The Typewriter's Tale Read online

  Chapter Two

  1906

  Frieda did not have strong views on the question of heredity, which Mr Dodds had denounced to her as the futile fabrication of a godless age. But if the years with her mother in penurious Chelsea, after the inconvenient death of her inconvenient father, had taught her anything, it was that she was, after all, the daughter of the man who had, so her mother grimly assured her, ‘done for’ them, through ‘not having what it takes’. In response to Frieda’s queries as to the identity of this exacting force, her mother had replied tersely: ‘Life.’ As this ominously adumbrated entity gradually took shape for Frieda, revealing itself to be a matter of dark corridors and thin soup, of clothes ‘done over’ and furniture propped up, of importunate tradesmen and inadequate relations, she concluded that, like her paternal parent, she did not have what it takes. Like him, too, she turned, when she reached the age of discretion, her back upon the fray, and found refuge in Literature, indeed in the very volumes that, as her mother periodically mentioned in an aggrieved tone, were all that he had left his wife and daughter with which, in her phrase, to bless themselves. Whether for the benefit of this benediction or purely for the redoubt it offered, Frieda from an early age took possession of her meagre patrimony, and found there, if not the solution to the many quandaries attendant upon What it Takes, then at least a consolation for not having found it. Literature was at worst less expensive than Life, and at best more amusing.

  It had seemed natural then, when the time came for her to ‘do something for herself’, through the demise of her mother and the consequent drying up of her little pension, to turn her thoughts and her hand to this field of endeavour, really the only one she had cultivated with any assiduity. But as her mother had long maintained, and as soon enough appeared from her own tentative enquiries, literature was not a gainful employment for any but its most successful practitioners. The problem with literature was that short of writing it oneself there wasn’t very much one could do with it. Writing it herself was indeed an option to which she had addressed herself; but there, too, it transpired that writing was one thing, selling another, and to date she had not succeeded in persuading any buyer of the merit or the commercial viability – she was cynical enough to recognise the distinction – of her modest jottings.

  In the midst of this perplexity, it was suggested by her Aunt Frederica, after whom Frieda had been named and who in consequence felt entitled to take an interest in her welfare, that Frieda should qualify herself as a typewriter. ‘It’s quite the coming thing, my dear,’ she explained to her niece, over the cup of strong tea which she favoured, but of which she scrupulously took only one cup, in deference to what she called Frieda’s reduced state. Her own state had been assured against reduction by the prudence of her late husband, a bank clerk of such seniority as allowed her, without gross violation of her punctilious regard for truth, to refer to him as my late husband the banker. ‘It will take the place of hand-written communications forever. Somebody explained it all at my Women’s Group. They have courses in it. It’s called the mechanisation of the office.’

  To Frieda, things in general seemed more in need of humanisation than mechanisation; but Aunt Frederica explained that the aim of the process was exactly for the machines to free human beings for more fulfilling labour and leisure. Frieda remained sceptical, having in childhood listened in wide-eyed dismay to her father’s fulminations against the Industrial Revolution, leading her to wonder whether it was too late to reverse a process so self-evidently pernicious. Qualifying herself as a typewriter was clearly a capitulation; but Aunt Frederica’s suggestion was at any rate less inconveniently radical than some others that she had ventured – she had once, before the death of Mrs Wroth, advocated emigration to Canada as the remedy to their ills. Besides, typewriting, Frieda imagined, would at worst mean some communion with words. She had the vaguest of notions of what the practice would entail: she thought it might resemble the automatic writing she had witnessed in a darkened parlour in Pimlico, at the behest of her friend Mabel, whose young man Charlie had been killed by the Boers at Mafeking and with whom she sought to communicate through the ministrations of Mrs Beddow.

  Betaking herself with consciously heroic resolve to the Young Ladies’ Academy of Typewriting, an institution chronically advertised on the back of omnibuses, she was assured that for a very small sum she could be trained to produce a certain number of words per minute, a total which the tone of her informant seemed to suggest was prodigious. The small sum, it transpired, was larger than Frieda had at her ready disposal, but Aunt Frederica, pleased that her advice had, ‘for once’, been heeded, offered to make a handsome contribution.

  Even then Frieda would have demurred. Her design upon the future, though very indefinite, had never included a vision of ‘taking dictation’, as she now discovered her function would be designated: it seemed so, in its suggestions of mere receptiveness, to deprive her of any independent agency. She might be poor, but she was not abject. But her destiny declared itself, as it happened, during one of the evenings in Mrs Beddow’s dingily over-decorated parlour. It transpired that Charlie was a difficult subject: despite Mrs Beddow’s ministrations, hitherto so manifestly successful in awaking the departed to the perplexities of the living, the young man stubbornly refused to make known his whereabouts, intentions, or sentiments. Two sessions of Mrs Beddow’s fierce concentration produced nothing but a scrawl which even the eminent spiritualist medium herself was at a loss to elucidate, unless one were to take for an interpretation her firm declaration, in a tone less philosophical than aggrieved, ‘Well I daresay the dead have their reasons same as us.’ She shook her head with such emphasis that her wig shed motes of dust in the lamplight.

  Moved to some form of exculpation of her late sweetheart, and yet also put out at the young man’s failure to respond to the supernatural soliciting on her behalf, Mabel explained, ‘He never did have much to say for himself,’ in a tone to which apology and resentment contributed in about equal measure.

  For her part, Frieda could sympathise with the reticence of the young man. Whatever the nature of the hereafter – and on this she had no clear idea despite the most earnest efforts of Mr Dodds to explain the teachings of the Methodist Church on the subject – she could not conceive of it as a state in which one was liable to being summonsed, at the whim of one’s earthly relics, to account for oneself to Mrs Beddow. Explanations and explications she took to be the stuff of earthly commerce, from which one was exempted at death. If death was not a state of silence, there was very little to be said for it.

  One evening, after Charlie had once again declined to declare himself, Mrs Beddow announced that she could feel ‘trembulations’ signalling, she informed her audience, an urgent need to communicate on the part of one of ‘Them’. Taking up her pencil in a shaking hand and assuming the rapt expression of one in the throes of revelation, she submitted to the urgings of her supernatural correspondent. These were of a vigour unprecedented in the generally rather staid proceedings in the little parlour: her arm was slowly lifted in the air and then flung down on the table with a force suggesting some impatience on the part of her visitant, as if it had taken hold of the limb in error and wanted to divest itself of the encumbrance as promptly as possible. The pencil clattered to the table, but Mrs Beddow caught and clutched it with remarkable address, her face under its unrefulgent wig retaining an air of expectant but serene exaltation despite the indignities visited upon her extremities. Frieda, who was constitutionally uncomfortable in the presence of agitation of any kind, feared that Mrs Beddow’s sang froid would provoke a manifestation of even greater vigour on the part of an agency that had already unmistakably indicated its irritation. But she had reckoned without the force of character that had established Mrs Beddow as the most celebrated medium in Pimlico and Chelsea: her mysterious communicant seemed to have been cowed by her imperturbable mien into tractability and even co-operation, to judge by the large, confident movements o
f her hand, which was unmistakably forming characters on the blank sheet in front of her – characters with which Mrs Beddow seemed to have as little to do as with the flickering of the flame on the table. The arm, recovered from its recent violent convulsion, moved only enough to allow the hand its free range of expression.

  The seizure lasted a few minutes, during which Frieda, whose commitment to the proceedings was at best provisional, weighed up her scepticism against the evidence of her senses. There was of course no effect that a combination of legerdemain and bad light could not achieve; but Mrs Beddow had struck her as the dupe of her own enthusiasm rather than a practised charlatan, vaguely foolish rather than consciously duplicitous. It seemed to the young woman that if the medium had dissembled, she might have done so with more regard to mere aesthetics and with more of the appearance of prosperity than was evident in the threadbare setting and general discouraged air of the dusty old woman. The shabbiness of it all guaranteed its sincerity, if nothing else.

  Mrs Beddow emerged from her trance with an air of modest achievement. ‘That was an unusually powerful visitation,’ she informed her audience. ‘It has left me quite drained.’ Her audience, though sympathetic, was naturally more interested in the legible evidence of the visitation than in its effects on the medium’s constitution; even Frieda found herself hoping that Mrs Beddow was not so devastated as to be incapable of conveying to them the message from beyond. Once again, however, she found that she had underestimated the gumption of their hostess: pushing her wig into place with a determined air, she smoothed out the sheet of paper, and assumed a pair of reading goggles the sheer size of which seemed to confer authority upon the document scrutinised through its bulbous lenses.

  It transpired that in straining to summon forth the reticent spirit of Charlie, Mrs Beddow had aroused the shade of Frieda’s mother who, identifying herself rather grandly as Agatha (in life she had never been more than plain Aggie), made it known, through much misspelling (an effect, the medium reassured Frieda, of the vagaries of automatic writing rather than of educational regression in the next world), that she was concerned about her younger daughter’s welfare, and recommended ‘a corse in somthing usful’. Frieda, in spite of her sceptical view of the proceedings, recognised here, disconcertingly, the authentic note of maternal concern, peremptory and vague at the same time. Something useful: just so had her mother recommended, in Frieda’s youth, ‘something cheerful’ to relieve the tedium of rainy days, without being able to name, when challenged, any definite activity rangeable under that hopeful rubric. In this instance, though her mother was no more inclined than usual to specificity of reference, Frieda had the advantage of knowing something useful that she might take a course in, and that would please Aunt Frederica at the same time. However one looked at it – and our young woman looked at it in a severely pragmatic light – Aunt Frederica pleased was more convenient as a visitor than Aunt Frederica displeased. She dared not, though, divulge to Aunt Frederica her visit to Mrs Beddow: as a member of the Society for Psychical Research, she turned up her nose at mediums like Mrs Beddow, whom she had once denounced as lower-middle class charlatans.

  There remained the matter of Mr Dodds, whose views, expressed none the less freely for being unsolicited, proved surprisingly old-fashioned for one usually so respectful of the spirit of trade. Few things roused him to such dudgeon – indeed, dudgeon was not a frequent state with Mr Dodds – as references to Bonaparte’s famous slight on the English character, though Mr Dodds was jealous not so much of the English character as of shopkeeping, which avocation, he had been heard to maintain, combined the ideal of service with the noble ambition to ‘get on in life’.

  Frieda had thus imagined that typewriting, as an indubitably commercial activity, would meet with Mr Dodds’s approval; and to hear him say then, ‘You don’t want to get mixed up with that kind of thing,’ was as unexpected as it was, strangely, piquant. She had not yet had the opportunity of demonstrating the limits of her deference to Mr Dodds’s conception of things, and the prospect presented itself as possessed of certain distinct attractions. To prove to oneself as well as to any bystanders that, bereft of choice as one was, one was not yet reduced to that choice, seemed some compensation for the absence of a larger freedom. Besides, if Mr Dodds objected to typewriting there must be more to it than met the eye.

  They were seated in the Kensington Gardens, on the penny chairs that Mr Dodds took when the weather seemed set fair and there was no danger of having to abandon the investment before it had yielded its full value. Her indebtedness to Mr Dodds for this amenity did not prevent Frieda from enquiring ‘Why not?’ in a tone in which the interrogative was less in evidence than the disputatious. She did not want to hear Mr Dodds’s reasons: Mr Dodds’s reasons would be reasons only for Mr Dodds.

  But whatever there was of the contumacious in Frieda’s reply did not perturb this equanimous gentleman. He laughed fondly, as he did when he felt he had caught Frieda in a moment of adorable female weakness of mind. ‘My dear girl, you don’t know what you’re about. Those typewriting machines make an awful racket. You might as well take a job as a mill girl and have done. Besides, you don’t want to be one of these … independent women who are forever bustling about taking omnibuses and things.’

  Frieda wondered how she was expected to get around if not with the help of these useful vehicles; this, however, was extraneous to the question of typewriting, which now presented itself, not in the sober light of filial duty and compliance, but in the lurid glare of an independence of mind repugnant to Mr Dodds’s notion of her destiny. She could not have said why, but she realised with a clarity lent sharpness and outline by the brilliance of the morning, that it was important not to accept, and to be seen not to accept, Mr Dodds’s assessment of her possibilities.

  ‘The thing is,’ she accordingly said, ‘that Mama specifically said to do something useful, and I can’t think of anything more useful than typewriting.’

  ‘A woman is at her most useful in pleasing her husband,’ Mr Dodds complacently replied; then frowned and asked, ‘When would this be that your mother told you this?’

  ‘Oh, the other evening. At Mrs Beddow’s.’

  ‘Mrs Beddow?’

  ‘Yes. You know, the spiritualist medium.’ Frieda was being slightly disingenuous in pretending to think that Mr Dodds knew about Mrs Beddow: she had not told him about her visits to the medium.

  ‘My dear child, you don’t want to get mixed up in that lot. They’ve been proved to be impostors, one and all. Besides, spiritualism is explicitly reprehended in the Bible.’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ Frieda obstinately objected. ‘The Bible is full of spiritualists. What else is a prophet but a kind of medium? Or an angel if not a spirit guide?’

  ‘In those days God chose to reveal Himself to man through human mediums. Today we rely on faith and prayer.’

  ‘When you pray, does God reveal His will to you?’

  Mr Dodds looked uncomfortable. As a rule he avoided conversations that were what he described as ‘personal’. ‘I believe He does, yes.’

  Frieda found herself provoked to a spirit of contention by the image of Mr Dodds, no doubt in a kneeling position, his nose pointed heavenward, in communion with his deity. ‘How? Does He speak to you?’

  ‘Not as you are speaking to me now, but through – through a subtle influencing of my thoughts.’

  ‘Do you mean telepathy?’

  He looked shocked. ‘God does not need telepathy. God is God.’

  On this incontrovertible note Frieda abandoned the discussion, but resolved quietly not to be led in her decisions by Mr Dodds’s strictures and certainties. If she were booked to make a mistake, let it be at any rate her own mistake.

  * * *

  Not so much in obedience to the dictates of her maternal shade, then, as in defiance of Mr Dodds’s sense of propriety, Frieda betook herself to the Young Ladies’ Academy. This turned out to be an alarmingly thorough institution, pr
esided over by the formidable Miss Petherbridge, who proclaimed on the first day to her shivering gathering of prospective typewriters: ‘We women have learnt to our cost that we live as second-class citizens in a Man’s World. It is our duty to qualify ourselves to gain access to that world.’

  Miss Petherbridge apparently intended a massive invasion of the citadel of male privilege, and her methods of instruction were in keeping with this militaristic ambition. They were, in a word, draconian, and there were times when Frieda wondered whether the price of admission to the Man’s World was not higher than the privilege: from what she had seen of men, it seemed a moot point whether one would want admission to a domain so exclusively and invidiously populated by them. But she persevered, if only not to have to confess failure to Aunt Frederica: to brave the regime of Miss Petherbridge seemed less awful than to risk the displeasure of Aunt Frederica. She accordingly submitted to a system of instruction based, according to Miss Petherbridge, on the premise that thought, or what she called cognitive interference, impeded the transmission of information from the eye or ear to the fingers. ‘You are an extension of the machine, and your function is to operate it,’ she would enjoin her charges. ‘Think of yourself as the medium between the impulse and its execution, and you will become an Efficient Typewriter.’

  This designation, even when pronounced with all the dignity of Miss Petherbridge’s most severe manner, failed to appeal to Frieda’s imagination: to be an Efficient Typewriter was not the highest destiny she could conceive. When she mentioned this to Mabel, her friend, always more pragmatic than Frieda, rejoined, ‘Well it depends doesn’t it? – I mean depends on what it is you get to typewrite. It could be fascinating stuff. All sorts of things are being typewritten nowadays.’ When pressed, Mabel was unable to produce an example of such material, and Frieda remained sceptical.