Chapter Chapter 7 · THE HOME UNDER THE GROUND

. THE HOME UNDER THE GROUND

One of the first things Peter did next day was to measure Wendy and

John and Michael for hollow trees. Hook, you remember, had sneered at

the boys for thinking they needed a tree apiece, but this was

ignorance, for unless your tree fitted you it was difficult to go up

and down, and no two of the boys were quite the same size. Once you

fitted, you drew in your breath at the top, and down you went at

exactly the right speed, while to ascend you drew in and let out

alternately, and so wriggled up. Of course, when you have mastered the

action you are able to do these things without thinking of them, and

nothing can be more graceful.

But you simply must fit, and Peter measures you for your tree as

carefully as for a suit of clothes: the only difference being that the

clothes are made to fit you, while you have to be made to fit the tree.

Usually it is done quite easily, as by your wearing too many garments

or too few, but if you are bumpy in awkward places or the only

available tree is an odd shape, Peter does some things to you, and

after that you fit. Once you fit, great care must be taken to go on

fitting, and this, as Wendy was to discover to her delight, keeps a

whole family in perfect condition.

Wendy and Michael fitted their trees at the first try, but John had to

be altered a little.

After a few days’ practice they could go up and down as gaily as

buckets in a well. And how ardently they grew to love their home under

the ground; especially Wendy. It consisted of one large room, as all

houses should do, with a floor in which you could dig if you wanted to

go fishing, and in this floor grew stout mushrooms of a charming

colour, which were used as stools. A Never tree tried hard to grow in

the centre of the room, but every morning they sawed the trunk through,

level with the floor. By tea-time it was always about two feet high,

and then they put a door on top of it, the whole thus becoming a table;

as soon as they cleared away, they sawed off the trunk again, and thus

there was more room to play. There was an enormous fireplace which was

in almost any part of the room where you cared to light it, and across

this Wendy stretched strings, made of fibre, from which she suspended

her washing. The bed was tilted against the wall by day, and let down

at 6:30, when it filled nearly half the room; and all the boys slept in

it, except Michael, lying like sardines in a tin. There was a strict

rule against turning round until one gave the signal, when all turned

at once. Michael should have used it also, but Wendy would have a baby,

and he was the littlest, and you know what women are, and the short and

long of it is that he was hung up in a basket.

It was rough and simple, and not unlike what baby bears would have made

of an underground house in the same circumstances. But there was one

recess in the wall, no larger than a bird-cage, which was the private

apartment of Tinker Bell. It could be shut off from the rest of the

house by a tiny curtain, which Tink, who was most fastidious, always

kept drawn when dressing or undressing. No woman, however large, could

have had a more exquisite boudoir and bed-chamber combined. The couch,

as she always called it, was a genuine Queen Mab, with club legs; and

she varied the bedspreads according to what fruit-blossom was in

season. Her mirror was a Puss-in-Boots, of which there are now only

three, unchipped, known to fairy dealers; the washstand was Pie-crust

and reversible, the chest of drawers an authentic Charming the Sixth,

and the carpet and rugs the best (the early) period of Margery and

Robin. There was a chandelier from Tiddlywinks for the look of the

thing, but of course she lit the residence herself. Tink was very

contemptuous of the rest of the house, as indeed was perhaps

inevitable, and her chamber, though beautiful, looked rather conceited,

having the appearance of a nose permanently turned up.

I suppose it was all especially entrancing to Wendy, because those

rampagious boys of hers gave her so much to do. Really there were whole

weeks when, except perhaps with a stocking in the evening, she was

never above ground. The cooking, I can tell you, kept her nose to the

pot, and even if there was nothing in it, even if there was no pot, she

had to keep watching that it came aboil just the same. You never

exactly knew whether there would be a real meal or just a make-believe,

it all depended upon Peter’s whim: he could eat, really eat, if it was

part of a game, but he could not stodge just to feel stodgy, which is

what most children like better than anything else; the next best thing

being to talk about it. Make-believe was so real to him that during a

meal of it you could see him getting rounder. Of course it was trying,

but you simply had to follow his lead, and if you could prove to him

that you were getting loose for your tree he let you stodge.

Wendy’s favourite time for sewing and darning was after they had all

gone to bed. Then, as she expressed it, she had a breathing time for

herself; and she occupied it in making new things for them, and putting

double pieces on the knees, for they were all most frightfully hard on

their knees.

When she sat down to a basketful of their stockings, every heel with a

hole in it, she would fling up her arms and exclaim, “Oh dear, I am

sure I sometimes think spinsters are to be envied!”

Her face beamed when she exclaimed this.

You remember about her pet wolf. Well, it very soon discovered that she

had come to the island and it found her out, and they just ran into

each other’s arms. After that it followed her about everywhere.

As time wore on did she think much about the beloved parents she had

left behind her? This is a difficult question, because it is quite

impossible to say how time does wear on in the Neverland, where it is

calculated by moons and suns, and there are ever so many more of them

than on the mainland. But I am afraid that Wendy did not really worry

about her father and mother; she was absolutely confident that they

would always keep the window open for her to fly back by, and this gave

her complete ease of mind. What did disturb her at times was that John

remembered his parents vaguely only, as people he had once known, while

Michael was quite willing to believe that she was really his mother.

These things scared her a little, and nobly anxious to do her duty, she

tried to fix the old life in their minds by setting them examination

papers on it, as like as possible to the ones she used to do at school.

The other boys thought this awfully interesting, and insisted on

joining, and they made slates for themselves, and sat round the table,

writing and thinking hard about the questions she had written on

another slate and passed round. They were the most ordinary

questions—“What was the colour of Mother’s eyes? Which was taller,

Father or Mother? Was Mother blonde or brunette? Answer all three

questions if possible.” “(A) Write an essay of not less than 40 words

on How I spent my last Holidays, or The Characters of Father and Mother

compared. Only one of these to be attempted.” Or “(1) Describe Mother’s

laugh; (2) Describe Father’s laugh; (3) Describe Mother’s Party Dress;

(4) Describe the Kennel and its Inmate.”

They were just everyday questions like these, and when you could not

answer them you were told to make a cross; and it was really dreadful

what a number of crosses even John made. Of course the only boy who

replied to every question was Slightly, and no one could have been more

hopeful of coming out first, but his answers were perfectly ridiculous,

and he really came out last: a melancholy thing.

Peter did not compete. For one thing he despised all mothers except

Wendy, and for another he was the only boy on the island who could

neither write nor spell; not the smallest word. He was above all that

sort of thing.

By the way, the questions were all written in the past tense. What was

the colour of Mother’s eyes, and so on. Wendy, you see, had been

forgetting, too.

Adventures, of course, as we shall see, were of daily occurrence; but

about this time Peter invented, with Wendy’s help, a new game that

fascinated him enormously, until he suddenly had no more interest in

it, which, as you have been told, was what always happened with his

games. It consisted in pretending not to have adventures, in doing the

sort of thing John and Michael had been doing all their lives, sitting

on stools flinging balls in the air, pushing each other, going out for

walks and coming back without having killed so much as a grizzly. To

see Peter doing nothing on a stool was a great sight; he could not help

looking solemn at such times, to sit still seemed to him such a comic

thing to do. He boasted that he had gone walking for the good of his

health. For several suns these were the most novel of all adventures to

him; and John and Michael had to pretend to be delighted also;

otherwise he would have treated them severely.

He often went out alone, and when he came back you were never

absolutely certain whether he had had an adventure or not. He might

have forgotten it so completely that he said nothing about it; and then

when you went out you found the body; and, on the other hand, he might

say a great deal about it, and yet you could not find the body.

Sometimes he came home with his head bandaged, and then Wendy cooed

over him and bathed it in lukewarm water, while he told a dazzling

tale. But she was never quite sure, you know. There were, however, many

adventures which she knew to be true because she was in them herself,

and there were still more that were at least partly true, for the other

boys were in them and said they were wholly true. To describe them all

would require a book as large as an English-Latin, Latin-English

Dictionary, and the most we can do is to give one as a specimen of an

average hour on the island. The difficulty is which one to choose.

Should we take the brush with the redskins at Slightly Gulch? It was a

sanguinary affair, and especially interesting as showing one of Peter’s

peculiarities, which was that in the middle of a fight he would

suddenly change sides. At the Gulch, when victory was still in the

balance, sometimes leaning this way and sometimes that, he called out,

“I’m redskin to-day; what are you, Tootles?” And Tootles answered,

“Redskin; what are you, Nibs?” and Nibs said, “Redskin; what are you

Twin?” and so on; and they were all redskins; and of course this would

have ended the fight had not the real redskins fascinated by Peter’s

methods, agreed to be lost boys for that once, and so at it they all

went again, more fiercely than ever.

The extraordinary upshot of this adventure was—but we have not decided

yet that this is the adventure we are to narrate. Perhaps a better one

would be the night attack by the redskins on the house under the

ground, when several of them stuck in the hollow trees and had to be

pulled out like corks. Or we might tell how Peter saved Tiger Lily’s

life in