It Never Can Happen Again

by William De Morgan

"Yes, but, dearest!—I must call you so, or call you something with some heart in it; pardon me!—can I tell the reason? Can the reason be told?... Oh yes, of course, I know what you are going to say—it is reason enough that she is my wife, that the kids are my kids, that the home is my home. So it is; but there is more reason than that, and I am at a loss to tell it.... What?"

But Judith left whatever it was unsaid, and exchanged it for "No—go on!"

"Perhaps I do wrong when I use the only words I can find when I say that I long for Marianne back again to help me against you? Ought I not to say to help me against myself? Where is the fault in you that you are what you are? You are blameless, at least. It is I that must needs love you!"

And perhaps the story does wrong to allow a suspicion that, in the heart that beautiful face belonged to, was a half-formed thought that the speaker was even more Arcadian than the owner of both had suspected. But it creeps in—this suspicion—with the telling of a smile kept under by lips on the watch to check it. One thing may be relied on: Miss Arkroyd was not the least agitated.

Challis saw nothing of her face, as he never raised his eyes, and his face was half averted. He continued: "I cannot help an experience that no one will believe. I have no appeal against it. But I tell you this—that when I came home after ... after that evening at Royd, when I forgot myself and told the truth, for a few hours I forgot you too. As I sit here now, it seems to me a thing absolutely incredible. Even when Marianne turned against me on grounds that seemed to me almost a pretext, no memory of you or my folly—call it so if you will—anything you like!—no memory came back to me. Indeed, it is almost as though I had been two men by turns." He raised his eyes to hers, with a slowly drawn breath, as of fatigue, from the turmoil of his own feelings. If there was any of the smile left then, she was in time to cancel it.

But she hardly said anything. A mere run of the vowels of a sentence, as one speaks through a yawn, is not speech. It just made him say "What?" but evidently had no share in the question she replied to him with, and stopped in the middle of, "And what was it then made you?..." But the words she had decided on ignoring were "How funny men are!" Let us hope there was some affectation of indifference in this.

Challis understood her question. "What made my disorder break out again?" he repeated. "I can't fix the time. But now that I have been forced to discard one of my selves—the one that hoped for the calm of his old home life again ... no, Judith, indeed there have been many happy times...."

"Why? Did you think I doubted it?"

"I wasn't sure.... But I had not finished. Now that my hope has been simply strangled, I have to be my other self, in self-defence. I tell you—I must tell you—that the thought of you is with me every hour of the day, and what have I to help me to fight against it? Even my boy is away, and what adds to the cruelty of the position is that, will I nill I, I have to feel glad of his absence. Because when he was with me I was in constant terror of being asked for explanations which I could not give. A girl of his age would have been far easier to tell it to."

"Do you think so? I feel as if I could tell him about it all—much, much easier!" During some chat over the fact, and its strangeness, that the tongue of either sex is freest in speech with its opposite, on this one particular subject of Love, Challis felt, as they sat on in the growing twilight, that the soul-brush was at work again with a vengeance. The utter satisfaction of his thirst for speech about himself and his plight was so much sheer nectar to him while it lasted. If he paid for it after, at least his draught should be a deep one now. He confessed to the extent to which his constant home-life in the past had stood in the way of the formation of intimate friendships, and that he really had no one he could confide in. "I have a second cousin," said he—he was always absurd, sooner or later—"who has an impediment and a wig, and is slightly deaf. No, I really could not take him into my confidence." Judith said: "Of course you couldn't; I see that." "Besides," he continued, "he wears spats, and goes through courses of treatment for dyspepsia at Cheltenham." And Judith said again: "I see."