Mr. Polly's marriage followed with a certain inevitableness.
He tried to assure himself that he was acting upon his own forceful
initiative, but at the back of his mind was the completest realisation
of his powerlessness to resist the gigantic social forces he had set
in motion. He had got to marry under the will of society, even as in
times past it has been appointed for other sunny souls under the will
of society that they should be led out by serious and unavoidable
fellow-creatures and ceremoniously drowned or burnt or hung. He would
have preferred infinitely a more observant and less conspicuous rôle,
but the choice was no longer open to him. He did his best to play his
part, and he procured some particularly neat check trousers to do it
in. The rest of his costume, except for some bright yellow gloves, a
grey and blue mixture tie, and that the broad crape hat-band was
changed for a livelier piece of silk, were the things he had worn at
the funeral of his father. So nearly akin are human joy and sorrow.
The Larkins sisters had done wonders with grey sateen. The idea of
orange blossom and white veils had been abandoned reluctantly on
account of the expense of cabs. A novelette in which the heroine had
stood at the altar in "a modest going-away dress" had materially
assisted this decision. Miriam was frankly tearful, and so indeed was
Annie, but with laughter as well to carry it off. Mr. Polly heard
Annie say something vague about never getting a chance because of
Miriam always sticking about at home like a cat at a mouse-hole, that
became, as people say, food for thought. Mrs. Larkins was from the
first flushed, garrulous, and wet and smeared by copious weeping; an
incredibly soaked and crumpled and used-up pocket handkerchief never
left the clutch of her plump red hand. "Goo' girls, all of them," she
kept on saying in a tremulous voice; "such-goo-goo-goo-girls!" She
wetted Mr. Polly dreadfully when she kissed him. Her emotion affected
the buttons down the back of her bodice, and almost the last filial
duty Miriam did before entering on her new life was to close that
gaping orifice for the eleventh time. Her bonnet was small and
ill-balanced, black adorned with red roses, and first it got over her
right eye until Annie told her of it, and then she pushed it over her
left eye and looked ferocious for a space, and after that baptismal
kissing of Mr. Polly the delicate millinery took fright and climbed
right up to the back part of her head and hung on there by a pin, and
flapped piteously at all the larger waves of emotion that filled the
gathering. Mr. Polly became more and more aware of that bonnet as time
went on, until he felt for it like a thing alive. Towards the end it
had yawning fits.
The company did not include Mrs. Johnson, but Johnson came with a
manifest surreptitiousness and backed against walls and watched Mr.
Polly with doubt and speculation in his large grey eyes and whistled
noiselessly and doubtful on the edge of things. He was, so to speak,
to be best man, _sotto voce_. A sprinkling of girls in gay hats from
Miriam's place of business appeared in church, great nudgers all of
them, but only two came on afterwards to the house. Mrs. Punt brought
her son with his ever-widening mind, it was his first wedding, and a
Larkins uncle, a Mr. Voules, a licenced victualler, very kindly drove
over in a gig from Sommershill with a plump, well-dressed wife to give
the bride away. One or two total strangers drifted into the church and
sat down observantly far away.
This sprinkling of people seemed only to enhance the cool brown
emptiness of the church, the rows and rows of empty pews, disengaged
prayerbooks and abandoned hassocks. It had the effect of a
preposterous misfit. Johnson consulted with a thin-legged,
short-skirted verger about the disposition of the party. The
officiating clergy appeared distantly in the doorway of the vestry,
putting on his surplice, and relapsed into a contemplative
cheek-scratching that was manifestly habitual. Before the bride
arrived Mr. Polly's sense of the church found an outlet in whispered
criticisms of ecclesiastical architecture with Johnson. "Early Norman
arches, eh?" he said, "or Perpendicular."
"Can't say," said Johnson.
"Telessated pavements, all right."
"It's well laid anyhow."
"Can't say I admire the altar. Scrappy rather with those flowers."
He coughed behind his hand and cleared his throat. At the back of his
mind he was speculating whether flight at this eleventh hour would be
criminal or merely reprehensible bad taste. A murmur from the nudgers
announced the arrival of the bridal party.
The little procession from a remote door became one of the enduring
memories of Mr. Polly's life. The little verger had bustled to meet
it, and arrange it according to tradition and morality. In spite of
Mrs. Larkins' "Don't take her from me yet!" he made Miriam go first
with Mr. Voules, the bridesmaids followed and then himself hopelessly
unable to disentangle himself from the whispering maternal anguish of
Mrs. Larkins. Mrs. Voules, a compact, rounded woman with a square,
expressionless face, imperturbable dignity, and a dress of
considerable fashion, completed the procession.
Mr. Polly's eye fell first upon the bride; the sight of her filled him
with a curious stir of emotion. Alarm, desire, affection, respect--and
a queer element of reluctant dislike all played their part in that
complex eddy. The grey dress made her a stranger to him, made her
stiff and commonplace, she was not even the rather drooping form that
had caught his facile sense of beauty when he had proposed to her in
the Recreation Ground. There was something too that did not please him
in the angle of her hat, it was indeed an ill-conceived hat with large
aimless rosettes of pink and grey. Then his mind passed to Mrs.
Larkins and the bonnet that was to gain such a hold upon him; it
seemed to be flag-signalling as she advanced, and to the two eager,
unrefined sisters he was acquiring.
A freak of fancy set him wondering where and when in the future a
beautiful girl with red hair might march along some splendid aisle.
Never mind! He became aware of Mr. Voules.
He became aware of Mr. Voules as a watchful, blue eye of intense
forcefulness. It was the eye of a man who has got hold of a situation.
He was a fat, short, red-faced man clad in a tight-fitting tail coat
of black and white check with a coquettish bow tie under the lowest of
a number of crisp little red chins. He held the bride under his arm
with an air of invincible championship, and his free arm flourished a
grey top hat of an equestrian type. Mr. Polly instantly learnt from
the eye that Mr. Voules knew all about his longing for flight. Its
azure pupil glowed with disciplined resolution. It said: "I've come to
give this girl away, and give her away I will. I'm here now and things
have to go on all right. So don't think of it any more"--and Mr. Polly
didn't. A faint phantom of a certain "lill' dog" that had hovered just
beneath the threshold of consciousness vanished into black
impossibility. Until the conclusive moment of the service was attained
the eye of Mr. Voules watched Mr. Polly relentlessly, and then
instantly he relieved guard, and blew his nose into a voluminous and
richly patterned handkerchief, and sighed and looked round for the
approval and sympathy of Mrs. Voules, and nodded to her brightly like
one who has always foretold a successful issue to things. Mr. Polly
felt then like a marionette that has just dropped off its wire. But it
was long before that release arrived.
He became aware of Miriam breathing close to him.
"Hullo!" he said, and feeling that was clumsy and would meet the eye's
disapproval: "Grey dress--suits you no end."
Miriam's eyes shone under her hat-brim.
"Not reely!" she whispered.
"You're all right," he said with the feeling of observation and
criticism stiffening his lips. He cleared his throat.
The verger's hand pushed at him from behind. Someone was driving
Miriam towards the altar rail and the clergyman. "We're in for it,"
said Mr. Polly to her sympathetically. "Where? Here? Right O." He was
interested for a moment or so in something indescribably habitual in
the clergyman's pose. What a lot of weddings he must have seen! Sick
he must be of them!
"Don't let your attention wander," said the eye.
"Got the ring?" whispered Johnson.
"Pawned it yesterday," answered Mr. Polly and then had a dreadful
moment under that pitiless scrutiny while he felt in the wrong
waistcoat pocket....
The officiating clergy sighed deeply, began, and married them wearily
and without any hitch.
"_D'b'loved, we gath'd 'gether sight o' Gard 'n face this con'gation
join 'gather Man, Worn' Holy Mat'my which is on'bl state stooted by
Gard in times man's innocency_...."
Mr. Polly's thoughts wandered wide and far, and once again something
like a cold hand touched his heart, and he saw a sweet face in
sunshine under the shadow of trees.
Someone was nudging him. It was Johnson's finger diverted his eyes to
the crucial place in the prayer-book to which they had come.
"Wiltou lover, cumfer, oner, keeper sickness and health..."
"Say 'I will.'"
Mr. Polly moistened his lips. "I will," he said hoarsely.
Miriam, nearly inaudible, answered some similar demand.