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American Idyll: The Life of Carlton H. Parker

<h2>CHAPTER XVII</h2> One of the days in Seattle that I think of most was about a month before the end. The father of a great friend of ours died, and Carl and I went to the funeral one Sunday afternoon. We got in late, so stood in a corner by the door, and held hands, and seemed to own each other especially hard that day. Afterwards we prowled around the streets, talking of funerals and old age. Most of the people there that afternoon were gray-haired—the family had lived in Seattle for years and years, and these were the friends of years and years back. Carl said: "That is something we can't have when you and I die—the old, old friends who have stood by us year in and year out. It is one of the phases of life you sacrifice when you move around at the rate we do. But in the first place, neither of us wants a funeral, and in the second place, we feel that moving gives more than it takes away—so we are satisfied." Then we talked about our own old age—planned it in detail. Carl declared: "I want you to promise me faithfully you will make me stop teaching when I am sixty. I have seen too much of the tragedy of men hanging on and on and students and education being sacrificed because the teacher has lost his fire—has fallen behind in the parade. I feel now as if I'd never grow old—that doesn't mean that I won't. So, no matter how strong I may be going at sixty, make me stop—promise." Then we discussed our plans: by that time the children would be looking out for themselves,—very much so,—and we could plan as we pleased. It was to be England—some suburb outside of London, where we could get into big things, and yet where we could be peaceful and by ourselves, and read and write, and have the young economists who were traveling about, out to spend week-ends with us; and then we could keep our grandchildren while their parents were traveling in Europe! About a month from that day, he was dead. <hr style='width: 45%;' /> There is a path I must take daily to my work at college, which passes through the University Botanical Garden. Every day I must brace myself for it, for there, growing along the path, is a clump of old-fashioned morning glories. Always, from the time we first came back to teach in Berkeley and passed along that same path to the University, we planned to have morning glories like those—the odor came to meet you yards away—growing along the path to the little home we would at last settle down in when we were old. We used always to remark pictures in the newspapers, of So-and-so on their "golden anniversary," and would plan about our own "golden wedding-day"—old age together always seemed so good to think about. There was a time when we used to plan to live in a lighthouse, way out on some point, when we got old. It made a strong appeal, it really did. We planned many ways of growing old—not that we talked of it often, perhaps twice a year, but always, always it was, of course, together. Strange, that neither of us ever dreamed one would grow old without the other. And yet, too, there is the other side. I found a letter written during our first summer back in Berkeley, just after we had said good-bye at the station when Carl left for Chicago. Among other things he wrote: "It just makes me feel bad to see other folks living put-in lives, when we two (four) have loved through Harvard and Europe and it has only commenced, and no one is loving so hard or living so happily. . . . I am most willing to die now (if you die with me), for we have lived one complete life of joy already." And then he added—if only the adding of it could have made it come true: "But we have fifty years yet of love." Oh, it was so true that we packed into ten years the happiness that could normally be considered to last a lifetime—a long lifetime. Sometimes it seems almost as if we must have guessed it was to end so soon, and lived so as to crowd in all the joy we could while our time together was given us. I say so often that I stand right now the richest woman in the world—why talk of sympathy? I have our three precious, marvelously healthy children, I have perfect health myself, I have all and more than I can handle of big ambitious maturing plans, with a chance to see them carried out, I have enough to live on, and, greatest of all, fifteen years of perfect memories—And yet, to hear a snatch of a tune and know that the last time you heard it you were together—perhaps it was the very music they played as you left the theatre arm-in-arm that last night; to put on a dress you have not worn for some time and remember that, when you last had it on, it was the night you went, just the two of you, to Blanc's for dinner; to meet unexpectedly some friend, and recall that the last time you saw him it was that night you two, strolling with hands clasped, met him on Second Avenue accidentally, and chatted on the corner; to come across a necktie in a trunk, to read a book he had marked, to see his handwriting—perhaps just the address on an old baggage-check—Oh, one can sound so much braver than one feels! And then, because you have tried so hard to live up to the pride and faith he had in you, to be told: "You know I am surprised that you haven't taken Carl's death harder. You seem to be just the same exactly." What is seeming? Time and time again, these months, I have thought, what do any of us know about what another person feels? A smile—a laugh—I used to think of course they stood for happiness. There can be many smiles, much laughter, and it means—nothing. But surely anything is kinder for a friend to see than tears! When Carl returned from the East in January, he was more rushed than ever—his time more filled than ever with strike mediations, street-car arbitrations, cost of living surveys for the Government, conferences on lumber production. In all, he had mediated thirty-two strikes, sat on two arbitration boards, made three cost-of-living surveys for the Government. (Mediations did gall him—he grew intellectually impatient over this eternal patching up of what he was wont to call "a rotten system." Of course he saw the war-emergency need of it just then, but what he wanted to work on was, why were mediations ever necessary? what social and economic order would best ensure absence of friction?) On the campus work piled up. He had promised to give a course on Employment Management, especially to train men to go into the lumber industries with a new vision. (Each big company east of the mountains was to send a representative.) It was also open to seniors in college, and a splendid group it was, almost every one pledged to take up employment management as their vocation on graduation—no fear that they would take it up with a capitalist bias. Then—his friends and I had to laugh, it was so like him—the afternoon of the morning he arrived, he was in the thick of a scrap on the campus over a principle he held to tenaciously—the abolition of the one-year modern-language requirement for students in his college. To use his own expression, he "went to the bat on it," and at a faculty meeting that afternoon it carried. He had been working his little campaign for a couple of months, but in his absence in the East the other side had been busy. He returned just in time for the fray. Every one knows what a farce one year of a modern language is at college; even several of the language teachers themselves were frank enough to admit it. But it was an academic tradition! I think the two words that upset Carl most were "efficiency" and "tradition"—both being used too often as an excuse for practices that did more harm than good. <hr style='width: 45%;' /> And then came one Tuesday, the fifth of March. He had his hands full all morning with the continued threatened upheavals of the longshoremen. About noon the telephone rang—threatened strike in all the flour-mills; Dr. Parker must come at once. (I am reminded of a description which was published of Carl as a mediator. "He thought of himself as a physician and of an industry on strike as the patient. And he did not merely ease the patient's pain with opiates. He used the knife and tried for permanent cures.") I finally reached him by telephone; his voice sounded tired, for he had had a very hard morning. By one o'clock he was working on the flour-mill situation. He could not get home for dinner. About midnight he appeared, having sat almost twelve hours steadily on the new flour-difficulty. He was "all in," he said. The next morning, one of the rare instances in our years together, he claimed that he did not feel like getting up. But there were four important conferences that day to attend to, besides his work at college. He dressed, ate breakfast, then said he felt feverish. His temperature was 102. I made him get back into bed—let all the conferences on earth explode. The next day his temperature was 105. "This has taught us our lesson—no more living at this pace. I don't need two reminders that I ought to call a halt." Thursday, Friday, and Saturday he lay there, too weary to talk, not able to sleep at all nights; the doctor coming regularly, but unable to tell just what the trouble was, other than a "breakdown." Saturday afternoon he felt a little better; we planned then what we would do when he got well. The doctor had said that he should allow himself at least a month before going back to college. One month given to us! "Just think of the writing I can get done, being around home with my family!" There was an article for Taussig half done to appear in the "Quarterly Journal of Economics," a more technical analysis of the I.W.W. than had appeared in the "Atlantic Monthly"; he had just begun a review for the "American Journal of Economics" of Hoxie's "Trade-Unionism." Then he was full of ideas for a second article he had promised the "Atlantic"—"Is the United States a Nation?"—"And think of being able to see all I want of the June-Bug!" Since he had not slept for three nights, the doctor left powders which I was to give him for Saturday night. Still he could not sleep. He thought that, if I read aloud to him in a monotonous tone of voice, he could perhaps drop off. I got a high-school copy of "From Milton to Tennyson," and read every sing-songy poem I could find—"The Ancient Mariner" twice, hardly pronouncing the words as I droned along. Then he began to get delirious. It is a very terrifying experience—to see for the first time a person in a delirium, and that person the one you love most on earth. All night long I sat there trying to quiet him—it was always some mediation, some committee of employers he was attending. He would say: "I am so tired—can't you people come to some agreement, so that I can go home and sleep?" At first I would say: "Dearest, you must be quiet and try to go to sleep."—"But I can't leave the meeting!" He would look at me in such distress. So I learned my part, and at each new discussion he would get into, I would suggest: "Here's Will Ogburn just come—he'll take charge of the meeting for you. You come home with me and go to sleep." So he would introduce Will to the gathering, and add: "Gentlemen, my wife wants me to go home with her and go to sleep—good-bye." For a few moments he would be quiet. Then, "O my Lord, something to investigate! What is it this time?" I would cut in hastily: "The Government feels next week will be plenty of time for this investigation." He would look at me seriously. "Did you ever know the Government to give you a week's time to begin?" Then, "Telegrams—more telegrams! Nobody keeps their word, nobody." About six o'clock in the morning I could wait no longer and called the doctor. He pronounced it pneumonia—an absolutely different case from any he had ever seen: no sign of it the day before, though it was what he had been watching for all along. Every hospital in town was full. A splendid trained nurse came at once to the house—"the best nurse in the whole city," the doctor announced with relief. Wednesday afternoon the crisis seemed to have passed. That whole evening he was himself, and I—I was almost delirious from sheer joy. To hear his dear voice again just talking naturally! He noticed the nurse for the first time. He was jovial—happy. "I am going to get some fun out of this now!" he smiled. "And oh, won't we have a time, my girl, while I am convalescing!" And we planned the rosiest weeks any one ever planned. Thursday the nurse shaved him—he not only joked and talked like his dear old self—he looked it as well. (All along he had been cheerful—always told the doctor he was "feeling fine"; never complained of anything. It amused the doctor so one morning, when he was leaning over listening to Carl's heart and lungs, as he lay in more or less of a doze and partial delirium. A twinkle suddenly came into Carl's eye. "You sprung a new necktie on me this morning, didn't you?" Sure enough, it was new.) Thursday morning the nurse was preparing things for his bath in another room and I was with Carl. The sun was streaming in through the windows and my heart was too contented for words. He said: "Do you know what I've been thinking of so much this morning? I've been thinking of what it must be to go through a terrible illness and not have some one you loved desperately around. I say to myself all the while: 'Just think, my girl was here all the time—my girl will be here all the time!' I've lain here this morning and wondered more than ever what good angel was hovering over me the day I met you." I put this in because it is practically the last thing he said before delirium came on again, and I love to think of it. He said really more than that. In the morning he would start calling for me early—the nurse would try to soothe him for a while, then would call me. I wanted to be in his room at night, but they would not let me—there was an unborn life to be thought of those days, too. As soon as I reached his bed, he would clasp my hand and hold it oh, so tight. "I've been groping for you all night—all night! Why don't they let me find you?" Then, in a moment, he would not know I was there. Daytimes I had not left him five minutes, except for my meals. Several nights they had finally let me be by him, anyway. Saturday morning for the first time since the crisis the doctor was encouraged. "Things are really looking up," and "You go out for a few moments in the sun!" I walked a few blocks to the Mudgetts' in our department, to tell them the good news, and then back; but my heart sank to its depths again as soon as I entered Carl's room. The delirium always affected me that way: to see the vacant stare in his eyes—no look of recognition when I entered. The nurse went out that afternoon. "He's doing nicely," was the last thing she said. She had not been gone half an hour—it was just two-fifteen—and I was lying on her bed watching Carl, when he called, "Buddie, I'm going—come hold my hand." O my God—I dashed for him, I clung to him, I told him he could not, must not go—we needed him too terribly, we loved him too much to spare him. I felt so sure of it, that I said: "Why, my love is enough to keep you here!" He would not let me leave him to call the doctor. I just knelt there holding both his hands with all my might, talking, talking, telling him we were not going to let him go. And then, at last, the color came back into his face, he nodded his head a bit, and said, "I'll stay," very quietly. Then I was able to rush for the stairs and tell Mrs. Willard to telephone for the doctor. Three doctors we had that afternoon. They reported the case as "dangerous, but not absolutely hopeless." His heart, which had been so wonderful all along, had given out. That very morning the doctor had said: "I wish my pulse was as strong as that!" and there he lay—no pulse at all. They did everything: our own doctor stayed till about ten, then left, with Carl resting fairly easily. He lived only a block away. About one-thirty the nurse had me call the doctor again. I could see things were going wrong. Once Carl started to talk rather loud. I tried to quiet him and he said: "Twice I've pulled and fought and struggled to live just for you [one of the times had been during the crisis]. Let me just talk if I want to. I can't make the fight a third time—I'm so tired." Before the doctor could get there, he was dead. <hr style='width: 45%;' /> With our beliefs what they were, there was only one thing to be done. We had never discussed it in detail, but I felt absolutely sure I was doing as he would have me do. His body was cremated, without any service whatsoever—nobody present but one of his brothers and a great friend. The next day the two men scattered his ashes out on the waters of Puget Sound. I feel it was as he would have had it. <hr style='width: 45%;' /> "Out of your welded lives—welded in spirit and in the comradeship that you had in his splendid work—you know everything that I could say. "I grieve for you deeply—and I rejoice for any woman who, for even a few short years, is given the great gift in such a form." THE END <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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