was offered an assistant cashiership in a bank in Ellensburg,

Washington, we were just about to accept it, when the panic came, and
it was all for retrenchment in banks. Then we planned farming, planned
it with determination. It was too awful, those good-byes. Each got
worse and harder than the last. We had divine days in between, to be
sure, when we'd prowl out into the woods around the city, with a picnic
lunch, or bummel along the waterfront, ending at a counter we knew,
which produced, or the man behind it produced, delectable and cheap
clubhouse sandwiches.
The bond business, and business conditions generally in the Northwest,
got worse and worse. In March, after six months of Seattle, we were
called back to the San Francisco office. Business results were better,
Carl's salary was raised considerably, but there were still separations.
CHAPTER IV
On July 3, the Marvelous Son was born, and never was there such a
father. Even the trained nurse, hardened to new fathers by years of
experience, admitted that she never had seen any one take parenthood
quite so hard. Four times in the night he crept in to see if the baby was
surely breathing. We were in a very quiet neighborhood, yet the next
day, being Fourth of July, now and then a pop would be heard. At each
report of a cap-pistol a block away, Carl would dash out and
vehemently protest to a group of scornful youngsters that they would
wake our son. As if a one-day-old baby would seriously consider
waking if a giant fire-cracker went off under his bed!
Those were magic days. Three of us in the family instead of two--and
separations harder than ever. Once in all the ten and a half years we
were married I saw Carl Parker downright discouraged over his own
affairs, and that was the day I met him down town in Oakland and he
announced that he just could not stand the bond business any longer.
He had come to dislike it heartily as a business; and then, leaving the
boy and me was not worth the whole financial world put together.
Since his European experience,--meeting the Webbs and their kind,--he
had had a hankering for University work, but he felt that the money
return was so small he simply could not contemplate raising a family

on it. But now we were desperate. We longed for a life that would give
us the maximum chance to be together. Cold-bloodedly we decided that
University work would give us that opportunity, and the long vacations
would give us our mountains.
The work itself made its strong appeal, too. Professor Henry Morse
Stephens and Professor Miller of the University of California had long
urged Carl to go into teaching; and at last we decided that, even if it
meant living on husks and skimmed milk all our days, at least we
would be eating what there was to eat