Page:The Relentless City.djvu/206

196 take place, there had been constructed, hanging from the roof, an immense bell-shaped frame made of wood and canvas, which was completely covered inside and out with white flowers, and reached from side to side of what the reporters called the sacred edifice. It had been quite impossible, even for Mrs. Palmer, to procure at this time of year sufficient real flowers, and, as a matter of fact, they were largely artificial, like everything else. Round the edge of this large bell, suspended by invisible wires, but appearing to float in the air, were life-size baby figures of amorini, made of wood and beautifully tinted, winged, and almost completely nude, who discharged gilded arrows from their gilded bows towards the pair who were to stand in the centre of the bell. Numbers of others peeped from the banks of flowers that lined the walls, all aiming in the same direction, so that the bridegroom, one would have thought, might reasonably compare himself to a modern St. Sebastian. Framed in these banks of flowers also were several pictures belonging to Lewis Palmer, all bearing on what might be called classical matrimony: a Titian of Europa and the Bull, a Veronese of Bacchus and Ariadne, and a more than doubtful Rubens of Leda and the Swan. Gilded harps twined with flowers leaned about in odd corners, and the general impression was that one had come, not into a church, but, by some deplorable mistake, into the Venusberg as depicted in the first act of

The ceremony, of course, had been many times rehearsed, and for days beforehand the dummy bridegroom's procession had crossed Fifth Avenue (the house exactly opposite was to be Bertie's domicile for the night preceding the marriage), and taken up its position, chalked out, at the church door. That event was signalled to the chef d'orchestre in the gallery, who was thereupon to begin the Mendelssohn wedding-march, and to the bride's procession, which was to start at the same moment from Mr. Lewis Palmer's house