Volume 1 - Chapter 7. Marriage And Early Domestic Life

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_ VOLUME I CHAPTER VII. MARRIAGE AND EARLY DOMESTIC LIFE

And now I come to that event in the life of Eugene Field which has naturally attracted the widest interest among all who have delighted in his written tributes to womankind and mother love. In his memorial to Mrs. Gray, Field has given expression to his special reverence for the love between parent and child. "For my dear mother," he wrote, "went from me so many years ago that when I come to speak of the blessedness of a mother's love, I hardly know whereof I speak, it is all so far, so very far away, and withal so precious, so sacred a thing." This note recurs constantly through his writings, and it is not to be wondered at that the love of a man for a woman should have come early to a youth whose heart had always felt the yearning for something more tender and personal than the utmost kindness of those upon whose affections others had equal or greater claims.

Through his boyhood and school days, Field's affection for the petticoated sex had been tempered by an irresistible impulse to tease all the daughters of Eve. It is doubtful if his affections were ever more seriously engaged by the girls of Amherst or the young ladies of Williams and Knox than was his attention by the regular studies of school or college. He came to both in his own way and time; with the difference that when he once felt the touch of the inevitable maiden's hand in his, he responded with an immediate ardor far different from the slow and eccentric manner in which he wooed the love of scholarship and letters.

It was while a junior at the University of Missouri that Eugene Field made the acquaintance of Edgar V. Comstock, the sharer of the European trip and experiences. Now Edgar's parents lived at St. Joseph, and with them five sisters, the Misses Ida, Carrie, Georgia, Julia Sutherland, and Gussie Comstock, and the fairest of them all was Julia, albeit, at the time her brother was in college, she was still in short dresses. What more natural than that Edgar's elder sisters should visit him during his college term and there meet and be attracted by the gaunt, yet already unique and striking, figure of Eugene Field, the most unscholarly student and most incorrigible wag in Columbia? Julia was too young at this time, in the estimation of her sisters, to travel so far from St. Jo. Besides, what interest would a little girl in short skirts take in the grave and intellectual life of the brother and his undergraduate friends?

Out of the friendship of Eugene and Edgar and the visit of Edgar's sisters to Columbia, fate was weaving a web for the unsuspecting subject of this narrative which was not to be denied or altered by leaving little Julia to rusticate at home like another pretty little Cinderella. But this is not a fairy tale. It has no prince or glass slippers or pumpkin coaches, with which Field's fancy could have invested it. When the two friends separated on Commencement Day, after Field had delivered an oration that impressed Miss Ida (Mrs. Below), because of "his pale face and deep voice," a promise had been extorted that he would visit the Comstocks in their home in St. Joseph.

In the usual course of human events nothing further of concern to us would have come from the exchange of these common civilities of student life. Edgar would have returned to his home and forgotten Eugene, and Eugene would have gone his way and never known that Edgar had a younger sister Julia sitting at the gate awaiting the coming of her prince. But shortly after returning to St. Louis, Field was inspired by his natural roving restlessness--the French call it Fate--to run clear across the state of Missouri, some three hundred miles, to see what kind of a town St. Joseph was and incidentally to visit his college friend. Nearly twenty years later, in the gathering gloom of a rented apartment in London, the still-constant lover wrote of what happened when he first saw "Saint Jo, Buchanan County," in the early seventies. There he first met "the brown-eyed maiden" of his song, the Julia of numberless valentines that ran the gamut of grave and gay through the intervening years, the heroine of frequent drives which they "snailed along," as their proper horse went slow,

In those leafy aisles, where Cupid smiles
In Lover's Lane, Saint Jo.

* * * * *

Ah! sweet the hours of springtime
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 a 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.

By the time Field returned to St. Louis his ready funds were exhausted and he had to appeal to Mr. Gray to raise more by mortgaging the balance of his interest in his father's property. This is as good a place as any to take leave of the patrimony that came to Field at the death of his father, for he was never to see any more dividends from that source. When the loans fell due there were no funds to pay them, nor equity in the land to justify their renewal. So the land was sold and bid in by Mr. Gray, who holds it yet and would gladly dispose of it for what he paid out of his pocket and the goodness of his heart.

Roswell Field tells an interesting story of how their father's land speculation went out of sight in the queer mutations that befall real estate. In the year before Roswell the elder died, he took his younger son for a drive in the country south of St. Louis, where the property lies unimproved to this day. "Rosy," said the father, "hold on to your Carondelet property. In fifteen years it will be worth half a million dollars, and, very likely, a million and a half." That was thirty-three years ago when the Carondelet iron furnaces were in full blast and the city seemed stretching southward. In 1869 the property was appraised at $125,000. The panic came on and St. Louis changed its mind and headed toward the west, where the best part of the city now rears its mansions and wonders how it ever dreamed of going south. There Carondelet still bakes in the sun, on the far side of a slough which has diverted a fortune from the sons of the sanguine Roswell M. Field, the elder.

More provident than his brother, Roswell lived comfortably on his share for nearly seven years, only in the end to envy the superior shrewdness of Eugene, who, putting his portion into cash, realized more from it, and spent it like a lord while it lasted. I must confess that I share Roswell's views, for the investment which Eugene Field made in the two years after coming of age in spending $20,000 on experience, returned to him many fold in the profession he was finally driven to adopt, not as a pastime, but to earn a livelihood for himself and his growing family.

Having shot his bolt, Field went to work as a reporter on the St. Louis Evening Journal. He was not much of a success as a reporter for the simple reason that his fancy was more active than his legs and he was irresistibly disposed to save the latter at the expense of the former.

The best pen picture I have been able to secure of Field at this period of his career is from his life-long friend, William C. Buskett, the hero of "Penn Yan Bill," to whom Field dedicated "Casey's Table d'Hote," the first poem in "A Little Book of Western Verse."

"My association with Eugene Field," says Mr. Buskett, "began in St. Louis, Mo., in 1872. We had a little circle of friends that was surely to be envied in that we were fond of each other and our enjoyment was pure and genuine. In 1875 we formed what was known as the 'Arion Quartette,' composed of Thomas L. Crawford, now clerk in the United States Circuit Court in St. Louis, Thomas C. Baker (deceased), Roswell Martin Field, a brother of Eugene, and myself. 'Gene (as he was always called by his intimates) did not sing in the quartette, though he had a good voice. We frequently gave entertainments, at which Eugene was always the centre of attraction. The 'Old Sexton' was his favorite song. He was a great mimic and tease, and was always bubbling over with fun. At that time he was living on Adams Street, and many of these entertainments were given at his house. His household then consisted of himself, wife, and baby 'Trotty,' the pet name given his eldest daughter, Mary French Field, and with them Mrs. Comstock, mother of Mrs. Field, Edgar V. and Misses Carrie, Georgia, and Gussie Comstock, a delightful family.

"There was a genuine bond of friendship among us all then, for we were comparatively oblivious to care and trouble. We were all poor, you may say, earning reasonable salaries, but that never seemed to worry us much. If one had a dollar we would always divide and the crowd was never a cent ahead, but we defied misfortune.

"Among the pranks that Eugene used to play upon his wife in those days was that of appearing at some of our rehearsals on a warm evening in a costume that never failed to tease her. He would walk into the parlor and say: 'Well, boys, let us take off our coats and take it easy; it's too hot.' We would all proceed to do so. When Eugene would remove his coat he would display a red flannel undershirt, having pinned his cuffs to his coat sleeves and his necktie and collar to his shirt. He placed no limit on his humor."

Who of those at all intimate with Field will forget the enjoyment he took in trolling forth, in a quaint, quavering, cracked, but tuneful recitative, one stanza of "Ossian's Serenade":

I'll chase the antelope over the plain
The tiger's cub I'll bind with a chain,
The wild gazelle with its silvery feet
I'll give to thee as a playmate sweet.
Then come with me in my light canoe,
While the sea is calm and the sky is blue,
For I'll not linger another day
For storms may rise and love decay.

Well, this was a snatch that lingered in his memory from the old days in Adams Street, St. Louis, where he first caught it from the lips of Mr. Buskett, in whose family it was an heirloom. Field finally traced it to its source through persistent letters written to himself in his "Sharps and Flats" column in the Chicago Record.

The glad wild days of which Mr. Buskett testifies were passed in St. Louis after Field's return from a brief experience as city editor of the St. Joseph Gazette in 1875-76. The time is fixed by the presence of "Trotty" in the gypsy circle, who was the best bit of news he "managed to acquire" in the days whereof he wrote:

Oh, many a peck of apples and of peaches did I get
When I helped 'em run the local on the "St. Jo Gazette."

Judge Henry W. Burke, of St. Joseph, is authority for this story of the time when he was associated with Field on the Gazette: Burke had been sent out to report a "swell society event" in the eastern part of the city. Nearly all the prominent people of St. Joseph were present and the names of all were published. Burke's story of the affair was a column long, and after it was written Field got hold of the copy and at the end of the list of those present added, "and last but not least the handsome and talented society editor of the Gazette, H.W. Burke." The feelings of the young reporter and embryo judge may be imagined.

But a few months of "whooping up locals on the St. Jo Gazette" were enough for Eugene, who pined for the broader field and more congenial associations of St. Louis. Thither he returned in the spring of 1876, and the Evening Journal, being by this time consolidated with the Times, he became an editorial writer and paragrapher on the hyphenated publication. He also resumed the eccentric semi-bohemian life which Mr. Buskett has rather suggested than described. He had little or no business ability, had no use for money except to spend it, and therefore early adopted the plan of leaving to Mrs. Field the management of their household expenditures. To her, then, as throughout his life, was paid his weekly stipend--often depleted by the drafts for the "usual V" or the "necessary X" which he was wont to draw in advance from the cashier almost every week.

Before the newspaper cashier had risen as a life-saving station on the horizon of Eugene Field's constant impecuniosity, his father's executor, Mr. Gray, had been the object of his intermittent appeals for funds to meet pressing needs. The means he invented to wheedle the generous, but methodical, executor out of these appropriations afforded Field more genuine pleasure than the success that attended them. The coin they yielded passed through his fingers like water through a sieve, but the enjoyment of his happy schemes abided in his memory and also in that of his constant friend always. One of Field's most effective methods of securing an advance from Mr. Gray was the threat of going on the stage under the assumed name of Melvin L. Gray. On one occasion Field approached him for money for living expenses, and being met with what appeared to be an unrelenting negative, coolly said: "Very well, if you cannot advance it to me out of the estate I shall be compelled to go on the stage. But as I cannot keep my own name I have decided to assume yours, and shall have lithographs struck off at once. They will read, 'To-night, M.L. Gray, Banjo and Specialty Artist.'" It is needless to say that the much-needed funds were found. But whether they went to the payment of living expenses, to the importunity of some threatening creditor, or were divided between the joys of the bibliomaniac and the bon vivant, Field in his most confiding humor never disclosed to me.

But this I know, that one of these always respectful, if apparently threatening, appeals to Mr. Gray, was the basis for one of the few newspaper attacks on Eugene Field that he resented deeply. Some time after he had left St. Louis and was engaged on the Denver Tribune, the Spectator, a weekly paper of the former city, contained the following gossip regarding him which was written in a thoughtless rather than an intentionally inimical spirit:

One of the cleverest young journalists of this city, a few years ago, was Mr. Eugene Field, whose charming short poems and witty paragraphs still occasionally find their way into our paper from Denver, where he is now located. Mr. Field was the happy possessor of one of those sunny dispositions which is thoroughly antagonistic to trouble of every description; he absolutely refused to entertain the black demon under any pretext whatever, and after spending a small fortune with the easy grace of a prince, he settled down to doing without one with equal grace and nonchalance, in a manner more creditable to himself than satisfying to his creditors. Did his hatter or tailor present an untimely bill, the gay debonnaire Eugene would scribble on the back thereof an impromptu rhyme expressive of his deep regret at not being able to offer the cash instead, and return the same with an airy grace that the renowned orator, J. Wilkins Micawber, himself might have envied.

While the intellectual prominences upon the cranium of our friend and fellow-citizen had been well looked to, Dame Nature totally neglected to develop his bump of veneration; age possessed no qualities, wealth and position no prerogatives, which this singularly constituted young man felt bound to respect. When his father's executor, an able and exceedingly dignified member of the St. Louis bar, would refuse to respond to his frequent demands for moneyed advances, the young reprobate would coolly elevate his heels to a point in dangerous proximity to the old gentleman's nose, and threaten to go upon the stage, taking his guardian's honored name as a stage pseudonym and representing himself to be his son. This threat generally sufficed to bring the elder gentleman to terms, as he knew his charge's ability to execute as well as to threaten.

He was an inveterate joker, and his tendency to break out without regard to fitness of time or place into some mad prank made him almost a terror to his friends. On one occasion he informed a young lady friend that he did not think he would be able to come to her wedding because he had such a terrible toothache. "Then why not have your tooth pulled out?" said the young lady. "I never thought of that," quoth Eugene gravely; "I guess I will." When the wedding day arrived, among the other bridal gifts came a small box bearing Mr. Field's card, and reposing on a velvet cushion inside was the identical tooth which the bride had advised him to have extracted, and in the cavity where had once throbbed the agonizing nerve was neatly stuffed a fifty-dollar bill.

The recollection of the many amusing traits and freaks of this versatile genius affords amusement to the innumerable friends of his to this day. But time which sobers us all has doubtless taken some of the foam and sparkle from this rare spirit, although it would be hard to convince his friends that he will ever be anything but the gay and debonnaire Eugene.

Mr. Gray, who vouches for the general accuracy of the story of the strange wedding present, with its costly filling, preserves among his most cherished mementoes of his foster son-in-law, if I may be allowed the expression, Field's prompt repudiation of that paragraph in the above which charged him with lack of respect for one from whom he had received every evidence of affection:

DENVER, June 25, 1883.

DEAR MR. GRAY,

A copy of last Saturday's St. Louis Spectator has just arrived and I am equally surprised, pained and indignant to find in it a personal article about myself which represents me in the untruthful light of having been disrespectful and impudent to you. I believe you will bear me out when I say that my conduct towards you has upon all occasions been respectful and gentlemanly. I may not have been able to repay you the many obligations you have placed me under, but I have always regarded you with feelings of affectionate gratitude and I am deeply distressed lest the article referred to may create a widely different impression. Of course it makes no difference to you, but as gratitude is about all I have in this world to bestow on those who are good and kind to me, it is not right that I should be advertised--even in a joking way--as an ingrate.

Yours sincerely,

EUGENE FIELD.

This letter is valuable in more ways than the one which it was so unnecessarily written to serve. It is a negative admission of the general faithfulness of the impression left by Field upon those familiar with his life in St. Louis, and the reference to gratitude as all he had to bestow upon his true friends will be recognized as genuine by all who ever came near enough to his inner life to appreciate its sweetness as well as its lightness. As for his airy method of disposing of insistent creditors I have no doubt that the rhymes on the backs of their bills more often than not were more to them than the dollars and cents on their faces.

During the second period of his life in St. Louis two sons were born to Field and his wife, Melvin G., named after the "Dear Mr. Gray," of the foregoing letter, and Eugene, Jr., who, being born when the Pinafore craze was at its height, received the nickname of "Pinny," which has adhered to him to the present time. The fact that Melvin of all the children of Eugene Field was never called by any other name by a father prone to giving pet names, more or less fanciful, to every person and thing with which he came in contact, is, I take it, an even more sincere tribute to the high respect and love, if not reverence, in which he held Melvin's godfather.

The third son and last child born to Field during the time of which I am now writing appeared upon the scene, with his two eyes of wondrous blue, very like his father's, at Kansas City, whither the family had moved in the year 1880. Although he was duly christened Frederick, this newcomer was promptly nicknamed "Daisy," because, forsooth, Field one day happened to fancy that his two eyes looked like daisies peeping up at him from the grass. The similitude was far fetched, but the name stuck.

In Kansas City, where Field went from St. Louis to assume at thirty years of age the managing editorship of the Times of that town, the family lived in a rented house which was made the rendezvous for all the light-hearted members of the newspaper and theatrical professions. Perhaps I cannot give a more faithful picture of Field's life through all this period than is contained in the following unpublished lines, to the original manuscript of which I supplied the title, "The Good Knight and His Lady." Perhaps I should explain that it was written at a time when Field was infatuated with the stories and style of the early English narratives of knights and ladies:

THE GOOD KNIGHT AND HIS LADY

Soothly there was no lady faire
In all the province could compare
With Lady Julia Field,
The noble knight's most beauteous wife
For whom at any time his life
He would righte gladly yield.

'Twas at a tourney in St. Joe
The good knight met her first, I trow,
And was enamoured, straight;
And in less time than you could say
A pater noster he did pray
Her to become his mate.

And from the time she won his heart,
She sweetly played her wifely part--
Contented with her lot!
And tho' the little knightly horde
Came faster than they could afford
The good wife grumbled not.

But when arrived a prattling son,
She simply said, "God's will be done--
This babe shall give us joy!"
And when a little girl appeared,
The good wife quoth: "'Tis well--I feared
'Twould be another boy!"

She leased her castle by the year--
Her tables groaned with sumptuous cheer,
As epicures all say;
She paid her bills on Tuesdays, when
On Monday nights that best of men--
Her husband--drew his pay.

And often, when the good knight craved
A dime wherewith he might get shaved,
She doled him out the same;
For these and other generous deeds
The good and honest knight must needs
Have loved the kindly dame.

At all events, he never strayed
From those hymeneal vows he made
When their two loves combined;
A matron more discreet than she
Or husband more devote than he
It would be hard to find.

July 4th, 1885.

And so in very sooth it would have been. Under what circumstances and with what purpose Field wrote this I cannot now recall, if I ever knew. Nothing like it exists among my many manuscripts of his. It is written in pencil on what appears to be a sheet from a pad of ledger paper, watermarked "1879," a fact I mention for the benefit of his bibliomaniac admirers. And, what is most peculiar, it is written on both sides of the sheet--something most unusual with Field, except in correspondence--where the economy of the old half ounce three-cent postage and his New England training prevailed over his disposition to be lavish with paper if not with ink. Anyway, Field's "Good Knight and His Lady" gives a clearer insight into his home relations than any other thing that has been preserved respecting them. That it was prepared with care is witnessed by several interlineations in ink, sealed by a blot of his favorite red ink on the corner, which for a wonder does not bear the marks of the deliberate blemishes with which he frequently embellished his neatest manuscripts. _

Read next: Volume 1: Chapter 8. Early Experiences In Journalism

Read previous: Volume 1: Chapter 6. Choice Of A Profession

Table of content of Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions, Volumes 1 and 2


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