It Never Can Happen Again

by William De Morgan

No doubt this analysis of his own case, that Challis makes as he gets on with that pipe—near its end now—and waits to hear his wife's cab at the gate, would have clashed a good deal with his seeming reckless speech among men; speech he was apt to get himself a very bad name by, among precisians! But he was made up of oddities and paradoxes. Is any light thrown on him by what he is reported to have once said: "I can't see that it can matter how many wives—or whatever you like to call them—a man has, if he doesn't care twopence about any of them, and they all know it"? The funny part of this creed of Challis's about marriage and his fellow-men was that it caused them to ascribe to him precisely the same morals that he had ascribed to them; and that each one of them, whenever he chanced to speak of it in confidence to anyone he was not on his guard against, always appeared to disclaim attendance at the temple down the road for himself, personally; and, in fact, to suggest that he, exceptionally, had common decency in a corner somewhere.

No man will ever know—one may say that much safely—how far any other man is like himself. He is pretty sure to invent a curious monster for his fellow-man to be, based on all his own worst propensities; but utterly ignoring that mysterious impulse to fight against them which he has the egotism to call his better self. He credits himself, personally, with an inherent dislike of evil, and conceives that his fellow-man is kept in check by the Decalogue. He ascribes Original Sin to the race, and credits himself secretly with a monopoly of Original Virtue.

But it is unfair to go on moralizing in this way, merely because Marianne does not come back. The justification is that Challis spent such a long time in useless self-torment over his position; he all the while believing quite sincerely that real men of the world—say, broadly speaking, Mr. Brown and Lord Smith—practised double-dealers that they were in all that relates to womankind, would have dismissed the whole matter with an experienced smile. In the course of an hour, however, he endeavored to imitate the spirited demeanour of Mr. Brown and Lord Smith, and went away to his room to write.

He had to acknowledge that he could not fix his attention as Mr. Brown and Lord Smith would have done; but he made a fair show of writing, too—felt he had got to work again! Marianne would be back to tea; he was glad of that. He was distinctly not at all sorry to find he was glad of that. But he was a little annoyed that it had occurred to him to make the discovery—that he had not left the question dormant.

The noise in the kitchen below was almost inaudible in Challis's room, but a sense hung about of the remains of an engagement elsewhere. Challis was conscious that a dropping fire stopped when he rang the bell at four-thirty, to tell Harmood not to get the tea till her mistress came back. Harmood consented, provided that the obnoxious expression was withdrawn. Only she did not put it that way. What she said was, "To wait for Mrs. Challis, sir?" Had Challis answered, "Yes, your mistress!" she might have shown a proper spirit. But as he said, with discretion, "Exactly!" Miss Harmood consented to postpone tea. His phrase seemed to admit inexactness in the epithet "mistress."

But the young lady was going to make no suggestions. If Mr. Challis liked to go without his tea, let him! She was not going to attempt to influence anybody. The hours passed, and ink that might have perished on a penwiper became a permanent record of thoughts which their writer always doubted the value of the moment after writing them. But perhaps they were immortal? No one would ever know till the very end of Eternity.

Was that actually six o'clock? Well—she wouldn't come now till dinner! He considered a short walk before she turned up; but the drizzle was one of those all-pervading drizzles that despise umbrellas, and do the garden a world of good. One never goes out for a walk in those drizzles. He would have another pipe, and think it over—perhaps write a little more presently.

He would have done more wisely to write the little more at once—to remain hard and fast at his writing-table. For he had not been long over the second pipe when the summer sun, now on its way to roost, got a chance to peep through a cloud-rift, and straightway Wimbledon was aware it was the heart of a rainbow it could not see, however palpable it might be at Esher. Now, it chanced that just at the moment when the sudden prismatic glow flooded that vulgar, incorrigible drizzle, and clothed it in an undeserved radiance, Challis was watching the crystal beads that chased each other in a line along the under-edge of a sloping gutter above his window. He was wondering why they held on so tight—it was so seldom one dropped—when on a sudden they all became jewels, each with a little complete image of the sun in it, if they would only have stood still while one looked! And these jewels brought back a something to his mind. He felt it coming before he could define it: what was it going to be? Why, of course!—the gleaming beads or scales or spangles on Judith's dress, last night in the little garden with the funny name—what was it?——Tophet.

And then it all came back with a rush. He had contrived, in his home-surrounding, to dodge and evade, as it were, his memory of his folly of last night for a moment. He had now slipped unawares into his past; and malicious recollection had brought back this-and-that that was pleasant in it, but had closed the door against reminders of all that had been tedious and distasteful in his later married life. With no Marianne there in the flesh, to call attention to that morose and jealous temper she had developed in these later years, he had indulged in the luxury of forgetting it; and had repeopled the empty house with a cheerful version of its mistress, one that was exactly what the Marianne of old ought to have grown up into—not very clever, certainly—not Madame de Staël, by any means—but always good-humoured and ready to laugh at her own blunders, and gradually outgrowing that terrible vice of blood, that dire form of Christianity that made it a wonder to him how his new friend, that good parson-chap at Royd, should be tarred with the same feather. He had got into a backwater of the stream of life, and found a happy anchorage for a moment; and here came the torrent he had escaped, and caught him up and whirled him away with it, Heaven knows where! Little things make the great things of life, and no sooner was that miserable gew-gaw that was not even an expensive article brought across his mind by those jewel-drops flashing in the sun than he became again the heart-distempered victim of the image it brought with it—Judith in all her beauty, at its best in the moonlight. His incipient fit of reconciliation to his home had only been momentary, and the paroxysm of his disorder that upset it—how rightly he had spoken of it as a fool's passion!—sent him pacing to-and-fro across the room, catching at the empty air with nervous fingers, pressing them mercilessly on his eyes, as though he would crush out with them the beautiful image of the woman that bewitched him.

This sort of thing is not so uncommon as you, perhaps, think. You have read of it, of course—best told by Robert Browning, perhaps—how "the Devil spends a fire God gave for other ends." That was like to be Challis's case if this went on.