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Ebook has 684 lines and 60550 words, and 14 pages

I JOKING APART 1

II CHINESE TORTURE 9

V WHY NOT REST? 50

VI "WHAT THE DEVIL?" CLUB 68

X FIDELITY 124

XX LETTERS OF GEORGINA BROWN 315

But there was no difficulty in all this. The trouble was with that section of the public which wants a magnifying glass and a dissecting implement before it can enjoy a pinned-out butterfly. Aunt Mary, who takes a view altogether different from mine on almost every subject, but who is really a very sound woman and a good judge of what people think, read through my manuscript and said:

"But, my dear Martha, it is by no means clear what it is all about."

This put me in a fever. If there is one thing I dislike more than another it is to be told that something I am interested in is "not clear."

"Well, it is certainly not thick," I replied, my poor mind harking back, as it nearly always does, to some such homely matter as the soup.

"Now that is an excellent example of what I mean!" Aunt Mary complained. "I say that many things in your book are not clear, and your mind at once flies off on the word 'clear,' and you imagine yourself at table, with a greasy waiter leaning over your shoulder holding a plate of kidney pur?e in one hand and bouillon in the other. You forget that you don't carry your audience with you."

"You are not clear now, yourself," I said with a certain pleasure. "Would you please strain your criticism once more and add a little bit more beef."

"Well, for instance, you never explain where Millport is," she began. "You don't say how you came there, nor what sort of place it is."

"But everybody understands that," I argued. "We all come to live in a place in the same way; by train, with furniture and linen, and a list of things to be done when we get there. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred we come because our husbands have got a job in the place. Very few people go to live anywhere for pleasure."

"I don't know anything about it," my aunt admitted, "except that it is usual to give some explanation. Writers generally begin by describing the sun setting behind the suburbs, or rising over the heart of the city. They give the general lie of the streets and the surrounding country. And if they are talking about the provinces they usually create an atmosphere of depression, and domestic smells, and balked desires, just to start off with."

"Will you write a description of my home?" I suggested. "Tell them that it is a solid enough house, stucco in front and bricks at the back; a cat-run and some laurel bushes facing the road, and a gardener and another cat-run behind the house. In the middle of the back cat-run there is a tennis net and three seedy deck-chairs, one of which supports a blonde authoress with ill-defined features, the other an aunt with a high forehead and ideals about literature; the third will shortly contain a husband who will come home in about half an hour with a pink evening paper. What is there in all that to cheer a reader who is in the same unfortunate position herself?"

"Still, they like to know," said Aunt Mary. The gentle persistence of these mild women is what wrecks many homes, and was, I suppose, at the bottom of a good deal of martyrdom in the times of the Inquisition. We were silent. I was a little ruffled and bored, and Aunt Mary was planning a new attack in nearly the same place.

"You don't describe your people," averred Aunt Mary. "You talk of Mrs. Beehive, and Reginald, and Polly, and the Henrys, and the Spicers, but you don't give their heights or their features or circumstances, nor even tell us what rooms they are in when the conversations take place."

"But don't you see, dear," I explained, "that if I did that the Henrys would probably get a job in Edinburgh or Sheffield. Or Reginald and Polly might die, and their places be filled by a similar couple whose names were Tom and Katie. Then Reginald instead of having a fair moustache would have a dark beard, and so on, and make all the description wrong. It is much better to leave them quite free to look different in different towns. I believe if you think of all the great names you know in literature you will find that the make-up of most of them has been left to the imagination of the public. Take Noah--we all know the look of him, but there is no description of him anywhere. And there are many more of the same kind whom I could mention."

"Well, well," said Aunt Mary, "have it your own way, though I think you are wrong. But there is another thing. I don't like your putting in Miss Brown's letters. They are not in the spirit of the book, and they are a little vulgar in places, I think, if you will excuse my saying so. Those absurd names she gives to people do not deceive anybody, and the letters are calculated to do a great deal of harm. Louise made a great mistake in letting you have them."

"Anyhow I asked Miss Brown," I replied, "and she said I might do as I liked. She will never come back here, and the reason I wanted them is that my own view of Millport is one-sided. I have a filial sentiment for it, and I couldn't describe it with the kind of photographic falsity which is sometimes a help when such an unstable person as myself is trying to set down emotional truths."

"Still, I think it is a mistake," said Aunt Mary. "I don't like descriptions which, as you say, are like photographs. I never thought that Miss Brown showed much insight or tried to enter into the spirit of Millport society. But--joking apart--couldn't you, Martha dear, write a nice little chapter, just giving a bird's-eye view of the town, and explaining who all the people are who come into the book?"

I made several beginnings to please her, but it was no good. If I ever write a novel it will have no scenery, and no furniture, and very little gesture in it. People will speak as they do in nightmares, crowding round and peering into the sufferer's face, and the reader will gasp as he turns over to the other page, "Oh! There's Fred! stop him! He's going over the cliff!" But every reader must bring his own cliff. All that I supply is the dream people who have every one of them got faces which we have seen at one time or another.

The civilization of the Chinese is admittedly very old, and their forms of torture are supposed to be extremely subtle. Perhaps with great age has come the knowledge that the tortures which have occurred naturally to man since he first existed are not likely to be improved upon by those who wish to inconvenience their fellow-creatures. It is probable that the first human owner of a cave, gnawing his bone at the end of the family table, gnawed it in such a manner as to make some peculiar grating, slooping or gnashing sound which aroused the indignation of his hairy partner. It may almost be taken for granted that he forgot to help the stuffing. The rude physicians of that epoch would, in all likelihood, have testified that the cave ladies as a class were evasive and unruly, and that they would insist upon sitting round the fire capturing the parasites in one another's tresses instead of coming to bed at the proper time. There can be no doubt that the children speedily acquired the habit of saying "What?" every few minutes, that the slaves hid things, that the dweller in the next cave was the earliest inventor of a musical instrument, and that the first door which the first man put to his cave in self-defence banged the first time it was left ajar.

It may therefore be, for all we know, that the subtle devices called Chinese tortures are quite modern arrangements adapted to a frailer generation, and that the real old, original Chinaman just left his victims to suffer unprotected in an ordinary household. The prevaricating, garrulous female prisoners were, perhaps, shut up for years with a gentleman who slooped at his meals, thus killing two birds with one stone. The children who asked "Wha-at?" when their questions were answered for the first time were immured with parents who said "Waddear?" at the end of an animated description of a day's adventure. Prisoners of both sexes who left their clothes on the bathroom floor and never destroyed envelopes were served exclusively by maids who threw everything portable into the dustbin, except clothes, which they hung up in the wrong side of the wardrobe. People who laughed incessantly while they spoke kept house for those who grumphed and blew air through their cheeks at breakfast. They were a merry party in the prisons one way and another if you come to think of it!

"What does he mean?" a woman asked on one of these occasions.

"Well, Polly gets so gross when she begins to talk about ordinary things," said Reginald, "that I have to shout out all I know about more difficult subjects for fear she should begin to attempt them."

"What did I say that was gross?" asked Polly, opening her large eyes.

"I don't want ever to remember what you said about the baby," Reginald answered with haste. "Let us talk about something else quickly; rape, sacrilege, anything you like, but don't mention the child's toes again."

But apart from Reggie's little troubles, we all have our own. For instance, there is the torture by question. This is suitable for both men and women, and it is most effective, perhaps, when administered by women, because they have the pertinacity of insects and cannot be got rid of; slapping doesn't destroy them. You may even burn sulphur, it doesn't keep them off a bit. Remember, it was a poor, lorn widow who defeated the unjust judge. If her husband had been there he would have blushed and said, "Come away, Maria--it's no good--he won't listen." But Maria lit once more upon the bald head of the judge and set up her interminable buzz, and lo! the thing was done.

The following scene illustrates how the torture by question is administered:

SCENE. A cosy apartment provided with a telephone. The meals are ordered for the day. You have seen about the children's spring hats, you have telephoned for a man to see about the knife machine. "Seeing" stands for opening it to get out the knife which cook dropped in without thinking, and that means ten shillings, "for man's time--rep. kn. mach." There does not seem to be anything else to see about just at present, and you settle down to a bit of crochet or, perhaps, to some occupation which takes your whole thought, such as writing a story for the magazines.

Cook slides round the door and looks at you. At the sight of her, all your ideas get up and say they are afraid they must be going. Ideas don't like cook, because she doesn't like them. She has a heavy hand with them and they won't settle.

"Yes, cook, what is it?" you ask.

"If you please'm, the butcher hasn't veal to-day."

"Hasn't he?" you say patiently, "then tell him to raise some animal that he has got."

You wait, pencil in hand, for her to go.

"What shall I order, m'm?" she insists. "The boy is waiting."

You quickly review last week's meals. The household has had cutlets, fish, fowl, steak and a good many other things. Some people dislike the insides of animals so we will not complete the list. Anyhow, they seem to have eaten everything that there is in the world, except veal. Your horizon is all veal. There doesn't, in fact, seem to be anything but veal to eat, "without," as cook says, you have just what you had yesterday. The sudden passionate anger of the interrupted flies to your head.

"I don't care if it's stewed missionary," you stammer; "but I will have something new. Go away quickly and think of something."

Cook, like the fly, takes wing as far as the kitchen dresser and returns; stands once more, as it were, washing her front legs in the doorway.

"May I telephone, please, m'm?" she inquires.

You sharpen your pencil meanwhile, and there is a faint rustle in the air as of lost ideas peeping round to see whether every one has gone.

"H'm, h'm . If you please'm, Jones says that the haddock isn't very nice to-day; he has some nice turbot at two-and-sixpence."

"Ask the silly idiot if he sends up turbot for his own nursery breakfast, will you," is the only reply your indignation will afford. Goodness knows what all the haddock are about in these days; they always used to be "nice" at any time of year.

"Shall I tell him not to trouble about it, m'm?" she says, holding the receiver away from her ear.

"Oh, yes, don't let him break up his health over it," you say, and once more resume your work. Your quiet room is now, in your imagination, a seething, noisy mass of food, all of it quarrelling as to who shall climb on to the table at dinner.

"What shall I order for breakfast instead of the fish?" demands cook, lightly poised for flight beside the writing-table.

"Bacon," you say, "bacon, bacon, bacon," and you look up hoping to see a mess of squashed cook on the blotting-paper. But not at all. She is round the other side, tickling your left ear.

"The bacon's finished to-day, m'm. Did you remember to order any more?"

"Are the hens all dead?" you inquire.

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