Benighted

by J. B. Priestley

  They cried out at this. ‘No apologies necessary, Mrs. Waverton,’ Sir William’s voice came booming. ‘You’re too deep for me, though. Who’s next? Can’t we have a few facts?’

  It was Margaret’s turn, and her neighbour was Mr. Femm. She looked at him in bewilderment. He ought not to have been included, she felt, as she stared at the long, lined yellow mask he turned to her. There were deep wrinkles all round his eyes and the thin high bridge of his nose gleamed white as if the bone had burst through the skin, but the eyes themselves were as vague as smoke. She couldn’t ask him anything. He was as strange as a mandarin. Then she suddenly remembered Rebecca Femm and the dead Rachel Femm and the women who came in silks and scents and the men who said ‘Go away and pray,’ and it all seemed like something from a crazy old story she had just laid aside, and yet this man was in it, a character come to life. No, not quite to life.

  ‘I am ready, Mrs. Waverton.’ How queer it was to hear him speak. It made it worse.

  ‘Hurry up, Margaret.’ This from Philip. She was being absurd. Anything would do. ‘Tell us,’ she heard herself saying, ‘why you chose to live here.’

  Mr. Femm took a sip of his gin-and-water and replaced the glass very carefully, then he peered across the table, at the place his sister had vacated, and compressed his thin lips until his mouth seemed to vanish completely. ‘I came here,’ he said finally, ‘or rather I returned here, for I was born and brought up in this very house, for the same reason that brought you here. I did not want to live again in this house just as you did not want to spend a night in it. You came here for shelter, and so did I. When I decided to return, I had no money and no further prospects, if only because I was wanted by the police. That surprises you. It was nothing really criminal, nothing, that is, in bad taste, but the Law in this country happens to be as heavy and stupid and idiotic as the poor creatures it is supposed to benefit, and Chance for once was not on my side. This is the home of my family, it was my home too, once, so I returned to it, knocked at the door as you did to-night and demanded shelter. I have been here ever since.’ He lifted his glass again while they stared at him in silence. It was not that they were struck dumb by amazement but that there did not seem to be anything to say. Sir William made a noise in his throat that sounded like the preliminaries of speech, but he must have changed his mind for no words came.

  ‘So far, so good,’ said Penderel. ‘It’s your question now, Mr. Femm.’ But he couldn’t imagine that heavy-jowled magnate, whose turn it was, telling the truth. He was too rich, too successful, for the truth.

  Mr. Femm glanced at his neighbour and then looked straight in front of him. ‘You must tell us,’ he said, slowly, ‘the worst thing you have done during these last twelve months.’

  ‘Here!’ cried Sir William, protesting. ‘That’s a stinger, isn’t it?’

  ‘The thing,’ Mr. Femm added calmly, ‘that you are most ashamed of doing.’

  ‘You don’t want much, do you?’ He blew out a cloud of cigar smoke as if to relieve his feelings. Then he considered. ‘Well, I don’t know.’ He frowned and looked doubtful, but then suddenly his face cleared. ‘All right. You shall have it. The worst thing I’ve done this year. It’s nothing startling. Don’t expect any Sunday paper stuff, amazing revelations, orgies in the West End, that sort of stuff. But I’ll be honest with you; this really is the thing I’m most ashamed of. No names, of course, and all in confidence. Well, a few months ago I had a quarrel with the manager of one of my concerns and got rid of him. That’s all. But there’s a devil of a lot behind it. I said he wasn’t good enough, didn’t suit me, but the fact is he was one of the best managers I’d got and a better man than the fellow that took his place. And I knew it. He was just the sort of man I wanted in the business, a real find, all over the work and keen as a razor. But I booted him out. Why? I’ll tell you.’ He stopped for a moment, set his jaw, then laughed shortly. ‘You’ll probably find it amusing. I got rid of him because I couldn’t stand his damned superiority. That’s what it amounts to. He was only a youngster, had only left Oxford or Cambridge a few years when he came to me. He got to be manager of this particular concern in no time. I believe in rapid promotion and this fellow was worth it. But every time I saw him he made me uneasy. Nothing in his manner, at least nothing you could put a finger on. But—well, I always wanted to ask him where he got his shirts and ties from; I could never find any like ’em. That’s nothing, you think, but it worried me, made me feel uneasy. Then one day he asked me to go to dinner, meet his wife, who’d be honoured and delighted and so on. I went, and that settled it. There were only the three of us. His wife was very charming, very pretty woman too, and talked well. Her father’d been the Professor of something-or-other at Edinburgh. She was obviously in love with her husband and he with her, really in love, and I know the difference. Well, that was all right, something I like to see, in fact, though you mightn’t think it, but I’m a bit of a sentimentalist. They talked and they let me talk, encouraged me, were almost deferential. But that superiority was there. It was the shirts and ties all over again, only much worse. I felt more and more uncomfortable, uneasy, dissatisfied somehow. I tried to talk the feeling down, told ’em some of the things I’d done, spread myself out, but I knew it was just missing all the time. I could hear my own voice going on and on, bragging to no purpose; I could see myself, hot and sweating and waving my arms; and yet I knew this wasn’t really myself, you know. There was something in the confounded atmosphere of these people that was making me publish a libel of myself just to make some sort of impression on them. And the harder I tried, the more I was convinced that what I was saying, what I did, what I looked like, didn’t amount to anything, that is, didn’t seem to amount to anything with these people. D’you see what I mean? Of course I knew well enough, nobody better, that it did amount to something; I don’t pretend to despise myself. But I couldn’t get it over, as the actors say. And while I was fuming and sweating and talking big, there they sat, absolutely easy and comfortable, so damned sure of themselves. Nothing to do with social experience, y’know, for I’d had as much of that as they had. I’d had more, been to places they hadn’t reached, not by a long chalk. It was that mysterious superiority. Well, when I couldn’t make any headway against it, it got on my nerves. I’d beat it somehow. So when I left them that night, I said to myself, going home, “All right. I’ll show you. You’re doing very well, aren’t you? Everything’s beautiful. Well, we’ll see. I’ve made you and I’ll unmake you.” Within a month I’d faked a lot of grievances against him, and very soon I had him out. I paid for it, of course, losing a good man. It was all dead against my own interests. But I couldn’t rest until I’d done it. But I knew what I’d done. A damned dirty trick, weak too. And that’s that. Gad, but I’m thirsty.’

  He accepted some of Mr. Femm’s gin, the only drink on hand, hastily mixed it with water, and, without lifting his eyes, emptied the glass. ‘That’s better,’ he said, and looked round. If they didn’t like it, he thought, they could lump it. Anyhow, they had asked him and he had told them the truth. He had rather enjoyed it too; this was the time and place for telling these things, explaining yourself for once in a while. It was all right; they all looked just curious and friendly, except perhaps the one person he knew, Gladys. She was looking a bit scornful (as she always said herself), not so friendly as the other girl, Mrs. Waverton, who had seemed so cool and superior at first. But then Gladys was probably not judging the case but merely happened to be out of patience with him.

  ‘Your turn to answer now, Miss Du Cane,’ Penderel told her. ‘You’re in this, of course?’

  Yes, she was in it, and looked eagerly at Sir William. ‘Come on,’ she cried, ‘let’s know the worst.’

  ‘So it’s your turn, Miss Du Cane, is it?’ Sir William smiled rather grimly at her. The name itself suggested a question to him. ‘Suppose, then, you tell us exactly who you are.’
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  ‘Well, if you’re not the limit!’ There was real anger in her fine eyes. ‘What d’you mean by your “exactly who you are”?’

  The others felt uncomfortable, but Sir William himself was not disturbed. ‘Nothing in that. I mean, give us a few biographical details, the sort of thing you find in “Who’s Who.” Think of the question I had to answer. Yours is easy.’ But there was a touch of malice in the smile he gave her.

  Gladys stared at him, pushing out her full underlip, then gave a slight shrug and leaned back in her chair. ‘All right then. Here goes.’ But she stopped for a moment and looked in front of her with unseeing eyes. Then she seemed to give herself a little shake, lifted her chin, and spoke out briskly and bravely. ‘Well, to begin with my name’s not Du Cane. Probably none of you thought it really was, but that doesn’t make it easier to say right out that it isn’t. My real name’s Hoskiss; the Gladys is all right. When I first thought of trying to get into the chorus, I wanted another name, and I happened to see a book called “The Expensive Miss Du Cane.” That’s me, I thought. I was only a kid, seventeen about, at the time. We lived down in Fulham, Walham Green, to be exact, just off North End Road. There were seven of us, three girls, two boys, and mother and father. Father’s a joiner, when he’s working. I don’t suppose any of you know North End Road and district. You should go and have a look at it some time. It’s not one of these absolutely poverty-stricken places, and it strikes you as being quite cheery, lively in fact—so long as you’re half tight or don’t have to live there. I used to run up and down North End Road fetching fried fish and bottles of stout for the family, and try to make enough to get into the gallery of the Granville—that’s the little music-hall at the bottom. We’d only got half a house for the whole seven of us, and the house itself was no size at all, and we were always in one another’s way, with everybody grousing and nagging like fury. We’d one little room for the three of us, the girls I mean, and you can imagine what that was like, each of us shoving the others’ things out of the way or borrowing them to go out in. I was always doing that, being the youngest. Maggie, my eldest sister, got a job as a waitress, met a soldier on leave she liked who said he’d marry her when the war was over. She had a baby and he never came back, and that was that. The kid’s at home now and Maggie’s still a waitress, though not at the same place. Ethel, the one next to me, went to work in a laundry and then got married, married to something that looks like a rat and acts like one. The only thing you could say in his favour was that he was a great change after a laundry. Then I had to go out and work, and went through job after job, three months in one of those cheap sweet shops run by a dirty little Jew who was always putting his arm round me, another three months running about in a big draper’s, running round from morning till night, till I was fit to drop, then in other shops till I landed in the pictures, odd-job girl at one of the local picture palaces. That suited me all right, and at first I thought no end of myself, but the money was rotten, the manager got too friendly, and I couldn’t stick being at home. After I’d been an hour in that house, I wanted to scream. Every time I went up West—to see a show at Daly’s or the Gaiety or the Palace or the Palladium—I’d be awake half the night. And then one night I went to the Granville with two girls I knew and some boys, and they took us into the bar at the interval and gave us some port, and some people from the show came in and we all got friendly. One of the girls had dropped out of that show—it was a revue called “Oh, my eye!’’ absolutely fifteenth rate—and I dropped in. They’d been playing at some of the little London halls and were now going down into the country on one of the bread-and-dripping tours, you know the sort, All This Week in the Pier Pavilion or Three Nights Only at the Corn Exchange. I went with ’em, Miss Du Cane, third from the right in the chorus of twelve. And that’s how Gladys left home.’

  ‘Ever been back since?’ asked Sir William.

  ‘Course I have. But not to live, not likely. I used to look in sometimes when I was flush, and take something for mother or Maggie’s kid. I like ’em all and they like me. If you take any one of them away, get them into a quiet corner away from home and the others, put a drink in front of them, they come out then, you really get to know them. It’s when they’re all jumbled up together at home, nagging and grousing and snarling, that they get on your nerves, at least on mine.’ She looked across and met Margaret’s level glance. ‘But that’s enough of that. I’m not going to tell the story of my life, sir, not even to-night when we’re all lost and far from home and Piccadilly Circus seems to be somewhere in New Zealand.’

  ‘Well, ask a question then,’ said Sir William. ‘Get your own back.’ He was enjoying this and was wondering what Gladys would demand of the rather pale but bright-eyed youngster on her right, Penderel, with whom she seemed to have struck up a friendship at once.

  Gladys leaned forward and then turned her head so that she could look Penderel almost squarely in the face. He was telling himself that her eyes were like very old brown sherry, when she brought out her question. ‘What are you so bitter about?’

  ‘Me!’ It had taken his breath away.

  ‘Yes, you.’ She nodded at him like a wise child.

  ‘Why, am I bitter?’

  ‘I think you are,’ she told him. She appealed to the Wavertons.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Margaret. ‘It’s not perhaps the exact word, but it will do.’ Then she addressed herself to Penderel: ‘Yes, you are bitter, you know.’

  ‘Of course you are, Penderel,’ said Philip heartily. ‘You’re one of the worst post-War cases I know, a thundering sight worse than I am. Come on, admit it. You’re the sort of bloke they denounce in little talks in Bright Sunday Evening Services.’ He grinned and pointed his pipe-stem across the table. ‘Stand up to your question and explain the wormwood.’

  Penderel made a comical little grimace. ‘Well, I never knew I was so obvious. I suppose I shall have to explain myself. I went into the War when I was seventeen, ran away from school to do it, enlisting as a Tommy and telling them I was nineteen. I’m not going to talk about the War. You know all about that. It killed my father, who died from over-work. It killed my elder brother, Jim, who was blown to pieces up at Passchendaele. He was the best fellow in the world, and I idolised him. It was always fellows like him, the salt of the earth, who got done in, whether they were British or French or German or American. People wonder what’s the matter with the world these days. They forget that all the best fellows, the men who’d have been in their prime now, who’d have been giving us a lead in everything, are dead. If you could bring ’em all back, fellows like Jim, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of ’em, you’d soon see the difference they’d make in the place. But they’re dead, and a lot of other people, very different sort of people, are alive and kicking. Well, I saw all this, took an honours course in it, you might say, for it was the only education I got after the fifth form. Then towards the end of the War I fell in love. I was convalescent in a country house and it was spring. She was staying there, and every time we went out walking every little gust of wind snowed down blossom on us. I’ve never seen a place so thick with apple blossom and cherry blossom. And she’d be waiting down there. We became engaged. The world was all made over again and I’d only got to see the War through to find it all waiting for me. I thought about nothing else, went back to France, went through the dust and the gas of the last push in the summer and autumn of ’eighteen, thinking about nothing else. Then just after the Armistice I got a letter. It was all a mistake; we weren’t really suited, too young to know then; she’d found someone else; we’d always be friends. All very reasonable, no doubt, but you see I’d been thinking about nothing else. I got out of the Army, went home and saw her once, and gave it up. But I remember I went down to the old place that spring, in ’nineteen, and all the damned blossom was out again, miles of it, snowing through the air as it did before. It made me ache to se
e it. I told myself that it hadn’t been there for me and only another kind of frost would stop it. I packed my traps and set off to look for work.’ He stopped and looked down at his fingers drumming on the table.

  ‘Go on,’ said Philip, after they had waited a few moments. For that he received one of Margaret’s fierce little nudges, always so surprising because they never seemed part of her. They belonged, in fact, to the other Margaret, the one inside. This was the first he had had for some months and it was so welcome that it tingled.

  ‘I’ll cut it short,’ said Penderel. ‘Well, the good fellows were nearly all gone, love was off, and the world was in a filthy muddle, but there was still work. That was the thing. I told myself I’d work like hell. I could have gone up to Oxford or Cambridge, but didn’t want to go. I wasn’t in the mood for listening to the patter of dry little men in spectacles and then going ragging with a lot of kids. I felt there was nothing a varsity could teach me that I wanted to learn. Pure arrogance, of course, but there you are. I didn’t even want to play their games, their solemn good-form games. I’d go and work, find a man’s job. There was an African scheme going, good land for ex-officers and all that, and so I scraped together every penny I had and went into it and out to Africa. I won’t bore you with that. It was a swindle, and a particularly dirty swindle, the kind that sticks in your gullet. Africa didn’t want me, at least the part I saw didn’t, and I came back broke. I drifted about town for some time and swapped drinks with other fellows in the same boat. The work idea was off, but I was still looking for a job, which isn’t the same thing at all though. One or two of the fellows I knew joined the Black and Tans, and I nearly joined myself—nobody else seemed to want me—but I happened to like the Irish and I didn’t like the sound of their prospective job. So I hung about, talking over schemes with other drifters and having too many drinks. I sold one or two things on commission but found it a poor, dirty game. Then I found I hadn’t a bean, didn’t want to borrow, so put in a spell of navvying, up North on some public works, got the job through pure influence. That did me good, but I haven’t the navvy temperament and technique and it was about as hard as a spell of penal servitude. But I stuck it till we were paid off, came back to town and went round the bars, seeing if there was anything doing. There was—there always is, if you’ve got the stomach for it—but I couldn’t do it. I tried to write—I’d got plenty of material—but could only make a rotten hack job of it, just spoiling the stuff. Then my mother died. She’d not had much to live for after father and Jim went. My one sister had married and was out in India, and I wasn’t exactly a howling success as the prop and mainstay of the family. Some money came to me. It wasn’t much and it didn’t last long. I’ve seen to that. There’s still a little tied up, but I’ve borrowed on the strength of that. When you’ve nothing to do, no aim of any kind, very few real friends, money doesn’t last long. There are twenty-four hours in every day to be paid for, bought off, you might say. I’m one of the ugly ducklings of the War generation, the sort that will never become swans. Already another generation’s come up, who understand this world, who don’t let it take them in, kids soft enough in body and speech but really as hard as nails, all out for a damned good time. They know what they want and how to get it, and nothing’s going to take them in. I’m out too for a damned good time—there’s nothing else to be out for, nothing left—but I don’t get it. And I never will.’