It Never Can Happen Again

by William De Morgan

"Anyone would have thought you did. And it only upsets me, and does no good at all. Do leave it alone till Elizabeth Barclay has shown her one or two of her receipts. She's very willing to learn, and goes to chapel." For Marianne was disposed to be lazy about this as about other things, and was inclined to temporize. If Mrs. Steptoe could be educated, why not retain Mrs. Steptoe? "Even if you dined out every night for a time—you know you can; look at all those invitations!—it would be better than having to go through it all again. Oh dear!"

But Challis was not anxious either to dine out every night, or to quarrel over the dinners at home. He was really well pleased with himself and his surroundings, when he could feel that he had passed a comfortable domestic evening free from self-questionings and collisions with—well!—that disorder he made the awkward compound word for. But he never got off without scars. When he thought he had succeeded, after a very well-executed quiet evening with his wife, in saying to himself:

"Jam me juvaverit

Doctaeque conjugis

Sinu quiescere,"

really almost with earnestness!—all the wind was taken out of his sails by a perfectly uncalled-for reflection on Marianne's education. He was angry after with himself for making it. Besides, no one in his senses could ascribe any abnormal culture to.... Never you mind!—what on earth had she to do with it?

The fact is that, at this date of the story, some two or three weeks after we last heard his voice in that cab that drew up in Grosvenor Square, Challis was keeping watch and ward over his love of his own home and the mother of his two children. His other world—especially the brilliant and fascinating one that centred in the Megatherium Theatre and the preparation of his new play—was both courted and kept at bay by him. He could make no strong stand against its temptations; but he could resent them, and did so. And whenever his conscience—however he nicknamed it—had been especially intrusive, he could always rebuke it by a little more home life than usual, by a more patient toleration of some home discomfort. He did not see that the very fact of his doing penance, as it were, for his enjoyment of that outer world of enchantment, was really opening a postern-gate to admit the enemy his culverins were pounding from the battlements. When he paid himself out for that delightful supper with the Megatheriums in the small hours of the morning by showing forbearance over Mrs. Steptoe's fatuous attempts at cookery, he was no more conscious that he was really pleading guilty on the main issue than was Judith Arkroyd, when she declined an invitation to join it, conscious that she was only hedging against her dallyings with perfect truth and honour towards her family in keeping back the lengths she had gone in rehearsals of the part of Aminta Torrington. Mrs. Steptoe's greasy cookery and a dull pompous dinner at the Duke's each did duty as a salve to conscience without the unwilling sharers in either detecting their own self-deception. But it was good for Mr. Ramsey Tomes, who took Miss Arkroyd in to the banquet and bored her by his appreciation more than by his talk; which Judith mimicked extremely well, to Mr. Challis's great delight, when she met him next day at the theatre. And it was good for Mrs. Steptoe, who between Challis's penances and Marianne's indisposition for another excursion into disengaged-cook land, seemed likely to attain the low standard of excellence we have mentioned as satisfactory to the British housekeeper.

Marianne gave her husband no help. Of course, she was not bound to. We know! No woman is under any legal obligation to assist her husband against himself, if his affections—promised at the altar, don't you see?—become weak-kneed and uncertain. He may have to love uphill, but he must take his chance of that. Still, she need not skid his wheels or put stones in his path. But did Marianne do so?

In our opinion she did. Mere words, told in a story, go for little; a shade of accent makes them much or nothing. How, we ask you, did Bob Challis, Rugby-sharpened, know that his mater, whenever she made an allusion to churches or chapels, was having a fling at his Governor? How did Bob know that his Governor was making no answer in italics, as one might say, when he turned to him and said: "Got your new skates, human schoolboy? Let's have a look! Now, why is it no new strap ever has a hole in the right place?" And made conversation, transparently. Bob did know, somehow; and had he been present to hear his mother say that Mrs. Steptoe went to Chapel, he would have quite understood her inflection of voice to convey an addendum, "which you don't; or, at least, Church, and you wouldn't say the responses if you did."