Gray youth: The story of a very modern courtship and a very modern marriageOnions, Oliver
General
Gray youth: The story of a very modern courtship and a very modern marriage
Onions, Oliver
Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction; Women -- Social and moral questions -- Fiction
So Amory and Cosimo, presently descending by the lift again, watched
Jellies' nuptial party from the balcony, and went on to discuss their
own affairs again. They would be married--unless even yet they amicably
agreed that it would be best that they should not marry--at a Registry
Office; and if they did happen to feel hungry afterwards (certainly
_not_ unless) they would go to the Lettuce Grill. The noise that came
up from the vast oval below was no doubt a mere reaction from the
false religiosity in the church an hour or so before, and champagne
certainly heated the blood. Amory drank nothing at meals, Cosimo only
barley-water. Jellies' husband, as they could see from where they
leaned over the rail, was already a little drunk on champagne; there
was no doubt whatever that he would presently be quite drunk on beer.
And these were the people to whom England looked for a eugenically
begotten race! Black eyes were in front of Jellies, and intervals
of returning to her mother when 'Orris happened to be "in," and a
shamefully large family, and work at the Jelly Factory as before, and
very little prospect indeed of ever having either the money or the
initiative to obtain a Divorce. It made Amory sad....
And as she stood, with Cosimo by her side, looking down on the
laughing, moving crowd below, she thought of a picture that should move
the best women and men of her land as even "Barrage" had not moved
them. It was this:--
She would take a large canvas, and would rough out upon it that
very oval down on which she now looked. And she would fill it with
figures, even as it was filled with figures now. But they should
not be giggling, guffawing, gesticulating figures such as these,
uttering the inanities about lifelong happiness that they themselves
knew to be untrue, and filling and refilling their glasses with the
blood-heating champagne. No. They should be the enlightened men and
women of To-morrow; rational, responsible, of a nobler-moulded flesh
and a more ardent spirit; they should average about nine heads high.
And their eyes should be centred, not on their own selfish and private
parties, but on the figure in the centre of the room that she would
put where that absurd Hymen now stood. This figure should be symbolic,
colossal, twenty-five heads high. It should represent the Earthly
Authority of the marriage-contract. Its feet should be set upon broken
figures, each one of which should typify some marriage-form of the
past--hedge-priests, broomstick-weddings, handfastings, morganatic
unions, savage rites (from _Primitive Culture_), ecclesiastical rites,
even the Registry Office; and the fragments of such pagan emblems as
hearts and torches and Cupids and bells should appear all about it. And
in her right hand the figure should bear, as it were, a crystal with a
flame in it, which should be Marriage, and in her left another crystal
with a flame in it, no less perfect, no less honourable, which should
be Divorce.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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