Читать книгу Letters of Peregrine Pickle - George P. Upton - Страница 12

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I HAVE already intimated in these columns that Aurelia is about to be married. Young Peplum, who is so well known as the gentlemanly clerk at——'s dry goods store, and who is heir apparent to a snug hundred thousand, when his uncle dies, is the fortunate man who will have the pleasure of supplying her with millinery hereafter, and of being known as the husband of Mrs. Aurelia——.

Aurelia, at present, is in a frightful crisis of dry goods, and is driving to the very verge of distraction a score of dress-makers, milliners and cloak-makers, who are sitting around the house like so many Patiences on monuments. Fractions of bridal dresses, traveling dresses, morning wrappers, cloaks, basques and basquines, immaculate and mysterious white garments with the most spirituel ruffles and frills foaming over them, cobwebby handkerchiefs and articles in the sanctum sanctorum of the toilet, the meaning of which I suspect but dare not mention—are all over the house from the garret to the cellarage; on chairs, on tables, on beds, on the piano, on lounges, on everything. I had rather undertake to walk through an acre of eggs, without breaking one of them, than to go through the house without setting my No. 11 boot heel into some frail gossamer of a dress, and rending its gauzy fabric and Aurelia's heart at the same time.

All the expectations, the hopes, the responsibilities, the aims and ambitions of Aurelia's life, if not of all human lives, now depend on the difference of shade in two ribbons or the relative reflections in two different silks, on both of which she has set her heart.

They are sweet pretty—but O dear!

She has wept bitter tears over the total depravity of a bias and the literally infernal unreliability of a sewing machine, which will skip stitches in crises of awful importance. Three long nights she lay awake, haunted with the dreadful suspicion that her shoemaker was an impostor, and that he had not given her the latest style of slipper-tie.

How could she assume the grave responsibilities of married life, if her slipper-tie were not the very latest?

Of course she couldn't.

She is thoroughly convinced that if anything should go wrong in the preparations for the ceremony, or in the ceremony itself, the world would cease its diurnal revolutions; there would be no further use for its axis; seed time and harvest would be alike immaterial to the farmer; ships and ledgers to the merchant; the anvil and loom to the mechanic; there would be nothing more worth living for; her career might as well be ended, the curtain come down, the lights go out, and the audience go home, without stopping for the close of the play.

I pitied the Dear Child, and so, yesterday, after she had consulted the marriage column of the Tribune, to see if any other person in the city had undergone her tribulations, I invited her to my den, that I might administer some consolation to her, wading in such deep waters. She gave the Patiences some parting injunctions, and each of them, from their respective monuments, looked down with weary eyes and nodded acquiescence.

She sat down by my Minerva, paying little heed, however, to those wise, solemn eyes which looked out from the marble with a sort of pity at her. I lighted my meerschaum, just commencing to be flecked with delicate amber streaks, and I said to her, as she listlessly pulled a bouquet to pieces, scattering the petals upon the floor, as if they were the ghosts of little dead hopes:

My Dear Aurelia, I need not tell you that you are about to enter upon a very important phase of your life, which hitherto has been of about as much importance as your canary's; that you are about to assume the responsibility of knowing a porter-house from a tenderloin, peas from beans, and the mysteries of soup and salad; that you are about entering the arcana of the washboard, the mangle, and the sideboard; and that you are to fit yourself for the companionship of the young ladies who will stand to you in the relation of domestics: for all of which you will find a recompense and sweet solace in your husband's pocket-book. In view of these solemn responsibilities of the present, and small anxieties which may accrue in the hereafter, it is eminently proper that you should approach the altar with a certain degree of reverence—

(At this point Minerva distinctly winked her left eye at Aurelia, but Aurelia did not notice it, whereupon the Goddess resumed her wise look, and I continued):

I am only afraid, my Dear Child, that in making all these preparations, you are rather making them for Mrs. Grundy than for yourself, against which mistake I would caution you for several reasons.

It is not probable that the great world will care much for your marriage.

(Aurelia astonished, and Minerva winking both eyes.)

I presume to say that horse races, billiard and base-ball matches will take place just as they always have; that Napoleon will quarrel with Bismarck after your marriage as he did before; that the Eastern Question will continue to trouble political philosophers, and that your neighbors will go on eating, drinking, driving, gossiping and pouring out the small beer of their lives much the same as they have always done, and that the world will continue to turn round, and that you and your husband and your rainbows, orange flowers, Cupids and moonbeams will go round with it, just as if you had never been married.

My Dear Child, this world is nothing but an ant-hill, and we are quite insignificant ants, each toiling along with his or her little burden, and when one ant gets another to help carry the load, the other ants don't mind it much, but push on with their burdens. Some day we go out of sight into the alluvium of the hill, burden and all, and forget to come out again, but even then, strange to say, the other ants don't miss us or stop to look after us, but keep pushing on, this way and that, and running over each other, and quarrelling about burdens. Therefore, my dear, I would advise you to let Mrs. Grundy carry her burden and pay no attention to her. Take your meals regularly and your usual allowance of sleep. It will be better for your peace and your digestion.

And again, my dear Aurelia, I am afraid you are going to make a splurge. A splurge is a good thing if you can keep splurging. If, when you set off like a rocket, you can keep going like a rocket, brilliant and beautiful, it will be a very good thing to do. But if you start like a rocket, and come down like a poor, miserable stick, with a wad of burned pasteboard on the end of you, you had better never have been touched off, because everybody will say they knew it would be so, and you yourself will sit in ashes all your life, clothing yourself with sackcloth, and lamenting your silliness in trying to make a splurge.

Now your future husband is making a comfortable living, and by the practice of ordinary economy you and he may get along very comfortably. In regard to your legacy there is no certainty. Your uncle's lungs and liver are much better than your husband's, and even if your husband should outlive him, there may be nothing left to give you, so that after spreading your choice dishes for your guests you may have to come down to potsherds yourself. Do not splurge, therefore, unless you are ready to keep up your splurge. Beware of going into the large end of the horn and coming out of the little end, for you will be very thin when you come out, and Mrs. Grundy will laugh at you. I think it is better, if there is any uncertainty about your prospects, to go in at the little end, and then when you come out at the large end, you can come out in style and with plenty of room. But, under any and all circumstances, splurging is dangerous, and in nine cases out of ten will land you, heels upwards, kicking at space. You, yourself, my dear, will remember that on one occasion, when you were a little late at church and had on that new hat, you tried to splurge up the aisle and sat down suddenly upon the floor, with the whole congregation looking at you. Just so will it be all through life. If you have a weak point about you—and, my Dear Child, you have many (here Minerva actually nodded assent)—a splurge will be sure to discover that point to the spectator. Therefore I would advise you and your husband to launch your craft very quietly. You will then have the right, when you can afford it, to do and be something in the world, and when your husband goes into the ant-hill out of sight, some other ant will tell in the papers, for the other ants to read, how he commenced poor but honest, and worked his way up, and some little ants with very large burdens will take courage thereat and ply their legs more vigorously than ever.

In another respect it is well not to make a splurge. If you make a public wedding and issue a large number of invitations, astonishing as the event may seem to you, it will be quite a common affair to most of us. The young people will criticise you most unmercifully. If there is an orange flower awry upon your veil, if there is a bit of ribbon or lace out of gear, if your hair is not exactly a la mode, they will find it out. Your looks and responses also, my dear, will be canvassed by charming young creatures, and as they weep such pearly tears of sorrow over your misfortunes, and are dying of envy that they haven't an opportunity of looking interesting, because they could do it so much prettier than you, they will mentally take a catalogue of all your adornments and discuss them for many days to come. The old married people who come, I assure you, will do the operation much as they do their dinners. Bless you, they have seen weddings before, many a time, and if they have one interested thought about this ceremony, which you suppose all the world is looking at, it is that they did this sort of thing better in their day. Then in your list of invitations, when you make it general, there will always be the old lady who goes to funerals and weddings because she likes to, and thinks it her duty. She is equally solemn on both occasions, refers frequently to this vale of tears, and can weep with a fluency only equalled by a water-spout. You will do well to keep on her good side, which you can do by feeding her well; for in spite of the fact which she so frequently announces, that this is a vale of tears, she can eat a square meal with a success only equalled by young Boosey, whom you will have to invite, and who will come only to gormandize on your cake and wine and grow eloquent over your Russe. It would be better for you, therefore, to avoid a large gathering, and still better to make your party a family one.

Again, I would urge upon you, my Dear Child, not to attempt to look interesting. By all means avoid this rock upon which young brides are apt to split. I have seen scores of brides go off the stocks and I have never seen one yet who tried to look interesting, who didn't resemble a wax figure in a hair store or a goose in a paddock. You had better look like yourself. Remember that you are a woman. Listen to the minister and answer his questions sensibly and not go off in a paroxysm of smiles, quirks, simpers and pianissimo lisping, as if you were the ghost of a rose leaf, which you are not, my dear.

Also, have a perfect understanding with your husband-to-be. You have been living on moonbeams long enough. Sink your romance sufficiently to get at realities, and it will save you heartburns, headaches and red eyes hereafter. Your husband, who has a stomach like other men, will get sick of living on moonshine in an incredibly short space of time. He accomplished the purpose of moonshine, my Dear Child, when he got you, and he will immediately return to the more substantial things of the earth. And you yourself will be astonished how quickly the realities of married life will take the romantic starch out of you, and at the suddenness with which you will tumble, (like the man who came down too soon to inquire the way to Norwich,) from your enchanted world to the commonplaces of beefsteak, baby-baskets and washboards. It will be best, therefore, for you to exactly understand each other, because one of you cannot live in the moon and the other on the earth.

Lastly. I would solemnly caution you against making the mistake that you are the only woman in the world who ever got married. My dear Aurelia, singular as it may seem to you, thousands and millions have been married before you, and thousands and millions will be married after you, and thousands and millions will care as little for your marriage as you do for your grandmother's. (Minerva at this point nodded assent so vigorously that she lost her balance and fell at the feet of my Venus di Medici, and was exceedingly shocked at the latter.)

I was about to conclude my morning talk with an impressive peroration on the duties, trials and pleasures of wedded life, and rose to relight my pipe, when I found that Aurelia was fast asleep.

I was saddened at the discovery, but I quietly slipped out and told the Patiences on the monuments of it, and they one and all rested, and this explains the reason why the work got behind-hand, and Aurelia had to postpone the wedding one day.

June 22, 1867.