“Now,” interjected Selina, “you are talking! That is precisely my case.”
“Stop a minute, Selina. I said the method was good for the writer whose temperament it suited. But so are other methods for other temperaments. You may tell your story all in letters, if you are a Richardson, or with perpetual digressions and statements that you are telling a story, if you are a Fielding or a Thackeray, or autobiographically, if your autobiography is a ‘Copperfield’ or a ‘Kidnapped.’ Every author, I suggest, is a law to himself. And I see no reason why we should bar ‘omniscience,’ as you apparently want to. Why forbid the novelist the historian’s privilege? Why rule out the novel which is a history of imaginary facts?”
“I can’t quite see Gyp as a historian,” said Selina.
“No more can I, thank goodness,” said Patty.
And so we were rowed back to the jetty, and the blue eyes didn’t blink over half-a-crown under the very notice board.
AGAIN AT THE MARTELLO TOWER
Now that regattas are over and oysters have come in again, our little port has returned to its normal or W. W. Jacobs demeanour. The bathers on the sand-spit have struck their tents. The Salvation Army band is practising its winter repertory. When our blue-eyed boatman rowed us over to the Martello tower again the other day, he almost looked as though he expected little more than his legal fare. Selina, who has the gift of management, suggested that Patty should try it on with him, on the ground, first, that women always do these things better than men, and, second, that Patty was blue-eyes’ favourite. I acquiesced, and Patty borrowed half-a-crown of me, so as to be prepared when the time came.
Meanwhile Selina began to read us extracts from Professor Henri Bergson on “Laughter.” Selina is a serious person without, so far as I have ever discovered, a grain of humour in her composition. These are just the people who read theories of laughter. It is a mystery to them, and they desire to have it explained. “A laughable expression of the face,” began Selina, “is one that will make us think of something rigid and, so to speak, coagulated, in the wonted mobility of the face. What we shall see will be an ingrained twitching or a fixed grimace. One would say that the person’s whole moral life has crystallized into this particular cast of features.”
“I wonder whether Mr. George Robey’s whole moral life has,” dropped Patty, innocently.