H. L. Mencken

“ It is now a quarter to twelve, and of a sudden the vestibule fills with wedding guests. Nine-tenths of them, perhaps even nineteen-twentieths, are women, and most of them are beyond thirty-five. Scattered among them, hanging on to their skirts, are about a dozen little girls—one of them a youngster of eight or thereabout, with spindle shanks and shining morning face, entranced by her first wedding. Here and there lurks a man. ”

“ Vanities! Love is beyond and above them all—and art is love! I think I must be a pagan.
[92]
The Great Pianist
And the herring! Good God, what herring! These barbarous Americans——
The Virgin
Really, I am quite indecent! I should blush, I suppose. But love is never ashamed—How people misunderstand me!
The Married Woman
I wonder if he’s faithful. The chances are against it. I never heard of a man who was. (An agreeable melancholy overcomes her and she gives herself up to the mood without thought.)
The Great Pianist
I wonder whatever became of that girl in Dresden. ”

“ Far below, hugging the winding river, lies little Innsbruck, with its checkerboard parks and Christmas garden villas. A battalion of Austrian soldiers, drilling in the Exerzierplatz, appears as an army of grey ants, now barely visible. Somewhere to the left, beyond the broad flank of the Hungerberg, the night train for Venice labours toward the town.
It is a superbly beautiful scene, perhaps the most beautiful in all Europe. It has colour, dignity, repose. The Alps here come down a bit and so increase their spell. ”

“ The best man takes a flat flask of whiskey from his pocket, looks about him for a glass, finds it on the washstand, rinses it at the tap, fills it with a policeman’s drink, and hands it to the bridegroom. The latter downs it at a gulp. Then the best man pours out one for himself.
The ushers, reaching the vestibule of the church, have handed their silk hats to the sexton, and entered the sacred edifice. There was a rehearsal of the wedding last night, but after it was over the bride ordered certain incomprehensible changes in the plan, and the ushers are now completely at sea. ”

“ The bridegroom in the vestry-room, entering upon the second year (or is it the third?) of his long and ghastly wait, grows increasingly nervous, and when he hears the organist pass from the Spring Song into some more sonorous and stately thing he mistakes it for the wedding march from “Lohengrin,” and is hot for marching upon the altar at once. The best man, an old hand, restrains him gently, and administers another sedative from the bottle. The bridegroom’s thoughts turn to gloomy things. ”

“ To have a touch of bronchitis is almost fashionable; to have pneumonia is merely bad luck. The stomach, at least in America, is so respectable that it dignifies even seasickness, but I have never heard of any decent man who ever had any trouble with his œsophagus.
If you wish a short cut to a strange organ’s standing, study its diseases. Generally speaking, they are sure indices. Let us imagine a problem: What is the relative respectability of the hair and the scalp, close neighbors, offspring of the same osseous tissue? Turn to baldness and dandruff, and you have your answer. ”

“ You expect to see something magnificent and enormous, something to knock your eye out and send you down for the count. What you do see is a second-rate graveyard under roof. And when you examine into it, you find that two-thirds of the graves haven’t even got dead men in them! Whenever a prominent Englishman dies, they put up a statue to him in Westminster Abbey—no matter where he happens to be buried! ”

“ Finally, all being ready, with the ushers formed two abreast, the sexton pushes a button, a small buzzer sounds in the organ loft, and the organist, as has been said, plunges magnificently into the fanfare of the "Lohengrin" march. Simultaneously the sexton opens the door at the bottom of the main aisle, and the wedding procession gets under weigh.
The bride and her father march first. Their step is so slow (about one beat to two measures) that the father has some difficulty in maintaining his equilibrium, but the bride herself moves steadily and erectly, almost seeming to float. ”

“ Bachelors know more about women than married men. If they did’t they’d be married, too. ”

“ The ushers do their best to seat these wedding guests in some sort of order, but after a few minutes the crowd at the doors becomes so large that they have to give it up, and thereafter all they can do is to hold out their right arms ingratiatingly and trust to luck. One of them steps on a fat woman’s skirt, tearing it very badly, and she has to be helped back to the vestibule. ”

“ Why is the stomach such a libertine and outlaw in England, and so highly respectable in the United States? No Englishman of good breeding, save he be far gone in liquor, ever mentions his stomach in the presence of women, clergymen, or the Royal Family. To avoid the necessity—for Englishmen, too, are subject to the colic—he employs various far-fetched euphemisms, among them, the poetical Little Mary. ”

“ To the damp funeral smell of the flowers at the altar, there has been added the cacodorous scents of forty or fifty different brands of talcum and rice powder. It begins [64] to grow warm in the church, and a number of women open their vanity bags and duck down for stealthy dabs at their noses. Others, more reverent, suffer the agony of augmenting shines. One, a trickster, has concealed powder in her pocket handkerchief, and applies it dexterously while pretending to blow her nose. ”

“ The world awaits that pundit who will study at length the relative respectability of the inward parts of man—his pipes and bellows, his liver and lights. The inquiry will take him far into the twilight zones of psychology. Why is the vermiform appendix so much more virtuous and dignified than its next-door neighbor, the cæcum? Considered physiologically, anatomically, pathologically, surgically, the cæcum is the decenter of the two. It has more cleanly habits; it is more beautiful; it serves a more useful purpose; it brings its owner less often to the doors of death. ”

“ The Married Woman
Oh, I could listen to that sonata all day! The poetry he puts into it—even into the [90] allegro! Just think what the andante will be! I like music to be sad.
Another Woman
What a sob he gets into it!
Many Other Women
How exquisite!
The Great Pianist
(Gathering himself together for the difficult development section.) That American beer will be the death of me! I wonder what they put in it to give it its gassy taste. And the so-called German beer they sell over here—du heiliger Herr Jesu! Even Bremen would be ashamed of it. In München the police would take a hand. ”

“ Every time I think of her, she suggests pleasant thoughts—good beer, a fine band, Gemütlichkeit. I must have been in love with her—not much, of course, but just enough to make things pleasant. And not a single letter from her! I suppose she thinks I’m starving to death over here—or tuning pianos. [93] Well, when I get back with the money there’ll be a shock for her. A shock—but not a Pfennig!
The Married Woman
(Her emotional coma ended.) Still, you can hardly blame him. There must be a good deal of temptation for a great artist. ”

“ The Clergyman
(To The Bridegroom) Repeat after me: “I, John, take thee, Mary, to be my wedded and aseptic wife, to have and to hold from this [178] day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, convalescence, relapse and health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part; and thereto I plight thee my troth.”
(The Bridegroom duly repeats the formula, The Clergyman now looses their hands, and after another dip into the bichloride, joins them together again.) ”

“ In religion these estimable wives are pious in habit but somewhat nebulous in faith. That is to say, they regard any person who specifically refuses to go to church as a heathen, but they themselves are by no means regular in attendance, and not one in ten of them could tell you whether transubstantiation is a Roman Catholic or a Dunkard doctrine. About two per cent. have dallied more or less gingerly with Christian Science, their average period of belief being one year.
The church we are in is like the neighborhood and its people: well-to-do but not fashionable. ”

“ She is dressed in what appears to be white linen, with a long veil of aseptic gauze. The gauze testifies to its late and careful sterilization by yellowish scorches. There is a white rubber glove upon the Bride’s right hand, but that belonging to her left hand has been removed. Her Father is dressed like the Best Man. The Four Bridesmaids are in the garb of surgical nurses, with their hair completely concealed by turbans of gauze. As the Bride takes her place before the Clergyman, with the Bridegroom at her right, there is a faint, snuffling murmur among the spectators. ”

“ No such squeamishness is known in America. The American discusses his stomach as freely as he discusses his business. More, he regards its name with a degree of respect verging upon reverence—and so he uses it as a euphemism for the whole region from the diaphragm to the pelvic arch. Below his heart he has only a stomach and a vermiform appendix.
In the Englishman that large region is filled entirely by his liver, at least in polite conversation. He never mentions his kidneys save to [192] his medical adviser, but he will tell even a parlor maid that he is feeling liverish. ”

“ Yes, these foreigners know the game. They have made millions out of it in Paris. Every [127] time you go to see a musical comedy at home, the second act is laid in Paris, and you see a whole stageful of girls wriggling around, and a lot of old sports having the time of their lives. All your life you hear that Paris is something rich and racy, something that makes New York look like Roanoke, Virginia. ”

“ Scarcely a day passes that I don’t hear of some fresh soldiering. And, what is worse, they have stirred up some of my own people—the carpenters, stone-cutters, gang bosses and so on. Every now and then my inspectors find some rotten libel cut on a stone—something to the effect that I am overworking them, and knocking them about, and holding them against their will, and generally mistreating them. ”

“ One who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation.
Liar. (a) One who pretends to be very good; (b) one who pretends to be very bad.
Love. The delusion that one woman differs from another.
Love-At-First-Sight. A labor-saving device.
Lover. An apprentice second husband; victim No. 2 in the larval stage.
Misogynist. A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
Martyr. The husband of a woman with the martyr complex.
Morality. The theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong. ”

“ This done, he takes his seat, reaches for the pedals with his stockinged feet, tries an experimental 32-foot CCC, and then wanders gently into a Bach toccata. It is his limbering-up piece: he always plays it as a prelude to a wedding job. It thus goes very smoothly and even brilliantly, but when he comes to the end of it and tackles the ensuing fugue he is quickly in difficulties, and after four or five stumbling repetitions of the subject he hurriedly improvises a crude coda and has done. ”

“ Just behind the chancel rail, facing the center aisle, there is a prie-dieu, and to either side of it are great banks of lilies, carnations, gardenias and roses. Three or four feet behind the prie-dieu and completely concealing the high altar, there is a dense jungle of palms. Those in the front rank are authentically growing in pots, but behind them the florist’s men have artfully placed some more durable, and hence more profitable, sophistications. ”

“ The Clergyman is discovered standing behind the table in an expectant attitude. He is in the long white coat of a surgeon, with his head wrapped in white gauze and a gauze respirator over his mouth. His chunkiness suggests a fat, middle-aged Episcopal rector, but it is impossible to see either his face or his vestments. He wears rubber gloves of a dirty orange color, evidently much used. The Bridegroom and The Best Man have just emerged from the Anesthetic Room and are standing before him. Both are dressed exactly as he is, save that The Bridegroom’s rubber gloves are white. ”

“ Fat, slick, round-faced men, of the sort who haunt barber shops and are always having their shoes shined. Tall, gloomy, Gothic men, with eyebrows that meet over their noses and bunches of black, curly hair in their ears. Men wearing diamond solitaires, fraternal order watchcharms, golden elks’ heads with rubies for eyes. Men with thick, loose lips and shifty eyes. Men smoking pale, spotted cigars. Men who do not know what to do with their hands when they talk to women. Honorable, upright, successful men who seduce their stenographers and are kind to their dear old mothers. ”

“ The ushers never [61] find out. No one ever finds out. They remain a joint mystery for all time. In the end they become a sort of tradition, and years hence, when two of the ushers meet, they will cackle over old dreadnaught and her six cruisers. The bride, grown old and fat, will tell the tale to her daughter, and then to her granddaughter. It will grow more and more strange, marvelous, incredible. ”

“ Meanwhile, there is a steady crescendo, ending after three minutes of truly tremendous music with ten sharp blasts of the double chord. A moment of silence and a single trombone gives out a theme hitherto not heard. It is the theme of tenderness, or, as the German commentators call it, the Biermad’l Motiv: Thus:
[44] Again silence. Then a single piccolo plays the closing cadence of the composition:
Ruhm und Ewigkeit presents enormous difficulties to the performers, and taxes the generalship of the most skillful conductor. ”