IT appeared that Mrs. Cowan, the plump neighbour who was cooking Clive’s dinner, had heard his telephonic arrangements for a wedding, and was, according to Clive, much flustered. A few minutes later she disappeared from the kitchen, with a brief warning to Clive to keep his eye on the oven, and presently returned, breathless and sparkling-eyed, wearing her Sunday shawl, and bearing one of her own cakes.
“We’ll give them the best wedding we can, Mr. Bangs!” she said.
Clive came in to report this speech, and thus reminded that Mrs. Cowan was a human being, and a woman, with a prescriptive right to share in this occasion, he took the bridal pair to the kitchen and introduced them. Mrs. Cowan’s warm friendliness pleased as well as embarrassed them. Rose-Ann exclaimed over the cake, and putting on an apron, commenced to help with the last stages of dinner.
Clive and Felix wandered back to the Franklin stove. “Oh, yes,” said Clive. “I must build a fire in your room. Come along,” and he set Felix to chopping kindling in the woodshed while he carried up a load of cannel coal. Felix followed him to the great room at the top of the stairs, occupying almost the whole of the upstairs space, with a fireplace at one end. “I built that fireplace myself when I had the house remodeled,” said Clive. “It’s quite an art, building a fireplace so that it will draw properly. I’m very proud of it.”
Felix knelt and stuffed the kindling into the grate. “No,” said Clive, “let me do it—you don’t know how.”
While they waited for the kindling to get well ablaze 122before putting on the coal, Clive took Felix to a French window that opened on a balcony. “Here you have a view of the lake,” he said, and then going to one end of the balcony, “these steps lead down to my shower-bath, which unfortunately only functions in summer. You must come out here then—you’ll like it. It’s really wonderful country. I love it even in the winter. I’ll tell you: Why don’t you and Rose-Ann stay out here this week? I’ve got to be in town next week anyway, and I’ll clear out tonight when the fuss is all over and leave you to yourselves. Everything is shipshape, and Rose-Ann will have no difficulty in finding where things are—and I’ll arrange with Mrs. Cowan to get your dinners. You haven’t a place in town yet, have you?”
Felix thanked him, with the sense that the dedication of this house to another honeymoon than the one for which it was originally intended gave Clive a kind of painful and ironic pleasure. But there seemed to be no good reason for refusing the offer.
“Do you suppose my job will still be open for me when I come back married?” he asked.
“Not merely that, but you’ll probably get a raise,” said Clive. “That’s the custom. They figure that a young man who has married and settled down will be a more faithful slave. Usually they’re right. Only in this case, taking Rose-Ann into consideration, I would say that ‘settling down’ wasn’t the correct term.”
“Why, what do you mean?”
“I mean that Rose-Ann is much more likely to keep you in mischief than to keep you out of it. You know that.”
“You’ve got a funny idea of Rose-Ann,” said Felix.
“Oh, not at all. You know yourself she’s not the ordinary girl by any means. And she won’t make an ordinary wife—for which you can be thankful.”
He put the coal on the fire, set up the fire-screen in front of the fireplace, and they went downstairs.
“You needn’t eye me like the basilisk,” said Clive, taking a cigarette, “I’m not saying anything against your beloved.”
“All the same, I think you’ve got some kind of curious 123and erroneous notion about her. She’s not interested in these damned theories of ours. She’s a real person,” Felix protested.
“She’s real, all right,” said Clive. “But she’s not a simple person. She’s very complex. I think she’s just as complicated—as mixed up—as you or I.”
“Heaven forbid!” said Felix.
Rose-Ann came in just then, and Felix looked at her guiltily, ashamed of discussing her with his friend.
“Things are getting along very well,” she said. “I just ran in for a moment to see my lover.” She came up to him, with a shy frankness, to be kissed. “That ought to show Clive what sort of a person she is!” he thought.
She turned from his embrace to Clive. “It’s curious,” she said, “the pleasure people take in other people’s weddings! There’s Mrs. Cowan—she doesn’t know me and Felix. She hasn’t any reason to believe we are going to be happy. It’s just because it’s a wedding! I was thinking about it, and I realized that if this were a secret love-affair, she would be shut out of it. But a wedding lets her in. In a way, it’s really more her wedding than it is ours!”
“Well,” said Felix, “I don’t mind! I haven’t that damnable instinct of privacy that some people seem to regard as essential to love-affairs. I’d as soon the whole world knew we’re in love.”
“All right, Felix—but you haven’t had to discuss the nuptial couch with her, and I have! She’s upstairs now getting the room fixed up, and putting my clothes in the bureau; I left her to avoid an argument about which nightgown I should wear—as a matter of fact, she doesn’t think any of them are equal to the occasion, they’re all too plain! Perhaps you’d as soon everybody knew all about those details, which is what a wedding seems to amount to—but I don’t like it!” And she made a face and left the room.
“Well?” said Clive, rather triumphantly.
“Well?” said Felix, stolidly. He really had not liked that last speech of Rose-Ann’s. If she didn’t want her nightgowns discussed in public, then why—?
124“You’re really rather conventional, at the bottom of your soul, aren’t you?” Clive remarked thoughtfully.
“Of course I am. And so is everybody else. So are you, if you only knew it.”
“Then,” said Clive, coolly, “why do you marry Rose-Ann? She isn’t. It you want a conventional wife and conventional married happiness, why don’t you marry some simple little country girl, and have a houseful of babies? Why—”
There was a knock at the door.
“That’s my other witness,” said Clive, and hurried into the hall.
2
While Clive and the newcomer talked for a moment in the hall, Felix stood frowning at the fire.... Clive, he felt, was becoming rather exasperating. Really, the unquestioning enthusiasm of Mrs. Cowan was preferable to such an inappropriately critical attitude as Clive’s. There was something deliberately malicious in it. That last remark about the “simple little country girl” was an attempt to shake his faith in this marriage. It was a damned mean trick!... And then he laughed at himself. For how could Clive possibly have guessed the effect of that remark? How could he know what a crazy fool he was talking to? “A simple country girl.” How could Clive know that there lurked in the back of Felix’s mind an absurd and impossible wish—a wish, long-forgotten, except in the most senseless of idle day-dreams, which these words of Clive’s made him remember, with an inexplicable pang! A wish for precisely what he ought never to have—. Marriage with the girl of that foolish day-dream would be, for such a person as himself, the most fantastic of tragedies: and it was doubtless its very impossibility that had made him conceive it as a romantic ideal. And that houseful of babies—for they too were a part of that foolish day-dream of his—why, that was madness. In actuality, he would have fled from the prospect of such a marriage. He really wanted—what he had so miraculously found in Rose-Ann: 125a companionship in the adventure and beauty of life.... And in an hour or two his choice would be confirmed—irrevocably. Marriage was just that—a definite decision among tangled and contradictory wishes....
He turned to face the girl whom Clive had led into the room. For an instant he was startled as by an apparition. Perhaps it was the effect of Clive’s words—this young woman seemed the very creature of his day-dreaming wish. Young, hardly more than nineteen, of slight but robust figure, with soft brown hair, dark quiet eyes and a serene mouth, she brought with her the fragrance of that fantasy which had only a moment ago disquieted him. She had a bundle in her arms, and for an instant the illusion was breathlessly complete—she was Rose-Ann’s phantom rival come to him in visible sweet flesh, bearing his baby at her bosom.
“The bridegroom!” Clive was saying. “The witness!—Miss Phyllis Nelson, Mr. Felix Fay.”
She smiled imperturbably and held out her hand, her eyes meeting his.
“And what have you in that bundle, Phyllis? Something without which no wedding would be complete, I suppose,” said Clive.
“Only some smilax,” she said. “And I know how many knives and forks you have, Clive, so I brought along some of my mother’s silver. But where is—”
Rose-Ann ran in just then, and the two girls, while Clive pronounced their names, shook hands, and then suddenly kissed each other, and with arms linked went out into the kitchen.
Clive followed with the bundle, asking Phyllis if by any chance it contained a veil for the bride. He and Felix were shooed back into the other room, and Rose-Ann and Phyllis reset the table. The three women could be heard talking together, with a kind of excited seriousness, as they worked. Felix’s last glimpse was of Phyllis arranging wreaths of smilax on the white tablecloth, and Rose-Ann, with an adorable gesture, lifting her arms to twine some of 126it about the low-hanging chandelier, while Mrs. Cowan, her hands on her hips, stood looking from one to the other with approval before dashing back to the kitchen.
“Womenfolk have an instinct for such things,” said Clive, sitting down beside the fire. “Even Rose-Ann appears domestic.”
Felix looked at Clive fretfully. “I don’t see anything terribly domestic about hanging up a wreath of flowers.”
“You are hard to suit,” Clive commented. “When I say she isn’t domestic, you look daggers at me, and when I say she is, you still object. What shall I say? I strive to please.”
“So it seems,” said Felix.
Clive smiled. “Since you’re so conventional, you ought not to complain. Nothing is more regular and old-fashioned than the effort to embarrass a bridegroom. You may interpret my remarks as a modern version of that ancient mode of licensed tribal merriment—an intellectualized kind of ‘shivaree.’ I am trying to make up for the absence of the traditional tin pans out by the front gate. After all, Felix, you are taking Rose-Ann away from all the rest of us, and you must expect to be made to suffer a little for your selfishness.”
“Dinner!” Phyllis called in to them.
They went into the dining-room.
3
In the middle of the table was a glass bowl brimmed with sweet peas, and around it a wreath of smilax; a festoon of smilax hung from the chandelier. At the head of the table stood impressively a platter bearing a steaming roast duck.
Mrs. Cowan hovered proudly over this spectacle, preparing to take her departure.
“Oh, not without a piece of the wedding-cake!” cried Rose-Ann, and cut it for her.
Immensely gratified, and having wished the bride happiness, and at the last moment bestowed upon her a motherly kiss, 127Mrs. Cowan went, bearing the piece of cake carefully wrapped in a napkin.
Clive stared after her. “Very interesting,” he said, “she takes home a piece of her own cake—”
“No longer her own,” Rose-Ann finished, “and no longer merely cake—but a piece of Wedding Cake! Will she put it under her pillow, I wonder, and dream of getting another husband? She’s a widow, and her husband used to get drunk ‘something awful.’ Yes, she was telling me all about it—I think by way of warning, so I wouldn’t be too badly disillusioned by the facts of marriage. ‘You can’t expect ’em to be angels,’ she said. So you see Felix, I’m prepared for anything!”
This speech jarred upon Felix. It was too much in the vein that Clive had been indulging all evening. He wondered if he were going to become critical of Rose-Ann, now that he had a sense of possession with regard to her. He said to himself that Rose-Ann was over-wrought and he himself over-sensitive.
“Rose-Ann, here at my right hand,” Clive was saying, “Felix, here at my left. I believe that is correct. The Witness will take the remaining seat, opposite me. First of all, we must have a toast.” He rose. “Up with you all! No, Rose-Ann, you sit still—you can’t drink your own health.... Here’s to the bride!”
They lifted their glasses.
“No—wait till I finish my speech.... In defiance of all the laws of nature and of modern realistic fiction, we wish her happiness!... No, that isn’t all I have to say.... We make this wish—at least I do—with an unwonted confidence in its fulfilment. For this is no ordinary marriage, dedicated to the prosaic comforts of a mutual bondage—it is an attempt to realize the sharp new joys of freedom. A marriage, let us say, in name only—for upon Rose-Ann I set my faith, believing that not even a wedding can turn her into a wife!” Rose-Ann looked up at him and smiled. “To Rose-Ann,” he concluded, “and her adventure!”
128They drank. Felix looked at the others. He had a sense of something having been outraged by this speech—something which, if only a tradition, was somehow real to all of them except Clive. But Rose-Ann merely looked amused, and Phyllis’s expression told him nothing. He reflected, “She’s used to him by this time.”
A sense of embarrassment remained with him, in spite of the light talk that followed as Clive heaped their plates in turn with roast duck and dressing.
“Why are you so quiet, Felix?” Clive asked at last. “You might at least tell us how it feels to be a bridegroom—whether you feel as depressed as you look.”
“I confess I shall be glad when it’s over,” said Felix.
They laughed, and went on talking. Rose-Ann was apparently enjoying herself. She and Clive were exchanging pleasantries on the subject of “modern marriage.” For some reason the phrase annoyed Felix. Did they know what nonsense they were talking? Or did they really think that his and Rose-Ann’s marriage was to be, as it were, a sociological performance for the benefit of on-lookers?
Presently Rose-Ann was humourously disclaiming “all the credit” for the modernity of the arrangement. Felix, she insisted, was equally entitled to it; he was just as modern as she was!
“Why,” Felix suddenly asked in exasperation, “should we all want to be so damned modern?”
“Hark to the defiant bridegroom!” said Clive. “He wishes us to understand that his wife is going to love, honour, and obey him, in the good old—fashioned way. He won’t stand for any of this new-fangled nonsense. The Cave-man emerges!”
Felix flushed. He had only succeeded in making a fool of himself, it seemed.
Rose-Ann spoke up. “I hope it will be modern,” she said. “I’m sure it won’t be like any of the marriages I’ve seen back in my home town.... Why are you so afraid of freedom and modernity, Felix?”
129Perhaps it was that word afraid, which Rose-Ann used so lightly, that stung him. “Because,” he said, “I am apparently the only one here who knows what those words mean.”
He had not intended to say it—certainly he had not intended to say it in that tone of voice. It came out, raspingly, like a voice out of a music-box, a voice from a strange record that has been put in unawares. His voice was, even to his own ears, remote and metallic.
Rose-Ann looked at him, startled. “What words, Felix?” she asked gently.
“The words you have all been bandying about,” he replied. “Modernity. Freedom.” His voice was still hard.
“Well, what do they mean?”
She leaned toward him.
The others were silent, listening—Clive with an amused smile, Phyllis with troubled eyes.
“Not what you think, I’m afraid, Rose-Ann,” Felix’s voice answered, the voice with a quiet grimness in it.
Rose-Ann’s voice took up the challenge softly. “And what do you think they mean, Felix?”
He looked away from her, and spoke as if from a distance, slowly. “Freedom.... It’s not a nice word, not a pretty word ... to me. There is something terrible in it ... something to be afraid of....” He looked back at her. “Don’t offer me freedom, Rose-Ann.”
Her voice was still soft, but infinitely cool and firm. “Why? Because you might take it? I knew that when I made the offer, Felix. I think I know what you mean. But I take back nothing.” She lifted her chin proudly. “I am not afraid of freedom.”
“Bravo!” cried Clive. “Rose-Ann, I am falling in love with you myself! Why don’t you marry me instead of Felix! He doesn’t appreciate you.”
Curiously enough, nobody except Felix seemed to mind Clive’s clowning. Both girls laughed, and the atmosphere was suddenly cleared.
130“But what an odd occasion for us to choose to stage a quarrel!” said Rose-Ann, gaily.
“Yes,” said Felix, now bewildered and contrite. “I must have got into my argumentative mood. I’m sorry. When I get to arguing I think of no one and nothing, except the point at issue—which is usually not of the slightest importance. It’s a bad habit you must break me of when we are married.”
“You are forgiven,” said Phyllis.
“Don’t forget there’s fruit salad coming,” said Rose-Ann, rising and bringing a bowl from the sideboard.
“Yes,” said Clive, “and the car will be here for you two people in ten minutes or so. Will you have your coffee now, Felix?—Rose-Ann?”