Complete Works of J. M. Barrie

by Unknown

  “But I aye snort,” young Petey admitted, “and it should be done without a sound.” When he graduated, he was to marry Martha Spens, who was waiting for him at Tillyloss. There was a London seamstress whom he preferred, and she was willing, but it is safest to stick to Thrums.

  When Tommy was among his new friends a Scotch word or phrase often escaped his lips, but old Petey and the others thought he had picked it up from them, and would have been content to accept him as a London waif who lived somewhere round the corner. To trick people so simply, however, is not agreeable to an artist, and he told them his name was Tommy Shovel, and that his old girl walloped him, and his father found dogs, all which inventions Thrums Street accepted as true. What is much more noteworthy is that, as he gave them birth, Tommy half believed them also, being already the best kind of actor.

  Not all the talking was done by Tommy when he came home with news, for he seldom mentioned a Thrums name, of which his mother could not tell him something more. But sometimes she did not choose to tell, as when he announced that a certain Elspeth Lindsay, of the Marywellbrae, was dead. After this she ceased to listen, for old Elspeth had been her grandmother, and she had now no kin in Thrums.

  “Tell me about the Painted Lady,” Tommy said to her. “Is it true she’s a witch?” But Mrs. Sandys had never heard of any woman so called: the Painted Lady must have gone to Thrums after her time.

  “There ain’t no witches now,” said Elspeth tremulously; Shovel’s mother had told her so.

  “Not in London,” replied Tommy, with contempt; and this is all that was said of the Painted Lady then. It is the first mention of her in these pages.

  The people Mrs. Sandys wanted to hear of chiefly were Aaron Latta and Jean Myles, and soon Tommy brought news of them, but at the same time he had heard of the Den, and he said first:

  “Oh, mother, I thought as you had told me about all the beauty places in Thrums, and you ain’t never told me about the Den.”

  His mother heaved a quick breath. “It’s the only place I hinna telled you o’,” she said.

  “Had you forget, it mother?”

  Forget the Den! Ah, no, Tommy, your mother had not forgotten the Den.

  “And, listen, Elspeth, in the Den there’s a bonny spring of water called the Cuttle Well. Had you forgot the Cuttle Well, mother?”

  No, no; when Jean Myles forgot the names of her children she would still remember the Cuttle Well. Regardless now of the whispering between Tommy and Elspeth, she sat long over the fire, and it is not difficult to fathom her thoughts. They were of the Den and the Cuttle Well.

  Into the life of every man, and no woman, there comes a moment when he learns suddenly that he is held eligible for marriage. A girl gives him the jag, and it brings out the perspiration. Of the issue elsewhere of this stab with a bodkin let others speak; in Thrums its commonest effect is to make the callant’s body take a right angle to his legs, for he has been touched in the fifth button, and he backs away broken-winded. By and by, however, he is at his work — among the turnip-shoots, say — guffawing and clapping his corduroys, with pauses for uneasy meditation, and there he ripens with the swedes, so that by the backend of the year he has discovered, and exults to know, that the reward of manhood is neither more nor less than this sensation at the ribs. Soon thereafter, or at worst, sooner or later (for by holding out he only puts the women’s dander up), he is led captive to the Cuttle Well. This well has the reputation of being the place where it is most easily said.

  The wooded ravine called the Den is in Thrums rather than on its western edge, but is so craftily hidden away that when within a stone’s throw you may give up the search for it; it is also so deep that larks rise from the bottom and carol overhead, thinking themselves high in the heavens before they are on a level with Nether Drumley’s farmland. In shape it is almost a semicircle, but its size depends on you and the maid. If she be with you, the Den is so large that you must rest here and there; if you are after her boldly, you can dash to the Cuttle Well, which was the trysting-place, in the time a stout man takes to lace his boots; if you are of those selfconscious ones who look behind to see whether jeering blades are following, you may crouch and wriggle your way onward and not be with her in half an hour.

  Old Petey had told Tommy that, on the whole, the greatest pleasure in life on a Saturday evening is to put your back against a stile that leads into the Den and rally the sweethearts as they go by. The lads, when they see you, want to go round by the other stile, but the lasses like it, and often the sport ends spiritedly with their giving you a clout on the head.

  Through the Den runs a tiny burn, and by its side is a pink path, dyed this pretty color, perhaps, by the blushes the ladies leave behind them. The burn as it passes the Cuttle Well, which stands higher and just out of sight, leaps in vain to see who is making that cooing noise, and the well, taking the spray for kisses, laughs all day at Romeo, who cannot get up. Well is a name it must have given itself, for it is only a spring in the bottom of a basinful of water, where it makes about as much stir in the world as a minnow jumping at a fly. They say that if a boy, by making a bowl of his hands, should suddenly carry off all the water, a quick girl could thread her needle at the spring. But it is a spring that will not wait a moment.

  Men who have been lads in Thrums sometimes go back to it from London or from across the seas, to look again at some battered little house and feel the blasts of their bairnhood playing through the old wynds, and they may take with them a foreign wife. They show her everything, except the Cuttle Well; they often go there alone. The well is sacred to the memory of first love. You may walk from the well to the round cemetery in ten minutes. It is a common walk for those who go back.

  First love is but a boy and girl playing at the Cuttle Well with a bird’s egg. They blow it on one summer evening in the long grass, and on the next it is borne away on a coarse laugh, or it breaks beneath the burden of a tear. And yet — I once saw an aged woman, a widow of many years, cry softly at mention of the Cuttle Well. “John was a good man to you,” I said, for John had been her husband. “He was a leal man to me,” she answered with wistful eyes, “ay, he was a leal man to me — but it wasna John I was thinking o’. You dinna ken what makes me greet so sair,” she added, presently, and though I thought I knew now I was wrong. “It’s because I canna mind his name,” she said.

  So the Cuttle Well has its sad memories and its bright ones, and many of the bright memories have become sad with age, as so often happens to beautiful things, but the most mournful of all is the story of Aaron Latta and Jean Myles. Beside the well there stood for long a great pink stone, called the Shoaging, Stone, because it could be rocked like a cradle, and on it lovers used to cut their names. Often Aaron Latta and Jean Myles sat together on the Shoaging Stone, and then there came a time when it bore these words cut by Aaron Latta:

  HERE LIES THE MANHOOD OF AARON LATTA, A FOND SON, A FAITHFUL FRIEND AND A TRUE LOVER, WHO VIOLATED THE FEELINGS OF SEX ON THIS SPOT, AND IS NOW THE SCUNNER OF GOD AND MAN

  Tommy’s mother now heard these words for the first time, Aaron having cut them on the stone after she left Thrums, and her head sank at each line, as if someone had struck four blows at her.

  The stone was no longer at the Cuttle Well. As the easiest way of obliterating the words, the minister had ordered it to be broken, and of the pieces another mason had made stands for watches, one of which was now in Thrums Street.

  “Aaron Latta ain’t a mason now,” Tommy rattled on: “he is a warper, because he can warp in his own house without looking on mankind or speaking to mankind. Auld Petey said he minded the day when Aaron Latta was a merry loon, and then Andrew McVittie said, ‘God behears, to think that Aaron Latta was ever a merry man!’ and Baker Lumsden said, ‘Curse her!’”

  His mother shrank in her chair, but said nothing, and Tommy explained:

  “It was Jean Myles he was cursing; did you ken her, mother? she ruined

  Aaron Latta’s life.”


  “Ay, and wha ruined Jean Myles’s life?” his mother cried passionately.

  Tommy did not know, but he thought that young Petey might know, for young Petey had said: “If I had been Jean Myles I would have spat in Aaron’s face rather than marry him.”

  Mrs. Sandys seemed pleased to hear this.

  “They wouldna tell me what it were she did,” Tommy went on; “they said it was ower ugly a story, but she were a bad one, for they stoned her out of Thrums. I dinna know where she is now, but she were stoned out of Thrums!”

  “No alane?”

  “There was a man with her, and his name was — it was—”

  His mother clasped her hands nervously while Tommy tried to remember the name. “His name was Magerful Tam,” he said at length.

  “Ay,” said his mother, knitting her teeth, “that was his name.”

  “I dinna mind any more,” Tommy concluded. “Yes, I mind they aye called

  Aaron Latta ‘Poor Aaron Latta.’”

  “Did they? I warrant, though, there wasna one as said ‘Poor Jean

  Myles’?”

  She began the question in a hard voice, but as she said “Poor Jean

  Myles” something caught in her throat, and she sobbed, painful dry sobs.

  “How could they pity her when she were such a bad one?” Tommy answered briskly.

  “Is there none to pity bad ones?” said his sorrowful mother.

  Elspeth plucked her by the skirt. “There’s God, ain’t there?” she said, inquiringly, and getting no answer she flopped upon her knees, to say a babyish prayer that would sound comic to anybody except to Him to whom it was addressed.

  “You ain’t praying for a woman as was a disgrace to Thrums!” Tommy cried, jealously, and he was about to raise her by force, when his mother stayed his hand.

  “Let her alane,” she said, with a twitching mouth and filmy eyes. “Let her alane. Let my bairn pray for Jean Myles.”

  CHAPTER VII

  COMIC OVERTURE TO A TRAGEDY

  “Jean Myles bides in London” was the next remarkable news brought by Tommy from Thrums Street. “And that ain’t all, Magerful Tam is her man; and that ain’t all, she has a laddie called Tommy and that ain’t all, Petey and the rest has never seen her in London, but she writes letters to Thrums folks and they writes to Petey and tells him what she said. That ain’t all neither, they canna find out what street she bides in, but it’s on the bonny side of London, and it’s grand, and she wears silk clothes, and her Tommy has velvet trousers, and they have a servant as calls him ‘sir.’ Oh, I would just like to kick him! They often looks for her in the grand streets, but they’re angry at her getting on so well, and Martha Scrymgeour said it were enough to make good women like her stop going reg’lar to the kirk.”

  “Martha said that!” exclaimed his mother, highly pleased. “Heard you anything of a woman called Esther Auld? Her man does the orra work at the Tappit Hen public in Thrums.”

  “He’s head man at the Tappit Hen public now,” answered Tommy; “and she wishes she could find out where Jean Myles bides, so as she could write and tell her that she is grand too, and has six hair-bottomed chairs.”

  “She’ll never get the satisfaction,” said his mother triumphantly. “Tell me more about her.”

  “She has a laddie called Francie, and he has yellow curls, and she nearly greets because she canna tell Jean Myles that he goes to a school for the children of gentlemen only. She is so mad when she gets a letter from Jean Myles that she takes to her bed.”

  “Yea, yea!” said Mrs. Sandys cheerily.

  “But they think Jean Myles has been brought low at last,” continued

  Tommy, “because she hasna wrote for a long time to Thrums, and Esther

  Auld said that if she knowed for certain as Jean Myles had been brought

  low, she would put a threepenny bit in the kirk plate.”

  “I’m glad you’ve telled me that, laddie,” said Mrs. Sandys, and next day, unknown to her children, she wrote another letter. She knew she ran a risk of discovery, yet it was probable that Tommy would only hear her referred to in Thrums Street by her maiden name, which he had never heard from her, and as for her husband he had been Magerful Tam to everyone. The risk was great, but the pleasure —

  Unsuspicious Tommy soon had news of another letter from Jean Myles, which had sent Esther Auld to bed again.

  “Instead of being brought low,” he announced, “Jean Myles is grander than ever. Her Tommy has a governess.”

  “That would be a doush of water in Esther’s face?” his mother said, smiling.

  “She wrote to Martha Scrymgeour,” said Tommy, “that it ain’t no pleasure to her now to boast as her laddie is at a school for gentlemen’s children only. But what made her maddest was a bit in Jean Myles’s letter about chairs. Jean Myles has give all her hair-bottomed chairs to a poor woman and buyed a new kind, because hair-bottomed ones ain’t fashionable now. So Esther Auld can’t not bear the sight of her chairs now, though she were windy of them till the letter went to Thrums.”

  “Poor Esther!” said Mrs. Sandys gaily.

  “Oh, and I forgot this, mother. Jean Myles’s reason for not telling where she bides in London is that she’s so grand that she thinks if auld Petey and the rest knowed where the place was they would visit her and boast as they was her friends. Auld Petey stamped wi’ rage when he heard that, and Martha Scrymgeour said, ‘Oh, the pridefu’ limmer!’”

  “Ay, Martha,” muttered Mrs. Sandys, “you and Jean Myles is evens now.”

  But the passage that had made them all wince the most was one giving Jean’s reasons for making no calls in Thrums Street. “You can break it to Martha Scrymgeour’s father and mither,” the letter said, “and to Petey Whamond’s sisters and the rest as has friends in London, that I have seen no Thrums faces here, the low part where they bide not being for the like of me to file my feet in. Forby that, I could not let my son mix with their bairns for fear they should teach him the vulgar Thrums words and clarty his blue-velvet suit. I’m thinking you have to dress your laddie in corduroy, Esther, but you see that would not do for mine. So no more at present, and we all join in compliments, and my little velvets says he wishes I would send some of his toys to your little corduroys. And so maybe I will, Esther, if you’ll tell Aaron Latta how rich and happy I am, and if you’re feared to say it to his face, tell it to the roaring farmer of Double Dykes, and he’ll pass it on.”

  “Did you ever hear of such a woman?” Tommy said indignantly, when he had repeated as much of this insult to Thrums as he could remember.

  But it was information his mother wanted.

  “What said they to that bit?” she asked.

  At first, it appears, they limited their comments to “Losh, losh,” “keeps a’,” “it cows,” “my eertie,” “ay, ay,” “sal, tal,” “dagont” (the meaning of which is obvious). But by and by they recovered their breath, and then Baker Lamsden said, wonderingly:

  “Wha that was at her marriage could have thought it would turn out so weel? It was an eerie marriage that, Petey!”

  “Ay, man, you may say so,” old Petey answered. “I was there; I was one o’ them as went in ahint Aaron Latta, and I’m no’ likely to forget it.”

  “I wasna there,” said the baker, “but I was standing at the door, and I saw the hearse drive up.”

  “What did they mean, mother?” Tommy asked, but she shuddered and replied, evasively, “Did Martha Scrymgeour say anything?”

  “She said such a lot,” he had to confess, “that I dinna mind none on it. But I mind what her father in Thrums wrote to her; he wrote to her that if she saw a carriage go by, she was to keep her eyes on the ground, for likely as not Jean Myles would be in it, and she thought as they was all dirt beneath her feet. But Kirsty Ross — who is she?”

  “She’s Martha’s mother. What about her?”

  “She wrote at the end of the letter that Martha was to hang on ahint the carriage and find out wher
e Jean Myles bides.”

  “Laddie, that was like Kirsty! Heard you what the roaring farmer o’

  Double Dykes said?”

  No, Tommy had not heard him mentioned. And indeed the roaring farmer of Double Dykes had said nothing. He was already lying very quiet on the south side of the cemetery.

  Tommy’s mother’s next question cost her a painful effort. “Did you hear,” she asked, “whether they telled Aaron Latta about the letter?”

  “Yes, they telled him,” Tommy replied, “and he said a queer thing; he said, ‘Jean Myles is dead, I was at her coffining.’ That’s what he aye says when they tell him there’s another letter. I wonder what he means, mother?”

  “I wonder!” she echoed, faintly. The only pleasure left her was to raise the envy of those who had hooted her from Thrums, but she paid a price for it. Many a stab she had got from the unwitting Tommy as he repeated the gossip of his new friends, and she only won their envy at the cost of their increased ill-will. They thought she was lording it in London, and so they were merciless; had they known how poor she was and how ill, they would have forgotten everything save that she was a Thrummy like themselves, and there were few but would have shared their all with her. But she did not believe this, and therefore you may pity her, for the hour was drawing near, and she knew it, when she must appeal to some one for her children’s sake, not for her own.