The Relentless City

CHAPTER XIV

The marriage of Bertie Keynes and Amelie was to be celebrated at New York towards the end of February, and bade fair to be the comble up to date (not even excepting the famous pearl fishery) of Mrs. Palmer's social successes. It was to take place in St. Luke's Church, Fifth Avenue, and for days beforehand the ordinary services had been altogether suspended, because the church had to be made fit to be the theatre of the ceremony, and a perfect army of furniture-men, upholsterers, carpenters, and plumbers occupied it. The ordinary square-backed wooden pews were removed from the body of the church, which was carpeted from wall to wall with purple felt, and rows of fauteuils in scarlet morocco, like the stalls of an opera-house, occupied their places. To complete the resemblance, each chair was marked with its particular number in its own row, and the occupants, who gave up their tickets at the church door, retaining only the tallies, were shown to their places, where they found in each chair a copy of the service printed on vellum and bound by Riviere, by scarlet-coated footmen. Similarly, the free seats in the gallery were cleared out in order to make room for the very magnificent orchestra, which beguiled the hours of waiting for the guests with inspiriting and purely secular pieces, and during the choral part of the service accompanied the choir.

In front of the altar, where the actual ceremony would take place, there had been constructed, hanging from the roof, an immense bell-shaped frame made of wood and canvas, which was completely covered inside and out with white flowers, and reached from side to side of what the reporters called the sacred edifice. It had been quite impossible, even for Mrs. Palmer, to procure at this time of year sufficient real flowers, and, as a matter of fact, they were largely artificial, like everything else. Round the edge of this large bell, suspended by invisible wires, but appearing to float in the air, were life-size baby figures of amorini, made of wood and beautifully tinted, winged, and almost completely nude, who discharged gilded arrows from their gilded bows towards the pair who were to stand in the centre of the bell. Numbers of others peeped from the banks of flowers that lined the walls, all aiming in the same direction, so that the bridegroom, one would have thought, might reasonably compare himself to a modern St. Sebastian. Framed in these banks of flowers also were several pictures belonging to Lewis Palmer, all bearing on what might be called classical matrimony: a Titian of Europa and the Bull, a Veronese of Bacchus and Ariadne, and a more than doubtful Rubens of Leda and the Swan. Gilded harps twined with flowers leaned about in odd corners, and the general impression was that one had come, not into a church, but, by some deplorable mistake, into the Venusberg as depicted in the first act of 'Tannhauser.'

The ceremony, of course, had been many times rehearsed, and for days beforehand the dummy bridegroom's procession had crossed Fifth Avenue (the house exactly opposite was to be Bertie's domicile for the night preceding the marriage), and taken up its position, chalked out, at the church door. That event was signalled to the chef d'orchestre in the gallery, who was thereupon to begin the Mendelssohn wedding-march, and to the bride's procession, which was to start at the same moment from Mr. Lewis Palmer's house four blocks off. This, proceeding at walking speed, should reach the church door exactly at the conclusion of the wedding-march, whereupon the two processions, dummy-Bertie attended by his usher, dummy-Amelie by her bridesmaids, moved up the church to right and left of the bell, at such a pace that the voice which breathed o'er Eden ceased breathing as they reached their places. Then – this was a startling innovation – Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, arm in arm, were to have an unattended progress up the aisle to two very suitable golden chairs, which at this moment would be the only unoccupied places in the church, while the choir in their honour were to sing a short hymn specially written for the occasion, and addressed to them, beginning:

Then the bride and bridegroom took their places under the bell, and the service proceeded in the usual manner. One rehearsal was rudely interrupted by the fall of one of the wooden amorini at this point, which narrowly missed the dummy-bridegroom's head, and fell with a loud crash, splintering itself into match-wood on, the floor of the chancel. So another one was procured, and they were all more securely wired. Immense baskets of white flowers were to be carried by the bridesmaids, which they were to strew in the path of the bride both as she entered and left the church with her husband; and from the belfry outside, as they emerged, a shower of sham satin slippers with little parachute wings, so that they should float in the air and sink very gradually on to the heads of the amazed crowd, was to be discharged. These had been tested privately, and were not used in the rehearsals.

Bertie had arrived in New York some fortnight before the marriage, leaving Mr. Palmer, who was very much occupied, in England, to follow a week later. Wedding-presents for both of them had begun arriving, and were still doing so in shoals, and every day he was occupied for several hours in writing letters of gratitude. He soon got a certain facility at this, but one morning there arrived for him a present which astonished him. The present itself was a charming dressing-bag (there was nothing surprising in this, for it was the eleventh he had received), and the donor was Mrs. Emsworth. She wrote with it a characteristic little note, saying that she was unable to come to the ceremony, as she was at Chicago, and begging him to forget her and not acknowledge the gift. She was making a great success with her tour, and was getting quite rich. Considering what had happened, this seemed to him one of the most superb pieces of impertinence ever perpetrated. 'She was getting quite rich!' Quite so; she had made a considerable sum lately apart from her theatrical business; she could well afford to give him a dressing-bag.

But the impertinence of it, the irresistible impertinence! How like the gamin who puts his tongue in his cheek and says 'Yah!' He almost laughed when he thought of it. But the laughter died at the memory of those sickening hours in London on the day he had received the blackmailing letter, and in a sudden spasm of anger against her, not pausing to consider whether it was wise or not, he gave orders that the bag should be packed up again and sent back to her at Chicago, without word of any kind. She would understand quite well.

This incident, small though it was in itself, served to increase a certain depression and uneasiness that beset him during this fortnight. The appalling apparatus and dis-play which was to be made over the wedding was intolerable to him; never before, as he read and re-read the instructions which had been sent him as to the timing of his own movements in what he mentally termed 'the show,' had the huge, preposterous vulgarity of the American mind fully struck him. The thought of what his wedding-day would be like was unfaceable, and the unextinguishable mirth of Ginger, who had come over as his best man, was not consoling.

'Here the bridegroom, crowned with garlands and ribands, shall be led underneath the largest amorino, which at a given signal shall descend upon his head, while the orchestra plays the Dead March from "Saul,"' had been his comment when the accident in rehearsal happened, and Bertie, though he laughed, groaned inwardly.

All this, however, was, as he recognised, but a temporary worry, and did not seriously affect him. More intimately disquieting was the perpetual sense of his nerves being jarred by the voices, manners, aims, mode of looking at life of the society into which he was to marry. Not for a moment did he even hint to himself that his manner of living and conducting himself, traditional to him, English, was in the smallest degree better or wiser than the manner of living and conducting themselves practised by these people, traditional (though less so) to them, American. Only there was an enormous difference, which had been seen by him in the autumn and dismissed as unessential, since it concerned only their manners, and had nothing to do with their immense kindliness of heart, which he never doubted or questioned for a moment. What he questioned now was whether manners did not spring, after all, from something which might be essential, something, the lack of which in one case, the presence of it in another, might make you find a man or a woman tolerable or intolerable if brought into continuous contact. He was going to marry this charming American girl, whose friends, interests, companions, pursuits, were American. It was reasonable and natural for her – indeed, it would have shown a certain heartlessness had it not been so – that she should wish to continue to be in touch with her friends and interests. For no human being can be plucked up, like a plant, and have its roots buried in an alien soil; transplant it without a lump of its own earth, and it will infallibly wither. Nor had Bertie the least intention of making the attempt to transplant her like that. All along he had known that the American invasion would come to his house; he no more expected Amelie to give up her American milieu than she would have expected him to give up his English milieu. Indeed, when Mr. Palmer had presented him with a charming little bijou flat in New York, he had accepted the implication that he would pay from time to time a visit there with the same unquestioning acquiescence.

But now in his second visit he found to his dismay that, so far from ceasing to mind or notice the difference between the two peoples, the difference was accentuated as far as notice went, and doubled as far as minding went. His nerves, no doubt, were a little out of order, and what would have scarcely affected him in a serener frame of mind was in his present mood like the squeak of a slate pencil.

Yet behind all this, even as the sky extends for millions of miles behind a stormy and cloudy foreground, lay his feeling for Amelie herself. True, once in his life the passion for a woman had burned in him with so absorbing and fierce a flame that for more than two years afterwards he had soberly believed that he never again could feel any touch of passion for another. His adoration for Dorothy Emsworth had been his first grande passion; it was therefore probably his last, for such a thing does not come twice. Men whose lives are morally unedifying might doubt it, so he said to himself, but merely because they have never experienced it at all. To them has come a succession of strong desires, but this never. And though he did not give, nor did he make pretence of giving, to Amelie that which Mrs. Emsworth could find no use for, yet he gave her very honestly another way of love: he gave her very strong and honest affection; he gave her immense admiration; lie gave her as much, for he was of ardent nature, as many men have ever felt. All the chords of his lyre sounded for her. But once there had been another chord; that he could not give her, for it was gone.

Consequently, when he wondered whether continuous contact with American milieu might not prove absolutely intolerable, he did not include in his misgivings his continuous contact with Amelie. He had deliberately set out in the quest of a wealthy wife, and he had found one in all ways so charming, so lovable, that the mercenary side of his quest was out of sight. That quest, he admitted to himself, was not a very exalted one; but as his father had pointed out, he could not, practically speaking, marry a poor girl – at least, without marrying a great deal of discomfort – and it was therefore more sensible to look for his wife among wealth. He had been quite prepared, in fact, for marrying a girl who 'would do,' provided she saw the matter in the same light. Amelie did much more than 'do.'

Two nights before his marriage he had been to a very ingenious party, the author and inventor of which had been Reggie Armstrong. It was called a 'Noah's Ark' party, for he had caused his stable-yard to be flooded, and erected in the centre of it a huge wooden building in shape and form exactly like the Noah's arks which children play with. It had false painted windows on it, the whole was in crude and glaring colours, and it was approached up a gang-plank across the stable-yard. At the door stood Reggie Armstrong on a little wooden stand, dressed like Noah in a brown ulster, with a stiff wide-awake hat and a false black beard, and by him the four other people who were the joint hosts. Mrs. Palmer was one, representing Mrs. Noah, and three young New York bachelors were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. A confused noise came from within the ark, and as the astonished guests entered they saw that all round the walls were cages containing real live animals. A pair of elephants occupied the top end, a snarling tiger was in the next cage; there were giraffes, lions, pumas, antelopes, all sorts of birds in diminishing order of size, and at the tail a small glass-covered box containing fleas. Shrill cries of excited admiration greeted this striking piece of genius, and in the rather pungent menagerie atmosphere, to the snarling of the tiger, the growling of lions, the mewing of cats, the barking of dogs, and the neighing of the equine species, the banquet, at which each guest sat on a wooden stool, and ate off wooden plates, in order to accentuate the primitive nature of the surroundings, ran its appointed course, and took rank among the brilliant entertainments of the world.