by Osa Johnson
There were times when I achingly missed Mama, Papa, and Grandma, but I consoled myself with thinking that as soon as Martin and I had enough money we’d build a house big enough for all of us, with another house for Mother and Father Johnson and Freda, perhaps, right next door. I even began studying house plans and landscaping gardening, and walked up one street and down another looking at empty lots. With no disloyalty at all to Chanute, I had grown to love Independence. I had married here. I would raise my family and live here all the rest of my days.
“Darling!” I flew to meet Martin as he came up the stairs. “I’ve found two of the dearest little lots over on Poplar Street, and I talked to your father about them and he says he’ll help us, and there’s no reason at all why we couldn’t start building…”
I stopped and looked at him, then added lamely, “Is there?”
Martin closed the door and stared at me helplessly.
“We can’t do that,” he said. “I’m just not like that at all!”
“Not like what?”
“About buying lots and building houses. I can’t do it!”
“But—your father says he’ll help us, and of course we’ll pay him back. I’m a good manager, I am—we’ll save—and I mean, we must do it now while we’re young, and then the money we spend for rent—”
“Osa, I don’t want a house!” Martin said.
“But—we’ve got to live someplace, and why can’t we live in our own house? It’ll be much cheaper in the end.”
“Because we’re going away, that’s why, before you have us anchored here!”
“Anchored?”
Martin took me in his arms.
“Having a home—and everything—means so much to you,” he said miserably. “I guess your father was right—we should never have married.”
“Not married! You mean—you don’t like me anymore?”
“Oh, you know it isn’t that, but—I’d go crazy if I thought I had to stay here all the rest of my life.”
He looked so desperate I couldn’t think of anything to say. And besides, things were all mixed up in my head.
“We’re going around the world, Osa!” This came out very abruptly.
“Well—all right, dear.”
Martin stared at me. “Did you say ‘all right’?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, darling!”
“I was just wondering, though. What about the Snarks?” I asked.
“Well, I’ll just turn them over to Charlie Kerr,” he answered. “It’s his money that’s in them anyhow.”
I tried to think. “It costs a lot of money to go around the world, doesn’t it?”
“Well, of course, it depends on where you’re going. But I thought we could sell our wedding presents and the furniture.”
“Yes, Yes, I hadn’t thought about that.” I swallowed a big lump. “Would that be enough?”
“No, it wouldn’t. But what I thought was that I could take my slides and the film, and lecture in different towns until we got enough.”
“I think that’s a very good idea,” I said without enthusiasm.
“Do you really?”
“Sure. When do we start?”
“As soon as we can sell the stuff,” Martin said happily.
“Only thing—are we going to those places where they have cannibals?”
“You bet we are. They’re—why, they’re practically savages down where I went with Jack London, and what I want to do some day is to get a good, honest, complete motion picture of them to show people who’ve had all the advantages of civilization—in big cities and places like that—so they can get an idea of what they themselves were like, maybe half a million years ago.”
Dimly, then, I began to grasp the fact that I was married to not only a very unusual man, but a man with an obsession besides. I grasped the additional fact that we probably never would live the way other people did, and it seemed to me suddenly that under the circumstances I had an excessive amount of pride of the wrong sort. Acquiring a fine home, nice clothes, having a successful husband—all the substantial things—had been very important to me. But now, as I looked at Martin, I began in a fumbling way to shape a different sort of pride.
I began to wonder if I couldn’t help increase our revenue by singing at the theaters where Martin lectured. Martin improved on this idea by teaching me some Hawaiian dances and songs, or, at any rate, his version of them. I made a Hawaiian costume out of bright-colored cloth to wear during the performances.
“We’re going around the world,” I told my friends on the day we sold off our furniture and wedding presents. That night we said good-bye to Father and Mother Johnson and Freda, and the next morning we left for Kansas City.
After our engagement there, we went to Emporia, Kansas. Emporia probably didn’t mean to be unfriendly or uninterested in what Martin had to say about his trip on the Snark with Jack and Charmian London, but in spite of our personally distributed handbills and announcements in the papers and posters, the attendance at the theater only increased about ten percent during the week that we were there.
“For one thing,” the plump manager of the theater was quite jovial about it, “it must be pretty near a year since you got back to Independence from that Snark trip. We carried the whole thing in the paper here. I guess folks kind of think it’s old stuff now, or maybe that you could’ve come around this way a mite sooner.”
“Yes, I know,” Martin said lamely. “It’s just that I’ve been so busy. You know how it is, with my own theaters and everything.”
“Oh, sure, I understand, but that doesn’t help the box office none.” The manager counted out eight dollars.
“Your percentage, son,” he said, “and come around again some time when you got something new.”
Martin and I went back to the hotel and talked things over.
“If that’s the way they feel,” Martin said glumly, “I guess we’d better go to some other state where I won’t be just a Kansas boy that made good.”
“A year ago,” I added thoughtfully.
“Like a barrel of apples that’s stood too long.” He grinned wryly.
“You’re no such thing,” I said indignantly.
Then his grin faded. “The money we’ve got won’t last long this way. Maybe we’d better go back to Independence. I can always go to work for my dad.”
“If you did that, it would be because of me.” I found myself suddenly being very firm. “What other state do you think we ought to try?”
“Well, I was wondering about Colorado,” Martin said.
“Sure,” I agreed. “I bet they like Jack London up there, and I bet they’ll like you too.”
The next morning we left for Colorado. It was a good idea, Martin said, to try the small towns first. And we did. But our outgo was still more than our income. Neither of us said anything about its being Thanksgiving time. I fried some eggs over a gas jet and the next morning we left Rocky Ford.
“I’ve got it all figured, this poor-attendance stuff,” Martin said glumly. “It’s the holiday season. People haven’t either the time or the money to go to shows.” Then, after some deep thought, “Maybe we’d better go to Denver. People are sort of gayer in big towns when it’s holiday time. Yes, I guess that’s what we’d better do.” This, it seemed to me, was a positive inspiration.
It took nearly everything we had for railroad fare, so when we arrived on Christmas Eve in Denver we pawned Martin’s watch for five dollars, then hunted up a rooming house within walking distance of the theaters in the center of town where we hoped we might secure bookings.
“This will be fine, Martin,” I said, trying not to look at the torn places in the wallpaper. “You go out and get some eggs and bread or something while I unpack, but don’t spend more than fifty cents, because we might not get a booking right away.”
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“Yes,” replied Martin in a kind of croak. “Our first Christmas together, and all I can do is go buy some eggs for my wife to fry over a gas flame.”
“Martin!” I ran to him. His face was hot and flushed. “You’ve got a fever—you’re sick!”
“I’m not sick, I’m just mad and disgusted with myself. I had no right to drag you into anything like this!” He was shouting by now. “Look at that wallpaper!” He seized a piece that was loose and ripped it from floor to ceiling. He began to laugh.
I wanted to cry, but instead I scolded and bossed him and got him into bed, then took fifty cents of our five dollars and ran out to get some lemons and quinine.
It was dusk now, and sharply cold. In no time at all the tip of my nose was numb, and my feet felt like stumps in the hard-packed snow. I found a grocery store in the next block and bought some lemons. The nearest drugstore, I was told, was three blocks down and one block over.
Somehow I lost my way, I don’t know how, and still strong upon me was my mother’s warning not to speak to strangers. I doubled back; I turned corner after corner in streets that were dark and alien. The tears ran unchecked from my eyes and nose, and with no sobs to dramatize them. My handkerchief was now a frozen ball that scratched my face.
I turned another corner and there, suddenly and miraculously, was a window edged in frosty lace like a valentine and holding in its frame the great, round crystal globes of green, blue, and red liquid that said here was a drugstore. All terror dropped from the night as I stared at them, limpid clear, glowing, warm. Here I would find the medicine I needed for Martin. Tomorrow was Christmas—I’d nurse him out of his cold and, with care, our four dollars and fifty cents would see us through until he was better. Why, the very size of the city, which had been so frightening when I felt myself lost, assured me that somewhere there would be a theater that would want to put on Martin’s fine lecture. It began to snow big, feathery, gentle flakes.
It was warm in the drugstore and bright, with a clean, bitterish smell. I bought the quinine and had twenty-five cents left. The druggist, a kindly gentleman in a very white apron, directed me back to the shabby street where our rooming house stood, and I set out on the run. Martin would be worried. Perhaps he would also be hungry. Most certainly I was.
I caught sight of a hand-lettered card in the window of a lunch room. “Christmas dinner now being served,” it said. “Twenty-five cents.”
Wonderful, I thought, and went in. The proprietor was a stout, energetic little woman who bounced as she walked. She listened sympathetically when I told her my husband was sick, and piled up a tray with some beef hash over which she poured a dark gravy. “Genuine turkey flavor,” she said. Some mashed potatoes, pickled beets—“exactly the color of cranberries”—two thick slices of bread, a sad-looking piece of apple pie, and a cup of coffee completed the “Christmas dinner.”
The tray was heavy, and the snow now drove straight into my face. My footing on the ice-rutted sidewalk was precarious at best, and to see it at all I now lifted the tray to the top of my head. Added to my worries, of course, was the fear of breaking the dishes and having to pay for them out of our little bit of money.
Panting but relieved, I reached our rooming house with nothing spilled except the coffee. Hurrying up the stairs to our room on the second floor, I pushed the door open.
Cutting cleanly through the stale odors of cabbage, dust, and grease was the fresh, spicy smell of carnations. Then I saw them in the water pitcher, a great bouquet—all white, as I loved them best.
“Martin—the flowers—who—here in Denver? Who sent them to us? How did they find us?”
My husband lay shivering, the bedclothes pulled up around his head, his feet uncovered, out at the bottom. I set the tray down and fixed this, then, shaking the snow from my coat, put it over him. The bed quilts were thin and filled with wadded cotton. I looked around for something else and wished passionately for some of Grandma’s good lamb’s-wool quilts. Martin’s big overcoat. That would help. I picked it up from the chair over which he had thrown it and found it damp to my hand. And there on the shoulder I saw some flakes of only partly melted snow. I looked at the dressing table then where the four dollars and fifty cents had been. It was gone.
* * *
—
Martin wrote home for help, which came promptly. I wrote home that we were living on the fat of the land. Martin was soon over his cold—he was thinner, and so was I, after the experience—and we set about securing bookings. The holiday season, we were told—and already knew too well—was bad in the theater. Things wouldn’t pick up until around early spring, maybe. At any rate, we made enough to move into a slightly better rooming house, and this, we felt, was distinctly a step ahead. Looking at the whole thing squarely, however, we couldn’t see that we were any closer to going around the world than we’d been on the day we left home.
“Tell you what,” Martin said one night late in March after a close study of an item in the newspaper, “we’re going to pick up and go to Black Hawk.”
“Go where?” I asked.
“Black Hawk. It’s right here in the state of Colorado. A gold-mining town, and there’s a strike on. Now, I figure those fellows will have a lot of time to kill, and as well as giving them the Snark stuff and the cannibal pictures, I’ll tell them about Jack’s gold-mining experiences in the Klondike.”
“Why, that’s wonderful,” I said.
Black Hawk proved even more than wonderful. There were two nickel theaters on the wide dirt street. We made a deal with the one that offered the best percentage, and, in spite of rain and mud, ankle deep, and the boosted price of ten cents, the theater was packed from nine in the morning until two the next morning. Martin’s lecture went over in a fine way. The men liked him for his simple, direct manner, and they liked, too, what he told them about Jack up in the Klondike. I sang what passed for some Hawaiian songs.
We remained in Black Hawk until every man in the place had paid his ten cents’ admission to the theater. The living problem was somewhat complicated. The shack-like hotel was packed, with four and five men to a room, we were told. There were no sleeping quarters to be had anyplace in town at any price. Had Martin been alone, of course, he could have managed. Some nights we tried fixing up a place at the theater after the crowds were gone, but it was so stuffy, with bad ventilation, that we couldn’t stand it. On fine nights we sometimes slept on the benches at the railroad station, but found ourselves early in the morning the objects of too much curiosity. On our third week in town, Martin, completely desperate, went to the owner of the hotel to see if something couldn’t be done in the way of a bed for me at least.
From that night on and until we packed up and left, the pool room was ours. What Martin had to pay for this I never knew. Of course, we had to wait until nearly daylight before the men cleared out. It smelled of stale tobacco smoke and other smells too numerous to mention, but we opened the windows, and I was astonished that a pool table, spread with our coats and a blanket borrowed from the hotel, could seem so luxurious. It was somewhere along in here that I discovered for myself the meaning of relative values, and I was pleased to think that I was becoming quite profound.
And, of course, I was intensely proud of Martin. Coming to Black Hawk had been his idea; we had nearly five hundred good hard silver dollars saved up; and it seemed to me we could start going around the world practically any minute.
“Five hundred dollars is a good beginning, of course,” Martin said, “but it will take more than that to buy even a secondhand motion-picture camera.” Our future was assured, though. I knew it, and so did he. It was just a matter of a little more time.
Optimism is a fine thing to hang onto, I found, and carries one blithely over the bad places. Sometimes its promise, like a pretty balloon, explodes, but usually it serves its purpose gaily and well.
There were no more Black Hawks on our s
elf-selected itinerary, and little by little our five hundred silver dollars dwindled. The whole trouble, of course, was the five- and ten-cent admission price. Only under exceptional conditions, such as were afforded by the miners’ strike in Black Hawk, could enough business be done to net us an even adequate income.
In May, our first wedding anniversary found us in western Canada, in the town of Calgary. Martin had heard that admissions up there were generally higher than in the States.
We seldom spoke of the trip around the world now; we just did the best we could with each day as it came. Largely because of Martin’s dogged insistence that I should always have the best that he could afford, our brave five hundred dollars dropped to around three hundred, and I think our only expressed goal by this time was to build the sum back to five hundred.
We had selected a nice, clean little room in a small but charming hotel just a block from the theater where Martin had secured the promise of a booking. He was there now, closing it, I fervently hoped. The view between the clean white scrim curtains was of a green, lush countryside, with pretty cottages and gardens.
There was a sudden sharp hunger in me for a place I could call home, and for security and permanence. I thought of the furniture and wedding presents I had given up, and the nice Hoover kitchen cabinet which had been Martin’s wedding gift, and I began to cry. Purposely I had refrained from reminding Martin that it was our anniversary. To keep him from spending money foolishly on me was my most difficult task.
Suddenly I heard him come whistling along the hall. Blowing my nose, I ran to let him in and found him carrying a box which he had to turn on end to get in the door.