Thyrza was nervous too, her head drooped like an over-blown rose upon its stalk, and Mr. Sumption’s manner was not of the kind that soothes and reassures. He shouted at the bride and bridegroom, and “thumped at” various members of the congregation who whispered or (later in the proceedings) yawned. He was not often asked to officiate at weddings, and had apparently decided to make the most of this one, for he wound up with an address to the married pair so lengthy and apocalyptic that Mrs. Beatup became anxious as to the fate of a pudding she had left to “cook itself,” and rising noisily in her pew creaked out through a silence weighted with doom. “And whosoever hath not a wedding garment,” the minister shouted after her, “shall be cast into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth”—for which Mrs. Beatup never forgave him, as she had spent nearly three shillings on retrimming her bonnet, “and if her cape wurn’t good enough fur him, she reckoned he’d never seen a better on the gipsy-woman’s back.”
The service came to an end at last, and the congregation pushed after the bride to see her get into the cab drawn by a pair of seedy greys, which would take her the few yards from the chapel to the farm. The breakfast was to be at Worge, for Thyrza had no kin besides the bachelor cousin, and it was considered more fitting that her husband’s family should undertake the social and domestic duties of the occasion. The feast was spread in the kitchen, which had been decorated with flags, lent for the afternoon from the club-room of the Rifle Volunteer. The unsugared wedding-cake was a terrible humiliation to Mrs. Beatup, who felt sure that, in spite of her repeated explanations, everyone would put it down to poverty and meanness instead of to the tyranny of “Govunmunt.” However, she had restored the balance of her self-respect by providing wine (at eighteen-pence the bottle).
There was much laughter and good-humour and the wit proper to weddings as the guests squeezed themselves round the table. Even Mr. Sumption’s five-minute grace, in which he approvingly mentioned more than one dish on the table, but added to his score with Mrs. Beatup by referring to the wine as poison and “the forerunner of thirst in hell,” was only a temporary blight. The bride and bridegroom alone looked subdued, their sleek heads drooping together, their hands nervously crumbling their food—also Ivy, who was heard to say in a hoarse whisper to Nell, “If I can’t go somewheres and taake my stays off I shall bust.” However, in time she forgot her constriction in flirting with Thyrza’s bachelor cousin, who had pale blue eyes, bulging out as if in vain effort to catch sight of a receding chin, and was exempt by reason of ruptured hernia from military service.
The usual healths were drunk, and the sight of other people drinking—for he himself would take only water—seemed to intoxicate Mr. Sumption, and he forgot the cares that had made his black hair as ashes on his head—his sleepless anxiety for Jerry, and the crying in him of that day which shall burn the stubble—and became merry as a corn-fed colt, laughing with all his big white teeth, and paying iron-shod compliments to Thyrza and Ivy and Nell, and even Mrs. Beatup, who maintained, however, an impressive indifference. Bill Putland made the principal speech of the afternoon, and looked so smart and handsome, with his hair in a soaring quiff and a trench-ring on each hand, that Ivy might have plotted to substitute his arm for Ern Honey’s round her waist, if she had not been too experienced to fail to realise that he was about the only man in Dallington she could not win with her floppy charms.
In the end all was cheerful incoherence, and just as the sunshine was losing its heat on the yard-stones, the bride and bridegroom rose to go away. A trap from the Volunteer would drive them to the station, and they climbed into it through a flying rainbow of confetti, which stuck in Thyrza’s loosening hair, and spotted her dim gown with colours.
Amidst cheering and laughter the old horse lurched off, and soon Thyrza’s grey and Tom’s dun were blurred together in the distance, which was already staining with purple as the air thickened towards the twilight. The guests turned back into the house, or scattered over fields and footpaths. Ivy rushed upstairs to take off her stays, and Bill Putland swaggered home between his parents, with a flower in his button-hole and plans in his heart for an evening at Little Worge. The Reverend Mr. Sumption went off with Bourner to the smithy. The blacksmith had a shoeing and clipping to do, and the minister would sit and watch him in the red, hoof-smelling warmth, and lend an experienced hand if occasion needed. Mus’ Beatup, his tongue all sour with the Australian wine, took advantage of the general flit to creep along the hedge to the Rifle Volunteer, there to wait for the magic stroke of six and unlocking of his paradise. Mrs. Beatup was the last to leave the doorstep. She thought she could hear the old horse clopping on the East Road, and when her eyes no longer helped her to follow her son, she used her ears. She remembered that earlier occasion when she had gone with him to the end of the drive and kissed him there. He had wanted her then; he did not want her now—his good-bye kiss had been kind yet perfunctory. Another woman had him—a woman who had never suffered pain or discomfort or anxiety or privation for his sake. Yet her jealousy had unexpectedly died. Somehow, to-day, all that she had suffered for Tom when she bore him, nursed him, reared him and bred him, seemed a sufficient reward in itself. Her sufferings had made him what he was, and this other woman took only what she, his mother, had made. “She never went heavy wud him, nor bore him in pain, nor lay awaake at night wud his screeching, nor thought as he’d die when he cut his teeth, nor went all skeered when he took the fever.... So thur aun’t no sense in vrothering. Reckon he’ll always be more mine nor hers, even if I am never to set eyes on him agaun.”
10
Tom and Thyrza came back from Hastings in a few days. They talked as if they had been away for weeks, and indeed it had seemed weeks to them—not that any moment had faltered or dragged, but each had held the delight of hours, and each hour had been a day of new wonder. Perhaps the dazzle was brightest for Tom—Thyrza could remember an earlier honeymoon, which had held no presage of darkness to follow, and she slipped back pretty easily into the old habit of having a man about her; but for Tom even the traces of her here and there in the room, her hat thrown down, her petticoat trailing over a chair, the dim scent of clover that hung on her pillow, making her bed like a field, all joined to bind him with her enchantment, to drug him with an ecstasy which had its sweet foundation in the commonplace.
When they came back to Sunday Street the honeymoon did not end. Contrariwise, it seemed to wax fuller in the freedom of the old ways. Even sweeter than the sense of passionate holiday was the taking up of a common life together, the daily sharing of food and work and rest, the doing of things he had done a hundred times before, but never like this. Thyrza’s little cottage had been hung with new curtains, and some unknown hand—which afterwards unexpectedly proved to be Nell’s—had filled it with flowers on the evening of their return. Bunches of primroses, violets and bluebells stuffed the vases in bedroom and parlour, and the soft fugitive scent of April banks mixed with the scent of lath and plaster which haunts old cottages, and the more spicy, powdery smells of the shop.