Bab Bab 1 · PETER BREAKS THROUGH

. PETER BREAKS THROUGH

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow

up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old

she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran

with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather

delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, “Oh,

why can’t you remain like this for ever!” This was all that passed

between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must

grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the

end.

Of course they lived at 14, and until Wendy came her mother was the

chief one. She was a lovely lady, with a romantic mind and such a sweet

mocking mouth. Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within

the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover

there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on

it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly

conspicuous in the right-hand corner.

The way Mr. Darling won her was this: the many gentlemen who had been

boys when she was a girl discovered simultaneously that they loved her,

and they all ran to her house to propose to her except Mr. Darling, who

took a cab and nipped in first, and so he got her. He got all of her,

except the innermost box and the kiss. He never knew about the box, and

in time he gave up trying for the kiss. Wendy thought Napoleon could

have got it, but I can picture him trying, and then going off in a

passion, slamming the door.

Mr. Darling used to boast to Wendy that her mother not only loved him

but respected him. He was one of those deep ones who know about stocks

and shares. Of course no one really knows, but he quite seemed to know,

and he often said stocks were up and shares were down in a way that

would have made any woman respect him.

Mrs. Darling was married in white, and at first she kept the books

perfectly, almost gleefully, as if it were a game, not so much as a

Brussels sprout was missing; but by and by whole cauliflowers dropped

out, and instead of them there were pictures of babies without faces.

She drew them when she should have been totting up. They were Mrs.

Darling’s guesses.

Wendy came first, then John, then Michael.

For a week or two after Wendy came it was doubtful whether they would

be able to keep her, as she was another mouth to feed. Mr. Darling was

frightfully proud of her, but he was very honourable, and he sat on the

edge of Mrs. Darling’s bed, holding her hand and calculating expenses,

while she looked at him imploringly. She wanted to risk it, come what

might, but that was not his way; his way was with a pencil and a piece

of paper, and if she confused him with suggestions he had to begin at

the beginning again.

“Now don’t interrupt,” he would beg of her.

“I have one pound seventeen here, and two and six at the office; I can

cut off my coffee at the office, say ten shillings, making two nine and

six, with your eighteen and three makes three nine seven, with five

naught naught in my cheque-book makes eight nine seven—who is that

moving?—eight nine seven, dot and carry seven—don’t speak, my own—and

the pound you lent to that man who came to the door—quiet, child—dot

and carry child—there, you’ve done it!—did I say nine nine seven? yes,

I said nine nine seven; the question is, can we try it for a year on

nine nine seven?”

“Of course we can, George,” she cried. But she was prejudiced in

Wendy’s favour, and he was really the grander character of the two.

“Remember mumps,” he warned her almost threateningly, and off he went

again. “Mumps one pound, that is what I have put down, but I daresay it

will be more like thirty shillings—don’t speak—measles one five, German

measles half a guinea, makes two fifteen six—don’t waggle your

finger—whooping-cough, say fifteen shillings”—and so on it went, and it

added up differently each time; but at last Wendy just got through,

with mumps reduced to twelve six, and the two kinds of measles treated

as one.

There was the same excitement over John, and Michael had even a

narrower squeak; but both were kept, and soon, you might have seen the

three of them going in a row to Miss Fulsom’s Kindergarten school,

accompanied by their nurse.

Mrs. Darling loved to have everything just so, and Mr. Darling had a

passion for being exactly like his neighbours; so, of course, they had

a nurse. As they were poor, owing to the amount of milk the children

drank, this nurse was a prim Newfoundland dog, called Nana, who had

belonged to no one in particular until the Darlings engaged her. She

had always thought children important, however, and the Darlings had

become acquainted with her in Kensington Gardens, where she spent most

of her spare time peeping into perambulators, and was much hated by

careless nursemaids, whom she followed to their homes and complained of

to their mistresses. She proved to be quite a treasure of a nurse. How

thorough she was at bath-time, and up at any moment of the night if one

of her charges made the slightest cry. Of course her kennel was in the

nursery. She had a genius for knowing when a cough is a thing to have

no patience with and when it needs stocking around your throat. She

believed to her last day in old-fashioned remedies like rhubarb leaf,

and made sounds of contempt over all this new-fangled talk about germs,

and so on. It was a lesson in propriety to see her escorting the

children to school, walking sedately by their side when they were well

behaved, and butting them back into line if they strayed. On John’s

footer days she never once forgot his sweater, and she usually carried

an umbrella in her mouth in case of rain. There is a room in the

basement of Miss Fulsom’s school where the nurses wait. They sat on

forms, while Nana lay on the floor, but that was the only difference.

They affected to ignore her as of an inferior social status to

themselves, and she despised their light talk. She resented visits to

the nursery from Mrs. Darling’s friends, but if they did come she first

whipped off Michael’s pinafore and put him into the one with blue

braiding, and smoothed out Wendy and made a dash at John’s hair.

No nursery could possibly have been conducted more correctly, and Mr.

Darling knew it, yet he sometimes wondered uneasily whether the

neighbours talked.

He had his position in the city to consider.

Nana also troubled him in another way. He had sometimes a feeling that

she did not admire him. “I know she admires you tremendously, George,”

Mrs. Darling would assure him, and then she would sign to the children

to be specially nice to father. Lovely dances followed, in which the

only other servant, Liza, was sometimes allowed to join. Such a midget

she looked in her long skirt and maid’s cap, though she had sworn, when

engaged, that she would never see ten again. The gaiety of those romps!

And gayest of all was Mrs. Darling, who would pirouette so wildly that

all you could see of her was the kiss, and then if you had dashed at

her you might have got it. There never was a simpler happier family

until the coming of Peter Pan.

Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her

children’s minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after

her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things

straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many

articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake

(but of course you can’t) you would see your own mother doing this, and

you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like

tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering

humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had

picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet,

pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and

hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the

naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been

folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on the top,

beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you

to put on.

I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind.

Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can

become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a

child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the

time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a

card, and these are probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is

always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here

and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and

savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves

through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a

hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked

nose. It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first

day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders,

hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting

into braces, say ninety-nine, three-pence for pulling out your tooth

yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they

are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing,

especially as nothing will stand still.

Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John’s, for instance, had a

lagoon with flamingoes flying over it at which John was shooting, while

Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over

it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a

wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together. John had no

friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had a pet wolf forsaken by

its parents, but on the whole the Neverlands have a family resemblance,

and if they stood still in a row you could say of them that they have

each other’s nose, and so forth. On these magic shores children at play

are for ever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can

still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.

Of all delectable islands the Neverland is the snuggest and most

compact, not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances

between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed. When you play at

it by day with the chairs and table-cloth, it is not in the least

alarming, but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it becomes very

real. That is why there are night-lights.

Occasionally in her travels through her children’s minds Mrs. Darling

found things she could not understand, and of these quite the most

perplexing was the word Peter. She knew of no Peter, and yet he was

here and there in John and Michael’s minds, while Wendy’s began to be

scrawled all over with him. The name stood out in bolder letters than

any of the other words, and as Mrs. Darling gazed she felt that it had

an oddly cocky appearance.

“Yes, he is rather cocky,” Wendy admitted with regret. Her mother had

been questioning her.

“But who is he, my pet?”

“He is Peter Pan, you know, mother.”

At first Mrs. Darling did not know, but after thinking back into her

childhood she just remembered a Peter Pan who was said to live with the

fairies. There were odd stories about him, as that when children died

he went part of the way with them, so that they should not be

frightened. She had believed in him at the time, but now that she was

married and full of sense she quite doubted whether there was any such

person.

“Besides,” she said to Wendy, “he would be grown up by this time.”

“Oh no, he isn’t grown up,” Wendy assured her confidently, “and he is

just my size.” She meant that he was her size in both mind and body;

she didn’t know how she knew, she just knew it.

Mrs. Darling consulted Mr. Darling, but he smiled pooh-pooh. “Mark my

words,” he said, “it is some nonsense Nana has been putting into their

heads; just the sort of idea a dog would have. Leave it alone, and it

will blow over.”

But it would not blow over and soon the troublesome boy gave Mrs.

Darling quite a shock.

Children have the strangest adventures without being troubled by them.

For instance, they may remember to mention, a week after the event

happened, that when they were in the wood they had met their dead

father and had a game with him. It was in this casual way that Wendy

one morning made a disquieting revelation. Some leaves of a tree had

been found on the nursery floor, which certainly were not there when

the children went to bed, and Mrs. Darling was puzzling over them when

Wendy said with a tolerant smile:

“I do believe it is that Peter again!”

“Whatever do you mean, Wendy?”

“It is so naughty of him not to wipe his feet,” Wendy said, sighing.

She was a tidy child.

She explained in quite a matter-of-fact way that she thought Peter

sometimes came to the nursery in the night and sat on the foot of her

bed and played on his pipes to her. Unfortunately she never woke, so

she didn’t know how she knew, she just knew.

“What nonsense you talk, precious. No one can get into the house

without knocking.”

“I think he comes in by the window,” she said.

“My love, it is three floors up.”

“Were not the leaves at the foot of the window, mother?”

It was quite true; the leaves had been found very near the window.

Mrs. Darling did not know what to think, for it all seemed so natural

to Wendy that you could not dismiss it by saying she had been dreaming.

“My child,” the mother cried, “why did you not tell me of this before?”

“I forgot,” said Wendy lightly. She was in a hurry to get her

breakfast.

Oh, surely she must have been dreaming.

But, on the other hand, there were the leaves. Mrs. Darling examined

them very carefully; they were skeleton leaves, but she was sure they

did not come from any tree that grew in England. She crawled about the

floor, peering at it with a candle for marks of a strange foot. She

rattled the poker up the chimney and tapped the walls. She let down a

tape from the window to the pavement, and it was a sheer drop of thirty

feet, without so much as a spout to climb up by.

Certainly Wendy had been dreaming.

But Wendy had not been dreaming, as the very next night showed, the

night on which the extraordinary adventures of these children may be

said to have begun.

On the night we speak of all the children were once more in bed. It

happened to be Nana’s evening off, and Mrs. Darling had bathed them and

sung to them till one by one they had let go her hand and slid away

into the land of sleep.

All were looking so safe and cosy that she smiled at her fears now and

sat down tranquilly by the fire to sew.

It was something for Michael, who on his birthday was getting into

shirts. The fire was warm, however, and the nursery dimly lit by three

night-lights, and presently the sewing lay on Mrs. Darling’s lap. Then

her head nodded, oh, so gracefully. She was asleep. Look at the four of

them, Wendy and Michael over there, John here, and Mrs. Darling by the

fire. There should have been a fourth night-light.

While she slept she had a dream. She dreamt that the Neverland had come

too near and that a strange boy had broken through from it. He did not

alarm her, for she thought she had seen him before in the faces of many

women who have no children. Perhaps he is to be found in the faces of

some mothers also. But in her dream he had rent the film that obscures

the Neverland, and she saw Wendy and John and Michael peeping through

the gap.

The dream by itself would have been a trifle, but while she was

dreaming the window of the nursery blew open, and a boy did drop on the

floor. He was accompanied by a strange light, no bigger than your fist,

which darted about the room like a living thing and I think it must

have been this light that wakened Mrs. Darling.

She started up with a cry, and saw the boy, and somehow she knew at

once that he was Peter Pan. If you or I or Wendy had been there we

should have seen that he was very like Mrs. Darling’s kiss. He was a

lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of

trees but the most entrancing thing about him was that he had all his

first teeth. When he saw she was a grown-up, he gnashed the little

pearls at her.