Complete Works of J. M. Barrie

by Unknown

  I was told of Mr. Wall that the day he was born his people had to call from the window telling him to lay down that ball and come inside. I should say from what I have seen of Mr. Wall, that its only effect upon him was to make him take a longer run.

  Sir James also referred humorously to other members of the team, adding, ‘I think that is all of you. I just wanted to run through the side.’

  For the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children

  AT THE GUILDHALL — December 3, 1930

  I NOTICE that I am being called the chairman this evening. If you don’t mind I should prefer to follow the old custom and be called the chair. I feel that children would be more interested in me if they thought I was the chair.

  Children! You know, the marvel of the world to me is that you can pick out your own. Do you really think when you take them to a party that it is always the same ones you bring back? It should now be evident to you that I am the chair tonight owing to an extraordinary blunder made by the hospital. I can’t abide children, never could. It was merely pretend on my part to get round their mothers and so spend an idle hour in dalliance. I know a boy of four who, when he wakes up and sees the sun, calls out ‘Good morning, God.’ His own idea. Horrible.

  I saw the eclipse of two or three years ago. There were hundreds of thousands of us on a Yorkshire hill, reverent, appalled; but there was also, of course, the inevitable child. What was he doing in the one thrilling moment of his life? He was trying to catch earwigs in the part of a soap-dish that has holes in it.

  It is said that mothers like best the children who give them most trouble. I suppose Cain was Eve’s favourite. Wordsworth says that children arrive trailing clouds of glory. I question this; but if so, it is probably the very worst ones who come that way. Mind you, I don’t blame them. It is every one for himself in this world, and no one knows that better than a child.

  Be thankful that you have me to protect you tonight, for they are to make a fierce assault upon your already depleted pockets. This assault will be conducted by unprincipled representatives whom they hoodwinked long ago. The rules compel me to ask those suspects to address you, but before doing so I feel that it is my duty to warn you against them. Perhaps the most sinister figure in the Guildhall tonight is Lord Macmillan. Attuned by his calling to make the worse appear the better reason, he will stick at nothing in his championship of the Children’s Hospital. One of the most artful things he is likely to do this evening is to invite you to come to that hospital and judge for yourselves. That sounds fair, but don’t you do it. If you do that, he has got you. It would be impossible for any Bigly, which is what children call you, to go round those wards without writing in a Wobbly, which is what they call your cheque-book, or producing a Crinkly, which is their name for a fiver. While Lord Macmillan is getting at you, you hold my hand, and I’ll pull you through.

  Those patients in the hospital beds — I don’t know whether they are following the instructions of Lord Macmillan, or whether it is just their own natural depravity, or whether in some moment of aberration I have put them up to it myself — but small as they are, as soon as you enter they will immediately look smaller. You may take it from me that this is a deliberate design to melt you. They know that there is a degree of smallness a sick child can reach which is beyond putting up with. There they are, lying broken in their cots, making the most of their illness, their bandages, their shrunken forms, the girls listless, with dolls beside them, neglected, as if they needed someone to teach them what a child does with a doll. Don’t let go my hand. They are just playing a game with your long faces. They are so happy in those cosy beds that soon they burst into merriment because you are pitying them, and they hug their dolls as if they knew all about them, and they dive beneath their blankets and kick with joy and peep at you mischievously over the coverlet — all because they are the lucky ones who have cots in the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street.

  Now perhaps is the time for you to cut and run. Don’t look out at the windows or you may see some emaciated little face staring up at them wistfully. He is carrying a tiny bundle, containing, I suppose, his night things, but he can’t get in because we are already far too full. He and his like are a sadder sight than you will find inside the hospital. The little fools think it is a sort of Heaven.

  Don’t ask Lord Macmillan for statistics. He might show you some child who had been carried in a few weeks before, fevered, done for, and is now going out romping with her exultant parents. He might tell you — and it would be the truth — that this is a sight which has been witnessed a million times or so since our hospital was opened. A million children saved. It is something to set against even the ravages of the War.

  We have now pulverised Lord Macmillan. But instead of throwing up his brief he calls as witness no less a person than Mr. Justice Eve.

  You see from the programme that Mr. Justice Eve is to speak about the Medical and Nursing Staffs, and I know he will have such fine things to say of them that I am rather alarmed. I fear that when his turn comes it won’t be any good your holding my hand. At this moment I merely ask him to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to two or three questions.

  Kindly conceive Mr. Justice Eve stepping into the witness-box, and looking around him curiously, as if he had gone into the wrong compartment. Now, Sir, I say sharply to him, do you dare to stand there and tell me that much of the work of the medical staff of this hospital, nobly helped by famous physicians and surgeons from outside, consists of investigations into the causes of children’s ailments which are thus in time modified or even banished from the world? His damping answer is ‘Yes.’ Take care, witness! Because of their devotion do these eminent physicians give up all the accommodation that is rightly theirs to the children, and carry on their researches in the very holes and corners of the hospital? Yes, again! One question about the nurses. Are the nurses sacrificing themselves? Are they, in order to save a few more children, living in such discomfort that it is a shame to every one of us who lives in comfort? He asks if he is compelled to answer that question. I say hurriedly, ‘No’; but Lord Macmillan says hurriedly, ‘Yes.’

  Things are not going too well with me now, and I had better let go your hand. I can do no more for you. Yes, I can. I have seen enough of our medical and nursing staffs to know that, however hardheartedly we refuse our succour, they will disregard their own worldly interests and go on fighting for the children. So let us take advantage of that devotion and sneak out of doing our part. The hospital will still go on, because they will never forsake it. For long so great, our hospital will have, of course, to fall gradually from the front rank, but it will continue to shine from Great Ormond Street, beckoning to that emaciated little face carrying a bundle who is still staring up wistfully at the windows. Perhaps the bundle does not contain his night things. Perhaps he has no night things. It would be funny, wouldn’t it, if the bundle turned out too late to be full of trailing clouds of glory? Well, the light from Great Ormond Street will still burn, but it may have in the future to be a smaller light, instead of the glowing beacon it could become if you and yours, and others like you, would say it shall.

  Unveiling a Statue of Thomas Hardy

  Dorchester — September 2, 1931

  FOR a very few minutes only shall I venture to stand between you and what we have all come here to see — the figure that is behind these sheets. He was a great man. That was his hard fate. In this matter you and I are the lucky ones. Our lot is to be soon forgotten, not to be messed about by the spade-men of the future — it is a warming thought for us, and what the kind Creator meant, but Hardy has to miss it. I believe he would have preferred to share our right to the shorter span once his ‘task was accomplished and the long day done.’

  I believe, indeed, that in one way this statue must be a failure. If it is the living image of him whom it portrays you will find when the sheet is removed that there is no statue there. It will have done what Mr. Hardy would have done, if he had heard that there
was a great concourse of people to do him honour, slipped quietly away.

  I hope I have made our sculptor (Mr. Eric Kennington) a little uneasy. It may be a warning to him not to do so well in the future.

  What is it precisely that we are expecting to see? Our ideas must be very varied. When the child Hardy was born the doctor thought him dead and dropped him into a basket. That was an anxious moment for this country. But a woman slipped forward to make sure and found he was alive. A statue to this woman Mr. Kennington could have done worse than give us.

  What interests me still more is this — was Hardy shamming in the basket? If so, it was the only time in his life that he ever shammed. Yet, knowing what we know of him now, we may think that at his first sight of life he liked it so little that he lay very still. There was never any more faltering. The undaunted mind, that was Hardy. That is a statue I see.

  Let me admit to you a certain longing I have. I know some things about Hardy that I feel sure cannot be in Mr. Kennington’s work, and I should like us to come here some night soon — maybe tonight when all of you are in bed, especially Mr. Kennington. I should like to steal here in a white coat with a hammer and chisel and chip those little bits in.

  Perhaps I shall find the statue surrounded by critics all in white coats, all chipping, each one of us so zealous to get in some favourite bit of his own that he forgets it can only be done by chipping some better bit off.

  The darkness of his spirit, for instance, which some people, long forgiven, mistook for pessimism. There were years, certainly, when I thought him the most unhappy man I had ever known — but if he had escaped his weird we could not have had our Hardy.

  And, after all, can one be altogether unhappy, even when ridden by the Furies, if he is producing masterpieces? May we not suspect that he has moments of exaltation which are denied to other mortals?

  I dare say the shades of the departed great gathered in that room at Max Gate to watch their brother write the last page of ‘The Dynasts.’ Happily after that he was to pass into a long evening of serenity.

  The president of the immortals had ended his sport with Hardy. I will not further delay your seeing the statue. Our sculptor has chosen to show you, I think very wisely, Mr. Hardy as you knew him best in Dorchester, as you may often have met that quietest figure in literature on your country walks and his, as you and he went home-along.

  I am as curious as you, for, except in the photograph, I only saw the statue long ago in the making. I hope it has grown so true to him that I shall even know what is in his pockets — probably a piece of string and an old knife.

  Opening the Edinburgh Health Exhibition

  IN THE WAVERLEY MARKET, EDINBURGH January 27, 1932

  IF only some illustrious servant of medicine could now push me aside and take my place how much happier all of us would be — especially one of us. If some of the great shades of our medical school could return. ‘Lord Lister then rose and addressed the meeting.’ If our newspapers could say that! ‘Sir James Young Simpson, in replying, stated’ — If we could hear what he stated. Probably something about the Maternity Hospital. But you know these great ones — and there were many others — are here to-day in a very real sense.

  Let us reflect for a moment about that. Every great healer lives on though he may be long dead. As the saying is, he lives on in the lives he has saved. He lives on in us in the Waverley Market to-day though it may be some distant forebear that he saved. For it was such men as these who once upon a time founded what was then a very-small hospital in this city just a few years before the ‘Forty-Five,’ which made more stir, but was really a smaller affair. Similar men of the same calibre in an unending line have gone on until they have raised that little hospital to its present pinnacle. Ladies and gentlemen, a part of these great ones lives on in us if we have any gratitude, any pity. That part is in us to-day in some inner chamber of our soul. It is only asking one thing of us, that all the other parts of us should combine with it in bringing to its fullest fruit the brave little effort of 200 years ago, the now world-famous Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh.

  As for myself, I would not venture to address you on so great a matter were it not that I had once a little hospital of my own. It was in France during the war, on the Marne, not very far from Verdun, and it had some little peculiarities that made it, I think, rather different from any other war hospital that you may have heard of. Perhaps you would like me to tell you a little about it. It owed its existence to my lamentable weakness for children and old ladies. It was staffed largely by voluntary help, and I dare say its ways were less like those of the Royal Infirmary to-day than like those of the little hospital started so long ago in Robertson’s Close. But I must not disparage my hospital. I must stick up for it. The Edinburgh Infirmary started with six beds. I started with eight. Our progress was also much quicker. In two or three months we had about 100, although, I dare say, some of you would not have called them beds. It was a hospital for children wounded by the guns, French children, many of them very badly maimed, without a leg or an arm, very young. The oldest, I suppose, was not more than ten. Many of them were almost babes. On the very first day that we opened the hospital those eight were all asleep in one room, which was afterwards called, more finely, No.! Ward. It was in a château which had been lent to us, rather damp, and that night, unfortunately, part of the ceiling fell down. The nurse rushed into the room, wondering why she did not hear the children screaming, and thinking it was a bomb, for it sounded like a bomb, and they were used to bombs. When she opened the door she found all those eight little Roman Catholics kneeling by their bedsides praying.

  When the hospital was at its fullest a Zeppelin fell into the grounds of it, brought down by the guns of Bar-le-Duc. I think it was one of the first Zeppelins brought down in the war. It had been coming and going, dropping occasional bombs all day, and I am quite sure that the airmen had no idea that there were these small people below. The children were put to bed very early, while it was still light, the blinds pulled down, and they were told it was night time and to go to sleep. Next morning when they woke they knew, though we kept them away from it, that the airship was lying in little pieces in the grounds along with some fragments of airmen who had once been as brave as ours. The children were very terrified at first, but some one had the happy thought of giving them an equivalent in money of threepence each. Then they all danced and sang with glee and, with the awful sarcasm of early years, they called their threepences ‘The Tears of William.’ They gave little financial gifts to 40 old ladies who had been living mostly in holes in the ground with some planks over them for a roof and to whom we were afterwards able to give 40 beds in another château. I was not there that night, but it must have been great fun seeing the children tipping the old ladies. The children themselves managed to get a good deal of fun out of the hospital. They invented games in which to have one leg or one arm was not a disadvantage but rather an advantage, and if I was there they got me to invent these games for them, and to play in them too.

  They were really dreadfully sharp little children. They did things none of your children would have done. When they were playing, and nurses were in the offing with their thermometers, these children used to stop and hold their breath so that their temperature should not go up. I also taught them cricket with a ball of lint taken from the surgery, purloined from it, and with a bat that had been a crutch. I was sort of thinking now that it was I who purloined that lint. They had a very artful way of trying to get me to come out to play with them very early in the morning. They learned a few Scots words, taught them by a nurse who did not know the language, words like ‘Reeky-reeky,’

  ‘Tam Shan ter,’ and ‘pot-ae-toes,’ which they thought so very Scots. They did not tell me about that, but they gathered under my bedroom window in the early morning and all shouted out those words to lure me down, usually quite effectively. They had a name for me. They called me ‘Monsieur Auld Reekie.’

  Now you see why I have told
you this story, and why you come into it, and why it comes about that we are back again at the Edinburgh Infirmary.

  I am not going into the history of the Infirmary. It must be so well known to nearly all of you from the days of those famous six beds up to recent times when I understand that £150,000 is about the yearly expenditure, and there are 100,000 beds, counting ins and outs. In other places, they are used to having a pageant nowadays for the glorification of their great times of the past. If Edinburgh were to go in for pageants, it would need to have so many. Most cities find they can cover the ground with one. In Edinburgh you might have a great pageant illustrating the glories of the Royal Infirmary. I think it should be a night-piece, because I want to have a students’ procession in it, a torchlight procession. That is the time when, in my memory, Edinburgh — the fairest of all cities to me — is also the most mysterious. Also, I was a student once in one of those torchlight processions, and nothing, ladies and gentlemen, could persuade me to tell you what happened towards the end of it.

  Our students would not appear on this occasion as themselves. They would be representing great figures of the Infirmary. All sorts of people would be there besides students, women students, of course, as well as men. We would have — why, everyone here ought to be in it. All the people who have contributed to the Infirmary, made it great, who are helping just now.

  The things that individuals can do. All those sitting on the platform would be there and some of them, I dare say, would get so excited at the end, what with the glare of the lights and the feeling that they were in another triumph, that perhaps by the end of the procession they would find themselves in hands in which they had never been before. Do you know, we cannot have the procession or the pageant just yet. There are so many people who ought to be in it who cannot be in it. For instance, there are all the nurses of the Royal Infirmary. Those nurses have earned their torches and many a one of them has been a torch herself, and yet just because they have given up so much for the sake of the patients the accommodation is not what it should be — very much the reverse! Are we going to allow them to make all those sacrifices and not make some more for them?