by Unknown
Of more interest to the vulgar, to whom, after all, this talk must make its chief appeal, is James Hook’s last will, which was forwarded to his aunt by a landshark of Rio. By this James left everything to Eton. But the Governors, it appears, had scruples — even about the hat — and so all passed to his Aunt Emily, who told me with a faint flush that not to accept them would have been a slight on James’s memory.
These are all the facts I have been able to learn about Hook at Eton, and if you agree that once in his life, that night, he did all that such as he could do for his old school, I seek to draw no other moral, though surely the proud, if detestable, position he attained is another proof that the Etonian is a natural leader of men. Educationally, I gather from the log-book, his sympathies were with the classical rather than the modern side. In politics he was a Conservative. So far as I can learn there never was any woman in his life. His furrow had therefore to be a lonely one. Perhaps if some dear girl — who can tell? or why so bright a morning had to close in such a cataclysm? Perhaps it was just that at Oxford he fell among bad companions — Harrovians.
Worcestershire Association Dinner
SECOND ANNUAL DINNER, LONDON
February 29, 1928
Sir James Barrie, in reply, began by following Lord Beauchamp’s example of speaking in dialect, affecting the Scotch, but resisted, saying: It would take too long. He went on: What a lot of people seem to live in Worcestershire. I do not know whether you can hear me away over on the South Wales’ district (indicating the far recesses of the hall). I shall try to speak up, but if you don’t hear me you can be sure you are having much the best of it.
I have got a terrible statement to make to you. I do not know whether you noticed that Earl Beauchamp spoke of ‘the visitors.’ At the same time a strange malevolent look might have been seen passing across the face of our Chairman, (The Rt. Hon. Stanley Baldwin) whose name, I regret to say, I failed to catch. Sir James said that he was asked to speak for the guests, and he had prepared a speech about the guests. What is to be done? he asked, rolling a cigar round his mouth. Its name is ‘might have been.’ With that he tore up some pieces of paper purporting to be the prepared speech, and then remarked that it was a terrible position. I can only think of two people who, placed in such a terrible position, would be able to rise to it — two members of His Majesty’s Government. I am sure that you can think of the same two. They could have responded to that toast of the visitors without a moment’s preparation even on the Day of Judgement.
Sir James Barrie then pieced together the torn bits of paper and suggested that perhaps that speech would do after all, and added: I do not know why none of you thought of that. Appearing to read from the notes, he went on: We are especially proud to be here because of the presence of our most beloved Prince of Wales. And yet no one of us can be quite sure that if he had known we were to be here he would have come. I am particularly proud to reply for the women visitors. What does the poet say about woman? Well, what does the poet not say about woman? Here Sir James stopped, lit his cigar, and went on as dreamily: Years ago I remember one who is here tonight sitting down to prepare a toast to the ladies. I won’t mention names, and I do not see why Lord Ednam should be blushing. He sat down at his desk.
I happened to be there. He was looking very confident. I went for a walk and when I came back I found he had written, ‘O woman.’ He still looked confident. I went for another walk, and when I came back I found it was ‘Oh, woman oh.’ He was no longer looking confident. I tried to reassure him by saying that that was everything one did know for certain about woman.
Sir James then purported to read from the tattered notes again: ‘ Worcestershire’s darling son, his dark secret,’ and then said: The Premier has a dark secret. For fear that you might think it is worse than it is, I think that I had better make a clean breast of it. That dark secret is that he absolutely abominates pipe-smoking. Have any of you ever seen him smoking a pipe — trying to smoke a pipe — not even able to hold the thing properly? It all arose out of an unfortunate newspaper mistake, which the public liked, and rather than disappoint them he went on smoking ‘this horrible thing.’ But if you want to see the Prime Minister at his best, it is when he hears the hundred nightingales and when he has thrown that rank thing aside and lights his beloved cigarette.
Those, commented Sir James irrelevantly, are the views of the visitors upon the vexed questions of the day. In a speech it is not the words that matter, it is the face. You all have dark secrets, all the men among you, and even I. I should like to tell you my dark secret. When I was at school in the south of Scotland — it was a mixed school — one day the girls took a plebiscite about which boy had the sweetest smile. It came to my ears that I had one. Think of my elation. But the tragedy is that it made me selfconscious, and I have never been able to smile since.
To Rhodes Scholars
AT THEIR ANNUAL DINNER AT OXFORD
June 20, 1928
IN proposing the toast of the Rhodes Scholars I am asked to bear in mind chiefly those whose three years here, and in Europe generally, have just come, or are coming, to an end. And so, gentlemen, have at you! A kindly soul once divided books into two kinds — those that one likes to read, and those that are very able. You young Rhodes Scholars are surrounded tonight by people who are very able. But it is you we want to read — you, the unwritten ones. Now that the stage direction is, alas, ‘Exit William K. Brown’ — that fascinating fellow, yourself (your interest in whom passes the love of Woman) — what is to happen to you next? ‘Chapter one,! Depart from Oxford determined to make Public Duty my highest aim.’ Bravo! But how? ‘Chapter the last, The Result in my Case.’ Namely? Ah, Mr. Brown, how we wish we could guide you through the paper hoop; but we know as little as yourselves what is being spun for you. Yet the beginning, of all you are to be, already lies inside you — a little speck that is to grow, while you sleep, while you are awake, and that in the fullness of time, according to your control of it, is to be the making of you, or to destroy you. You will know a great deal more about that speck when you come back here, years hence, not, perhaps, so bright as you are to-day, but I am sure all very able.
Education is a noble word in Mr. Rhodes’s conception of it, Fellowship. I can just remember days in a little Scottish town, the only place I know that beats Oxford — I don’t mean in games — where weavers of all ages trudged on their shanks to distant St. Andrews or Aberdeen in quest of college bursaries. If they returned victorious they reappeared by day, but if they failed they hung about the outskirts till nightfall and then stole to their homes. Early next morning you heard them at their looms again, teeth set, waiting for next year. Dour times — dogged students — no Cecil Rhodes. But that speck under control. On the other hand, there is the old village superannuated schoolmistress, who, before she slammed the door on her school for the last time, chalked on her blackboard this her message to posterity, ‘Drat all education.’ When one sees two jaded Oxford dons in earnest converse among the immemorial elms, I wonder if they are ever saying that?
‘Nobody has ever had to put on mourning because of me.’ A proud summing up for the best of you if after reflection you can claim it. But you will find you can’t. You ask the speck. You will do things — have probably already done them — shabby, ignoble things, dear Mr. Brown — that will mean mourning for at least those who love you — or would, if you were found out. I am not saying this to damp you, but rather as a comfort in case you have been reading the sort of biographies in which the hero is without a flaw. It may have given you a sinking to feel that you can never be like him. But you may be like him, and in many cases it will be a mighty good thing for you to be as like him as you can. He is more neighbourly now that you know he has the speck. Of course, I am not speaking of the up-to-date memoirs, in which there is a completely successful attempt to dig up the dead and twist a finger in their sockets. ‘Lives of great men all remind us We can t make our lives sublime.’ But they may bring us nearer
to it. ‘And departing leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.’ I don’t know that you should rollick in anticipation of that. Those footprints, even if you achieve them, what will happen to them in the end? They will be carefully sliced off, and sold at Christie’s. On my soul, Brown, I believe you would be wiser, if it does not incommode you too much, to stop short of greatness. ‘Chapter 18,! Reach the Summit.’ No, they sometimes fall off. To be very able is safer. The one place where the immortals are never seen is at the top table.
One hopes that you are leaving Oxford feeling as the old saying has it, that red blood boils in your veins, that you hear a thousand nightingales, and could eat all the elephants in Hindustan, and pick your teeth with the spire of Strasburg Cathedral. That’s the spirit. If to despise us helps you in your enthusiasms, then, gentlemen, continue. Far worse than your scorning us beyond reason would be your not having a cheery belief that you can do better. If in firing at some of our performances you feel that the straightest line is through our bodies — still, fire. I only ask you to let Mr. Brown give the order. I am getting quite fond of that man.
And so, goodbye and good fortune. I suppose most of you are now going home-along, as Mr. Hardy’s rustics say. I believe you will find, nay, be surprised to find, that your sojourn here has not perhaps made you know England and Europe better so much as made you know your own home-lands better. Don’t forget Oxford and the clashing with us and foreign nationalities, on which Mr. Rhodes set so much store; Oxford, where you once sat out a dance with the evening star. If you are to be writers, don’t be roarers. Literary roarers — on their tubs — in the marketplace — thumping on their expanses. Go out to meet the mistress of the spindle not fearfully, but with a gay curiosity. Whether you are to be masonwork in the edifice of Cecil Rhodes’s imagination, or thrown out as bad, depends chiefly on character, and character depends on the speck. We all seem to be touched by it, and are perhaps sent into the world to decide for ourselves whether we are worth saving. Above all things, don’t defer finding out what your particular speck is — for they vary very much — before it spreads. Mr. Brown, my dear, forgive me for prosing. ‘I am the tomb of one shipwrecked, but sail thou on.’ The toast is the Rhodes Scholars with thoughts of the great — shall we say Elizabethan, who brings them here.
Mary Queen of Scots
AT JEDBURGH — October 11, 1928
(The occasion was the opening of a bazaar and fancy fair, the object of which was to raise funds to maintain the house which Mary Queen of Scots occupied during her residence in Jedburgh in 1566, while on her way to visit Bothwell at Hermitage Castle, in Liddesdale, where he was lying severely wounded. The house was presented to the town by Mr and Mrs. F. S. Oliver of Edgerston.)
BEFORE I begin, may I ask you to make sure that all the doors are locked? We want no Government spies in here. However innocent our intention, there is no denying that this meeting for the preservation of the house of Mary Queen of Scots has many of the marks of a Stuart rising. Positively the last leaf on the tree. Though great efforts have been made to keep this assemblage secret, we cannot be certain that something has not leaked out. Quite possibly tomorrow’s news-sheets may bear startling headlines—’ Extraordinary Jacobite Gathering at Jedburgh — The Town Council Involved — J. M. Barrie escaped to France — F. S. Oliver arrested at Edgerston.’ How strange if Mr. Oliver, who has done such manful deeds for Queen Mary’s House — Ah, don’t cheer him, it may be remembered against you at the trials — how strange if, as a result of this meeting, he were to end his days confined in a dungeon in that very house. Nevertheless, we must remember in this connection that the inventor of the guillotine himself perished by it. I think in any further references I may feel constrained to make about Mr. Oliver I shall be giving him a better chance if I simply call him X. No doubt you are planning, if the worst comes to the worst, to succour him at his little window, with provender thrust between the bars. Disabuse yourselves of that idea. If X. is under lock and key, you will be in full flight. Winter is coming on, and I hope you have brought warm clothing with you. In dank caves on Western Isles you will lay your heads — such of them as have not been laid elsewhere. Is there no bright side to this gloomy picture? Yes. Bank-notes will be of no use to you among the bracken; indeed, to be tracked down with them on you will be a suspicious circumstance. Be thankful that a number of courageous ladies are here to-day to relieve you of them. Before you start for the misty Hebrides, don’t miss this opportunity of getting rid of those — incriminating documents.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, leaving you in the wind-driven haunts where the whaup and the seagull build their lonely nests, I return to Queen Mary’s picturesque house at Jedburgh. It is chiefly historical, if I remember aright, because she rushed to it, womanlike, to visit a sick friend. Somehow that has always troubled the Southerner; What is the vital difference between the Scot and his friendly brother? Of course it has to do with Mary Queen of Scots. A Scot, wherever he may be, has always at least one moment of the day when he leans against the nearest object and thinks about her. That is our romantic secret, at last divulged. In England they had a contemporary Queen, a far greater than Mary, though I am not going to advertise her here by mentioning her name. But do they think of her every day? You Scotsmen in the hall are leaning and thinking of Mary now; I can even tell you what you are thinking of her; you are wondering whether if you had lived in her day — whether she would have liked you.
Of course, I would not have dared to speak in Jedburgh unless I could answer that question. It seems only fair to tell you how I found the answer. By the way, I hope I didn’t wake up any of you last night? I mean by the galloping of my horse? I couldn’t sleep, and after X. had gone to bed — the last downy couch he may stretch himself upon for many a day — I saddled my steed and galloped into Jedburgh. A call irresistible was drawing me to Queen Mary’s House. I stood beneath the glamorous pile and not one of its many windows showed a gleam. And yet — I remembered from our beloved Sir Walter’s pages, how at Loch Leven there was at all hours someone ready to place a lamp in a darkened eye of the castle in response to a light across the loch, a signal that friends were near, a reminder which in her own words was ‘more dear to Mary Stuart than any star that twinkles in the blue vault of Heaven.’ I dared to flash my lantern, and almost immediately a lamp shone for a moment in a turret window. Without a sound the celebrated key turned in the lock, the door opened softly, and I found myself in the presence of Mary of Scots. She was but a moving part of the night; but a mother will forget her child and rivers flow uphill before a Scotsman is unable to recognise that face and form.
Inside, I went on one knee to her and she extended her pretty hand. I called her ‘My Liege.’ It may mean caves for me, but it was worth it. I said there was one question I craved to ask of her: — Were the Casket Letters genuine?
You will be glad to know that the answer was in the negative. So, after the lapse of centuries, our greatest Scottish case is closed. There was much else I wanted to learn about the past, but strangely enough she was more interested in the present. She made many inquiries about Jedburgh itself, as, for instance, did ‘Jeddart Justice’ still hold, and who was provost now. She had been puzzling why there was of late so much stir around this hall, and when I hazarded the guess that it was probably preparation for the bazaar, I was touched to find that she did not know what bazaars were.
But when I explained, and told her the object of this one, she wept tears of joy because her Jedburgh still remembered her kindly. She said she must see the bazaar — you know how — how hasty she was — and putting her hands in mine in that confiding way which is either the best or the worst thing in woman — she was dressed in black velvet with a white ruff about her neck and a white veil flying — and so we came here — by the longest route. When she saw the lovely stalls she fingered the display, calling them by old lavender names, and some of them she tried on, and she clapped her hands, and exclaimed, ‘Whoever buys at my bazaar, I wil
l always have a leaning to him.’ ‘Him,’ she said, though I had told her that most of the work was done by ladies. I told her there would be Southerners here to-day, and asked her whether she would be vexed if they were purchasers, and she said ‘No,’ that she wanted them to have the same rights as the others, for old wounds were healed, and she touched her neck and smiled.
Then I did a foolish thing. I asked her whether she would like to buy some little article herself, and at that she began to fade away — a sure proof that she was no French woman, but Scotch to the core. Before she was quite obliterated — when there was no more of her than the veil, she placed in my hand a sprig of white heather. (Here the speaker drew attention to white heather in his buttonhole.’) Seeing is believing! I have an uneasy feeling that this was not meant for me, but for a better man, whom she had been mistaking me for all the time — our friend, X. However, — (Here he resumed the buttonhole).