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 purée 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, either,” she began again presently, boring away. It was like that bad moment when the dentist, having fitted a new spike on to his steam gimlet, says, “Now please, shall we go on? A little wider——”