Tommy and Grizel
Copyright© 2026 by J. M. Barrie
Chapter 32: Tommy’s Best Work
And thus was begun a year and a half of as great devotion as remorseful man ever gave to woman. When she was asleep and he could not write, his mind would sometimes roam after abandoned things; it sought them in the night as a savage beast steals forth for water to slake the thirst of many days. But if she stirred in her sleep they were all dispelled; there was not a moment in that eighteen months when he was twenty yards from Grizel’s side.
He would not let himself lose hope. All the others lost it. “The only thing you can do is to humour her,” even David was reduced in time to saying; but Tommy replied cheerily, “Not a bit of it.” Every morning he had to begin at the same place as on the previous morning, and he was always as ready to do it, and as patient, as if this were the first time.
“I think she is a little more herself to-day,” he would say determinedly, till David wondered to hear him.
“She makes no progress, Sandys.”
“I can at least keep her from slipping back.”
And he did, and there is no doubt that this was what saved Grizel in the end. How he strove to prevent her slipping back! The morning was the time when she was least troubled, and had he humoured her then they would often have been easy hours for him. But it was the time when he tried most doggedly, with a gentleness she could not ruffle, to teach her the alphabet of who she was. She coaxed him to let her off those mental struggles; she turned petulant and sulky; she was willing to be good and sweet if he would permit her to sew or to sing to herself instead, or to sit staring at the fire: but he would not yield; he promised those things as the reward, and in the end she stood before him like a child at lessons.
“What is your name?” The catechism always began thus.
“Grizel,” she said obediently, if it was a day when she wanted to please him.
“And my name?”
“Tommy.” Once, to his great delight, she said, “Sentimental Tommy.” He quite bragged about this to David.
“Where is your home?”
“Here.” She was never in doubt about this, and it was always a pleasure to her to say it.
“Did you live here long ago?”
She nodded.
“And then did you live for a long time somewhere else?”
“Yes.”
“Where was it?”
“Here.”
“No, it was with the old doctor. You were his little housekeeper; don’t you remember? Try to remember, Grizel; he loved you so much.”
She tried to think. Her face was very painful when she tried to think. “It hurts,” she said.
“Do you remember him, Grizel?”
“Please let me sing,” she begged, “such a sweet song!”
“Do you remember the old doctor who called you his little housekeeper? He used to sit in that chair.”
The old chair was among Grizel’s many possessions that had been brought to Double Dykes, and her face lit up with recollection. She ran to the chair and kissed it.
“What was his name, Grizel?”
“I should love to know his name,” she said wistfully.
He told her the name many times, and she repeated it docilely.
Or perhaps she remembered her dear doctor quite well to-day, and thought Tommy was some one in need of his services.
“He has gone into the country,” she said, as she had so often said to anxious people at the door; “but he won’t be long, and I shall give him your message the moment he comes in.”
But Tommy would not pass that. He explained to her again and again that the doctor was dead, and perhaps she would remember, or perhaps, without remembering, she said she was glad he was dead.
“Why are you glad, Grizel?”
She whispered, as if frightened she might be overheard: “I don’t want him to see me like this.” It was one of the pathetic things about her that she seemed at times to have some vague understanding of her condition, and then she would sob. Her tears were anguish to him, but it was at those times that she clung to him as if she knew he was trying to do something for her, and that encouraged him to go on. He went over, step by step, the time when she lived alone in the doctor’s house, the time of his own coming back, her love for him and his treatment of her, the story of the garnet ring, her coming to Switzerland, her terrible walk, her return; he would miss out nothing, for he was fighting for her. Day after day, month by month, it went on, and to-morrow, perhaps, she would insist that the old doctor and this man who asked her so many questions were one. And Tommy argued with her until he had driven that notion out, to make way for another, and then he fought it, and so on and on all round the circle of her delusions, day by day and month by month.
She knew that he sometimes wrote while she was asleep, for she might start up from her bed or from the sofa, and there he was, laying down his pen to come to her. Her eyes were never open for any large fraction of a minute without his knowing, and immediately he went to her, nodding and smiling lest she had wakened with some fear upon her. Perhaps she refused to sleep again unless he promised to put away those horrid papers for the night, and however intoxicating a point he had reached in his labours, he always promised, and kept his word. He was most scrupulous in keeping any promise he made her, and one great result was that she trusted him implicitly. Whatever others promised, she doubted them.
There were times when she seemed to be casting about in her mind for something to do that would please him, and then she would bring pieces of paper to him, and pen and ink, and tell him to write. She thought this very clever of her, and expected to be praised for it.
But she might also bring him writing materials at times when she hated him very much. Then there would be sly smiles, even pretended affection, on her face, unless she thought he was not looking, when she cast him ugly glances. Her intention was to trick him into forgetting her so that she might talk to herself or slip out of the room to the Den, just as her mother had done in the days when it was Grizel who had to be tricked. He would not let her talk to herself until he had tried endless ways of exorcising that demon by interesting her in some sort of work, by going out with her, by talking of one thing and another till at last a subject was lit upon that made her forget to brood.
But sometimes it seemed best to let her go to the Den, she was in such a quiver of desire to go. She hurried to it, so that he had to stride to keep up with her; and he said little until they got there, for she was too excited to listen. She was very like her mother again; but it was not the man who never came that she went in search of—it was a lost child. I have not the heart to tell of the pitiful scenes in the Den while Grizel searched for her child. They always ended in those two walking silently home, and for a day or two Grizel would be ill, and Tommy tended her, so that she was soon able to hasten to the Den again, holding out her arms as she ran.
“She makes no progress,” David said.