Our Engagement
“Love comes, my mother says, like flowers in the night. It is a thing a single look will kindle and not an ocean quench.”
--Ingomar and Parthenia.
From my four years of training and experience in an Eastern city I came back to find Lamoni just the same. The children with whom I had played at Sister Marietta’s party were young men and women now, and among them my sisters and I found congenial company and many pleasant friendships which lasted through all the earlier years of our young married life and even until the present time.
I had been in town only a few days when I met Fred Smith in the post office. I had gone there for my mother’s mail and was just leaving the room when he slid down from the high writing desk and extended a great hand to me, the biggest, strongest, most skilled and gentlest hand I think I have ever seen, exclaiming as he pulled off his soft gray cap with a peculiar, half-embarrassed gesture:
“Why, how do you do, Miss Cobb!”
It had been fully a year since he had written me, or I him, but I caught myself wondering if he liked my new black hat with one great yellow rose, straight from New York. I did not know then that he is one of those exasperating men to whom a woman’s clothes usually makes no conscious or unconscious difference. At least that is the conclusion I have reached after my experience of many years. I know whenever I have been dressed in a new hat or gown for dinner or to go out with him I have always waited in vain for him to notice, and when I have finally asked him how he like my dress he would say, still quite absorbed in his newspaper, “Oh—why, it’s very nice—something new?”
That week there was a little party to which I was invited and went with my brother-in-law. Fred Smith was there, too, with one of the pretty girls who had been so in evidence at that earlier party, but Fred Smith and I found no difficulty in renewing the friendship begun seven years before.
He asked me presently if I would be at home on Sunday. I probably said that I would, and a friend told me afterward that the girl who had come with Fred Smith overheard his question and my answer, and Fred told me later, as a good joke, that she had refused to speak to him all the say home.
We soon settled down to our quiet home life and the winter’s social activities, skating, the college prayer meetings and the Shakespeare Club in the main part with an occasional sleighride, or “taffy pull.” Dances were practically unknown in Lamoni. The church had expressed its disapproval of the social dance, as indeed it still does, as an unwholesome form of recreation, and though my sisters and I had been away from home at various times we had always been willing to confine ourselves to the normal and healthy pleasures which our parents and church preferred for us.
The Shakespeare Club was perhaps the most prominent institution of the day, with many of the town’s young people belonging, and a number of the younger high school instructors and college professors. Fred Smith was the president.
It afforded me a good deal of amusement during those long evenings, when we read or listened to the president read and expound the line of the old master, to carry on certain whispered controversies with one Oscar Anderson, a brother of the Dave Anderson who had been so devoted to Fred in the episode of the yells. Oscar was an amusing talker, and my giggles sometimes dispelled the contemplative atmosphere which is considered conducive to reading and study.
Of course I was fond of Shakespeare, and I might have waited till after the meeting to hear what Oscar had to say; but I wanted to see what the president—and I must have been half in love with him already—would say to our interrupting the meeting.
At first he was annoyed, and would look up with that peculiar stare, then in its infancy, and as he looked a pained expression would come over his face. Presently his eyes would flash darkly, and with a few abrupt words he would call the meeting to order.
He never apologized to me for the public scoldings. It would have lessened my respect for him if he had. He has never been in the habit of apologizing to those with who he works for the rough and tumble of any official transaction. That is a trait which may have made him certain enemies; but that, too, is a characteristic of leadership.
I suppose it is my pride in him that has caused me always to like to see him make the best of an awkward situation. I know I enjoyed watching him preside over the General Conference sessions when the parliamentary bombardment was at its heaviest, and it was a crowning delight to see him when other tried to down a “long-winded” speaker, or fight out an appeal from the decision of the chair, whether he won or lost.
The men and women who were young with us that winter have insisted that they guessed the outcome of our friendship long before we planned to be married. They knew, they said, from the proprietary manner with which he wrapped my great cape around me when I stepped from the platform warm and perspiring after reciting or giving an address or when we were leaving a bright room for the frosty walk home.
It has always been difficult for me to say just when and why I began to love Fred Smith, in spite of the fact that our friends claim they knew all about it from the first. You would presume, of course, that it was because of his great brain and masterful attitude, but I have always maintained that I fell in love with my husband in his baseball suit. I am fond of baseball, and I remember how I used to thrill with delight and pride when Fred Smith, clad in his old red suit “hit,” and finally slid home.
Usually after the game he walked home with me, and people smiled sometimes at the contrast between us—I in my dainty summer dress and he all sweaty and dusty, swing along with his bat over his shoulder.
I think is must have been his muscles and not his brain, for his writings have been far too numerous for me to try to keep copies of them, but I kept that faded old baseball suit with padded pants, kept it with my babies’ christening robes and my own wedding dress. And when in the course of years, and changes of residence many of the “keepsakes” could no longer be cared for, and I destroyed them, I burned my wedding dress with a sign, and the tears come to my eyes as I gave up the baby garments, but after I had cast that old red baseball suit into the flames I locked myself in my room and cried for hours.
As for our engagement, there was no word said. It was simply understood. But in looking back, I think I can determine the time from which we considered ourselves promised to each other.
It was on the back lawn of our Lamoni home, the house we always called the “Camel’s back.” I had said, I cannot remember exactly what, but I suppose I had demanded some preposterous thing of Fred. He turned on me in anger, his dark eyes charged with flame, as he stammered almost incoherently:
“No! If you think you are going to make a slave of me, as you have of every other boy and man who has run at your beck and call, you are very much mistaken. I shall never be your slave!”
He ended with a half sob.
This was my great moment. I had found a man, at last, a man who would not be any woman’s slave; for what woman does not desire above all things the love of a man who will not be imposed on, even by herself?
He had told me that he would never be my slave, but he had choked as he said it. And what woman does not know that the man who cries out in his great love and sense of possession, “I will to be your slave!” is, in very truth, her slave already?
We were a curious pair of lovers. He never gave me flowers and bonbons, as had the other men I had known. He wanted me to love him for himself, he said, and I think that he prided himself on the fact that he, without favors, could hold the affection of a girl who had had many formal attentions.
The only flowers he ever gave me were the botany specimens we gathered in our walks, and which he was so fond of strewing over his little study room, to the great disgust of his feminine relatives.
Geology specimens he loved even better than the flowers; and he has never ceased to tell how his older sister, Audentia, and her friend, Viola Blair, now of Detroit, came in and cleaned his den in his absence one day, “dumping” into one pile his collections of years which he had classified and placed in little heaps around the room. He has neither forgotten nor forgiven, for he always add a little vindictively and in an almost abused tone when he laughs with “VEE” or Audie about it to this day: “And do you remember the stiff hat you accidentally put a hook through?”
He loved the quiet of my mother’s book-lined library. Many and many an evening we sat during our engagement, he reading aloud to me as I rested my head against his shoulder till I went to sleep at the sound of his voice, when he would read on to himself until it was time for him to go. He has told me that as he walked home in the white moonlight nights he sometimes stopped on the little bridge at the foot of the hill on which his home stood, and sitting on the rail with his head in his hands, he wondered what in the world had come over him!
We had not meant to fall in love with each other. Each of us had other ideas and purposes, but it seemed simply as if there were no other way.
Once before we were married I was called to a nearby town to assist a woman’s club with an entertainment. One of the numbers was to be a musical reading of Longfellow’s beautiful old poem, “The Hanging of the Crane.” This was to illustrated by tableaux, homey scenes such as the young people at their evening meal with the baby in its high-chair drumming on the table with its silver spoon.
I remember of wondering, as I lifted the little one to the high-chair when we arranged the scene, if sometime in the far-off dreamy future I might not place a baby at our table—a chubby, dimpled baby with wonderful brown eyes and silky curls like its fathers.
God is very good sometimes. That dream at least, came true; but I wonder why I never thought in those dream days, that I might be called on to get out the high-chair again for the other baby with the round bright eyes and the straight short hair, Indian-straight like its mother’s, who always sat by its father at the table. In these times of short engagements and “convenient” marriages a great many young people are cheating themselves out of one of the sweetest and happiest of all human relationships, that time of beautiful dreams which sometimes come true.
During our engagement Mr. Smith’s mother was killed in an accident. I did not know her well, but my husband has spoken of her, as have others, as a good woman and a splendid mother. It also has been said of her that throughout her entire life she could not let a hungry cat or lost dog, a stray tramp or a hopeless “down-and-outer” go from her door unfed or without shelter.
“Ruth,” my husband said to me once after her death, “you will have to be both a wife and a mother to me.”
I have tried. In fact, when a woman has grown with her husband, studied with him, cooperated with him and served him in all things to the best of her ability for a number of years, it is rather a remarkable thing if she does not become quite as much of a mother to him as she is a wife. It is a very wonderful thing, that mother love which many women find for their husbands as they approach middle-life—the kind of affection which I have noticed many middle-aged husbands appreciate very much from their middle-aged wives.
That is a pretty quotation from the old play, is it not, when Parthenia insists that her mother has told her that love is a thing an ocean cannot quench? But I have an idea that the good lady, having attained the years sufficient to be instructing a daughter of marriageable age, was quite old enough to have told us, had she wished, of just what kind of affection that “waterproof” love consisted.
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