Eugene Field, a Study in Heredity and Contradictions — Volume 1

by Slason Thompson

When the heart inclines to woo,

And it's deemed all right for the callow wight

To do what he wants to do.

In his "Auto-Analysis" Field says, "I favor early marriage." Even if Edgar Comstock's elder sisters had known this, it is doubtful whether the thought would have crossed their minds that their brother's chum of twenty-one would overlook their more mature charms (they were all fair to look upon), to be more than gracious to their fourteen-year-old sister. Time out of mind sophisticated sisters of sixteen and eighteen have regarded younger sisters as altogether out of the sphere of those attentions which find their echo in wedding bells, only to awake some bright morning to find the child a woman and the attentive friend an accepted lover.

So it happened in this case. While her sisters were thinking how good it was of Field to take so much interest in a mere child, their long afternoon drives together down "Lovers' Lane, Saint Jo," had come to that happy turn that ignores all immaturities of age and lays the life of a man at the feet of the maid—albeit, the feet are still strangers to the French heels and have not yet known the witchery that goes with long dresses. Once sure of himself, Field lost no time in making his wishes known not only to Mistress Julia, but to her astonished family. She listened and was lost and won. Her parents expostulated that she was but a child. Field had no difficulty in convincing them that she would outgrow that. He pleaded for an immediate marriage, but her father firmly insisted that though Julia might not be too young to love and be loved, she was "o'er young to marry yet." Field was forced to accept the sensible decree against the early realization of his hopes and returned to St. Louis with the understanding that he should establish himself in business and wait until Miss Comstock was eighteen.

Whether this had anything to do with Field's going to Europe or not I cannot say. It had nothing to do with his return, for his term of waiting for his modern Rachel had still two years to run when he got back from Europe. There is a pretty story told that after all arrangements were made for his European trip and he and Edgar Comstock, accompanied by Miss Ida, had reached New York, she and her brother were amazed to receive a note by mail saying, "Important business has called me back to St. Joseph; I hope you will pardon my sudden leave-taking." They knew the nature of his important business and had to wait with what patience they could command while he posted fifteen hundred miles and returned with barely time, if all connections served, to catch the steamer.

Field never dreamed of fulfilling that condition of his probation which required him to become established in business. If he had done so the date of his marriage would have been indefinitely postponed. He returned from Europe, as we have seen, sans the better part of his patrimony, in the spring of 1873, and instead of attempting to establish himself in business, immediately set himself to secure an abridgment of his term of waiting. The years between fourteen and eighteen run slow. To every true lover Time moves with leaden feet. As Rosalind tells us, "Marry, he trots hard with a young maid between the contract of her marriage and the day it is solemnized: if the interim be but a se'nnight, Time's pace is so hard that it seems the length of seven year." What wonder then if the four years they were pledged to wait seemed an eternity, and that both set themselves to abridge it by all the arts and persuasion of young lovers. They pleaded and contrived so cunningly and successfully that the obdurate parents finally acceded to their wishes, and Eugene Field and Julia Sutherland Comstock were married at St. Joseph on October 16th, 1873. The bride "at that time was a girl of sixteen," is the laconic and only comment of the "Auto-Analysis." This he supplemented with the further information, "we have had eight children—three daughters and five sons."

But this is jumping from Saint Jo into the future more than a score of years in advance of our story. The young couple spent their honeymoon in the East. Field took especial delight in showing his bride of sixteen the wonders of New York and in playing practical jokes upon her unsophisticated nature, thereby keeping her in a perpetual state of amazement or of terror as to what he would do next. He sought to make her at home at Delmonico's by ordering "boiled pig's feet à la Saint Jo," with a gravity of countenance that tested the solemnity of the waiters and provoked the protest, "Oh, Eugene!" that was to be the feminine accompaniment to his boyish humor throughout their married life. No matter how often Field played his antics before or on his wife, they always seemed to take her by surprise and evoked a remonstrance in which pride over his mirthfulness mollified all displeasure.