Wedding Journeys by Proxy

MEETING in the street the other day an old friend and his wife who live in a distant, city, I expressed my pleased surprise. ‘This is a wedding journey,’they explained. ‘Our daughter was married last week, and as neither she nor her husband is fond of travel, they insisted that we should make the conventional tour in their stead. We have got thus far on our way, and are enjoying the honeymoon to the utmost.’

Now, this was putting to the practical test of experiment an idea which has been lying in the back of my brain many years, unexpressed in words. A spectacle familiar to every Contributor who attends weddings is a bride worn out by months of nerve-racking preparation, better fitted for the hospital than the altar, yet doomed to start on a season of moving from pillar to post, with its incessant strain on body, brain, and senses. Nobody protests audibly, not even the family doctor, because this is the orthodox custom. It remains for a few bold spirits to start a new fashion and require the bride to stay at home after the wedding and take a good rest, letting some kind friend do her traveling for her.

The customary tour is, of course, only one of many inanities connected with weddings, which have nothing better to urge in self-defense than immemorial tradition. Why, for instance, must a lot of well-wishers be corralled on the fateful day for a breakfast, stuffed with sweets and deluged with champagne at high noon, and thus condemned to a term of indigestion and repentance? Dread of appearing churlish, a crow in a dove-cote, prompts many a guest at such a feast to throw prudence to the winds and do what his inward monitor warns him to avoid. Is there not here another opening for vicarious activity? If a repast is imperative, why not call in the services of the younger brothers and sisters of the bride for the consumption of the solids, — asking of them only that they will do in public what they are all too prone to do on the sly, — and turn over the liquids to the servants with a like assurance. This plan would at any rate confine the physicians’ ministrations and the drug bills within the offending household, instead of spreading them all over its more intimate acquaintance.

But whether at a later stage we modify the breakfast habit or any of the other mediæval incidentals, surely the wedding journey is something that will bear changing at once. Grant all that could be pleaded in its favor, such as the need of the young couple to isolate themselves for a while and get better acquainted, or the special virtue of travel as a temper-ordeal and a revealer of unsuspected quips and quirks of disposition, my faith is still anchored to the efficacy of a carefully managed substitution. Let the newly married pair settle down quietly somewhere, — in the bride’s old home if you will, or in one of which she is thereafter to be mistress, or in a little cottage in the country, — deny themselves to visitors, and study each other at close range under the same conditions which will normally environ their future life. At the same time, let the old folk be turned loose to do the jaunting. Ten to one, they will enjoy it immensely, and be the better for the change. It will make a pleasant bridge over that little interval of heartsinking which comes to the parents of a girl after her marriage, before they have accommodated themselves to her habitual absence from the table and the fireside.

When the young couple shall have become old in their turn, and are sending out branches from the family tree laden with new little homes, they can perform a corresponding service for their girls. It will multiply their honeymoons, and refresh the fires of sentiment in their maturer hearts; and we all know how a whole family feels the influence of anything which tends to perpetuate the spirit of courtship between father and mother.