Page:John M. Synge - Masefield - Dublin 1915.djvu/28

 He said that he had just come to London from Paris, and that he found Bloomsbury strange after the Quartier Latin. He was puzzled by the talk of the clever young men from Oxford. “That’s a queer way to talk. They all talk like that. I wonder what makes them talk like that? I suppose they’re always stewing over dead things.”

Synge lodged in a front room on the second floor of No. 4, Handel Street, Bloomsbury. It was a quiet house in a quiet, out-of-the-way street. His room there was always very clean and tidy. The people made him very comfortable. Afterwards, in 1907, during his last visit to London, he lodged there again, in the same room. I called upon him there in the afternoon of the day on which I last saw him.

When I first called upon him, I found him at his type-writer, hard at work. He was making a fair copy of one of his two early one-act plays, then just finished. His type-writer was a small portable machine, of the Blick variety. He was the only writer I have ever known who composed direct upon a type-writing machine. I