Free Stop Press by Michael Innes

cloud of perplexity on his face. ‘Yes, I see what you mean. I can conceive an attitude from which all the writing that ever was might appear as a fragment of some pointless mathematical labour. Only your observer would soon see that the combination were being pursued in a very haphazard manner.’ And Mr Eliot looked enquiringly at Winter, seeming to wonder if he were making the right responses in this eccentric conversation.
    ‘Exactly!’ Winter, turning up the collar of his coat, nodded with an exaggerated air of logical keenness. ‘So why not organize and concentrate? Students of language have demonstrated the possibility of putting a linguistic instrument adequate to every operation of the human intellect upon a single sheet of notepaper. A steady drive for say a couple of centuries with that – a steady working out, regardless of the distractions of seeming sense and nonsense, of the possible combinations of such a rational language–’
    ‘Little Limber,’ said Timmy.
    ‘Snug,’ said Timmy.
    ‘…And the intellectual frailty’, said Winter – who had persuaded himself that he must talk or freeze – ‘of believing that by feeding the flux of experience once more through the typewriter, twisting it here and there with exhausting and boring prestidigitation into the casually pleasing effects which are called art–’
    He stopped. Mr Eliot was listening with the politest attention, but rather – Winter suddenly saw – as a matter of duty than of pleasure. It was not that Mr Eliot was incapable of following a fantastic argument; it was simply that this sort of thing was not his pigeon. Emancipated from his own popular literary labours Mr Eliot was serious. Sustained by the sense of a serious environment – of reasonably conducted dons and of daughters who studied early printers’ devices – he could be spontaneously gay. But faced with levity where he expected the solemnities of literary discussion he became perplexed and his gaiety faded; his whole personality faded visibly, as figures on a stage fade into insubstantiality at a touch on a dimmer. Winter, made aware of this oddly physical effect and divining something of the mechanism at work, was conscious too that he had rashly proceeded farther in his absurd theme than was tactful or even decent. This amiable and volatile gentleman, in whose house he was going to stay in obscure and somewhat uncomfortable circumstances, was the manufacturer of thirty-seven romances. And Winter, to beguile this chilly and trundling tail-end of a journey, had been presenting him with an extravagant vision of the profession of letters as an ant-like activity, one of the ultimate futilities of the human spirit. Mr Eliot, it was true, had begun the debate, but on the most unpretentious level. There had been no call for aggressive pyrotechnics in reply. Appalled by a sudden sense of his sins – a sense pointed by the positively cliff-like symbol of dissociation into which the so correct Toplady had erected The Times – he tumbled into apology. He had been talking, he was sure, most tedious nonsense. He even stopped curling and uncurling his toes, as if that too were an offence against the bread and salt he was presently to consume.
    There was a slightly awkward pause. It was terminated by the voice of Toplady. ‘Old Findon?’ he asked.
    ‘Cold Findon,’ said Timmy.
     
    ‘A tedious train,’ said Mr Eliot. But this time he spoke as if he meant it. He peered despondently through the window – a different being from the gentleman who had so childishly and delightedly eluded his guests. ‘How melancholy the winter landscape can be.’
    Winter peered too. A cottage, a haystack chopped like a half- consumed loaf, an unstartled Jersey cow – these had as background bare fields cross-hatched with hedgerows and beyond them a gentle grassy swell – the fringes of downland country – crowned with a grove of oaks. And on the other side the face of nature stretched away in