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Transcriber's note:
The volume from which this e-book was created contained two
books, _A Window in Thrums_ and _Auld Licht Idylls_.
A WINDOW IN THRUMS
by
J. M. BARRIE
Illustrated
[Frontispiece: Photograph of J. M. Barrie]
New York
Charles Scribner's Sons
1918
Copyright, 1896, by
Charles Scribner's Sons
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I THE HOUSE ON THE BRAE
II ON THE TRACK OF THE MINISTER
III PREPARING TO RECEIVE COMPANY
IV WAITING FOR THE DOCTOR
V A HUMORIST ON HIS CALLING
VI DEAD THIS TWENTY YEARS
VII THE STATEMENT OF TIBBIE BIRSE
VIII A CLOAK WITH BEADS
IX THE POWER OF BEAUTY
X A MAGNUM OPUS
XI THE GHOST CRADLE
XII THE TRAGEDY OF A WIFE
XIII MAKING THE BEST OF IT
XIV VISITORS AT THE MANSE
XV HOW GAVIN BIRSE PUT IT TO MAG LOWNIE
XVI THE SON FROM LONDON
XVII A HOME FOR GENIUSES
XVIII LEEBY AND JAMIE
XIX A TALE OF A GLOVE
XX THE LAST NIGHT
XXI JESS LEFT ALONE
XXII JAMIE'S HOME-COMING
ILLUSTRATIONS
J. M. BARRIE . . . . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
The square foot of glass where Jess sat in her chair and looked down
the brae
INTRODUCTION
When the English publishers read "A Window in Thrums" in manuscript
they thought it unbearably sad and begged me to alter the end. They
warned me that the public do not like sad books. Well, the older I
grow and the sadder the things I see, the more do I wish my books to be
bright and hopeful, but an author may not always interfere with his
story, and if I had altered the end of "A Window in Thrums" I think I
should never have had any more respect for myself. It is a sadder book
to me than it can ever be to anyone else. I see Jess at her window
looking for the son who never came back as no other can see her, and I
knew that unless I brought him back in time the book would be a pain to
me all my days, but the thing had to be done.
I think there are soft-hearted readers here and there who will be glad
to know that there never was any Jess. There is a little house still
standing at the top of the brae which can be identified as her house, I
chose it for her though I was never in it myself, but it is only the
places in my books about Thrums that may be identified. The men and
women, with indeed some very subsidiary exceptions, who now and again
cross the square, are entirely imaginary, and Jess is of them. But
anything in her that was rare or beautiful she had from my mother; the
imaginary woman came to me as I looked into the eyes of the real one.
And as it is the love of mother and son that has written everything of
mine that is of any worth, it was natural that the awful horror of the
untrue son should dog my thoughts and call upon me to paint the
picture. That, I believe now, though I had no idea of it at the time,
is how "A Window in Thrums" came to be written, less by me than by an
impulse from behind. And so it wrote itself, very quickly. I have
read that I rewrote it eight times, but it was written once only,
nearly every chapter, I think, at a sitting.
A WINDOW IN THRUMS
CHAPTER I
THE HOUSE ON THE BRAE
On the bump of green round which the brae twists, at the top of the
brae, and within cry of T'nowhead Farm, still stands a one-storey
house, whose whitewashed walls, streaked with the discoloration that
rain leaves, look yellow when the snow comes. In the old days the
stiff ascent left Thrums behind, and where is now the making of a
suburb was only a poor row of dwellings and a manse, with Hendry's cot
to watch the brae. The house stood bare, without a shrub, in a garden
whose paling did not go all the way round, the potato pit being only
kept out of the road, that here sets off southward, by a broken dyke of
stones and earth. On each side of the slate-coloured door was a window
of knotted glass. Ropes were flung over the thatch to keep the roof on
in wind.
Into this humble abode I would take any one who cares to accompany me.
But you must not come in a contemptuous mood, thinking that the poor
are but a stage removed from beasts of burden, as some cruel writers of
these days say; nor will I have you turn over with your foot the shabby
horse-hair chairs that Leeby kept so speckless, and Hendry weaved for
years to buy, and Jess so loved to look upon.
I speak of the chairs, but if we go together into the "room" they will
not be visible to you. For a long time the house has been to let.
Here, on the left of the doorway, as we enter, is the room, without a
shred of furniture in it except the boards of two closed-in beds. The
flooring is not steady, and here and there holes have been eaten into
the planks. You can scarcely stand upright beneath the decaying
ceiling. Worn boards and ragged walls, and the rusty ribs fallen from
the fireplace, are all that meet your eyes, but I see a round,
unsteady, waxcloth-covered table, with four books lying at equal
distances on it. There are six prim chairs, two of them not to be sat
upon, backed against the walls, and between the window and the
fireplace a chest of drawers, with a snowy coverlet. On the drawers
stands a board with coloured marbles for the game of solitaire, and I
have only to open the drawer with the loose handle to bring out the
dambrod. In the carved wood frame over the window hangs Jamie's
portrait; in the only other frame a picture of Daniel in the den of
lions, sewn by Leeby in wool. Over the chimney-piece with its shells,
in which the roar of the sea can be heard, are strung three rows of
birds' eggs. Once again we might be expecting company to tea.
The passage is narrow. There is a square hole between the rafters, and
a ladder leading up to it. You may climb and look into the attic, as
Jess liked to hear me call my tiny garret-room. I am stiffer now than
in the days when I lodged with Jess during the summer holiday I am
trying to bring back, and there is no need for me to ascend. Do not
laugh at the newspapers with which Leeby papered the garret, nor at the
yarn Hendry stuffed into the windy holes. He did it to warm the house
for Jess. But the paper must have gone to pieces and the yarn rotted
decades ago.
I have kept the kitchen for the last, as Jamie did on the dire day of
which I shall have to tell. It has a flooring of stone now, where
there used only to be hard earth, and a broken pane in the window is
indifferently stuffed with rags. But it is the other window I turn to,
with a pain at my heart, and pride and fondness too, the square foot of
glass where Jess sat in her chair and looked down the brae.
[Illustration: The square foot of glass where Jess sat in her chair and
looked down the brae.]
Ah, that brae! The history of tragic little Thrums is sunk into it
like the stones it swallows in the winter. We have all found the brae
long and steep in the spring of life. Do you remember how the child
you once were sat at the foot of it and wondered if a new world began
at the top? It climbs from a shallow burn, and we used to sit on the
brig a long time before venturing to climb. As boys we ran up the
brae. As men and women, young and in our prime, we almost forgot that
it was there. But the autumn of life comes, and the brae grows
steeper; then the winter, and once again we are as the child pausing
apprehensively on the brig. Yet are we no longer the child; we look
now for no new world at the top, only for a little garden and a tiny
house, and a handloom in the house. It is only a garden of kail and
potatoes, but there may be a line of daisies, white and red, on each
side of the narrow footpath, and honeysuckle over the door. Life is
not always hard, even after backs grow bent, and we know that all braes
lead only to the grave.
This is Jess's window. For more than twenty years she had not been
able to go so far as the door, and only once while I knew her was she
ben in the room. With her husband, Hendry, or their only daughter,
Leeby, to lean upon, and her hand clutching her staff, she took twice a
day, when she was strong, the journey between her bed and the window
where stood her chair. She did not lie there looking at the sparrows
or at Leeby redding up the house, and I hardly ever heard her complain.
All the sewing was done by her; she often baked on a table pushed close
to the window, and by leaning forward she could stir the porridge.
Leeby was seldom off her feet, but I do not know that she did more than
Jess, who liked to tell me, when she had a moment to spare, that she
had a terrible lot to be thankful for.
To those who dwell in great cities Thrums is only a small place, but
what a clatter of life it has for me when I come to it from my
school-house in the glen. Had my lot been cast in a town I would no
doubt have sought country parts during my September holiday, but the
school-house is quiet even when the summer takes brakes full of
sportsmen and others past the top of my footpath, and I was always
light-hearted when Craigiebuckle's cart bore me into the din of Thrums.
I only once stayed during the whole of my holiday at the house on the
brae, but I knew its inmates for many years, including Jamie, the son,
who was a barber in London. Of their ancestry I never heard. With us
it was only some of the articles of furniture, or perhaps a snuff-mull,
that had a genealogical tree. In the house on the brae was a great
kettle, called the boiler, that was said to be fifty years old in the
days of Hendry's grandfather, of whom nothing more is known. Jess's
chair, which had carved arms and a seat stuffed with rags, had been
Snecky Hobart's father's before it was hers, and old Snecky bought it
at a roup in the Tenements. Jess's rarest possession was, perhaps, the
christening robe that even people at a distance came to borrow. Her
mother could count up a hundred persons who had been baptized in it.
Every one of the hundred, I believe, is dead, and even I cannot now
pick out Jess and Hendry's grave; but I heard recently that the
christening robe is still in use. It is strange that I should still be
left after so many changes, one of the three or four who can to-day
stand on the brae and point out Jess's window. The little window
commands the incline to the point where the brae suddenly jerks out of
sight in its climb down into the town. The steep path up the commonty
makes for this elbow of the brae, and thus, whichever way the traveller
takes, it is here that he comes first into sight of the window. Here,
too, those who go to the town from the south get their first glimpse of
Thrums.
Carts pass up and down the brae every few minutes, and there comes an
occasional gig. Seldom is the brae empty, for many live beyond the top
of it now, and men and women go by to their work, children to school or
play. Not one of the children I see from the window to-day is known to
me, and most of the men and women I only recognize by their likeness to
their parents. That sweet-faced old woman with the shawl on her
shoulders may be one of the girls who was playing at the game of
palaulays when Jamie stole into Thrums for the last time; the man who
is leaning on the commonty gate gathering breath for the last quarter
of the brae may, as a barefooted callant, have been one of those who
chased Cree Queery past the poor-house. I cannot say; but this I know,
that the grandparents of most of these boys and girls were once young
with me. If I see the sons and daughters of my friends grown old, I
also see the grandchildren spinning the peerie and hunkering at
I-dree-I-dree--I-droppit-it--as we did so long ago. The world remains
as young as ever. The lovers that met on the commonty in the gloaming
are gone, but there are other lovers to take their place, and still the
commonty is here. The sun had sunk on a fine day in June, early in the
century, when Hendry and Jess, newly married, he in a rich moleskin
waistcoat, she in a white net cap, walked to the house on the brae that
was to be their home. So Jess has told me. Here again has been just
such a day, and somewhere in Thrums there may be just such a couple,
setting out for their home behind a horse with white ears instead of
walking, but with the same hopes and fears, and the same love light in
their eyes. The world does not age. The hearse passes over the brae
and up the straight burying-ground road, but still there is a cry for
the christening robe.
Jess's window was a beacon by night to travellers in the dark, and it
will be so in the future when there are none to remember Jess. There
are many such windows still, with loving faces behind them. From them
we watch for the friends and relatives who are coming back, and some,
alas! watch in vain. Not every one returns who takes the elbow of the
brae bravely, or waves his handkerchief to those who watch from the
window with wet eyes, and some return too late. To Jess, at her window
always when she was not in bed, things happy and mournful and terrible
came into view. At this window she sat for twenty years or more
looking at the world as through a telescope; and here an awful ordeal
was gone through after her sweet untarnished soul had been given back
to God.