I Married Adventure

by Osa Johnson

  He said, and his eyes were shining, “This is your reward for marrying me one year ago today, Mrs. Martin Johnson.”

  “Oh, Martin, you shouldn’t.!”

  I was trembling all over as I untied the string and removed the lid and then the lovely white tissue paper. It was a hat. The biggest, most beautiful hat I had ever seen, and on it a mauve willow ostrich plume that swept clear to my shoulder.

  I held my breath as I contemplated its beauty. I held it a second time when I thought of its probable price. I looked at Martin, and he read my question in my face.

  “Well, only thirty-seven fifty,” he admitted guiltily, “but it looked just like you and I—well, I couldn’t help buying it.”

  “No, of course not,” I said, though my heart sank, “and it’s wonderful, and cheap as anything at the price.”

  I had put the hat on, and Martin was staring at me.

  “You know,” he said, “it’s funny what a good-looking hat will do for a girl, but the way you carry your head and all, that hat gives you the look of—well, of a great lady!”

  Nothing would do then but that I must keep the hat on. Martin ordered our anniversary dinner sent up, and to the amazement of the nice stout little waiter, I sat grandly all evening eating roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and feeling almost as wonderful as Martin said I looked.

  “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” Martin yelled suddenly.

  “What?”

  “A great idea!”

  The next day the sedate little city of Calgary looked both startled and impressed when a small but lively brass band made its way through the quiet streets, followed by a livery-stable phaeton in which a tall young man bowed affably right and left, and a young woman, a little scared and very erect in an immense plumed hat, also bowed right and left.

  The purpose of the parade was made known with utmost restraint. Indeed, it was not disclosed until after the parade had passed, and then it was told very modestly on a white oblong card fastened to the back of the phaeton. Here, it said in neat black letters, were the two world-famous travelers and lecturers, Mr. and Mrs. Martin Johnson, and that night and for only a brief period thereafter, they would appear in person at the city’s most popular theater.

  I felt a little bad about the whole thing because I was neither a world traveler nor a lecturer, but a sudden drenching thunderstorm put everything else out of my head, and my lovely hat was a ruin.

  Western Canada was very kind to us indeed. Our five hundred dollars was once more intact, and Martin decided we should head toward Chicago. The bigger the theaters the better the earnings, he said. Chicago was only moderately interested in us, however, so Martin next decided on New York. He thought that there he might be able to get some between-times jobs, that we couldn’t go on forever fooling around and letting five hundred dollars—whether we had it or didn’t have it—be so all-important. We’d never get anywhere that way. In other words, the way we were going, we had lost our real goal.

  New York it was, then, a New York that, for longer than I care to remember, was indifferent to whether we lived or died, and certainly was emphatic about not liking my type of singing. Twenty-five dollars a week, and that not regularly, was all Martin could get out of his lectures.

  Another Christmas was drawing near, and I had a serious talk with Martin about it. Presents were out of the question, I insisted, and if any money at all was to be spent, it must go to buy shoes for him and some rubbers.

  “Those thin shoes—your feet are wet every night when you come home. It just won’t do.” Then it occurred to me that I was scolding him a lot lately, but I had to take care of him. For good measure, I reminded him how sick he had been that time in Denver.

  “All right,” he grinned. “You’re the boss.”

  On Christmas Eve I heard him come whistling to the door. This time he brought me an ermine neckpiece and muff. What it cost him I don’t know, but since we were able to pawn it for twenty-five dollars, it must have been a lot.

  Finally, feeling myself completely useless, I decided to take in roomers. What we had to pay for single, dingy rooms gave me the idea. So I rented a flat with seven rooms, two of which, a small bedroom and kitchen, I kept for ourselves.

  Martin was in a fury with me over this, and when I started serving breakfasts I began to be afraid I had gone too far.

  “We’re going back to Independence,” he shouted. “If you think I’ll let you turn into a scrubwoman, you’d better think again!”

  “And if you think that because you married me you can’t do the things you did before you married me, you’d better think again too!” Martin had worked things out simply enough without me, I knew that. It was having me that made everything difficult.

  I went on. “You keep talking about the big theaters and that they pay bigger money, and yet all you do is fool around with the little ones. That big vaudeville theater over on Seventh Avenue near Forty-fifth—I bet you’ve never even been near it!”

  “But that’s the Palace! I’d look nice, wouldn’t I, going in the Palace with my old scratched film and those slides. You haven’t seen those slides lately!”

  “Well, you can get some more, can’t you, off the negatives?”

  Martin left without kissing me. I made five beds and cried into all of them. Then, I don’t know how many hours later, I heard him coming to the door—whistling.

  I ran to let him in. He took me in his arms and held me and held me, and when one of his tears went down the back of my neck I knew he was crying in that silent way men have, and then I cried too.

  “I saw Martin Beck,” he said after a bit.

  I tried to think who Martin Beck was.

  “Well, if he’s somebody from Independence,” I said, “for goodness’ sake don’t tell him about things—being the way they are, I mean. The folks would get to know, and that would be just awful.”

  At this my husband held me tighter than ever and laughed and laughed, and then he told me what it was all about. Mr. Beck, he said, was the big man of the Orpheum vaudeville circuit, and he had given Martin a contract on that very afternoon.

  My blank stare was an exact reflection of my state of mind.

  “The Orpheum circuit, Osa! Big theaters—and good money, do you hear me, good money!”

  I sat down suddenly. “Good money!”

  “Yes, and we’re getting out of this dump today. We’re going to the Waldorf!”

  Now I asserted myself. “Oh, no we’re not,” I said.

  “Oh yes we are. If you think I’m going to let my wife be a boarding-house keeper—if you think—”

  “If you have half the brains I give you credit for,” I said severely, “I think you’ll save that money and buy a motion-picture camera and go around the world the way you always said you would.” I was full of scorn. “The Waldorf!”

  “Yes, I know, but—you—like this—”

  “And besides,” I went on, “you don’t want to go on talking about the Snark all the rest of your life, do you?” I eyed him curiously. “Or do you?”

  Martin fairly exploded at this. “Good God, no!” he said.

  * * *

  —

  And back west we went. The Orpheum circuit took us back to Michigan, to Iowa, Indiana, and on to the West Coast. And finally I met Jack London and his wife, when they came to the theater in Seattle, Washington.

  Completely secondary to Martin, though not to me, was the fact that the critics, nearly everywhere we went, spoke favorably of Martin and his lecture, some even saying he was the “best thing on the bill.”

  With the accumulation of money in the bank, we now dared to talk about our dream and the plan to make it come true. I say “our” because it had become just as important to me as it had always been to Martin. Even the talk of going down to the South Seas among the cannibals now seemed a perfectly normal and right o
bjective.

  “What clothes do you think you’ll need?” Martin asked one Sunday morning in the early fall. We had, just the day before, put our thousandth dollar in the bank.

  “I don’t know,” I said doubtfully. “I suppose some high boots and things like that.” Snakes were a secret terror to me, even more so than cannibals who ate people and then dried their victims’ heads into hard brown knobs with the hair still on.

  “Yes, boots.” Martin put that down. “Two pairs.”

  Chic Sale and his wife were on the same bill with us, and the four of us became great friends. We were all relatively unknown and struggling. Marie Sale and I used to get together and make our own hats. We got the cost down to seventy-five cents apiece, which we thought was very good.

  “And some denim overalls and huck shirts,” Martin said, following me into the kitchen.

  “For me?” I asked.

  “For both of us,” he replied.

  I tried to picture myself dressed that way and wondered whether I ought to cut my hair. Martin was against this so emphatically, however, that I decided to wear it long and heavy as it was.

  “We can do it for an even four thousand dollars,” Martin announced in triumph at length. And he asked our friends if they would chip in and form a syndicate to finance our expedition.

  Chic Sale grinned. “I’ve only listened to you tell about that trip a couple of hundred times,” he said, “and I’ll give you a thousand dollars to change your routine.”

  As the circuit took us toward Oakland, Martin talked of little except Jack and Charmian London, and especially of Charmian and what a fine wife she was to Jack. It was all arranged that we were to visit the Londons for a few days at their ranch near Glen Ellen.

  “You’ll have to go some to beat her,” Martin said, grinning at me.

  “Well, for goodness sake,” I said, “it’s too bad she hasn’t got a sister!”

  In all my life I’ve never been as nervous as when we walked up the steps of Jack and Charmian’s home. I had made up my mind that they wouldn’t like me at all, and I was miserable. And I continued to be miserable until the day we left. I was on probation, and I knew it.

  Then, on the last day, just as we were saying good-bye, they kissed me warmly. I must have looked completely bewildered.

  “You see, Osa,” Jack said, laughing, “Charmian and I had just about adopted Martin, and when he wrote us that he was marrying—well, we were sort of worried.”

  “Oh, Jack, you brute!” Charmian was laughing, but she tried to stop him. “That isn’t fair.”

  Jack went right on. “ ‘A fine career arrested,’ we said. ‘Poor fellow.’ ”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just waited for the rest of the verdict.

  “It was just because you looked so young,” Charmian put in.

  “But now we’ve gotten to know you,” Jack finally added, “we can see that everything’s all right.”

  Charmian hugged me. “It’s better than all right, and we’ll never feel sorry for Martin again.”

  Then Jack dubbed me “Snarkette” and I’ve never felt so proud; nor have I ever seen Martin as proud as when Jack gave him his best gun.

  * * *

  —

  My scrapbooks of reviews were growing. Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Denver, Kansas City, Louisville, and then, London. Martin was booked at the Victoria Palace in London. And when we returned, we were scheduled at the Criterion in New York City. We had truly arrived.

  The next few years passed quickly, and with the help of our friends we had our four thousand dollars and were on our way, first to Chanute, and then to Independence, for farewells which we knew would be painful.

  I find it difficult to look back on them even today. Mama, always gentle and thoughtful of other people, nevertheless looked tearfully at Martin and asked him how he could do such a thing—take her baby down into those heathenish lands among a lot of cannibals.

  Papa, fists once more doubled, asked Martin if this, then, was the way he proposed to take care of me. Grandma, always practical and a bit of a philosopher, bustled in with two lovely new patchwork quilts for the trip.

  “You, Belle,” she looked at Mama’s tears, “I’m ashamed of you.” Then, to Papa, “And you too!”

  From the day she had first doubted Martin and then was won over to him, her admiration had been unqualified. She kissed us both, then hustled us on our way. Prolonged farewells were a nuisance, she said.

  Vaughn met us at the gate and told Martin he ought to take him instead of me. “Girls are no good for things like that,” he said.

  In Independence, the concern expressed for my safety was even greater than it had been in Chanute.

  “Martin,” Mrs. Johnson was almost angry, “I don’t see how you dare take that child down where all those heathens are. Why, young and pretty as she is, there’s no telling—there’s just no telling!”

  Martin winked at me. “Well, she’s good enough to eat, I’ll say that for her.”

  And for perhaps the first time in all of Martin’s comings and goings, Mr. Johnson expressed the gravity he felt.

  “It’s all right for you, son, to go risk your neck, but I don’t think you’ve any right to risk hers.”

  Martin grew a little irritated, finally.

  “Why does everybody have to act as if I was going to take Osa down there and dish her up on a platter to a lot of cannibals or something? Gosh, I guess she means more to me than to anybody else, doesn’t she?”

  Then he swung on me. “Or maybe you don’t want to go?” he said fiercely.

  Whereupon I burst into tears. “After the way I’ve pushed you into going, that’s a nice thing for you to say!”

  Freda gave me three lovely lace-edged handkerchiefs and a bottle of perfume, and finally, with everybody feeling very hot and miserable, we were on our way.

  A lot of people were at the station to see us off. We got on the train with flowers, several boxes of candy, a watermelon, and a basket of Martin’s favorite fruit, cantaloupes. Just as the train started to move, I saw Gail and Dick, radiantly proud of their first-born son, rushing to say good-bye. Dick lifted the baby to the open window and I kissed his cool, sweet cheek.

  We were on our way!

  Chapter 10

  We were at last aboard the freighter Sonoma in San Francisco harbor, and I was practically beside myself.

  Martin grinned. “Happy?”

  “Oh, yes, my goodness!” That’s all I could think of to say.

  I had looked forward to getting on the boat and heading for the South Seas as the fulfillment of long-deferred hopes for Martin. That it would hold all this excitement for me was astonishing. Everything about it—the dock, the smell of the sea, the lapping of the green, dirty water against the black hull of the ship, the moment when we finally went up the gangplank—all of these sights, sounds, smells, filled me to bursting. For no reason at all I thought of the time when, as a little girl, I had experimented with pulling in a big breath and seeing how long I could hold it. Perhaps I was holding my breath now.

  The trip from Kansas to San Francisco had been uneventful, although I knew Martin was dreading our visit to Glen Ellen. It would be the first time we had seen Charmian London since Jack’s death. But it had been all right, and Charmian had come to the dock to see us off.

  Even the tiny stateroom delighted me, with its two narrow, white berths, one above the other, and its round portholes—it was ours. I hung my hat on a hook and then, as quickly as possible, started to unpack, while Martin went to see that our trunks were safety aboard. And well he might, for in them were all our earthly goods, not to speak of our hopes for the future.

  In the light of subsequent expeditions, our equipment was meager to the point of not being equipment at all. It consisted of one hand-cranked Universal motion-picture c
amera, one 5-x-7 Graflex, one 4-x-5 Graflex, plates for the still cameras, Jack London’s original Marlin rifle, two automatic revolvers, and, an inadequacy which I look back on today with amazement, only a few thousand feet of motion-picture film. But it was all we could afford. A wool tailored suit, a cotton dress, some high boots, a few hickory shirts, and overalls completed my personal outfit. At the last moment, before our trunk was picked up, Martin found the lid hard to close and discovered that I had rammed in a tin of baking powder and a small sack of flour!

  I was so happy that I started to sing as, with great preciseness, I hung our things on the hooks along the wall of the stateroom.

  “Hey, little fussy.” Martin was laughing at me from the doorway. “That unpacking can wait till we’re out of the harbor.” He took my hand and hustled me up on deck, and there, leaning on the rail, we watched the cargo, cradled in huge nets, being swung from dock to deck. This and the score of activities that went with readying the ship for her long voyage had me once more holding my breath. I glanced at Martin. He was lazily relaxed against the railing.

  “Well, aren’t you excited?” I demanded.

  “Fit to pop,” he said.

  “You don’t look it,” I said accusingly. “Why, I think everything is wonderful.”

  “Wait till you’ve embarked as often as I have,” he grinned. “You’re always excited, but you don’t exactly break out in a rash.”

  “And you said this ship would be a little tub or something. Why, I think it’s marvelous, and big, too.”

  “This is ‘peanuts.’ ”

  I looked at him in proper awe. Because he had traveled so much, this was “peanuts.” Actually, for the first time since we were married, I think, I realized that my husband was a much-traveled man. “Peanuts” to him, but stupendous to me. I’d never be able to catch up with him, of that I was sure.

  Suddenly the rowdy noise of the donkey engine and winches stopped, and a blast from the ship’s whistle shook the world.

  “Golly!” I said, breathing hard.