Complete Works of J. M. Barrie

by Unknown

  The ideal holiday in bed does not require the presence of a ministering angel in the room all day. You frequently prefer to be alone, and point out to your wife that you cannot have her trifling with her health for your sake, and so she must go out for a walk. She is reluctant, but finally goes, protesting that you are the most unselfish of men, and only too good for her. This leaves a pleasant aroma behind it, for even when lying in bed, we like to feel that we are uncommonly fine fellows. After she has gone you get up cautiously, and, walking stealthily to the wardrobe, produce from the pocket of your greatcoat a good novel. A holiday in bed must be arranged for beforehand. With a gleam in your eye you slip back to bed, double your pillow to make it higher, and begin to read. You have only got to the fourth page, when you make a horrible discovery — namely, that the book is not cut. An experienced holiday-maker would have had it cut the night before, but this is your first real holiday, or perhaps you have been thoughtless. In any case you have now matter to think of. You are torn in two different ways. There is your coat on the floor with a knife in it, but you cannot reach the coat without getting up again. Ought you to get the knife or to give up reading? Perhaps it takes a quarter of an hour to decide this question, and you decide it by discovering a third course. Being a sort of an invalid, you have certain privileges which would be denied you if you were merely sitting in a chair in the agonies of neuralgia. One of the glorious privileges of a holiday in bed is that you are entitled to cut books with your fingers. So you cut the novel in this way, and read on.

  Those who have never tried it may fancy that there is a lack of incident in a holiday in bed. There could not be a more monstrous mistake. You are in the middle of a chapter, when suddenly you hear a step upon the stair. Your loving ears tell you that your wife has returned, and is hastening to you. Now, what happens? The book disappears beneath the pillow, and when she enters the room softly you are lying there with your eyes shut. This is not merely incident; it is drama.

  What happens next depends on circumstances. She says, in a low voice:

  “Are you feeling any easier now, John?”

  No answer.

  “Oh, I believe he is sleeping.”

  Then she steals from the room, and you begin to read again.

  During a holiday in bed one never thinks, of course, of analyzing his actions. If you had done so in this instance, you would have seen that you pretended sleep because you had got to an exciting passage. You love your wife, but, wife or no wife, you must see how the passage ends.

  Possibly the little scene plays differently, as thus: “John, are you feeling any easier now?”

  No answer.

  “Are you asleep?”

  No answer.

  “What a pity! I don’t want to waken him, and yet the fowl will be spoilt.”

  “Is that you back, Marion?”

  “Yes, dear; I thought you were asleep.”

  “No, only thinking.”

  “You think too much, dear. I have cooked a chicken for you.”

  “I have no appetite.”

  “I’m so sorry, but I can give it to the children.”

  “Oh, as it’s cooked, you may as well bring it up.”

  In that case the reason of your change of action is obvious. But why do you not let your wife know that you have been reading? This is another matter that you never reason about. Perhaps it is because of your craving for sympathy, and you fear that if you were seen enjoying a novel the sympathy would go. Or perhaps it is that a holiday in bed is never perfect without a secret. Monotony must be guarded against, and so long as you keep the book to yourself your holiday in bed is a healthy excitement. A stolen book (as we may call it) is like stolen fruit, sweeter than what you can devour openly. The boy enjoys his stolen apple because at any moment he may have to slip it down the leg of his trousers and pretend that he has merely climbed the tree to enjoy the scenery. You enjoy your book doubly because you feel that it is a forbidden pleasure. Or do you conceal the book from your wife lest she should think that you are overexerting yourself? She must not to be made anxious on your account. Ah, that is it.

  People who pretend (for it must be pretence) that they enjoy their holiday in the country, explain that the hills or the sea gave them such an appetite. I could never myself feel the delight of being able to manage an extra herring for breakfast, but it should be pointed out that neither mountains nor oceans give you such an appetite as a holiday in bed. What makes people eat more anywhere is that they have nothing else to do, and in bed you have lots of time for meals. As for the quality of the food supplied, there is no comparison. In the Highlands it is ham and eggs all day till you sicken. At the seaside it is fish till the bones stick in your mouth. But in bed — oh, there you get something worth eating. You don’t take three big meals a day, but twelve little ones, and each time it is something different from the last. There are delicacies for breakfast, for your four luncheons and your five dinners. You explain to your wife that you have lost your appetite, and she believes you, but at the same time she has the sense to hurry on your dinner. At the clatter of dishes (for which you have been lying listening) you raise your poor head, and say faintly:

  “Really, Marion, I can’t touch food.”

  “But this is nothing,” she says, “only the wing of a partridge.”

  You take a side glance at it, and see that there is also the other wing and the body and two legs. Your alarm thus dispelled, you say:

  “I really can’t.”

  “But, dear, it is so beautifully cooked.”

  “Yes, but I have no appetite.”

  “But try to take it, John, for my sake.”

  Then for her sake you say she can leave it on the chair, and perhaps you will just taste it. As soon as she has gone you devour that partridge, and when she comes back she has the sense to say:

  “Why you have scarcely eaten anything. What could you take for supper?”

  You say you can take nothing, but if she likes she can cook a large sole, only you won’t be able to touch it.

  “Poor dear!” she says, “your appetite has completely gone,” and then she rushes to the kitchen to cook the sole with her own hands. In half an hour she steals into your room with it, and then you (who have been wondering why she is such a time) start up protesting:

  “I hope, Marion, this is nothing for me.”

  “Only the least bit of a sole, dear.”

  “But I told you I could eat nothing.”

  “Well, this is nothing, it is so small.”

  You look again, and see with relief that it is a large sole.

  “I would much rather that you took it away.”

  “But, dear—”

  “I tell you I have no appetite.”

  “Of course I know that; but how can you hope to preserve your strength if you eat so little You have had nothing all day.”

  You glance at her face to see if she is in earnest, for you can remember three breakfasts, four luncheons, two dinners, and sandwiches between; but evidently she is not jesting. Then you yield.

  “Oh, well, to keep my health up I may just put a fork into it.”

  “Do, dear; it will do you good, though you have no caring for it.”

  Take a holiday in bed, if only to discover what an angel your wife is.

  There is one thing to guard against. Never call it a holiday. Continue not to feel sure what is wrong with you, and to talk vaguely of getting up presently. Your wife will suggest calling in the doctor, but pooh-pooh him. Be firm on that point. The chances are that he won’t understand your case.

  IS IT A MAN?

  I.

  I CAME upon his grave accidentally a few weeks ago while taking a short cut through the cemetery of an unlovely provincial town. His name I had forgotten the night I heard it years ago: had flung it away, so to speak, with the handbills he gave me at the same time, but the wording on the tombstone recalled his story to me as vividly as if it was a long lost friend whom I had suddenly struck agai
nst. I laughed at the story when he told it to me, but when I read it in brief on the tombstone I wondered why I had laughed.

  We only met once, and it was in London at the theatre. His stall adjoined mine. When his lips were at rest he was a melancholy looking little man, but frequently he spoke to himself, and then all character went out of his face. For a time he paid no attention to the acting, but by and by he sat up excitedly in his seat, rubbed his hands nervously on his trousers, and leaning in my direction, peered, not at the stage, but at the wings. I heard him mutter, “Her cue in a moment, and I don’t see her!” He looked around the house as if to signal to everybody that something was about to happen, and then I noticed his feet begin to beat the floor instinctively, and his one palm run to the other. Next moment the heavy father whispered to the old, and therefore comic spinster, “But not a word of this to my daughter, here she comes.”

  The heroine of the piece sailed on to the stage, with tears for her father and smiles for the audience, and, as I thought, one quick glance for my neighbor. His feet pattered softly on the floor, as a sign to the audience to cheer, but they were reluctant, and after she had given them an imploring glance, she began to speak slowly, as one saying to herself between her spoken words, “I am still quite willing to stop if you will applaud me.” And she was applauded, for my neighbor’s feet at last set others a-going, and then she courtesied and waited for more, and then we all became energetic. The little man had been breathing quick in his excitement, but now he heaved a great sigh of relief, and whispered to me, in exultation, “What a reception the O’Reilly has got, sir, and quite spontaneous. The same thing occurs every night, every night, every night! Hush! you will see acting now.”

  He had silenced me when I was about to ask him if he was here every night. I judged him an ardent admirer of Miss O’Reilly, and had further evidence during the first act that one man may lead the applause as a conductor leads the orchestra. When Miss Helmsley entered, and some pittites began to cheer, my neighbor cried “Sh-sh” so fiercely that the demonstration stopped abruptly, and Miss Helmsley withdrew her courtesy. When the heavy father stopped in the middle of his long speech for a “hand” to help him on his way, he would have got it but for the “Sh-sh” of the little man. When the comedian nudged the elderly spinster in the ribs, which is how elderly spinsters are made love to on the stage, some ladies giggled, but my neighbor looked at them with a face that said, “There is nothing funny in that,” and they restrained their mirth. But when Miss O’Reilly snatched the smoking cap from Leonard and put it on her own flaxen head, he chuckled till the whole audience admitted the fun of it, and when Miss O’Reilly told Lord John to stand back and let her pass, my neighbor brought down the house; and when she made her reluctant exit he brought down the house again; and when the curtain fell on the first act he shouted “O’Reilly” until we were all infected. Not until he had her before the curtain would he retire, and then it was to speak about her to me. The exchange of a vesta introduced us to each other.

  “You have seen the piece before?” I asked, with the good-nature that is born of a cigarette. I had already sufficient interest in him to wonder who he was.

  “The piece?” he echoed, indifferently. “Oh, yes; I have seen the greater part of it frequently.”

  “How does it end?”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “I don’t know,” he answered, contemptuously, “I always walk out of the house just before the last tableau.”

  “Is Miss O’Reilly not on the stage in that tableau?” I asked.

  “She is not,” he replied, rapping out an oath or two, and trembling with rage. “Did you ever hear of anything so monstrous? She is leading lady, the idol of the town, and yet she is not on at the end. Excuse me, sir. I am always taken in this way when I think of it.”

  He bit his cigarette in two and asked for another vesta. Then he explained.

  “She dies, you know, in the middle of the act.”

  “Ah, that accounts for it,” I said.

  “Not at all,” he retorted, “she ought not to die until the tableau. And if she had to die then, that should have been the tableau. What do people come to the theatre to see?”

  “The play,” I suggested.

  “Pooh, the play!” he sneered. “There are twenty plays to be seen nightly at West End theatres, but only one O’Reilly. They come to see the O’Reilly, sir, and it is defrauding the public to let her die a moment before the end.”

  “Still,” I said, “the author—”

  “Pshaw!” he broke in, “who thinks of the author? He could have easily have brought down the curtain on the O’Reilly’s death, and I am confident he meant to do it. But Helmsley is the management’s niece, and insisted on being the only lady in the tableau. You noticed that Helmsley was a complete frost? I distinctly heard someone hissing her.”

  “So did I,” I said, smiling, for the someone had been himself.

  “You heard it, too,” he cried, audaciously. “Thank you sir,” he said, and shook me warmly by the hand.

  “The O’Reilly herself,” he added, “had no wish to be in the tableau, but she knew the public would expect it. She is a woman, that, sir!”

  “She is,” I agreed.

  “Ha!” he exclaimed. “You, too, were struck by it? But she impresses everyone in the same way. The management pay her a princely salary, but she is worth it. Did you hear how that man in the pit laughed over her lines about bread and cheese and kisses? I wonder who he is?”

  “What salary does she get?” I asked, with the curiosity of a theatregoer.

  “They say,” he replied, looking at me sharply, ‘‘that she gets eighty pounds a week.”

  “Hem!” I said.

  He coughed. “What a carriage she has!” he exclaimed; and then waited for me to agree.

  “Wonderful!” I said, for I never contradict a man who is in love.

  “You think she has a wonderful carriage?” he asked, as if I had put the idea into his head. “Yes, you are quite right. I will tell her you remarked on it.”

  “You know her personally?”

  “I have that honor,” he replied, with dignity. “Candidly now, is not her elocution superb?”

  “It is,” I said.

  “I agree with you,” he answered, “and you have used the one word that properly describes it. Superb! Yes, that is the very word. I will tell her you said superb. I see you know acting, sir, when you see it. Not that I would call it acting. Would you call it acting?”

  “Certainly not,” I answered recklessly, but hoping he would not ask me to give it a name.

  “No,” he said, “it is not acting. It is simply genius.”

  “Genius,” I said from memory, “is all the talents in a nutshell.”

  “Ha!” he cried, “that is how you would describe her? All the talents in a nutshell! What a capital line for the advertisements. All the talents in a nutshell! I will tell her you said that about her.”

  He lowered his voice. “Press?” he asked with some awe. I shook my head.

  “Got friends on the press?” he next inquired.

  “Yes,” I said, remembering that a pressman owed me five pounds.

  “Critics?”

  “I shouldn’t wonder.”

  ‘‘Then,” he said, eagerly, “put them up to that line, ‘ all the talents in a nutshell,’ or stop, would you mind giving me their private address?”

  “Unfortunately, I cannot.”

  “That is a pity, because if you could see your way to a ‘ par,’ I think I might be able to introduce you to the O’Reilly. But she is very particular.”

  “You are an enthusiast about her,” I remarked.

  “Who could help it?” he answered. “I have watched her career since she was — on my soul, sir, since she was nobody in particular. There was a time when that woman was no more famous than you are. You were speaking of her genius a minute ago, but, would you believe it, she rose from the ranks, positively from the ranks
.”

  If I had swooned at this, his hands would have been ready to catch me; but I kept my senses.

  “Your interest in her,” I ventured to say, “was very natural, but it must have taken up a good deal of your time.”

  “All my time,” he said.

  “Except during business hours, of course.”

  “From the time I rise until midnight.”

  “Then you have no profession?”

  “That is my profession.”

  “What?”

  “The interest I take in her.”

  “And did you never do anything else?” I asked, beginning to envy the little man his father.

  At once the melancholy look, of which I have spoken, came back to his face.

  “I used to be in the profession myself,” he said, sighing, “I am Jolly Little Jim.”

  He did not look it at that moment.

  “You have forgotten me, I see,” he said, dolefully. “Think a moment. Jolly Little Jim was the name.”

  “I am afraid I never heard it,” I had to admit. “Nonsense,” he answered, testily. “Everybody knew that name once. I got no other, though my real name is James Thorpe. Why, I advertised as Jolly Little Jim. You must have heard it.”

  “Perhaps I have,” I replied, pitying his distress. “If you would care to read my press notices,” he began putting his hand into his pocket, “I can—”