Wedding Bells
Champagne is often pleasant at lunch, it is always delightful at
dinner, and it is an absolute necessity, if one is to talk freely
about oneself afterwards, at a dance supper. But champagne for tea is
horrible. Perhaps this is why a wedding always finds me melancholy
next morning. "She has married the wrong man," I say to myself. "I
wonder if it is too late to tell her."
The trouble of answering the invitation and of thinking of something
to give more original than a toast rack should, one feels, have its
compensations. From each wedding that I attend I expect an afternoon's
enjoyment in return for my egg stand. For one thing I have my best
clothes on. Few people have seen me in them (and these few won't
believe it), so that from the very beginning the day has a certain
freshness. It is not an ordinary day. It starts with this advantage,
that in my best clothes I am not difficult to please. The world smiles
upon me.
Once I am in church, however, my calm begins to leave me. As time
wears on, and the organist invents more and more tunes, I tremble lest
the bride has forgotten the day. The choir is waiting for her; the
bridegroom is waiting for her. I--I also--wait. What if she has
changed her mind at the last minute? But no. The organist has sailed
into his set piece; the choir advances; follows the bride looking so
lonely that I long to comfort her and remind her of my egg stand; and,
last of all, the pretty bridesmaids. The clergyman begins his drone.
You would think that, reassured by the presence of the bride, I could
be happy now. But there is still much to bother me. The bridegroom is
showing signs of having forgotten his part, the bride can't get her
glove off, one of the bridesmaids is treading on my hat. Worse than
all this, there is a painful want of unanimity among the congregation
as to when we stand up and when we sit down. Sometimes I am alone and
sitting when everybody else is standing, and that is easy to bear; but
sometimes I find myself standing when everybody else is sitting, and
that is very hard.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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