The Retrospect

by Ada Cambridge

We arrived at the decorated village—a village for a picture-book, if ever there was one. The road where the carriages of the assembling wedding guests were left had the effect of a ravine in its relation to the church above it. We looked up and before us rose an irregular footpath, like a worn-away and dislocated staircase, curving round and about the beflagged and beflowered churchyard hill; and its whole length, which straightened out would have been considerable, was covered with red baize which had evidently taken a good deal of fitting to make it lie so that it would not trip up the bridal company. At the top we could just see the outline of the church and the dim colour and flutter of the most distant flags. Sunshine could not have created a more charming effect.

The church is the crowning glory of that typical Devonshire village. It dates from the fourteenth century and its registers go back to the year 1538, but old age is not all its claim to distinction. It has a precious cradle roof inside and a not less precious rood-screen (time of Richard the Second), and a lovely harmony of every stick and stone with every other, that was a luxury to contemplate what time I sat among the wedding guests awaiting the coming of the bride. To-day the slender shafts of the screen had bridal flowers tied to them and nestling beneath—pink predominating (Japanese lilies, I think), a colour which "went" with the blackened oak as cold white blossoms would not have done. I had but such glimpses of the chancel as the interstices of the screen afforded; understanding that the chancel was a "restoration" I was content with that. I heard afterwards that it had a "squint" and rood-stairs, fourteenth-century brasses and other interesting things, such as I made a reverent study of in my young days.

The bride arrived. She was a young Norwegian lady, and a bright-faced, wholesome, happy-looking creature—as attractive a bride as one could wish to wait on. The English bridegroom looked a good fellow, and I trust he has made her a good husband.

They stood outside the screen and close to us for the first part of the marriage service, which the officiating clergyman declaimed with remarkable enthusiasm; then they passed into the sanctuary for the completion of the rite. As a mere wedding it was like other weddings. The coloured flowers in the decorations (I believe they were all white in the chancel) was the only unusual note.

But when the bride and bridegroom came out of church man and wife together, there were a couple of minutes when the bridal spectacle surpassed anything of the sort that I ever saw. I want to paint the scene, but I know I cannot do it—cannot convey to another who was not there the impression it made on me. The subject may be "genre," but of all the pictures in my gallery I can find none more poetically composed. Let me try to sketch it somehow.

You must first imagine rural Devonshire and one of its sweetest villages; the deep road, the hedges and the trees and the churchyard slopes, the flowers, the flags, the scarlet carpet, the still rainless mist. The red stairway twisting and dropping through the green from porch to gate is now lined with the village children, all in bewreathed new hats (provided by the bride's family), and they hold in their hands baskets of flower petals, with which they bestrew the way of the bridal procession. Down they come—we had preceded them to the road, or I should have lost one of the sights of my life—down they come, winding with the winding path, the bride with her veil up, smiling and bowing, her white train and her young maids behind her; every figure, every feature of the scene, refined and idealised by the (to me) extraordinary atmosphere. Bright sunlight would have made a picture which I should have thought perfect had I not seen it through this pure poetic haze. As a study of fog effects—well, it is no use trying to elucidate the thing further. But I carried it away with the delight of a collector in a work of art that is unmatchable, and now it is safe in my gallery of Blessed Memories, and I would not take any money for it.

When we drove to the house which commanded "one of the finest views in England"—home of the bride's sister—a rather less density of fog would have answered the purpose, instead of which we had rather more. The house, with its platform and all the lawns and flower-beds and marquees thereon, was quite plain to view; the first terrace was visible; some trees between that and the second tier of garden loomed a shade more substantial than their shadows would have been; below and beyond them—nothing. Nothing, nothing but cotton-wool, a white blanket, a wall impenetrable. Not a glimpse, not a hint of the coombe and sea that M. had promised me. So that to this day I do not really know how lovely Devonshire can be, although I can imagine that I know.

The visible house had the more attention paid to it, and within it there was much to charm the eye of a wedding guest, apart from the show of wedding presents. Our Norwegian hostess had brought to her English home treasure of furniture and curios that I had to apologise for staring at as if they were things in a museum; masses of black wood carved all over, and strange pottery and metal ware, drinking-cups and the like; they brought the Norse country, ere while distant and practically unknown, to sight and touch, and set my unsated traveller's soul a-dreaming of snows and sagas, mountains and fjords.

But the Norwegian wedding-cake was the pride of its nation, amongst them all.

In the large marquee where the dinner-destroying marriage feast was spread, there were two of these nuptial trophies, an English cake crowning one long table, a Norwegian the other. The first was the white, three-tiered, much decorated affair that we are familiar with, and I did not go near it. The bride cut it ceremonially, and it was distributed in the usual way. Then, escorted by her bridegroom, she came across the carpeted tent through the smart crowd to where I stood at the other table. "I must 'break' this cake," she remarked, with her pretty foreign accent, and proceeded to do it with her two hands in what one perceived to be the correct Norwegian bridal fashion. In case the reader is as ignorant of the constitution of Norwegian bridescakes as I was until that afternoon, I will try to describe it.