Then it was my turn to sit silent, and the pause was so awkward that in a minute, to break it, I exclaimed--"Let's drop personalities, old chap--I mean my dear Miss An. Tell me something about your people, and let us begin properly at the top: have you got a king, for instance?"To this the girl, pulling herself out of the pleasant slough of her listlessness, and falling into my vein, answered--"Both yes and no, sir traveller from afar--no chiefly, and yet perhaps yes. If it were no then it were so, and if yes then Hath were our king.""A mild king I should judge by your uncertainty. In the place where I came from kings press their individualities somewhat more clearly on their subjects' minds. Is Hath here in the city? Does he come to your feasts today?"An nodded. Hath was on the river, he had been to see the sunrise; even now she thought the laughter and singing down behind the bend might be the king's barge coming up citywards. "He will not be late," said my companion, "because the marriage-feast is set for tomorrow in the palace."I became interested. Kings, palaces, marriage-feasts--why, here was something substantial to go upon; after all these gauzy folk might turn out good fellows, jolly com-rades to sojourn amongst--and marriage-feasts reminded me again I was hungry.
"Who is it," I asked, with more interest in my tone, "who gets married?--is it your ambiguous king himself?"Whereat An's purple eyes broadened with wonder: then as though she would not be uncivil she checked herself, and answered with smothered pity for my ignorance, "Not only Hath himself, but every one, stranger, they are all married tomorrow; you would not have them married one at a time, would you?"--this with inexpressible derision.
I said, with humility, something like that happened in the place I came from, asking her how it chanced the convenience of so many came to one climax at the same mo-ment. "Surely, An, this is a marvel of arrangement. Where Idwelt wooings would sometimes be long or sometimes short, and all maids were not complacent by such universal agree-ment."The girl was clearly perplexed. She stared at me a space, then said, "What have wooings long or short to do with weddings? You talk as if you did your wooing first and then came to marriage--we get married first and woo after-wards!""'Tis not a bad idea, and I can see it might lend an ease and certainty to the pastime which our method lacks.
But if the woman is got first and sued subsequently, who brings you together? Who sees to the essential preliminaries of assortment?"An, looking at my shoes as though she speculated on the remoteness of the journey I had come if it were measured by my ignorance, replied, "The urn, stranger, the urn does that--what else? How it may be in that out-fashioned region you have come from I cannot tell, but here--'tis so commonplace I should have thought you must have known it--we put each new year the names of all womenkind into an urn and the men draw for them, each town, each village by itself, and those they draw are theirs; is it conceivable your race has other methods?"I told her it was so--we picked and chose for ourselves, beseeching the damsels, fighting for them, and holding the sun of romance was at its setting just where the Martians held it to rise. Whereat An burst out laughing--a clear, ringing laugh that set all the light-hearted folk in the nearest boats laughing in sympathy. But when the grotesqueness of the idea had somewhat worn off, she turned grave and asked me if such a fancy did not lead to spite, envy, and bickerings.
"Why, it seems to me," she said, shaking her curly head, "such a plan might fire cities, desolate plains, and empty palaces--""Such things have been.""Ah! our way is much the better. See!" quoth that gentle philosopher. "'Here,' one of our women would say, 'am Ito-day, unwed, as free of thought as yonder bird chasing the catkin down; tomorrow I shall be married, with a whole summer to make love in, relieved at one bound of all those uncertainties you acknowledge to, with nothing to do but lie about on sunny banks with him whom chance sends me, come to the goal of love without any travelling to get there.' Why, you must acknowledge this is the per-fection of ease.""But supposing," I said, "chance dealt unkindly to you from your nuptial urn, supposing the man was not to your liking, or another coveted him?" To which An answered, with some shrewdness--"In the first case we should do what we might, being no worse off than those in your land who had played ill providence to themselves. In the second, no maid would covet him whom fate had given to another, it were too fatiguing, or if such a thing DID happen, then one of them would waive his claims, for no man or woman ever born was worth a wrangle, and it is allowed us to barter and change a little."All this was strange enough. I could not but laugh, while An laughed at the lightest invitation, and thus chatting and deriding each other's social arrangements we floated idly townwards and presently came out into the main waterway perhaps a mile wide and flowing rapidly, as streams will on the threshold of the spring, with brash or waste of distant beaches riding down it, and every now and then a broken branch or tree-stem glancing through waves whose crests a fresh wind lifted and sowed in golden showers in the inter-vening furrows. The Martians seemed expert upon the water, steering nimbly between these floating dangers when they met them, but for the most part hugging the shore where a more placid stream better suited their fancies, and for a time all went well.
