“You’ve got it all planned, haven’t you?” said Ismay to him when her parents were not near. “You’ve got them completely outgeneralled.” She spoke with admiration.
“It’s a short plan,” said he; “but it gives us a year to think about what we intend to do. I don’t want to settle here and become ‘Francis Cornish, whose sensitive landscapes follow in the path of B. W. Leader’.” He was really thinking about the profession, of which he had said nothing to Ismay, and which he was determined not to mention unless it became inescapable. Ismay as the Desired One was being replaced in his heart and mind by Ismay the Promised One, not to say the Inescapable One, and there were some things she must not know. She was worse than a blabber; she was a hinter. It gave her pleasure to rouse curiosity and speculation about dangerous things.
These family deliberations took place in the evenings, after Aunt Prudence and in a lesser degree Uncle Roderick had spent a toilsome day planning the wedding. So much to do! And all to be done on a shoestring—for the Glassons insisted that it would be indefensible, and even perhaps unchancy, to let Francis pay for any part of that. They greatly enjoyed the excitement, protesting that they did not know how they could get through another day like the one just completed.
Two nights before the wedding day Francis and Ismay escaped from the general hubbub, and were walking in a lane at dusk. Overhead the sky was deepening from a colour which reminded Francis of the cloak that Time and Truth deploy so effectively in the Bronzino Allegory.
“You feel trapped, don’t you?” said Ismay.
“Do you?”
“Yes, but my trap is a physical one. The kid. That has to be dealt with before I can do anything else. But you’re not trapped in that way.”
“No, but I have an obligation. Surely you see that? Apart from loving you, and wanting to marry you, of course.”
“Oh Frank, don’t be so stuffy! I hate to think what your upbringing must have been. You’ve still got a chance.”
“How?”
“Scarper, of course.”
“Desert you? Now?”
“It’s been done.”
“Not by me. I’d feel the most terrible shit.”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“Maybe not. But I’d think so.”
“All right, my dear-O-dear. It’s your neck.”
“I’m really surprised you think I might.”
“Don’t ever say I didn’t give you a chance.”
“You’re a tough little nut, Ismay.”
“Not the Celtic princess of your dreams? Maybe I’m more like a Celtic princess of reality than you suppose. From all I’ve heard they could be very tough nuts, too.”
When the wedding day came neighbours arrived from far and wide: county families, the professional bourgeoisie, tenants of St. Columb’s (who had been badgered by the agent into presenting the couple with a mantel clock, engraved in suitably modified feudal terms), such old women as attended all weddings and funerals without distinction of class, and the Bishop of Truro, who did not read the Marriage Service, but gave the blessing afterward. Ismay, tidy for once, and robed in virgin white, looked so lovely that Francis’s heart ached toward her. The Service was read by the local parson, who was from the very lowest shelf of the Low Church cupboard. He stressed the admonition that marriage was not to be taken in hand wantonly, to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding, but for the propagation of children. All of this he spat out with such distaste that he alarmed Ismay’s two sisters, Isabel and Amabel, present in white dresses to signify virginity in its rawest and meatiest guise, and caused the Glassons and Francis to wonder if the good man smelt a rat. But it was soon over; “The Voice That Breathed o’er Eden” was sung, the Bishop said his say, and Francis and Ismay had been licensed to go to bed in future without shame.
The wedding had not bothered Francis unduly, but the wedding breakfast was a different matter. At this affair, which was held on the lawn at St. Columb’s because it was a fineish day, Roderick Glasson the Younger took charge, and conducted the affair in the manner of a Best Man who was aimed at Whitehall, and wanted everything to be done with precision, and with only such enthusiasm as was compatible with his ideal of elegance—which kept enthusiasm well in check.
Roderick gave a good impression of what he would be like at forty-five. He read, like one communicating a knotty minute to a Civil Service superior, some telegrams of congratulation, most of which were from Canada and one or two from Oxford friends which had to be read with restraint. The Bride was toasted by Uncle Arthur Cornish, who described her in terms that made Ismay giggle unsuitably and chilled Francis, who detected in it allusions to his money, and satisfaction that it was not going out of the family. Francis replied, briefly, and made insincere protestations of humility and gratitude toward the Bride’s parents, who liked that part of his speech very much, but thought it could have been even more forcibly put. As he spoke, Francis had to overcome whispering among the guests who had not met him, and hissed, “An American? Nobody told me he was an American.” “Not American—Canadian.” “Well, what’s the difference?” “They’re touchier, that’s what.” “They say he’s very wealthy.” “Oh, so that’s it,” Then the Best Man toasted the bridesmaids, and was arch about the fact that, as they were his little sisters, he could not say too much in their favour, but he had hopes that they would improve. The bridesmaids took this with scarlet faces and occasional murmurs of Oh, I say, Roddy, pack it in, can’t you? Roderick told about the time he and his sisters had put a dead adder in the groom’s bed, and an indecency had to be frowned down when Old George Trethewey, a cousin but not a favourite, shouted drunkenly that they’d put something a damned sight better in his bed now. And finally the tenant who farmed the biggest of St. Columb’s farms toasted The Happy Couple, and was somewhat indiscreet in hinting that the coming of new blood (he did not say new money) into the family promised well for the future of agriculture at St. Columb’s. But at last it was over, the wedding cake had been deflowered and distributed, every hand had been shaken; the Bride had flung her bouquet from the front door with such force that it took her sister Amabel full in the face, and the couple sped away in a hired car toward Truro, where they were to catch a train.
In Lausanne there was no difficulty about having Ismay entered as a student, with credit for the year she had already completed at Oxford. In Montreux it was not hard to find a pension with a living room and a bedroom, the latter containing a couch on which she or Aunt Prudence could sleep when they occupied the place together. But it all meant laying out money in sums small and large, and Francis, who had never had experience of this sort of slow bleeding, undertaken in a cause which was not nearest his heart, suffered an early bout of the outraged parsimony which was to visit him so often in later life. Stinginess does nothing to improve the looks, and Ismay commented that he was becoming hatchet-faced.