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

loud bullying voice, but 'Along this path came a woman' I read, and stop. Did I hear a faint sound from the other end of the bed? Perhaps I did not; I may only have been listening for it, but I falter and look up. My sister and I look sternly at my mother. She bites her under-lip and clutches the bed with both hands, really she is doing her best for me, but first comes a smothered gurgling sound, then her hold on herself relaxes and she shakes with mirth.

'That's a way to behave!' cries my sister.

'I cannot help it,' my mother gasps.

'And there's nothing to laugh at.'

'It's that woman,' my mother explains unnecessarily.

'Maybe she's not the woman you think her,' I say, crushed.

'Maybe not,' says my mother doubtfully. 'What was her name?'

'Her name,' I answer with triumph, 'was not Margaret'; but this makes her ripple again. 'I have so many names nowadays,' she mutters.

'H'sh!' says my father, and the reading is resumed.

Perhaps the woman who came along the path was of tall and majestic figure, which should have shown my mother that I had contrived to start my train without her this time. But it did not.

'What are you laughing at now?' says my sister severely. 'Do you not hear that she was a tall, majestic woman?'

'It's the first time I ever heard it said of her,' replies my mother.

'But she is.'

'Ke fy, havers!'

'The book says it.'

'There will be a many queer things in the book. What was she wearing?'

I have not described her clothes. 'That's a mistake,' says my mother. 'When I come upon a woman in a book, the first thing I want to know about her is whether she was good-looking, and the second, how she was put on.'

The woman on the path was eighteen years of age, and of remarkable beauty.

'That settles you,' says my sister.

'I was no beauty at eighteen,' my mother admits, but here my father interferes unexpectedly. 'There wasna your like in this countryside at eighteen,' says he stoutly.

'Pooh!' says she, well pleased.

'Were you plain, then?' we ask.

'Sal,' she replies briskly, 'I was far from plain.'

'H'sh!'

Perhaps in the next chapter this lady (or another) appears in a carriage.

'I assure you we're mounting in the world,' I hear my mother murmur, but I hurry on without looking up. The lady lives in a house where there are footmen - but the footmen have come on the scene too hurriedly. 'This is more than I can stand,' gasps my mother, and just as she is getting the better of a fit of laughter, 'Footman, give me a drink of water,' she cries, and this sets her off again. Often the readings had to end abruptly because her mirth brought on violent fits of coughing.

Sometimes I read to my sister alone, and she assured me that she could not see my mother among the women this time. This she said to humour me. Presently she would slip upstairs to announce triumphantly, 'You are in again!'

Or in the small hours I might make a confidant of my father, and when I had finished reading he would say thoughtfully, 'That lassie is very natural. Some of the ways you say she had - your mother had them just the same. Did you ever notice what an extraordinary woman your mother is?'

Then would I seek my mother for comfort. She was the more ready to give it because of her profound conviction that if I was found out - that is, if readers discovered how frequently and in how many guises she appeared in my books - the affair would become a public scandal.

'You see Jess is not really you,' I begin inquiringly.

'Oh no, she is another kind of woman altogether,' my mother says, and then spoils the compliment by adding naively, 'She had but two rooms and I have six.'

I sigh. 'Without counting the pantry, and it's a great big pantry,' she mutters.

This was not the sort of difference I could greatly plume myself upon, and honesty would force me to say, 'As far as that goes, there was a time when you had but two rooms yourself - '

'That's long since,' she breaks in. 'I began with an up-the-stair, but I always had it in my mind - I never mentioned it, but there it was - to have the down-the-stair as well. Ay, and I've had it this many a year.'

'Still, there is no denying that Jess had the same ambition.'

'She had, but to her two-roomed house she had to stick all her born days. Was that like me?'

'No, but she wanted - '

'She wanted, and I wanted, but I got and she didna. That's the difference betwixt her and me.'

'If that is all the difference, it is little credit I can claim for having created her.'

My mother sees that I need soothing. 'That is far from being all the difference,' she would say eagerly. 'There's my silk, for instance. Though I say it mysel, there's not a better silk in the valley of Strathmore. Had Jess a silk of any kind - not to speak of a silk like that?'

'Well, she had no silk, but you remember how she got that cloak with beads.'

'An eleven and a bit! Hoots, what was that to boast of! I tell you, every single yard of my silk cost - '

'Mother, that is the very way Jess spoke about her cloak!'

She lets this pass, perhaps without hearing it, for solicitude about her silk has hurried her to the wardrobe where it hangs.

'Ah, mother, I am afraid that was very like Jess!'

'How could it be like her when she didna even have a wardrobe? I tell you what, if there had been a real Jess and she had boasted to me about her cloak with beads, I would have said to her in a careless sort of voice, "Step across with me, Jess and I'll let you see something that is hanging in my wardrobe." That would have lowered her pride!'

'I don't believe that is what you would have done, mother.'

Then a sweeter expression would come into her face. 'No,' she would say reflectively, 'it's not.'

'What would you have done? I think I know.'

'You canna know. But I'm thinking I would have called to mind that she was a poor woman, and ailing, and terrible windy about her cloak, and I would just have said it was a beauty and that I wished I had one like it.'

'Yes, I am certain that is what you would have done. But oh, mother, that is just how Jess would have acted if some poorer woman than she had shown her a new shawl.'

'Maybe, but though I hadna boasted about my silk I would have wanted to do it.'

'Just as Jess would have been fidgeting to show off her eleven and a bit!'

It seems advisable to jump to another book; not to my first, because - well, as it was my first there would naturally be something of my mother in it, and not to the second, as it was my first novel and not much esteemed even in our family. (But the little touches of my mother in it are not so bad.) Let us try the story about the minister.

My mother's first remark is decidedly damping. 'Many a time in my young days,' she says, 'I played about the Auld Licht manse, but I little thought I should live to be the mistress of it!'

'But Margaret is not you.'

'N-no, oh no. She had a very different life from mine. I never let on to a soul that she is me!'

'She was not meant to be you when I began. Mother, what a way you have of coming creeping in!'

'You should keep better watch on yourself.'

'Perhaps if I had called Margaret by some other name - '

'I should have seen through her just the same. As soon as I heard she was the mother I began to laugh. In some ways, though, she's no' so very like me. She was long in finding out about Babbie. I'se uphaud I should have been quicker.'

'Babbie, you see, kept close to the garden-wall.'

'It's not the wall up at the manse that would have hidden her from me.'

'She came out in the dark.'

'I'm thinking she would have found me looking for her with a candle.'

'And Gavin was secretive.'

'That would have put me on my mettle.'

'She never suspected anything.'

'I wonder at her.'

But my new heroine is to be a child. What has madam to say to that?

A child! Yes, she has something to say even to that. 'This beats all!' are the words.

'Come, come, mother, I see what you are thinking, but I assure you that this time - '

'Of course not,' she says soothingly, 'oh no, she canna be me'; but anon her real thoughts are revealed by the artless remark, 'I doubt, though, this is a tough job you have on hand - it is so long since I was a bairn.'

We came very close to each other in those talks. 'It is a queer thing,' she would say softly, 'that near everything you write is about this bit place. You little expected that when you began. I mind well the time when it never entered your head, any more than mine, that you could write a page about our squares and wynds. I wonder how it has come about?'

There was a time when I could not have answered that question, but that time had long passed. 'I suppose, mother, it was because you were most at home in your own town, and there was never much pleasure to me in writing of people who could not have known you, nor of squares and wynds you never passed through, nor of a country-side where you never carried your father's dinner in a flagon. There is scarce a house in all my books where I have not seemed to see you a thousand times, bending over the fireplace or winding up the clock.'

'And yet you used to be in such a quandary because you knew nobody you could make your women-folk out of!