by Unknown
Well, at that time my friend became enamoured of a maid. No longer did he care what his jump was. In his dire need he consulted me. At that time he had a gratifying faith in me in affairs of the heart, partly because he recognised that I should be a poor rival, but still more because I was then — it is now revealed for the first time — I was then writing my first novel. It was a very cynical work, entitled ‘A Child of Nature’ — she was not really that kind. It was a tale of Dumfries, and practically an exposure of the ladies therein. A long thing — 100,000 words. A few years ago I came upon the manuscript, and, you will be relieved to hear, gently tore it up — just in case it should fall into the wrong hands, you know.
My friend liked the story and was always begging me to read the new chapter to him, especially if it was a love chapter. I got the best of my love scenes out of the novels by sparkling ladies which I read with my eyes standing out of my head in Mr. Anderson’s library. The swain did not know that, however, and I was flattered by his interest, until I discovered that he liked my love scenes because he was turning them to his own practical use. A coldness arose, but things were not going well with his romance and he had to return to me for succour. I told him — it was my first homage to the craft — that his one chance was to go to that stile — he on one side of it and she on the other — and if its associations did not bring him to great sayings then he had better hie him to a monastery. He was very despondent, did not have much hope, he was not really literary, but he made the assignation and he went, and I am afraid he held a lonely vigil at the stile. She never appeared — I think she was otherwise occupied writing out 500 lines at her boarding-school. To me, looking back, that is quite a walnut, but I dare say he walked in no walnut grove that day. I can tell you, however, that it all ended happily, and that not many years afterwards they were married — though not to each other.
One of the best walnuts Dumfries ever gave to me is called the John Neilson. I have been to see him to-day, and he was sorry he could not come along here. I tell you I think I should have been prouder to have him here than almost any other man in Scotland. Those of you here who have sat under him, and many thousands outside, have reason, as I have, to roll that name affectionately on the tongue, not necessarily because he was so determined to make us mathematicians, whatever might be our own views on the subject — and I for one differed from him profoundly — but because in our most impressionable years he set us an example of conduct and character that kept a guiding hand on our shoulders when we went out into the world. For many years he has been an ornament to what I think must now be called the most important of all professions. I have sought the company of schoolmasters in England because I find them often to be the pick of men, but if this were their prize-getting day and I had the distribution of the honours, I know whom I should begin with—’First Prize, John Neilson.’ I wish I had said that to him long ago in my Academy days: it might have got a prize for me out of him. No, it wouldn’t, no one could ever get round that man. The other masters one could work upon with some hope of a modest success — even Dr. Cranston, that fine scholar — but Mr. Neilson, the winds of our artifice beat upon him in vain. He was so dogged about his triangles that even I can still wave a hand of acquaintance to them if we meet in the marketplace. He did not always win. We did manage to keep some things from him. He never heard, for instance, about the ‘Child of Nature.’ Not a word ever reached him about that stile. All unconscious was he that, when the shades of night began to fall, certain young mathematicians shed their triangles, crept up walls and down trees, and became pirates in a sort of Odyssey that was long afterwards to become the play of Peter Pan. For our escapades in a certain Dumfries garden, which is enchanted land to me, were certainly the genesis of that nefarious work. We lived in the tree-tops, on coconuts attached thereto, and that were in a bad condition; we were buccaneers and I kept the log-book of our depredations, an eerie journal, without a triangle in it to mar the beauty of its page. That log-book I trust is no longer extant, though I should like one last look at it, to see if Captain Hook is in it, and whether there are any indications that he was drawn from Mr. Neilson. If so, I should like him to look upon it as a walnut.
I have never divulged to anyone what set me, a dour Scot, to the writing of plays, but to-day one seems impelled to tell everything, and to tell it truthfully — another unexpected and disquieting result of the Burgess ticket. I think I should never have taken to it seriously but for pressure from two great Englishmen, Sir Henry Irving and Mr. George Meredith. Irving not only drove me to write my first three plays — the first three that actually appeared in London — and found managers to produce them, but it was he who got me out of the way of writing them on the backs of old envelopes. Why Mr. Meredith wanted me so ardently to turn playwright I could never quite understand, unless it was because he liked me to go down to his famous chalet and tell him about theatres without his having to go to them himself. Those two, however, had not the luck to be Dumfriesians, and so any further mention of them is barred.
My first play was very properly written for the Dumfries Academy Dramatic Society, on whose boards I also made my only appearance as an actor. That was due to the histrionic enthusiasm of an Academy boy, certainly the best amateur actor I have ever seen, whom I am glad to know is here to-day, and who blushes so easily — at least he blushed easily a century or two ago — that I shall cleverly conceal his identity under the name of Wedd. Never can there have been a more devoted follower of the Muse, or a stage manager with more ingratiating ways. During the winters of our existence his pockets were always bulging with stage directions, which fell on the floor as he was being caned, and all the time the masters were submitting him to drastic treatment he was considering how they would do for walking-on gentlemen. Is it conceivable that he ever had designs on Mr. Neilson?
Our Wedd was truly great in low comedy, but not so convincing as a young lady with her hair attached to her hat, the sort of part for which he usually cast me. I may perhaps be allowed to tell you without unpardonable elation — so many years having elapsed — that at one of our performances at the Crichton a male member of the audience asked for an introduction. I think I did greatest credit to our admired Wedd on one occasion when the curtain rose on my husband and me about to partake of breakfast, and in his stage-fright my husband pulled the table-cover and its contents to the floor. How would a superb actress have risen to that emergency? I have asked some of them — Sarah Bernhardt and others — and none of them conceived anything equal to what that Adèle did — Adèle was my name, I was taken from the French — but the unworthy youth who played my husband would call me Addle, to my annoyance — I went behind him, and, putting my arms round his neck — yet not forgetting even in that supreme moment to be wary about my hair and hat — I said, ‘You clumsy darling!’ The house rose — I don’t mean they went out — several of them cheered, led on by Wedd, who, when not actually on the stage himself, was always somewhere in hiding, leading the applause. Thus was a great comedienne lost to the world. The next time I saw that play was in London, with Miss Irene Vanbrugh in my part. You may guess I was critical, and she was nervous. I told her I thought her good, but that she was lacking in some of my womanly touches.
It was in order to escape from feminine rôles that I wrote for the Academy my first play, a staggering work entitled Bandelero the Bandit. I was not Bandelero. I nobly gave up that to Tom Newbigging, because I thought one of the other parts was better. It was the part of all my favourite characters in fiction rolled into one, so that I had to be constantly changing my clothes, with the result that I was scarcely ever on the stage. A disappointing kind of part. I foolishly told Mr. Meredith about that play long afterwards, and when the fly came to take me from his house to the station he used to announce, in a manner that would have set Wedd considering him, ‘Bandelero’s carriage stops the way.’
Fiction — the drama — I was also a painter in those days. I gave up becoming a painter for life only b
ecause I always lost my paint-box. That probably accounts for the darker side of my character which some people have noticed. I lose everything. I shall have a nice time with that Ticket.
Once a learned professor came to the Academy to examine us, and after some days of it I decided to absent myself from the final proceedings. Other boys were sent in pursuit, and there was a hot chase until I discovered that if I went slowly they also went slowly; that, in short, they were as little desirous of returning to Lochaber as I was. Thus did they throw away those precious hours. I ought to have exposed them. I do so now. As it was, I remember going to the station, and from a safe place watching the professor go off in his train, before I returned to the school, to find, alas! that the exams, were over. But Dr. Cranston had me that day, for he told me the professor had wanted me back only to commend me for a confiscated book of sketches. So that was a walnut I missed.
I did get two or three prizes at the Academy — and I always knew that I could get the second prize without working much, but that I could never get the first, however hard I worked. That was because of a boy — I can’t sit down without saying a word about him. One day there was a timid knock at the door of the Rector’s room, and a thin, frightened-looking boy, poorly clad and frail, came in. No doubt we all promptly summed him up as of small account, but I should not wonder though he was the greatest boy that ever sat on the forms of the old Dumfries Academy. I don’t mean merely as a scholar, though in scholarship he was of another world from the rest of us; so he shone, pale star that he was, when he went to Glasgow University and afterwards to Oxford, until — someone turned out that light. He was too poor, was that brave little adventurer. I think that explains it all. The other boys felt that there was something winged about him, just as I did. He couldn’t play games, and yet we all accepted him as our wonder one. That this could have been so is a good mark for the Academy, and is perhaps a proof, if one were needed, that Dumfries is a Scottish town. What was it about James M’Millan that has stayed with me for so many years, and can still touch me to the quick? I felt, when we were boys, that he was — a Presence, and I feel it still. Literature was to be his game, and what play he might have made with it! Your lost might-have-been.
‘His spirit’s bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng,
Whose sails were never to the tempest given.’
I think the shade of Burns was restless on the night the caretaker’s boy died.
Dumfries will think this all so much vain blowing of fires that have burnt themselves out. Even the ashes have gone cold. I feel as if I had popped out of the grave to show you some shivering, blackened paper crumble in my hand. With your permission, I shall now pop back again. I have sometimes been called elusive. After such a straight talk I can never be called that any more — Can I?
I — thank you humbly for the great honour given me by inscribing my name in an illustrious roll, in some cases so illustrious that it is almost strange to think that they have all to take the kerb to make way for an exciseman. Among them belted earls and a’ that, such as he liked when the wind was in the east to pour a molten fire upon, but every one of them now, we may be very sure, glorying chiefly in being burgesses of Dumfries, because he was one also. One-half of Burns we can all fathom, for he was so Scotch that he was, and is, our blood relation, the one who lived more vividly than the rest. He was so frank about himself that we know that flame of life as we don’t know even Dr. Johnson. All the miseries of him, his misdeeds, his follies, we understand, as we know some loved and erring son with whom we have sat up all night in the fields. That is the mortal part of him, which is ours — perhaps the one thing in all Scotland which we, his countrymen, ask outsiders to keep their hands off. There is also the immortal part, to which we don’t belong, the part that is now a walnut tree for all the world. The errors and woes of Burns are, perhaps, too much harped upon. In his life even he, too, had his walnuts, and by all the Gods, he could crack them. To know how best to crack your walnuts! There have been many definitions of genius; I offer you that as another one.
II
At the Commemoration Dinner given at the Royal Restaurant, Dumfries, that evening, by Sir James Barrie’s old school friends and admirers.
Sir James Crichton-Browne said: —
I know well, and have had impressed on me, Sir James Barrie’s objection to speechmaking especially when levelled at himself’, but in my professional capacity I frequently meet people with a strong objection to a surgical operation, and the time comes when they have to waive that objection and submit to it, and so Sir James, having got himself into a certain predicament, must bear up, with what fortitude he can command, under post-prandial manipulation. I have no anaesthetic to offer him, but I shall not be at all hurt should he take refuge from my parleying in what is now a fashionable remedy known as “twilight sleep.’
Sir James once said to me, in response to my invitation, that wild horses would not drag him to lecture at the Royal Institute in London, and in his inimitable rectorial address at St. Andrews, he declared, ‘This is my first and last public appearance,’ but ‘the best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft agley’ — and happily Sir James has not been allowed to stand aloof, but has by gentler traction than wild horses been drawn on to the rostrum more than once, and has to-day made a very notable public appearance. Now, I can explain that. The fact is, Sir James is not ‘master of his fate.’ Socrates had his familiar demon; Sir James has his M’Connachie — but while the demon or ‘divine voice’ of Socrates was purely negative or prohibitive, warning him against the things he ought not to do, the M’Connachie of Sir James is of a more positive and active disposition, takes possession of him and whisks him about in delightful cantrips at its pleasure.
I have no doubt that it is to M’Connachie that we owe Sir James’s presence here this evening. Sir James was standing ‘on the hearthrug, among the harsh realities of furniture’ in what he called his ‘dour, practical and canny mood,’ when the invitation to this dinner reached him, and he said peremptorily, between two puffs of Craven Mixture, ‘I shall decline.’ But M’Connachie intervened, and, conjuring up a radiant vision of Nithsdale in all its beauty, old memories interwoven with newborn fancies, said, ‘Nothing of the kind. I shall carry you down to that Dumfries dinner whether you like it or not. Haggis or no haggis, you shall be there.’ I have no doubt M’Connachie is here now whispering into Sir fames’s ear some of those sparkling whimsicalities to which we shall shortly listen.
Dumfries, like the enchanted island of ‘Mary Rose,’ has a glamour of its own. Barrie has heard the call and he is here. He has told us that ‘ the first years of boyhood are the most impressionable of any, and that nothing that happens after twelve matters very much,’ so I suppose Kirriemuir must have the credit of having had the principal hand in the making of him, but I claim for Dumfries that it sharpened and polished the impressions that Kirriemuir had engraved. It taught his young ideas how to shoot, and, but for it, they might not have burgeoned as bravely as they have done. Perhaps some inspirations came from the Mausoleum in St. Michael’s Churchyard.
I was not in Dumfries in Barrie’s time. I was away in the Metropolis, where he later followed me in quest of bawbees, but I well recollect visiting Dumfries one autumn in one of the ‘seventies of last century, and meeting at Crindau a schoolboy — the most highly gifted and promising schoolboy I have ever met — James M’Millan, who was reader to my blind father, and who said to me, ‘ We ha’e a genius at the Academy and his name’s Barrie.’ I had faith in James M’Millan’s discernment, but thought he might be carried away by friendly feeling, and asked him, ‘But how do you know he’s a genius? Is he dux or has he shown special talent in any subject?’ To which he replied, ‘Na, na, it’s no that, it’s jist his conversation and his eccentreecity.’ I walked into Dumfries with James M’Millan that afternoon, and as we reached the end of Irving Street, he stopped suddenly and with a rapt expression pointed and sai
d, ‘There he is, that’s Barrie! ‘ Now early genius, unlike early piety, does not make much outward show. It is hidden away in the crevices of the brain, and so I did not see in the boy indicated any ostensible sign of creative energy, and yet there was something unique about him. I recall his delicate physique, his slim figure — a contrast to the sturdy build and more succulent contour of our Border boys — his mobile features, his bright eye, his long dark hair, his bilious temperament, his tout ensemble suggestive of a youthful Spanish hidalgo, whom one might have addressed as Don Barrie, or recognised as a first cousin of Louis Stevenson. I saw him enter the house of his big brother, a valued friend of mine, from the windows of which he had a good view of the Cameronian Church. I suppose, almost the last Covenanting Conventicle in Scotland, so that in Dumfries the Auld Lights with all austerities were still with him.
The next time I saw Barrie he was the boy who had grown up. It was in London, but he was still in company of a Dumfriesian — a famous Dumfriesian, another Mungo Park, one of the Edinburgh Eleven, Joseph Thomson, whose courageous travels are chronicled on the monument on the brae at Thornhill. Barrie has always had explorers among his intimate friends; for instance, Nansen and Scott of the Antarctic, and he has admitted that he has himself had hankerings after geographical discovery. Thus it was, no doubt, that he joined Joseph Thomson, just back from Masailand, on a little expedition of their own. They resolved to penetrate to the dark heart of Central Germany, and to explore the sources of the Rhine. No history of that memorable excursion has ever been published, but I remember Thomson telling me a characteristic incident, that as they went along, Barrie with what was, I fear, a misplaced confidence in German integrity, and perhaps also with some doubts about the currency, disdained to look at the hotel bills — but when they were presented, plunged his hand into his pocket, brought out a gowpen of coins, and begged the astonished landlord to help himself and the waiters to select their own tips.
