Peter Pan
if she were inside him, knocking.
“Oh, all right,” he said at last, and gulped. Then he unbarred the
window. “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 deserved. 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.
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 little boy who
was staring in at the window. He had had ecstasies innumerable 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.
Chapter XVII.
WHEN WENDY GREW UP
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.
“We could lie doubled up,” said Nibs.
“I always cut their hair myself,” said Wendy.
“George!” Mrs. Darling exclaimed, pained to see her dear one showing
himself in such an unfavourable light.
Then he burst into tears, and the truth came out. He was as glad to
have them as she was, he said, but he thought they should have asked
his consent as well as hers, instead of treating him as a cypher in his
own house.
“I don’t think he is a cypher,” Tootles cried instantly. “Do you think
he is a cypher, Curly?”
“No, I don’t. Do you think he is a cypher, Slightly?”
“Rather not. Twin, what do you think?”
It turned out that not one of them thought him a cypher; and he was
absurdly gratified, and said he would find space for them all in the
drawing-room if they fitted in.
“We’ll fit in, sir,” they assured him.
“Then follow the leader,” he cried gaily. “Mind you, I am not sure that
we have a drawing-room, but we pretend we have, and it’s all the same.
Hoop la!”
He went off dancing through the house, and they all cried “Hoop la!”
and danced after him, searching for the drawing-room; and I forget
whether they found it, but at any rate they found corners, and they all
fitted in.
As for Peter, he saw Wendy once again before he flew away. He did not
exactly come to the window, but he brushed against it in passing so
that she could open it if she liked and call to him. That is what she
did.
“Hullo, Wendy, good-bye,” he said.
“Oh dear, are you going away?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t feel, Peter,” she said falteringly, “that you would like to
say anything to my parents about a very sweet subject?”
“No.”
“About me, Peter?”
“No.”
Mrs. Darling came to the window, for at present she was keeping a sharp
eye on Wendy. She told Peter that she had adopted all the other boys,
and would like to adopt him also.
“Would you send me to school?” he inquired craftily.
“Yes.”
“And then to an office?”
“I suppose so.”
“Soon I would be a man?”
“Very soon.”
“I don’t want to go to school and learn solemn things,” he told her
passionately. “I don’t want to be a man. O Wendy’s mother, if I was to
wake up and feel there was a beard!”
“Peter,” said Wendy the comforter, “I should love you in a beard;” and
Mrs. Darling stretched out her arms to him, but he repulsed her.
“Keep back, lady, no one is going to catch me and make me a man.”
“But where are you going to live?”
“With Tink in the house we built for Wendy. The fairies are to put it
high up among the tree tops where they sleep at nights.”
“How lovely,” cried Wendy so longingly that Mrs. Darling tightened her
grip.
“I thought all the fairies were dead,” Mrs. Darling said.
“There are always a lot of young ones,” explained Wendy, who was now
quite an authority, “because you see when a new baby laughs for the
first time a new fairy is born, and as there are always new babies
there are always new fairies. They live in nests on the tops of trees;
and the mauve ones are boys and the white ones are girls, and the blue
ones are just little sillies who are not sure what they are.”
“I shall have such fun,” said Peter, with eye on Wendy.
“It will be rather lonely in the evening,” she said, “sitting by the
fire.”
“I shall have Tink.”
“Tink can’t go a twentieth part of the way round,” she reminded him a
little tartly.
“Sneaky tell-tale!” Tink called out from somewhere round the corner.
“It doesn’t matter,” Peter said.
“O Peter, you know it matters.”
“Well, then, come with me to the little house.”
“May I, mummy?”
“Certainly not. I have got you home again, and I mean to keep you.”
“But he does so need a mother.”
“So do you, my love.”
“Oh, all right,” Peter said, as if he had asked her from politeness
merely; but Mrs. Darling saw his mouth twitch, and she made this
handsome offer: to let Wendy go to him for a week every year to do his
spring cleaning. Wendy would have preferred a more permanent
arrangement; and it seemed to her that spring would be long in coming;
but this promise sent Peter away quite gay again. He had no sense of
time, and was so full of adventures that all I have told you about him
is only a halfpenny-worth of them. I suppose it was because Wendy knew
this that her last words to him were these rather plaintive ones:
“You won’t forget me, Peter, will you, before spring cleaning time
comes?”
Of course Peter promised; and then he flew away. He took Mrs. Darling’s
kiss with him. The kiss that had been for no one else, Peter took quite
easily. Funny. But she seemed satisfied.
Of course all the boys went to school; and most of them got into Class
III, but Slightly was put first into Class IV and then into Class V.
Class I is the top class. Before they had attended school a week they
saw what goats they had been not to remain on the island; but it was
too late now, and soon they settled down to being as ordinary as you or
me or Jenkins minor. It is sad to have to say that the power to fly
gradually left them. At first Nana tied their feet to the bed-posts so
that they should not fly away in the night; and one of their diversions
by day was to pretend to fall off buses; but by and by they ceased to
tug at their bonds in bed, and found that they hurt themselves when
they let go of the bus. In time they could not even fly after their
hats. Want of practice, they called it; but what it really meant was
that they no longer believed.
Michael believed longer than the other boys, though they jeered at him;
so he was with Wendy when Peter came for her at the end of the first
year. She flew away with Peter in the frock she had woven from leaves
and berries in the Neverland, and her one fear was that he might notice
how short it had become; but he never noticed, he had so much to say
about himself.
She had looked forward to thrilling talks with him about old times, but
new adventures had crowded the old ones from his mind.
“Who is Captain Hook?” he asked with interest when she spoke of the
arch enemy.
“Don’t you remember,” she asked, amazed, “how you killed him and saved
all our lives?”
“I forget them after I kill them,” he replied carelessly.
When she expressed a doubtful hope that Tinker Bell would be glad to
see her he said, “Who is Tinker Bell?”
“O Peter,” she said, shocked; but even when she explained he could not
remember.
“There are such a lot of them,” he said. “I expect she is no more.”
I expect he was right, for fairies don’t live long, but they are so
little that a short time seems a good while to them.
Wendy was pained too to find that the past year was but as yesterday to
Peter; it had seemed such a long year of waiting to her. But he was
exactly as fascinating as ever, and they had a lovely spring cleaning
in the little house on the tree tops.
Next year he did not come for her. She waited in a new frock because
the old one simply would not meet; but he never came.
“Perhaps he is ill,” Michael said.
“You know he is never ill.”
Michael came close to her and whispered, with a shiver, “Perhaps there