MAURY: If you’ll give me another minute
I’ll think of that about the mice.
OTIS: I was usher last month for old Charlie
McIntyre and——
(They move slowly toward the door as the chatter
becomes a babel and the practising preliminary to
the overture issues in long pious groans from ADAM
PATCH’S organ.)
There were five hundred eyes boring through the back
of his cutaway and the sun glinting on the clergyman’s
inappropriately bourgeois teeth. With difficulty
he restrained a laugh. Gloria was saying something
in a clear proud voice and he tried to think that
the affair was irrevocable, that every second was
significant, that his life was being slashed into
two periods and that the face of the world was changing
before him. He tried to recapture that ecstatic
sensation of ten weeks before. All these emotions
eluded him, he did not even feel the physical nervousness
of that very morning—it was all one gigantic
aftermath. And those gold teeth! He wondered
if the clergyman were married; he wondered perversely
if a clergyman could perform his own marriage service....
But as he took Gloria into his arms he was conscious
of a strong reaction. The blood was moving in
his veins now. A languorous and pleasant content
settled like a weight upon him, bringing responsibility
and possession. He was married.
So many, such mingled emotions, that no one of them
was separable from the others! She could have
wept for her mother, who was crying quietly back there
ten feet and for the loveliness of the June sunlight
flooding in at the windows. She was beyond all
conscious perceptions. Only a sense, colored
with delirious wild excitement, that the ultimately
important was happening—and a trust, fierce
and passionate, burning in her like a prayer, that
in a moment she would be forever and securely safe.
Late one night they arrived in Santa Barbara, where
the night clerk at the Hotel Lafcadio refused to admit
them, on the grounds that they were not married.
The clerk thought that Gloria was beautiful.
He did not think that anything so beautiful as Gloria
could be moral.
“CON AMORE”
That first half-year—the trip West, the
long months’ loiter along the California coast,
and the gray house near Greenwich where they lived
until late autumn made the country dreary—those
days, those places, saw the enraptured hours.
The breathless idyl of their engagement gave way,
first, to the intense romance of the more passionate
relationship. The breathless idyl left them,
fled on to other lovers; they looked around one day
and it was gone, how they scarcely knew. Had either
of them lost the other in the days of the idyl, the
love lost would have been ever to the loser that dim
desire without fulfilment which stands back of all
life. But magic must hurry on, and the lovers
remain....
