Part 4
Ann Veronica's ideas of marriage were limited and unsystematic.
Her teachers and mistresses had done their best to stamp her mind
with an ineradicable persuasion that it was tremendously
important, and on no account to be thought about. Her first
intimations of marriage as a fact of extreme significance in a
woman's life had come with the marriage of Alice and the
elopement of her second sister, Gwen.
These convulsions occurred when Ann Veronica was about twelve.
There was a gulf of eight years between her and the youngest of
her brace of sisters--an impassable gulf inhabited chaotically by
two noisy brothers. These sisters moved in a grown-up world
inaccessible to Ann Veronica's sympathies, and to a large extent
remote from her curiosity. She got into rows through meddling
with their shoes and tennis-rackets, and had moments of carefully
concealed admiration when she was privileged to see them just
before her bedtime, rather radiantly dressed in white or pink or
amber and prepared to go out with her mother. She thought Alice
a bit of a sneak, an opinion her brothers shared, and Gwen rather
a snatch at meals. She saw nothing of their love-making, and
came home from her boarding-school in a state of decently
suppressed curiosity for Alice's wedding.
Her impressions of this cardinal ceremony were rich and confused,
complicated by a quite transitory passion that awakened no
reciprocal fire for a fat curly headed cousin in black velveteen
and a lace collar, who assisted as a page. She followed him
about persistently, and succeeded, after a brisk, unchivalrous
struggle (in which he pinched and asked her to "cheese it"), in
kissing him among the raspberries behind the greenhouse.
Afterward her brother Roddy, also strange in velveteen, feeling
rather than knowing of this relationship, punched this Adonis's
head.
A marriage in the house proved to be exciting but extremely
disorganizing. Everything seemed designed to unhinge the mind
and make the cat wretched. All the furniture was moved, all the
meals were disarranged, and everybody, Ann Veronica included,
appeared in new, bright costumes. She had to wear cream and a
brown sash and a short frock and her hair down, and Gwen cream
and a brown sash and a long skirt and her hair up. And her
mother, looking unusually alert and hectic, wore cream and brown
also, made up in a more complicated manner.
Ann Veronica was much impressed by a mighty trying on and
altering and fussing about Alice's "things"--Alice was being
re-costumed from garret to cellar, with a walking-dress and
walking-boots to measure, and a bride's costume of the most
ravishing description, and stockings and such like beyond the
dreams of avarice --and a constant and increasing dripping into
the house of irrelevant remarkable objects, such as--
Real lace bedspread;
Gilt travelling clock;
Ornamental pewter plaque;
Salad bowl (silver mounted) and servers;
Madgett's "English Poets" (twelve volumes), bound purple morocco;
Etc., etc.
Through all this flutter of novelty there came and went a
solicitous, preoccupied, almost depressed figure. It was Doctor
Ralph, formerly the partner of Doctor Stickell in the Avenue, and
now with a thriving practice of his own in Wamblesmith. He had
shaved his side-whiskers and come over in flannels, but he was
still indisputably the same person who had attended Ann Veronica
for the measles and when she swallowed the fish-bone. But his
role was altered, and he was now playing the bridegroom in this
remarkable drama. Alice was going to be Mrs. Ralph. He came in
apologetically; all the old "Well, and how ARE we?" note gone;
and once he asked Ann Veronica, almost furtively,
"How's Alice getting on, Vee?" Finally, on the Day, he appeared
like his old professional self transfigured, in the most
beautiful light gray trousers Ann Veronica had ever seen and a
new shiny silk hat with a most becoming roll. . . .
It was not simply that all the rooms were rearranged and
everybody dressed in unusual fashions, and all the routines of
life abolished and put away: people's tempers and emotions also
seemed strangely disturbed and shifted about. Her father was
distinctly irascible, and disposed more than ever to hide away
among the petrological things--the study was turned out. At
table he carved in a gloomy but resolute manner. On the Day he
had trumpet-like outbreaks of cordiality, varied by a watchful
preoccupation. Gwen and Alice were fantastically friendly, which
seemed to annoy him, and Mrs. Stanley was throughout enigmatical,
with an anxious eye on her husband and Alice.
There was a confused impression of livery carriages and whips
with white favors, people fussily wanting other people to get in
before them, and then the church. People sat in unusual pews, and
a wide margin of hassocky emptiness intervened between the
ceremony and the walls.
Ann Veronica had a number of fragmentary impressions of Alice
strangely transfigured in bridal raiment. It seemed to make her
sister downcast beyond any precedent. The bridesmaids and pages
got rather jumbled in the aisle, and she had an effect of Alice's
white back and sloping shoulders and veiled head receding toward
the altar. In some incomprehensible way that back view made her
feel sorry for Alice. Also she remembered very vividly the smell
of orange blossom, and Alice, drooping and spiritless, mumbling
responses, facing Doctor Ralph, while the Rev. Edward Bribble
stood between them with an open book. Doctor Ralph looked kind
and large, and listened to Alice's responses as though he was
listening to symptoms and thought that on the whole she was
progressing favorably.
And afterward her mother and Alice kissed long and clung to each
other. And Doctor Ralph stood by looking considerate. He and
her father shook hands manfully.
Ann Veronica had got quite interested in Mr. Bribble's rendering
of the service--he had the sort of voice that brings out
things--and was still teeming with ideas about it when finally a
wild outburst from the organ made it clear that, whatever
snivelling there might be down in the chancel, that excellent
wind instrument was, in its Mendelssohnian way, as glad as ever
it could be. "Pump, pump, per-um-pump, Pum, Pump, Per-um. . . ."
The wedding-breakfast was for Ann Veronica a spectacle of the
unreal consuming the real; she liked that part very well, until
she was carelessly served against her expressed wishes with
mayonnaise. She was caught by an uncle, whose opinion she
valued, making faces at Roddy because he had exulted at this.
Of the vast mass of these impressions Ann Veronica could make
nothing at the time; there they were--Fact! She stored them away
in a mind naturally retentive, as a squirrel stores away nuts,
for further digestion. Only one thing emerged with any
reasonable clarity in her mind at once, and that was that unless
she was saved from drowning by an unmarried man, in which case
the ceremony is unavoidable, or totally destitute of under-
clothing, and so driven to get a trousseau, in which hardship a
trousseau would certainly be "ripping," marriage was an
experience to be strenuously evaded.
When they were going home she asked her mother why she and Gwen
and Alice had cried.
"Ssh!" said her mother, and then added, "A little natural
feeling, dear."
"But didn't Alice want to marry Doctor Ralph?"
"Oh, ssh, Vee!" said her mother, with an evasion as patent as an
advertisement board. "I am sure she will be very happy indeed
with Doctor Ralph."
But Ann Veronica was by no means sure of that until she went over
to Wamblesmith and saw her sister, very remote and domestic and
authoritative, in a becoming tea-gown, in command of Doctor
Ralph's home. Doctor Ralph came in to tea and put his arm round
Alice and kissed her, and Alice called him "Squiggles," and stood
in the shelter of his arms for a moment with an expression of
satisfied proprietorship. She HAD cried, Ann Veronica knew.
There had been fusses and scenes dimly apprehended through
half-open doors. She had heard Alice talking and crying at the
same time, a painful noise. Perhaps marriage hurt. But now it
was all over, and Alice was getting on well. It reminded Ann
Veronica of having a tooth stopped.
And after that Alice became remoter than ever, and, after a time,
ill. Then she had a baby and became as old as any really
grown-up person, or older, and very dull. Then she and her
husband went off to a Yorkshire practice, and had four more
babies, none of whom photographed well, and so she passed beyond
the sphere of Ann Veronica's sympathies altogether.
