Tommy and Grizel
Copyright© 2026 by J. M. Barrie
Chapter 24: The Monster
Tommy’s new character was that of a monster. He always liked the big parts.
Concealed, as usual, in the garments that clung so oddly to him, modesty, generosity, indifference to applause and all the nobler impulses, he could not strip himself of them, try as he would, and so he found, to his scornful amusement, that he still escaped the public fury. In the two months that preceded Elspeth’s marriage there was positively scarce a soul in Thrums who did not think rather well of him. “If they knew what I really am,” he cried with splendid bitterness, “how they would run from me!”
Even David could no longer withhold the hand of fellowship, for Grizel would tell him nothing, except that, after all, and for reasons sufficient to herself, she had declined to become Mrs. Sandys. He sought in vain to discover how Tommy could be to blame. “And now,” Tommy said grimly to Grizel, “our doctor thinks you have used me badly, and that I am a fine fellow to bear no resentment! Elspeth told me that he admires the gentle and manly dignity with which I submit to the blow, and I have no doubt that, as soon as I heard that, I made it more gentle and manly than ever!
“I have forbidden Elspeth,” he told her, “to upbraid you for not accepting me, with the result that she thinks me too good to live! Ha, ha! what do you think, Grizel?”
It became known in the town that she had refused him. Everybody was on Tommy’s side. They said she had treated him badly. Even Aaron was staggered at the sight of Tommy accepting his double defeat in such good part. “And all the time I am the greatest cur unhung,” says Tommy. “Why don’t you laugh, Grizel?”
Never, they said, had there been such a generous brother. The town was astir about this poor man’s gifts to the lucky bride. There were rumours that among the articles was a silver coal-scuttle, but it proved to be a sugar-bowl in that pattern. Three bandboxes came for her to select from; somebody discovered who was on the watch, but may I be struck dead if more than one went back. Yesterday it was bonnets; to-day she is at Tilliedrum again, trying on her going-away dress. And she really was to go away in it, a noticeable thing, for in Thrums society, though they usually get a going-away dress, they are too canny to go away in it The local shops were not ignored, but the best of the trousseau came from London. “That makes the second box this week, as I’m a living sinner,” cries the lady on the watch again. When boxes arrived at the station Corp wheeled them up to Elspeth without so much as looking at the label.
Ah, what a brother! They said it openly to their own brothers, and to Tommy in the way they looked at him.
“There has been nothing like it,” he assured Grizel, “since Red Riding-hood and the wolf. Why can’t I fling off my disguise and cry, ‘The better to eat you with!’”
He always spoke to her now in this vein of magnificent bitterness, but Grizel seldom rewarded him by crying, “Oh, oh!” She might, however, give him a patient, reproachful glance instead, and it had the irritating effect of making him feel that perhaps he was under life-size, instead of over it.
“I daresay you are right,” says Tommy, savagely.
“I said nothing.”
“You don’t need to say it. What a grand capacity you have for knocking me off my horse, Grizel!”
“Are you angry with me for that?”
“No; it is delicious to pick one’s self out of the mud, especially when you find it is a baby you are picking up, instead of a brute. Am I a baby only, Grizel?”
“I think it is childish of you,” she replied, “to say you are a brute.”
“There is not to be even that satisfaction left to me! You are hard on me, Grizel.”
“I am trying to help you. How can you be angry with me?”
“The instinct of self-preservation, I suppose. I see myself dwindling so rapidly under your treatment that soon there will be nothing of me left.”
It was said cruelly, for he knew that the one thing Grizel could not bear now was the implication that she saw his faults only. She always went down under that blow with pitiful surrender, showing the woman suddenly, as if under a physical knouting.
He apologized contritely. “But, after all, it proves my case,” he said, “for I could not hurt you in this way, Grizel, if I were not a pretty well-grown specimen of a monster.”
“Don’t,” she said; but she did not seek to help him by drawing him away to other subjects, which would have been his way. “What is there monstrous,” she asked, “in your being so good to Elspeth? It is very kind of you to give her all these things.”
“Especially when by rights they are yours, Grizel!”
“No, not when you did not want to give them to me.”
He dared say nothing to that; there were some matters on which he must not contradict Grizel now.
“It is nice of you,” she said, “not to complain, though Elspeth is deserting you. It must have been a blow.”
“You and I only know why,” he answered. “But for her, Grizel, I might be whining sentiment to you at this moment.”
“That,” she said, “would be the monstrous thing.”
“And it is not monstrous, I suppose, that I should let Gemmell press my hand under the conviction that, after all, I am a trump.”
“You don’t pose as one.”
“That makes them think the more highly of me! Nothing monstrous, Grizel, in my standing quietly by while you are showing Elspeth how to furnish her house—I, who know why you have the subject at your finger-tips!”
For Grizel had given all her sweet ideas to Elspeth. Heigh-ho! how she had guarded them once, confiding them half reluctantly even to Tommy; half reluctantly, that is, at the start, because they were her very own, but once she was embarked on the subject talking with such rapture that every minute or two he had to beg her to be calm. She was the first person in that part of the world to think that old furniture need not be kept in the dark corners, and she knew where there was an oak bedstead that was looked upon as a disgrace, and where to obtain the dearest cupboards, one of them in use as the retiring-chamber of a rabbit-hutch, and stately clocks made in the town a hundred years ago, and quaint old-farrant lamps and cogeys and sand-glasses that apologized if you looked at them, and yet were as willing to be loved again as any old lady in a mutch. You will not buy them easily now, the people will not chuckle at you when you bid for them now. We have become so cute in Thrums that when the fender breaks we think it may have increased in value, and we preserve any old board lest the worms have made it artistic. Grizel, however, was in advance of her time. She could lay her hands on all she wanted, and she did, but it was for Elspeth’s house.
“And the table-cloths and the towels and the sheets,” said Tommy. “Nothing monstrous in my letting you give Elspeth them?”
The linen, you see, was no longer in Grizel’s press.
“I could not help making them,” she answered, “they were so longing to be made. I did not mean to give them to her. I think I meant to put them back in the press, but when they were made it was natural that they should want to have something to do. So I gave them to Elspeth.”
“With how many tears on them?”
“Not many. But with some kisses.”
“All which,” says Tommy, “goes to prove that I have nothing with which to reproach myself!”
“No, I never said that,” she told him. “You have to reproach yourself with wanting me to love you.”
She paused a moment to let him say, if he dared, that he had not done that, when she would have replied instantly, “You know you did.” He could have disabused her, but it would have been cruel, and so on this subject, as ever, he remained silent.
“But that is not what I have been trying to prove,” she continued. “You know as well as I that the cause of this unhappiness has been—what you call your wings.”
He was about to thank her for her delicacy in avoiding its real name, when she added, “I mean your sentiment,” and he laughed instead.
“I flatter myself that I no longer fly, at all events,” he said. “I know what I am at last, Grizel”
“It is flattery only,” she replied with her old directness. “This thing you are regarding with a morbid satisfaction is not you at all.”
He groaned. “Which of them all is me, Grizel?” he asked gloomily.
“We shall see,” she said, “when we have got the wings off.”
“They will have to come off a feather at a time.”
“That,” she declared, “is what I have been trying to prove.”
“It will be a weary task, Grizel.”
“I won’t weary at it,” she said, smiling.
Her cheerfulness was a continual surprise to him. “You bear up wonderfully well yourself,” he sometimes said to her, almost reproachfully, and she never replied that, perhaps, that was one of her ways of trying to help him.
She is not so heartbroken, after all, you may be saying, and I had promised to break her heart. But, honestly, I don’t know how to do it more thoroughly, and you must remember that we have not seen her alone yet.
She tried to be very little alone. She helped David in his work more than ever; not a person, for instance, managed to escape the bath because Grizel’s heart was broken. You could never say that she was alone when her needle was going, and the linen became sheets and the like, in what was probably record time. Yet they could have been sewn more quickly; for at times the needle stopped and she did not know it. Once a bedridden old woman, with whom she had been sitting up, lay watching her instead of sleeping, and finally said: “What makes you sit staring at a cauld fire, and speaking to yourself?” And there was a strange day when she had been too long in the Den. When she started for home she went in the direction of Double Dykes, her old home, instead.
She could bear everything except doubt. She had told him so, when he wondered at her calmness; she often said it to herself. She could tread any path, however drearily it stretched before her, so long as she knew whither it led, but there could be no more doubt. Oh, he must never again disturb her mind with hope! How clearly she showed him that, and yet they had perhaps no more than parted when it seemed impossible to bear for the next hour the desolation she was sentenced to for life. She lay quivering and tossing on the hearth-rug of the parlour, beating it with her fists, rocking her arms, and calling to him to give her doubt again, that she might get through the days.
“Let me doubt again!” Here was Grizel starting to beg it of him. More than once she got half-way to Aaron’s house before she could turn; but she always did turn, with the words unspoken; never did Tommy hear her say them, but always that she was tranquil now. Was it pride that supported her in the trying hour? Oh, no, it was not pride. That is an old garment, which once became Grizel well, but she does not wear it now; she takes it out of the closet, perhaps, at times to look at it. What gave her strength when he was by was her promise to help him. It was not by asking for leave to dream herself that she could make him dream the less. All done for you, Tommy! It might have helped you to loosen a few of the feathers.
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