Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/93

THE AMBITIONS OF SIR JAMES BARRIE 67 our sentimentalized Arcadie. He would bring out the slowness of these weavers and their ludicrous love- making ; he would paint " the dull vacant faces " of the Tammas Haggarts and Pete Lunans as pitilessly as any Degas drawing washerwomen. You could generally tell an Auld Licht in Thrums when you passed hiin, his dull vacant face wrinkled over a heavy wob. He wore tags of yarn round his trousers beneath the knee, that looked like ostentatious garters, and frequently his jacket of corduroy was put on beneath his waistcoat. If he was too old to carry his load on his back, he wheeled it on a creaking barrow, and when he met a friend they said '*Ay, Jeames," and "Ay, Davit," and then could think of nothing else. But as he worked, there came a change. Tammas began to grow eldritch. Pete became a quaint gnome. Gnarled idiosyncrasies sprouted, the stolid features swelled or shrank. Thrums grew into a goblin market, all quirks and wynds and cobbles, its weavers were a race of hob-nailed elves : " As unlooked for as a tele- gram," admitted Barrie himself (in Margaret Ogilvy), "there came to me the thought that there was some- thing quaint about my native place. A boy who had found a knife in his pocket could not have been more surprised." That expresses the suddenness perfectly — but not the nature of the impulse. What he discovered in his pocket was not a knife. It was (I am convinced) a little bottle containing a philtre with the unforget- able flavour of " mixed cherry-tart, custard, pine- apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast," and labelled DRINK ME in large letters. And standing there, on the bank of the Quharity, he drained it desperately, and at once began to shrink. He dwindled, he sped downwards, till he pierced the surface of the pool ; and there he was, safe at last, beside his own reflection, in the mimic world of make-believe, so quaint and queer and comical, so wanton and so