The Dwarfs by Harold Pinter Read Free Book Online Page A

just about ready for your cat. The neighbour, though, was in a state, white in the face. Obviously thought I’d been boiling human bones.
    - Yes, I can see that, Len nodded.
    - You can?
    - Oh yes, I can see that all right.
    The tap dripped. Len turned it tight.
    - Well, how are you, Len? Pete said.
    - What?
    - How’s things?
    - Huh, Len said, and kicked a chair. I’m supper for the crows.
    - Who is?
    - I’ll tell you, Len said, and straddled the chair. I’m a non-participator.
    - Go home. You? You’re just a Charley Hunt.
    - That too.
    - I’ll tell you what your trouble is, Pete said. You need to be more elastic.
    - Elastic? Elastic. You’re quite right. Elastic. What are you talking about?
    - How are you getting on with Christ?
    - Christ? No, no. No. He’s what he is and I’m what I’m not. I don’t see how we can be related.
    - Giving up the ghost, Pete said, lighting a cigarette, isn’t so much a failure as a tactical error. By elastic I mean being prepared for your own deviations. You don’t know where you’re going to come out next at the moment. You’re like a rotten old shirt. Buck your ideas up. They’ll lock you up before you’re much older, if you go on like this. You want to cut out this terror and pity lark. It’s bullshit. Common-sense can work wonders. The first thing you’ve got to do is kill that cat. It’s leading you nowhere.
    Len stood up and wiped his glasses. He looked down, shivering.
    - No, he said. There is a different sky each time I look. The clouds run about in my eye. I can’t do it.
    - The apprehension of experience, Pete said, must obviously be dependent upon discrimination if it is to be considered valuable. That’s what you lack. You haven’t got the faculty for making a simple distinction between one thing and another. Every time you walk out of this door you go straight over a cliff. What you’ve got to do is nourish the power of assessment. How can you hope to assess and verify anything if you walk about with your nose stuck between your feet all day long?
    - Look, Len said, I could never give up Bach.
    - Who asked you to do that?
    - No? Oh. Oh, I see. I misunderstood you.
    - What?
    - You didn’t ask me to give up Bach?
    - What are you talking about?
    - It must have been somebody else.
    Len cleared the cups and put them in the sink.
    - I wonder what Mark’s up to.
    - Saying sweet syllables into some lady’s earhole, Pete smiled. Don’t you think?
    - Probably.
    - Yes, Pete said, he’s a strange chap, is Mark. I sometimes think he’s a man of weeds.
    Balancing the chair under his body, he put his legs up on the table.
    - Yes, he said, I sometimes think he’s a man of weeds. And yet I don’t know. Fie surprises me, that bloke, now and again, for the good, I mean. But often I wonder about him. I sometimes think he makes capital out of the mud on his shoes, that he’s just playing a game. But what game?
    Len turned the tap and rinsed a saucer.
    - I wonder, Pete said, now and again, why I bother. He’s got, after all, a conceit enough to hid an army in. And what’s there to back it up? There’s the point. Eh?
    Len rinsed a cup and did not answer.
    - An attitude. But has it substance or is it barren? Sometimes I think it is barren, as barren as a bombed site. But I won’t be dogmatic on it.
    - No, Len said, wiping; the cups.
    - He’s an elusive customer. Of course, I like him, when it comes down to it. You can forgive a lot. But he’s never done a day’s work in his life, that’s his trouble. He’s a bit of a ponce, he wouldn’t deny it. But I think he overdoes the lechery. Between you and me, he’ll be a spent force in no time if he doesn’t watch his step.
    - Pss! Pss! Len hissed.
    The cat slid out from under the table. Len, warding it off,poured milk into a saucer and stood up. The cat lapped.
    - What do you call that cat?
    - Solomon, said Len.
    He leaned against the sideboard and poked at the corner of his eye, under his glasses.
    - Here, Pete said,