The Dwarfs by Harold Pinter

decisive. It seemed to him that Mark was quite content to conform to his body’s disposition. He was satisfied to accept a worship based on those grounds alone. But he surely had more to offer than his profile and his abilities as a sexual mechanic. He was letting his potentialities slip. Acting in such complacent liaison with his body’s whims, he could not hope to preserve any objective or critical point of view, either in relation to himself or to others. For a distance had always to be kept between what was smelt and your ability to weigh in the balance the located matter or event. Mark was not only failing in this but was a closed book to all emendation. He was not open to criticism.
    She listened.
    Len, of course, was not so much a physical type as a physical symptom. His behaviour, his manner of expression, were informed by something in the nature of a central and compulsive stammer. He was never still, or when he was, his stillness was both a gesture and an argument. But it was never his features themselves that were to the fore, it was what came after them; the smokescreens, the distress signals of his nature. He was encountered on that territory only and to comment on his physical make-up was irrelevant, for his body, as such, simply, did not participate. The constant activity one noted when in his company obtained only at the nerve ends and limits of his body, and to objects attached to it; his hands and his glasses. His eyes were active only as nerve ends, they could not be regarded as features. And where this nervous territory normally constituted a part of the sum, in Len’s case it was the sum. It preceded his body, which was by way of being merely a conveyance for the box of tricks and conundrums he was.
    She lay back.
    In point of fact, Len preserved no more of a distance between what he smelt and what he thought about it than Mark, but for different reasons. They both failed to distinguish between any given smell and the conclusion consequent upon it, but where Mark was simply too lazy to attempt to differentiate, Len was too lacking in trust in his own discernment. He must stick to the smell and equate it with the thought, till the thought was the smell, because he was unable to face up to the true nature of thought and its demands. But while Mark was not open to correction, though he might in time discover his errors or be brought to appreciate them by example, Len was open both to instruction and to assistance.
    She lay back, listening.
    This, he went on, he was prepared to give, and more, to either of them. For upon consideration, taking all differences into account, he knew their friendship as valuable. In fact he was not sure whether they might not be said to constitute a church, of a kind. They were hardly one in dogma or direction,but there was common ground and there was a framework. At their best they formed a unit, and a unit which, in his terms, was entitled to be called a church; an alliance of the three of them for the common good, and a faith in that alliance. It was, of course, a matter of working towards a balanced and flexible structure. He was well aware this structure was nowhere near completion. Their differences were conducive to corruption within the unit. Labour was needed to contain them, but if they were contained or, what was more productive, brought to an honest reconcilement, then they would be able to speak of achievement. For him the effort was worthwhile. It was more than worthwhile, it was quite frankly, essential. It was the simple matter of communication. If he remained unable to communicate with his fellowman there was nothing left but dryrot.
    She listened.
    Having admitted the possibility of corruption within the unit, he would deal with the question of corruption from outside it. An outside influence, he was convinced, could be absorbed without harm. For instance, Virginia was acting upon one of them at that moment; himself. On the assumption that she did him positive