Chapter 9

Tom’s marriage was on the Thursday of Easter week. All the morning a soft teeming fog lay over the fields, drawing out scents of growth and warmth and life. Worge lay in the midst of it like the ghost of a farm, a dim grey shadow on the whiteness, and the voices of her men came muffled, as in dreams. Towards noon the sunshine had begun to eat away the mist—it grew yellower, streakier, and at last began to scatter, rolling up the fields in solemn clouds, balling and pilling itself against the hedges, melting into the April green of the woods; and then suddenly it was gone—sucked up into the sky, sucked down into the earth, living only in a few drops in the cups of violets.

The Bethel stared away across the fields to Puddledock. [138] For some time its roof, with the chipped Georgian pediment, had risen above the mist. Then the grim windows had come out to stare, and then the tombstones that grew round its feet, leaning and tottering among the chapel weed.

Tom and Thyrza were to be married at the Bethel. This had caused some surprise in the neighbourhood, as the Beatups had always been “Church”; but friendship and convenience had led to the decision—friendship for the Reverend Mr. Sumption, because Tom knew him better than Mr. Poullett-Smith, and was sorry for him on account of Jerry, convenience because the chapel was close at hand, and the makers of the wedding breakfast would have time to run across and witness the ceremony, which they could not have done had it taken place at Brownbread Street, two miles away.

The only one to whom these reasons seemed inadequate was Nell. To her the proceeding was not only heretical but mean—her affection for the Church had always been led by taste rather than belief, and her attitude, which she had considered (under instruction) as that of an orthodox Anglican, was in reality that of an Italian peasant, who looks upon his church as his drawing-room, a place of brightness to which he can go for refuge from the drabness of every day. Her opposition to the chapel marriage was based on an emotion similar to what she would have felt for the party who, with the chance of eating and drinking out of delicate china in the drawing-room, chose to devour their food out of broken pots in the scullery. She did not acknowledge this, any more than she acknowledged the motive which fed uneasily on Mr. Poullett-Smith’s inevitable disgust; she talked to Tom about his duty as a Baptized Churchman, and was both surprised and grieved to find that the [139] War seemed to have destroyed what little sense of this he had ever had.

“I tell you as it’s all different out there. There aun’t no church and chapel saum as there is here. You stick to church on Church Parade down at the base, but when you’re up in the firing line, there’s a queer kind of religion going around. You hear chaps praying as if they wur swearing and swearing as if they wur praying, and in the Y.M. plaace they have sort of holy sing-songs wud priests and ministers all mixed up; and I’ve heard a Catholic priest read the English funeral over one of us, and I’ve seen a rosary on a dead Baptist’s neck. Church and chapel may be all very good for civvies, but you can’t go vrothering about such things when you’re a soldier.”

Nell was hurt and frightened by these sayings. She had an idea that any danger or suffering would only make a man cling closer to the Sanctuary. It was terrible to think that at the first earthquake Peter’s Rock cracked to its foundations. A defiant loyalty inspired her, and at first she made up her mind not to go to the wedding, but she could not resist the temptation of asking Mr. Poullett-Smith’s advice, and he thought she had better attend, and pray for the backsliders. He also earnestly bade her distrust any appearance of cracks in Peter’s Rock, and she went away comforted, with shining eyes and burning cheeks, and her church standing firmer than ever on the rock which was neither Peter nor Christ, but her love for a very ordinary young man.

So all the Beatups went to the Bethel, leaving Worge locked up and the yard in charge of Elphick. Mrs. Beatup wore her Sunday bonnet, the wheat-crop having been superseded, contrary to all the laws of rotation, by one of small green grapes. Both Ivy and Nell had [140] new gowns, Ivy looking squeezed and unnatural in a sky-blue cloth, which together with a pair of straight-fronted corsets, she had bought at a Hastings dress agency—Nell pretty and demure in a grey coat and skirt, and one of those small towny-looking hats which seemed to find their way to her head alone in all Dallington. Mus’ Beatup, with Harry and Zacky, smelled strongly of hair-oil and moth-killer, and Harry had nearly scrubbed his skin off in his efforts to get out of it the earth of his new furrows. He was considered too young to be Tom’s best man, and the office had been at the last moment unexpectedly filled by Bill Putland. Bill, now a sergeant, was home on seven days’ leave, looking very brown and smart, and Polly Sinden, who, not having been invited with her parents to the breakfast, had vowed she would waste no time going to the chapel, suddenly changed her mind and appeared in her most ceremonial hat.

The chapel was packed with Sindens, Bourners, Putlands, Hubbles, Viners, Kadwells, Pixes. Mrs. Lamb of Bucksteep was there, with Miss Marian, but as she had not thought it necessary to put on the elegant clothes in which she was seen gliding into church on Sundays, her presence was regarded as an affront rather than an honour; Mrs. Beatup would have dressed herself in her best for any Bucksteep wedding, and thought that the squire’s wife might have done the same for her. Also, she came in very late, and her entrance was mistaken for that of the bride by many folk, who shot up out of the pew-boxes, only to be disappointed by the sight of Mrs. Lamb’s faded, powdered features behind a spotted veil, and Miss Marian swinging along after her with a tread like a policeman. “I reckon my feet are smaller than hers,” thought Nell, “for all that I’m only [141] a farmer’s daughter.”

Then Mr. Sumption came out of the vestry, and stood under the pulpit to wait for the bride. He looked more like a figure of cursing than of blessing—black as a rook, with his thick curly hair falling into his eyes, yet not quite hiding the furrows which the plough of care had dragged across his forehead. There was a rustle and a flutter and a turning of heads, as Thyrza came up the aisle on the arm of the bachelor cousin who was giving her away. She wore a grey gown like a March cloud, and carried a bunch of flowers, and the congregation whispered when they saw that she had sleeked her feathery hair with water, so that it lay smooth behind her ears, which were round and pink like those of mice. “It didn’t look like Thyrza,” everyone said—and perhaps that was why Tom was so loutishly nervous, and nearly broke Bill Putland’s heart with his fumblings and stutterings.

Thyrza was nervous too, her head drooped like an over-blown rose upon its stalk, and Mr. Sumption’s manner was not of the kind that soothes and reassures. He shouted at the bride and bridegroom, and “thumped at” various members of the congregation who whispered or (later in the proceedings) yawned. He was not often asked to officiate at weddings, and had apparently decided to make the most of this one, for he wound up with an address to the married pair so lengthy and apocalyptic that Mrs. Beatup became anxious as to the fate of a pudding she had left to “cook itself,” and rising noisily in her pew creaked out through a silence weighted with doom. “And whosoever hath not a wedding garment,” the minister shouted after her, “shall be cast into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth”—for which Mrs. Beatup never forgave him, as she had spent nearly three shillings on retrimming her bonnet, “and if her cape wurn’t [142] good enough fur him, she reckoned he’d never seen a better on the gipsy-woman’s back.”

The service came to an end at last, and the congregation pushed after the bride to see her get into the cab drawn by a pair of seedy greys, which would take her the few yards from the chapel to the farm. The breakfast was to be at Worge, for Thyrza had no kin besides the bachelor cousin, and it was considered more fitting that her husband’s family should undertake the social and domestic duties of the occasion. The feast was spread in the kitchen, which had been decorated with flags, lent for the afternoon from the club-room of the Rifle Volunteer. The unsugared wedding-cake was a terrible humiliation to Mrs. Beatup, who felt sure that, in spite of her repeated explanations, everyone would put it down to poverty and meanness instead of to the tyranny of “Govunmunt.” However, she had restored the balance of her self-respect by providing wine (at eighteen-pence the bottle).

There was much laughter and good-humour and the wit proper to weddings as the guests squeezed themselves round the table. Even Mr. Sumption’s five-minute grace, in which he approvingly mentioned more than one dish on the table, but added to his score with Mrs. Beatup by referring to the wine as poison and “the forerunner of thirst in hell,” was only a temporary blight. The bride and bridegroom alone looked subdued, their sleek heads drooping together, their hands nervously crumbling their food—also Ivy, who was heard to say in a hoarse whisper to Nell, “If I can’t go somewheres and taake my stays off I shall bust.” However, in time she forgot her constriction in flirting with Thyrza’s bachelor cousin, who had pale blue eyes, bulging out as if in vain effort to catch sight of a receding chin, and was exempt by reason of ruptured hernia from military service.

[143]

The usual healths were drunk, and the sight of other people drinking—for he himself would take only water—seemed to intoxicate Mr. Sumption, and he forgot the cares that had made his black hair as ashes on his head—his sleepless anxiety for Jerry, and the crying in him of that day which shall burn the stubble—and became merry as a corn-fed colt, laughing with all his big white teeth, and paying iron-shod compliments to Thyrza and Ivy and Nell, and even Mrs. Beatup, who maintained, however, an impressive indifference. Bill Putland made the principal speech of the afternoon, and looked so smart and handsome, with his hair in a soaring quiff and a trench-ring on each hand, that Ivy might have plotted to substitute his arm for Ern Honey’s round her waist, if she had not been too experienced to fail to realise that he was about the only man in Dallington she could not win with her floppy charms.

In the end all was cheerful incoherence, and just as the sunshine was losing its heat on the yard-stones, the bride and bridegroom rose to go away. A trap from the Volunteer would drive them to the station, and they climbed into it through a flying rainbow of confetti, which stuck in Thyrza’s loosening hair, and spotted her dim gown with colours.

Amidst cheering and laughter the old horse lurched off, and soon Thyrza’s grey and Tom’s dun were blurred together in the distance, which was already staining with purple as the air thickened towards the twilight. The guests turned back into the house, or scattered over fields and footpaths. Ivy rushed upstairs to take off her stays, and Bill Putland swaggered home between his parents, with a flower in his button-hole and plans in his heart for an evening at Little Worge. The Reverend Mr. Sumption went off with Bourner to the smithy. The blacksmith had a shoeing and clipping to do, and the minister [144] would sit and watch him in the red, hoof-smelling warmth, and lend an experienced hand if occasion needed. Mus’ Beatup, his tongue all sour with the Australian wine, took advantage of the general flit to creep along the hedge to the Rifle Volunteer, there to wait for the magic stroke of six and unlocking of his paradise. Mrs. Beatup was the last to leave the doorstep. She thought she could hear the old horse clopping on the East Road, and when her eyes no longer helped her to follow her son, she used her ears. She remembered that earlier occasion when she had gone with him to the end of the drive and kissed him there. He had wanted her then; he did not want her now—his good-bye kiss had been kind yet perfunctory. Another woman had him—a woman who had never suffered pain or discomfort or anxiety or privation for his sake. Yet her jealousy had unexpectedly died. Somehow, to-day, all that she had suffered for Tom when she bore him, nursed him, reared him and bred him, seemed a sufficient reward in itself. Her sufferings had made him what he was, and this other woman took only what she, his mother, had made. “She never went heavy wud him, nor bore him in pain, nor lay awaake at night wud his screeching, nor thought as he’d die when he cut his teeth, nor went all skeered when he took the fever.... So thur aun’t no sense in vrothering. Reckon he’ll always be more mine nor hers, even if I am never to set eyes on him agaun.”