“It’s not quite so bad as that. You’ve come on no end though, you know. The last two or three have been astonishingly good. You’re not creative. You’ve got a good sound mind, a good style and a curious intense critical perception. You’ll be a critic. But writing, Miriam, should be done with a pen. Can’t call yourself a writer till you do it direct.”
“How can I write with a pen, in bed, on my knee, at midnight or dawn?”
“A fountain pen?”
“No one can write with a fountain pen.”
“Quite a number of us do. Quite a number of not altogether unsuccessful little writers, Miriam.”
“Well, it’s wrong. How can thought or anything, well thought perhaps can, which doesn’t matter and nobody really cares about, wait a minute, nothing else can come through a hand whose fingers are held stiffly apart by a fat slippery barrel. A writing machine. A quill would be the thing, with a fine flourishing tail. But it is too important. It squeaks out an important sense of writing, makes people too objective, so that it’s as much a man’s pen, a mechanical, see life steadily and see it whole (when nobody knows what life is) man’s view sort of implement as a fountain pen. A pen should be thin, not disturbing the hand, and the nib flexible and silent, with up and down strokes. Fountain pen writing is like … democracy.”
“Why not go back to clay tablets?”
“Machine-made things are dead things.”
“You came down here by train, Miriam.”
“I ought to have flown.”
“You’ll fly yet. No. Perhaps you won’t. When your dead people have solved the problem, you’ll be found weeping over the rusty skeleton of a locomotive.”
“I don’t mean Lilienfeld and Maxim. I can be fearfully interested in all that when I think of it. But to the people who do not see the beginning of flying it won’t seem wonderful. It won’t change anything.”
“It’ll change, Miriam, pretty well everything. And if you don’t mean Lilienfeld and Maxim what do you mean?”
“Well, by inventing the telephone we’ve damaged the chances of telepathy.”
“Nonsense, Miriam. You’re suffering from too much Taylor.”
“The most striking thing about Taylor is that he does not want to develop his powers.”
“What powers?”
“The things in him that have made him discover things that you admit are true; that make you interested in his little paper.”
“They’re not right you know about their phosphoric bank; energy is not a simple calculable affair.”
“Now here’s a strange thing. That time you met them, the first thing you said when they’d gone, was what’s wrong with them? And the next time I met them they said there’s something wrong with him. The truth is you are polar opposites and have everything to learn from each other.”
“Elizabeth Snowden Poole.”
“Yes. And without him no one would have heard of her. No one understood. And now psychology is going absolutely her way. In fifty years’ time her books will be as clear as daylight.”
“Damned obstructive classics. That’s what all our books will be. But I’ll give you Mrs. Poole. Mrs. Poole is a very wonderful lady. She’s the unprecedented.”
“There you are. Then you must admit the Taylors.”
“I’m not so sure about your little Taylors. There’s nothing to be said, you know, for just going about not doing things.”
“They are wonderful. Their atmosphere is the freest I know.”
“I envy you your enthusiasms, Miriam. Even your misplaced enthusiasms.”
“You go there, worn out, at the end of the day, and have to walk, after a long tram-ride through the wrong part of London, along raw new roads, dark little houses on either side, solid, without a single break, darkness, a streetlamp, more darkness, another lamp; and something in the air that lets you down and down. Partly the thought of these streets increasing, all the time, all over London. Yet when someone said walking home after a good evening at the Taylors’ that the thought of having to settle down in one of those houses made him feel suicidal, I felt he was wrong; and saw them, from inside, bright and big; people’s homes.”
“They’re not big, Miriam. You wanted to marry him.”
“Good Heavens. An Adam’s apple, sloping shoulders and a Cockney accent.”
“I have a Cockney accent, Miriam.”
“…”
“Don’t go about classifying with your ears. People, you know, are very much alike.”
“They’re utterly different.”
“Your vanity. Go on with your Taylors.”
“They are very much like other people.”
“With my Taylors. I’m interested; really.”
“Well, suddenly you are in their kitchen. White walls and aluminium and a smell of fruit. Do you know the smell of root vegetables cooking slowly in a casserole?”
“I’ll imagine it. Right. Where are the Taylors?”
“You are all standing about. Happy and undisturbed. None of that feeling of darkness and strangeness and the need for a fresh beginning. Tranquillity. As if someone had gone away.”
“The devil; exorcised, poor dear.”
“No but glorious. Making everyone move like a song. And talk. You are all, at once, bursting with talk. All over the flat, in and out of the rooms. George washing up all the time, wandering about with a dish and a cloth and Dora probably doing her hair in a dressing-gown, and cooking. It’s the only place where I can talk exhausted and starving.”
“What do you talk about?”
“Everything. We find ourselves sitting in the bathroom, engrossed—long speeches—they talk to each other, like strangers talking intimately on a bus. Then something boils over and we all drift back to the kitchen. Left to herself Dora would go on forever and sit down to a few walnuts at midnight.”
“Mary.”
“But she is an absolutely perfect cook. An artist. She invents and experiments. But he has a feminine consciousness, though he’s a most manly little man with a head like Beethoven. So he’s practical. Meaning he feels with his nerves and has a perfect sympathetic imagination. So presently we are all sitting down to a meal and the evening begins to look short. And yet endless. With them everything feels endless; the present I mean. They
