“You promise me he shall say that?” said Cosimo incredulously.
“Oh, you don’t know the atmosphere I’ve had to keep my art alive in!”
“I shall certainly come,” Cosimo had said. He added that he would have gone there barefoot if only Mr. Wellcome would say, “May all your troubles be little ones.”
The wedding was to take place at St. Mark’s, not far from Mr. Massey’s bookshop, and the breakfast was to be given at Glenerne itself. It was to be sent in from Bunters’, all but what Mr. Sandys, the baritone, of the Lillie Road branch of the East Midlands Bank, called “the wet.” That was to be Mr. Wellcome’s wedding-gift. He had vowed that unless he was allowed to stand just one little bottle with a bit of gold foil on it to two of the very best that ever stepped, he would never set foot in Glenerne again; and everybody knew that by “just one little bottle,” Mr. Wellcome meant a case, if not two, not to speak of a liqueur for the sake of which an invading general might have sacked a monastery. Mr. Wellcome was also to give Miss Geraldine Towers away.
The clear-eyed Weiniger, the ruthless Strindberg, the hypochondriac Schopenhauer himself—not one of these could have shed a more searching light of criticism on the whole apparatus of Aunt Jerry’s wedding than did the bride’s pretty and artistic niece. She reduced Cosimo to a state of mere respectful admiration. First there was the age of the contracting parties. It was not even (so to speak) a case of May and December; it was November and December—or, at any rate, October and November. If this was the outcome of young and musical society, what was to be expected of those who really were in the April of their lives? It was a very good thing indeed that Amory and Cosimo were able to set an example of restraint. If age must go a-giddying, youth must show itself sober and responsible. Amory put it fairly and squarely to Cosimo: was that not a Law? Cosimo agreed that it was a Law—the Law of Compensation.
Then there was the Service itself. Amory had just read the Service again for the first time for a number of years, and really the claims it made could only be described as stupendous!... How could you possibly know that you were going to honour somebody until death did you depart? Suppose they turned out to be a different kind of person altogether from what you had supposed? Surely, then, it would be your clear duty, as an open-minded person, not to honour them! And how could you possibly know that you might not be doing a quite criminally improvident thing in promising to endow somebody, as to whose real character you were totally in the dark, with all your worldly goods? Of course, the sensible view was that that person should be endowed with the worldly goods who was best capable of looking after them. And how could you possibly know that you would cleave to one only, and so on? Not that anybody else was likely to take Aunt Jerry away from Mr. Massey, but suppose they did want to? Amory called that stultifying. It was not open-minded: it was a wilful and deliberate shutting of your mind, perhaps to some really wonderful revelation.... And what had Abraham and Sarah, and Isaac and Rebecca, and all these dead-and-gone Jews got to do with it all? Pretty records some of them had for that matter!... Oh no, the whole thing was simply fossilized. Strictly speaking, it ought to be looked on paleontologically, as a curious and interesting historic survival. For that matter, people seemed to have their doubts even in going into it, for they usually talked about “the silken cord of Love” in an apologetic sort of way—silken cord, indeed, with all those cast-iron regulations! Amory liked “silken cord!”... Oh no; the Service started out all right; it hit the nail on the head with “First it was ordained,” and so on, but the rest, eugenically speaking, was mere—mere——
“Obscurantism,” Cosimo suggested, but rather diffidently. Even he had never seen Amory so astonishingly into her stride before. He could have listened to her all day; he did listen to her half the day.
“That’s the very word!” Amory praised him. “Signifying darkness, where it’s pretending to shed light all the time! If exploded ideas like those can be put into the Prayer Book, it seems to me that a Divorce Service ought to go into the Prayer Book too, instead of having to go to a court of law for it! And look, I ask you, at the position of woman in divorce to-day!” (Amory drove ahead as if it had been a question of Aunt Jerry’s divorce already.) “Suppose she gets her decree: there’s an odium attaches to her just the same whether it’s her fault or not! I call it the fault of Abraham and Sarah, and their stupid old Service! Laws that are too harsh are bound to be broken! It’s a duty to break them, so that we can get them altered. What we want is a rational tie, voluntarily entered into, and sweep all these archaic old penalties aside! Not that it’s any business of mine; thank goodness I shan’t marry....”
None the less, out of a noble love of abstract justice and a hatred of wrong merely because it was wrong, Amory found it intolerable.