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
[let out] 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 [for worms] 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
enourmous 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 [desired] 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 [particular],
always kept drawn when dressing or undressing. No
woman, however large, could have had a more
exquisite boudoir [dressing room] 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 [cram down
the food] just to feel stodgy [stuffed with food],
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 [cheerful] 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
the Mermaids' Lagoon, and so made her his ally.
Or we could tell of
that cake the pirates cooked so that the boys
might eat it and perish; and how they placed it in
one cunning spot after another; but always Wendy
snatched it from the hands of her children, so
that in time it lost its succulence, and became as
hard as a stone, and was used as a missile, and
Hook fell over it in the dark.
Or suppose we tell
of the birds that were Peter's friends,
particularly of the Never bird that built in a
tree overhanging the lagoon, and how the nest fell
into the water, and still the bird sat on her
eggs, and Peter gave orders that she was not to be
disturbed. That is a pretty story, and the end
shows how grateful a bird can be; but if we tell
it we must also tell the whole adventure of the
lagoon, which would of course be telling two
adventures rather than just one. A shorter
adventure, and quite as exciting, was Tinker
Bell's attempt, with the help of some street
fairies, to have the sleeping Wendy conveyed on a
great floating leaf to the mainland. Fortunately
the leaf gave way and Wendy woke, thinking it was
bath-time, and swam back. Or again, we might
choose Peter's defiance of the lions, when he drew
a circle round him on the ground with an arrow and
dared them to cross it; and though he waited for
hours, with the other boys and Wendy looking on
breathlessly from trees, not one of them dared to
accept his challenge.
Which of these
adventures shall we choose? The best way will be
to toss for it.
I have tossed, and
the lagoon has won. This almost makes one wish
that the gulch or the cake or Tink's leaf had won.
Of course I could do it again, and make it best
out of three; however, perhaps fairest to stick to
the lagoon.
