Margaret Ogilvy - Sir James Matthew Barrie (all ebook reader txt) 📗

contortions, I cringe, or twist my legs until I have to stop writing to undo the knot. I bow with him, eat with him, and gnaw my moustache with him. If the character be a lady with an exquisite laugh, I suddenly terrify you by laughing exquisitely. One reads of the astounding versatility of an actor who is stout and lean on the same evening, but what is he to the novelist who is a dozen persons within the hour? Morally, I fear, we must deteriorate - but this is a subject I may wisely edge away from.

We always spoke to each other in broad Scotch (I think in it still), but now and again she would use a word that was new to me, or I might hear one of her contemporaries use it. Now is my opportunity to angle for its meaning. If I ask, boldly, what was chat word she used just now, something like 'bilbie' or 'silvendy'? she blushes, and says she never said anything so common, or hoots! it is some auld-farrant word about which she can tell me nothing. But if in the course of conversation I remark casually, 'Did he find bilbie?' or 'Was that quite silvendy?' (though the sense of the question is vague to me) she falls into the trap, and the words explain themselves in her replies. Or maybe to-day she sees whither I am leading her, and such is her sensitiveness that she is quite hurt. The humour goes out of her face (to find bilbie in some more silvendy spot), and her reproachful eyes - but now I am on the arm of her chair, and we have made it up. Nevertheless, I shall get no more old-world Scotch out of her this forenoon, she weeds her talk determinedly, and it is as great a falling away as when the mutch gives place to the cap.

I am off for my afternoon walk, and she has promised to bar the door behind me and open it to none. When I return, - well, the door is still barred, but she is looking both furtive and elated. I should say that she is burning to tell me something, but cannot tell it without exposing herself. Has she opened the door, and if so, why? I don't ask, but I watch. It is she who is sly now.

'Have you been in the east room since you came in?' she asks, with apparent indifference.

'No; why do you ask?'

'Oh, I just thought you might have looked in.'

'Is there anything new there?'

'I dinna say there is, but - but just go and see.'

'There can't be anything new if you kept the door barred,' I say cleverly.

This crushes her for a moment; but her eagerness that I should see is greater than her fear. I set off for the east room, and she follows, affecting humility, but with triumph in her eye. How often those little scenes took place! I was never told of the new purchase, I was lured into its presence, and then she waited timidly for my start of surprise.

'Do you see it?' she says anxiously, and I see it, and hear it, for this time it is a bran-new wicker chair, of the kind that whisper to themselves for the first six months.

'A going-about body was selling them in a cart,' my mother begins, and what followed presents itself to my eyes before she can utter another word. Ten minutes at the least did she stand at the door argy-bargying with that man. But it would be cruelty to scold a woman so uplifted.

'Fifteen shillings he wanted,' she cries, 'but what do you think I beat him down to?'

'Seven and sixpence?'

She claps her hands with delight. 'Four shillings, as I'm a living woman!' she crows: never was a woman fonder of a bargain.

I gaze at the purchase with the amazement expected of me, and the chair itself crinkles and shudders to hear what it went for (or is it merely chuckling at her?). 'And the man said it cost himself five shillings,' my mother continues exultantly. You would have thought her the hardest person had not a knock on the wall summoned us about this time to my sister's side. Though in bed she has been listening, and this is what she has to say, in a voice that makes my mother very indignant, 'You drive a bargain! I'm thinking ten shillings was nearer what you paid.'

'Four shillings to a penny!' says my mother.

'I daresay,' says my sister; 'but after you paid him the money I heard you in the little bedroom press. What were you doing there?'

My mother winces. 'I may have given him a present of an old topcoat,' she falters. 'He looked ill-happit. But that was after I made the bargain.'

'Were there bairns in the cart?'

'There might have been a bit lassie in the cart.'

'I thought as much. What did you give her? I heard you in the pantry.'

'Four shillings was what I got that chair for,' replies my mother firmly. If I don't interfere there will be a coldness between them for at least a minute. 'There is blood on your finger,' I say to my mother.

'So there is,' she says, concealing her hand.

'Blood!' exclaims my sister anxiously, and then with a cry of triumph, 'I warrant it's jelly. You gave that lassie one of the jelly cans!'

The Glasgow waiter brings up tea, and presently my sister is able to rise, and after a sharp fight I am expelled from the kitchen. The last thing I do as maid of all work is to lug upstairs the clothes-basket which has just arrived with the mangling. Now there is delicious linen for my mother to finger; there was always rapture on her face when the clothes-basket came in; it never failed to make her once more the active genius of the house. I may leave her now with her sheets and collars and napkins and fronts. Indeed, she probably orders me to go. A son is all very well, but suppose he were to tread on that counterpane!

My sister is but and I am ben - I mean she is in the east end and I am in the west - tuts, tuts! let us get at the English of this by striving: she is in the kitchen and I am at my desk in the parlour. I hope I may not be disturbed, for to-night I must make my hero say 'Darling,' and it needs both privacy and concentration. In a word, let me admit (though I should like to beat about the bush) that I have sat down to a love-chapter. Too long has it been avoided, Albert has called Marion 'dear' only as yet (between you and me these are not their real names), but though the public will probably read the word without blinking, it went off in my hands with a bang. They tell me - the Sassenach tell me - that in time I shall be able without a blush to make Albert say 'darling,' and even gather her up in his arms, but I begin to doubt it; the moment sees me as shy as ever; I still find it advisable to lock the door, and then - no witness save the dog - I 'do' it dourly with my teeth clenched, while the dog retreats into the far corner and moans. The bolder Englishman (I am told) will write a love-chapter and then go out, quite coolly, to dinner, but such goings on are contrary to the Scotch nature; even the great novelists dared not. Conceive Mr. Stevenson left alone with a hero, a heroine, and a proposal impending (he does not know where to look). Sir Walter in the same circumstances gets out of the room by making his love- scenes take place between the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next, but he could afford to do anything, and the small fry must e'en to their task, moan the dog as he may. So I have yoked to mine when, enter my mother, looking wistful.

'I suppose you are terrible thrang,' she says.

'Well, I am rather busy, but - what is it you want me to do?'

'It would be a shame to ask you.'

'Still, ask me.'

'I am so terrified they may be filed.'

'You want me to - ?'

'If you would just come up, and help me to fold the sheets!'

The sheets are folded and I return to Albert. I lock the door, and at last I am bringing my hero forward nicely (my knee in the small of his back), when this startling question is shot by my sister through the key-hole-

'Where did you put the carrot-grater?'

It will all have to be done over again if I let Albert go for a moment, so, gripping him hard, I shout indignantly that I have not seen the carrot-grater.

'Then what did you grate the carrots on?' asks the voice, and the door-handle is shaken just as I shake Albert.

'On a broken cup,' I reply with surprising readiness, and I get to work again but am less engrossed, for a conviction grows on me that I put the carrot-grater in the drawer of the sewing-machine.

I am wondering whether I should confess or brazen it out, when I hear my sister going hurriedly upstairs. I have a presentiment that she has gone to talk about me, and I basely open my door and listen.

'Just look at that, mother!'

'Is it a dish-cloth?'

'That's what it is now.'

'Losh behears! it's one of the new table-napkins.'

'That's what it was. He has been polishing the kitchen grate with it!'

(I remember!)

'Woe's me! That is what comes of his not letting me budge from this room. O, it is a watery Sabbath when men take to doing women's work!'

'It defies the face of clay, mother, to fathom what makes him so senseless.'

'Oh, it's that weary writing.'

'And the worst of it is he will talk to-morrow as if he had done wonders.'

'That's the way with the whole clanjam-fray of them.'

'Yes, but as usual you will humour him, mother.'

'Oh, well, it pleases him, you see,' says my mother, 'and we can have our laugh when his door's shut.'

'He is most terribly handless.'

'He is all that, but, poor soul, he does his best.'


CHAPTER VII