In the fulness of time, Scott married Catie. To put the case more
accurately, albeit in less lovely phrase, Scott was married by Catie.
From start to finish, Catie was the active force in whatever wooing
achieved itself, the active force which swept down on and annexed a
passive principle.
From the start, their courtship lacked most of the hallmarks of that
tender process. There were few endearments, fewer still of the
half-told, half-guessed confidences which, by their very fragmentary
nature only serve to add emphasis to a comprehension that can construct
a living, vital intimacy out of such slight materials. Indeed, there
was no especial effort at spiritual comprehension between them.
Instead, their unsentimental wooing was a sort of amatory bargain day
for Catie, who must have the best sort of husband to be found on the
domestic market. For Scott, on the other hand, it was the bored
acquiescence of a man too full of other dreams and hopes and even
concrete plannings to regard the choosing of a wife as more important
than the selection of his next-morning's steak. His mother had
impressed upon him that Catie would be the best wife possible for him.
The professors in the divinity school had laid some stress upon the
advantage of their clergy's marrying young. Therefore Scott Brenton
dutifully took to himself a wife, without the slightest previous notion
of what domestic intercourse was bound to mean.
Notwithstanding the education given him by Reed Opdyke and his pseudo
sirens, young Scott Brenton was singularly ignorant of the elements
that go into the making of almost any woman, singularly ignorant
regarding all the practical details of wedded life. Of course, he knew
his mother well; but she seemed to him a little bit archaic. Besides,
he knew her only as a thing apart from all other human relations, as an
isolated personality whose one point of contact was with himself. The
society of a woman who parted her hair straight down the middle of her
head and who quoted Job at breakfast was not a perfect preparation for
modern domestic life.
As for Catie, or Catia, as she now called herself, she was modern
enough, distressingly so sometimes. Nevertheless, analyzed, she would
not have seemed to Scott at all domestic. She was too much wrapped up
in her own personal concerns, too uncomprehending in a spiritual
crisis. Domesticity, to be practical, must consist of something else
than mere ability to keep a house and to extract from the butcher the
best cuts obtainable for one's income. One's spiritual bric-a-brac must
be taken down and dusted with just as careful reverence as one shows
the glass things on one's mantel. Catia could cut her own cloth up into
pieces, and then sew up the pieces into quite presentable garments; she
could make good coffee and cook lamb chops to perfection; but, that
done, she could not sit down of an evening and fling herself, heart and
soul, into the interests of her husband's life.
Of this, as yet, Scott Brenton was mercifully ignorant. He might have
known it; but, unhappily, he never had found it altogether worth his
while to meditate very much upon the question. He passed by Catia as an
established fact; he left her quite unanalyzed. Instead, he turned the
whole force of his analytic power upon the needs of his profession,
without in the least realizing that, in the case of a married man,
professional acumen and efficiency depend a good deal upon the quality
of his domestic atmosphere. Later on, he was destined to find out that
a family jar at breakfast, a discussion born of a muddy cup of coffee
or a sticky muffin, can wreck the fervour of a sermon born of a week of
prayer and meditation, wreck it at so late an hour that any salvage is
impossible.
"Really," Catia observed to her solitary bridesmaid, a week before the
wedding day; "you'd never think it that Scott was just getting ready to
be married; would you?"
The bridesmaid was not so much tactless as envious. As she and Catia
were well aware, Scott Brenton was the one really personable man upon
the horizon of their village life, the only man who seemed to have it
in him to translate a wife out of that humdrum village into the
seething world beyond. Of course, it was nice of Catia to have chosen
her for bridesmaid. Nevertheless, it would have been far, far more
agreeable, if only she could have been the bride. Therefore,--
"No," she answered flatly. "No; I never would. I'd think he ought to be
in a perfect twitter, by this time; but he takes it as calmly as if a
wedding weren't any more important than a sack of beans."
Catia, hoping for a prompt denial of the point of view she had put
forth, was conscious of a certain pique at the prompt agreement. She
showed her pique with equal promptness, and phrased it in unanswerable
rebuke.
"How common you are, Eva!" she said quite scornfully. "A sack of beans!
One would know your father kept a country store."
Eva Saint Clair Andrews felt herself justified in the retort
discourteous.
"It is better to keep a country store than it is to hoe your own
potatoes, barefoot," she responded tartly. "Besides, what about Scott
Brenton's father?"
Then, catching sight, by way of the mirror, of Catia's irate
countenance, she stayed her speech. Already, she well realized, her
bridesmaid's robes were in the extreme of jeopardy. Unsatisfactory as
it was going to be to take the second place at Scott Brenton's wedding,
it would be far more unsatisfactory to take the twenty-second, and
watch the ceremony from one of the rear pews of the church, instead of
from the front aisle which answers architecturally to the functions of
the chancel. Besides, there was going to be a visiting minister extra,
a rector who was a classmate of Scott Brenton and therefore rather
young. And no one ever knew. Accordingly, Eva Saint Clair Andrews,
called usually by the whole of her name, even in intimate address,
stayed her speech and, after a fashion, temporized.
"Of course," she added, with a hasty giggle; "a minister like Scott is
more used to weddings than we girls are."
Turning from the mirror, Catia spoke with a dignity which was crushing.
"But not to his own," she informed her guest.
And Eva Saint Clair Andrews gave up the effort to extricate herself
from disgrace. Instead, she fell upon discussion of the wedding plans.
"How many do you expect at the reception, Catia?" she made query, with
an accent which discretion had suddenly rendered exceedingly full of
respect.
"Oh, I can't stop to count them up," Catia replied, with magnificent
carelessness. "I've asked about everybody in town, of course. Mother
would have insisted on it, anyway; and, besides, Scott's position would
make us do it, even if he were the only one to count."
Eva Saint Clair Andrews opened her blue eyes a little wider than was
quite becoming.
"I didn't suppose the Brentons were----" she was beginning.
But Catia interrupted, with a fresh access of magnificence.
"Not the Brentons, Eva," Catia had only lately forbidden herself the
village use of the full name, and her sudden recollection of the fact
caused her to speak with nippy brevity; "not the Brentons, but just
Scott himself. Of course, we owe it to his cloth."
"Yes," Eva Saint Clair Andrews answered, in an appreciative murmur.
None the less, lacking the training vouchsafed to Catia by the closing
functions of the divinity school, she wondered what the cloth might be,
that it should so outrank good Mrs. Brenton in its claim to social
precedence.
A week later, came the wedding. Even the most carping one of all the
village gossips was ready to agree that it had thrown new lustre over
the entire community, and even shed its beams into the next county
whence certain of the guests had come. There had been many guests and
some unusual costumes. The church had been filled with a wealth of
flowers, chiefly of the home-grown species, until the place reeked with
the spicy odours, not of Araby the blest, but of a kitchen garden, or a
soup bunch.
Beside the village parson, there had been three young clergymen in
attendance and more or less in active service while the nuptial knot
was being tied. Indeed, so many were there of them and so active were
they in their ministrations that poor Mrs. Brenton, down in the front
pew and painfully shiny between her proud maternal tears and the
reflected lustre of her new black satin frock, was never quite certain
in her mind which one of them, in the end, had pronounced her son and
Catia man and wife. For the sake of the ancestral Wheelers, she hoped
it was the broadcloth-coated village parson; but she had her doubts.
Her doubts increased into a positive agony of uneasiness when she
discovered, at the reception later on, that the three young clergymen,
with one consent, had put their waistcoats on hind side before. Had she
conceived the notion that, within the limits of three years, her son
would adopt the same preposterous fashion, she would have believed
herself in readiness for the nearest madhouse. Mercifully, however, so
much was spared her, at that time and for ever after.
The reception itself was a glorious occasion. Practically the entire
village was present, a good half of them in new frocks manufactured by
themselves in honour of the great event. It was now four years and
seven months since there had been a wedding in the village. The local
type of damsel was a pre-natal spinster, and the few village boys went
otherwhere in search of wives. Brides there had been, of course; but
they had been of the ready-made variety. Other communities had had the
glory of the weddings. It was not every day, by any means, that the
local leaders of society were asked to prepare themselves a wedding
garment. They stitched away all the more cunningly on that account.
Judged by the standards of the _Ladies' Galaxy_, their gowns were
models of the mode. Viewed even in the uncritical eyes of the visiting
clergy, they were, as has been said, unusual.
Aside from gowns, the reception was chiefly notable for its cake; not
cakes, but solid loaves made up in layers with oozy sweetnesses
sandwiched in between. Served with neither forks nor napkins, it gave
rise to complications; but it was none the less appreciated upon that
account. There were two kinds of lemonade, too, one plain, one mixed
with home-brewed grape juice. In all surety, Catia's wedding reception
left nothing lacking on the score of elegance. Later, her satisfaction
was obvious in her shining eyes, as she halted, half-way down the front
stairs, to look upon her guests. The reception was nearing its end, for
Catia was now dressed for going away, and topped with a hat which
combined the more essential characteristics of the helmet of the
British grenadier and a mascot upon a Princeton football field. Indeed,
it was almost as rigid in its outlines as was the smile which creased
its wearer's lips. Catia was not unimpressive in her new dignity of
wifehood; but the dignity bore traces of diligent rehearsal, and left
singularly little to the imagination. By her side, Scott, looking down
upon his fellow townsmen, wore the self-conscious smirk of a sheepish
schoolboy; and the best of his fellow townsmen respected him the more
on that account. Catia was the more impressive of the two, they told
themselves; but there was no especial sense in a pair of young things
like these, trying to act as if their getting married were a mere fact
of every-day routine.
Smiling steadily, Catia stood there, waiting until, by very force of
motionless persistence, she had focussed every eye upon her person.
Then, according to the mandates of the _Ladies' Galaxy_, she hurled her
bridal bouquet down across the banister, not upon the waiting Eva Saint
Clair Andrews who hankered for it lustily, but straight against the
manly waistcoat of the least and the pinkest one of the visiting
clergy, a youth of twenty-five or six who had reluctantly torn himself
away from an anxious wife and a croupy baby, on purpose to be on hand
at Brenton's wedding. Mercifully for Catia's poise, her young husband
forebore explaining to her the reason for the three-fold clerical roar
which went up upon the heels of her well-meant attention.
Afterwards, in looking backward, that evening seemed to Scott to stand
out as a dream, unforeseen, yet not inconsequential. Nothing that had
gone before appeared to him to be able to explain it. It just was, a
fact without any planning or volition on his part. He had known Catia
from his little boyhood, had been used to her, had counted on her in a
sense; but always he had held himself a little bit aloof from her, even
when, to outward seeming, he had sought her with the greatest
regularity. Early in their intercourse, indeed, he had discovered the
main fact of all those which were to govern their later life together:
that he could not so much talk over things with her, as talk them over
with himself when she was present.
And then, all at once and without warning, Catia had swept in and
dominated him completely, dominated him with her oozy layer cake, and
her two sorts of lemonade, and with her Princeton grenadier of a hat.
Beside it all, he felt himself dwindling into insignificance, despite
the hind-side-before waistcoats of the visiting clergymen and his
mother's gown of stiff black satin. It was a positive relief to him
when he could turn his back upon the whole hot, chattering function,
and, with Catia's new gilt-initialled bag to balance his much-rubbed
suitcase, go striding away to the station underneath the wintry
freshness of the night. Catia had rebelled at the idea of walking to
their train; but the one hack afforded by the village had gone away to
a funeral in the next town but two.
So they went stepping out into the new life before them: Catia Brenton
and Scott, her husband. To Catia it seemed that, the first of her
milestones reached, it was time for her to sit down for a while, and
rest, and take a little comfort out of thinking over what she already
had achieved. To Scott, the first stage of his journey had scarcely
been begun. Indeed, it did not even start from that night, nor from any
night in which Catia's memory could have a share. And yet, asked, he
would have been swift to affirm that he loved Catia; that life ahead of
him, without her for his wife, would be unsatisfactory, perhaps a
little vacant. Catia had always been a part of his environment, ever
since the long-gone day when she had hailed him, sodden in his weeping,
the while he cooled his nether man upon the chilly doorstep.
For nearly twenty years, they had been meeting life together, and
comparing notes upon the impressions they had gained. Often and often,
each one had found the other's notes a cipher, had lacked the cipher's
proper code. Nevertheless, there had been a certain sense of intimacy
in the mere fact of the comparison. Without Catia in his past, Scott
Brenton would have been lonely. Therefore he felt it safe to reason
that, without her in his future, the loneliness would become infinitely
worse. The marriage, in its inception, might have been altogether
Catia's doing. In the end, he had been giving it his full assent, and
he took his marriage vows in all sincerity, determined to do his best
towards their fulfilment.
His fingers shut quite closely, then, upon the slippery handle of
Catia's new bag, and he stepped a bit nearer to her side, as they
halted beneath the shining stars, to look back upon what they left
behind them. Catia saw the huddled gathering of the village people,
already looking a little dowdy to her critical eyes. Scott only saw
four faces, grouped in perspective: his mother, tearful, a little
tremulous, yet radiant in her full content; behind her, two of the
visiting clergy, classmates and chums of the divinity school, and,
still behind these two, the eager young face of the curly-headed rector
of the many hyphens, the man who first had opened his eyes to a
brand-new gospel, one of fatherly affection, not of pursuant wrath, a
gospel elastic as the mind of man, plastic as the flowing life of all
the ages, not a hard and fast affair whose boundaries were laid down
for all time, hundreds of years before. And this was the man of them
all, and not the broadcloth village parson, whom Scott Brenton had
chosen to pronounce himself and Catia man and wife.
Why not?
Scott waved his hand. His mother sought her handkerchief, though not to
wave it. His two classmates saluted him, the one with Catia's big
bouquet, the other with a crochetted "throw" snatched from the nearest
chair. Above them all, though, the curly-headed rector flung up his arm
in greeting, and with his arm his voice.
"Bless you, old man, and keep at it! Remember I'm always in the same
old corner, if you ever need me."
And Scott Brenton took the assurance with him, as he entered into his
new life.