J. B. Priestley

“ He alone is unspotted, hospitality incarnate, the perfect host, whose story I have lately read in an old volume that is a gallery of strange forgotten figures. There, it is true, he appears only as a man of whims, an eccentric, an oddity in a collection of oddities; but it takes time for a man to come into his own. But though nearly two hundred years have gone over his grave, Mr. Mathew of Thomastown, for such was his designation, shall take his true place yet as the pattern of hosts and the idol of all who go out as guests. ”

“ Soon I came upon an old man, warming his blood in the sunshine. I gave him greeting, and he creased his face with a smile, saying: ‘Stay a while and I will tell you a tale.’
So I stayed, and he told me a tale I had never heard before. It was called ‘The Man who could not eat Porridge’; but I have forgotten it now.
Further down the highway was the edge of a Pine Forest, dark and full of years, and as I passed I heard Time and Death whispering and chuckling together in the gloom. I hurried along and came near to the End of the World. There I met an Angel, sitting on a great flat stone. ”

“ If it is Madame Nature who gives us the truth, who sets up the standard by which our talk must be judged, then there is hardly room in this universe for bold lying and no man should be accused of it.
The great poets follow Nature as closely in this love of the hyperbole as they do in other matters. It is your little poets, your timid versifiers, who write in fear of the raised eyebrows of the pedant and the guffaw of the unimaginative, and keep their images down to the level of coffee-room gossip. ”

“ It was as if the door had been opened into Siberia. The thought of the menacing night and the Wavertons waiting there behind him, the contrast between their situation and this senseless immobility suddenly angered him. He raised his voice: ‘The road here’s under water now. There are floods, landslides. All the mountain side’s coming down. We shall have to stay here. Don’t you understand?’
If the man did, he gave no sign, but stood there as if he were staring out of another world. Penderel had a sudden desire to pound the great senseless carcase. ”

“ Somehow it was as if all things had narrowed to one perilous rim.
‘Give me London,’ said Gladys, her mouth close to his ear. ‘London every time. You never see a night like this there. It never seems so bad. Ugh! I’d get the horrors here. And, mind you, I’ve struck some rotten places in London, but you always feel you’ve only to make a little dash for it and everything’s all right, there’s the lights and the buses and policemen just outside. But look at this.’
‘We’re probably cut off altogether by this time.’ Penderel found the idea attractive. ”

“ I have never played a mouth-organ, because I know that my own native optimism would not be strong enough to resist the baneful influence of the music it makes. To hear it now and again is more than enough for me.
To one who is filled with the joy of life—a small boy, for example—such hopeless strains may prove only invigorating, may serve as a wholesome check upon his ebullient spirits, like the skeleton at the Egyptian feasts. But to most of us weaker brethren, frail in spirit, music that is unillumined by even a glimmer of hope is intolerable. ”

“ Go to the cards, and see existence woven madly in black and crimson—The life they present knows nothing of boredom, for no card in all the pack stands for such a thing—Go read the cards! As for myself, I have but one confession to make: I dare not play at cards now, for they are fraught with such significance to me that I could not trifle with them in a mere game. I cannot rid them of their meanings, and while others are thinking of nothing but winning tricks, I see myself, and my unconscious colleagues, playing havoc with the destinies of dark ladies and fair men. ”

“ Philip’s queer little exit had somehow left her shaken, and now she regarded Miss Femm with positive hatred.
‘Must leave us a light, you know,’ Sir William shouted. And he gave Margaret a friendly glance, as if to suggest that he knew what she was feeling, a glance for which Margaret, who hadn’t expected it, was instantly grateful. ‘If you’re going,’ he went on, bellowing cheerfully, ‘you must leave us this. Can’t sit in the dark.’
In reply to this, Miss Femm, surprisingly enough, produced from the grey fat folds of her face a kind of smile. ”

“ Many men had his respect, even his homage, but as an editor—and I never knew him as anything else—he would allow no man to dictate to him; he served only the Public and ‘those few great principles.’ ‘An editor,’ he would say, tapping a sheet of paper with his glasses, ‘is the servant of the Public although his duty is to educate it.’ And his innocent vanity would swell out into such monstrous proportions, would bud and blossom into such foolish phrases, that his hearer would wonder if he had suddenly strayed into the rigid world of the third-rate comic novel. ”

“ He’d always been more afraid of madness than anything else—the very thought of a maniac had always filled him with terror, and when this creature had raved on the stairs he’d felt sick, as if he were being pelted with lumps of putrid flesh—and of course he’d have to come in the end to face it alone. The thing came at last, the darkness shaping itself, and immediately everybody disappeared, doors were locked all round you, and you found yourself alone with it. That noise again, much nearer this time! Yes, he was at the other end of the landing. ”

“ As a husband and family man Mathew would have been admirable and still the very soul of hospitality, but, you may depend upon it, he would never have carried out his astonishing scheme, never have had his coffee-house and tavern and what not at Thomastown, never have come down to us as one of the most delightful eccentrics of his age. As it was, the life at Thomastown was a purely masculine affair, as remote from femininity as that of a monastery or a college, and better than either, where men not desperately in love could ‘fleet the time carelessly,’ away from their ladies’ eyes. ”

“ There came gibbering into it the fancy that she was the victim of a plot, that all the others had been deliberately spirited away by Miss Femm, who would lock them all up and then come creeping back to lay a toad-like witch’s hand [174] upon her. For one sickening moment she could feel that hand, but the next instant the whole fantastic web was broken. Nerves and a too eager imagination were playing her false again, playing false indeed to life itself, through which there ran the unbroken cord of sanity; they were lying and treacherous, betraying her mind back into primitive darkness. ”

“ There are some men who will handle words and images in their talk as if they were making miniature watches instead of re-creating a world. Give me a man like Carlyle, who roared for the truth night and morning, and yet did not hesitate to juggle with the universe, to cut and carve it and parcel it out afresh, for his own good purposes. Where there is such divine bounty, to cut the fashion of one’s speech like some pitiful little tailor snipping his own cloth is the very height of meanness. ”

“ Penderel noticed that Waverton, now no longer a manipulator of brakes and gears but a human being, was looking about him curiously and stealing an odd glance or two at friend Femm. And well he might, Penderel told himself, and suddenly felt unreasonably sorry for Waverton. Somehow he felt that Waverton ought not to be there. Waverton wasn’t like him, a man without a load, almost outlawed, naked, but a fellow who had given—what was it?—yes, hostages to fortune. He had, for example, a wife there, now changing her clothes. How odd women were, always either not quite human or too human! ”

“ A book may be a vain thing, but it knows nothing of that swelling vanity which belongs to us alone, and to creators more than most. This apart, we must discriminate between good and bad authors. A writer who has been unsuccessful in his art, one who is not master of his craft, a bad author in fact, may be, and very often is, better than his books. An encounter with such a one will not be sought after, except by the wise few, but it may very well bring surprise and delight in its train. ”

“ Blood and sweat ran down his face, blinding him; the pain in his side was intolerable; and he felt his strength ebbing out; but he held on, held on as if there was nothing else left in the world to do. And all the while his mind, escaping from this shameful nightmare of stench and blood and pain, went darting back to queer memories and flashing along the edge of vivid little dreams; and once more he was lying in the long cool grass near the playing-field wall, or listening to Jim and Tom Ranger outside a tent, a glimmer of starlight there, or standing under the blossom at Garthstead ”

“ Nothing that has been arranged for the piano or that can be played in some sort of fashion on the instrument comes amiss if it has once aroused our enthusiasm; symphonies, operas, tone-poems, string-quartets are all welcome. Nay, we often prefer the arrangements of orchestral things, for we do not think of the piano merely as a solo instrument; to us it is the shining ivory and ebony gateway to the land of music. As our fingers wander over the keys our great dream-orchestras waken to life. ”

“ Margaret nodded in silence. The thought of being left in total darkness filled her mind. Her skin tightened and shrank again from a clammy touch. If those lights did go out, she wouldn’t move a yard from the fire and Philip until morning.
Mr. Femm, who had exchanged a remark with Penderel, now remembered his duties as a host and stretched a hand towards the dish of potatoes.
‘Stop!’ screamed his sister, making them all jump. ‘What are you doing? We’re not all heathens.’
He brought back his hand, folded his arms, and looked across at her with a sneer on his face. ”

“ I believe that at the very end, when the depths of our folly and ignorance are fully revealed, when all our false notes have been cast up into one awful total by the recording angel of music, it will be found that we, the bad pianists, have been misjudged among men, that we, too, have loved and laboured for the divine art. When we file into Elysium, forlorn, scared, a shabby little band, and come within sight of Beethoven, whom we have murdered so many times, I believe that a smile will break through the thunder-cloud of his face. ”

“ I’m always glad to wake in the morning and find myself out of my dreams, which always turn me into a poor shaking barbarian wandering in the dark, compelled to do some idiotic thing with terror all round me. Ordinary life’s bad enough, but it’s a prince to the stuff we spin out of our rotten unconsciousnesses every night. Don’t you think so?’
‘I’m not sure.’ Penderel stopped to consider the question. ‘I think I must be one of the other people. I often have a splendid time in dreams, and hate waking up. Perhaps when I wake up, I land into one of your dreams. ”