Jaffery Part 13

There is a race of gifted people who make their livelihood by writing descriptions of weddings. I envy them. They can crowd so many pebbly facts into such a small compa.s.s. They know the names of everybody who attended from the officiating clergy to the shyest of poor relations.

With the cold accuracy of an encyclopaedia, and with expert technical discrimination, they mention the various fabrics of which the costumes of bride and bridesmaids were composed. They catalogue the wedding presents with the correct names of the donors. They remember what hymns were sung and who signed the register. They know the spot chosen for the honeymoon. They know the exact hour of the train by which the happy pair departed. Their knowledge is astonishing in its detail. Their accounts naturally lack imagination. Otherwise they would not be faithful records of fact. But they do lack colour, the magic word that brings a scene before the eye. Perhaps that is why they are never collected and published in book form.

Now I have been wondering how to describe the wedding of Doria and Adrian. I have recourse to Barbara.

"Why, I have the very thing for you," she says, and runs away and presently reappears with a long thing like a paper snake. "This is a full report of the wedding. I kept it. I felt it might come in useful some day," she cried in triumph. "You can stick it in bodily."

I began to read in hope the column of precise information. I end it in despair. It leaves me admiring but cold. It fails to conjure up to my mind the picture of a single mortal thing. Sadly I hand it back to Barbara.

"I shan't describe the wedding at all," I say.

And indeed why should I? Our young friends were married as legally and irrevocably as half a dozen parsons in the presence of a distinguished congregation a.s.sembled in a fashionable London church could marry them.

Of what actually took place I have the confused memory of the mere man.

I know that it was magnificent. All the dinner parties of Mr. Jornicroft were splendidly united. Adrian's troops of friends supported him. Doria, dark eyed, without a tinge of colour in the strange ivory of her cheek, looked more elfin than ever beneath the white veil. Jaffery, who was best man, vast in a loose frock coat, loomed like a monstrous effigy by the altar-rails. Susan, at the head of the bridesmaids, kept the stern set face of one at grapple with awful responsibility. She told her mother afterwards that a pin was running into her all the time... .

Well, I, for one, signed the register and I kissed the bride and shook hands with Adrian, who adopted the poor nonchalant att.i.tude of one accustomed to get married every day of his life. Driving from church to reception with Barbara, I railed, in the orthodox manner of the superior husband, at the modern wedding.

"A survival of barbarism," said I. "What is the veil but a relic of marriage by barter, when the man bought a pig in a poke and never knew his luck till he unveiled his bride? What is the ring but the symbol of the fetters of slavery? The rice, but the expression of a hope for a prolific union? The satin slipper tied on to the carriage or thrown after it? Good luck? No such thing. It was once part of the marriage ceremony for the bridegroom to tap the wife with a shoe to symbolise his a.s.sertion of and her acquiescence in her entire subjection."

"Where did Lady Bagshawe get that awful hat?" said Barbara sweetly. "Did you notice it? It isn't a hat; it's a crime."

I turned on her severely. "What has Lady Bagshawe's hat to do with the subject under discussion? Haven't you been listening?"

She squeezed my hand and laughed. "No, you dear silly, of course not."

Another instance of the essential inconvincibility of woman.

It was Jaffery Chayne, who, on the pavement before the house in Park Crescent, threw the satin slipper at the departing carriage. He had been very hearty and booming all the time, the human presentment of a devil-may-care lion out for a jaunt, and his great laugh thundering cheerily above the clatter of talk had infected the heterogeneous gathering. Unconsciously dull eyes sparkled and pursy lips vibrated into smiles. So gay a wedding reception I have never attended, and I am sure it was nothing but Jaffery's pervasive influence that infused vitality into the deadly and decorous mob. It was a miracle wrought by a rich Silenic personality. I had never guessed before the magnetic power of Jaffery Chayne. Indeed I had often wondered how the overgrown and apparently irresponsible schoolboy who couldn't make head or tail of Nietzsche and from whom the music of Sh.e.l.ley was hid, had managed to make a journalistic reputation as a great war and foreign correspondent.

Now the veil of the mystery was drawn an inch or two aside. I saw him mingle with an alien crowd, and, by what On the surface appeared to be sheer brute full-bloodedness, compel them to his will. The wedding was not to be a hollow clang of bells but a glad fanfare of trumpets in all hearts. In order that this wedding of Adrian and Doria should be memorable he had instinctively put out the forces that had carried him unscathed through the wildest and fiercest of the congregations of men.

He could subdue and he could create. In the most pithless he had started the working of the sap of life.

As for his own definite part of best man, he played it with an Elizabethan s.p.a.ciousness... . There was no hugger-mugger escape of travel-clad bride and bridegroom. He contrived a triumphal progress through lines of guests led by a ruddy giant, Master of the Ceremonies, exuding Pantagruelian life. Joyously he conducted them to their glittering carriage and pair--and, unconscious of anthropological truth, threw the slipper of woman's humiliation. The carriage drove off amid the cheers of the mult.i.tude. Jaffery stood and watched it until it disappeared round the curve. In my eagerness to throw the unnecessarily symbolic rice I had followed and stayed a foot or two away from him; and then I saw his face change--just for a few seconds. All the joyousness was stricken from it; his features puckered up into the familiar twists of a child about to cry. His huge glazed hands clenched and unclenched themselves. It was astonishing and very pitiful. Quickly he gulped something down and turned on me with a grin and shook me by the shoulders.

"Now I'm the only free man of the bunch. The only one. Don't you wish you were a bachelor and could go to h.e.l.l or Honolulu--wherever you chose without a care? Ho! ho! ho!" He linked his arm in mine, and said in what he thought was a whisper: "For Heaven's sake let us go in and try to find a real drink."

We went into a deserted smoking-room where decanters and siphons were set out. Jaffery helped himself to a mighty whisky and soda and poured it down his throat.

"You seemed to want that," said I, drily.

"It's this infernal kit," said he, with a gesture including his frock coat and patent leather boots. "For gossamer comfort give me a suit of armour. At any rate that's a man's kit."

I made some jesting answer; but it had been given to me to see that transient shadow of pain and despair, and I knew that the discomfort of the garments of civilisation had nothing to do with the swallowing of the huge jorum of alcohol.

Of course I told Barbara all about it--it is best to establish your wife in the habit of thinking you tell her everything--and she was more than usually gentle to Jaffery. We carried him down with us to Northlands that afternoon, calling at his club for a suit-case. In the car he tucked a very tired and comfort-desiring Susan in the shelter of his great arm. There was something pathetically tender in the gathering of the child to him. Barbara with her delicate woman's sense felt the harmonics of chords swept within him. And when we reached home and were alone together, she said with tears very near her eyes:

"Poor old Jaff. What a waste of a life!"

"My dear," I replied, "so said Doria. But you speak with the tongue of an angel, whereas Doria, I'm afraid, is still earth-bound."

The tear fell with a laugh. She touched my cheek with her hand.

"When you're intelligent like that," she said, "I really love you."

For a mere man to be certified by Barbara as intelligent is praise indeed.

"I wonder," she said, a little later, "whether those two are going to be happy?"

"As happy," said I, "as a mutual admiration society of two people can possibly be."

She rebuked me for a tinge of cynicism in my estimate. They were both of them dears and the marriage was genuine Heaven-made goods. I avowed absolute agreement.

"But what would have happened," she said reflectively, "if Jaffery had come along first and there had been no question of Adrian. Would they have been happy?"

Then I found my opportunity. "Woman," said I, "aren't you satisfied? You have made one match--you, and you'll pardon me for saying so, not Heaven--and now you want to unmake it and make a brand-new hypothetical one."

"All your talk," she said, "doesn't help poor Jaffery."

I put my hand to my head to still the flickering in my brain, kissed her and retired to my dressing-room. Barbara smiled, conscious of triumph over me.

During dinner and afterwards in the drawing-room, she played the part of Jaffery's fairy mother. She discussed his homelessness--she had an eerie way of treading on delicate ground. A bed in a tent or a club or an inn.

That was his home. He had no possessions.

"Good Lord!" cried Jaffery. "I should think I have. I've got about three hundred stuffed head of game stored in the London Repository, to say nothing of skins and as fine a collection of modern weapons as you ever saw. I could furnish a place in slap-up style to-morrow."

"But have you a chest of drawers or a pillow slip or a book or a dinner plate or a fork?"

"Thousands, my dear," said Jaffery. "They're waiting to be called for in all the shops of London."

He laughed his great laugh at Barbara's momentary discomfiture. I laughed too, for he had scored a point. When a man has, say, a thousand pounds wherewith to buy that much money's worth of household clutter, he certainly is that household clutter's potential owner. Between us we developed this incontrovertible proposition.

"Then why," said Barbara, "don't you go at once to Harrod's Stores and purchase a comfortable home?"

"Because, my dear Barbara," said Jaffery, "I'm starting off for the interior of China the day after to-morrow."

"China?" echoed Barbara vaguely.

"The interior of China?" I reechoed, with masculine definiteness.

"Why not? It isn't in Neptune or Ura.n.u.s. You wouldn't go into hysterics if I said I was going to Boulogne. Let him come with me, Barbara. It would do him a thundering lot of good."

At this very faintly humorous proposal he laughed immoderately. I need not say that I declined it. I should be as happy in the interior of China as on an Albanian mountain. I asked him how long he would be away.

"A year or two," he replied casually.

"It must be a queer thing," said I, "to be born with no conception of time and s.p.a.ce."

"A couple of years pa.s.s pretty quick," said Jaffery.

"So does a lifetime," said I.

Well, this was just like Jaffery. No sooner home amid the amenities of civilisation than the wander-fever seizes him again. In vain he pleaded his job, the valuable copy he would send to his paper. I proved to him it was but the mere l.u.s.t of savagery. And he could not understand why we should be startled by the announcement that within forty-eight hours he would be on his way to lose himself for a couple of years in Crim Tartary.