It Never Can Happen Again

by William De Morgan

Her daughter may have shown her state of mind; for as she returned to her sofa, her amiable mother added, "If you are going to sniff and make a scene, Marianne, you had better have the children down." The old woman was sitting with her eyes shut, and really had very slight data to go on.

"Whatever Titus was, at least he wasn't unkind!" said Marianne tartly. But she touched the bell-handle, and its sound was followed by the prompt appearance of Mumps and Chobbles, now no longer known by those names, which had been to some extent their father's private property. The younger child came into the room shouting, with jumps as emphasis, "Now we may have the Thunday papers to make boats of, long ones and short ones."

The construction of a Navy had been a great pièce de résistance at the Hermitage in old days. The vessels had weak points; notably that when the deck was flattened out on completion, the cut-water was apt to part amidships, unless firmly held together by a neighbouring shipwright, or stuck together with a pin. But this last practice was looked upon with suspicion, as hardly legitimate. The question does not arise, so far as we are aware, at Chatham or Devonport; as in no case are ships first constructed with decks analogous to the bottoms of wine-bottles seen from within, and levelled down before launching.

Traditions of bygone Dockyards naturally survived, and gave rise to controversy. Marianne was always in dread of some painful reminder of the past during ship-building. But it kept the children quiet; so, though she had not seen the whole of the paper, owing to the difficulty of analyzing that Debate, she conceded it to the Contractors.

Now, a practice obtained between them quite at variance with the care and foresight usually shown in the placing of new ships on the stocks. If in any of the Government Dockyards it is common for the actual length of a ship to remain an open question until the moment of construction, it should surely be made the subject of a question in Parliament! Mumps and Chobbles, having obtained the paper, differed about the length of the first hull to be put in hand. Chobbles preferred a normal full sheet, alleging that vessels built of two sheets were only just seaworthy, owing to weakness of the backbone. Mumps was ambitious, advocating a ship of huge length, made with two full sheets. Chobbles opposed this scheme on the ground that, if pushed, such a vessel would collapse, or go scrunch. Mumps, however, had set her heart on it.

"Papa thaid it wouldn't go scrunch—not if we sticked it over in the middle—not if we pulled bofe the edges across—not if we doo'd like viss." Mumps ended an imperfect description with a practical demonstration of how the vessel might be strengthened in the middle if some of the length were sacrificed. "Overlap" was the word she wanted.

"Then we must have wafers," said Chobbles. Because otherwise, you see, the ship might come in half, and founder—who knows?—with all on board.

"You may have wafers if you won't quarrel," said the mother of the shipwrights. And wafers being obtained from her writing-desk, a threat of violence from Mumps was withdrawn, and overlooked.

Now it so chanced that, the newspaper being large and difficult to control, Chobbles, as principal, gave instructions to Mumps to hold the two sheets the long ship was to be made from as directed, while she herself stuck the two together, cautiously advancing across the paper on her knees. A more mature shipwright would have wafered the two corners first, and distributed the remaining wafers over the space between, so as to make the most of them. As it turned out, Mumps shifted her corner while Chobbles was yet half-way, and when Chobbles completed, dismay ensued. For the paper didn't lie straight, and all the wafers were used up. Words followed, and recriminations. Mumps maintained that she had held on to her corner loyally, unwaveringly; Chobbles that she could not have done so, because she herself had selected a passage in large type as the point Mumps was to remain faithful to. She was in a position to show that if her little sister had adhered to her instructions, the accident would not have happened.

"What are those children fighting about?" said their Grandmamma, who had fallen asleep—had been snoring, in fact—and who waked suddenly. "It all comes, Marianne, of your letting them play on Sunday afternoon. When I was a child I should have been writing out the sermon, and well whipped if I couldn't recollect it...." And so forth.