Джон Пристли - Benighted

CHAPTER III

Margaret felt relieved at the very sight of her bag. Five minutes with it in private and she would be herself again. Dry clothes and a comb through her hair would settle everything. The last ten minutes had been dreadful. She felt all wet round her shoulders and knees, and so bedraggled, so effaced by rain and rushing darkness, that she could hardly think of herself as having the outward appearance of a complete real person. It was like being a tattered ghost; you couldn't possibly face anything. It had been worse coming in here, meeting these people, than it was in the actual danger outside. The moment you were less than yourself, people were the worst of all. There had been one awful second, when this queer creature, Miss Femm, had been screaming at her brother, when she had suddenly wanted to scream herself, to clutch at Philip, to drag him to the door, back to the car. It was absurd. But she was wet and tired; the storm had got on her nerves. Once neat outside, cosy within, she would be ready to face anything. Now for some dry things at last.

She picked up her bag and walked up to Miss Femm. "I'm dreadfully wet," she said, producing a splendid woman-to-woman smile. "May I go and change my things?"

"What?" the woman screamed at her. Of course, she was deaf. How annoying deaf people were, and how queer: they seemed scarcely human. Margaret repeated her request in a loud voice, but this time without the smile. She felt like a ridiculous little girl.

Miss Femm nodded. "You look wet. You go and change your clothes."

"A bathroom perhaps?" Margaret shouted. How silly she sounded! "Will you please show me where to go?"

"You'll have to go in my bedroom. That's all there is." There was no note of apology in this. Miss Femm seemed to be enjoying herself. "There's no bathroom, not now. It's all in ruins. You couldn't get inside the door. We're all in ruins here. You'll have to put up with it." Only the tiny snapping eyes were alive in that doughy face of hers. They went travelling over Margaret like two angry little exiles in a hateful country.

"I quite understand. It's very good of you to have us here." Margaret made a movement to show that she was tired of standing there with the bag in her hand.

"Come with me then." Miss Femm turned and went waddling away. Margaret, following behind, expected her to make for the staircase and was surprised to find her going towards a door on the left. They passed through this door and walked down a very dimly lit corridor that had an uncarpeted stone floor. Margaret shivered: the place was like a cellar. There was a big window on the left, without curtains, brightly slashed with rain until she came up to it, and then it was all black, with the night roaring outside. This must be the back of the house then. A little further on, however, they came to a door on the same side as the window. Miss Femm halted, her hand on the knob. It flashed upon Margaret that if this door were opened the wind and the rain and the darkness would come in, and they would walk through it back into the night. But she must be sensible; this wasn't the place for silly fancies; there must be a little wing, of course, jutting out here.

"You came yourselves, didn't you?" cried Miss Femm, still standing at the door. "You thought it better to be here than out there, eh? Well, you'll have to put up with it. We're all going to pieces here. You'd have been proud to come here once; you'd have thought my brother, Sir Roderick, a great man then; and so he was, in a way. But not in God's way. None of them were that. And now they're all rotting, going to pieces, choked with dust, like this house. We've done with life here, what you'd call life." Her voice had risen to a scream again.

There was no reply to this and Margaret didn't try to make any. With someone else she might have ventured some soothing meaningless remark, but you couldn't do that at the top of your voice. The woman was obviously a little mad, probably touched with religious mania, and if she had lived here all her life there was some excuse for her. After all, there was no reason to be alarmed. These were only the old apologies (I'm afraid you'll find us all upset, Mrs. Waverton) in a new fantastic shape. So she said nothing, but nodded sympathetically. There was something comforting in the very weight of the bag she was holding.

Miss Femm opened the door. "I've none of this electric light. I won't have it. You'll have to wait till I've lit the candles." She went in and Margaret waited in the doorway. The room was not quite dark for a sullen glow of firelight crept about in it. Margaret took heart. A fire was more than she had expected. It was all going to be quite pleasant. Two candles were alight now, one on a rather high mantelshelf and the other on a little dressing-table. "Come in," Miss Femm shouted, "and shut the door."

The room was not very large; it seemed to be crowded with heavy furniture; and it was closely shuttered. You couldn't imagine it ever having had an open window. The place was muggy and stale, smelling as if it were buried deep in dirty old blankets. On the left was a big bed, piled suffocatingly high with clothes, and an enormous wardrobe so top-heavy that it seemed to be falling forward. A wood fire smouldered in a little iron grate. On the other side of the fireplace were a massive chest of drawers, looking as if they bulged with folded alpaca and flannel and moth-balls, the little dressing-table, which had a tiny cracked mirror on it, and a dismal wash-hand stand. The walls seemed to be crowded with old-fashioned oleographs and steel engravings of an hysterically religious kind, full of downy-bearded and ringleted Saviours, and with ornamented texts about the Prince of Love and the Blood of the Lamb. Having once glanced round, Margaret kept her eyes away from the walls. Next week, to-morrow even, these things would probably seem funny; the whole room would be a remembered joke; but at the moment it was all rather horrible. It was all so thick and woolly and smelly.

There was a chair near the fire and Margaret promptly took possession of it. She felt rather sick. Miss Femm, a thick little image, stood watching her at the other side of the fireplace. Why didn't the creature go? Margaret pulled the bag towards her and began to unfasten it. "Thank you," she called, looking up. "I can manage quite well now." It was a relief to see her own things, so familiar, so sensible, snugly waiting her in the open bag.

Miss Femm suddenly shattered the silence. "I stay down here," she shrieked, "because it's less trouble and it's quiet. My sister Rachel had this room once, after she'd hurt her spine. She died here. I was only young then, but she was younger than I was, only twenty-two when she died. That was in ninety-three – before you were born, eh?"

Margaret nodded and kicked off a shoe. She hoped this wasn't opening a chapter of reminiscence. She wanted to change and get out of this place. The very thought of the hall, with Philip and the others there, seemed pleasant now.

"Rachel was a handsome girl, wild as a hawk, always laughing and singing, tearing up and down the hills, going out riding. She was the great favourite. My father and Roderick worshipped her and let her have all her own way. All the young men that came followed her about. Then it was all Rachel, Rachel, with her big brown eyes and her red cheeks and her white neck. She found a young man to please her at last, but one day she went out riding and they brought her back in here. She was six months on that bed, and many an hour I spent listening to her screaming. I'd sit there by the bedside and she'd cry out for me to kill her, and I'd tell her to turn to Jesus. But she didn"t, even at the end. She was godless to the last."

With both shoes off now, Margaret was waiting impatiently for the woman to go. She didn't want to listen, but there was no escape from that screeching voice nor from the image it called up of the long-dead Rachel Femm, who would remain with her like a figure from a bad dream. Somehow she felt as if the broad road of life were rapidly narrowing to a glittering wire. She must hurry, hurry. She stood up, pointedly turned her back on her companion, and began taking things out of the bag.