It Never Can Happen Again

by William De Morgan

Grandmamma said she would never be the least surprised at any freethinker committing bigamy. All freethinkers committed something, or many things, for that matter, avoiding felony from motives of policy. "He knows that his children are contrary to the Act of Parliament now, and that he's no right to them, and that's why he keeps his distance. You'll see, Marianne, that it will be quite another story if this wicked Bill passes."

"I don't believe it. Anyhow, it hasn't passed yet! Besides, the amendment was withdrawn."

"Well!"

"Well, of course! Then the Bill won't have a retrospective character." But the old lady was too sharp to fall into this topsy-turvy view of the case, and presently succeeded in convincing her daughter of her mistake. However, Perplexity was only scotched, not killed. "Suppose Titus had married this girl already, I mean, and the Bill passes, which of us would be his wife? I don't see how any amount of retrospects could unmarry them." Thus Marianne; and her mother can't meet the difficulty off-hand.

But consideration lights on a solution. "It would make your children legitimate, and he would claim them," says she, with the sort of glee in ambush people feel over a fellow-creature caught in a legal man-trap.

But Marianne's short sight is often clear sight. "What rubbish!" says she. "If Miss Arkroyd had a baby.... No!—I don't care, Grandmamma. She wouldn't be Titus's wife, if she married him at all the churches in London, and you know it.... Yes!—I say again, if she had a baby, Titus would have two legitimate families at once, and she would be his Law-wife, and I shouldn't. It's silly!"

Those who read the Debates on this question at the time—it is not so long ago all this happened—will remember that arguments akin to this one of Marianne's repulsed the forlorn hopes of the Bill's opponents, and clinched its retrospective character. What has happened to women who had married their sister's husbands, and been superseded by a "lawful" wife, before the passing of this Bill, the story knows not. Have the husbands been convicted of retrospective bigamy?

But this story has little more concern with the intricacies of difficult legislation in this matter than with those that have arisen in any other coercion by Law of the private lives of the non-aggressive classes. It is hopeless, apparently, to look forward to a day when the guiding rule of the law-giver will be non-interference with all but molestation; but one may indulge in satisfaction at each removal from the Statute Book of an enactment that infringes it.

Marianne's last speech, recorded above, shows a curious frame of mind. She had thrust her husband away from her in a fit of jealousy—not an ill-grounded one, by any means—and had bolstered up her conscience by what she more than half suspected to be a false pretext; but one in which she felt sure of the support of Grundydom in Great Britain, passim. How if this new legislation, or abrogation of old legislation, should undermine the fortress of her powerful allies, and leave a small and unconsidered band of bigots to fight the battle of an imaginary consanguinity? Those are not the words of her mind—only the gist of her thought. What she said to herself was that now there was to be an Act of Parliament everyone would go round the other way. To her that included the thought that the old catchwords that had done duty for so long would begin to ring false when brought into collision with that powerful agency, a Parliamentary majority. Since she had been dwelling so constantly on the subject she had more than once found herself face to face with impeachments of well-worn arguments derived from Scripture; notably when she found that one Biblical denunciation treated a marriage with a woman who might have one day become her husband's Deceased Wife's Sister, but who would not have been so when he married her, unless he had waited for that sine qua non, his wife's death. Thoughts of this sort strengthened and multiplied as the time drew nearer for this Parliamentary discussion, and here was the Bill apparently going to become Law, and by a backhanded thrust to make her Titus's "Law-wife" again, as well as what her own heart in some mysterious way proclaimed her to be—namely, his real wife, whatever that meant! She was certainly in a very curious, confused, self-contradictious frame of mind, was Marianne.

Perhaps her contradiction and confusion had never been much greater than on this Sunday afternoon, where the story has left her for so long, feverishly pacing up and down the room, after puzzling her poor stupid head trying to follow the Debate, and make some sense of it. She had succeeded in finding out that the Bill was nearly through Parliament, and that it would affect her and Titus more than she had conceived possible hitherto. She was working herself up into a state of bitten lips and sobs kept in abeyance. Her mother was not the person to encourage this sort of thing. "If you must prowl, Marianne," said she, "can't you go and prowl somewhere else?"