Benighted

by J. B. Priestley

  ‘I know him too,’ she said. ‘He’s rather a nice boy really, bit young and silly of course. I asked because I’m sure I saw you with him once. I knew I’d seen you somewhere and I couldn’t think where, but now I remember. Weren’t you with him one night—three or four months ago—at the “Rats and Mice”?’

  ‘The “Rats and Mice”?’ Then he remembered the place, one of the smaller night clubs. ‘Yes, I did go there one night with Dick Ranger. It’s a little place, isn’t it, with everything and everybody jammed together. There was a band all squashed in a balcony, just like sardines in a half-opened tin. I remember the name of the place because I told Ranger it was like being inside a cheese. I hated it. The drinks were about the worst and the dearest I’ve ever known.’

  ‘Pretty rotten, yes, but not quite so bad if you’re in with the crowd who are running it. I go there a lot, though it’s not my favourite haunt.’

  ‘Haunt’s a good word, isn’t it?’ He grinned at her and she—perhaps mechanically, he didn’t know—wrinkled her nose in reply. ‘We have to go somewhere, haven’t we?’

  ‘That’s just it. That’s what I always say.’ She was quite eager about this. ‘You can have a dance or two and a drink with some of the girls and boys you know, and the band’s making a cheerful row and the lights are nice and bright, and so you turn in there night after night and hang on, not wanting to turn out and crawl home to your rotten digs.’

  ‘I know. Once down the steps and outside the door, it’s dark and raining probably and to-morrow’s begun. So you put it off.’

  ‘You’ve hit it in one,’ she told him. And then, after a moment’s reflection, she went on: ‘It’s like being in here after that.’ She jerked her head towards the door. Then she lowered her voice. ‘This seems a funny, dingy sort of hole—funny people here too—but it’s the Ritz itself after being out there.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’ He didn’t want to sound dubious, but he couldn’t help wondering. He turned his glance on the impassive Miss Femm for a moment, then looked across at her brother, who was talking to Porterhouse.

  ‘You surprise me, sir,’ Mr. Femm was remarking, though there was no surprise but something quite different flickering in his eyes. ‘But then, I have been out of the world, you might say, for at least ten years. I never even see a newspaper now.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know it, then. Take my word for that,’ said Porterhouse. ‘You couldn’t come back into it. It’s a different world altogether. I’ve kept pace with it, so to speak; might even say I’ve been in front; but it’s taken me all my time.’

  ‘The world will be very different,’ said Mr. Femm, slowly, ‘when all the people have been cleared out of it, and not before. Men and women do not change. Their silly antics are always the same. There will always be a few clever ones, who can see a yard or two in front of their noses, and a host of fools who can see nothing, who are all befuddled, who pride themselves on being virtuous because they are incompetent or short-sighted.’

  ‘Something in that, p’r’aps,’ the other admitted, after a stare.

  Margaret Waverton was talking to her husband. Her rather clipped and very clear voice found its way across the table. ‘But you’ll never get Muriel Ainsley to see that, Philip. It’s really astonishing how people, people with brains too, can know so little about themselves. The more I see of life, the more I’m convinced that onlookers really do see most of the game.’

  ‘So they do.’ Philip’s voice, dropping into a meditative bass, could be heard distinctly. ‘Only life isn’t a game, you know, and you never really feel it is except where you yourself are not concerned. That’s where the smart saying breaks down; nearly all smart sayings do break down badly. Anyhow, we ought to stop talking about life, because what we say doesn’t mean anything. What’s the use of saying it’s like this or means that, when obviously it includes both this and that and their opposites.’

  ‘Don’t be sententious, Philip,’ she told him. ‘You’ve said that before, too. Besides, I was talking about Muriel Ainsley.’

  But they were all sententious, Penderel reflected, himself included. They were settling down very cosily. They would all start boasting soon, and if he wasn’t careful, he would be the first, though as usual he would do it topsy-turvily. It was odd how what you might call the Femmishness of the place had suddenly vanished—no, not vanished but retreated. He thought of the girl at his side. Certainly it didn’t stand much of a chance with her, this Femmishness. But perhaps it hadn’t fairly begun yet. He had a feeling that there was more to come. There was a whole night before them and it was early yet. Why, the little band wouldn’t have arrived yet at the ‘Rats and Mice.’

  CHAPTER V

  They had finished eating now and had somehow drifted into silence. Throughout supper, all six of them (Miss Femm had never spoken a word) had chatted easily, though there had been no general burst of talk; but now they were quiet. They might have been waiting for a signal, they were so curiously still. Then suddenly they were given one, for Miss Femm, who had begun to seem a mere object, turned herself into a real person again by rising from her chair and waddling away. She said nothing, gave no meaning glances, did not hesitate, but simply arose and departed. From her manner, they might have been as unreal to her as she had been to them. They stared after her in silence. If they were waiting for a signal, it was not this.

  There came a second one, this time out of the encompassing night, which they had almost forgotten. It might have been thunder rolling among the hills, the bursting of a bank above, or another landslide; the noise was distant and indeterminate, and yet it was full of menace. Sharply, dramatically, it pointed to their situation, like a pin stuck into a map. The roof and walls were no longer another sky and horizon but were roof and walls and nothing more. A little box held them all, tiny creatures crouching in a dot of light. Thus dwarfed and huddled together in body, their spirits first shrank to a point and then expanded in concert. They awoke to share a common mood. The change in them was as decisive as Miss Femm’s exit, but it had to struggle through to the surface, into speech, and so it seemed gradual, as if curtain after curtain of gauze were being raised between them.

  Philip made the first remark, and all he said was: ‘If nobody objects, I think I’ll have a pipe.’ That was nothing, yet by addressing the whole company as he did, he made it easier for the others to speak to the whole table. He brought out his pipe, Sir William found a cigar, and Penderel and the two women lit cigarettes. Mr. Femm contented himself with gin-and-water.

  ‘You know,’ said Penderel, ‘we ought to play a game.’

  ‘Good idea,’ cried Sir William, very hearty and masterful behind his cigar. ‘Can’t sleep yet. What about bridge?’

  Margaret jumped at this. ‘I’d love a game.’ She thought how comforting the familiar faces of the kings and queens would be. No wonder old people, surrounded by strange faces and passing Death every night on the stairs, became so passionately fond of cards.

  ‘But I’ve no cards,’ Sir William went on. He turned to Mr. Femm. ‘Expect you’ve got a pack of cards you could lend us, eh?’

  ‘I have none myself,’ Mr. Femm began, ‘but I have seen a pack here——’ He stopped short, something came and went in his eyes, then he shook his head hastily. ‘No, there are none here. I am sorry.’ It was very queer. Penderel, remembering, looked at him curiously and began to wonder again. Sir William appealed to the Wavertons, but they had none.

  ‘We’ll play Truth,’ said Penderel. ‘It’s just the moment for it.’

  ‘So they have turned it into a game now, have they?’ cried Mr. Femm, in his thin, bitter voice. ‘It was high time they did.’

  Sir William looked puzzled. ‘Don’t seem to know it, and don’t like the sound of it. How d’you play it? Hope it isn’t one of those games that make you use paper and pencil, like so man
y kids at school. If it is, you can count me out. I hate ’em.’

  ‘So do I,’ cried Gladys. ‘Is it one of them?’

  ‘It’s the simplest game in the world,’ Penderel explained. ‘Indeed you can hardly call it a game. We just go on talking but we stop lying. We simply ask one another questions, and these questions must be answered truthfully. You have to be on your honour to answer as truthfully as you can.’

  ‘My God!’ Gladys couldn’t help it, but she stopped short and then said ‘Sorry!’

  ‘This doesn’t seem to be your game, Gladys,’ Sir William told her. ‘You’d better keep out.’

  She shook her head very decisively. ‘Not me. I’m on. It’ll be a nice change for some of us, you particularly, Bill. But somebody wants to be easy with the questions, or God knows what we shall hear.’ She darted a glance across the table at Margaret to see how she was taking it. Not too well apparently. Serve her right.

  ‘You two are in?’ Penderel looked at the Wavertons and they nodded. ‘We’re all in, then. Now, don’t forget, you’re bound to answer as truthfully as you can. Get down to the stony facts.’

  ‘When you think of it,’ Philip growled, looking down into his pipe, ‘the very existence of this pastime, with its one rule about answering truthfully, is an awful comment on society.’

  Mr. Femm stared at him. ‘But what do you expect?’

  ‘Couldn’t say what we think all the time or there’d’—and Sir William waved his cigar—‘there’d be the devil to pay! Not sure how it’ll work even here. Still, I’m with you, and I promise to tell the truth. Won’t hurt me for once. D’you all promise?’ They all promised.

  ‘How shall we begin, then?’ asked Margaret. It was queer, but she was quite eager to begin. She had played it before and had hated it—a thoroughly mischievous little game, she had thought. But now, perhaps because she was in such an odd jumble of a company, perhaps because she was simply taking shelter here, she was more than willing to ask and answer and listen.

  ‘We’ll do it this way,’ Penderel suggested. He pointed to Waverton. ‘I’ll ask you a question, then you’ll ask Mrs. Waverton, and so on round the table. That’s a pleasant neighbourly way of doing it. But everyone must speak up so that we can all hear.’

  Nobody objected to the arrangement. ‘Ask away, then,’ said Philip. ‘But don’t be too hard on me. Remember I’m a shy man and I’m the first in the confessional.’

  ‘All right. Nothing too searching to begin with.’ Penderel reflected for a moment. ‘How’s this, then? There are, you’ll agree, innumerable snags in life——’

  ‘Oh, you mustn’t talk to him about life,’ Margaret broke in. ‘He’s just told me not to.’

  ‘You be quiet, Margaret,’ Philip growled, but felt himself warming towards her. That little characteristic thrust suddenly and cosily domesticated them. ‘Yes,’ he told Penderel, ‘I admit the snags.’

  ‘Good. Well, then’—and Penderel rumpled his hair and the girl at his side laughed at him—‘tell us what seems to you the snag-in-chief, the great, the fundamental snag. In a word, if there’s a catch in life, where does the catch come in? You follow me? Name the fly in the ointment.’

  Philip puffed at his pipe. ‘Wait a minute. That’s a question that can’t be answered without thought.’ He puffed away again.

  ‘You see what I mean?’ said Penderel. ‘Of course, you may not think there is any one great snag or catch. If so, you simply say so.’

  ‘I wish I could,’ Philip replied. ‘I can’t, though, because there is a catch, an enormous fly in the ointment. And to me, it’s this. It seems to me that life demands so much care to be lived at all decently that it’s hardly worth living. I’m talking about life as we see it, civilisation as it’s called, and not the life, say, of a Fiji Islander or a Zulu. With us the whole thing has got to be so careful, so ordered, has become so conscious, asks for so much planning and safeguarding, that we never arrive at any real enjoyment or ease, to say nothing of sheer rapture. We’re like people walking on a tightrope, and the only real pleasure we get is when we say to ourselves, “Well, that bit’s safely passed.” Do you see what I mean? If you decide to lean back and enjoy things, then you simply come a cropper and everything’s smashed for you; but if you’re careful to avoid the cropper, it takes so much out of you that you can’t really enjoy life at all. And it’s no use talking about the golden mean and compromise and so forth, because if you try to work on that principle, you only get bits of cropper, bits of anxiety and carefulness, bits of cropper again, a miserable alternation. If you let things go at all, disaster comes; if you don’t, if you look after them, then you’re simply working hard at it all the time. The trouble is that we can’t trust life, and in order to keep going with it at all, we have to be for ever watching it and patching it up. Therefore the only sort of happiness we can get out of it is like the weird pleasure that some people get from making and altering and fiddling about with wireless sets. So long as we continually turn the discs and change coils, we can congratulate ourselves on the fact that the set’s working, but that’s all we can do. We can’t sit back and listen to the music. There’s the great snag. You all see what I mean?’

  ‘Can’t say that I do exactly,’ said Sir William. ‘Give me an instance.’

  ‘Well, take a comparatively simple matter. Health, for example. Life’s hardly worth living without decent health, but according to the thousand and one experts of the body, we must look after this and that and the other in order to keep reasonably fit, and if we took the slightest notice of one-half of them we should be worrying about our bodies all day. Most of us don’t trouble, of course, but the fact remains that most of us are rapidly drifting further and further away from good health and we shall soon find ourselves crocked. I’d like to come to a life in which I could play the fool with my body without inevitable disaster. I must have been meant for such a life, for there’s something inside me that protests against these conditions we know. Or, take personal relations. They ought to be delightfully easy and careless, but they can’t be now that we’re so self-conscious. The best of them can’t be left to look after themselves a month, and to keep them going properly is only another anxiety. By the time our relations with the people close to us have been put in proper trim, we’re in no state to enjoy them but can only find a dim sort of pleasure in the thought that they are in proper trim. Again, take children. Being a parent is rapidly becoming a nightmare of worry. I’m not attacking mere crankiness now, for most of the worry is justified, and that’s the trouble. If you don’t worry, if you are grand and complacent, then life will make haste to see that they suffer for it. You can’t enjoy the children—you’ve no energy left for it—you can only enjoy repeating to yourself that you’re doing your best for them. We’ve no easy and rapturous contact with things themselves; we only watch their shadows, either anxiously or, at the best, with a dim sense of triumph. There’s the snag, the catch, then. We’ve either eaten too much or still too little from the Tree of Knowledge. As it is, we know just enough to give life a hair-trigger.’ Then he looked round apologetically. ‘Sorry. I seem to have made a speech.’

  While the others were waving away his apology, Margaret was telling herself that she had never heard Philip reveal himself so clearly and fully, even though he did it unconsciously. That speech was dear old Phil all over: he didn’t trust life an inch. It was a silly grumble, she told herself, but only the very nicest kind of man could have made it. And now it was her turn. She looked at Philip speculatively. What would he ask her?

  ‘Your turn to ask now, Waverton,’ said Penderel. ‘And you’re lucky, having a wife for victim.’

  Philip looked at her as if she were a strange person. It gave Margaret a little thrill, though she knew that it was because they were playing this game, for she had noticed that look before in company.

 
‘Your question is this,’ said Philip, still looking at her as if he had hardly ever seen her before. ‘What do you want? What are you getting at? What do you want, in your heart of hearts, to do, to be? What’s the core of the thing for you?’

  ‘That’s the sort of question a man would ask,’ Margaret exclaimed. ‘As if I had a definite object in life tucked away in a pigeonhole in my mind! Still, I’ll try to find an answer. Let me think.’ She glanced round at the eyes fixed upon her, and wished there was another woman of her own kind there, to whom she could address herself. That girl wouldn’t understand. ‘Well,’ she began, hesitatingly, ‘I’m not sure I can make myself clear or whether you’ll understand. The question is, what am I getting at, what do I really want to do or to be, isn’t it? All I can say is that I want to create a certain atmosphere, which I won’t attempt to define for you. It’s in my mind, just as the idea for a novel or a play is in an author’s mind, but I have to bring it outside, into life—do you see?—just as the author has. I want to bathe life itself in this atmosphere. I want to move in the centre of this atmosphere, really to be always creating it, and I want the people close to me, the ones I care for, to live in this atmosphere, and other people, friendly outsiders, to come and dip into it and recognise it and tell themselves that it’s my atmosphere and very good. This atmosphere contains all the good things of life, all those things that men put into separate compartments and somehow raise above life, and because it includes them, is served by them, it’s naturally more important than any of them.’ She warmed to the thought now and forgot her audience. ‘By doing this—or trying to do this—you’re creating in the most marvellous way because you’re using life itself as the raw material. And the women who’ve succeeded in doing it—there are bad atmospheres as well as good ones, of course—are really tremendous, like queens without the fuss and the show. Men only notice it in a dim sort of way, though they’re affected by it, of course, and you can see how the greatest of them have been enchanted by a certain woman’s atmosphere. They’ve not simply fallen in love, as people always think, but they’ve discovered a new country and have stayed there. That’s what I want then, to create my own little country.’ She stopped, breathless, and looked round at her listeners, feeling suddenly frightened. The next moment there would be a huge guffaw. But there wasn’t; everybody looked either puzzled or friendly or both; and she felt relieved and rather happy. She smiled at them: ‘I seem to have been guilty of a speech too. I apologise.’