by J. M. Barrie
You see, the woman had no proper spirit. I had meant to say extraordinarily nice things about her; but I despise her,11 and not one of them will I say now. She does not really need to be told to have things ready, for they are ready. All the beds are aired, and she never leaves the house, and observe, the window is open. For all the use we are to her, we might go back to the ship. However, as we are here we may as well stay and look on. That is all we are, lookers-on.12 Nobody really wants us. So let us watch and say jaggy things,13 in the hope that some of them will hurt.
The only change to be seen in the night-nursery is that between nine and six the kennel is no longer there. When the children flew away, Mr. Darling felt in his bones that all the blame was his for having chained Nana up, and that from first to last she had been wiser than he. Of course, as we have seen, he was quite a simple man; indeed he might have passed for a boy again if he had been able to take his baldness off; but he had also a noble sense of justice and a lion’s courage to do what seemed right to him; and having thought the matter out with anxious care after the flight of the children, he went down on all fours and crawled into the kennel. To all Mrs. Darling’s dear invitations to him to come out he replied sadly but firmly:
“No, my own one, this is the place for me.”
In the bitterness of his remorse he swore that he would never leave the kennel until his children came back. Of course this was a pity; but whatever Mr. Darling did he had to do in excess; otherwise he soon gave up doing it. And there never was a more humble man than the once proud George Darling, as he sat in the kennel of an evening talking with his wife of their children and all their pretty ways.
Very touching was his deference to Nana. He would not let her come into the kennel, but on all other matters he followed her wishes implicitly.
Every morning the kennel was carried with Mr. Darling in it to a cab, which conveyed him to his office, and he returned home in the same way at six. Something of the strength of character of the man will be seen if we remember how sensitive he was to the opinion of neighbours: this man whose every movement now attracted surprised attention. Inwardly he must have suffered torture; but he preserved a calm exterior even when the young criticised his little home, and he always lifted his hat courteously to any lady who looked inside.
It may have been quixotic,14 but it was magnificent. Soon the inward meaning of it leaked out, and the great heart of the public was touched. Crowds followed the cab, cheer ing it lustily; charming girls scaled it to get his autograph; interviews appeared in the better class of papers, and society invited him to dinner and added, “Do come in the kennel.”
On that eventful Thursday week Mrs. Darling was in the night-nursery awaiting George’s return home: a very sad-eyed woman. Now that we look at her closely and remember the gaiety of her in the old days, all gone now just because she has lost her babes, I find I won’t be able to say nasty things about her after all. If she was too fond of her rubbishy children she couldn’t help it. Look at her in her chair, where she has fallen asleep. The corner of her mouth, where one looks first, is almost withered up. Her hand moves restlessly on her breast as if she had a pain there. Some like Peter best, and some like Wendy best, but I like her best.15 Suppose, to make her happy, we whisper to her in her sleep that the brats are coming back. They are really within two miles of the window now, and flying strong, but all we need whisper is that they are on the way. Let’s.16
It is a pity we did it, for she has started up, calling their names; and there is no one in the room but Nana.
“O Nana, I dreamt my dear ones had come back.”
Nana had filmy eyes, but all she could do was put her paw gently on her mistress’s lap; and they were sitting together thus when the kennel was brought back. As Mr. Darling puts his head out to kiss his wife, we see that his face is more worn than of yore, but has a softer expression.
He gave his hat to Liza, who took it scornfully; for she had no imagination, and was quite incapable of understanding the motives of such a man. Outside, the crowd who had accompanied the cab home were still cheering, and he was naturally not unmoved.
“Listen to them,” he said; “it is very gratifying.”
“Lots of little boys,” sneered Liza.
“There were several adults to-day,” he assured her with a faint flush; but when she tossed her head he had not a word of reproof for her. Social success had not spoilt him; it had made him sweeter. For some time he sat half out of the kennel, talking with Mrs. Darling of this success, and pressing her hand reassuringly when she said she hoped his head would not be turned by it.
“But if I had been a weak man,” he said. “Good heavens, if I had been a weak man!”
“And, George,” she said timidly, “you are as full of remorse as ever, aren’t you?”
“Full of remorse as ever, dearest! See my punishment: living in a kennel.”
“But it is punishment, isn’t it, George? You are sure you are not enjoying it?”
“My love!”
You may be sure she begged his pardon; and then, feeling drowsy, he curled round in the kennel.
“Won’t you play me to sleep,” he asked, “on the nursery piano?” and as he was crossing to the day-nursery he added thoughtlessly, “And shut that window. I feel a draught.”
“O George, never ask me to do that. The window must always be left open for them, always, always.”
Now it was his turn to beg her pardon; and she went into the day-nursery and played, and soon he was asleep; and while he slept, Wendy and John and Michael flew into the room.
Oh no. We have written it so, because that was the charming arrangement planned by them before we left the ship; but something must have happened since then, for it is not they who have flown in, it is Peter and Tinker Bell.
Peter’s first words tell all.
“Quick, Tink,” he whispered, “close the window; bar it. That’s right. Now you and I must get away by the door; and when Wendy comes she will think her mother has barred her out; and she will have to go back with me.”
Now I understand what had hitherto puzzled me,17 why when Peter had exterminated the pirates he did not return to the island and leave Tink to escort the children to the mainland. This trick had been in his head all the time.
Instead of feeling that he was behaving badly he danced with glee; then he peeped into the day-nursery to see who was playing. He whispered to Tink, “It’s Wendy’s mother. She is a pretty lady, but not so pretty as my mother. Her mouth is full of thimbles, but not so full as my mother’s was.”
Of course he knew nothing whatever about his mother; but he sometimes bragged about her.
He did not know the tune, which was “Home, Sweet Home,”18 but he knew it was saying, “Come back, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy”; and he cried exultantly, “You will never see Wendy again, lady, for the window is barred.”
He peeped in again to see why the music had stopped; and now he saw that Mrs. Darling had laid her head on the box, and that two tears were sitting on her eyes.
“She wants me to unbar the window,” thought Peter, “but I won’t, not I.”
He peeped again, and the tears were still there, or another two had taken their place.
“She’s awfully fond of Wendy,” he said to himself. He was angry with her now for not seeing why she could not have Wendy.
The reason was so simple: “I’m fond of her too. We can’t both have her, lady.”
But the lady would not make the best of it, and he was unhappy. He ceased to look at her, but even then she would not let go of him. He skipped about and made funny faces, but when he stopped it was just as if she were inside him, knocking.
“Oh, all right,” he said at last, and gulped. Then he unbarred the window.19 “Come on, Tink,” he cried, with a frightful sneer at the laws of nature; “we don’t want any silly mothers”; and he flew away.
Thus Wendy and John and Michael found the window open for them after all, which of course was more than they deser
ved. They alighted on the floor, quite unashamed of themselves; and the youngest one had already forgotten his home.
“John,” he said, looking around him doubtfully, “I think I have been here before.”
“Of course you have, you silly. There is your old bed.”
“So it is,” Michael said, but not with much conviction.
“I say,” cried John, “the kennel!” and he dashed across to look into it.
“Perhaps Nana is inside it,” Wendy said.
But John whistled. “Hullo,” he said, “there’s a man inside it.”
“It’s father!” exclaimed Wendy.
“Let me see father,” Michael begged eagerly, and he took a good look. “He is not so big as the pirate I killed,” he said with such frank disappointment that I am glad Mr. Darling was asleep; it would have been sad if those had been the first words he heard his little Michael say.
Wendy and John had been taken aback somewhat at finding their father in the kennel.
“Surely,” said John, like one who had lost faith in his memory, “he used not to sleep in the kennel?”
“John,” Wendy said falteringly, “perhaps we don’t remember the old life as well as we thought we did.”
A chill fell upon them; and serve them right.
“It is very careless of mother,” said that young scoundrel John, “not to be here when we come back.”
It was then that Mrs. Darling began playing again.
“It’s mother!” cried Wendy, peeping.
“So it is!” said John.
“Then are you not really our mother, Wendy?” asked Michael, who was surely sleepy.
“Oh dear!” exclaimed Wendy, with her first real twinge of remorse, “it was quite time we came back.”
“Let us creep in,” John suggested, “and put our hands over her eyes.”
But Wendy, who saw that they must break the joyous news more gently, had a better plan.
“Let us all slip into our beds, and be there when she comes in, just as if we had never been away.”
And so when Mrs. Darling went back to the night-nursery to see if her husband was asleep, all the beds were occupied. The children waited for her cry of joy, but it did not come. She saw them, but she did not believe they were there. You see, she saw them in their beds so often in her dreams that she thought this was just the dream hanging around her still.20
She sat down in the chair by the fire, where in the old days she had nursed them.
They could not understand this, and a cold fear fell upon all the three of them.
“Mother!” Wendy cried.
“That’s Wendy,” she said, but still she was sure it was the dream.
“Mother!”
“That’s John,” she said.
“Mother!” cried Michael. He knew her now.
“That’s Michael,” she said, and she stretched out her arms for the three little selfish children they would never envelop again. Yes, they did, they went round Wendy and John and Michael, who had slipped out of bed and run to her.
“George, George,” she cried when she could speak; and Mr. Darling woke to share her bliss, and Nana came rushing in. There could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a strange boy who was staring in at the window. He had ecstasies innumerable21 that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be for ever barred.
1. with a rope’s end in his hand. The bo’sun’s job is to keep discipline on board ship by beating disobedient or delinquent sailors with a rope’s end. Tootles makes an unlikely disciplinarian, and it is hard to imagine him wielding the rope and chewing tobacco.
2. tars before the mast. Jack Tar was the standard name for sailors. “Before the mast” refers to the location of the sailors’ quarters—here, before or in front of the mast, which was amidship.
3. lashed himself to the wheel. Peter has now become both captain and helmsman and, with characteristic exaggerated bravado, has lashed himself to the wheel, as if in preparation for stormy weather that might sweep him overboard.
4. round robin. The phrase is a term used for nautical documents of complaint, with the names of the sailors written in a circle to conceal the order in which they signed.
5. Slightly got a dozen. A dozen lashes.
6. take soundings. Soundings are taken to determine the depths of water by putting a weight on the end of a line.
7. on the first night he wore this suit. That Peter channels Hook by putting on his garments and pretending that he has a hook reminds us of the deep connection between boy and man, with the boy “trying on” the role of the adult.
8. they may lay to that. They may bet on that.
9. Even now we venture into that familiar nursery. We have seen how the narrator slips in and out of different roles. In this passage, he is able to make his way—like a “servant”—into the house to check on the airing of the beds. Taking on an adult judgmental role, he scolds the children for being “thankless” and calls them “brats.” The chapter displays feelings of resentment toward both children and parents.
10. in the way authors have. Here Barrie actually refers to himself as an author of the events, thereby undermining the sense of anxiety he has built up about the return of the children. The made-up dialogue between him and Mrs. Darling that follows reveals just how much he feels marginalized by the children’s mother.
11. I despise her. The tirade against Mrs. Darling is not completely unexpected (mothers are “despised” twice before), but it is astonishingly mean-spirited in the context of the novel’s earlier sentimentalization of domestic life and of mothers. And it flagrantly contradicts the narrator’s insistence that he likes Mrs. Darling “best.”
12. That is all we are, lookers-on. Here the narrator concedes that he is perched outside the story, looking in, and can never really enter it (although he tries at various times to assume the role of adult, child, or servant). The world of family life and parenting that he has created, like Neverland, is barred to him forever. Barrie might here be reflecting on his role as outsider to the Llewelyn Davies family.
13. jaggy things. Prickly things or barbs.
14. It may have been quixotic. With the term quixotic, Mr. Darling is compared to the visionary but misguided hero of Cervantes’s epic work, Don Quixote. The comparison makes Mr. Darling’s efforts appear all the more small by contrast to the deluded idealist Don Quixote.
15. I like her best. The narrator appears to be as flighty and capricious as Peter Pan, and now he suddenly has a change of heart, moving from “I despise her” to “I like her best.”
16. Let’s. In this one monosyllabic sentence, Barrie’s narrator identifies himself with a collective “we” and becomes a spectral presence in the nursery, eerily whispering in Mrs. Darling’s ear when there is no other human in the room.
17. Now I understand what had hitherto puzzled me. The improvisational quality of the narration becomes more evident in the novel’s final chapters, with the narrator’s emphasis on how the characters have a life of their own, with motives that are not always transparent to him.
18. “Home, Sweet Home.” The famous song was adapted from John Howard Payne’s 1823 opera Clari, Maid of Milan and set to music by Sir Henry Bishop, with lyrics by Payne. It begins with the words: “Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, / Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.” The song is used, along with “Rule, Britannia,” in Sir Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs. “There’s no place like home” are words spoken by Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, published over a decade before Peter and Wendy. Barrie once noted that “Scotch literature” (as he called it) was often “inspired by the domestic hearth and has treated it with a passionate understanding” (Margaret Ogilvy, 158).
19. Then he unbarred the window. With this gesture, Peter overcomes his own nature and “heartlessness.” Moved by Mrs. Darling’s tears, he not only feels compassion but also acts on it.
20. just the dream hanging around her still. Mrs. Darling herself has trouble distinguishing between dreams and reality, and the boundary between them is as fluid as that between No. 14 and Neverland.
21. ecstasies innumerable. The phrase has become Peter Pan’s signature, indicating the euphoric quality of childhood experience. The children’s joyous reunion with their parents functions as a strong contrast with whatever “ecstasies” Peter feels in Neverland. Curiously, the narrator effaces himself and asserts that Peter Pan is the only witness to this scene, suggesting perhaps that he is one with Pan. Walter Pater, the British essayist and critic whose influence on Barrie’s aesthetics is profound, lauded the power of living in the moment and may well have inspired Barrie’s use of the term “ecstasies”: “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. . . . While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion” (Pater 152).
CHAPTER 17
When Wendy Grew Up 1
I hope you want to know what became of the other boys. They were waiting below to give Wendy time to explain about them; and when they had counted five hundred they went up. They went up by the stair, because they thought this would make a better impression. They stood in a row in front of Mrs. Darling, with their hats off, and wishing they were not wearing their pirate clothes. They said nothing, but their eyes asked her to have them. They ought to have looked at Mr. Darling also, but they forgot about him.
Of course Mrs. Darling said at once that she would have them; but Mr. Darling was curiously depressed, and they saw that he considered six a rather large number.
“I must say,” he said to Wendy, “that you don’t do things by halves,” a grudging remark which the twins thought was pointed at them.
The first twin was the proud one, and he asked, flushing, “Do you think we should be too much of a handful, sir? Because, if so, we can go away.”
“Father!” Wendy cried, shocked; but still the cloud was on him. He knew he was behaving unworthily, but he could not help it.
