By Gregory Clark, August 26, 1933.
The editor of The Star Weekly was hurrying up Yonge St. at noon to keep a luncheon engagement. The hot, dusty downtown was crowded with the armies of noon.
Tired people. Hot people. Undefeated but without hope of victory. Past the same stores and the same windows. Going the same path, at the same time.
The editor walks quickly. He sees the colors of yellow dresses, of dark shine in windows, the blur of a bright blue car passing, but suddenly his heart stands still and he stops in his tracks to pretend to look in a window.
Coming down Yonge St. is a young telegraph messenger boy, his cap tilted. Beside the boy walks a slim bit of a girl, brown hair blowing about her face, pink frock, some parcels in her hands. And high by his shoulder, as if to ride above all the multitude, the messenger boy is carrying a baby.
A tiny baby.
If you should suddenly see a garden of flowers marching down Yonge St., you could not be more arrested. Here in the midst of the incomprehensible city walked Joy!
All unaware of the world around them, this telegraph messenger, this girl, this baby, moved with a strange nimbus around them, a cloud, a bright sheen of happiness. The newspaper editor for no reason felt tears coming into his eyes as he stood to watch them pass. He saw others start and turn. He saw men halt and look back at these three children walking with joy. Men who, after gazing, seemed to wake.
The editor went on to luncheon. But he could not get the picture of that messenger boy, the girl and the baby out of his eyes.
He came back to the office. He sent for his art editor and his writing men. He described the scene to them.
“We’ve got to find them,” said he. “Are they married? Is that their baby? The tiniest baby I ever saw downtown. How do they get along? He’s a messenger boy, and she was so young! Why do they look so happy? Happiness isn’t so plentiful nowadays. Yet here are two children, already launched on the adventures of life, in a stormy time like this, and if ever I saw joy, I saw it on Yonge St. at noon to-day.”
So we went out and found them.
We visited them in their little apartment. surrounded by everything they have bought themselves.
Boy and girl.
“In these days,” we explained to them, “tens of thousands of people are afraid to get married, wondering how they would get along, until you find any number of people near thirty who still can’t make up their mind, work up their courage. Tell us about you, won’t you? It would interest all young people. And old people.”
“All right,” they laughed, sitting on their chesterfield, side by side, a little bewildered at having an old weasel of a newspaperman, without coat or vest, sitting under their bridge lamp on the low chair, drinking their lemonade in the hot summer night.
Harry Watson lost his job at the metal stamping works, so he decided to go with a chum up to Bathurst and Bloor and take in a movie.
That is the way youth meets Fate.
Not having any money to spare, he left his chum outside on Bloor and he stepped into an ice cream parlor for a cold drink.
He sat at the marble counter. Facing him was a large mirror in which youth could see the cubicles along the other side, in which girls preferred to sit.
Clara Callicott was in one of the cubicles treating her young cousin to ice cream. Clara could afford to treat young cousins because she was a business girl. She wrapped parcels in one of the big department stores.
“Clara,” said the young cousin, “there’s a fellow looking at you in the mirror. He’s staring.”
“Tell me when he looks away,” said Clara. “He is looking away now,” said the cousin. But at the moment Clara looked, so did Harry.
And Harry couldn’t help but smile. And before she knew it, so did Clara.
Harry Watson sat there, eking out his drink as long as possible. But a drink is only so long. And before he could get another smile in, he had to go.
“There goes your boy friend,” said the young cousin.
But when Clara came out, there was the boy friend standing very casually on the sidewalk.
Clara walked up Bathurst.
“Let’s lead him a chase,” said Clara. They walked as fast as they could, laughing, up Bathurst St., in the night.
But Harry kept up with them, and when they slowed down, Harry walked past, and then had to stop and kneel down and tie his shoe lace. And this old scheme, as old as shoe laces anyway, worked.
“Hello,” said Harry.
I suppose it is something about a man kneeling that stirs a girl’s heart.
“Hello,” said Clara.
As Harry lived in Parkdale, and Clara lived on Davenport, it was only Sundays that they could see each other. And as Clara had a Sunday School class, it was after four.
But they used to walk up to Cedarvale, and then, after a reasonable period of being out of work, Harry Watson got his job as telegraph messenger. In the downtown district.
You get 3 cents a message. In a sense, you are on commission when you are a telegraph messenger. The snappier you are, the more you make. If you get down early, and get into your uniform without undue delay and so on, you can get a bunch of night letters to deliver. That brings up your average.
Harry liked his job. And worked at it. He had an idea.
He had known Clara for quite a time and was satisfied in his mind that she was the only girl in the world. He saw her a great deal oftener than on Sunday afternoon for a walk in Cedarvale. He could see her in her noon hour.
“Here comes Romeo,” the other girls used to say in Clara’s department in the big store when the familiar figure of Harry in his jaunty cap and gray shirt and army breeches appeared at noon.
So one Sunday in Cedarvale, Harry asked Clara to marry him.
“Are you crazy?” asked Clara.
Harry assured Clara he was not crazy.
“We have been going together now for some time,” he said. (Now you know what young people are saying in Cedarvale on June Sunday afternoons.) “We are sure we like each other. I’ve got a good steady job. Two can live cheaper than one.”
Clara still thought Harry was crazy. But it was nice walking home from Cedarvale in the evening and knowing that the boy beside you was a man who had asked you to be his wife.
She said she would think about it. And sure enough next week, Clara had thought about it long enough to say yes. Clara lived at home with her father and grandmother. She does not ever remember her own mother. She had been working two years and at sixteen was more independent in her spirit than most girls.
“All right,” she said to Harry.
And they proceeded to plan to get married.
“How much money did you have?” I asked Harry.
“Next week’s pay, when I got it,” laughed Harry.
“Why didn’t you save first and then get married?” I asked.
“No,” said Clara, “that’s what everybody else does, and they take so long saving up that they never do seem to get married. So we decided to get married first and then we would have to save. And we were right.”
The wedding supper consisted of ice cream soda in a handsome Yonge St. fountain. All around them in the bright evening moved the workaday world through with work. All the people afraid of romance, all the people walking cautiously around the rims of life. And here sat the bride and the bridegroom, with the last step taken first, and the unheard, invisible theme song of the moment being “So what?”
“By the way,” I asked, “how much money did you save by this time?”
“Still next week’s pay,” said Harry. “You see, a fellow feels kind of proud of getting things for his wife. The first couple of pay days after we were married, I bought things for Clara. Not presents, you see. But dresses and things she was entitled to.”
“So the saving?” I suggested.
“Yes, that’s how the saving went.”
For a month the young couple considered the next step in their adventure.
“A honeymoon!” exclaimed Harry. “We’ve got to have a honeymoon.”
He had friends in Detroit, a young married couple in their middle twenties. Harry wrote them. In early October, Harry and Clara, with their marriage certificate with them in case of questions at the border, went to a movie and then to the Union Station and got the 1 a.m. train for Detroit.
They had four days in Detroit, and if the average middle-aged honeymooner, who stalks with dignity in and out of vast hotel dining rooms, and waddles solemnly around Detroit or New York department stores showing his bride a big time, would like to know about less pompous honeymoons, Harry and Clara will tell him that they went to movies, they ran laughing up strange dark residential streets in Detroit, they got on any old street car going anywhere, and for a car fare, journeyed a thousand miles on the road of mystery and happiness. Their friends treated them wonderfully. Drove them all over in their car. Left them alone. Jollied them.
“We sat up all night in the day coach from Toronto to Detroit,” said Clara. “And when we got to Detroit, to our friend’s apartment, I was a sight. But the way they took us to their hearts, you would think we were angels. Oh, we had a wonderful honeymoon.” And so home.
Their Home of Joy
They got in early in the morning. They both went to work as usual (Clara hadn’t told her employers she was married) and got there on time. They were living in furnished rooms on Howland Ave., near Dupont, with an elderly couple who were rejoiced to have two such young people for their tenants. Bed-sitting room, kitchenette and sunroom, $20 a month1.
“The first meal I cooked,” said Clara, “well, first of all, I had on an apron. I cooked sausages, creamed mashed potatoes, cake and coffee.”
The first piece of furniture they possessed was the walnut smoker’s stand Clara gave Harry for his birthday.
The second piece of furniture was one of those blue enamelled kitchen receptacles you open with your foot on a pedal which was given by one of Clara’s girl friends.
In one of the banks where he delivered telegrams Harry saw a small booklet on budgeting. He took one home and Clara and he devised a budget. They have stayed on it ever since.
The evening I visited them I found them in a pretty apartment, consisting of four rooms. The living room has a beautiful chesterfield suite, attractive curtains made and hung by Clara herself. Pictures and ornaments few and tasteful, chosen with all the reserve of people of thirty or forty. A fine radio softly playing.
“You hadn’t much experience of housekeeping?” I suggested.
“No, but it comes very naturally to girls,” said Clara. Her kitchen is enamelled white, and everything is spotless. Over the kitchen cabinet hangs a small white framed picture – you know the kind – showing a bouncing baby lying on its back, with its bare toes in the air, and it smiling out at you.
“When I knew I was going to have a baby,” said Clara, “Harry bought me that picture.”
All the autumn and winter the two young ones sailed along and then in March Clara knew the blessed event was to occur next fall. That meant, of course, the end of the business-girl part of her life.
“One of the girls in the baby’s wear department was away and I managed to get her job for a few weeks,” said Clara. “I had a wonderful time then. There I was in the loveliest department of the store. And every parcel I did up I imagined it was for me!”
Don’t imagine, Mrs. Reader, that I, the poor recorder of this story, made up that last sentence.
It was in April that Clara decided to give up her work. So she, with a whimsical appreciation of womanhood, brought down her marriage license and displayed it individually and collectively to the girls in the department.
“I suspected it all along,” the girls said. “We have been whispering for months, because one of the girls in another department saw a telegraph messenger buying a ring.”
But that was another telegraph messenger. Because they had been married months before.
Sunshine Goes With Them
“So one source of income was stopped?” I said.
“Yes, and don’t imagine it has all been plain sailing,” said Clara, “as far as money was concerned. We have had some pretty close figuring to do. But when you must, you can do remarkable things. We budget everything.”
The baby boy was born in the Women’s College Hospital. Clara stayed twelve days there and then came home, and the great test of bathing the baby she passed with flying colors.
“Were you frightened of your responsibility those first few weeks?” I asked.
“I think when people are happy, their babies are happy,” said Clara. “My baby has been wonderful from the beginning. He weighed eight pounds. He never cries. He is just bubbling with joy all the time.”
“Do you ever wish you were a girl in the big store again, with no cares, no responsibilities.”
Clara gave me a funny look, and getting up suddenly, she walked into the other room where the baby boy, in the humid evening, was still talking to himself and you could hear his little fists thumping a tune on the little iron cot.
Back she came with her boy. He was in his nappy and a flimsy shirt. His little. sturdy body gleamed in the soft light of the stand lamp. He put his head on one side and smiled at me. The girl mother walked once around the quiet, sweet room with its blue curtains, low-toned furniture. Just once around that room, with her boy husband sitting watching them with a sort of stillness on him, and then, with a look at me that was all the answer in the world to my question, she walked out of the room and put the baby back in his little bed.
There are some questions, it seems, you do not need to answer with words.
What fun do they have? They go to a movie once a week. Daddy Callicott comes and minds the baby boy. They have their radio. It is all the entertainment they need to divert the joy of being at home together, with their plans, their budgets, their little boy.
On fine days, Clara takes the baby as far as Sunnyside. On the street car, she can see people nudging each other and debating whether she is the mother or the big sister or the nurse girl.
At Sunnyside, elderly ladies come and sit beside the two of them and get into conversation, and come roundabout and twisty to the question, is Clara the mother or the sister of the little boy in the sunsuit?
Oh, it’s great fun.
Perhaps only two in a million could dare the risk of doing what these two have done. They have never had a quarrel. They have the same sweet, honest attitude toward life. They are happy. Hard working. Devoted. But it is not for children we have told their story. It is for the older folk. The ones who come at life so practically and methodically, as if life were a cold pool, and they were prowling timidly or cautiously about its edge.
He is a telegraph messenger.
She is still a girl.
And they are on September 3rd two years hand in hand along the main road of life.
And where they walk, the sun shines.
Editor’s Notes: This story is also considered a classic of Greg’s writing during the Great Depression.
- $20 in 1933 would be $455 in 2024. ↩︎
Leave a Reply