It Never Can Happen Again

by William De Morgan

Marianne Challis, or, as she preferred to be called, Craik, had sentenced herself to an embittered life, and knew it. But she had, as we have said, so much in her of the dogged tenacity and vengefulness of a Red Indian brave that scarcely any idea of surrender had ever, so far, entered her mind. Whenever the smallest suspicion of wavering had approached its outskirts, during the year and a half of her residence with her mother at Broadstairs, she had at once brought into the field an auxiliary force, the consolation to her conscience that she was, at least, no longer "living in sin" with the father of her children. Even if her jealousy of what she found a satisfaction in calling his "connection with" Miss Arkroyd—a phrase first used, dexterously, by Charlotte Eldridge—had been ill-founded, which it wasn't, it would have been a misapprehension to be thankful for, in that it had made her alive to the heinousness of her immoral life, and qualified her to go before the Bar of an Offended God, not only with mere lame apologies for the existence of her two girls, but with a statement of account, claiming payment of Joy over the Sinner that Repenteth. Where would have been the use of pleading, before that Awful Throne, that she was "only Kate's half-sister"?

This story knows that accusation will be brought against it of "sneering" at things sacred; but let the accuser try to depict the frame of mind of this poor lady without seeming to do so. Marianne had accepted her mother's Choctaw Deity, a creation of the sullen vices of her own mind, on the strength of an assurance that he was also the God of the man who paid, in Syria, the penalty of the most intrepid and magnificent attempt to touch the hearts of men the world has ever known. Let him be sure that when he talks of "things sacred" he is really holding those things sacred that that man was tortured to death for proclaiming the truth of, two thousand years ago, and that he is not exalting the comicalities of a Theologism.

But the outcome of it all was an embittered life for Marianne. And the bitterness was bound to come out—could not be concealed. It showed itself in severity towards her children to some extent, but very much more in acrimony towards her mother. It was just as well, perhaps, that the safety-valve existed. The worthy old lady would have been quarrelling with some one else if she had not quarrelled with her daughter; so it was all one to her.

This old lady was the soul of dissension and savage righteousness. It must not be understood that what Bob called a "regular set-to between Gran and the Mater" was of daily occurrence. Often a week would pass without a battle-royal. But no hour ever passed without an exchange of shots. Bob's reports to his father of the life at Belvedere Villa, Broadstairs, were highly coloured, perhaps, but they enabled the author to picture to himself a daily routine not far from the truth. When Bob stated that Old Gran was all shaky-waky with rage to begin with, and would pucker up and fly at a moment's notice if you didn't look uncommon sharp, Challis accepted the first clause of the indictment as a false diagnosis of the tremulousness of old age; the second as realistic poetry; and the condition precedent of immunity at the end as an admission that his son's own attitude was not always faultless. When that young man said it was "pray, pray, pray, all day long," and he didn't see the fun, his father perceived that his meaning was that religious exercises were protracted beyond usage, for instance, of the Deanery at Inchester; where, according to Bob, it was "once and done with." Besides, the Dean didn't snuffle, and Old Gran did. Challis remarked that Bob would have cut a poor figure as a Hindu Yogi, and felt grateful in his heart to Dean Tillotson for not snuffling. It might arrest a violent reaction on Bob's part against all Religion, Law, Order, and Morality. For Challis would not trust anyone but himself without the first; weak natures, like other people's, might lose touch with the other three as well, and take to the secret manufacture of melinite. He never suspected himself of a weak nature.

These illuminations had been thrown on Belvedere Villa after Bob's first visit there, a year since. This August he was acquiring more dignified forms of speech, befitting a fifth-form boy. But he was still capable of saying that he had seen "awfully little" of his Governor these holidays. Indeed, if he had not gone with him to a place in Derbyshire for a week, he would hardly have set eyes on him. Then if his Governor was stopping on a week at this beastly little place—Heaven knows why!—why shouldn't he? Why was he to go to Broadstairs? However, he went. And from Broadstairs he wrote to his Governor, at Brideswell-Poulgreave, Derby, saying that Gran was "as bad, if not worse, than ever," and provoked severe criticism of his English in reply. He had his revenge, though, for he pelted his Governor with samples of the same solecism, cut from current literature, till the accumulations became quite formidable.

It may seem strange, but the story must record it, that almost the only thing that gave poor Marianne any real pleasure during this year-and-a-half in her mother's house was the reading from time to time in the newspapers of the literary successes of "Titus"; for to her he never ceased to be Titus. So self-contradictory was her frame of mind that, when "Aminta Torrington" made such a sensation just after Christmas, her bosom swelled with pride over the play's success, just as though she herself had been by the author's side at the fall of the curtain. Her curiosity was intense to know whether or not the name of the actress who personated Aminta was her own or one assumed by that detestable woman to whom she owed all her unhappiness. "Silvia Berens" puzzled her, because it sounded familiar. But not sufficiently so to be sure she had known it in those last days she had spent at the Hermitage.

It was a grievous vexation to have no one she could take into her confidence. She would have shrunk from showing her inner mind to her mother, even if there had been the slightest prospect of the old woman knowing anything on dramatic or literary subjects; and when she threw out a feeler to Charlotte Eldridge, that lady irritated her by taking for granted that the pleasure she had expressed was a creditable impulse of generosity, and not spontaneous at all. Just like Charlotte! And all the while her pleasure was a reality she had a right to indulge in—a luxury she could allow herself without any weak concession to feelings she had destined to extinction.

For the fact is Marianne had never ceased to love the father of her children. Can a woman ever succeed in doing so, except by hating him? Now, Choctaw as she was, she was under no obligation to detest her husband as long as she could fully gratify her hatred elsewhere. Judith Arkroyd had the full benefit of it—drew the fire of her batteries on herself. Oh, the hypocrisy of that letter the girl had the impertinence to write to her! But she saw through it. As for Titus, did she not know him well enough to know he would be mere wax in the hands of a designing woman like that? Oh yes!—she knew how to flatter him, no doubt! And how to make the best of herself, too. Charlotte could at least sympathize about that; she knew the sort this Judith was! Indeed, Charlotte had been liberal in her realistic suggestions about Judith, who may have been in some ways no better than she made her out, but who was certainly short of the standard of depravity this moralist vouched for in telegraph-girls, her bêtes-noires in all that touched the purity of the domestic hearth. Charlotte's sidelights on the Tophet incident, as explained in "that hypocritical letter from the girl herself," would have done credit to Paul de Kock.

Chewing this cud—or these cuds; which should it be?—would take the poor woman so perilously near a fit of exculpation of Titus that she was often forced to have recourse to the old story of their consanguinity to keep her resentment up to the mark. Yes!—she would—she could—go through a mental operation technically called "forgiving" Titus. But go back to him? No! She had sinned, all those years, in ignorance, and with a false ideal of her husband, who had now fallen from his high estate. And look you!—it was not only this Judith business. How about that other story? How about that Steptoe story, not an hour's walk from here? She found the neighbourhood of Ramsgate oppressive to her.

No—she could never go back to Titus, whatever happened. Not even if this Bill that was to come into Parliament were to make marriages like hers and Titus's lawful for the future. What was wrong was wrong, and how the House of Lords could make it right was more than Marianne could understand. She wasn't aware that it was the House of Lords that originally made it wrong.