“Mr Edward Albert Tewler at Home,” she said, bowing.
“Evadne darling.”
“And about our wedding. We’re going to have a real, proper wedding. None of your jump over a broomstick registry office affair. Voice that breathed o’er Eden and all of it. And you looking lovely in a silk hat and light grey trousers. You’ll have, you know, white slips to your waistcoat.”
“Gaw!” said Edward Albert, flattered and attracted but very much scared.
“And orange blossom for me.”
“But won’t it be an expense?”
“I’m afraid you’ll think me terribly old-fashioned, but then I’ve got other people to consider. Isn’t it queer you don’t know anything about my people yet? Not a thing. You never even asked. I’ve got a father and a godfather and cousins galore.”
“I aren’t going to marry all them,” said the bridegroom.
“I’ll protect you, Teddy. But there they are. We’ve got to humour them. My father he’s a policeman—oh, not an ordinary policeman. He’s at Scotland Yard. He’s a C.I.D. Inspector Birkenhead. He’s never had a big case yet, but some day he’ll get his chance, he says. Very, very exact. Nothing escapes him. He’s a bit stiff in his way—very proper-minded. You see my mother left him and he never quite got over it. If he knew—If he thought we were going to anticipate—!”
“Nobody need know, need they?”
“Heaven help us if he does. So you see it’s got to be as I say, A proper wedding and someone to give me away.”
“Oo’s going to give you away? Oo’s got the right to give you away?”
“Darling, I think we ought to go and see a proper wedding somewhere. Then you’ll see how it’s done. We’ve jurst got to have a best man to hop about and do everything for us. Rice and orange blossom and everything de rigor. I’ve thought of all that. There’s my cousins the Chasers. There’s Millie, who used to go to school with me. She married young Chaser. Pip Chaser. He’s a Card, as Arnold Bennett would say—a regular Card. Smart! He’s manager to a big West End undertaker and he can get carriages and horses for nothing from the stables. Carriages, Teddy! But no black gloves and funeral baked meats for us! Old Mr Chaser is my godfather; he sells champagne—special non-vintage champagne for balls and night-clubs and weddings and things like that, a sort of champagne he gets made for him. It doesn’t fizz so much but it’s just as good. Better, he thinks. And he’s always promised that he would stand me my wedding breakfast when the great day came.”
She reflected. “I won’t have any of the people from the business. No. I’ve done with that. They liked me of course, as soon as I get clear of it all, it’s good-bye for good. I don’t want anyone hurt....”
“Some things are better ended for good and all....”
She reflected. “No,” she said, as if she closed a door, “I told about Doober’s. Mrs Doober? Dear old Gawpy. that’s all. That half-wit niece might come to the arch....”
Edward Albert contemplated his future in a mood of triumphant assertion. Somehow he wanted Bert and Nuts to be there, astonished, and some of the chaps and girls in North London Leaseholds—overwhelmed. And somehow, somewhere, he imagined a triumphant whisper to Bert, I’ve ’ad ’er already. She’s all right, my boy.”
Hubris, I suppose the classical gentlemen would call it. The wedding dream unfolded. He learnt how the bride would slip away and put on her going-away dress. And he’d change too. They’d throw old slippers for luck.
“Then off we go. Shall it be gay Paree? I’ve always had a yearn. Someday, when you have learnt French too, we might have a teeny, weeny, little venire it terre in Paris....”
Edward Albert suddenly put his foot down.
“Not to Paris we don’t go. You’d start flirting again with that faux pa of yours. No fear.”
“Jealous! I like you to be jealous,” said Evadne Evangeline. “If you saw him. So old. Debonair, I admit, but in the last stage....”
“Anyhow if you don’t like that, there’s all the world to choose from. Let’s go to Boulogne perhaps or down to Torquay or Bournemouth to a room, our room with the sun shining in on us! Think of it.”
He thought of it.
They went about to shops. Evadne was the most discriminating of shoppers. The gentlemen in black coats bowed obsequiously and rubbed their hands together. And she would turn to Edward Albert and consult him. They bought furniture. They bought a lovely soft fur rug “for our little pink toes”, she whispered, “a sauté lit.” And pictures, for the artist gentleman had taken away all his pictures.
She recognised one she was, looking for with a cry of, “Enfant saoul!” It was a beautiful steel engraving of a tall lover, holding his new-won lady to him and pressing her fingers to his lips in the serene first moment of complete possession.
“I think it serch a lovely picture!” said Evadne Evangeline.
She feasted her eyes on it adoringly. “Darling,” she whispered, when the salesman was out of earshot, “I’m counting the days. I’m counting the hours. To that.”
In this fashion was our Edward Albert installed in his new home, and, at the propitious moment, Evangeline came, as she had promised him and herself, to give herself to him.
XI. Trap for Innocents
So, drawn by genuine passionate desire, our two heirs to the Wisdom of the Ages came to the cardinal moment of their sexual lives.
And here I find that for one brief chapter at least there has to be a change of key in this veracious narrative.
Hitherto this record of the acts and sayings of Edward Albert has been a simple unemotional record of the facts of the case. and if at times a certain realisation of the immanent absurdity of his life has betrayed itself, it has, I hope, been kept for the most part below the level of derision. But what has to be told now of this young couple is something so pitiful that I find myself taking sides with them against the circumstances that brought them to this pass.
They were both, and Edward Albert more especially, profoundly ignorant of the essentials of sex. That beneficent writer, Mrs Marie Stopes, was already at large in the world about this time, but her instructions in the conditions of connubial happiness had still to penetrate to their class. She was still some years from becoming a sly music-hall joke. Edward Albert knew; indeed he had exaggerated ideas; of venereal disease, clumsy “precautions” and the repulsive aspects of the overwhelming desire for “It”, but the only idea he attached to Maidenhead was that it was a town on the road to Reading with a pretty bridge overlooking Skindle’s Hotel with a very attractive but rather high-class riverside lawn. And Evangeline for her part thought a loving maiden yielded with delight. Something happened, she knew, but she thought it was something happy.
He hardly waited to kiss her. There was a rapid struggle. She felt herself gripped and assailed with insane energy.
“Oh! oh! oh!” she groaned in crescendo. “Stop! Ow-woo-woohoo. Oooh!” The climax of the unendurable passed. Her body went limp.
Then Edward Albert was sitting up with an expression of horror on his face. “Gaw!” he was saying. “You got some disease? It’s blood!”
He dashed for the bathroom.
He came back to discover Evangeline sitting up in a storm of pain, disappointment and fear.
“You pig,” she said. “You fool. You selfish young fool. You ignoramus! What have you done to me?... Look at that dirty precaution of yours there. Look at it!”
Her pointing beringed finger trembled.
“Gaw, I forgot all about it!”
“And about me. And about everything. You foul, disgusting young hog.”
“Well, ’ow was I to know? And anyhow ’ow about me? What have you done to me?”
“I wish to God I could give you worse than I’ve got. If I could strike you dead this minute I’d strike you dead. Get out of my way.”