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The Incredible Honeymoon
XII
WESTMINSTER
A WEDDING-DAY – even a real wedding-day – leaves at best but a vague and incoherent memory. To the bridegroom it is a confused whirling recollection of white satin and tears and smiles and flowers and music – or perhaps a dingy room with a long table and an uninterested registrar at the end of it.
Edward Basingstoke thought with regret of the flowers and the white satin. If he had accepted her submission, had consented to the real marriage, there should have been white roses by the hundred, and the softest lace and silk to set off her beauty. As it was —
"We shall have to go through some sort of form," he told her, "because of the clerks. If my friend were just to tear out a certificate and give it to us the people in the office… You understand."
"Quite," she said.
"It'll be rather like a very dingy pretense at a marriage. You won't mind that?"
"Of course not. Why should I?"
"Then, if you're sure you really want to go through with it.. shall we go to my friend's now, and get it over?"
"He doesn't mind?"
"Not a bit."
"He must be a very accommodating friend."
"He is," said Edward.
"Where did you leave the luggage?" she asked, suddenly. They were walking along the Embankment.
"At Charing Cross."
"Well, I'm going to get it. And I shall go to the Charing Cross Hotel with it, and you can meet me in three hours."
"But that'll only just give us time," he said. "Why not come with me now?"
"Because," she said, firmly, "I won't play at mock marriages unless I like, and I won't play at all unless you let me do as I like first."
"Won't you tell me why?"
"I'll tell you when I meet you again."
"Where?" he asked. And she stopped at the statue of Forster in the Embankment Gardens, and answered:
"Here."
Then she smiled at him so kindly that he asked no more questions, but just said:
"In three hours, then," and they walked on together to Charing Cross.
And after three hours, in which he had time to be at least six different Edwards, he met, by the statue of the estimable Mr. Forster, a lady all in fine white linen, wearing a white hat with a wreath of white roses around it, and long white gloves, and little white shoes. And she had a white lace scarf and a live white rose at her waist.
"I thought I'd better dress the part," she said, a little nervously, "for the sake of the clerks, you know."
"How beautiful you are," he said, becoming yet another kind of Edward at the sight of her, and looking at her as she stood in the afternoon sunshine. "Why didn't you tell me before how beautiful you were?"
"I… How silly you are," was all she found to say.
"I wish, though," he said, as they walked together along the gravel of the garden, "that you'd done it for me, and not for those clerks, confound them!"
"I didn't really do it for them," she said. "Oh no – and not for you, either. I did it for myself. I couldn't even pretend to be married in anything but white. It would be so unlucky."
All that he remembered well. And what came afterward – the dingy house with the grimy door-step, and the area where dust and torn paper lay, the bare room, the few words that were a mockery of what a marriage service should be, the policeman who met them as they went in, the charwoman who followed them as they went out, the man at the end of the long, leather-covered table – Edward's old acquaintance, but that seemed negligible – who who wished them joy with, as it were, his tongue in his cheek. And there was signing of names and dabbing of them with a little oblong of pink blotting-paper crisscrossed with the ghosts of the names of other brides and bridegrooms – real ones, these – and then they were walking down the sordid street, she rather pale and looking straight before her, and in her white-gloved hand the prize of the expedition, the marriage certificate, to gain which the mock marriage had been undertaken.
And suddenly the romantic exaltation of the day yielded to deepest depression, and Edward Basingstoke, earnestly and from the heart, wished the day's work undone. It was all very well to talk about mock marriages, but he knew well enough that his honor was as deeply engaged as though he had been well and truly married in Westminster Abbey by His Grace of York assisted by His Grace of Canterbury. Freedom was over, independence was over, and all his life lay at the mercy of a girl – the girl who, a week ago, had no existence for him. The whole adventure, from his first sight of her among dewy grass and trees, had been like a fairy-tale, like a romance of old chivalry. He had played his part handsomely, but with the underlying consciousness that it was a part – a part sympathetic to his inclinations, but a part, none the less. The whole thing had been veiled in the mists of poetry, illuminated by the glow of adventure. And now it seemed as though he had thoughtlessly plucked the flower of romance which, with patience and careful tending, would have turned to the fruit of happiness. He had plucked the flower, and all he had gained was the power to keep a beautiful stranger with him – on false pretenses. He wished that she, at least, had not so gaily entered on the path of deception. Never a scruple had disturbed her – the idea of deceiving an aunt who loved her had been less to her than – than what? Less, at least, than the pain of losing him forever, he reminded himself. He tried to be just – to be generous. But at the back of his mind, and not so very far back, either, Iago's words echoed, "She did deceive her father, and may thee." His part of the deception now seemed to him the blackest deed of his life, and he could not undo it. It was impossible to turn to this white shape, moving so quietly beside him, with:
"Let's burn the certificate. Deceit is dishonorable."
If she did not think so.. well, women's code of honor was different from men's. And she had been willing to marry him in earnest, with no deceptions or reservations. This mock business had been, in the end, his doing, not hers. And now they had gone through with it, and here he was walking beside her, silent, like a resentful accomplice. They had walked the street's length, its whole dingy length, in silence. The light of life had, once more, for Mr. Basingstoke, absolutely gone out. They turned the corner, and still he could find nothing to say; nor, it appeared, could she. The hand with the paper hung loosely. The other hand was busy at her belt – and now the white rose fell on the dusty pavement, between a banana-skin and a bit of torn printed paper. He stooped, automatically, to pick up the rose.
"Don't," she said. "It's faded."
It so manifestly wasn't that he looked at her, and on the instant the light of life began to be again visible to him, very faint and far, like the pin-point of daylight at the end of a long tunnel, but still visible. For he now perceived that for her, too, the light had gone out – blown out, most likely, by the same breath of remorse. Sublime egoist! He was to have the monopoly of fine sentiments and regretful indecisions, was he? Not a thought for her, and what she must have been feeling. But perhaps what she had felt had not been that at all; yet something she had felt, something not happy – something that led to the throwing away of white roses.
"I can't let it lie there," he said, holding it in his hand. "I should like to think," he added, madly trying to find some words to break the spell that, he now felt, held them both – "I should like to think it would never fade."
She smiled at that – a small and pitiful smile.
"Cheer up," she said; "lots of people have got really married and then parted, as they say, at the church door. This is a perfect spot for a parting," she added, a little wildly, waving toward a corn-chandler's and a tobacconist's; "or, if your chivalry won't let you desert me in this desolate neighborhood.. let me tell you something, something to remember; you'll find it wonderfully soothing and helpful. From this moment henceforth, forever, every place in the world where we are will be the best place for parting – if we want to part. Isn't that almost as good as the freedom you're crying your eyes out for?"
"I'm not," he said, absurdly; but she went on.
"Do you think I don't understand? Do you think I don't know how you feel twenty times more bound to me than if we were really married? Perhaps it's only because everything's so new and nasty. Perhaps you won't feel like that when you get used to things. But if you do – if you don't get over it then – it's all been for nothing, and we might as well have parted among the pigeons."
She walked faster and faster.
"What we have to remember – oh yes, it's for me as well as you – what we've got to remember is that we're to be perfectly free. We needn't stay with each other an instant after we wish not to stay. Doesn't that help?"
"You're a witch," he said, keeping pace with her quickened steps, "but you don't know everything. And you're tired and – "
"I know quite enough," she said.
Never had he felt more helpless. Their aimless walking was leading them into narrower and poorer streets where her bridal whiteness caught the eye and turned the head of every passer-by. The pavements were choked with slow passengers and playing children, small, dirty, pale, with the anxious expression of little old men and women.
"Do you like deer?" he asked, suddenly.
"Deer?"
"Yes – fawns, does, stags, antlers?"
"Of course I do."
"Then let's go to Richmond Park. Let's get out of this."
The points of her white shoes showed like stars among the filth of the pavement, her clean, clear beauty shining against the drab and dirty houses like a lily against a dust-heap. He felt a surge of impotent fury that such a background should be possible. The children, tired and pale with the summer heat that had been so glad and gay and shining to him and to her yesterday on the quiet river, looked like some sort of living fungus – and their clothes looked like decaying vegetables. If Mr. Basingstoke had been alone he would have solaced himself by going to the nearest baker's and buying buns for every child in sight. But somehow it is very difficult to do that sort of thing unless you are alone or have a companion who trusts you and whom you trust beyond the limit of life's cheaper confidences. He felt that self-exculpatory eagerness to give which certain natures experience in the presence of sufferings which they do not share. Also he felt – and hated himself for feeling – a fear lest, if he should act naturally, she might think he wanted to "show off." To show off what, in the name of all that was pretentious and insincere? Had civilization come to this, that a man was "showing off" who took want as he found it and changed it, without its costing him the least little loss or self-denial, into a radiant, if momentary, satisfaction? And yet, somehow, he found he could not say, "Let's go and raid the bun-shop for these kiddies."
"We're to pass our lives together, and I can't say a simple thing like that," he thought, with curious bitterness – but, indeed, all his thoughts were confused and bitter just then.
What a travesty of a wedding-day! He would have liked his wedding-feast to be in the big barn of the bride's father, and every neighbor, rich and poor, to have drunk their health in home-brewed ale of the best, and the tables cleared away and a jolly dance to follow, and when the fun was at its merriest he and she would have slipped out and ridden home to his own house on the white horse – Dobbin, his name – she on the pillion behind him, her arm soft about his waist, and the good horse so sure of foot that he never stumbled, however often his master turned his face back to the dear face over his shoulder. Instead of which she had consented to a mock marriage in a registry-office – and this.
"Let's get out of this," he repeated.
"We are getting out of it," she said, and, abruptly, "Don't people who have real weddings pay the ringers and the beadle and give a feast to the villagers – open house, and all that?"
He thrilled to the magic of that apt capping of his thought.
"Yes," he said, and, not knowing why, hung on her next words.
"Couldn't we?" she said, and her eyes wandered to the rose he still carried. "Of course it was only pretending, but we might pretend a little longer. Couldn't we give our wedding-feast here? The guests are all ready," she added, and her voice trembled a little.
How seldom can man follow his desire. Edward would have liked to fall on his knees among the cabbage-stalks and the drifting dust and straw and paper – to kneel before her and kiss her feet. For, in that moment, and for the first time, he worshiped her.
The imbecile irrationality of this will not have escaped you. He worshiped her for the very thought, the very impulse of simple loving-kindness which he had been ashamed to let her know as his own.
She kindled to the lighting of his face. "I knew you would," she said. "You are a dear." The same irrational admiration shone in her eyes. "Sweets? Pounds and pounds of?"
"Buns," he answered, "buns and rock-cakes. Sweets afterward, if you like," and enthusiastically led the way to the nearest baker's.
Now this is difficult to believe and quite impossible to explain, but it is true. No human ear but their own had heard this interchange. "Sweets," "buns," and "rock-cakes," those words of power had, in fact, been spoken in the softest whisper, but from the moment of their being spoken a sort of wireless telegraphy ran down that mean street from end to end, and by the time they reached the baker's they had a ragged following of some fifty children, while from court and alley and narrow side-street came ever more and more children, ragged children, stuffily dressed children, children carrying bags, children carrying parcels, children carrying babies and jugs and jars and bundles. The crowd of children pressed around the baker's door, and noses flattened like the suckers of the octopus in aquariums marked a long line across the window a little above the level of the bun-trays. I do not pretend to explain how this happened. Good news proverbially travels fast. It also travels by ways past finding out.
She began to take the buns by twos and threes from the tray in the window, and held them out. A forest of lean arms reached up and a shrill chorus of, "Me, teacher! Me!" varied by, "She's 'ad one – me next, teacher! Let the little boy 'ave one, lady; 'e 'ain't 'ad nuffin."
The woman of the shop rolled forward. She was as perfectly spherical as is possible to the human form.
"Treat, sir?" she said, in a thick, rich, husky voice (like cake, as Edward said later). They owned her guess correct.
"How much'll you go to?"
"A bun apiece," said Edward.
"For the whole street? Why, there's hundreds!"
"The more the merrier," said Mr. Basingstoke.
"Do 'e mean it?" the woman asked, turning to the bun-giver.
"Yes, oh yes." The girl turned from the door to lean over the smooth deal counter. "It's our wedding-day," she whispered, "and we didn't give any wedding-breakfast, so we thought we'd give one now."
Edward had turned to the door and was making a speech.
"You shall all have a bun," he said, "to eat the lady's health in. But it's one at a time. Now you just hold on a minute and don't be impatient."
"Bless your good 'art, my dear," the globular lady was wheezing into the ear of the mock bride. "Married to-day, was you? I'm sure you look it, both of you – every inch you do. But we 'aven't got the stuff in the place for 'arf that lot."
"How soon could you get it?"
"I could send a couple of the men out. Do it in ten minutes – or less, if Prickets around the corner's not sold out."
"How much will it cost – something for each of them – cake if not buns – sweets if not cake – ?"
The round woman made a swift mental calculation and announced the result.
She who looked so much like a bride turned to him who seemed her bridegroom. "Give me some money, please, will you?"
Money changed hands, and changed again.
"Now, lookee 'ere," said the round one, "you let me manage this 'ere for you. If you don't you'll be giving three times over to the pushing ones, and the quiet ones won't get nothing but kicked shins and elbows in the pit of stomachs. I know every man jack of them 'cept the hinfans in arms, and even them I knows the ones as is carrying of them. Wait till I send the chaps off for the rest of the stuff."
The crowd outside surged excitedly, and the frail arms still waved to the tune of, "Me next, teacher!" All along the street the faces of the houses changed features as slatternly women and shirt-sleeved men leaned out of the windows to watch and wonder. When the baker's wife rolled back into the shop she found the girl silent, with lips that trembled.
"There, don't you upset yourself, my pretty," said the round one. "You'll like to give it to 'em with your own hands, I lay. Take and begin on what's before you – let 'em come in one door and out of the other, and I'll see as they don't come twice."
"You do it," said the girl, and she spoke to Edward over her shoulder. "I didn't think it would be like this. Tell them we've got to go, but Mrs. Peacock will give them each a bun."
"How clever of her to have noticed the name," he thought; but he said, "Are you sure you don't want to have the pleasure of seeing their pleasure?"
"No – no," she said. "Let's get away. I can't bear it. Mrs. Peacock will see to it for us – won't you?"
"That I will, lovey, and keep the change for you against you call again. You can trust me."
"We don't want any change," she said. "Spend it all on buns, or cake, or anything you like. It is good of you. Oh, good-by, and thank you – so much. I didn't think it would be like this," she said, and gave Mrs. Peacock both hands, while Edward explained to the crowd outside.
A wail of disappointment went up, but stayed itself as Mrs. Peacock rushed to the door.
"It's all true," she said, in that thick, rich, caky voice; "every good little boy and gell's to have a bun. Now then," she added, in a perfect blaze of tactlessness, "three cheers for the bride and bridegroom, and many happy returns."
The two had to stand side by side and hear those shrill, thin cheers, strengthened by the voices of fathers and mothers at the windows. He had to wave his hat to the crowd and to be waved at in return from every window in the street – even those too far away for their occupants to have any certain idea why they cheered and waved. She had to bow and kiss her hand to the children and to bow and smile to the window-dwellers.
Next moment she was out of the shop and running like a deer along a side-street, he following. They took hands and ran; and by luck their street brought them to a road where trams were, and escape. They rode on the top of the tram, and she held his hand all the way to Charing Cross. I cannot explain this. Neither of them spoke a word. Further, it was almost without a word that they got themselves to Richmond. It was not till they had been for many minutes in the deep quiet of the bracken and green leafage that she spoke, with a little laugh that had more than laughter in it.
"We might almost as well," she said, "have been married in church."
XIII
WARWICK
ONLY those who have gone through the ceremony of a mock marriage, from the gentlest motives, and have soothed the solicitude of a beloved and invalid aunt by the gift of the marriage certificate thus obtained, can have any idea of the minor difficulties which beset the path of the really unselfish. Had the ceremony been one in which either party was deceived as to its real nature the sequent embarrassments would have been far less. The first and greatest was the question of names. The persons mentioned in the certificate now bedewed by the joyful tears of the invalid aunt, and scorched by the fierce fires of a first-class family row, were committed, so far as the family and the world knew, to a wedding-journey. That is to say, Mr. and Mrs. Basingstoke, after posting the certificate, were to proceed on their honeymoon. But cold mock marriages claim no honeymoon. So far the only explanation of the relations of the now mockly married had been made to Mr. Schultz across the peaches in the sunned and shadowy arbor at Tunbridge Wells. To Mr. Schultz the two were brother and sister. To travel as Mr. and Mrs. Basingstoke presented difficulties almost insurmountable – to pursue their wanderings as Mr. and Miss Basingstoke involved bother about letters and the constant risk of explanations to any of the friends and relations of either across whose path fate might be spiteful enough to drive them. Because, of course, your friends and relations know how many brothers and sisters you have and what they look like, and those sort of people never forget. You could never persuade them that the young man with whom you were traveling was a brother whom they had overlooked or forgotten.
A long silence in the train that meant to go to Warwick was spent by each in the same tangle of puzzle and conjecture. They had the carriage to themselves. Her eyes were on the green changing picture framed by the window; his eyes noted the firm, pretty line of her chin, the way her hair grew, the delicate charm of the pale roses under the curve of her hat-brim – the proud carriage of head and neck; he liked the way she held herself, the way her hands lay in her lap, the self-possession and self-respect that showed in every line of that gracious figure.
The four walls of the carriage seemed to shut them in with a new and deeper intimacy than yesterday's. He would have liked to hold her hand as he had held it on the way to Richmond – to have her shoulder lightly touching his and to sit by her and watch the changing of that green picture from which she never turned her eyes. And all the time the two alternatives seesawed at the back of his mind: "Mr. and Mrs. or Mr. and Miss?"
Her eyes suddenly left the picture and met his. In that one glance she knew what sort of thoughts had been his, and knew also quite surely and unmistakably, as women do know such things, that the relations between them had been changed by that mock marriage – that now it would not be he who would make the advances. That he was hers for the asking, she knew, but she also knew that there would have to be asking, and that asking hers. She knew then, as well as she knew it later, that that act had set a barrier between them and that his would never be the hand to break it down; a barrier strong as iron, behind which she could, if she would, remain alone forever – and yet a barrier which, if she chose that it should be so, her choice could break at a touch, as bubbles are broken. She felt as perhaps a queen in old romance might have felt traveling through the world served only by a faithful knight. That they had held each other's hand on their wedding-day had been an accident. This would never happen again – unless she made it happen.
"We must have our letters sent to the post-offices where we go," she said, suddenly, turning to the problem at the back of her mind. "Then the aunts can call me 'Mrs.' when they write to me. I suppose they'll want to call me that?"
"Mrs. Basingstoke," he said, slowly. "Yes, it seems likely that they will want to."
"Then," she went on, "we needn't pretend to the hotel people that we're married. They'd be sure to find out we weren't, or something, and we should always be trembling on the perilous edge of detection. I couldn't bear to be always wondering whether the landlord had found us out."
"It would be intolerable," he agreed, deeply conscious of the admirable way in which she grasped this delicate nettle. "Whereas.."
"Whereas if we're Mr. and Miss Basingstoke at our hotels, and Mr. and Mrs. at the post-office, it's all as simple as the Hebrew alphabet."
"The Hebrew.. ?"
"Well, it's not quite as simple as A B C, but very nearly. So that's settled."
"What," he asked, hastily, anxious to show his sense of a difficulty avoided, a subject dismissed – "what do you think about when you look out of the windows in trains? Or don't you think at all – just let the country flow through your soul as though it were music?"
"One does that when one's in it," she answered, "in woods and meadows and in those deep lanes where you see nothing but the hedges and the cart-tracks – and on the downs – yes. But when you look out at the country it's different, isn't it? One looks at the churches and thinks about all the people who were christened and married and buried there, and then you look at the houses they lived in – the old farm-houses more than anything. Do you know, all my life I've wished I'd been born a farmer's daughter. All the little things of life in those thatched homesteads are beautiful to me. The smell of the wood smoke, and the way all your life is next door to out-of-doors – always having to go out and feed the calves or the pigs or the fowls, and always little young things, the goslings and the ducklings and the chicks – you know how soft and pretty they are. And all these lovely little live things dependent on you. And the men as well – they come home tired from their work and you have their meals all ready – the bread you've baked yourself, and the pasties you've made – perhaps, even, you brew the beer and salt the pork – and they come in, your husband and your father and your brothers, and they think what a good housekeeper you are, and love you for it. Or if you're a man yourself, all your work's out of doors with the nice, clean earth and making things grow, and seeing the glorious seasons go round and round like a splendid kaleidoscope; and in the winter coming home through the dusk and seeing the dancing light of your own hearth-fire showing through the windows, till you go into the warm, cozy place, and then the red curtains are drawn and the door is shut, and you're safe inside – at home."
He felt in every word a new intimacy, a new confidence. For the first time she was speaking to him from the heart without afterthought and without reservations. And he knew why. He knew that the queen, confident and confiding, spoke to the faithful knight. And the matter of her speech no less than its manner enchanted him so that he could think of nothing better to say than:
"Go on – tell me some more."
"There isn't any more, only I think that must have been the life I lived in my last incarnation, because a little house in the country – any little house, even an old turnpike cottage – always seems to call out to me, 'Here I am! Come home! What a long time you've been away!'"
"And yet," he said, and felt, as he said it, how stupid he was being – "and yet you love traveling and adventure – seeing the world and the wonders of the world."
"Ah!" she said, "that's my new incarnation. But what the old one loved goes deeper than that. I love adventure and new bits of the world as I love strawberries and ice-cream, and waltzing and Chopin, but the little house in the green country is like the daily bread of the heart."
"I understand you," he said, slowly. "I understand you in the only possible way. I mean that's the way I feel about it, too. If you were really my sister, what a united family the last of the Basingstokes would be."
"Do you really feel the same about it – you, too?" she asked. "Oh, what a pity I wasn't born Basingstoke, and we would have lived on our own farm and been happy all our lives."
He would not say what he might have said, and her heart praised him for not saying it. And so at last they came to Warwick, and Charles had bounded from the dog-box all pink tongue and white teeth and strenuous white-covered muscles, and knocked down a little boy in a blue jersey, who had to be consoled by chocolate which came out of the machine like the god in the Latin tag. And then all the luggage was retrieved – there was getting to be a most respectable amount of it, as she pointed out – and it and they and Charles got into a fly (for there are still places where an open carriage bears that ironic name) and drove through the afternoon sunshine to the Warwick Arms. But when they were asked to write their names in the visitors' book, each naturally signed a Christian name, and the management, putting two and two together, deduced Mr. and Mrs. Basingstoke, and entered this result in more intimate books, living in retirement in the glass case which preserves the young lady who knows all about which rooms you can have. The chambermaid and the boots agreed that Mr. and Mrs. Basingstoke were a handsome couple. Also, when a new-comer, signing his name, asked a question about the signatures just above his, "Mr. and Mrs. Basingstoke," was the answer he got.
Now all this time, for all her frankness, she had been concealing something from him.
You must know that the wedding-dinner, if a mock marriage can be said to involve a wedding-dinner, had been at the Star and Garter, and after the wooded slopes and the shining spaces of the river her London hotel had seemed but a dull and dusty resting-place. And it was she who had met him when he called to take her out to breakfast with a petition for more river. So they had taken more river, in the shape of a Sunday at Coohmah, where the beautiful woods lean down to the water, and the many boats keep to the stream and the few creep into backwaters whither the swans follow you, and eat all the lunch if you will only give them half a chance. It was a delightful day, full of incident and charm. The cool, gleaming river, the self-possessed gray poplars, the generous, green-spreading beeches, the lovelorn willows trailing their tresses in the stream, the reeds and the rushes, the quiet, emphasized by the knowledge that but for the supremest luck they might have been two in a very large and noisy party, such as that on the steam-launch which thrust its nose into their backwater and had to back out with fussings and snortings, like a terrier out of a rabbit-hole. The dappled shadows on the spread carpet of lily-leaves, the green gleams in the deep darkness of the woods, the slow, dripping veil of dusk through which they rowed slowly back to the inn – even being late for the train and having to run for it – all, as he said, when they had caught the train and were crammed into a first-class carriage with three boating-men, a painted lady, an aged beau, and a gentleman almost of color, from Brazil – all had been very good. But he did not know all. There had been a moment, while he had gone in to the bar of the inn to settle for the boat – a moment in which she waited in the little grassy garden that shelves down to the river's edge – and in that moment a boat slid up to the landing-stage. The first man to get out of it was nobody, and didn't matter. The second was Mr. Schultz. As it happened, her face was lighted by a yellow beam from one of the inn windows, and as he landed the beam from the other window fell across his face, so that they saw and recognized each other in a blaze of light that might have been arranged for no other purpose.
