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

it was she who had heated them in preparation for my going. The arrangement between us was that she should lie down until my return, and to ensure its being carried out I saw her in bed before I started, but with the bang of the door she would be at the window to watch me go: there is one spot on the road where a thousand times I have turned to wave my stick to her, while she nodded and smiled and kissed her hand to me. That kissing of the hand was the one English custom she had learned.

In an hour or so I return, and perhaps find her in bed, according to promise, but still I am suspicious. The way to her detection is circuitous.

'I'll need to be rising now,' she says, with a yawn that may be genuine.

'How long have you been in bed?'

'You saw me go.'

'And then I saw you at the window. Did you go straight back to bed?'

'Surely I had that much sense.'

'The truth!'

'I might have taken a look at the clock first.'

'It is a terrible thing to have a mother who prevaricates. Have you been lying down ever since I left?'

'Thereabout.'

'What does that mean exactly?'

'Off and on.'

'Have you been to the garret?'

'What should I do in the garret?'

'But have you?'

'I might just have looked up the garret stair.'

'You have been redding up the garret again!'

'Not what you could call a redd up.'

'O, woman, woman, I believe you have not been in bed at all!'

'You see me in it.'

'My opinion is that you jumped into bed when you heard me open the door.'

'Havers.'

'Did you?'

'No.'

'Well, then, when you heard me at the gate?'

'It might have been when I heard you at the gate.'

As daylight goes she follows it with her sewing to the window, and gets another needleful out of it, as one may run after a departed visitor for a last word, but now the gas is lit, and no longer is it shameful to sit down to literature. If the book be a story by George Eliot or Mrs. Oliphant, her favourites (and mine) among women novelists, or if it be a Carlyle, and we move softly, she will read, entranced, for hours. Her delight in Carlyle was so well known that various good people would send her books that contained a page about him; she could place her finger on any passage wanted in the biography as promptly as though she were looking for some article in her own drawer, and given a date she was often able to tell you what they were doing in Cheyne Row that day. Carlyle, she decided, was not so much an ill man to live with as one who needed a deal of managing, but when I asked if she thought she could have managed him she only replied with a modest smile that meant 'Oh no!' but had the face of 'Sal, I would have liked to try.'

One lady lent her some scores of Carlyle letters that have never been published, and crabbed was the writing, but though my mother liked to have our letters read aloud to her, she read every one of these herself, and would quote from them in her talk. Side by side with the Carlyle letters, which show him in his most gracious light, were many from his wife to a friend, and in one of these a romantic adventure is described - I quote from memory, and it is a poor memory compared to my mother's, which registered everything by a method of her own: 'What might be the age of Bell Tibbits? Well, she was born the week I bought the boiler, so she'll be one-and- fifty (no less!) come Martinmas.' Mrs. Carlyle had got into the train at a London station and was feeling very lonely, for the journey to Scotland lay before her and no one had come to see her off. Then, just as the train was starting, a man jumped into the carriage, to her regret until she saw his face, when, behold, they were old friends, and the last time they met (I forget how many years before) he had asked her to be his wife. He was very nice, and if I remember aright, saw her to her journey's end, though he had intended to alight at some half-way place. I call this an adventure, and I am sure it seemed to my mother to be the most touching and memorable adventure that can come into a woman's life. 'You see he hadna forgot,' she would say proudly, as if this was a compliment in which all her sex could share, and on her old tender face shone some of the elation with which Mrs. Carlyle wrote that letter.

But there were times, she held, when Carlyle must have made his wife a glorious woman. 'As when?' I might inquire.

'When she keeked in at his study door and said to herself, "The whole world is ringing with his fame, and he is my man!"'

'And then,' I might point out, 'he would roar to her to shut the door.'

'Pooh!' said my mother, 'a man's roar is neither here nor there.' But her verdict as a whole was, 'I would rather have been his mother than his wife.'

So we have got her into her chair with the Carlyles, and all is well. Furthermore, 'to mak siccar,' my father has taken the opposite side of the fireplace and is deep in the latest five columns of Gladstone, who is his Carlyle. He is to see that she does not slip away fired by a conviction, which suddenly overrides her pages, that the kitchen is going to rack and ruin for want of her, and she is to recall him to himself should he put his foot in the fire and keep it there, forgetful of all save his hero's eloquence. (We were a family who needed a deal of watching.) She is not interested in what Mr. Gladstone has to say; indeed she could never be brought to look upon politics as of serious concern for grown folk (a class in which she scarcely included man), and she gratefully gave up reading 'leaders' the day I ceased to write them. But like want of reasonableness, a love for having the last word, want of humour and the like, politics were in her opinion a mannish attribute to be tolerated, and Gladstone was the name of the something which makes all our sex such queer characters. She had a profound faith in him as an aid to conversation, and if there were silent men in the company would give him to them to talk about, precisely as she divided a cake among children. And then, with a motherly smile, she would leave them to gorge on him. But in the idolising of Gladstone she recognised, nevertheless, a certain inevitability, and would no more have tried to contend with it than to sweep a shadow off the floor. Gladstone was, and there was an end of it in her practical philosophy. Nor did she accept him coldly; like a true woman she sympathised with those who suffered severely, and they knew it and took counsel of her in the hour of need. I remember one ardent Gladstonian who, as a general election drew near, was in sore straits indeed, for he disbelieved in Home Rule, and yet how could he vote against 'Gladstone's man'? His distress was so real that it gave him a hang-dog appearance. He put his case gloomily before her, and until the day of the election she riddled him with sarcasm; I think he only went to her because he found a mournful enjoyment in seeing a false Gladstonian tortured.

It was all such plain-sailing for him, she pointed out; he did not like this Home Rule, and therefore he must vote against it.

She put it pitiful clear, he replied with a groan.

But she was like another woman to him when he appeared before her on his way to the polling-booth.

'This is a watery Sabbath to you, I'm thinking,' she said sympathetically, but without dropping her wires - for Home Rule or no Home Rule that stocking-foot must be turned before twelve o'clock.

A watery Sabbath means a doleful day, and 'A watery Sabbath it is,' he replied with feeling. A silence followed, broken only by the click of the wires. Now and again he would mutter, 'Ay, well, I'll be going to vote - little did I think the day would come,' and so on, but if he rose it was only to sit down again, and at last she crossed over to him and said softly, (no sarcasm in her voice now), 'Away with you, and vote for Gladstone's man!' He jumped up and made off without a word, but from the east window we watched him strutting down the brae. I laughed, but she said, 'I'm no sure that it's a laughing matter,' and afterwards, 'I would have liked fine to be that Gladstone's mother.'

It is nine o'clock now, a quarter-past nine, half-past nine - all the same moment to me, for I am at a sentence that will not write. I know, though I can't hear, what my sister has gone upstairs to say to my mother:-

'I was in at him at nine, and he said, "In five minutes," so I put the steak on the brander, but I've been in thrice since then, and every time he says, "In five minutes," and when I try to take the table-cover off, he presses his elbows hard on it, and growls. His supper will be completely spoilt.'

'Oh, that weary writing!'

'I can do no more, mother, so you must come down and stop him.'

'I have no power over him,' my mother says, but she rises smiling, and presently she is opening my door.

'In five minutes!' I cry, but when I see that it is she I rise and put my arm round her. 'What a full basket!' she says, looking at the waste-paper basket, which contains most of my work of the night and with a dear gesture she lifts up a torn page and kisses it. 'Poor thing,' she says to it, 'and you would have liked so fine to be printed!' and she puts her hand over my desk to prevent my writing more.

'In the last five minutes,' I begin, 'one can often do more than in the first hour.'