Читать книгу Letters of Peregrine Pickle - George P. Upton - Страница 13

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THE great event of the week has not been the Fourth of July, as is vulgarly supposed, but the marriage of Aurelia to young Peplum, the gentlemanly clerk at——'s dry goods store, heir apparent to $100,000, etc.

I regret to say that Aurelia paid no regard to the advice I gave her two weeks ago. In spite of all my efforts to persuade her to the contrary, she persisted in the hallucination that she was the first woman who had ever been torn away from distracted parents and led, a garlanded victim, to the matrimonial altar. I think she was disappointed that the heavens were not hung with white favors, and that deputations were not present from the various races of the globe, and that business was not suspended. The number of invitations was only limited by the capacity of the house. Everyone of the young ladies invited was a very dear friend, not to have invited whom would have given mortal offence, and sundered friendships, in many cases of several weeks' existence, without which life would have been a blank—Sahara without an oasis—Heaven without a star.

M. Arsene Houssaye, rash man, says that woman is the fourth theologic virtue and the eighth mortal sin. Upon this standard it is safe to say there was present a frightful amount of theologic virtue and mortal sin. I am sure of the latter fact.

The hour for the ceremony had been appointed at 6 P.M. Deeply impressed as was Aurelia with the idea that Columbus, discovering the New World; Galileo, fixing the motion of the earth round the sun; Newton, discovering the laws of gravitation, and Harvey, finding the circulation of the blood—were but every-day common-places compared with this event—she had, nevertheless, found it impossible to convince the Directors of the Michigan Central Railroad of that fact. The result was that trains ran at the usual hour, and would not wait, even one little minute, and it was vulgarly necessary, therefore, to have the wedding promptly at six.

After the wedding was over, I invited old Blobbs up to my den to smoke, and we compared notes on this occasion, and mutually arrived at this result: That the good old-fashioned custom of a large family wedding, celebrated in hospitable style, followed up with wit, sociality, games, and a dance, the guests departing at a seasonable time, well lined with capon and punch, trusting to Providence and instinct that the young couple would find their way through the night, somehow, to the breakfast table the next morning, the bride dressed in the rosiest of blushes, and the groom very plucky and defiant, each commencing the race in life from the starting point of home, was much more sensible than this modern custom of gathering together all their dear friends, hurrying through the ceremony, and then running off a thousand miles, as if the couple had done something they were ashamed of.

And then we compared the comfort of home with a sleeping car: your own snugly furnished and beautifully adorned room, cosy, quiet, dreamy and mysterious, with the vulgar, rattling, smoking, baby-crying, enjoyed-in-common, dirty-counterpaned, cindery, head-smashing, waked-up-every-hour bunks of the sleeping car; the breakfast of cream and honey and strawberries, fragrant Mocha and snowy rolls, with the dirt, dust, cinders, smoke, tough beefsteaks and mahogany coffee of a sleeping car.

"De gustibus non est disputandum," said I.

"Ditto," said Blobbs.

From early morn until dewy eve, the dressmakers, mantau-makers, milliners, hair-dressers and chambermaids had been laboring on Aurelia. They modelled her, shaped her, powdered her, painted her, twisted her, pulled her, laced her, unlaced her, fixed her, took her to pieces and put her together again, behind carefully locked doors, while that poor devil Peplum, in a seven-by-nine room, with a two-by-three looking glass, two brushes and a comb, went at himself with fear and trembling, and although he was more lavish than ever of Macassar and Day & Martin, and split three pairs of kids and looked very red in the face, still he looked like himself, which is more than I can say of Aurelia.

In the meantime the guests were assembled, one hundred of whom were young ladies and all dear friends, looking very much like pinks in a parterre; fifty young gentlemen who looked as if they had something on their minds and were suspicious of the integrity of their cravats—(I know of nothing more terrible than to be in the company of very dear friends when you have a suspicion of the integrity of your outer man); a handful of old people who resembled feathery dandelion-tufts in a field of red and white clover; and Rev. Fitz-Herbert Evelyn, the sweet young associate of old Dr. Homilectics, who does up the weddings, youthful funerals, evening meetings, and morning calls, is sound on lunch, convenient in doctrine, and orthodox in raiment. For a set sermon on the rationalistic errors in Transubstantiation, the old doctor can beat him out of sight, but he has given up weddings as he is no longer sweet, and has been known to have talked common sense on such occasions, which is as much out of place as honesty in a Legislature. Consequently, the young ladies prefer the sweet, young Fitz-Herbert, who would sleep uneasily should he find a rose leaf under him edge upward, who rushes through the ceremony daintily, with the tips of his fingers, and after having tied the young lambs together with a thread, cooly dares anybody to put them asunder.

When the bridal couple entered the room, they immediately became the foci of three hundred or more eyes. They had scarcely got into position, when one hundred noses were elevated just a trifle, from which I judged that Aurelia, although fearfully and wonderfully made, was not altogether a success to her dear young friends. One hundred upper lips curled up, and fifty elbows of dear friends nudged in concert the corsets of fifty other dear friends, at what I afterwards found to be a spot upon her veil, left by one of the bridesmaids who was addicted to chewing spruce gum.

Aurelia commenced to look interesting, and, to my horror, so did young Peplum, and they succeeded admirably in looking like a young man and a young woman detected in the act of stealing green apples from a corner grocery. Sweet Mr. Evelyn stepped up, and after running his hand through his raven hair and passing it over his marble brow once or twice, thereby setting off to more advantage that amethyst ring which Blanche Jessamine gave him at the last meeting of the Young Ladies' Aid Society, he commenced looking very saintly and talking very sweetly.

After the customary promises, Fitz-Herbert began a beautiful exordium, feelingly alluding to the journey of life; touching upon the launching of the craft; alluding to calm seas; solemnly describing the mutual partnership of joys and sorrows; mentioning cups of bliss, sprinkling roses and boldly deprecating thorns. And when he said, in a solemn but sweet tone of voice: "My dear young friends, you are about to enter upon a pathway," etc., all the dear friends were visibly affected. One hundred lace handkerchiefs went up to two hundred eyes. The old maid who goes to all the weddings and funerals for lachrymal purposes went off like a waterspout. As she afterwards told me it did her a power of good, and that she hadn't enjoyed the blessing of tears so much since Podgers died.

(Podgers was a distant relative of her's on her mother's side, and was so confused at the time of his decease, that he forgot to mention her in his will.)

Mrs. Carbuncle, the woman in red hair and blue Thibet, who went to see Booth in Othello, because she doted on the Irish drama, had her child with her, who had served his purpose thus far in supplying some of the rash young fellows present with significant jokes. The child, seeing all the rest of the company in a lachrymose state, also lifted up his voice and wept out of sympathy. Mrs. Carbuncle's efforts to quiet him only made matters worse, and the youthful Carbuncle, kicking and weeping, was carried off in disgrace to an upper chamber, where, for half an hour afterwards, he manifested his poignant grief, by refusing to be comforted, and bumping the back of his head against a cottage bedstead.

Sweet Fitz-Herbert, who has a gift at weddings, but a keen appreciation of fees, was very brief in his ceremony, much to young Boosey's delight, who was dying to get at the supper table, around which Biddy was hovering in transports of delight like a bee round a hollyhock, being engaged at the same time in an internecine war with some men and brethren who had invaded her domains, in which war she was assisted by all the Biddies of the neighborhood, whom she had smuggled in by the back entrance to see the tables.

The ceremony having been concluded, congratulations were in order, when Mrs. Flamingo burst in, in a state of perspiration and general deshabille. For being just two minutes late, and for sleeping over on important occasions, that woman is a prodigy. In the natural history of society, she is the Great American Snail. If she ever dies, she will have to change her present habits, and in any event will sleep over when Gabriel blows his trumpet. If she had lived in the days of Noah, she would have been drowned within hailing distance of the ark. She is the woman who always comes late at the concerts and has to be waked by the door-keeper when he puts out the lights, and is always vigorous in pursuit of the last car of a railroad train.

It is hardly necessary for me to describe the wedding supper: the cakes, crowned with sugar cherubs straddling white roses and chasing golden butterflies among silver leaves; sugar Cupids, hovering on the brink of an ocean of Charlotte Russe; the huge pyramid of small syllabubs, which a man and brother, losing his presence of mind in waiting upon young Boosey, upset in all directions; the saucer of ice cream which another man, etc., upset upon Mrs. Carbuncle's head; the Heidseck which ruined Celeste's silk; the customary sentiment of sweet Fitz-Herbert, which I give entire: "Our dear young friends, who this night enter the pathway of life: May their cup of bliss always be full and their journey strewn with roses without a thorn. And if we never meet here, may we meet hereafter where they neither marry nor are given in marriage." Greatest of all, need I describe how Boosey and the crying old maid commenced at one end of the table and ate and drank through to the other without a single skip, or how Boosey retired from the fray, confused in his mind and uncertain in his legs, after proposing as a sentiment: "Here's to Peplum and Mrs. Peplum—j-j-jolly good fe-fe-fe-fellows. Dr-dr-dr-drink hearty."

The most astonishing event of the evening was the utter indifference of the hackman, who took the bride and Mr. Peplum to the depot. He was not aware of the importance of the event, and even dared to growl up to the fifth trunk, and swear in a low tone of voice at the sixth and last—the four-story Saratoga, and in a satirical tone of voice asked if he should drive to the freight depot.

That wretched man knew not that he carried the first woman ever married.

The guests finally departed—Mr. and Mrs. Peplum to the uncertainties of the sleeping car; sweet Fitz-Herbert leaving a Night-Blooming Cereus odor of sanctity behind him; the dear young friends; the old dandelion tops; the old maid still weeping; the disgraced child; Boosey on his winding way; and Mrs. Flamingo, who was found asleep near the ruins of the supper table, when Biddy was putting out the lights.

And I went to my den and lit my pipe and looked out of the window. The moon was still shining. The stars winked at me. A romantic young man was practising "Oft in the Stilly Night" on a cracked trumpet. Terrence and Bridget were sitting up at the next gate. The wind blew. The leaves rustled. My pipe glowed. The world revolved. I existed. And yet Aurelia had been married that very night.

If I have said little about Mr. Peplum, it is because Mr. Peplum seemed to have very little to do with it.

July 6, 1867.