Tommy and Grizel
Copyright© 2026 by J. M. Barrie
Chapter 28: Two of Them
When Tommy started impulsively on what proved to be his only Continental trip he had expected to join Mrs. Jerry and her stepdaughter at Bad-Platten. They had been there for a fortnight, and “the place is a dream,” Mrs. Jerry had said in the letter pressing him to come; but it was at St. Gian that she met the diligence and told him to descend. Bad-Platten, she explained, was a horror.
Her fuller explanation was that she was becoming known there as the round lady.
“Now, am I as round as all that?” she said plaintively to Tommy.
“Mrs. Jerry,” he replied, with emotion, “you must not ask me what I think of you.” He always treated her with extraordinary respect and chivalry now, and it awed her.
She had looked too, too round because she was in the company of Lady Pippinworth. Everyone seemed to be too round or too large by the side of that gifted lady, who somehow never looked too thin. She knew her power. When there were women in the room whom she disliked she merely went and stood beside them. In the gyrations of the dance the onlooker would momentarily lose sight of her; she came and went like a blinking candle. Men could not dance with her without its being said that they were getting stout. There is nothing they dislike so much, yet they did dance with her. Tommy, having some slight reason, was particularly sensitive about references to his figure, yet it was Lady Pippinworth who had drawn him to Switzerland. What was her strange attraction?
Calmly considered, she was preposterously thin, but men, at least, could not think merely of her thinness, unless, when walking with her, they became fascinated by its shadow on the ground. She was tall, and had a very clear, pale complexion and light-brown hair. Light brown, too, were her heavy eyelashes, which were famous for being black-tipped, as if a brush had touched them, though it had not. She made play with her eyelashes as with a fan, and sometimes the upper and lower seemed to entangle for a moment and be in difficulties, from which you wanted to extricate them in the tenderest manner. And the more you wanted to help her the more disdainfully she looked at you. Yet though she looked disdainful she also looked helpless. Now we have the secret of her charm.
This helpless disdain was the natural expression of her face, and I am sure she fell asleep with a curl of the lip. Her scorn of men so maddened them that they could not keep away from her. “Damn!” they said under their breath, and rushed to her. If rumour is to be believed, Sir Harry Pippinworth proposed to her in a fury brought on by the sneer with which she had surveyed his family portraits. I know nothing more of Sir Harry, except that she called him Pips, which seems to settle him.
“They will be calling me the round gentleman,” Tommy said ruefully to her that evening, as he strolled with her towards the lake, and indeed he was looking stout. Mrs. Jerry did not accompany them; she wanted to be seen with her trying stepdaughter as little as possible, and Tommy’s had been the happy proposal that he should attend them alternately—”fling away my own figure to save yours,” he had said gallantly to Mrs. Jerry.
“Do you mind?” Lady Pippinworth asked.
“I mind nothing,” he replied, “so long as I am with you.”
He had not meant to begin so near the point where they had last left off; he had meant to begin much farther back: but an irresistible desire came over him to make sure that she really did permit him to say this sort of thing.
Her only reply was a flutter of the little fans and a most contemptuous glance.
“Alice,” said Tommy, in the old way.
“Well?”
“You don’t understand what it is to me to say Alice again.”
“Many people call me Alice.”
“But they have a right to.”
“I supposed you thought you had a right to also.”
“No,” said Tommy. “That is why I do it.”
She strolled on, more scornful and helpless than ever. Apparently it did not matter what one said to Lady Pippinworth; her pout kept it within the proprieties.
There was a magnificent sunset that evening, which dyed a snow-topped mountain pink. “That is what I came all the way from London to see,” Tommy remarked, after they had gazed at it.
“I hope you feel repaid,” she said, a little tartly.
“You mistake my meaning,” he replied. “I had heard of these wonderful sunsets, and an intense desire came over me to see you looking disdainfully at them. Yes, I feel amply repaid. Did you notice, Alice, or was it but a fancy of my own, that when he had seen the expression on your face the sun quite slunk away?”
“I wonder you don’t do so also,” she retorted. She had no sense of humour, and was rather stupid; so it is no wonder that the men ran after her.
“I am more gallant than the sun,” said he. “If I had been up there in its place, Alice, and you had been looking at me, I could never have set.”
She pouted contemptuously, which meant, I think, that she was well pleased. Yet, though he seemed to be complimenting her, she was not sure of him. She had never been sure of Tommy, nor, indeed, he of her, which was probably why they were so interested in each other still.
“Do you know,” Tommy said, “what I have told you is really at least half the truth? If I did not come here to see you disdaining the sun, I think I did come to see you disdaining me. Odd, is it not, if true, that a man should travel so far to see a lip curl up?”
“You don’t seem to know what brought you,” she said.
“It seems so monstrous,” he replied, musing. “Oh, yes, I am quite certain that the curl of the lip is responsible for my being here; it kept sending me constant telegrams; but what I want to know is, do I come for the pleasure of the thing or for the pain? Do I like your disdain, Alice, or does it make me writhe? Am I here to beg you to do it again, or to defy it?”
“Which are you doing now?” she inquired.
“I had hoped,” he said with a sigh, “that you could tell me that.”
On another occasion they reached the same point in this discussion, and went a little beyond it. It was on a wet afternoon, too, when Tommy had vowed to himself to mend his ways. “That disdainful look is you,” he told her, “and I admire it more than anything in nature; and yet, Alice, and yet——”
“Well?” she answered coldly, but not moving, though he had come suddenly too near her. They were on a private veranda of the hotel, and she was lolling in a wicker chair.
“And yet,” he said intensely, “I am not certain that I would not give the world to have the power to drive that look from your face. That, I begin to think, is what brought me here.”
“But you are not sure,” she said, with a shrug of the shoulder.
It stung him into venturing further than he had ever gone with her before. Not too gently, he took her head in both his hands and forced her to look up at him. She submitted without a protest. She was disdainful, but helpless.
“Well?” she said again.
He withdrew his hands, and she smiled mockingly.
“If I thought——” he cried with sudden passion, and stopped.
“You think a great deal, don’t you?” she said. She was going now.
“If I thought there was any blood in your veins, you icy woman——”
“Or in your own,” said she. But she said it a little fiercely, and he noticed that.
“Alice,” he cried, “I know now. It is to drive that look from your face that I am here.”
She courtesied from the door. She was quite herself again.
But for that moment she had been moved. He was convinced of it, and his first feeling was of exultation as in an achievement. I don’t know what you are doing just now, Lady Pippinworth, but my compliments to you, and T. Sandys is swelling.
There followed on this exultation another feeling as sincere—devout thankfulness that he had gone no further. He drew deep breaths of relief over his escape, but knew that he had not himself to thank. His friends, the little sprites, had done it, in return for the amusement he seemed to give them. They had stayed him in the nick of time, but not earlier; it was quite as if they wanted Tommy to have his fun first. So often they had saved him from being spitted, how could he guess that the great catastrophe was fixed for to-night, and that henceforth they were to sit round him counting his wriggles, as if this new treatment of him tickled them even more than the other?
But he was too clever not to know that they might be fattening him for some very special feast, and his thanks took the form of a vow to need their help no more. To-morrow he would begin to climb the mountains around St. Gian; if he danced attendance on her dangerous Ladyship again, Mrs. Jerry should be there also, and he would walk circumspectly between them, like a man with gyves upon his wrists. He was in the midst of all the details of these reforms, when suddenly he looked at himself thus occupied, and laughed bitterly; he had so often come upon Tommy making grand resolves!
He stopped operations and sat down beside them. No one could have wished more heartily to be anybody else, or have had less hope. He had not even the excuse of being passionately drawn to this woman; he remembered that she had never interested him until he heard of her effect upon other men. Her reputation as a duellist, whose defence none of his sex could pass, had led to his wondering what they saw in her, and he had dressed himself in their sentiments and so approached her. There were times in her company when he forgot that he was wearing borrowed garments, when he went on flame, but he always knew, as now, upon reflection. Nothing seemed easier at this moment than to fling them aside; with one jerk they were on the floor. Obviously it was only vanity that had inspired him, and vanity was satisfied: the easier, therefore, to stop. Would you like to make the woman unhappy, Tommy? You know you would not; you have somewhere about you one of the softest hearts in the world. Then desist; be satisfied that you did thaw her once, and grateful that she so quickly froze again. “I am; indeed I am,” he responds. “No one could have himself better in hand for the time being than I, and if a competition in morals were now going on, I should certainly take the medal. But I cannot speak for myself an hour in advance. I make a vow, as I have done so often before, but it does not help me to know what I may be at before the night is out.”
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