Barley Patch Read Online Free Page B

am in need of a faculty such as I have never possessed.
    On the verandah of my aunt’s house, I looked into each of the two upper rooms of the doll’s house and then eased the house back to its former position. Then I climbed back into my bed, feeling foolish. I had expected that my looking into the house might reveal to me some sort of secret that my girl-cousins had been keeping from me—perhaps on some bed in an upper room lay a tiny doll with only a thin nightdress covering her female parts. In the event, I had seen in the upper rooms only neat furniture. No doll that my cousins owned was small enough or dainty enough to belong in the house. It was not only I who had no right to poke my fingers through the windows; I began to think of my cousins as hardly worthy to own the house, which I had stopped thinking of as a mere residence for dolls.
    Three or four years after my visit to the house in the clearing in the Heytesbury Forest, I read a comic-book about a character named Doll-man. Some or another unremarkable citizen of a vaguely American city was able, when the need arose, to compress the molecules of his body and to become a doll-sized man. On the night when I had looked into the doll’s house, I fell asleep as though my own molecules had been somehow compressed so that I was able to lie comfortably in my chosen bed in an upper-storey room overlooking a clearing in the Heytesbury Forest and to hear already in my mind the shrieks of the giant female personages who would look in on me next morning through the windows.
    I reported at the end of the fifth paragraph before the previous paragraph that I was often afraid of the character known as Aunt Bee in the work of fiction Brat Farrar. I reported even earlier that I sometimes resented the influence that Aunt Bee was allowed to exert over one at least of the other characters in the work. While I was reporting those matters, I seemed to recall from more than fifty years ago my having once or twice doubted whether the one character in a work of fiction should be allowed to possess so many qualities deemed admirable by the narrator as Aunt Bee was allowed to possess in Brat Farrar . Of course, terms such as narrator and even character were unknown to me at the time. I simply observed what happened in my mind while I read. And although I was afraid of Aunt Bee, I must sometimes have been aware that the cause of her appearing as she did in my mind was no more than that a personage known to me only as Josephine Tey had chosen that she, Aunt Bee, should appear thus.
    I would like to be able to report here that I supposed at least once during my reading that Josephine Tey, whoever she might have been, ought to have written differently about Aunt Bee. I suspect that I had already accepted, more than fifty years ago, that no writer could be required to deal fairly with his or her characters, let alone readers.
    When Aunt Bee was first mentioned in the text of Brat Farrar , she was probably the subject of a long passage of description. Any such passage would have been wasted on me, as all so-called descriptions of so-called characters in works of fiction have been wasted on me since I first began to read such works. For how many years did I read dutifully what I thought of as descriptive passages? How often did I try to feel grateful to the authors who included such passages in their works, thereby enabling me to see vividly while I read what they, the authors, had imagined while they wrote? I can recall my having discovered as early as in 1952, while I was reading Little Women , by Louisa M. Alcott, that the female characters-in-my-mind, so to call them, were wholly different in appearance from the characters-in-the-text, so to call them. I was too young at the time to know that this was not the result of my being an unskilled reader. Many years passed before I began to understand that looking at line after line of text is only a small part of reading; that I might need to