+---------------------------+
| THE UNIFORM EDITION OF |
| THE PLAYS OF J. M. BARRIE |
+---------------------------+
PETER PAN
OR
THE BOY WHO WOULD NOT
GROW UP
_THE WORKS OF J. M. BARRIE._
_NOVELS, STORIES, PLAYS, AND SKETCHES._
_Uniform Edition._
AULD LICHT IDYLLS, BETTER DEAD.
WHEN A MAN’S SINGLE.
A WINDOW IN THRUMS, AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN.
THE LITTLE MINISTER.
SENTIMENTAL TOMMY.
MY LADY NICOTINE, MARGARET OGILVY.
TOMMY AND GRIZEL.
THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD.
PETER AND WENDY.
_Also_
HALF HOURS, DER TAG.
ECHOES OF THE WAR.
_PLAYS._
_Uniform Edition._
PETER PAN.
MARY ROSE.
DEAR BRUTUS.
A KISS FOR CINDERELLA.
ALICE SIT-BY-THE-FIRE.
WHAT EVERY WOMAN KNOWS.
QUALITY STREET.
THE ADMIRABLE CRICHTON.
ECHOES OF THE WAR.
_Containing_: The Old Lady Shows Her Medals--The New Word--Barbara’s
Wedding--A Well-Remembered Voice.
HALF HOURS.
_Containing_: Pantaloon--The Twelve-Pound Look--Rosalind--The Will.
_Others in Preparation._
_INDIVIDUAL EDITIONS._
COURAGE.
PETER PAN IN KENSINGTON GARDENS.
Illustrated by ARTHUR RACKHAM.
PETER AND WENDY.
Illustrated by F. D. BEDFORD.
PETER PAN AND WENDY.
Illustrated by MISS ATTWELL.
TOMMY AND GRIZEL.
Illustrated by BERNARD PARTRIDGE.
MARGARET OGILVY.
⁂ For particulars concerning _The Thistle Edition_ of the Works of J.
M. Barrie, sold only by subscription, send for circular.
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
THE PLAYS OF
J. M. BARRIE
PETER PAN
OR
THE BOY WHO WOULD NOT
GROW UP
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK : : : : : : : : 1928
COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY
J. M. BARRIE
Printed in the United States of America
_All rights reserved under the International Copyright Act.
Performance forbidden and right of representation reserved.
Application for the right of performing this play must be
made to Charles Frohman, Inc., Empire Theatre, New York._
[Illustration]
TO THE FIVE
A DEDICATION
Some disquieting confessions must be made in printing at last the play
of _Peter Pan_; among them this, that I have no recollection of having
written it. Of that, however, anon. What I want to do first is to give
Peter to the Five without whom he never would have existed. I hope,
my dear sirs, that in memory of what we have been to each other you
will accept this dedication with your friend’s love. The play of Peter
is streaky with you still, though none may see this save ourselves. A
score of Acts had to be left out, and you were in them all. We first
brought Peter down, didn’t we, with a blunt-headed arrow in Kensington
Gardens? I seem to remember that we believed we had killed him, though
he was only winded, and that after a spasm of exultation in our
prowess the more soft-hearted among us wept and all of us thought of
the police. There was not one of you who would not have sworn as an
eye-witness to this occurence; no doubt I was abetting, but you used to
provide corroboration that was never given to you by me. As for myself,
I suppose I always knew that I made Peter by rubbing the five of you
violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame. That is
all he is, the spark I got from you.
We had good sport of him before we clipped him small to make him fit
the boards. Some of you were not born when the story began and yet
were hefty figures before we saw that the game was up. Do you remember
a garden at Burpham and the initiation there of No. 4 when he was six
weeks old, and three of you grudged letting him in so young? Have you,
No. 3, forgotten the white violets at the Cistercian abbey in which
we cassocked our first fairies (all little friends of St. Benedict),
or your cry to the Gods, ‘Do I just kill one pirate all the time?’ Do
you remember Marooners’ Hut in the haunted groves of Waverley, and the
St. Bernard dog in a tiger’s mask who so frequently attacked you, and
the literary record of that summer, _The Boy Castaways_, which is
so much the best and the rarest of this author’s works? What was it
that made us eventually give to the public in the thin form of a play
that which had been woven for ourselves alone? Alas, I know what it
was, I was losing my grip. One by one as you swung monkey-wise from
branch to branch in the wood of make-believe you reached the tree of
knowledge. Sometimes you swung back into the wood, as the unthinking
may at a cross-road take a familiar path that no longer leads to home;
or you perched ostentatiously on its boughs to please me, pretending
that you still belonged; soon you knew it only as the vanished wood,
for it vanishes if one needs to look for it. A time came when I saw
that No. 1, the most gallant of you all, ceased to believe that he was
ploughing woods incarnadine, and with an apologetic eye for me derided
the lingering faith of No. 2; when even No. 3 questioned gloomily
whether he did not really spend his nights in bed. There were still two
who knew no better, but their day was dawning. In these circumstances,
I suppose, was begun the writing of the play of Peter. That was a
quarter of a century ago, and I clutch my brows in vain to remember
whether it was a last desperate throw to retain the five of you for a
little longer, or merely a cold decision to turn you into bread and
butter.
This brings us back to my uncomfortable admission that I have no
recollection of writing the play of _Peter Pan_, now being published
for the first time so long after he made his bow upon the stage. You
had played it until you tired of it, and tossed it in the air and gored
it and left it derelict in the mud and went on your way singing other
songs; and then I stole back and sewed some of the gory fragments
together with a pen-nib. That is what must have happened, but I cannot
remember doing it. I remember writing the story of _Peter and Wendy_
many years after the production of the play, but I might have cribbed
that from some typed copy. I can haul back to mind the writing of
almost every other essay of mine, however forgotten by the pretty
public; but this play of Peter, no. Even my beginning as an amateur
playwright, that noble mouthful, _Bandelero the Bandit_, I remember
every detail of its composition in my school days at Dumfries. Not less
vivid is my first little piece, produced by Mr. Toole. It was called
_Ibsen’s Ghost_, and was a parody of the mightiest craftsman that ever
wrote for our kind friends in front. To save the management the cost
of typing I wrote out the ‘parts,’ after being told what parts were,
and I can still recall my first words, spoken so plaintively by a now
famous actress,--‘To run away from my second husband just as I ran
away from my first, it feels quite like old times.’ On the first night
a man in the pit found _Ibsen’s Ghost_ so diverting that he had to be
removed in hysterics. After that no one seems to have thought of it at
all. But what a man to carry about with one! How odd, too, that these
trifles should adhere to the mind that cannot remember the long job of
writing Peter. It does seem almost suspicious, especially as I have
not the original MS. of _Peter Pan_ (except a few stray pages), with
which to support my claim. I have indeed another MS., lately made, but
that ‘proves nothing.’ I know not whether I lost that original MS. or
destroyed it or happily gave it away. I talk of dedicating the play to
you, but how can I prove it is mine? How ought I to act if some other
hand, who could also have made a copy, thinks it worth while to contest
the cold rights? Cold they are to me now as that laughter of yours in
which Peter came into being long before he was caught and written down.
There is Peter still, but to me he lies sunk in the gay Black Lake.
Any one of you five brothers has a better claim to the authorship than
most, and I would not fight you for it, but you should have launched
your case long ago in the days when you most admired me, which were in
the first year of the play, owing to a rumour’s reaching you that my
spoils were one-and-sixpence a night. This was untrue, but it did give
me a standing among you. You watched for my next play with peeled eyes,
not for entertainment but lest it contained some chance witticism of
yours that could be challenged as collaboration; indeed I believe there
still exists a legal document, full of the Aforesaid and Henceforward
to be called Part-Author, in which for some such snatching I was tied
down to pay No. 2 one halfpenny daily throughout the run of the piece.
During the rehearsals of Peter (and it is evidence in my favour
that I was admitted to them) a depressed man in overalls, carrying
a mug of tea or a paint-pot, used often to appear by my side in the
shadowy stalls and say to me, ‘The gallery boys won’t stand it.’ He
then mysteriously faded away as if he were the theatre ghost. This
hopelessness of his is what all dramatists are said to feel at such
times, so perhaps he was the author. Again, a large number of children
whom I have seen playing Peter in their homes with careless mastership,
constantly putting in better words, could have thrown it off with ease.
It was for such as they that after the first production I had to add
something to the play at the request of parents (who thus showed that
they thought me the responsible person) about no one being able to fly
until the fairy dust had been blown on him; so many children having
gone home and tried it from their beds and needed surgical attention.
Notwithstanding other possibilities, I think I wrote Peter, and if so
it must have been in the usual inky way. Some of it, I like to think,
was done in that native place which is the dearest spot on earth to me,
though my last heart-beats shall be with my beloved solitary London
that was so hard to reach. I must have sat at a table with that great
dog waiting for me to stop, not complaining, for he knew it was thus we
made our living, but giving me a look when he found he was to be in the
play, with his sex changed. In after years when the actor who was Nana
had to go to the wars he first taught his wife how to take his place as
the dog till he came back, and I am glad that I see nothing funny in
this; it seems to me to belong to the play. I offer this obtuseness on
my part as my first proof that I am the author.
Some say that we are different people at different periods of our
lives, changing not through effort of will, which is a brave affair,
but in the easy course of nature every ten years or so. I suppose
this theory might explain my present trouble, but I don’t hold with
it; I think one remains the same person throughout, merely passing,
as it were, in these lapses of time from one room to another, but all
in the same house. If we unlock the rooms of the far past we can peer
in and see ourselves, busily occupied in beginning to become you and
me. Thus, if I am the author in question the way he is to go should
already be showing in the occupant of my first compartment, at whom
I now take the liberty to peep. Here he is at the age of seven or so
with his fellow-conspirator Robb, both in glengarry bonnets. They are
giving an entertainment in a tiny old washing-house that still stands.
The charge for admission is preens, a bool, or a peerie (I taught you a
good deal of Scotch, so possibly you can follow that), and apparently
the culminating Act consists in our trying to put each other into the
boiler, though some say that I also addressed the spell-bound audience.
This washing-house is not only the theatre of my first play, but has a
still closer connection with Peter. It is the original of the little
house the Lost Boys built in the Never Land for Wendy, the chief
difference being that it never wore John’s hat as a chimney. If Robb
had owned such a hat I have no doubt that it would have been placed on
the washing-house.
Here is that boy again some four years older, and the reading he is
munching feverishly is about desert islands; he calls them wrecked
islands. He buys his sanguinary tales surreptitiously in penny
numbers. I see a change coming over him; he is blanching as he reads
in the high-class magazine, _Chatterbox_, a fulmination against such
literature, and sees that unless his greed for islands is quenched
he is for ever lost. With gloaming he steals out of the house, his
library bulging beneath his palpitating waistcoat. I follow like his
shadow, as indeed I am, and watch him dig a hole in a field at Pathhead
farm and bury his islands in it; it was ages ago, but I could walk
straight to that hole in the field now and delve for the remains. I
peep into the next compartment. There he is again, ten years older, an
undergraduate now and craving to be a real explorer, one of those who
do things instead of prating of them, but otherwise unaltered; he might
be painted at twenty on top of a mast, in his hand a spy-glass through
which he rakes the horizon for an elusive strand. I go from room to
room, and he is now a man, real exploration abandoned (though only
because no one would have him). Soon he is even concocting other plays,
and quaking a little lest some low person counts how many islands there
are in them. I note that with the years the islands grow more sinister,
but it is only because he has now to write with the left hand, the
right having given out; evidently one thinks more darkly down the left
arm. Go to the keyhole of the compartment where he and I join up, and
you may see us wondering whether they would stand one more island.
This journey through the house may not convince any one that I wrote
Peter, but it does suggest me as a likely person. I pause to ask myself
whether I read _Chatterbox_ again, suffered the old agony, and buried
that MS. of the play in a hole in a field.
Of course this is over-charged. Perhaps we do change; except a little
something in us which is no larger than a mote in the eye, and that,
like it, dances in front of us beguiling us all our days. I cannot cut
the hair by which it hangs.
The strongest evidence that I am the author is to be found, I think,
in a now melancholy volume, the aforementioned _The Boy Castaways_; so
you must excuse me for parading that work here. Officer of the Court,
call _The Boy Castaways_. The witness steps forward and proves to be
a book you remember well though you have not glanced at it these many
years. I pulled it out of a bookcase just now not without difficulty,
for its recent occupation has been to support the shelf above. I
suppose, though I am uncertain, that it was I and not you who hammered
it into that place of utility. It is a little battered and bent after
the manner of those who shoulder burdens, and ought (to our shame)
to remind us of the witnesses who sometimes get an hour off from the
cells to give evidence before his Lordship. I have said that it is
the rarest of my printed works, as it must be, for the only edition
was limited to two copies, of which one (there was always some devilry
in any matter connected with Peter) instantly lost itself in railway
carriage. This is the survivor. The idlers in court may have assumed
that it is a handwritten screed, and are impressed by its bulk. It is
printed by Constable’s (how handsomely you did us, dear Blaikie), it
contains thirty-five illustrations and is bound in cloth with a picture
stamped on the cover of the three eldest of you ‘setting out to be
wrecked.’ This record is supposed to be edited by the youngest of the
three, and I must have granted him that honour to make up for his being
so often lifted bodily out of our adventures by his nurse, who kept
breaking into them for the fell purpose of giving him a midday rest.
No. 4 rested so much at this period that he was merely an honorary
member of the band, waving his foot to you for luck when you set off
with bow and arrow to shoot his dinner for him; and one may rummage the
book in vain for any trace of No. 5. Here is the title-page, except
that you are numbered instead of named--
THE BOY
CASTAWAYS
OF BLACK LAKE ISLAND
Being a record of the Terrible
Adventures of Three Brothers
in the summer of 1901
faithfully set forth
by No. 3.
LONDON
Published by J. M. Barrie
in the Gloucester Road
1901
There is a long preface by No. 3 in which we gather your ages at this
first flight. ‘No. 1 was eight and a month, No. 2 was approaching his
seventh lustrum, and I was a good bit past four.’ Of his two elders,
while commending their fearless dispositions, the editor complains that
they wanted to do all the shooting and carried the whole equipment of
arrows inside their shirts. He is attractively modest about himself,
‘Of No. 3 I prefer to say nothing, hoping that the tale as it is
unwound will show that he was a boy of deeds rather than of words,’ a
quality which he hints did not unduly protrude upon the brows of Nos.
1 and 2. His preface ends on a high note, ‘I should say that the work
was in the first instance compiled as a record simply at which we could
whet our memories, and that it is now published for No. 4’s benefit. If
it teaches him by example lessons in fortitude and manly endurance we
shall consider that we were not wrecked in vain.’
Published to whet your memories. Does it whet them? Do you hear once
more, like some long-forgotten whistle beneath your window (Robb at
dawn calling me to the fishing!) the not quite mortal blows that still
echo in some of the chapter headings?--‘Chapter II, No. 1 teaches
Wilkinson (his master) a Stern Lesson--We Run away to Sea. Chapter
III, A Fearful Hurricane--Wreck of the “Anna Pink”--We go crazy from
Want of Food--Proposal to eat No. 3--Land Ahoy.’ Such are two chapters
out of sixteen. Are these again your javelins cutting tunes in the
blue haze of the pines; do you sweat as you scale the dreadful Valley
of Rolling Stones, and cleanse your hands of pirate blood by scouring
them carelessly in Mother Earth? Can you still make a fire (you could
do it once, Mr. Seton-Thompson taught us in, surely an odd place, the
Reform Club) by rubbing those sticks together? Was it the travail of
hut-building that subsequently advised Peter to find a ‘home under the
ground’? The bottle and mugs in that lurid picture, ‘Last night on
the Island,’ seem to suggest that you had changed from Lost Boys into
pirates, which was probably also a tendency of Peter’s. Listen again
to our stolen saw-mill, man’s proudest invention; when he made the
saw-mill he beat the birds for music in a wood.
The illustrations (full-paged) in _The Boy Castaways_ are all
photographs taken by myself; some of them indeed of phenomena that had
to be invented afterwards, for you were always off doing the wrong
things when I pressed the button. I see that we combined instruction
with amusement; perhaps we had given our kingly word to that effect.
How otherwise account for such wording to the pictures as these: ‘It
is undoubtedly,’ says No. 1 in a fir tree that is bearing unwonted
fruit, recently tied to it, ‘the _Cocos nucifera_, for observe the
slender columns supporting the crown of leaves which fall with a grace
that no art can imitate.’ ‘Truly,’ continues No. 1 under the same
tree in another forest as he leans upon his trusty gun, ‘though the
perils of these happenings are great, yet would I rejoice to endure
still greater privations to be thus rewarded by such wondrous studies
of Nature.’ He is soon back to the practical, however, ‘recognising
the Mango (_Magnifera indica_) by its lancet-shaped leaves and the
cucumber-shaped fruit.’ No. 1 was certainly the right sort of voyager
to be wrecked with, though if my memory fails me not, No. 2, to whom
these strutting observations were addressed, sometimes protested
because none of them was given to him. No. 3 being the author is in
surprisingly few of the pictures, but this, you may remember, was
because the lady already darkly referred to used to pluck him from our
midst for his siesta at 12 o’clock, which was the hour that best suited
the camera. With a skill on which he has never been complimented the
photographer sometimes got No. 3 nominally included in a wild-life
picture when he was really in a humdrum house kicking on the sofa.
Thus in a scene representing Nos. 1 and 2 sitting scowling outside the
hut it is untruly written that they scowled because ‘their brother was
within singing and playing on a barbaric instrument. The music,’ the
unseen No. 3 is represented as saying (obviously forestalling No. 1),
‘is rude and to a cultured ear discordant, but the songs like those of
the Arabs are full of poetic imagery.’ He was perhaps allowed to say
this sulkily on the sofa.
Though _The Boy Castaways_ has sixteen chapter-headings, there is no
other letterpress; an absence which possible purchasers might complain
of, though there are surely worse ways of writing a book than this.
These headings anticipate much of the play of _Peter Pan_, but there
were many incidents of our Kensington Gardens days that never get into
the book, such as our Antarctic exploits when we reached the Pole in
advance of our friend Captain Scott and cut our initials on it for
him to find, a strange foreshadowing of what was really to happen. In
_The Boy Castaways_ Captain Hook has arrived but is called Captain
Swarthy, and he seems from the pictures to have been a black man. This
character, as you do not need to be told, is held by those in the know
to be autobiographical. You had many tussels with him (though you
never, I think, got his right arm) before you reached the terrible
chapter (which might be taken from the play) entitled ‘We Board the
Pirate Ship at Dawn--A Rakish Craft--No. 1 Hew-them-Down and No. 2 of
the Red Hatchet--A Holocaust of Pirates--Rescue of Peter.’ (Hullo,
Peter rescued instead of rescuing others? I know what that means and so
do you, but we are not going to give away all our secrets.) The scene
of the Holocaust is the Black Lake (afterwards, when we let women in,
the Mermaids’ Lagoon). The pirate captain’s end was not in the mouth
of a crocodile though we had crocodiles on the spot (‘while No. 2 was
removing the crocodiles from the stream No. 1 shot a few parrots,
_Psittacidae_, for our evening meal’). I think our captain had divers
deaths owing to unseemly competition among you, each wanting to slay
him single-handed. On a special occasion, such as when No. 3 pulled out
the tooth himself, you gave the deed to him, but took it from him while
he rested. The only pictorial representation in the book of Swarthy’s
fate is in two parts. In one, called briefly ‘We string him up,’ Nos.
1 and 2, stern as Athos, are hauling him up a tree by a rope, his face
snarling as if it were a grinning mask (which indeed it was), and his
garments very like some of my own stuffed with bracken. The other, the
same scene next day, is called ‘The Vultures had Picked him Clean,’ and
tells its own tale.
The dog in _The Boy Castaways_ seems never to have been called Nana
but was evidently in training for that post. He originally belonged
to Swarthy (or to Captain Marryat?), and the first picture of him,
lean, skulking, and hunched (how did I get that effect?), ‘patrolling
the island’ in that monster’s interests, gives little indication of
the domestic paragon he was to become. We lured him away to the better
life, and there is, later, a touching picture, a clear forecast of the
Darling nursery, entitled ‘We trained the dog to watch over us while we
slept.’ In this he also is sleeping, in a position that is a careful
copy of his charges; indeed any trouble we had with him was because,
once he knew he was in a story, he thought his safest course was to
imitate you in everything you did. How anxious he was to show that he
understood the game, and more generous than you, he never pretended
that he was the one who killed Captain Swarthy. I must not imply that
he was entirely without initiative, for it was his own idea to bark
warningly a minute or two before twelve o’clock as a signal to No.
3 that his keeper was probably on her way for him (Disappearance of
No. 3); and he became so used to living in the world of Pretend that
when we reached the hut of a morning he was often there waiting for
us, looking, it is true, rather idiotic, but with a new bark he had
invented which puzzled us until we decided that he was demanding the
password. He was always willing to do any extra jobs, such as becoming
the tiger in mask, and when after a fierce engagement you carried home
that mask in triumph, he joined in the procession proudly and never
let on that the trophy had ever been part of him. Long afterwards he
saw the play from a box in the theatre, and as familiar scenes were
unrolled before his eyes I have never seen a dog so bothered. At one
matinee we even let him for a moment take the place of the actor who
played Nana, and I don’t know that any members of the audience ever
noticed the change, though he introduced some ‘business’ that was
new to them but old to you and me. Heigh-ho, I suspect that in this
reminiscence I am mixing him up with his successor, for such a one
there had to be, the loyal Newfoundland who, perhaps in the following
year, applied, so to say, for the part by bringing hedgehogs to the hut
in his mouth as offerings for our evening repasts. The head and coat
of him were copied for the Nana of the play.
They do seem to be emerging out of our island, don’t they, the little
people of the play, all except that sly one, the chief figure, who
draws farther and farther into the wood as we advance upon him? He so
dislikes being tracked, as if there were something odd about him, that
when he dies he means to get up and blow away the particle that will be
his ashes.
Wendy has not yet appeared, but she has been trying to come ever since
that loyal nurse cast the humorous shadow of woman upon the scene and
made us feel that it might be fun to let in a disturbing element.
Perhaps she would have bored her way in at last whether we wanted her
or not. It may be that even Peter did not really bring her to the
Never Land of his free will, but merely pretended to do so because she
would not stay away. Even Tinker Bell had reached our island before we
left it. It was one evening when we climbed the wood carrying No. 4 to
show him what the trail was like by twilight. As our lanterns twinkled
among the leaves No. 4 saw a twinkle stand still for a moment and he
waved his foot gaily to it, thus creating Tink. It must not be thought,
however, that there were any other sentimental passages between No.
4 and Tink; indeed, as he got to know her better he suspected her of
frequenting the hut to see what we had been having for supper, and to
partake of the same, and he pursued her with malignancy.
A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open
a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you
don’t find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more
interesting. It is in this way that I get my desultory reading, which
includes the few stray leaves of the original MS. of Peter that I have
said I do possess, though even they, when returned to the drawer, are
gone again, as if that touch of devilry lurked in them still. They show
that in early days I hacked at and added to the play. In the drawer I
find some scraps of Mr. Crook’s delightful music, and other incomplete
matter relating to Peter. Here is the reply of a boy whom I favoured
with a seat in my box and injudiciously asked at the end what he had
liked best. ‘What I think I liked best,’ he said, ‘was tearing up the
programme and dropping the bits on people’s heads.’ Thus am I often
laid low. A copy of my favourite programme of the play is still in the
drawer. In the first or second year of Peter No. 4 could not attend
through illness, so we took the play to his nursery, far away in the
country, an array of vehicles almost as glorious as a travelling
circus; the leading parts were played by the youngest children in
the London company, and No. 4, aged five, looked on solemnly at the
performance from his bed and never smiled once. That was my first and
only appearance on the real stage, and this copy of the programme shows
I was thought so meanly of as an actor that they printed my name in
smaller letters than the others.
I have said little here of Nos. 4 and 5, and it is high time I had
finished. They had a long summer day, and I turn round twice and now
they are off to school. On Monday, as it seems, I was escorting No. 5
to a children’s party and brushing his hair in the ante-room; and by
Thursday he is placing me against the wall of an underground station
and saying, ‘Now I am going to get the tickets; don’t move till I come
back for you or you’ll lose yourself.’ No. 4 jumps from being astride
my shoulders fishing, I knee-deep in the stream, to becoming, while
still a schoolboy, the sternest of my literary critics. Anything he
shook his head over I abandoned, and conceivably the world has thus
been deprived of masterpieces. There was for instance an unfortunate
little tragedy which I liked until I foolishly told No. 4 its subject,
when he frowned and said he had better have a look at it. He read it,
and then, patting me on the back, as only he and No. 1 could touch me,
said, ‘You know you can’t do this sort of thing.’ End of a tragedian.
Sometimes, however, No. 4 liked my efforts, and I walked in the azure
that day when he returned _Dear Brutus_ to me with the comment ‘Not
so bad.’ In earlier days, when he was ten, I offered him the MS. of
my book _Margaret Ogilvy_. ‘Oh, thanks,’ he said almost immediately,
and added, ‘Of course my desk is awfully full.’ I reminded him that he
could take out some of its more ridiculous contents. He said, ‘I have
read it already in the book.’ This I had not known, and I was secretly
elated, but I said that people sometimes liked to preserve this kind of
thing as a curiosity. He said ‘Oh’ again. I said tartly that he was not
compelled to take it if he didn’t want it. He said, ‘Of course I want
it, but my desk----’ Then he wriggled out of the room and came back in
a few minutes dragging in No. 5 and announcing triumphantly, ‘No. 5
will have it.’
The rebuffs I have got from all of you! They were especially crushing
in those early days when one by one you came out of your belief in
fairies and lowered on me as the deceiver. My grandest triumph, the
best thing in the play of _Peter Pan_ (though it is not in it), is
that long after No. 4 had ceased to believe, I brought him back to the
faith for at least two minutes. We were on our way in a boat to fish
the Outer Hebrides (where we caught _Mary Rose_), and though it was a
journey of days he wore his fishing basket on his back all the time,
so as to be able to begin at once. His one pain was the absence of
Johnny Mackay, for Johnny was the loved gillie of the previous summer
who had taught him everything that is worth knowing (which is a matter
of flies) but could not be with us this time as he would have had to
cross and re-cross Scotland to reach us. As the boat drew near the Kyle
of Lochalsh pier I told Nos. 4 and 5 it was such a famous wishing pier
that they had now but to wish and they should have. No. 5 believed at
once and expressed a wish to meet himself (I afterwards found him on
the pier searching faces confidently), but No. 4 thought it more of
my untimely nonsense and doggedly declined to humour me. ‘Whom do you
want to see most, No. 4?’ ‘Of course I would like most to see Johnny
Mackay.’ ‘Well, then, wish for him.’ ‘Oh, rot.’ ‘It can’t do any harm
to wish.’ Contemptuously he wished, and as the ropes were thrown on the
pier he saw Johnny waiting for him, loaded with angling paraphernalia.
I know no one less like a fairy than Johnny Mackay, but for two
minutes No. 4 was quivering in another world than ours. When he came
to he gave me a smile which meant that we understood each other, and
thereafter neglected me for a month, being always with Johnny. As I
have said, this episode is not in the play; so though I dedicate _Peter
Pan_ to you I keep the smile, with the few other broken fragments of
immortality that have come my way.
ACT I