When they had settled that the schoolmaster was not marrying for money, they discussed the problem of “what the young people were going to live on.” The bookseller made a guess at the schoolmaster’s salary and “what he might earn besides by giving private lessons.” When that question, too, had been settled, the proprietor, who had returned to the table, asked for details.
“Where had he met her? Was she fair or dark? Was she in love with him?”
The last question was by no means out of the way; the bookseller “thought she was,” for he had seen them together, arm in arm, looking into shop windows.
“But that he, who was such a stick, could fall in love! It was incredible!”
“And what a husband he would make!” The proprietor knew that he was devilish particular about his food, and that, he said, was a mistake when one was married.
“And he likes a glass of punch in the evening, and surely a married man can’t drink punch every evening of his life. And he doesn’t like children! It won’t turn out well,” he whispered. “Take my word for it, it won’t turn out well. And, gentlemen, there’s another thing,” (he rose from his seat, looked round and continued in a whisper), “I believe, I’m hanged if I don’t, that the old hypocrite has had a love affair of some sort. Do you remember that incident, gentlemen, with the—hihihi—sleeping suit? He’s one of those whom you don’t find where you leave them! Take care, Mrs. Blom! Mind what you are about! I’ll say no more!”
It was certainly a fact that the schoolmaster was engaged to be married and that the wedding was to take place within two months.
What happened after, does not belong to this story, and, moreover, it is difficult to know what goes on behind the convent walls of domesticity when the vow of silence is being kept.
It was also a fact that the schoolmaster, after his marriage, was never again seen at a public house.
The bookseller, who met him by himself in the street one evening, had to listen to a long exhortation on getting married. The schoolmaster had inveighed against all bachelors; he had called them egotists, who refused to do their duty by the State; in his opinion they ought to be heavily taxed, for all indirect taxes weighed most cruelly on the father of a family. He went so far as to say that he wished to see bachelorhood punished by the law of the land as a “crime against nature.”