“Me and Arthur? Rather! I don’t suppose we shall be married this side of the next eclipse if we don’t do something of the sort! I’m not proud, as long as they don’t mix the husbands up; I’ve had to watch Arthur, I can tell you, ever since he got his new Sans Souci hat!... But really, Lennie, do you think you could get us a ticket or whatever it is?”
“If you really mean it——”
“Of course I mean it. Oh, I say, you are a brick! What a lark!”
And so Miss Umpleby, who otherwise would have had to wait for another year, put her name down for that public wedding-breakfast.
And so a word was dropped here and a word was dropped there, and the business spies stole back and forth piecing gathered rumours together, and, some days before the announcements appeared in the papers, Doubledays’ and the rest of them knew that they were done. No counter-device they could have prepared in the time would have compared for one single instant with that clean-cut and beauty-bright idea of Dorothy’s. So some of them touched hidden springs that caused letters on over-advertised business to appear in the papers, but most of them took their defeat magnanimously, merely sending out fresh spies to try to discover “whose notion Miller had stolen that time” and to try to secure the services of that ingenious brain for themselves. Oh, Dorothy would have had no difficulty whatever in selling herself two or three times over! In fact she did so, at varying figures, though of course not to Hallowell’s trade competitors. It is quite simple. When you are more anxious to sell your brains than somebody else is to buy them, then your price is a low one; but when people come running to you with their money in their hands, that is the time to stick it on....
Dorothy stuck it on. If Stan got his game of polo once in a while he must have just as good ponies as anybody else’s...
And so, you know, in the beginning of the June of that year the famous Wedding Week opened. You do not need to dig deep into your newspaper files in order to read all about it and to remember how, for brilliance and festivity and renown, for crowds and mirth and family gatherings and thundering good business, it by far outdistanced any mere Shopping Week that had ever been held in this island realm. It caught on instantaneously. London talked of nothing else. From eleven o’clock to four daily, Oxford Street was blocked. Folk stood up to watch from the standing buses; streams of traffic were diverted into the side streets; it took you half an hour to walk on foot from Oxford Circus to Tottenham Court Road, and high across the street, all pale blue and silver and white, Hallowell’s swinging banner, “OUR WEDDING WEEK,” flapped and fluttered in the spring wind. And the evening papers reserved special columns for the daily doings. Press-photographers snapped; descriptive reporting soared; ponderously playful editorials gave the Wedding Week their imprimatur; comedians made it the theme of their choicest “gags.” The Daily Speculum rose to a million a day on the strength of its photographs of bridal-parties alone. There were rumours of a Manchester Wedding Week. One couple journeyed all the way from Stornoway to be married by Special Licence and to breakfast at Hallowells’; another couple came from the Potteries. In both these cases Hallowells’ handsomely paid for the railway-tickets also. Newly-made husbands and wives were interviewed as they signed the large Bridal Book; they bore testimony that the champagne was excellent, the wedding-cakes not made of plaster of Paris, and that there were absolutely no gratuities whatever. Hallowells’ defiantly invited investigation on these points. They issued a public challenge to anybody who could prove that they were not doing all they had undertaken to do. Especially they drove it home that any genuine bride or bridegroom or member of their party might drink just as much champagne as ever he or she wished. Doubts, they said, had been cast upon their bona fides, and they considered that they owed it to themselves to set themselves right with the public. And surely you could not blame them.
And inside the great domed Central Hall was the sight of a lifetime. The large twenty-four-hours’ clock was embowered with cherubs’ heads so that it almost resembled the picture by Reynolds, and quivers and darts and nuptial torches, big and little, were arranged in trophies everywhere. A real sculptor had been commissioned to model the figure of Hymen that stood in the middle of the hall, and at or in among the fifty tables the wedding-parties sat or moved. Ordinarily the parties were limited to a dozen; special notice had to be given of larger parties; but the mirth those dozens made!... Party succeeded party while the chairs were yet warm; as one party ate its fruit those who waited for the vacated chairs stood so close behind them that they also might almost have bitten of the same banana or apple or pear. The room that is now the world-famed Juperies was the reception-room; there those who did not breakfast joined their friends who did; and the Umbrella Department was turned into a smoking-room for the men. And in they came, party after party, to Hallowells’ to breakfast. Cheers went up from those whom Hallowells’ carriages passed in the streets. An amber-yellow, the same yellow in which their parcels are now done up, was Hallowells’ chosen colour; flowers of that colour filled the carriage lamps, rosettes of that colour were tied to the drivers’ whips. The souvenirs and favours were tied with ribbons of that colour, and confetti of that colour (unless not desired) was thrown at the parties that descended from Hallowells’ vestibule to Oxford Street; this confetti thinned gradually out on the pavements for a quarter of a mile either way, east and west. And every bride and bridegroom who breakfasted was made to enter the great Floral Bell, and to take, from the shelves that lined the structure, the parcel of souvenirs for the party. Two Cupids kept the flap-doors of the Bell. They shot harmless darts at Hallowells’ guests. Sometimes these darts had serpentins of coloured paper (amber yellow) attached to them; sometimes they had whistles. These last, as they flew through the air, made a noise like swallows.
And the parties themselves!... Arthur and Miss Umpleby were among the first to breakfast and then, to the strains of the Wedding March from the string band, to take their souvenirs from the Bell; but on the following day Mr. Nolan, of the Satteens, took Miss Feather, of the Fancies Counters, to have and to hold, and the whole of those two Departments took tea in relays in the room where Sir Walter spread the Cloak, and Mr. Miller himself presided at the tea, and gave Mr. Nolan an advance of salary, and the reporters, too, joined in the applause that greeted the announcement. Mr. Miller would have given his ears to have dared to suggest to Dorothy that she and Mr. Stanhope, Lady Tasker’s nephew and niece, should eat their cake and enter the Bell along with the others; but though he guessed an understanding to exist, he knew no more than that, and in the end funked it. Moreover, to his chagrin, he was losing Mr. Stanhope. His swellest Marshal of all had handed in his paper. In vain had Mr. Miller offered to confer on him the title of Field-Marshal; Stan had told him that he really didn’t feel up to the job, and had refused to reconsider his decision. But that drop of mortification was as nothing in the buckets and buckets of good business the Wedding Week was doing. If Stan was leaving, there was still Sir Walter, and a daily drilling of Marshals for an hour before that inspiring picture might be expected to work wonders. They had really performed very creditably at the Nolan-Feather wedding-tea, and a touch here and there of the easy negligence Dorothy had used when she had introduced him to Lady Tasker in the simple words, “Mr. Miller,” should presently give their deportment its consummation and crown.