The bride fetched a swoop with her fingers from one end of the keyboard to the other, just to get her bearings, as it were, and you could see the congregation set their teeth with the agony of it. Her stripling brought an armful of aged sheet-music from their room-for this bride went “heeled,” as you might say-and bent himself lovingly over and got ready to turn the pages. She was a brand-new bride, innocent, girlish, happy in herself and her grave and worshiping stripling of a husband she was about eighteen, just out of school, free from affectations, unconscious of that passionless multitude around her and the very first time she smote that old wreck one recognized that it had met its destiny. But the boss of that instrument was to come, nevertheless and from my own country-from Arkansaw.
In turn, five or six dejected and homesick ladies approached it doubtingly, gave it a single inquiring thump, and retired with the lockjaw. There was a small piano in this room, a clattery, wheezy, asthmatic thing, certainly the very worst miscarriage in the way of a piano that the world has seen. There they grouped themselves about, in couples and threes, and mumbled in bated voices, and looked timid and homeless and forlorn. One sees many women on the continent with quite conspicuous mustaches, but this was the only woman I saw who had reached the dignity of whiskers.Īfter dinner the guests of both sexes distributed themselves about the front porches and the ornamental grounds belonging to the hotel, to enjoy the cool air but, as the twilight deepened toward darkness, they gathered themselves together in that saddest and solemnest and most constrained of all places, the great blank drawing-room which is the chief feature of all continental summer hotels. They were two fingers broad, dark in color, pretty thick, and the hairs were an inch long. One of these waitresses, a woman of forty, had side-whiskers reaching half-way down her jaws. It gives to the wearer a singularly piquant and alluring aspect. This consists of a simple gros de laine, trimmed with ashes of roses, with overskirt of scare bleu ventre saint gris, cut bias on the off-side, with facings of petit polonaise and narrow insertions of pâte de foie gras backstitched to the mise en sce`ne in the form of a jeu d’esprit. The table d’hôte was served by waitresses dressed in the quaint and comely costume of the Swiss peasants. There was a great gathering at dinner, and, as usual, one heard all sorts of languages.
We located ourselves at the Jungfrau Hotel, one of those huge establishments which the needs of modern travel have created in every attractive spot on the continent. Previous Chapter Next Chapter Chapter XXXII - The Jungfrau, the Bride, and the Piano
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