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Sentimental Tommy by J. M. Barrie

J >> J. M. Barrie >> Sentimental Tommy




But Tommy sobbed in reply, "That ain't it. I bounced so much about the
Thrums folk to Shovel, and now the first day I'm here I heard myself
bouncing about Shovel to Thrums folk, and it were that what made me
cry. Oh, Elspeth, it's--it's not the same what I thought it would be!"

Nor was it the same to Elspeth, so they sat down by the roadside and
cried with their arms round each other, and any passer-by could look who
had the heart. But when night came, and they were in their garret bed,
Tommy was once more seeking to comfort Elspeth with arguments he
disbelieved, and again he succeeded. As usual, too, the make-believe
made him happy also.

"Have you forgot," he whispered, "that my mother said as she would come
and see us every night in our bed? If yer cries, she'll see as we're
terrible unhappy, and that will make her unhappy too."

"Oh, Tommy, is she here now?"

"Whisht! She's here, but they don't like living ones to let on as they
knows it."

Elspeth kept closer to Tommy, and with their heads beneath the blankets,
so as to stifle the sound, he explained to her how they could cheat
their mother. When she understood, he took the blankets off their faces
and said in the darkness in a loud voice:

"It's a grand place, Thrums!"

Elspeth replied in a similar voice, "Ain't the town-house just big!"

Said Tommy, almost chuckling, "Oh, the bonny, bonny Auld Licht Kirk!"

Said Elspeth, "Oh, the beauty outside stairs!"

Said Tommy, "The minister is so long!"

Said Elspeth, "The folk is so kind!"

Said Tommy, "Especially the laddies!"

"Oh, I is so happy!" cried Elspeth.

"Me too!" cried Tommy.

"My mother would be so chirpy if she could jest see us!" Elspeth said,
quite archly.

"But she canna!" replied Tommy, slyly pinching Elspeth in the rib.

Then they dived beneath the blankets, and the whispering was resumed.

"Did she hear, does yer think?" asked Elspeth.

"Every word," Tommy replied. "Elspeth, we've done her!"




CHAPTER XIII

SHOWS HOW TOMMY TOOK CARE OF ELSPETH


Thus the first day passed, and others followed in which women, who had
known Jean Myles, did her children kindnesses, but could not do all they
would have done, for Aaron forbade them to enter his home except on
business though it was begging for a housewife all day. Had Elspeth at
the age of six now settled down to domestic duties she would not have
been the youngest housekeeper ever known in Thrums, but she was never
very good at doing things, only at loving and being loved, and the
observant neighbors thought her a backward girl; they forgot, like most
people, that service is not necessarily a handicraft. Tommy discovered
what they were saying, and to shield Elspeth he took to housewifery with
the blind down; but Aaron, entering the kitchen unexpectedly, took the
besom from, him, saying:

"It's an ill thing for men folk to ken ower muckle about women's work."

"You do it yoursel'," Tommy argued.

"I said men folk," replied Aaron, quietly.

The children knew that remarks of this sort had reference to their
mother, of whom he never spoke more directly; indeed he seldom spoke to
them at all, and save when he was cooking or giving the kitchen a
slovenly cleaning they saw little of him. Monypenny had predicted that
their presence must make a new man of him, but he was still unsociable
and morose and sat as long as ever at the warping-mill, of which he
seemed to have become the silent wheel. Tommy and Elspeth always dropped
their voices when they spoke of him, and sometimes when his mill stopped
he heard one of them say to the other, "Whisht, he's coming!" Though he
seldom, spoke sharply to them, his face did not lose its loneliness at
sight of them. Elspeth was his favorite (somewhat to the indignation of
both); they found this out without his telling them or even showing it
markedly, and when they wanted to ask anything of him she was deputed to
do it, but she did it quavering, and after drawing farther away from him
instead of going nearer. A dreary life would have lain before them had
they not been sent to school.

There were at this time three schools in Thrums, the chief of them ruled
over by the terrible Cathro (called Knuckly when you were a street away
from him). It was a famous school, from which a band of three or four or
even six marched every autumn to the universities as determined after
bursaries as ever were Highlandmen to lift cattle, and for the same
reason, that they could not do without.

A very different kind of dominie was Cursing Ballingall, who had been
dropped at Thrums by a travelling circus, and first became familiar to
the town as, carrying two carpet shoes, two books, a pillow, and a
saucepan, which were all his belongings, he wandered from manse to manse
offering to write sermons for the ministers at circus prices. That
scheme failing, he was next seen looking in at windows in search of a
canny calling, and eventually he cut one of his braces into a pair of
tawse, thus with a single stroke of the knife, making himself a
school-master and lop-sided for life. His fee was but a penny a week,
"with a bit o' the swine when your father kills," and sometimes there
were so many pupils on a form that they could only rise as one. During
the first half of the scholastic day Ballingall's shouts and pounces
were for parents to listen to, but after his dinner of crowdy, which is
raw meal and hot water, served in a cogie, or wooden bowl, languor
overcame him and he would sleep, having first given out a sum in
arithmetic and announced:

"The one as finds out the answer first, I'll give him his licks."

Last comes the Hanky School, which was for the genteel and for the
common who contemplated soaring. You were not admitted to it in
corduroys or bare-footed, nor did you pay weekly; no, your father called
four times a year with the money in an envelope. He was shown into the
blue-and-white room, and there, after business had been transacted, very
nervously on Miss Ailie's part, she offered him his choice between
ginger wine and what she falteringly called wh-wh-whiskey. He partook in
the polite national manner, which is thus:

"You will take something, Mr. Cortachy?"

"No, I thank you, ma'am."

"A little ginger wine?"

"It agrees ill with me."

"Then a little wh-wh-whiskey?"

"You are ower kind."

"Then may I?"

"I am not heeding."

"Perhaps, though, you don't take?"

"I can take it or want it."

"Is that enough?"

"It will do perfectly."

"Shall I fill it up?"

"As you please, ma'am."

Miss Ailie's relationship to the magerful man may be remembered; she
shuddered to think of it herself, for in middle-age she retained the
mind of a young girl, but when duty seemed to call, this school-mistress
could be brave, and she offered to give Elspeth her schooling free of
charge. Like the other two hers was a "mixed" school, but she did not
want Tommy, because she had seen him in the square one day, and there
was a leer on his face that reminded her of his father.

Another woman was less particular. This was Mrs. Crabb, of the Tappit
Hen, the Esther Auld whom Jean Myles's letters had so frequently sent
to bed. Her Francie was still a pupil of Miss Ailie, and still he wore
the golden hair, which, despite all advice, she would not crop. It was
so beautiful that no common boys could see it without wanting to give it
a tug in passing, and partly to prevent this, partly to show how high
she had risen in the social scale, Esther usually sent him to school
under the charge of her servant lass. She now proposed to Aaron that
this duty should devolve on Tommy, and for the service she would pay his
fees at the Hanky School.

"We maun all lend a hand to poor Jean's bairns," she said, with a gleam
in her eye. "It would have been well for her, Aaron, if she had married
you."

"Is that all you have to say?" asked the warper, who had let her enter
no farther than the hallan.

"I would expect him to lift Francie ower the pools in wet weather; and
it might be as well if he called him Master Francie."

"Is that all?"

"Ay, I ask no more, for we maun all help Jean's bairns. If she could
only look down, Aaron, and see her little velvets, as she called him,
lifting my little corduroys ower the pools!"

Aaron flung open the door. "Munt!" he said, and he looked so dangerous
that she retired at once. He sent Tommy to Ballingall's, and accepted
Miss Ailie's offer for Elspeth, but this was an impossible arrangement,
for it was known to the two persons primarily concerned that Elspeth
would die if she was not where Tommy was. The few boys he had already
begun to know were at Cathro's or Ballingall's, and as they called Miss
Ailie's a lassie school he had no desire to attend it, but where he was
there also must Elspeth be. Daily he escaped from Ballingall's and hid
near the Dovecot, as Miss Ailie's house was called, and every little
while he gave vent to Shovel's whistle, so that Elspeth might know of
his proximity and be cheered. Thrice was he carried back, kicking, to
Ballingall's by urchins sent in pursuit, stern ministers of justice on
the first two occasions; but on the third they made him an offer: if he
would hide in Couthie's hen-house they were willing to look for him
everywhere else for two hours.

Tommy's behavior seemed beautiful to the impressionable Miss Ailie, but
it infuriated Aaron, and on the fourth day he set off for the parish
school, meaning to put the truant in the hands of Cathro, from whom
there was no escape. Vainly had Elspeth implored him to let Tommy come
to the Dovecot, and vainly apparently was she trotting at his side now,
looking up appealingly in his face. But when they reached the gate of
the parish school-yard he walked past it because she was tugging him,
and always when he seemed about to turn she took his hand again, and he
seemed to have lost the power to resist Jean Myles's bairn. So they came
to the Dovecot, and Miss Ailie gained a pupil who had been meant for
Cathro. Tommy's arms were stronger than Elspeth's, but they could not
hare done as much for him that day.

Thus did the two children enter upon the genteel career, to the
indignation of the other boys and girls of Monypenny, all of whom were
commoners.




CHAPTER XIV

THE HANKY SCHOOL


The Dovecot was a prim little cottage standing back from the steepest
brae in Thrums and hidden by high garden walls, to the top of which
another boy's shoulders were, for apple-lovers, but one step up.
Jargonelle trees grew against the house, stretching their arms round it
as if to measure its girth, and it was also remarkable for several
"dumb" windows with the most artful blinds painted on them. Miss Ailie's
fruit was famous, but she loved her flowers best, and for long a notice
board in her garden said, appealingly: "Persons who come to steal the
fruit are requested not to walk on the flower-beds." It was that old
bachelor, Dr. McQueen, who suggested this inscription to her, and she
could never understand why he chuckled every time he read it.

There were seven rooms in the house, but only two were of public note,
the school-room, which was downstairs, and the blue-and-white room
above. The school-room was so long that it looked very low in the
ceiling, and it had a carpet, and on the walls were texts as well as
maps. Miss Ailie's desk was in the middle of the room, and there was
another desk in the corner; a cloth had been hung over it, as one covers
a cage to send the bird to sleep. Perhaps Miss Ailie thought that a bird
had once sung there, for this had been the desk of her sister, Miss
Kitty, who died years before Tommy came to Thrums. Dainty Miss Kitty,
Miss Kitty with the roguish curls, it is strange to think that you are
dead, and that only Miss Ailie hears you singing now at your desk in the
corner! Miss Kitty never sang there, but the playful ringlets were once
the bright thing in the room, and Miss Ailie sees them still, and they
are a song to her.

The pupils had to bring handkerchiefs to the Dovecot, which led to its
being called the Hanky School, and in time these handkerchiefs may be
said to have assumed a religious character, though their purpose was
merely to protect Miss Ailie's carpet. She opened each scholastic day by
reading fifteen verses from the Bible, and then she said sternly,
"Hankies!" whereupon her pupils whipped out their handkerchiefs, spread
them on the floor and kneeled on them while Miss Ailie repeated the
Lord's Prayer. School closed at four o'clock, again with hankies.

Only on great occasions were the boys and girls admitted to the
blue-and-white room, when they were given shortbread, but had to eat it
with their heads flung back so that no crumbs should fall. Nearly
everything in this room was blue or white, or both. There were white
blinds and blue curtains, a blue table-cover and a white crumb-cloth, a
white sheepskin with a blue footstool on it, blue chairs dotted with
white buttons. Only white flowers came into this room, where there were
blue vases for them, not a book was to be seen without a blue alpaca
cover. Here Miss Ailie received visitors in her white with the blue
braid, and enrolled new pupils in blue ink with a white pen. Some
laughed at her, others remembered that she must have something to love
after Miss Kitty died.

Miss Ailie had her romance, as you may hear by and by, but you would not
have thought it as she came forward to meet you in the blue-and-white
room, trembling lest your feet had brought in mud, but too much a lady
to ask you to stand on a newspaper, as she would have liked dearly to
do. She was somewhat beyond middle-age, and stoutly, even squarely,
built, which gave her a masculine appearance; but she had grown so timid
since Miss Kitty's death that when she spoke you felt that either her
figure or her manner must have been intended for someone else. In
conversation she had a way of ending a sentence in the middle which gave
her a reputation of being "thro'ither," though an artificial tooth was
the cause. It was slightly loose, and had she not at times shut her
mouth suddenly, and then done something with her tongue, an accident
might have happened. This tooth fascinated Tommy, and once when she was
talking he cried, excitedly, "Quick, it's coming!" whereupon her mouth
snapped close, and she turned pink in the blue-and-white room.

Nevertheless Tommy became her favorite, and as he had taught himself to
read, after a fashion, in London, where his lesson-books were chiefly
placards and the journal subscribed to by Shovel's father, she often
invited him after school hours to the blue-and-white room, where he sat
on a kitchen chair (with his boots off) and read aloud, very slowly,
while Miss Ailie knitted. The volume was from the Thrums Book Club, of
which Miss Ailie was one of the twelve members. Each member contributed
a book every year, and as their tastes in literature differed, all sorts
of books came into the club, and there was one member who invariably
gave a ro-ro-romance. He was double-chinned and forty, but the
school-mistress called him the dashing young banker, and for months she
avoided his dangerous contribution. But always there came a black day
when a desire to read the novel seized her, and she hurried home with it
beneath her rokelay. This year the dashing banker's choice was a lady's
novel called "I Love My Love with an A," and it was a frivolous tale,
those being before the days of the new fiction, with its grand discovery
that women have an equal right with men to grow beards. The hero had
such a way with him and was so young (Miss Ailie could not stand them a
day more than twenty) that the school-mistress was enraptured and scared
at every page, but she fondly hoped that Tommy did not understand.
However, he discovered one day what something printed thus, "D--n,"
meant, and he immediately said the word with such unction that Miss
Ailie let fall her knitting. She would have ended the readings then had
not Agatha been at that point in the arms of an officer who, Miss Ailie
felt almost certain, had a wife in India, and so how could she rest till
she knew for certain? To track the officer by herself was not to be
thought of, to read without knitting being such shameless waste of time,
and it was decided to resume the readings on a revised plan: Tommy to
say "stroke" in place of the "D--ns," and "word we have no concern with"
instead of "Darling" and "Little One."

Miss Ailie was not the only person at the Dovecot who admired Tommy.
Though in duty bound, as young patriots, to jeer at him for having been
born in the wrong place, the pupils of his own age could not resist the
charm of his reminiscences; even Gav Dishart, a son of the manse,
listened attentively to him. His great topic was his birthplace, and
whatever happened in Thrums, he instantly made contemptible by citing
something of the same kind, but on a larger scale, that had happened in
London; he turned up his nose almost farther than was safe when they
said Catlaw was a stiff mountain to climb. ("Oh, Gav, if you just saw
the London mountains!") Snow! why they didn't know what snow was in
Thrums. If they could only see St. Paul's or Hyde Park or Shovel! he
couldn't help laughing at Thrums, he couldn't--Larfing, he said at
first, but in a short time his Scotch was better than theirs, though
less unconscious. His English was better also, of course, and you had to
speak in a kind of English when inside the Hanky School; you got your
revenge at "minutes." On the whole, Tommy irritated his fellow-pupils a
good deal, but they found it difficult to keep away from him.

He also contrived to enrage the less genteel boys of Monypenny. Their
leader was Corp Shiach, three years Tommy's senior, who had never been
inside a school except once, when he broke hopefully into Ballingall's
because of a stirring rumor (nothing in it) that the dominie had hangit
himself with his remaining brace; then in order of merit came Birkie
Fleemister; then, perhaps, the smith's family, called the
Haggerty-Taggertys, they were such slovens. When school was over Tommy
frequently stepped out of his boots and stockings, so that he no longer
looked offensively genteel, and then Monypenny was willing to let him
join in spyo, smuggle bools, kickbonnety, peeries, the preens, suckers
pilly, or whatever game was in season, even to the baiting of the
Painted Lady, but they would not have Elspeth, who should have been
content to play dumps with the female Haggerty-Taggertys, but could
enjoy no game of which Tommy was not the larger half. Many times he
deserted her for manlier joys, but though she was out of sight he could
not forget her longing face, and soon he sneaked off to her; he
upbraided her, but he stayed with her. They bore with him for a time,
but when they discovered that she had persuaded him (after prayer) to
put back the spug's eggs which he had brought home in triumph, then they
drove him from their company, and for a long time afterwards his deadly
enemy was the hard-hitting Corp Shiach.

Elspeth was not invited to attend the readings of "I Love My Love with
an A," perhaps because there were so many words in it that she had no
concern with, but she knew they ended as the eight-o'clock bell began to
ring, and it was her custom to meet Tommy a few yards from Aaron's door.
Farther she durst not venture in the gloaming through fear of the
Painted Lady, for Aaron's house was not far from the fearsome lane that
led to Double Dykes, and even the big boys who made faces at this woman
by day ran from her in the dusk. Creepy tales were told of what happened
to those on whom she cast a blighting eye before they could touch cold
iron, and Tommy was one of many who kept a bit of cold iron from the
smithy handy in his pocket. On his way home from the readings he never
had occasion to use it, but at these times he sometimes met Grizel, who
liked to do her shopping in the evenings when her persecutors were more
easily eluded, and he forced her to speak to him. Not her loneliness
appealed to him, but that look of admiration she had given him when he
was astride of Francie Crabb. For such a look he could pardon many
rebuffs; without it no praise greatly pleased him; he was always on the
outlook for it.

"I warrant," he said to her one evening, "you want to have some man-body
to take care of you the way I take care of Elspeth."

"No, I don't," she replied, promptly.

"Would you no like somebody to love you?"

"Do you mean kissing?" she asked.

"There's better things in it than that," he said guardedly; "but if you
want kissing, I--I--Elspeth'll kiss you."

"Will she want to do it?" inquired Grizel, a little wistfully.

"I'll make her do it," Tommy said.

"I don't want her to do it," cried Grizel, and he could not draw another
word from her. However he was sure she thought him a wonder, and when
next they met he challenged her with it.

"Do you not now?"

"I won't tell you," answered Grizel, who was never known to lie.

"You think I'm a wonder," Tommy persisted, "but you dinna want me to
know you think it."

Grizel rocked her arms, a quaint way she had when excited, and she
blurted out, "How do you know?"

The look he liked had come back to her face, but he had no time to enjoy
it, for just then Elspeth appeared, and Elspeth's jealousy was easily
aroused.

"I dinna ken you, lassie," he said coolly to Grizel, and left her
stamping her foot at him. She decided never to speak to Tommy again, but
the next time they met he took her into the Den and taught her how to
fight.

It is painful to have to tell that Miss Ailie was the person who
provided him with the opportunity. In the readings they arrived one
evening at the scene in the conservatory, which has not a single Stroke
in it, but is so full of Words We have no Concern with that Tommy reeled
home blinking, and next day so disgracefully did he flounder in his
lessons that the gentle school-mistress cast up her arms in despair.

"I don't know what to say to you," she exclaimed.

"Fine I know what you want to say," he retorted, and unfortunately she
asked, "What?"

"Stroke!" he replied, leering horridly.

"I Love My Love with an A" was returned to the club forthwith (whether
he really did have a wife in India Miss Ailie never knew) and "Judd on
the Shorter Catechism" took its place. But mark the result. The readings
ended at a quarter to eight now, at twenty to eight, at half-past seven,
and so Tommy could loiter on the way home without arousing Elspeth's
suspicion. One evening he saw Grizel cutting her way through the
Haggerty-Taggerty group, and he offered to come to her aid if she would
say "Help me." But she refused.

When, however, the Haggerty-Taggertys were gone she condescended to say,
"I shall never, never ask you to help me, but--if you like--you can
show me how to hit without biting my tongue."

"I'll learn you Shovel's curly ones," replied Tommy, cordially, and he
adjourned with her to the Den for that purpose. He said he chose the Den
so that Corp Shiach and the others might not interrupt them, but it was
Elspeth he was thinking of.

"You are like Miss Ailie with her cane when she is pandying," he told
Grizel. "You begin well, but you slacken just when you are going to
hit."

"It is because my hand opens," Grizel said.

"And then it ends in a shove," said her mentor, severely. "You should
close your fists like this, with the thumbs inside, and then play dab,
this way, that way, yon way. That's what Shovel calls, 'You want it,
take it, you've got it.'"

Thus did the hunted girl get her first lesson in scientific warfare in
the Den, and neither she nor Tommy saw the pathos of it. Other lessons
followed, and during the rests Grizel told Tommy all that she knew about
herself. He had won her confidence at last by--by swearing dagont that
he was English also.




CHAPTER XV

THE MAN WHO NEVER CAME


"Is it true that your mother's a bonny swearer?"

Tommy wanted to find out all about the Painted Lady, and the best way
was to ask.

"She does not always swear," Grizel said eagerly. "She sometimes says
sweet, sweet things."

"What kind of things?"

"I won't tell you."

"Tell me one."

"Well, then, 'Beloved.'"

"Word We have no Concern with," murmured Tommy. He was shocked, but
still curious. "Does she say 'Beloved' to you?" he inquired.

"No, she says it to him."

"Him! Wha is he?" Tommy thought he was at the beginning of a discovery,
but she answered, uncomfortably,

"I don't know."

"But you've seen him?"

"No, he--he is not there."

"Not there! How can she speak to him if he's no there?"

"She thinks he is there. He--he comes on a horse."

"What is the horse like?"

"There is no horse."

"But you said--"

"She just thinks there is a horse. She hears it."

"Do you ever hear it?"

"No."

The girl was looking imploringly into Tommy's face as if begging it to
say that these things need not terrify her, but what he wanted was
information.

"What does the Painted Lady do," he asked, "when she thinks she hears
the horse?"

"She blows kisses, and then--then she goes to the Den."

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