Then a loud “Hi, Squeegee—Lueegee—Guliulimo! Them things come?” was heard in the hall. Mr. Wellcome, with Mrs. Wellcome bearing a torrent of lace in which the youngest Master Wellcome slept, had arrived. “Brought her after all, you see, Nellie!” Mr. Wellcome cried triumphantly to Mrs. Deschamps, whom he met at the foot of the stairs; and then he spoke behind his hand: “Lucky ... always want one like that at a wedding!”... “Not again!” Mrs. Deschamps whispered back, half shocked, half as if such a man was indeed a creature to be dreaded. “Eh? Why not?” Mr. Wellcome blustered. “We don’t adopt ’em at our house! Not while we have our health! Now, time we were off; where’s this daughter o’ mine pro tem?”
The arrival of the Wellcomes was all they had been waiting for. They set off, the line of cabs drawing up at the gate, stopping, starting, stopping again, until the last had driven off with a couple of urchins sitting on the back of it.
Amory and Cosimo heard every word of that preposterous Service from the front pew. The quick glances that passed between them from time to time only emphasized their rock-like gravity between whiles. And after all, there is such a thing as tolerance. If this Sacrament was really the crumbling institution the pure beam of reason showed it to be, so much the less abolition there would be for Amory and Cosimo to do. You teach a lesson to those who do not respect your convictions when you deal gently with their manifest prejudices, and the fewer who shared the joke the more humour there would be for themselves. So Amory merely noted that her aunt made no bones about the word “obey,” and wondered, as man and wife knelt, where Uncle George’s brother, who was best man, got those extraordinary boots.
But she had promised Cosimo that the real humour should come afterwards, when the wedding-party returned to Glenerne; and her promise was richly fulfilled. There were heads at every window in the street, and they could hardly get in at the gate for the press of watchers about it. And when they had got in and mounted the front steps and passed along the hall, they could hardly get into the dining-room for the crowd of waiters, Bunters’ and Glenerne’s, who, making an international matter of it, covertly elbowed and shouldered one another and muttered words of contempt under their breath and exchanged malevolent glances. But when they had got in, and had found each his or her name written by Mrs. Deschamps on the half-sheets of notepaper with the silver-lettered Glenerne heading, it was worth coming miles to see and participate in. Regular boarders eyed the table, with its dishes glazed and its dishes garnished, its dishes frilled and crimped and made strange with icing and aspic and cochineal, very much as a man who knew a buttercup and a daisy when he saw them might peep, intimidated, into a house of rare and exotic orchids. These fantastic growths of the same kingdom as the dandelion and the dog-rose? These gemmed and enamelled comestibles food also, like Miss Addams’s thin soups and strips of watery fish and semi-transparent slices of Argentine beef and New Zealand lamb?... Each resolved to let his neighbour tackle them first and to see what implement he did so with. For, while fingers might have been made before forks, they were no fewer in number than the bright plated objects of cutlery (including something that seemed to start as a pair of sugar-tongs and to end as a sort of cigar-cutter) that extended for quite six inches on either side of each plate. It might be going too far to say that one must necessarily be born to these things; nevertheless a fellow did feel a bit taken aback when he was confronted with them straight away.
(To anticipate a little: Nobody knew who it was who first discovered that here they had a tower of strength in Mr. Wellcome. But it was presently seen that Mr. Wellcome knew all about fish-knives and finger-bowls, and made nothing of them. Therefore all you had to do was to watch Mr. Wellcome. Then, no idea being so good but that it is capable of improvement, it was discovered that you were quite safe if you watched Mr. Sandys, who watched Mr. Rainbow, who watched Mr. Wellcome. Soon each plat was being attacked with grace and confidence at its proper remove from the fountainhead of good form, the movement passing down the table very much as the cabs had drawn up one by one at the door.)
To ask who occupied Mr. Wellcome’s Chair were to ask who occupies the Throne at a Coronation. Mr. Wellcome Himself occupied it. Mrs. George Massey sat on his right hand, George Massey on his left. This arrangement was duplicated at the other end of the long table, where Miss Addams sat between Cosimo and Amory. These constellations of primary and hardly secondary brilliance were united, along either side of the table, by the lesser stars; and, just as a hole appears in the Southern Heavens, so the three Indian students made a sort of Coal Sack among the whiter faces on Miss Addams’s right hand. Amory thought it far better that she and Cosimo should not be sitting actually together. Apart, they would have all the more notes to compare afterwards.
Cosimo was gathering these already. As once he had taken the broom from the crossing-sweeper, so now he was talking across the corner of the table to Mrs. Wellcome. He was talking about the only person who breakfasted without taking his cue of deportment from anybody—the child; he got, as he said afterwards, “simply priceless things.” Amory, across the other corner, was engaged in a series of lively rallies with Mr. Rainbow. Mr. Rainbow always expanded when Mr. Wellcome came to Glenerne. If he became a little deflated again when Mr. Wellcome had turned his back, nobody thought the less of him on that account. To be able to play up to Mr. Wellcome at all was an achievement beyond the power of most.
Not that Mr. Wellcome Himself showed himself immediately at the top of his form; he husbanded his resources better than that. He had almost reunited the two hostile camps of waiters and set them to make common cause against himself when he had asked which of them knew the top from the bottom of a bottle of G. H. Mumm, and, taking a napkin and a cutter, had shown them how to unwire one and to pour its contents out; and when all the glasses had been filled, and Mr. Wellcome had risen at the head of the table, dark against the bow-window with its indiarubber-plants in the mustard-yellow faience vases, those who rapped with the ends of their knives on the table and called “Order, order!” felt that it would be some minutes yet before he was thoroughly “warm.”
And yet he started at a more humorous level than anybody else could have attained. In the first place (he said) he must apologize for speaking at all. It was all Mrs. W.’s fault. As everybody knew, he was not allowed to get a word in edgeways at home (smiles)—led a dog’s life, in fact (more smiles)—indeed, as he had said to his old friend Charlie Cutbush only the other day, Charlie Cutbush, who used to travel for Dwu Mawr Whisky and now kept “The Silent Woman” in the Borough, “Charlie,” he had said, “you ought to get that sign o’ yours altered—it ought to be a man with his head cut off, not a woman!” (A little more laughter, and a gallant remark from Cosimo to the speaker’s wife that at any rate Mr. Wellcome looked well on it). But to get on (Mr. Wellcome continued). As they all knew, there was a good deal of giving in connexion with weddings. In his own time at Glenerne it had always been a bit of a puzzle where Miss Addams put ’em all to sleep; but they all knew now where Mrs. Deschamps slept, and a pretty little room it was, and its occupant lots of time before her yet (quite a sudden outburst of mirth at this, and confusion and a cry of “Wretch!” from Mrs. Deschamps). Tut-tut!—What Mr. Wellcome meant to say, if they’d be quiet a bit and not jump down his throat like that, was that they’d all been into Mrs. Deschamps’ room to see the wedding-presents. (Laughter.) Now Mr. Wellcome wasn’t going to say they weren’t, one and all, very handsome wedding-presents, especially Miss Addams’s oak-and-silver biscuit-box and the embroidered quilt given by Mrs. Deschamps herself (but Mr. Wellcome would have a word to say to his old friend George Massey, about the comparative inefficacy of embroidered quilts when your feet were really cold, by and by.) (More laughter.) But what Mr. Wellcome was going to say, and he’d say it twice if anybody didn’t hear it the first time, was that he’d been giving something away that morning that he hoped and trusted his old friend George would find worth more than all the rest put together—a bonny bride. (Loud applause, and an instant recognition of their error on the part of those who had thought that a humorist couldn’t on occasion be serious too.) Mr. Wellcome repeated: a bonnie bride. Mr. Wellcome didn’t mean that they didn’t all joke about these things sometimes. He did himself, and so would George Massey be doing by and by. But he did say this about marriage, and he spoke as a man who had been married more years than he cared to remember: that there was nothing like it. (Cries of “Hear, hear!” from married and unmarried alike, and a noisy drumming of knives and hands on the table.) And while Mr. Wellcome was about it he was going to say something else. There seemed to be people about who thought themselves very wise nowadays. They wanted this changed and that changed; Mr. Wellcome didn’t know what they did want, and he didn’t think they themselves did either; sometimes it seemed to him that they just wanted something different—good or bad, but different. In fact he, Mr. Wellcome, called ’em grousers and grizzlers—a pack o’ frosty-faces. Now nobody expected the world to stand still. No doubt there was lots of things could be improved on. There was off-licences, for instance. Likewise Clubs. But (here Mr. Wellcome shook a fat forefinger warningly and impressively) Marriage wasn’t one of ’em. If an Englishman’s house was his castle, Marriage was what Mr. Wellcome might call the front-door key of it! (Applause far more loud and sustained than any mere humorous sally could have called forth.) Now he kept his front-door key on the bunch. (A “Go on with you!” from Mrs. Wellcome.) If the law allowed him two or three wives (and he had only to look round that table to wish ... but that was neither here nor there, and no doubt if he could he’d soon be wishing he hadn’t—much laughter)—what he was going to say was that if he had twenty wives he’d keep ’em all on the bunch too.... “But instead o’ that one of ’em keeps me on a bit of string,” said Mr. Wellcome, dropping his voice so comically and despondingly that the whole table roared with laughter....
“And now,” said Mr. Wellcome, beginning to pat his pockets in search of something, “let’s cut the cackle and come to the horses.... Where is the dashed thing? Ah, here it is!...”