I said to Carl: "If that is true, you must have been doing all the adjusting; I never have had to give up, or fit in, or relinquish one little thing, so you've been doing it all."
He thought for a moment, then answered: "You know, I've heard that too, and wondered about it. For I know I've given up nothing, made no 'adjustments.' On the contrary, I seem always to have been getting more than a human being had any right to count on."
It was that way, even to the merest details, such as both liking identically the same things to eat, seasoned the identical way. We both liked to do the identical things, without a single exception. Perhaps one exception—he had a fondness in his heart for firearms that I could not share. (The gleam in his eyes when he got out his collection every so often to clean and oil it!) I liked guns, provided I did not have to shoot at anything alive with them; but pistols I just plain did not like at all. We rarely could pass one of these shooting-galleries without trying our luck at five cents for so many turns—at clay pigeons or rabbits whirling around on whatnots; but that was as wild as I ever wanted to get with a gun.
We liked the same friends without exception, the same books, the same pictures, the same music. He wrote once: "We (the two of us) love each other, like to do things together (absolutely anything), don't need or want anybody else, and the world is ours." Mrs. Willard once told me that if she had read about our life together in a book, she would not have believed it. She did not know that any one on earth could live like that. Perhaps that is one reason why I want to tell about it—because it was just so plain wonderful day in, day out. I feel, too, that I have a complete record of our life. For fourteen years, every day that we were not together we wrote to each other, with the exception of two short camping-trips that Carl made, where mail could be sent out only by chance returning campers.
Somehow I find myself thinking here of our wedding anniversaries,—spread over half the globe,—and the joy we got out of just those ten occasions. The first one was back in Oakland, after our return from Seattle. We still had elements of convention left in us then,—or, rather, I still had some; I don't believe Carl had a streak of it in him ever,—so we dressed in our very best clothes, dress-suit and all, and had dinner at the Key Route Inn, where we had gone after the wedding a year before. After dinner we rushed home, I nursed the son, we changed into natural clothes, and went to the circus. I had misgivings about the circus being a fitting wedding-anniversary celebration; but what was one to do when the circus comes to town but one night in the year?
The second anniversary was in Cambridge. We always used to laugh each year and say: "Gracious! if any one had told us a year ago we'd be here this September seventh!" Every year we were somewhere we never dreamed we would be. That first September seventh, the night of the wedding, we were to be in Seattle for years—selling bonds. What a fearful prospect in retrospect, compared to what we really did! The second September, back in Oakland, we thought we were to be in the bond business for years in Oakland. More horrible thoughts as I look back upon it. The third September seventh, the second anniversary, lo and behold, was in Cambridge, Massachusetts! Whoever would have guessed it, in all the world? It was three days after Carl's return from that awful Freiburg summer—we left Nandy with a kind-hearted neighbor, and away we spreed to Boston, to the matinée and something good to eat.
Then, whoever would have imagined for a moment that the next year we would be celebrating in Berlin—dinner at the Café Rheingold, with wine! The fourth anniversary was at Heidelberg—one of the red-letter days, as I look back upon those magic years. We left home early, with our lunch, which we ate on a bed of dry leaves in a fairy birch forest back—and a good ways up—in the Odenwald. Then we walked and walked—almost twenty-five miles all told—through little forest hamlets, stopping now and then at some small inn along the roadside for a cheese sandwich or a glass of beer. By nightfall we reached Neckarsteinach and the railroad, and prowled around the twisted narrow streets till train-time, gazing often at our beloved Dilsberg crowning the hilltop across the river, her ancient castle tower and town walls showing black against the starlight. The happiness, the foreign untouristed wonder of that day!
Our fifth anniversary was another red-letter day—one of the days that always made me feel, in looking back on it, that we must have been people in a novel, an English novel; that it could not really have been Carl and I who walked that perfect Saturday from Swanage to Studland. But it was our own two joyous souls who explored that quaint English thatched-roof, moss-covered corner of creation; who poked about the wee old mouldy church and cemetery; who had tea and muffins and jam out under an old gnarled apple tree behind a thatched-roof cottage. What a wonder of a day it was! And indeed it was my Carl and I who walked the few miles home toward sunset, swinging hands along the downs, and fairly speechless with the glory of five years married and England and our love. I should like to be thinking of that day just before I die. It was so utterly perfect, and so ours.
Our sixth anniversary was another, yes, yet another red-letter memory—one of those times that the world seemed to have been leading up to since it first cooled down. We left our robust sons in the care of our beloved aunt, Elsie Turner,—this was back in Berkeley,—and one Saturday we fared forth, plus sleeping-bags, frying-pan, fishing-rod, and a rifle. We rode to the end of the Ocean Shore Line—but first got off the train at Half Moon Bay, bought half a dozen eggs from a lonely-looking female, made for the beach, and fried said eggs for supper. Then we got back on another train, and stepped off at the end of the line, in utter darkness. We decided that somewhere we should find a suitable wooded nook where we could sequester ourselves for the night. We stumbled along until we could not see another inch in front of us for the dark and the thick fog; so made camp—which meant spreading out two bags—in what looked like as auspicious a spot as was findable. When we opened our eyes to the morning sunlight, we discovered we were on a perfectly barren open ploughed piece of land, and had slept so near the road that if a machine passing along in the night had skidded out a bit to the side, it would have removed our feet.
That day, Sunday, was our anniversary, and the Lord was with us early and late, though not obtrusively. We got a farmer out of bed to buy some eggs for our breakfast. He wanted to know what we were doing out so early, anyhow. We told him, celebrating our sixth wedding anniversary. Whereat he positively refused to take a cent for the eggs—wedding present, he said. Around noon we passed a hunter, who stopped to chat, and ended by presenting us with a cotton-tail rabbit to cook for dinner. And such a dinner!—by a bit of a stream up in the hills. That afternoon, late, we stumbled on a deserted farmhouse almost at the summit—trees laden with apples and the ground red with them, pears and a few peaches for the picking, and a spring of ice-cold water with one lost fat trout in it that I tried for hours to catch by fair means or foul; but he merely waved his tail slowly, as if to say, "One wedding present you don't get!" We slept that night on some hay left in an old barn—lots of mice and gnawy things about; but I could not get nearly as angry at a gnawy mouse as at a fat conceited trout who refused to be caught.