Transcribed from the 1897 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: Picture of Margaret Ogilvy]
MARGARET OGILVY
BY HER SON
J. M. BARRIE
[Picture: Graphic]
_Second Edition_
_Completing Twentieth Thousand_
* * * * *
LONDON
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
27 paternoster row
1897
TO
THE MEMORY OF
MY SISTER
JANE ANN
CHAPTER I—HOW MY MOTHER GOT HER SOFT FACE
On the day I was born we bought six hair-bottomed chairs, and in our
little house it was an event, the first great victory in a woman’s long
campaign; how they had been laboured for, the pound-note and the thirty
threepenny-bits they cost, what anxiety there was about the purchase, the
show they made in possession of the west room, my father’s unnatural
coolness when he brought them in (but his face was white)—I so often
heard the tale afterwards, and shared as boy and man in so many similar
triumphs, that the coming of the chairs seems to be something I remember,
as if I had jumped out of bed on that first day, and run ben to see how
they looked. I am sure my mother’s feet were ettling to be ben long
before they could be trusted, and that the moment after she was left
alone with me she was discovered barefooted in the west room, doctoring a
scar (which she had been the first to detect) on one of the chairs, or
sitting on them regally, or withdrawing and re-opening the door suddenly
to take the six by surprise. And then, I think, a shawl was flung over
her (it is strange to me to think it was not I who ran after her with the
shawl), and she was escorted sternly back to bed and reminded that she
had promised not to budge, to which her reply was probably that she had
been gone but an instant, and the implication that therefore she had not
been gone at all. Thus was one little bit of her revealed to me at once:
I wonder if I took note of it. Neighbours came in to see the boy and the
chairs. I wonder if she deceived me when she affected to think that
there were others like us, or whether I saw through her from the first,
she was so easily seen through. When she seemed to agree with them that
it would be impossible to give me a college education, was I so easily
taken in, or did I know already what ambitions burned behind that dear
face? when they spoke of the chairs as the goal quickly reached, was I
such a newcomer that her timid lips must say ‘They are but a beginning’
before I heard the words? And when we were left together, did I laugh at
the great things that were in her mind, or had she to whisper them to me
first, and then did I put my arm round her and tell her that I would
help? Thus it was for such a long time: it is strange to me to feel that
it was not so from the beginning.
It is all guess-work for six years, and she whom I see in them is the
woman who came suddenly into view when they were at an end. Her timid
lips I have said, but they were not timid then, and when I knew her the
timid lips had come. The soft face—they say the face was not so soft
then. The shawl that was flung over her—we had not begun to hunt her
with a shawl, nor to make our bodies a screen between her and the
draughts, nor to creep into her room a score of times in the night to
stand looking at her as she slept. We did not see her becoming little
then, nor sharply turn our heads when she said wonderingly how small her
arms had grown. In her happiest moments—and never was a happier
woman—her mouth did not of a sudden begin to twitch, and tears to lie on
the mute blue eyes in which I have read all I know and would ever care to
write. For when you looked into my mother’s eyes you knew, as if He had
told you, why God sent her into the world—it was to open the minds of all
who looked to beautiful thoughts. And that is the beginning and end of
literature. Those eyes that I cannot see until I was six years old have
guided me through life, and I pray God they may remain my only earthly
judge to the last. They were never more my guide than when I helped to
put her to earth, not whimpering because my mother had been taken away
after seventy-six glorious years of life, but exulting in her even at the
grave.
* * * * *
She had a son who was far away at school. I remember very little about
him, only that he was a merry-faced boy who ran like a squirrel up a tree
and shook the cherries into my lap. When he was thirteen and I was half
his age the terrible news came, and I have been told the face of my
mother was awful in its calmness as she set off to get between Death and
her boy. We trooped with her down the brae to the wooden station, and I
think I was envying her the journey in the mysterious wagons; I know we
played around her, proud of our right to be there, but I do not recall
it, I only speak from hearsay. Her ticket was taken, she had bidden us
good-bye with that fighting face which I cannot see, and then my father
came out of the telegraph-office and said huskily, ‘He’s gone!’ Then we
turned very quietly and went home again up the little brae. But I speak
from hearsay no longer; I knew my mother for ever now.
That is how she got her soft face and her pathetic ways and her large
charity, and why other mothers ran to her when they had lost a child.
‘Dinna greet, poor Janet,’ she would say to them; and they would answer,
‘Ah, Margaret, but you’re greeting yoursel.’ Margaret Ogilvy had been
her maiden name, and after the Scotch custom she was still Margaret
Ogilvy to her old friends. Margaret Ogilvy I loved to name her. Often
when I was a boy, ‘Margaret Ogilvy, are you there?’ I would call up the
stair.
She was always delicate from that hour, and for many months she was very
ill. I have heard that the first thing she expressed a wish to see was
the christening robe, and she looked long at it and then turned her face
to the wall. That was what made me as a boy think of it always as the
robe in which he was christened, but I knew later that we had all been
christened in it, from the oldest of the family to the youngest, between
whom stood twenty years. Hundreds of other children were christened in
it also, such robes being then a rare possession, and the lending of ours
among my mother’s glories. It was carried carefully from house to house,
as if it were itself a child; my mother made much of it, smoothed it out,
petted it, smiled to it before putting it into the arms of those to whom
it was being lent; she was in our pew to see it borne magnificently
(something inside it now) down the aisle to the pulpit-side, when a stir
of expectancy went through the church and we kicked each other’s feet
beneath the book-board but were reverent in the face; and however the
child might behave, laughing brazenly or skirling to its mother’s shame,
and whatever the father as he held it up might do, look doited probably
and bow at the wrong time, the christening robe of long experience helped
them through. And when it was brought back to her she took it in her
arms as softly as if it might be asleep, and unconsciously pressed it to
her breast: there was never anything in the house that spoke to her quite
so eloquently as that little white robe; it was the one of her children
that always remained a baby. And she had not made it herself, which was
the most wonderful thing about it to me, for she seemed to have made all
other things. All the clothes in the house were of her making, and you
don’t know her in the least if you think they were out of the fashion;
she turned them and made them new again, she beat them and made them new
again, and then she coaxed them into being new again just for the last
time, she let them out and took them in and put on new braid, and added a
piece up the back, and thus they passed from one member of the family to
another until they reached the youngest, and even when we were done with
them they reappeared as something else. In the fashion! I must come
back to this. Never was a woman with such an eye for it. She had no
fashion-plates; she did not need them. The minister’s wife (a cloak),
the banker’s daughters (the new sleeve)—they had but to pass our window
once, and the scalp, so to speak, was in my mother’s hands. Observe her
rushing, scissors in hand, thread in mouth, to the drawers where her
daughters’ Sabbath clothes were kept. Or go to church next Sunday, and
watch a certain family filing in, the boy lifting his legs high to show
off his new boots, but all the others demure, especially the timid,
unobservant-looking little woman in the rear of them. If you were the
minister’s wife that day or the banker’s daughters you would have got a
shock. But she bought the christening robe, and when I used to ask why,
she would beam and look conscious, and say she wanted to be extravagant
once. And she told me, still smiling, that the more a woman was given to
stitching and making things for herself, the greater was her passionate
desire now and again to rush to the shops and ‘be foolish.’ The
christening robe with its pathetic frills is over half a century old now,
and has begun to droop a little, like a daisy whose time is past; but it
is as fondly kept together as ever: I saw it in use again only the other
day.
My mother lay in bed with the christening robe beside her, and I peeped
in many times at the door and then went to the stair and sat on it and
sobbed. I know not if it was that first day, or many days afterwards,
that there came to me, my sister, the daughter my mother loved the best;
yes, more I am sure even than she loved me, whose great glory she has
been since I was six years old. This sister, who was then passing out of
her ‘teens, came to me with a very anxious face and wringing her hands,
and she told me to go ben to my mother and say to her that she still had
another boy. I went ben excitedly, but the room was dark, and when I
heard the door shut and no sound come from the bed I was afraid, and I
stood still. I suppose I was breathing hard, or perhaps I was crying,
for after a time I heard a listless voice that had never been listless
before say, ‘Is that you?’ I think the tone hurt me, for I made no
answer, and then the voice said more anxiously ‘Is that you?’ again. I
thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to, and I said in a little
lonely voice, ‘No, it’s no him, it’s just me.’ Then I heard a cry, and
my mother turned in bed, and though it was dark I knew that she was
holding out her arms.
After that I sat a great deal in her bed trying to make her forget him,
which was my crafty way of playing physician, and if I saw any one out of
doors do something that made the others laugh I immediately hastened to
that dark room and did it before her. I suppose I was an odd little
figure; I have been told that my anxiety to brighten her gave my face a
strained look and put a tremor into the joke (I would stand on my head in
the bed, my feet against the wall, and then cry excitedly, ‘Are you
laughing, mother?’)—and perhaps what made her laugh was something I was
unconscious of, but she did laugh suddenly now and then, whereupon I
screamed exultantly to that dear sister, who was ever in waiting, to come
and see the sight, but by the time she came the soft face was wet again.
Thus I was deprived of some of my glory, and I remember once only making
her laugh before witnesses. I kept a record of her laughs on a piece of
paper, a stroke for each, and it was my custom to show this proudly to
the doctor every morning. There were five strokes the first time I
slipped it into his hand, and when their meaning was explained to him he
laughed so boisterously, that I cried, ‘I wish that was one of hers!’
Then he was sympathetic, and asked me if my mother had seen the paper
yet, and when I shook my head he said that if I showed it to her now and
told her that these were her five laughs he thought I might win another.
I had less confidence, but he was the mysterious man whom you ran for in
the dead of night (you flung sand at his window to waken him, and if it
was only toothache he extracted the tooth through the open window, but
when it was something sterner he was with you in the dark square at once,
like a man who slept in his topcoat), so I did as he bade me, and not
only did she laugh then but again when I put the laugh down, so that
though it was really one laugh with a tear in the middle I counted it as
two.
It was doubtless that same sister who told me not to sulk when my mother
lay thinking of him, but to try instead to get her to talk about him. I
did not see how this could make her the merry mother she used to be, but
I was told that if I could not do it nobody could, and this made me eager
to begin. At first, they say, I was often jealous, stopping her fond
memories with the cry, ‘Do you mind nothing about me?’ but that did not
last; its place was taken by an intense desire (again, I think, my sister
must have breathed it into life) to become so like him that even my
mother should not see the difference, and many and artful were the
questions I put to that end. Then I practised in secret, but after a
whole week had passed I was still rather like myself. He had such a
cheery way of whistling, she had told me, it had always brightened her at
her work to hear him whistling, and when he whistled he stood with his
legs apart, and his hands in the pockets of his knickerbockers. I
decided to trust to this, so one day after I had learned his whistle
(every boy of enterprise invents a whistle of his own) from boys who had
been his comrades, I secretly put on a suit of his clothes, dark grey
they were, with little spots, and they fitted me many years afterwards,
and thus disguised I slipped, unknown to the others, into my mother’s
room. Quaking, I doubt not, yet so pleased, I stood still until she saw
me, and then—how it must have hurt her! ‘Listen!’ I cried in a glow of
triumph, and I stretched my legs wide apart and plunged my hands into the
pockets of my knickerbockers, and began to whistle.
She lived twenty-nine years after his death, such active years until
toward the end, that you never knew where she was unless you took hold of
her, and though she was frail henceforth and ever growing frailer, her
housekeeping again became famous, so that brides called as a matter of
course to watch her ca’ming and sanding and stitching: there are old
people still, one or two, to tell with wonder in their eyes how she could
bake twenty-four bannocks in the hour, and not a chip in one of them.
And how many she gave away, how much she gave away of all she had, and
what pretty ways she had of giving it! Her face beamed and rippled with
mirth as before, and her laugh that I had tried so hard to force came
running home again. I have heard no such laugh as hers save from merry
children; the laughter of most of us ages, and wears out with the body,
but hers remained gleeful to the last, as if it were born afresh every
morning. There was always something of the child in her, and her laugh
was its voice, as eloquent of the past to me as was the christening robe
to her. But I had not made her forget the bit of her that was dead; in
those nine-and-twenty years he was not removed one day farther from her.
Many a time she fell asleep speaking to him, and even while she slept her
lips moved and she smiled as if he had come back to her, and when she
woke he might vanish so suddenly that she started up bewildered and
looked about her, and then said slowly, ‘My David’s dead!’ or perhaps he
remained long enough to whisper why he must leave her now, and then she
lay silent with filmy eyes. When I became a man and he was still a boy
of thirteen, I wrote a little paper called ‘Dead this Twenty Years,’
which was about a similar tragedy in another woman’s life, and it is the
only thing I have written that she never spoke about, not even to that
daughter she loved the best. No one ever spoke of it to her, or asked
her if she had read it: one does not ask a mother if she knows that there
is a little coffin in the house. She read many times the book in which
it is printed, but when she came to that chapter she would put her hands
to her heart or even over her ears.