‘Oh, we’re quite out of our depths with these old hats,’ cried Laura Crich. ‘Dry up now, Gerald. We’re going to drink toasts. Let us drink toasts. Toasts—glasses, glasses—now then, toasts! Speech! Speech!’
Birkin, thinking about race or national death, watched his glass being filled with champagne. The bubbles broke at the rim, the man withdrew, and feeling a sudden thirst at the sight of the fresh wine, Birkin drank up his glass. A queer little tension in the room roused him. He felt a sharp constraint.
‘Did I do it by accident, or on purpose?’ he asked himself. And he decided that, according to the vulgar phrase, he had done it ‘accidentally on purpose.’ He looked round at the hired footman. And the hired footman came, with a silent step of cold servant-like disapprobation. Birkin decided that he detested toasts, and footmen, and assemblies, and mankind altogether, in most of its aspects. Then he rose to make a speech. But he was somehow disgusted.
At length it was over, the meal. Several men strolled out into the garden. There was a lawn, and flower-beds, and at the boundary an iron fence shutting off the little field or park. The view was pleasant; a highroad curving round the edge of a low lake, under the trees. In the spring air, the water gleamed and the opposite woods were purplish with new life. Charming Jersey cattle came to the fence, breathing hoarsely from their velvet muzzles at the human beings, expecting perhaps a crust.
Birkin leaned on the fence. A cow was breathing wet hotness on his hand.
‘Pretty cattle, very pretty,’ said Marshall, one of the brothers-in-law. ‘They give the best milk you can have.’
‘Yes,’ said Birkin.
‘Eh, my little beauty, eh, my beauty!’ said Marshall, in a queer high falsetto voice, that caused the other man to have convulsions of laughter in his stomach.
‘Who won the race, Lupton?’ he called to the bridegroom, to hide the fact that he was laughing.
The bridegroom took his cigar from his mouth.
‘The race?’ he exclaimed. Then a rather thin smile came over his face. He did not want to say anything about the flight to the church door. ‘We got there together. At least she touched first, but I had my hand on her shoulder.’
‘What’s this?’ asked Gerald.
Birkin told him about the race of the bride and the bridegroom.
‘H’m!’ said Gerald, in disapproval. ‘What made you late then?’
‘Lupton would talk about the immortality of the soul,’ said Birkin, ‘and then he hadn’t got a button-hook.’
‘Oh God!’ cried Marshall. ‘The immortality of the soul on your wedding day! Hadn’t you got anything better to occupy your mind?’
‘What’s wrong with it?’ asked the bridegroom, a clean-shaven naval man, flushing sensitively.
‘Sounds as if you were going to be executed instead of married. THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL!’ repeated the brother-in-law, with most killing emphasis.
But he fell quite flat.
‘And what did you decide?’ asked Gerald, at once pricking up his ears at the thought of a metaphysical discussion.
‘You don’t want a soul today, my boy,’ said Marshall. ‘It’d be in your road.’
‘Christ! Marshall, go and talk to somebody else,’ cried Gerald, with sudden impatience.
‘By God, I’m willing,’ said Marshall, in a temper. ‘Too much bloody soul and talk altogether—’
He withdrew in a dudgeon, Gerald staring after him with angry eyes, that grew gradually calm and amiable as the stoutly-built form of the other man passed into the distance.
‘There’s one thing, Lupton,’ said Gerald, turning suddenly to the bridegroom. ‘Laura won’t have brought such a fool into the family as Lottie did.’
‘Comfort yourself with that,’ laughed Birkin.
‘I take no notice of them,’ laughed the bridegroom.
‘What about this race then—who began it?’ Gerald asked.
‘We were late. Laura was at the top of the churchyard steps when our cab came up. She saw Lupton bolting towards her. And she fled. But why do you look so cross? Does it hurt your sense of the family dignity?’
‘It does, rather,’ said Gerald. ‘If you’re doing a thing, do it properly, and if you’re not going to do it properly, leave it alone.’
‘Very nice aphorism,’ said Birkin.
‘Don’t you agree?’ asked Gerald.
‘Quite,’ said Birkin. ‘Only it bores me rather, when you become aphoristic.’
‘Damn you, Rupert, you want all the aphorisms your own way,’ said Gerald.
‘No. I want them out of the way, and you’re always shoving them in it.’
Gerald smiled grimly at this humorism. Then he made a little gesture of dismissal, with his eyebrows.
‘You don’t believe in having any standard of behaviour at all, do you?’ he challenged Birkin, censoriously.
‘Standard—no. I hate standards. But they’re necessary for the common ruck. Anybody who is anything can just be himself and do as he likes.’
