Free Stop Press by Michael Innes Page A

similar severe neutrality – waiting, Winter thought, for such as Mr Eliot to pump in something of their own changing chemistry. Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud.
    ‘I am interested’, said Mr Eliot, ‘in what you have been saying about writing. It reminds me of a passage in the third part of Gulliver’s Travels – the one filled with the pedants and people of barrenly ingenious mind.’ He paused to smile at Winter – evidently he was not guileless and continued in careful résumé . ‘You will remember the professor who had perfected a machine for improving speculative knowledge by practical and mechanical operations? It was an enormous mosaic of words; what you have called a whole human vocabulary. The professor’s pupil manipulated levers, the whole mosaic fell into a new order, and the result was noted down. In time the device was going to give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences. The satire, at its most obvious, is directed at the professor and his nonsensical invention. But it is meant, perhaps, to hit at the arts and sciences too – to hit, just as you have been so amusingly doing, at the whole business of writing. Writing is a matter of shoving the words about and might very well be done by a machine.’
    Mr Eliot paused and for a moment looked doubtfully at Winter. Then his eye grew abstracted, searching some problematical territory in front of him. ‘Swift’, he said, ‘distrusted what he called vain babbling and mere sound of words. He distrusted the Word ; perhaps he feared it.’
    Toplady put down The Times – cautiously. Timmy, who had been fidgeting, was sitting very still.
    ‘Swift,’ said Mr Eliot, ‘the most rational of men, feared the Word because it is magical. He tried never to use it magically; only flatly, barely, rationally. But – because he understood as well as feared – the magic crowded in upon his writing. He shoved the words about and somewhere’ – Mr Eliot gestured diffidently – ‘another world acknowledged a fresh act of creation. Mr Winter: Lilliput and Brobdingnag – would you deny that they exist?’
    The little train rattled sleepily but pertinaciously onwards; the engine whistled; from down the corridor came the subdued whine of a Birdwire dog. But within the compartment silence was absolute.
    ‘It is’, said Mr Eliot, ‘a metaphysical problem.’ He looked up quickly as if there was something encouraging in this reflection. ‘An interesting metaphysical problem. I remember a colleague of yours’ – he glanced at Winter – ‘a New College man and a most distinguished philosopher’ – he turned to the gravely attentive Toplady – ‘putting a very pretty question. Just what is the metaphysical status of a wild animal encountered in a dream? If the dream is vivid or terrifying then there is an obvious sense in which the creature in it is more real than any similar creature observed in the security of the zoo. And the same problem attaches to the creatures of the world of words as to the creatures of the world of dreams. What is their status?’
    From the corridor came some casual sound. Winter found himself starting and glancing half-fearfully out. Fanciful talk in return for fanciful talk – only behind this talk of his host’s was the pressure of urgent thought. The Spider was indeed stirring, if only in his creator’s mind; was asserting himself as something mysteriously more and other than the sum of the words from which he had been built up. His footstep – less solid perhaps than a mortal’s, yet not heard by an inner ear alone – might even now be echoing down some farther corridor of the train; his eye might be bent curiously on Bussenschutt, be frowning at Mrs Birdwire’s dogs. Winter, who had no fancy for notions of this sort, found that he had to brace his mind to get rid of them.
    ‘Yesterday’, continued Mr Eliot, ‘I happened to see the porter at my club for the first time in nearly a year. What has he