Ere the wedding-day arrived, Salvina had to go to the seaside.
Clacton-on-Sea was the somewhat plebeian place and the school-fete the
occasion. Salvina looked forward to it without much personal pleasure,
because of the responsibilities involved, but it was a break in the
pupil-teacher's monotonous round of teaching at the school and being
taught at the Centres; and in the actual expedition the children's joy
was contagious and made Salvina shed secret tears of sympathy. Arrived
at the beach of the stony, treeless, popular watering-place, most of
the happy little girls were instantly paddling in the surf with yells
of delight, while the tamer sort dug sand-pits and erected castles.
Salvina, whose office on this occasion was to assist an "assistant
teacher," had to keep her eye on a particular contingent. She sat down
on the noisy sunlit sands with her back to the sea-wall so as to sweep
the field of vision. Her nervous conscientiousness made her count her
sheep at frequent intervals, and be worried over missing now this
one, now that one. How her heart beat furiously and then almost
stopped, when she saw a child wading out too far. No, decidedly it was
a trying form of pleasure for the teacher. One bright little girl who
had never beheld the sea before picked up a wonderfully smooth white
pebble, and bringing it to Salvina asked if it was worth any money.
Salvina held it up, extemporizing an object lesson for the benefit of
the little bystanders.
"No," she said, "this is not worth any money, because you can get
plenty of them without trouble, and even beautiful things are not
considered valuable if anybody can have them. This stone was polished
without charge by the action of the waves washing against it for
millions and millions of years, and if it--"
The sudden blare of a brass band on the other side of the sea-wall
made her turn her head, and there, in a brand-new room of a brand-new
house on the glaring Promenade, a room radiating blatant prosperity
from its stony balcony, she perceived her father, in holiday attire,
and by his side a woman, buxom and yellow-haired. A hot wave of blood
seemed to flood Salvina up to the eyes. So there he was luxuriating in
the sun, rich and careless. All her homely instincts of work and duty
rose in burning contempt. And poor Mrs. Brill had to remain cooped at
home, drudging and wailing. For a second she felt she would like to
throw the stone at him, but her next feeling was pain lest the sight
of her should painfully embarrass him; and turning her face swiftly
seawards she went on, with scarce a pause perceptible to the little
girls, "If it gets worn away some more millions of years, it will be
ground down to sand, like all the other stones that were once here,"
and as she spoke, she began to realize her own words, and a tragic
sense of her own insignificance in this eternal wash of space and time
seemed to reduce her to a grain of sand, and blow her about the great
spaces. But the mood passed away before a fresh upwelling of concrete
resentment against the self-pampered pair at the Promenade window.
Nevertheless, her feeling of how their seeming satisfaction would be
upset at the sight of her, made her carefully minimize the
contingency, and the dread of it hovered over the day, adding to the
worries over the children. But she vowed that her mother should be
revenged; she, too, poor wronged one, should wallow in Promenade
luxury in her future holidays; no more should she be housed in back
streets without sea-views.
At night, after Mrs. Brill was in bed, Salvina could not resist saying
to Lazarus, whose supper she had been keeping hot for him: "How
strange! Father _is_ at the seaside."
"The dickens!" He paused, fork in hand. "You saw him at
Clacton-on-Sea?"
"Yes, but don't tell mother. So we didn't tell a lie after all. I'm so
glad."
"Oh, go to blazes, you and your conscience. Where was he staying?"
"In a house in the very centre of the Promenade; it's simply
shocking!"
"Make me some fresh mustard, and don't moralize. Did you have a good
time?"
"Not very; a little cripple-girl in my class went paddling, and
joking, and dropped her crutch, and it floated away--"
"Bother your little cripple-girls. They always seem to be in your
class!"
"Because my class is on the ground floor."
"Ha! ha! ha! Just your luck. By the way," he became grave, "look what
a beastly letter from Kitty! Not coming to the wedding. I call it
awfully selfish of her."
Kitty wrote her deep regrets, but her people had suddenly determined
to go abroad and she could not lose this chance of seeing the world;
"the governess's honeymoon," she christened it. Paris, Switzerland,
Rome,--all the magic places were to be hers,--and Salvina, reading the
letter, gasped with sympathy and longing.
But the happy traveller was represented at the wedding by a large
bronze-looking knight on horseback, which towered in shining green
over the insignificant gifts of the Jonas's circle; the utilitarian
salad-bowls, and fish-slices, and dessert sets. One other present
stood out luridly, but only to Salvina. It was a glossy arm-chair,
and on the seat lay a card: "From Rhoda's loving father-in-law." When
Salvina first saw this--at a family card-party, the Sunday evening
before the wedding--she started and flushed so furiously that Lazarus
had to give her a warning nudge, and to whisper: "Only for
appearance." At the supper-table old Jonas, who carved and jested with
much appreciation of his own skill in both departments, referred
facetiously to the absent father, who might, nevertheless, be said to
be "in the chair" on that occasion.
Salvina dressed her mother as carefully for the ceremony as though
Kitty's fears were being realized and Mrs. Brill was the bride of the
occasion; and so debonair a figure emerged from the ordeal that you
could recognize Kitty's mother instead of Salvina's. Lazarus had spent
his farewell evening of bachelorhood at an hotel, justly complaining
that a mirrorless bed-room with a straw mattress was no place for a
bridegroom to issue from. Never had bridegroom been so ill-treated, he
grumbled; and he shook his fist imaginatively at the father who had
despoiled him.
But he joined his mother and sister in the cab; and as it approached
the synagogue, he said suddenly: "Don't be shocked--but I rather
expect father will be at the _Shool_ (synagogue)."
"What!" and Mrs. Brill appeared like to faint.
"He wouldn't have the cheek," Salvina said reassuringly, as she
pulled out the smelling-salts which Kitty had not needed.
"He wouldn't have the cheek _not_ to come," said Lazarus. "I asked
him."
"You!" They glared at him in horror.
"Yes; I wasn't going to have things look funny--I hate explanations.
The Jonases thought there was something queer the other night, when
you both bungled the explanation of the rheumatism, spite all my
coaching."
"But where did you find him?" said the mother excitedly.
"At Clacton-on-Sea."
Salvina bit her lip.
"I sent in my card,--'Laurence Beryl, of Granders Brothers.' When he
saw me, I thought he would have had a fit. I told him if he didn't
come up to the wedding and play heavy father, I'd summons him--"
"Summons him!" echoed Mrs. Brill.
"For stealing my old arm-chair. I remembered--ha! ha! ha!--it was I
that had bought the easy-chair for myself, when we lived in
Spitalfields and had only wooden chairs."
"So he _did_ send that easy-chair!" said Salvina.
"Yes; that was rather clever of him. And don't you think it's clever
of me to save appearances?"
"It'll be terrible for mother!" said Salvina hotly. "Didn't you think
of that?"
"She won't have to talk to him. He'll only hang round. Nobody will
notice."
"It would have been better to tell the truth," cried Salvina, "or even
a lie. This is only acting a lie. And it must be as painful for him as
for us."
"Serve him right--the old furniture-sneak!"
"It was a mistake," Salvina persisted.
"Hush, hush, Salvina!" said Mrs. Brill. "Don't disturb your brother's
festival."
"He has disturbed it himself," said Salvina, bursting into tears. "I
wish, mother, we had not come."
"Here, here! This is a pretty wedding," said Lazarus.
"Hush, Salvina, hush!" said Mrs. Brill. "What does it matter to us if
a dog creeps into synagogue?"
At this point the cab stopped.
"We're not there!" cried Mrs. Brill.
"No," Lazarus explained; "but we pick up father here. We must appear
to arrive together."
Ere the horrified pair could protest, he opened the door, sprang out,
and pushed inside a stout, rubicund man with a festal rose in his
holiday coat, but a miserable, shamefaced look in his eyes. Lazarus
took his seat ere a word could be spoken. The cab rolled on.
"Good-morning, Esther," he muttered. "I offered you _Get_."
"Silence!" cried Salvina, as if she had been talking to the little
girls. "How dare you speak to her?" She held her mother's hand and
felt the pulse beating madly.
"You old serpent--" began Mrs. Brill hotly.
"Mother!" pleaded Salvina; "not a word; he doesn't deserve it."
"In Jerusalem I could have two wives," he muttered. But no one
replied.
The four human beings sat in painful silence, their knees touching.
The culprit shot uneasy, surreptitious glances at his wife, so radiant
in jewels and finery and with so Kitty-like a complexion. It was as if
he saw her freshly, or as if he were shocked--even startled--by her
retaining so much joy of life despite his desertion of her.
Fortunately the strange drive only lasted a few minutes. The
bridegroom's wedding-party passed into the synagogue through an avenue
of sympathetic observers.
Mr. Brill had no part to play in the ceremony. The honours were
carried off by Mr. Jonas, who stalked in slowly, with the bride on his
arm, and a new green shade over his left eye. The rival father hovered
meekly on the outskirts of the marriage-canopy amid a crowd of
Jonases. Salvina stationed herself and her mother on the opposite
border of the canopy, and throughout bristled, apprehensive,
prohibitive, fiery, like a spaniel guarding its mistress against a
bull-dog on the pounce. The bull-dog indeed was docile enough;
avoiding the spaniel's eye, and trailing a spiritless tail. But the
creature revived at the great wedding-feast in the hall of a hundred
covers, and under the congratulations and the convivial influences
tended to forget he was in disgrace. The bridegroom's parents were
placed together, but Salvina changed seats with her mother, and became
a buffer between the twain, a non-conducting medium through which the
father could not communicate with the mother. With the latter she
herself maintained a continuous conversation, and Mr. Brill soon found
it more pleasant to forget his troubles in the charms of Mrs. Jonas,
his other neighbour.
After the almond-pudding, a succession of speakers ranging from
relatives to old friends, and even the officiating minister, gave
certificates of character to the bride and the bridegroom, amid the
tears of the ladies. Father Jonas made an elaborate speech beginning,
"Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking," and interlarded with Hebrew
quotations. Father Brill expressed the pleasure it gave him to
acknowledge on behalf of himself and his dear wife, the kind things
which had been said, and the delight they felt in seeing their son
settled in the paths of domestic happiness, especially in connection
with a scion of the house of Jonas, of whose virtues much had been
said so deservedly that night. Lazarus declared, amid roars of
laughter, that on this occasion only he would respond for his dear
wife, but he felt sure that for the rest of their lives she would have
the last word. Then the tables were cleared away and dancing began,
which grew livelier as the dawn grew nearer. But long before that,
Salvina had borne her mother away from the hovering bull-dog. Not,
however, without a terrible scene in the homeward cab. All the
volcanic flames Salvina and etiquette had suppressed during the day
shot forth luridly. Burning lava was hurled against her husband,
against her son, against Salvina. An impassioned inventory of the lost
furniture followed, and the refrain of the whole was that she had been
taken to a wedding, when all she wanted was a funeral.