Chapter 10
THERE was Dixie come up to the altar with her wide flouncy dress and her nose, a little red from her cold, tilted up towards the minister.
‘Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife?’
‘No, to be quite frank,’ Humphrey said, ‘I won’t.’
Dougal never read of it in the newspapers. He was away off to Africa with the intention of selling tape- recorders to all the witch doctors. ‘No medicine man, ‘Dougal said, ‘these days can afford to be without a portable tape-recorder. Without the aid of this modern device, which may be easily concealed in the undergrowth of the jungle, the old tribal authority will rapidly become undermined by the mounting influence of modern scepticism.’
Much could be told of Dougal’s subsequent life. He returned from Africa and became a novice in a Franciscan monastery. Before he was asked to leave, the Prior had endured a nervous breakdown and several of the monks had broken their vows of obedience in actuality, and their other vows by desire; Dougal pleaded his powers as an exorcist in vain. Thereafter, for economy’s sake, he gathered together the scrap ends of his profligate experience – for he was a frugal man at heart – and turned them into a lot of cockeyed books, and went far in the world. He never married.
The night after Humphrey arrived alone at the honeymoon hotel at Folkestone, Arthur Crewe walked into the bar.
‘The girl’s heart-broken,’ he said to Humphrey.
‘Better soon than late,’ Humphrey said. ‘Tell her I’m coming back.’
‘She’s blaming Dougal Douglas. Is he here with you?’
‘Not so’s you’d notice it,’ Humphrey said.
‘I haven’t come here to blame you. I reckon there must be some reason behind it. But it’s hard on tine girl, in her wedding dress. My Leslie’s been put on probation for robbing a till.’
Some said Humphrey came back and married the girl in the end. Some said, no, he married another girl. Others said, it was like this, Dixie died of a broken heart and he never looked at another girl again. Some thought he had returned, and she had slammed the door in his face and called him a dirty swine, which he was. One or two recalled there had been a fight between Humphrey and Trevor Lomas. But at all events everyone remembered how a man had answered ‘No’ at his wedding.
In fact they got married two months later, and although few guests were invited, quite a lot of people came to the church to see if Humphrey would do it again.
Humphrey drove off with Dixie. She said, ‘I feel as if I’ve been twenty years married instead of two hours.’
He thought this a pity for a girl of eighteen. But it was a sunny day for November, and, as he drove swiftly past the Rye, he saw the children playing there and the women coming home from work with their shopping-bags, the Rye for an instant looking like a cloud of green and gold, the people seeming to ride upon it, as you might say there was another world than this.
Muriel Spark
