“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.
CHAPTER II: CHINESE TORTURE
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!