THE WEDDING JOURNEY.
A wedding journey,--what is it? A tour to all the most expensive and
fashionable hotels and watering-places. The care of Saratoga trunks and
bonnet-boxes. The display of a fashionable wardrobe made purposely for
this object, and affording three altogether new and different toilets a
day.
Very well.
Doubtless all this may coexist with true love; and true lovers, many and
ardent, have been this round, and may again, and been and be none the
worse for it. For where true love is, it is not much matter whatever
else is or is not.
But when the Saratoga trunks, the three dresses a day, and the display
of them to Mrs. Grundy, have been the substitute for love and one of the
impelling motives to marriage, or when they absorb all those means and
resources on which domestic comfort and peace should be built during the
first years of married life, then they are simply in Scriptural phrase
"the abomination of desolation, standing where it ought not."
Yet apart from that there is to me a violation of the essential
sacredness of the holiest portion of mortal life in exposing it to the
glare of everyday observation. It seems as if there were something so
wonderful and sacred in that union by which man and woman, forsaking all
others, cleave to each other, that its inception requires quiet
solitude, the withdrawal from the common-place and bustling ways of
ordinary life.
The two, more to each other than all the world besides, are best left to
the companionship of nature. Carpets of moss are better than the most
elaborate of fashionable hotel furniture; birds and squirrels are more
suitable companions than men and women.
Our wedding was a success, so far as cheerfulness and enjoyment was
concerned. The church had been garlanded and made fair and sweet by the
floral tributes of many friendly hands. Jim Fellows and one or two of
the other acquaintances of the family had exerted themselves to produce
a very pretty effect. The wedding party was one of relatives and near
friends only, without show or parade, but with a great deal of good
taste. There was the usual amount of weeping among the elderly female
relatives, particularly on the part of Aunt Maria, who insisted on
maintaining a purely sepulchral view of our prospects on life.
Ever since the failure of Mr. Van Arsdel, Aunt Maria had worn this
aspect, and seemed to consider all demonstrations of lightness of heart
and cheerfulness on the part of the family as unsuitable trifling with a
dreadful dispensation.
But the presence of this funereal influence could not destroy the gayety
of the younger members, and Jim Fellows seemed to exert himself
particularly to whip up such a froth and foam of merriment and jollity
as caused the day to be remembered as one of the gayest in our annals.
We had but one day's ride in the cars to bring us up to the old simple
stage route of the mountain country. During this said day in the cars,
under the tutelage of my Empress, I was made to behave myself with the
grimmest and most stately reserve of manner. Scarcely was I allowed the
same seat with her, and my conversation with her, so far as could be
observed, was confined to the most unimpassioned and didactic topics.
The reason for this appeared to be that having married in the very
matrimonial month of June, and our track lying along one of the great
routes of fashionable travel, we were beset behind and before by
enraptured couples, whose amiable artlessness in the display of their
emotions appeared particularly shocking to her taste. On the row of
seats in front of us could be seen now a masculine head lolling
confidentially on a feminine shoulder, and again in the next seat an
evident bridal bonnet leaning on the bosom of the beloved waistcoat of
its choice in sweet security.
"It is perfectly disgusting and disagreeable," she said in my ear.
"My dear," I replied, "I don't see as we can do anything about it."
"I don't see--I cannot imagine how people can make such a show of
themselves," she said.
"Well, you see," said I, "we are all among the _parvenus_ of married
life. It isn't everybody that knows how to behave as if he had always
been rich--let us comfort ourselves with reflections on our own
superiority."
The close of the day brought us, however, to the verge of the mountain
region where railroads cease and stages begin,--the beautiful country,
of hard, flinty, rocky roads, of pines and evergreens of silvery
cascades and brooks of melted crystal, and of a society, as yet homely
and heart-some, and with a certain degree of sylvan innocence. At once
we seemed to have left the artificial world behind us--the world of
observers and observed. We sat together on the top of the stage, and
sailed like two birds of the air through the tree-tops of the forest,
looking down into all the charming secrets of woodland ways as we went
on, and feeling ourselves delivered from all the spells and incantations
of artificial life. We might have been two squirrels, or a pair of
robins, or blue birds. We ceased to think how we appeared. We forgot
that there were an outer world and spectators, and felt ourselves taken
in and made at home in the wide hospitality of nature. Highland, where
my mother lived, was just within a day's ride of the finest part of the
White Mountains. The close of a charming leisurely drive upward brought
us at night to her home, and I saw her sweet face of welcome at the
door to meet us, and gave her new daughter to her arms with confident
pride.
The village was so calm, and still, and unchanged! The old church where
my father had preached, the houses where still lived the people I had
known from a boy, the old store, the tavern with its creaking sign-post,
and best of all, Uncle Jacob's house, with its recesses and corners full
of books, its quiet rooms full of comfort, its traditions of
hospitality, and the deep sense of calm and rest that seemed ever
brooding there. This was a paradise where I could bring my Eve for rest
and for refuge.
What charming days went over our heads there! We rambled like two school
children, hand in hand, over all the haunts of my boyhood. Where I and
my little child-wife had gathered golden-hearted lilies, and
strawberries, we gathered them again. The same bobolink seemed to sit on
the top twig of the old apple tree in the corner of the meadow and say
"Chack, chack, chack!" as he said it when Susie and I used to sit with
the meadow grass over our heads to watch him while he poured down on us
showers of musical dew drops. It seemed as if I had gone back to boyhood
again, so much did my inseparable companion recall to me the child-wife
of my early days. We were both such perfect children, living in the
enjoyment of the bright present, without a care or a fear for the
future.
Every day when we returned from our rambles and excursions the benignant
face of my mother shone down on us with fullness of appreciation and joy
in our joy; while Uncle Jacob, still dry, quizzical, and active as ever,
regarded us with an undisguised complacency.
"You've done the right thing now, Harry," he said to me. "She'll _do_.
You're a lucky boy to get such a one, even though she is a city girl."
Eva, after a little experience in mountain climbing, proceeded to equip
herself for it with feminine skill. Our village store supplied her with
material out of which with wonderful quickness she constructed what she
called a mountain suit, somewhat of the bloomer order, but to which she
contrived to impart a sort of air of dapper grace and fitness. And once
arrayed in this she climbed with me to the most impossible places, and
we investigated the innermost mysteries of rock, forest, and cavern.
My uncle lent me his horse and carriage, and with a luncheon-basket well
stored by my mother's providing care, we went on a tour of exploration
of two or three days into the mountains, in the course of which we made
ourselves familiar in a leisurely manner with some of the finest
scenery.
The mutual acquaintance that comes to companions in this solitude and
face-to-face communion with nature, is deeper and more radical than can
come when surrounded by the factitious circumstances of society. When
the whole artificial world is withdrawn, and far out of sight, when we
are surrounded with the pure and beautiful mysteries of nature, the very
best and most genuine part of us comes to the surface, we know each
other by the communion of our very highest faculties.
When Eva and I found ourselves alone together in the heart of some
primeval forest, where the foot sunk ankle-deep in a carpet of more
exquisite fabric than any loom of mortal workmanship could create, where
the old fallen trunks of trees were all overgrown with this exquisite
mossy tapestry, and all around us was a perfect broidery and inlay of
flower and leaf, while birds called to us overhead, down through the
flickering shadows of the pine boughs, we felt ourselves out of the
world and in paradise, and able to look back from its green depths with
a dispassionate judgment on the life we had left.
Then, the venture we had made in striking hands with each other to live,
not for the pomps and vanities of this world, but for the true realities
of the heart, seemed to us the highest reason. Nature smiled on it.
Every genuine green thing, every spicy fragrant bush and tree, every
warbling bird, true to the laws of its nature, seemed to say to us "Well
done."
"I suppose," said Eva, as we sat in one of these mountain recesses
whence we could gain a view of the little silvery cascade, "I suppose
that there are a great many people who look on me as a proper subject of
pity. My father has failed. I have married a man with no fortune, except
what he has in himself. We can't afford to spend our honeymoon at
Niagara, Saratoga, and the rest of the show places; and we don't
contemplate either going to parties or giving them when we go back to
New York."
"Poor, poor Eva Van Arsdel! how art thou fallen!" said I.
"Poor Aunt Maria!" said Eva. "I honestly and truly am sorry for her. She
really loves me in her way--the way most people love you, which is to
want you to be happy in doing as _they_ please. Her heart was set on my
making an astoundingly rich match, and having a wedding that should
eclipse all former weddings, and then becoming a leader of fashionable
society; and to have me fail of all this is a dreadful catastrophe. I
want somehow to comfort her and make up with her, but she can't forgive
me. She kissed me at last with a stern and warning air that seemed to
say: 'Well, if you will go to destruction, I can't help it.'"
"Perhaps when she sees how happy we are, she will get over it," said I.
"No, I fear not. Aunt Maria can't conceive of anybody's being happy that
has to begin life with an ingrain carpet on the floor. She would think
it a positive indecorum to be happy under such circumstances--a want of
a proper sense of the fitness of things. Now, I propose to be very happy
under precisely those circumstances, and to try to make you so;
consequently you see I shall offend her moral sense continuously, and,
as I said, I do wish it weren't so, because I love Aunt Maria, and am
sorry I can't please her."
"I suppose," said I, "there is no making her comprehend the resources we
have in each other--our love of just this bright, free, natural life?"
"Oh dear, no! All Aunt Maria's idea of visiting the mountains would be
having rooms at the Profile House in the height of the season, and
gazing in full dress at the mountains from the verandahs. I don't think
she really cares enough for any thing here to risk wetting her feet for
it. I dare say the poor dear soul is lying awake nights now, lamenting
over my loss of what I don't care for, and racking her brains how we may
contrive to patch up a little decent gentility."
"And you are as free and gay as an oriole!"
"Certainly I am. All I wish is that we could live in one of these little
mountain towns, just as your mother and uncle do. I love the hearty,
simple society here."
"Well," said I, "as we cannot, we can only try to make a home in New
York, as simple-hearted, and kindly, and unworldly as if we lived here."
"Yes, and we can do that," said she. "You have only to resolve to be
free, and you are free. Now, that is the beauty of our being married.
_Alone_, we are parts of other families, drawn along with
them--_entrained_, as the French say: now we are married, we can do as
we please; we become king and queen of a new state. In our own house we
can have our own ways. We are monarchs of all we survey."
"True," said I, "and a home and a family that has an original and
individual life of its own, is always recognized in time as a _fait
accompli_. You and I will be for the future 'The Hendersons;' and people
will say the Hendersons do this and that, or the Hendersons don't do the
other. They will study us as one studies a new State."
"Yes," said she, taking up my idea in her vivacious way, "and when they
have ascertained our latitude and longitude, soil and productions,
manners and customs, they can choose whether they like to visit us."
"And you are not in the least afraid of having it said, 'The Hendersons
are odd?'" asked I.
"Not a bit of it," replied Eva, "so long as the oddity is some unusual
form of comfort. For example, a sitting-room like your uncle's, with its
brass andirons and blazing wood fire, its books and work, its motherly
lounges, would be a sort of exotic in New York, where people, as a
matter of course, expect a pier-glass and marble slab, a somber
concatenation of cord and tassels and damask curtains, and a given
number of French chairs and ottomans, veiled with linen covers, and a
general funereal darkness of gentility. Now, I propose to introduce the
country sitting room into our New York house. Your mother already has
given me her wedding andirons--perfect loves--with shovel and tongs
corresponding; and I am going to have a bright, light, free and easy
room which the sunshine shall glorify."
"But you know, my love, wood is very dear in New York."
"So are curtains, and ottomans, and mirrors, and marble slabs, and
quantities of things which we shall do without. And then, you see, we
don't propose to _warm_ our house with a wood-fire, but only to adorn
it. It is an altar fire that we will kindle every evening, just to light
up our room and show it to advantage. How charming every thing looks at
your mother's in that time between daylight and dark, when you all sit
round the hearth, and the fire lights up the pictures and the books, and
makes every thing look so dreamy and beautiful!"
"You are a little poet, my dear; it will be your specialty to turn life
into poetry."
"And that is what I call woman's genius. To make life beautiful; to keep
down and out of sight the hard, dry, prosaic side, and keep up the
poetry--that is my idea of our 'mission.' I think woman ought to be,
what Hawthorne calls, 'The Artist of the Beautiful.'"