* * * * *
Now, old Joe, for all he is paralysed, has the use of his eyes, whereas
Mr. Wells, who can and does shuffle about pretty freely on his feet, has
not got the use of his.
Joe's sight is a great blessing to him; he can read. He has a sturdy
taste in literature, and will stand none of your milk-and-water stuff.
He likes fighting, plenty of that: and Red Indians, and duels, and
murders, and shipwrecks, and fires, and sudden deaths. He requires of
his author that he keep his mind steeped perpetually in blood and
thunder. You will always find that Old Joe is sitting on a penny
novelette, open at the place, and but little crumpled or creased from
the impress of his skeleton of a body. He is a great reader, one of the
greatest readers in London; and, perhaps, to no man in all the world
more than to Joe has literature brought so complete an escape from the
pressing demands of self-consciousness and the inconvenient emphasis of
personality.
It is at this point that we reach, by the reader's leave, the
psychological interest of this our simple story. For the problem
presents itself to Mr. Wells, as well as to me, whether all this violent
reading has not created in Joe's mind the impression of a Joe who never
was on sea or land. In other words: in the tale which Joe tells of his
own life, is any part of it fact, or is it not all a figment of his
brain, the creation of his bloody-minded authors? Joe himself believes
every word of it; Joe believes he was the Joe he tells you about, and
his face grows purple, and his glassy eyes dart fire out of their baggy
flesh, if you insinuate never so delicately that one of his stories is
in the very smallest detail just a little difficult of belief.
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