A Likely Story

by William De Morgan

"I do not think you are the person to say that to me, Euphemia, seeing that you have told me nothing—absolutely nothing! But I can wait." She waited. As she lay face upwards on the sofa—the nearest approach to an Early Victorian recumbent effigy that the Nature of Things permits—she presented the appearance of a deserving person floating on her back in a sea of exasperation. Unless this image justifies itself, it must be condemned. Nothing in literature can excuse it.

Mrs. Euphemia was so used to her aunt, with whom she had lived since the death of her parents fifteen years since, that she knew she might never get a better moment than this for telling the story of her passage of arms with her husband. She therefore embarked on a narrative of the events we know, and contrived to get them told, in spite of interruptions, the nature of which, after the foregoing sample of Aunt Priscilla, we can surmise. Neither need be repeated.

Thereafter followed a long conversation, the substance of which has already been given. Its effect was to try Mrs. Euphemia's faith in her husband—which still existed, mind you!—very severely. Have you ever noticed—but of course you have—that when Inexperience testifies to the sinfulness of the human race passim, Average Experience hides her diminished head, and does not venture on whatever there is to be said on behalf of the culprit. A shocking race, no doubt, but scarcely so bad as pure minds paint it! Old single ladies have pure minds, as often as not, and wield them with a fiendish dexterity, polishing off Lancelot and Galahad, Mordred and Arthur himself, all in a breath. Which of us dares to try a fall with a pure-minded person, in defence of his sex, or anyone else's? Miss Priscilla, having a pure mind and getting the bit in her teeth in connexion with her nephew-in-law's shortcomings, bolted, and dragged her niece after her through an imaginary Society compounded of London in the days of the Regency and Rome in the days of Tiberius, with a touch of impending Divine vengeance in the bush, justifying reference to Sodom and Gomorrah. She succeeded in making the young woman thoroughly uncomfortable, and causing the quarrel to assume proportions—which is what things that get bigger are understood to do nowadays—such as it never dreamed of at first. For Mrs. Euphemia's scheme of life allowed for everlasting bickerings, never-ending recriminations, last words ad libitum, short tiffs, long tiffs, tempersomeness and proper spirit—all, in fact, that makes life drag in families—but always under chronic conditions that precluded a crisis. If her worthy aunt's suggestion that this incident of Sairah was the merest spark from ignes suppositos cineri, and that her husband had never been even as good as he should be—if this indicated a true view of his character, she for one wasn't going to put up with such conduct. Corinthians or no! This was a crisis, only it was one that never would have come about but for Miss Priscilla. So, as we mentioned some time since, Mrs. Euphemia cried herself to sleep, and next day, galled by ill-considered moral precepts about the whole duty of Woman, wrote an infuriated letter to her dear Reginald—not her dearest; she might have any number of dearer Reginalds on draught—stating at a very high figure the amount of penance she would make a necessary condition of reconciliation, and even then it would never be the same thing underlined. She was, however, so completely the slave of a beautiful disposition, that no course was open to her but forgiveness, subject only to a reduction of some ninety-per-cent. at the dictation of a rarely sensitive consciousness of obligation to Duty, which she gave him to understand was her ruling passion. The letter demanded the assimilation of an amount of humble-pie outside practical politics—so Mr. Aiken said to a friend after reading it; the phraseology is his. He hadn't done anything to deserve the character imputed to him in language he could identify by the style as Aunt Priscilla's, shorn of much of its Scriptural character. It incensed him, and caused him to write a letter which widened the breach between them. Then she wrote back, and the breach fairly yawned. There is nothing so effective as correspondence to consolidate a quarrel.

She had been at all times since her marriage a frequent visitor enough at Athabasca Villa for the inquisitiveness of her Aunt's circle of friends to remain unexcited; for a week or so, at any rate. But that good lady's unholy alacrity in disclaiming all knowledge of her niece's domestic affairs stimulated a premature curiosity. When the Peter Dudburys called, Aunt Priscilla might quite easily have said, in reply to Mrs. Peter Dudbury's "And how is the Artist?" that she believed the said Artist was enjoying good health. Instead of which she was seized with a sort of paroxysm, exclaiming very often: "Don't ask me! I know nothing whatever about it. Nuth, thing-what, ever!" and shaking her head with her eyes tight shut. Whereupon Ellen Jane Dudbury said, "Shishmar!" and stamped cruelly on her mother's foot. Now really that amiable woman had only expanded into her gushy inquiry after Mr. Aiken because she knew that she and her three daughters had asked more than once after everyone else. She felt hurt, and resolved to have it out with Ellen Jane, and indeed began to do so as soon as they were out of hearing.

"Wellmar," said Ellen Jane, "what is one to do when you won't take the slightest notice?" She went on to explain that any person of normal shrewdness would have seen, the moment Mrs. Aiken made excuses and went upstairs, that there was something. You could always see when there was anything if you chose to use your eyes. It was no use telling her—Ellen Jane, that is—that there was nothing. She knew better. It was complimentary to Ellen Jane's penetration that her mother and sisters hoped aloud at the next house where they called, and captured the tenants to inquire after them, that there really was nothing between young Mrs. Aiken and her husband, and most likely it was all fancy, because there was nothing whatever to go upon, and such absurd stories did get about.

To our thinking it is clear that the receptivity of the Peter Dudburys was caused by that paroxysm of Aunt Priscilla's. An adoption of a like attitude with other visitors tended to enrich the gossip of Coombe and Maiden at the expense of Mrs. Euphemia Aiken.

Miss Priscilla did not have paroxysms of this class in her niece's presence, so of course the latter had the less chance of guessing that the cause of her visit to Athabasca Villa had become common property. She did, however, wake up to the fact that Coombe and Maiden were commiserating her. The impertinence of those neighbourhoods! She would have liked to knock their heads together. The worst of it was that no one put commiseration into a concrete form, such as "How is dear Mr. Aiken's infidelity going on?" or "We are so shocked to think how your most sacred affections are being lacerated." Then she might have flown at such like sympathizers with a poker, or got them down and cricked their joints by Ju-jutsu. This practice of talking about everyone else's private affairs to every-other else, never to their proprietor, is good for our father the Devil, but bad for his sons and daughters. Amen.

The truth is that, for some unexplained reason, a lady who runs away from her husband gets no sort of credit or glory by doing so, but only puts herself in an uncomfortable position; unless, indeed, she takes up with some other male, preferably a reprobate. Then an unhallowed splendour envelops her, and protects her from the cards of respectability, which has misgivings about her possible effect on its sons and husbands. We wonder, is this what is meant when one hears that some lady is living under the protection of Duke Baily or Duke Humphy? Are those—is one of them, we mean—protecting her from Mrs. Peter Dudbury? Honour to his Grace, whichever he is, if he acts up to his description!

With the nobler sex the reverse is the case. Whether deserting or deserted, he is rather looked up to by his more securely anchored male friends as the subject of a wider and more illuminating experience than their own. Of course, the forsaken example does not shine with the radiance of a self-supporting inconstancy. It may be that he comes off best in the end, if he is a man of spirit, and finds consolation elsewhere. For then he can not only crow, farmyard-wise, but he has the heartfelt satisfaction of being an ill-used man into the bargain. If he cottons to someone else's ill-used wife, he has nothing left to wish for.

Nothing of all this has any application in this story, unless it attaches to the fact that Mr. Aiken found some consolation in the company of his friends, while his wife found none in that of her acquaintances. As both parties were perfectly blameless in the ordinary sense of the word—geese are most blameless birds—none of the numerous advantages of wickedness were secured by either. Their interests in Belial never vested. Mrs. Aiken never meant not to go back in the end, as soon as she had made her husband knuckle down, and confess up. And he was consciously keeping his home unsullied by anything too Bohemian, in order that when Euphemia came back—as of course she would—no memory of the interregnum should clash with the Restoration.