The Story of J.M.B

By Denis Mackail

The authorized biography of playwright and novelist, Sir James Barrie.

Best known as the author of Peter Pan, Sir James Barrie, Bart, O. M. (1860–1937) was born in Kirriemuir, Angus, Scotland. He was educated at Edinburgh University and initially worked as a journalist in England.

His early books comprised novels and stories about Scottish provincial life, but from about 1900 his plays were international successes, especially Quality Street, The admirable Crichton and, later, Dear Brutus.

Mackail, who in his own childhood had known Barrie as a family friend, provides a respectful survey of Barrie's life and career, eschewing detailed analysis of the works in favour of historical description.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jun 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781448211289

Denis Mackail

James Branch Cabell (1879-1958) was an American writer of escapist and fantasy fiction. Born into a wealthy family in the state of Virginia, Cabell attended the College of William and Mary, where he graduated in 1898 following a brief personal scandal. His first stories began to be published, launching a productive decade in which Cabell’s worked appeared in both Harper’s Monthly Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. Over the next forty years, Cabell would go on to publish fifty-two books, many of them novels and short-story collections. A friend, colleague, and inspiration to such writers as Ellen Glasgow, H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser, James Branch Cabell is remembered as an iconoclastic pioneer of fantasy literature.

Book preview

Chapter 1

This is what some of us will always remember.

Evening in the low, large, square room—brown and book-lined—on the top floor of the building at the river end of Robert Street, Adelphi. Actually this flat, which our host has occupied since he moved up, after seven and a half years there, from the floor below, was never known or planned by the brothers Adam. The roof of the original attic has been raised, and, as is obvious if you look up to it from outside, the whole flat is perched above and behind the original parapet. Its outer walls, though not its windows, slope slightly inwards, and though the bookshelves disguise this in the room where we are sitting, in the dining-room, beyond the little oblong hall, there is quite a suggestion that we are on board a ship. A ship, it is true, becalmed now among London chimney-pots; but a ship whose captain has voyaged far enough in his day.

Perhaps he has just given us dinner there. Perhaps, in the course of this meal, Robb, the canary, has come out of his cage beyond the door and has touched and entertained us by taking a ride on one of the dishes from the sideboard. But Robb mustn’t stay up late. At a word from his master he retires once more. We’re back in the big study, or sitting-room, or whatever it is called, again. There is no doubt that we are wondering, however often we may have been privileged guests up here, what sort of an evening it is going to be now.

The gongs from the trams on the Embankment, far below, ring irregularly and a little sadly. The murmur of the traffic—though it is no more at this distance—never stills. There is no need to draw the curtains at this height, and lights from other windows, from trains, signals and illuminated advertisements, form a constant, flickering background. Adelphi Terrace is still standing, in this scene; quiet and dignified in spite of the cars which have been parked along its railings by playgoers. If we look out from the other corner, behind the host’s big desk, we can see—thanks to the curve of the river—the clock-tower of the Houses of Parliament.

The room, which was once Joseph Pennell’s studio, has two fire-places. One, surrounded by Dutch tiles, contains the broadest gas-fire these eyes have ever seen; while to the right of it, in yet another window, is the little desk where C. Greene—who can’t type, but is no ordinary secretary to no ordinary employer—has been doing her work today. The other or main fireplace is not only a fireplace, but a cave.

Beware, if you are even a six-footer, of stepping into it without ducking your head, or there will be little that you remember after that. Its floor and walls are of dark-red brick. The fire itself is a wood-fire, burning on a vast heap of silvery ash. Its bellows and a steel prong for jabbing at the logs (a store of which is kept on the landing outside the front door) are both on the heroic scale. On one side, still within the cave, there is a high-backed settle, which it would be inaccurate to describe as comfortable. On the other there is a short but considerably less Spartan settee.

What is the host doing? It seems that he has finished his after-dinner cigar, and has gone straight, and inevitably, to the tin of tobacco—John Cotton, it has been now, for many years—and one of his enormous bull-dog pipes. Many years ago, also, he gave me one of these, and I still know where I could get another if the need arose. But though I smoke pipes—and though Heaven knows I wanted to smoke that one—its capacity, its calibre, and above all the leverage which it exerted on the jaw, proved only too well what I should certainly have known already. That it was the gift of no ordinary smoker.

And of a smoker tonight with, alas, no ordinary cough. It comes on him again now as he stands there clasping the great bowl, racking him and choking him. Filling us also with sympathy and alarm. But nobody alludes to it. It is painful and pitiful, but we know, somehow, that it is better to let our eyes wander round the room again than attempt to go to his aid. For though the cough is an old enemy, it is also, in another sense, a very old friend.

You can’t say the room isn’t interesting. No chance to examine the books now, but almost every bit of furniture has its history or association. The photographs, dotted here and there, are familiar yet fascinating too. Other objects rouse memories which have been revealed. Others, again, are still mysterious and likely to remain so. Our host has had hundreds of friends, and among them there has been far more than the normal proportion of sorrow and tragedy. It would almost certainly be a mistake to try and make conversation—though this may be very necessary later on—by asking what some of the mysterious mementos represent.

There is another and less objective aspect. Up that lift shaft outside there have come, during the years that he has been here, more distinguished men and women than could easily be numbered. They have stepped out on to the little landing with the heap of fire-logs, have rung the bell and been admitted. They have sat in this room, as we are sitting now. They have felt and contributed to its atmosphere. Hundreds of them, and nearly all proud to have crossed the threshold. It wouldn’t be exactly fair to say that our host has ever tried to collect them. It would be fairer to say that his position has been such that most of them were more than glad to come. Yet it would also be perfectly fair to say that part of him—and later, perhaps, we may realise how many parts there were—was by no means dissatisfied that this position had been attained.

Well, fame may or may not be a glittering bauble, and men may or may not be born equal. But they don’t, in their own or each other’s view, remain equal, and this room has certainly seen some pretty great ones in its time. It can’t say so, of course, but we should be very insensitive if at some of these odd moments we didn’t feel that it has memories, too.

The paroxysm is over. Our host, looking faintly surprised and, as almost always nowadays, sad and weary beyond belief, hasn’t only filled the pipe but is recklessly lighting it. Is he going to walk or sit? He starts walking. If he carried a pedometer, and even if it had always been removed whenever he went out of doors, it would be impossible to imagine the mileage that it must now register from that endless to-and-fro. Watch him as he turns and comes back again. There is a slight, nautical roll, so that for the second time this evening we are reminded of a sea-captain; though perhaps we should be careful of such comparisons and hasten to add that there is no further resemblance at all. Yet there it is, and there it has always been. Again he turns with a swing, and sets off again across his invisible quarter-deck. Of course, if this is going to be one of the evenings when he walks but never talks …

No, don’t let’s remember that. Such evenings—and such afternoons and mornings—there have undoubtedly been. We know them all too well. We know the faint, Caledonian grunt with which our desperate observations are received—a sound corresponding to the hollow plop when a stone is dropped into a deep well—and the expression, which is horribly like a sneer, though he doesn’t know it or mean it, as he goes on marching again. Oh, yes, we have suffered, and some of us have said to ourselves that we won’t stand it, even as an extraordinary feeling of pity grips us again at the same time. Some of us have gone away and burst out afterwards to other victims, have forgotten the extraordinary feeling of pity, and have hardened our hearts. But don’t let’s remember that.

Let it be rather that, while still walking, and still without removing the pipe, he begins to speak. An answer, perhaps, to not so desperate an observation, for tonight is to be a lucky evening after all. You remember his voice? Not exactly deep, but with a persistent, rumbling burr in it. A slightly singsong intonation in the longer sentences, but a scrupulous absence of emphasis for every climax. A sad voice, nearly always. An enunciation which we naturally assume to be Scotch, and which is Scotch, though somehow completely individual as well. He doesn’t gesticulate, except occasionally with one or other of his eyebrows. The cough also interrupts him occasionally, yet so effectively sometimes that almost any actor might envy it. Well, if it comes to that, he is certainly giving one of his performances, for our benefit. We can be pretty sure that he is listening to it quite as carefully and appreciatively as we are.

Self-conscious? There has never been anyone so self-conscious, in the sense that still and always he is watching to see what he will do next. But not in the sense that he mistrusts himself. He doesn’t, and there would be very little reason for it if he did. That famous shyness isn’t, from our point of view, entirely a legend. The outward signs are there, often enough. Often enough it is part of the performance that he should pretend to play up to them. But underneath, inside, as J.M.B. still studies J.M.B.—by thunder there’s no feeling of inferiority!

It’s a cloak. We know it’s a cloak. He doesn’t want to be disturbed; that’s all. He’s busy with the strange companion whom he understands better than most of us, who always interests him, frequently fascinates him, and not infrequently scares him; whom he has forced to work for him. but whom he has never entirely learnt how to control.

To-night, however, perhaps he is only keeping half an eye on him. Here, fortunately with no need for encouragement (for no one, either, has ever learnt how to encourage him), comes the first of the stories. We’ve heard it before? Very likely. It is even possible that we know how utterly untrue it is. That isn’t the point. His version is almost unquestionably far better than the truth; riper, richer, funnier, or more sardonic. If another little improvement has crept into it since last time, we should certainly be base, ungrateful spoil-sports—quite apart from any affair of manners or pluck—if we let him see that we know this.

Of course we don’t dream of it. Our hope is only that one story will lead to another, and if luck holds, it will. He has stopped walking—that’s a good sign—he has come into the cave, still smoking, he has disposed himself on the settee—the one which isn’t as uncomfortable as the settle, where for some reason we seem to have disposed ourselves—and with one foot tucked under him he continues to talk.

More stories. More memories. Yet beware of them, even, more than of bumping your head. This little creature, with his sad face and in these days, alas, his slightly laboured breathing, is a man of genius. He has lived by mixing facts, as he sees them, with an imagination that can never leave them alone. Accuracy and sincerity are almost certainly qualities which he respects and admires—isn’t he a graduate of Edinburgh University?—but the first is only a word to him when a story is at stake; the second is always at the mercy of his own gift for words. Somewhere, as we also sit watching him, there must, presumably, be an essential J.M.B.—even if it is but a mixture or balance between elements which have never combined. But if any biographer should swallow what he is being told this evening—or, if it comes to that, if he should swallow more than a fraction of speeches and writings which are professedly autobiographical—he may still find himself quite a remarkable distance from the truth. Better, for we are a guest tonight, to abandon all notion of critical analysis. Far better just to appreciate the stories as they come.

He is inclined to represent himself as at once more cunning and simpler than he really is; telling stories against himself, yet with a strong, unspoken implication that it was the other characters who came out worst. As more than likely they did. Does he boast sometimes? Undoubtedly. Fame and flattery, he would have you suppose, have wearied him, and perhaps this is true of some of their manifestations—which can possibly be irritating enough; but he certainly doesn’t trouble to pretend that he hasn’t deserved them. So he’s conceited, is he? We can’t answer that one. Some people think so, and if he suspects this, it will be to them, in all probability, that he exhibits the clearest signs of conceit. For fun. Or to oblige them. Or again as another easy means of hiding what they can’t see anyhow. The immense number of secret doors through which he is always slipping in his mind, even when he is apparently at his frankest or at his most like the rest of us.

On the other hand, of course, if anyone says that he isn’t conceited—well, there you are again. One is almost bound to contradict such a statement. Then to remember this, that and the other proof and counter-proof. Finally to wish to goodness that such an extraordinarily irrelevant question had never been raised. Oh, the cleverness of me! says Peter in Peter Pan, and some of us have seemed to hear another voice speaking at the same time. Yet we should be wary of that resemblance or reminder, too. If our host had ever used such words himself, there would always have been a glimmer or inflexion of self-mockery. For even if Peter is puzzled by his own character sometimes, it is a far, far simpler one than that of the man who created him.

It mustn’t be thought, either, that our lucky evening is nothing but a monologue. Admittedly we have time, during some of the stories, to speculate on the amazingly impressive contours of our host’s head, which sometimes it seems that he can hardly support, so full is it of dreams and memories; and then again which makes a sudden, apposite and effective movement for the very special benefit of the story and ourselves. Time also, in some cases, to look back, as it were; to see it when it was younger and not always so sad; to remember it when it was apparently even more out of proportion to the body on the settee; to recall its devastating and catastrophic headaches; to return to personal memories, perhaps as far away as the house in Gloucester Road.

Further for a few of us still; but of course the composite guest is listening too. And as it isn’t to be all stories tonight—though undoubtedly they will recur—there must now be conversation as well. Talk about friends. Sometimes his face lights up, and if we were the friend who had brought that gleam into it, we should be proud indeed. For he knows how to praise.

And how to damn. Yes, it must be admitted again that friends can fall out of favour. A name is mentioned that had been better withheld. His head rolls round. One eyebrow lifts warningly. The Caledonian grunt; and that’s that.

Or short of this he can take an acquaintance, put him on a pin, twirl him before you, and leave him with less dignity at this moment than one whose clothes have been stolen while bathing. Blind, raging prejudice seems sometimes to actuate him in this mood, though of course the more he exaggerates, the less he can manage to retain any real bitterness. Another thing that you must never believe is that he isn’t deeply attached to some of these butts. While if there is anything about them that he can imitate or parody, he almost loves them.

Other names are sacred, and can never be ridiculed, whatever the mood. These are the giants of literature mostly, a list leading up to one with whom he only exchanged gifts and letters, and two whom he knew and treated as gods. R.L.S., George Meredith, Thomas Hardy.

And Charles Frohman, to whom he was a god in turn. And some of the actresses who have played his parts. You’d better not look as if you could say anything against these. Actors, on the other hand—always with the glorious and tremendous exception of Henry Irving—seem to be fair game. More prejudice here, perhaps—just consider what he and the actors have done for each other—but in his heart he doesn’t really feel that’s the way for a man to spend his life. The thought of it, apart from the one exception, has always made him a little uncomfortable and uneasy.

Authors bring us, not unnaturally, to books, and here there might be another surprise if we weren’t by this time prepared for it. Our host is over seventy. Well over seventy. But he still reads what the young ones are writing, and wherever there is any spark of merit in it, he is on to that too. No patronage or condescension. No reluctance to give praise again where it is due. No suggestion, though he can be critical enough when they are careless or provocatively coarse, that the literary world is going to the dogs. He will have written to some of them, as a brother and hardly even as an elder brother, and some of them will come up here to visit him. Not as the President of the Incorporated Society of Authors, but as a colleague who knows that every working artist works the better for sympathy and encouragement. That doesn’t sound very much like a septuagenarian, does it?

What a preposterously incongruous word for him. He was old when he was young, like a changeling with centuries of secret experience. But now that he is old, it is only a physical age. Because he is tired he has to spare himself, and do many of the things that old men do. But while any strength is left to him, his mind still darts about where no one can hope to follow it. Still pauses only, as it were, to call out to the rest of us to hurry up.

Now, perhaps, the conversation has drifted to more general topics. More prejudice here, true or assumed. There are a lot of things that he doesn’t like, or tries not to accept. Facets of the real world which have offended him; though if he wants to play at being grown-up and responsible, no one, for the time being, can do it better. Beware once more, though. He is only playing, or else, safe out of reach, he has let one of his lesser selves loose to see how it will fare in this rôle. The conversation is illuminating but extraordinarily misleading. He can be querulous and fantastically unreasonable at this stage, but it is no use trying to soothe him. Nor, however strong the impulse, can we possibly interrupt to tell him that we love him even when he is doing his utmost to provoke us. We just listen and look. You little wonder! we think, proudly. But of course it would be maddening for him if we were rash enough to answer his complaints like that.

So perhaps they work themselves out, or the lesser self is recalled. He’s calmer again. He’s lighting yet another pipe. Some of his attitudes on the settee are still very nearly those of a contortionist, but they always have been, and one supposes they always will. Or not? No, no; he’s so frail, so tired, he has suffered so much, and he is over seventy, but we mustn’t think of his leaving us. We can’t. We won’t.

But we do.

It is impossible not to. He is like no one else on earth, but for all that it is bound to happen. It’s coming nearer, and he knows it’s coming nearer. In a minute or two, though he is still prepared to sit up to any hour you like, something is going to make us rise and take our departure. An old and not unjustifiable feeling that it is always better to bring anything to an end too soon than too late. It is also extremely unlikely that he will press us to stay on, and if he does this—for it isn’t altogether unknown—there will only be two difficult decisions instead of one. A selfish thought, perhaps, but somehow we are on our legs.

I think I ought to be getting back now.

A Caledonian sound of inquiry, but the decision—now violently regretted—seems to have been accepted. He is getting up too. We wish we could say something, anything, to show our gratitude for this lucky evening. We wish to goodness we weren’t still wondering how many more of them there can possibly be. But, again, no one has ever produced a stronger feeling of inadequacy and paralysis when real emotion comes nearest the surface. It is one of the curses that has always accompanied the blessings. If we could suddenly sit down and write to each other now, he at least could express the whole thing—of which he is certainly aware—so exquisitely that—

Well, it might be too exquisite, you know. The letters that he has written to us, when the mood was on him, and when the best of a choice of phrases was just a little too good not to be used. He has probably forgotten them, and even at the time, though thrilled, we probably had just enough sense to remember his perilous gift with a pen. And, anyhow, of course this has got to be done by word of mouth.

So it can’t be done at all. He comes out into the hall with us, and there is complete silence as we heave ourselves into our overcoat and take our hat from among the letters and presentation copies which have arrived since dinner. He returns from the little landing, where he has just been pressing the button for the electric lift. Round sweeps his right arm once more—that characteristic action like the delivery of an old-fashioned bowler—to meet and grasp our hand. There’s the smile, too, whatever he may have written about losing it; almost as sweet and quite as indescribable as ever.

Goodnight.

Goodnight, J.M.B. And thank you—

He doesn’t look as if he wanted to be thankful at all. Paralysis again. The lift-cage has come up, and we are just going to step into it when he says one of the luckiest things of all.

Come again. Soon. Just ring up.

Oh, rather! Yes, I will. Thank you—

Short notice, you know. No, we’re certainly not going to try and reproduce his accent. I never like any arrangements far ahead.

He smiles again, nods, and vanishes, as we close the grille and descend. That point about short notice has grown on him lately, and we are afraid it isn’t the only point that keeps some of his older friends away. For they are supposed to invite themselves, too, and some of them don’t, or won’t, or find it too difficult. I never realised, indeed, until after he was dead, how lonely he had often been up there towards the end, because something inside him had forced him to transfer all this kind of initiative to others. I had thought, and he had let me think, that they were still coming night after night—I knew that he went out pretty seldom now—and always believed him when the message came back that Tuesday, which I had suggested, would be no good. That I must come on Thursday.

Why? I don’t know. Was this a sign of age after all, then? Or had he found a fresh way of tormenting himself?

There must be hundreds of questions like this, if I am now to try and tell the story of his life, and most of them, it had best be admitted at once, must remain unanswered. I knew him, I was deeply attached to him, and some of him I think I understood. I profited from him and put up with him—it’s no use pretending that one was possible without the other. I am not, to use his own phrase, preparing to twist my finger in the socket, though if I did so, I should be the one who would be the smaller for it.

I want to do a most difficult thing, which is to tell you or remind you of the truth. For as long as there are famous men, books will be written about them and people will want to hear about them. And you know this much, J.M.B. You wanted to be famous; didn’t you?

You had your wish, you earned it, and you paid for it. Perhaps there is another thing you know, which will help you to understand and forgive. That during all the years when you were my friend and more than my friend—including, inevitably, the times when you were making me pay for this, too—it never once occurred to me that I should be the one who would be asked to write this book.

If it had, the book might have been easier both to write and to read. As a biographer there is no question that I threw away more opportunities than come to most of them. Yet that’s how it was between us. Perhaps, all the time, you were trusting me not to write it. Perhaps I am betraying that trust now.

But if ever a bit of work were hard enough, you certainly approved of that. Didn’t you? And if ever there were a sort of twist or surprise in life—such as the task that has come to me so unexpectedly and alarmingly now—wasn’t this always something that you appreciated and that pleased you, too?

That is my excuse or defence, which it seems somehow that I am forced to make. But undoubtedly there has also and already been more than enough about me. As I drop down that lift-shaft, I disappear from these pages for at least thirty-five years—if not, which would be better still, for good. Yet they have to be written; because, dear J.M.B., you know you were no ordinary man.

Chapter 2

In 1860—the twenty-fourth year of Queen Victoria’s reign, and the last complete year of her husband’s life—these were some of the names and events in the national foreground.

Lord Palmerston was Prime Minister. Lord John Russell was Foreign Secretary. Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Bright and Cobden were both members of the House of Commons.

Mainly owing to the rising cost of Defence—fifteen millions were voted for the Army this spring, and nearly as much again for the Navy—income-tax was increased to no less than tenpence in the pound. The Emperor Napoleon III was the contemporary bogy; but there have been worse ones. It is true that he annexed Savoy and Nice, yet in the midst of our alarm—and while Home, the medium, was giving demonstrations of spirit-rapping and table-turning at the Tuileries—we managed to conclude a commercial treaty with him, and passports for British visitors to France were abolished. On the other hand, and though we seemed to have laughed at them a good deal ourselves, this was the great year for the Volunteer Rifle Corps. Form, form, Riflemen, form! sang the Poet Laureate, momentarily interrupting his work on Idylls of the King. Her Majesty attended a number of their reviews.

But John Bull wasn’t really frightened. Foreigners were still comic and contemptible. There was some trouble going on in Italy, which enabled our journalists and cartoonists to be remarkably frank and offensive. Except about Garibaldi, whom they accepted as a romantic hero. Other characters came off less lightly, and in April Mr. Punch (in whose pages John Leech was still going very strong) actually took it on himself to excommunicate the Pope. Not very much diffidence or undue sensibility about that.

What else was happening in 1860? The Prince of Wales visited America; as did the Great Eastern, on her maiden voyage. Tom Sayers fought the Benicia Boy. Constance Kent murdered her little step-brother—though it was another five years before her confession revealed the truth. Great Expectations was published. The game of Aunt Sally was introduced. G. P. R. James, prolific butt of so many other writers, passed away. Peking was entered for the first time by foreign troops—and the first Pekingese dogs set sail for England. The Cornhill Magazine was founded, with Thackeray as editor, and Ruskin contributed Unto This Last. Cambridge won the Boat Race. Mr. Merry’s Thormanby won the Derby. Phelps and Buckstone were ornaments of the London stage. Carlyle was still toiling away in Chelsea at his life of Frederick the Great.

And so on. Naturally and inevitably such a conspectus, of eighty years ago, can only serve to remind us of what we have read and heard. Naturally and inevitably, also, there is a kind of bright simplicity about anything seen from so far away. The colours are heightened. The shadows hide nearly everything else. No doubt the present age will take on the same appearance in due course; names and events may stand out, but the whole scene will have shrunk, and much of it will have vanished altogether. Or perhaps, as change comes faster and faster, even less time will be needed to blur the little everyday details which mean so much to us now.

Always, anyhow, the ordinary lives of ordinary people—though without them there would have been no scene at all—will be the first to fade. Sometimes, perhaps, we find ourselves thinking of them vaguely; at one moment pitying them for hardships of which they were quite possibly unaware, or at another moment envying them, for of course there is always that curious and contrasting sense of security about the past. But to go back, in our imaginations, for eighty years; to forget all that lies between; and, as if this weren’t difficult enough, to place ourselves in a little Scotch town well north of the Firth of Tay and nearly five hundred miles from London—

The effort must be made, though. And, if possible, another effort to realise that at that time, and to themselves, the people who lived there were quite as real, and quite as human, as we who can now telephone to their successors at any moment that we choose.

They were good, and bad, and a mixture of both. They loved and quarrelled. They hoped and despaired. Their simpler lives were only outwardly and comparatively simpler. And because one of their main interests—as elsewhere in Scotland at the time—lay in religion and the subtler distinctions between various forms of public worship, we shouldn’t think of them as absorbed in this and nothing else. They worked, and quite a lot of them played. They read, or if they couldn’t read, then others read to them. They talked, though you might have found it rather difficult to understand them. They fished. They dug in the ground. They drank, or some of them did. They smoked and took snuff. Few of them felt that they were imprisoned, either in time or space. And there can have been hardly one of them who didn’t—as is the habit of human beings—regard their birthplace as the real centre of the civilised world.

Its name—as there is less than no need to tell you—was and remains Kirriemuir. Kirrie, they have always called it, affectionately, as it were, and for short. If you haven’t been there, or don’t happen to have a map hanging on the wall, we might try to explain where it is.

You know Scotland? You know how it prances so gallantly towards the North Sea? It achieves this effect partly by being tilted a little westward from the top of England, and partly from the angle of the three main inlets on its eastern coast. The Moray Firth, the Firth of Tay, and the Firth of Forth. Inland, between the first two, rise the big ranges of the Grampians. South-east of them, beyond where they have dropped and frayed into a series of glens, lie the lower stretches of Strathmore. South-east of this, again, rise the Sidlaw Hills, which in turn look down on Dundee and the Firth of Tay.

Now we go back again. Kirriemuir stands north of the Sidlaws, south of the Grampians, a little more than twenty miles due east of Montrose on the coast, and—which may be clearer and is just as important as all this—looks out on and is surrounded by some of the most beautiful country in the whole of a notoriously beautiful land.

Here it would be so easy, and so very uninformative except to those who know them perfectly well already, to reel off the names of a string of mountains, lochs, glens, forests, rivers, and ruins. Consideration and self-control cut this down at the moment to a repetition of the statement that they are all beautiful. Hauntingly beautiful, in summer greenery, in the purple and gold of autumn, or in the whiteness of winter snow. But, again, what we are really trying to describe is that little town.

So small, eighty years ago—not that it is large even today, when the actual population has diminished—that perhaps you think we ought to call it a village. Yet it was nothing of the sort. It had so many streets and wynds that you could easily be lost among them. Roads set out from it to every point of the compass. Its outlying portions even had different names of their own. Tillyloss, between the road to Brechin and the Hill where all sects and denominations sleep in the same cemetery. Southmuir, divided from it by the steep valley of the commonty and the Gairie burn. It is this burn which, a little nearer its source, and now running to the east of the town, flows through the ravine which is known as the Den. About three hundred feet lower than the top of the Hill, so that Kirriemuir is a place where one nearly always seems to be climbing or descending.

Its own general colour has always been grey and pink. Grey for the slate roofs and pink for the stone from the neighbouring quarries. Eighty years ago very few of the buildings had more than two floors, with perhaps a garret above them. Many of them had the outside stairs which were doubtless an advantage when two families shared the same house. But a certain little cottage—as we should call it nowadays—with its back to the Brechin Road, and its door and four windows facing south, was grey all over and had its single flight of stairs inside. This was where David Barrie, the weaver, and his wife, Margaret Ogilvy, were living in 1860, when their third son and ninth child was born.

You see, therefore, at once how much more important it is for a man of genius to come into the world at the right time than in what might, at first sight, look like the right place. What chance has a ninth child of being born at all at the present day? Precious little. So perhaps that was the first clever or fortunate thing that this particular child can be said to have done. May the ninth. Eighteen-sixty. James Matthew Barrie has arrived in Kirriemuir.

The cottage was one of the tiniest you can ever have seen. Just four rooms—all small, and the two to the right of the outer door even narrower than the others—with those stairs running straight up the middle. Yes, but wait a moment. Only three rooms for living purposes. David Barrie’s hand-loom occupied, and must have nearly filled, the narrow room on the ground floor. By 1860 two of the little daughters had been dead for nine years. Alexander, the eldest son, was away at Aberdeen University except at Christmas and in the summer. But Mary, the next child, would still be only fifteen. Jane Ann was thirteen. David, seven. Sara, six. Isabella, two. Three years later another daughter, Margaret, was born.

The imagination has its work cut out here, even though we know that somewhere about this time the father and breadwinner managed to move to another workshop near at hand. Quite often, almost certainly, there must have been at least twice as many occupants as rooms in that little house in the Tenements—as the group of houses was then known. Today—when they have been renamed Lilybank—this kind of multiplication and division seems incredible and almost impossible.

Not in those days, though, when in addition to this congestion you must picture the constant clatter and racket from all the neighbouring looms. Morning, noon, and night. All for a wage which would now be thought incredible and impossible too. Yet this isn’t the way to judge what was happening eighty years ago. The noise, the weavers’ earning-power, and the size of their families all seemed natural and normal enough then. There is no need to pity the Barries in their four-roomed cottage. They knew they weren’t rich. The elder ones must have known also that at any moment an accident to the breadwinner would mean disaster for all. But as against this they were born and brought up to faith, courage, and prayer. And meanwhile they certainly didn’t think of themselves, nor would they have been regarded by their fellow-townspeople, as the poor.

David Barrie—forty-five this year—was an employer of other weavers, in a small way, as well as a weaver himself. On however diminutive a scale, he represented Capital as well as Labour. It might take a microscope to detect his turnover, but ends met. The simple necessaries were always forthcoming. Not much more, perhaps, at this stage, but the world hadn’t beaten him and didn’t look like beating him so long as he was granted his health.

Well, he lived to the age of eighty-seven, and only then met his death by mischance. If his ninth child had been no luckier or more successful than the others, his own industry and character, and the industry and character of his eldest son alone, would have assured him a sheltered and respected old age. He hadn’t by any means finished rising by his own efforts and talents when that ninth child was born.

Powerful temptation at this point—eighty years afterwards—to generalise about all Scotch breadwinners at that period. To represent them, without exception, as simple, honourable, conscientious, hard-working, and doggedly ambitious. Reason and even records show that there were weaklings and wastrels as well. Yet we shouldn’t feel the temptation without fairly solid grounds for it. Hundreds and thousands of Scotch breadwinners would have fallen into this precise category. If we look for an almost perfect individual example, David Barrie, linen manufacturer of Kirriemuir, is our man.

He wasn’t particularly well-read, and indeed can have had little time, let alone spare money, for books. He was no great talker, though the Scotch can convey a great deal to each other by short sounds which are indistinguishable to the southron. But he had a deep reverence for learning, for the pulpit, and for genuinely liberal politics. If we could cross the gulf of time and meet him as he was in 1860, we should still be a long way from getting to know him; for he was reserved as well as silent; we might easily find him terrifying and rather grim. Yet he was loved and admired by all under his roof. And only feared—though seldom if ever, we should imagine, by his wife—as it is rightly recommended that one should fear God.

He married in his twenty-seventh year; his wife, on their wedding-day, being just twenty-one and a half. Her father, Alexander Ogilvy, was a local stone-mason—there is no trace of anything but Kirriemuir in our hero’s ancestry—and for a description of this equally high-principled and hard-working Scotchman you would do far best to turn to the chapter in Margaret Ogilvy called What She Had Been. Knock out some of the sentiment, if you feel capable of such a feat, and you will still find the portrait of another character whom it is impossible not to admire. He was left a widower when his daughter was a child of eight, and when her brother—another David—was three years younger. He worked for them in the pink quarries and brought them both up—so that there is no need to look far for the little girl taking the place of a mother, who was always darting from his grandson’s pen. By the date of his death, twenty-four years later, the daughter was married and had had five children of her own, while the son had passed triumphantly into the ministry, and had already served five of his fifty years at a Free Church manse in Motherwell.

It’s rather staggering, this background of unswerving determination; of the sacrifices which achieved its end. Did Doctors of Divinity spring so inevitably and invariably from the homes of simple stone-masons in Scotland in the nineteenth century? Or, again, would you expect the son of a working weaver—as in the case of Alexander Barrie—to win a bursary at Aberdeen University, and, not so very long afterwards, one of the first of Her Majesty’s Inspectorships of Schools? Statistics—which aren’t available anyhow—might show how few actually attempted, and how fewer still attained, this kind of promotion from the ranks. Yet positively there were—yes, and still are—plenty of cottages bursting with similar ambition. Parents and sisters toiling and saving so that sons or brothers might stay the arduous course. Sons and brothers sticking to it, with all their might, until they reach the goal. If this is generalising again, it is a generalisation which has been fair enough, for a very long while, in Scotland. The instances of David Ogilvy and Alick Barrie are remarkable, but far from abnormal.

It was the stone-mason who was a member of the Original Seceders—though the real origin of secession in Scotland goes far further back—or, as they were also known, of the Old Lights. Or Auld Lichts. The implication of both names is that in setting themselves apart from the rest of the Church—which by 1860 had been split into at least five other categories in Kirriemuir alone—they were claiming not only independence but that their method of public worship was the purest and least corrupt. It may be seen, too, that with so many sects to dispute this, to dispute with each other, and to unite, at this time, only in their horror of the Church of England (which was also locally represented by what the natives insisted on calling a chapel), there was plenty of opportunity for what Scotchmen have always enjoyed. Heavy, whole-hearted argument, and stubborn adherence to their own point of view. Did they ever convert each other? Possibly, or in rare cases, though any dialectical victor would almost certainly think the less of his proselyte’s strength of character. For apart from recurrent and large-scale schism, it was held that a decent citizen would always stand by the sect in which he had been born.

Nevertheless, just as the cemetery on the Hill overlooked not only Kirriemuir, in one sense, but its spiritual sub-sections in another, so it was also held that marriage was a perfectly honourable means of bridging these bottomless gulfs. Common sense, at this point, seems to have gained a striking advantage over obstinacy; and accordingly, when Margaret Ogilvy left her father’s cottage to start a fresh life with David Barrie, it was thought quite natural that she should accept and adopt his form of religion as well. So little Jamie, like his brothers and sisters, was baptised in the South Free Church, and remained a member of it—in so far, at any rate, as he never joined any other—for the rest of his life.

He was never an Auld Licht himself, and his mother had worshipped elsewhere for nineteen years when he was born. But childhood is what counts, almost always; and it was her childhood’s memories that were presently to be given the touch of magic which would make the two words Auld Licht known all over the English-speaking world. Not, of course, and so oddly, that more than one in a thousand would ever be able to pronounce them.

Chapter 3

It is all guess-work, wrote J. M. Barrie in 1896, for six years. For the first six years, he means, in that crowded little house in the Tenements, as consciousness and intelligence came to him, and he found himself one of a large family, surrounded for six days in the week by the clatter of the looms. Gradually no doubt, the horizon widened. He would have learnt not only the way across the commonty to the long services on Sundays, but much or most of the bewildering geography of his native town. Very easy, also, to get out of it—down towards the Den, up on to the Hill, beyond it towards Caddam (or Caldhame) Wood, or southward on the road leading to Glamis. No child could be expected to realise the beauty of these walks, nor was there anything yet with which he could compare them. From the top of the Hill, by one of the prehistoric Standing Stones which are dotted about this countryside, he could have looked down—five miles or so—and seen Forfar. Perhaps he was taken there sometimes. But it is all guess-work.

What we, so long afterwards, have always to remember is that the Kirriemuir of which he will be writing later on is mostly, and at first entirely, a Kirriemuir which he never knew. It is his mother’s or even older than that, built on her memories and on what she had once heard. No guess-work, then, that some of this was reaching him towards the end of those six years. But for the rest, though there are legends and a few facts, it is mainly a question of how far our imagination can see a little Scotch boy in the thick of all the other Scotch children of his age. Very little to distinguish him yet. Or perhaps nothing, unless, in some miraculous manner, we can retain our present knowledge, and yet go back there and be told who he is. He wasn’t precocious. Nobody seems to have thought him particularly clever. If he was sensitive, so were the other children, each in their own way. Most of them were receiving almost exactly the same impressions.

Today any pilgrim who visits his birthplace will be shown the very small, communal wash-house—shared by those who lived round it and standing a few yards from the Barries’ door. There is still a copper in one corner of it, though it doesn’t look as if it were often used. Here, also, we know that he played, and because of what he wrote of his games there, in the preface to the published edition of Peter Pan, it is now boldly described as Sir James Barrie’s First Theatre. Yes and no, some of us may feel. We see what they are driving at, and the preface can certainly be quoted against us if we tend too much towards No. Yet other children have played in wash-houses and elsewhere, and his principal playmate grew up into an ironmonger. It may be all right for the picture post-cards and for a successful dramatist looking back at the distant past, but somehow it doesn’t satisfy us as a real contribution to his career. There it is, though, and we should be the last to say, in the light of subsequent events, that it isn’t touching and interesting.

So, if you like, is another story—his own again—of the first, amateur puppet-show which he saw, at about the same age, in a room over the bookseller’s shop in Bank Street, where he did much of his early reading. This, most positively, wasn’t what turned him into a playwright. Yet the glimpse is human and cosy. For a moment the past seems nearer and more real. The little boy had fun, we feel, in those far-off, forgotten days. The background isn’t entirely composed of long upper-lips, of fierce whiskers, and carefully preserved Sunday blacks. There was a lot of hard work going on all round him, and precious little of what we should consider luxury or even comfort, yet there were games for such children, indoors or out, all the year round. Some of them are listed, though hardly explained, in Sentimental Tommy. Spyo, smuggle bools, kickbonnety, peeries, the preens, suckers, pilly, buttony, palaulays, and fivey. Perhaps they sound rather strange to us by these names, but there seems to have been a fine selection, anyhow. And one thing is certain; that little Jamie always had an eye, as it is called, for any sport involving a good aim. He was proud of this, and with reason, as long as he lived.

Then there was fishing, though it wasn’t until he was grown-up and came to England that he learnt to cast a fly—and, incidentally, hooked his host and instructor by the nose. Fairs, too, and travelling shows, returning and reappearing in due season. Simple but unforgettable experiences in the age of innocence, and never banned or barred, apparently, by a community which, for all its preoccupation with religion, stopped short of actual puritanism on week-days. Yes, lots of fun, and plenty of opportunities for a reasonable amount of mischief, too, for the children in Kirriemuir during the sixties.

And of course, if a little surprisingly, there was cricket. We don’t, somehow, associate this with Scotland at that period; but there it was, in Kirriemuir at any rate, so of course—whatever their bats and balls might be made of—the children would have their own version of it too. Everyone knows how this passion remained with one of them always, but his elder brother, as another example, was just as keen a follower of averages and scores. It got into their blood and stayed there. Again one has to realise that Kirriemuir wasn’t a place where it was always Sunday afternoon.

More legends and memories. Of the time when little Jamie was four, so he says, and ran off hurriedly because there was a chance of seeing an old man who had committed suicide. This doesn’t sound unduly sensitive, though no doubt he was as sorry as any other little boy would have been when he got there.

Of the time when he was six (so he says), and changed clothes with a friend who was in mourning. So that the friend might go on playing, while little Jamie sat apart and wept. That, whether literally true or not, is getting decidedly more like J. M. Barrie. Tommy Sandys did this too, you may remember. But of course we are still a long way, in a sense, from Tommy.

Of the next-door neighbour, Bell Lunan, into whose house he ran so often, and in whose kitchen bed he would hide from the passing wrath of his parents. The really fascinating thing about her was the stick—or the staff, as it would be known—without which she was unable to walk. The childish Jamie took this away from her sometimes; as heartless a tease as any other little boy. Again, though the connection is obvious, we are still a very long way from Jess McQumpha. But J. M. Barrie knew and admitted it. After the old lady’s death, the staff came to him in London. After his own death, it returned to her grand-daughter in the same little house.

And so on, during those first six years in the misty past. Love and a certain amount of firmness for the David Barries’ youngest son, though doubtless he was also a little spoilt at times by his mother and elder sisters. Yet plenty of rough-and-tumble in which high spirits could be exercised and sometimes bring their own quick punishment. Not really so much a hard school, for the beginning of life, as one where nothing was made abnormally easy. Sometimes, we may reasonably imagine, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Sometimes, unquestionably, he was a little deevil. But learning things all the time, and in a setting where he would learn little or nothing but what would help to form anyone’s character. To be one of a large family, however humble, where virtue and respectability are in the very air that is breathed, is a sound beginning for any child in any age. Nobody can say that the young Barries were unfairly handicapped. Only that they didn’t happen to enter the world with a flying start.

Facts. In 1862 Alick, now twenty, graduated, with first-class honours in Classics, at Aberdeen. Well done, Alick. One can almost see his parents setting their teeth to conceal the extent of their pride. Having to remind themselves, though they couldn’t exactly have forgotten, that momentous as this was, it was only another rung in his ladder. Besides, this wasn’t the only local triumph. In the same month and at the same seat of learning, one Alexander Whyte—son and formerly apprentice to a Kirriemuir shoemaker—was capped after gaining a second in Mental Philosophy. These boys were friends, and had shared the same Spartan lodgings as undergraduates. Whyte aimed at the Ministry, got there, and was a famous preacher for many years in Edinburgh. His own son became a Member of Parliament, a Knight, and a K.C.S.I. Comment, as they say, is unnecessary, and might again be misleading. But you see what could be done.

Alick, on the other hand, was to be a schoolmaster, and for the time being disappears, in this capacity, into Lanarkshire. Mary, his eldest sister, accompanied him, but we shall hear of both again. In the same year James Barrie, their grandfather, died.

1863. The last of David and Margaret’s children is born. Another Margaret, but to be known as Maggie. Little Jamie’s nose out of joint? Not more than is good for him, perhaps. Not nearly such a dislocation as if there had been another son. At forty-four he can write One girl’s more use than twenty boys. But the expert on mothers knew well enough what they think.

Eight children, or eight living children, for the David Barries now. Jane Ann, the eldest at home, is sixteen, and already assuming responsibilities well beyond that age. Her mother leans on her, and will lean more and more heavily as the years go by. There is a beautiful side to this, and J. M. Barrie is going to blazon it throughout the world one day. But it will be a tale of human sacrifice, too. Willing, but rather terrible.

Three more summers and winters of the guess-work period, and then just as the shadow of education was falling across little Jamie’s path—he ran away, he says, from his first school after one day, but was soon caught and sent to another—tragedy entered his life and struck, as it was to go on striking to the end of it, a cruelly unexpected blow.

Even allowing for all that is always said, and believed by those who say it, of young lives suddenly cut short, there can be little doubt that his brother David—now nearing the end of his fourteenth year—was as bright, as industrious, and as full of promise as the remarkable Alick. Gayer, perhaps, or so it seemed when thinking of him afterwards, and whether already ambitious for himself or not, the second and possibly the greater object of his parents’ aspirations and prayers. Alick had done well for himself, was an M.A., a schoolmaster who was to go far in that calling, and further still when he was set over other schoolmasters. But David was to be a minister and bring even greater glory to his name. Those who were old enough to plan such dreams knew it, with the joint assurance of humility and pride.

In January, 1867, he was a pupil, under the care of his elder brother and sister, at their private school in Bothwell, Lanarkshire. On the eve of his fourteenth birthday there was a frost, and not even while skating himself, but standing watching a friend set off on the one pair of skates which they shared, he was accidentally knocked down by this boy, fell, and fractured his skull.

There was little if any hope for him. His brother telegraphed immediately to their parents, and they set off at once for the station—for the little branch line from Forfar had been open now for more than ten years. The telegraph office was there in those days, and before boarding the train David Barrie the elder thought to ask if there were any further message. A second telegram had just been received. It told him that his son was dead.

The shock to both parents can be imagined. Far worse for them, far more dreadful than when their two little daughters had died in infancy. It was a catastrophe almost beyond belief, and the mother—as we are told in her youngest son’s book about her—never really got over it. That little boy, who had gone to the station with her, vaguely excited by the atmosphere of crisis and wishing that he could start on such a long, adventurous journey too, was just of an age to understand nothing except that there had been some terrible change. Long, long afterwards he could still remember playing with his younger sister beneath the table on which the coffin lay. But this doesn’t mean that the shock had spared him; for though actual memories of his brother soon faded, there was still the discovery that the world was a horrible place in which his mother could lie there weeping in her bed; as if suddenly transformed into someone else.

Turn, if you please, to Margaret Ogilvy for the story of how he tried to take little David’s place, and to make that grief-stricken woman laugh. No other hand could, or perhaps would, have written such pages, and no paraphrase could possibly be as poignant and revealing. Yet it is the story of how a mark was set on a child’s soul, as well as of the beginning of twenty-eight years of incessant and unalterable devotion. Here already, at six and a half, is the presage of what he won’t afterwards escape or try to escape. Already his mother has let him be a little different from other boys, as she still thinks only of a boy who has gone. Yet even if she had guessed for a moment that she was fanning a spark, would this mean that for such extremity of sorrow she is to have nothing but praise, and no syllable of blame?

Perhaps it is all beyond us now, and of course it was no clearer to anybody then. Day follows day for the living, and they don’t know, in the midst of it all, what they are really doing to their own and each other’s lives. Many will still be unconscious long after they have done it. The inmates of that little house in the Tenements, simple as they may seem to us, weren’t nearly as simple as characters in a play. They were far more complex and fluid. Even the mother wouldn’t always