My dear Louise,—We have just come back from a wedding; the wedding of Miss Darling and Mr. Friseur. You remember, he is the young man I told you about at the first dinner-party. It seems such a long time ago since I first came here portrait-painting. I am getting so fond of them all that I believe I shall think you rather drunk and disorderly when I come back. The extraordinary innocence of every one amazes me. Most of them are as good as gold (nice refined gold with enough alloy in it to stand hard wear, and really quite good enough for all one wants). Perhaps they are innocent because they live within a short distance of the country, which makes them healthy and not morbidly civilized, and on the other hand, rumours of the Court and fashion filter through to them quite rapidly, which prevents them from relapsing easily into bucolic vices.
Miss Darling’s wedding was about as flat and comfortable and sensible a proceeding as you could well imagine. No passion in it to lead to possible disappointment and disaster; no marrying for money or position, as they are both already comfortably seated on the top branch of their social tree, and both have about the same amount of money, enough for perfect ease and to cover sudden emergencies, but not enough to lead to riotous living. Miss Darling loves everybody, so it is not likely that she will leave out her husband. Mr. Friseur loves himself chiefly, therefore, having chosen a wife, there is nothing to tempt him to ask for any other lady. If you like gooseberry-fool better than any other dish and are already eating gooseberry-fool, you don’t bother about the relative value of the other dishes on the table. You may need a biscuit of some sort to bring out the flavour of your choice, and Mr. Friseur has chosen Miss Darling to be his biscuit, so that he may enjoy himself more. But the other women may leave the world so far as he is concerned; his interest in the meal is at an end.
We had an early lunch, and got off afterwards in a great hurry. The coffee was late and too hot to drink. Our hair did not go so well as it did the last time we wore the same hat, and our gloves were a little tight, which made us flushed. It is only at a wedding that these contretemps happen; one can get to any other sort of party quite calmly. It is all such a self-conscious ceremony from beginning to end. The crowd by the awning leading to the church seems to have one gigantic eye fixed on the first leg one puts to the ground in getting out of the motor. When it is a motor I can just bear the ordeal, as the step is broad and low, but when I have to shuffle out of a cab, and hit just the right spot on which to plant my toe, the eye of the crowd slays my ease for the rest of the day. “Eh, look! h’m”—says the eye, and off I go up the red carpet, thoroughly flushed, and with my dress up to the knees on one side and a tail of chiffon dragging in the mud at the other. I find this out when I get home, and the mark always shows afterwards. The church, again, is all eyes. Every one has been there for hours, in a state of acute observation. The young gentlemen with shiny hair and buttonholes don’t mind this much. Boys are more or less uncomfortable anywhere in society, and have to be brave about it, so this is not worse than any ordinary party. Besides, it takes them all their time to remember the things they have been told to do; to see that the right people get seats beyond the cord, and so on. We were just short of the cord and in a perfect nest of acquaintances. I saw Mrs. Bushytail and Mrs. County, and Mrs. Cambridge was tucked away comfortably under the lee of the mammoth, who sat down upon me that afternoon I told you about. The brazen serpent was also there, looking about her through a lorgnette. She is very religious, and therefore behaves in a church as if she were very much at home, and could sit in all the pews at once if she liked. She reminds me of a person one always meets on a sea voyage, who wears a yachting cap and examines the wheel and the barometer, and counts the knots at breakfast. I once met one who was seasick, and I was so pleased. I should love it if an angel came into the church and didn’t recognize the brazen serpent, and she had to explain who she was. She was taking charge of the whole wedding. I wish I had been sitting next to her! I should have tried to put on a face like G. P. Huntley’s, and drawled, “Oh, that’s the bride, is it? What’ll they do with her, now? Oh, do they? Very nice, yes. Who’s the old fellow dressed up in calico, what? Vicar—Ah, quite so, yes, very nice. Cuts the cake and finds a ring and a sixpence in it, doesn’t he? Yaas, thanks—what a lot you know about it!”
Miss Darling is, as I have told you, a velvet-hearted creature, and no doubt the life she is to lead will give her more opportunity of cultivating her good qualities than if she were marrying any one with intelligence enough to be a connoisseur in velvet. Mr. Friseur will know how to keep himself warm with the velvet, but that is all; he cares nothing for quality or light and shade.
Bridesmaids always look their worst, don’t they? whereas brides just look queer. Very often brides are persons rarely visited by emotion. But on that day they have an idea that emotion is not only natural, but necessary; it would be an opportunity missed if they did not have some then. So they either fish a little out of the pockets of their own consciousness, or they borrow some from friends and relations, who are all ready to contribute for the occasion. “It is quite right that dear Emily should be upset,” they say; so dear Emily manages somehow to get a little upset, and looks it, and the guests revel in her indisposition. Her red nose and trembling hand have the same luscious, nutritive quality for the wedding-guests as the implements of a murder or other work of the emotions have for the unemployed. People who are themselves sensitive to the varying weather of the passions are usually eager to keep those whom they love as warm and sheltered as may be when a storm threatens, but those who habitually lead the sheltered life like nothing better than to stare out of the windows at their friends who are being buffeted about in the gale.
Miss Darling, however, was not out in any storm. She walked to the altar as to a new plateau in an altogether agreeable country, where her Friseur figures as a picturesque object for the devotion which she lavishes on every human creature within her reach. He will need to beat her very hard indeed before she takes a dislike to him. But to go back to the bridesmaids. They were not queer, like the bride; they were just sticky, and they were suffering as we had suffered about our hair. I don’t know which of them were the worst—those who had done their own hair with trembling fingers, or those who had got in a man and had it waved. They were as solemn and self-conscious as a stuffed owl that tries to look natural with its foot on a real egg which has, unfortunately, been blown previously. Miss Darling’s awful father (as they described him in the hymn, with unnecessary rudeness, I thought) looked really detestable in a white waistcoat and spats, and a pink skin head. Men, when they get to that age, look so much better if they have been exposed to the weather a good deal. I should think that Mr. Darling had been kept too warm, and given too soft food. All the slyness and cupidity and harshness, which may be quite dignified when they form a horny skin over a heart full of natural fire, are in his case just spongy and unpleasant indications of general rottenness. I don’t think that Miss Darling has a mother, but the bridegroom’s was there—a bad woman, I should think, from the look of her: thick-skinned, over-dressed, and with short legs, which are always a sign of doubtful virtue. I don’t think that her son drinks; in fact, I am sure he does not; but she is the type of woman who schemes indefatigably to find a good young girl to marry her drunken blackguard of a son in the hope of keeping him straight. The bridegroom looked like the man who takes the leading part in that wearisome type of play where the old men are fossils, the young men are nonentities, the elder women are saints, and all are marshalled into a ritual of self-revelation by a girl of eighteen, who has sown some fairly commonplace wild oats. Well, that is all over, and they have gone off to the Riviera to listen to the Voice that breathed o’er Eden.
I spent the evening helping Mrs. Merchant with the accounts of a ball which she is getting up for her favourite hospital. Wherever one goes in this town, some one is doing something for his neighbour, or, rather, for an organized section of his neighbours. There is any amount of kindness to be had, but very little pleasure. There are parties—any number of parties—for all classes of society (the kind creatures give parties for the poor and for themselves), where the only practical difference is in the quality of the refreshments; but I have seen very little happiness since I came. People like everything very much, and it is all most enjoyable, but I have not seen any one make any attempt to jump over the moon. In fact, if a scheme were got up for hoisting the public over the moon, a good many would take advantage of it. And then, by and by, the lift would get crowded with the wrong sort of people, who smell and make a noise, so the parties would be discontinued. Probably by that time some bright spirit would have begun organizing trips to hell, and it would be so interesting getting special asbestos clothes to wear going down.
Last week I went with Mrs. Merchant to her hospital. It was her day for visiting there, and we also met Mrs. Bushytail going her rounds. She looked tremendously fat—fatter than usual—and was simply all over the place as regarded management.
“Well, now, how are you getting on, Mrs. Tibby?” I heard her ask at one bed-side.