by J. M. Barrie
Her voice was so low that at first he could not make out what she said. Then he made it out. She was saying that she thought she could get well again if children believed in fairies.
Peter flung out his arms. There were no children there, and it was night-time; but he addressed all who might be dreaming of the Neverland, and who were therefore nearer to him than you think: boys and girls in their nighties, and naked papooses in their baskets hung from trees.
“Do you believe?” he cried.10
Tink sat up in bed almost briskly to listen to her fate.
She fancied she heard answers in the affirmative, and then again she wasn’t sure.
“What do you think?” she asked Peter.
“If you believe,” he shouted to them, “clap your hands; don’t let Tink die.”
Many clapped.
Some didn’t.
A few little beasts hissed.
The clapping stopped suddenly; as if countless mothers had rushed to their nurseries to see what on earth was happening; but already Tink was saved. First her voice grew strong, then she popped out of bed; then she was flashing through the room more merry and impudent than ever. She never thought of thanking those who believed, but she would have liked to get at the ones who had hissed.
“And now to rescue Wendy.”
The moon was riding in a cloudy heaven when Peter rose from his tree, begirt11 with weapons and wearing little else, to set out upon his perilous quest. It was not such a night as he would have chosen. He had hoped to fly, keeping not far from the ground so that nothing unwonted should escape his eyes; but in that fitful light to have flown low would have meant trailing his shadow through the trees, thus disturbing birds and acquainting a watchful foe that he was astir.
He regretted now that he had given the birds of the island such strange names that they are very wild and difficult of approach.
There was no other course but to press forward in redskin fashion, at which happily he was an adept. But in what direction, for he could not be sure that the children had been taken to the ship? A light fall of snow had obliterated all foot marks; and a deathly silence pervaded the island, as if for a space Nature stood still in horror of the recent carnage. He had taught the children something of the forest lore that he had himself learned from Tiger Lily and Tinker Bell, and knew that in their dire hour they were not likely to forget it. Slightly, if he had an opportunity, would blaze12 the trees, for instance, Curly would drop seeds, and Wendy would leave her handkerchief at some important place. The morning was needed to search for such guidance, and he could not wait. The upper world had called him, but would give no help.
The crocodile passed him, but not another living thing, not a sound, not a movement; and yet he knew well that sudden death might be at the next tree, or stalking him from behind.
He swore this terrible oath: “Hook or me this time.”
Now he crawled forward like a snake; and again, erect, he darted across a space on which the moonlight played: one finger on his lip and his dagger at the ready. He was frightfully happy.13
1. Hook entranced her. Hook is a gentleman who minds his manners, even when staging a raid. That Wendy is fascinated by him is not surprising, given the fact that Peter and Hook shadow each other, with Peter executing a dead-on imitation of Hook. In this scene, Hook becomes something of a Svengali, the sinister fictional character in the immensely successful novel Trilby (1894), written by Sylvia Davies’s father, George du Maurier. And Wendy’s vulnerability to Hook becomes the direct cause of a “foul attempt on Peter’s life.”
2. that he would be alone. The phrase means “that he wished to be alone.”
3. periwinkle. An evergreen known as vinca major, with violet-blue flowers. In the play, Hook’s eyes are described as “blue as the forget-me-not.”
4. they were more painful than the dreams of other boys. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, placed new importance on the significance of dreams and the unconscious. Peter has just made a heroic effort to reveal that he cannot be touched and that he is immune to feelings of helplessness, even though he has just been abandoned. His defenses include playing on the pipes, rebelling against Wendy by refusing to take his medicine and lying on the coverlet, and, most importantly, laughing. And yet his dreams suggest that this second abandonment cuts deep, repeating and recalling the barred windows of home. In them, he gives in to tears rather than reining in the weeping with a “haughty laugh.”
5. Thus defenceless Hook found him. In this scene, the entire range and play of Hook’s feelings about Peter Pan are revealed. The seductive beauty of the vulnerable, sleeping child disarms Hook, and he gives in, for a moment, to his “better self.”
6. The open mouth, the drooping arm, the arched knee. The tableau of Peter sleeping has a distinctly aesthetic and possibly erotic charge to it, with the sleeper illuminated by a lamp while his surroundings are cloaked in darkness. The beauty of the sleeping child generally evokes compassion and sympathy rather than the cold rage Hook experiences.
7. death-dealing rings. These are rings that contain poison.
8. He could take his medicine. Mr. Darling’s struggles with Michael over the taking of medicine (“Be a man, Michael . . . when I was your age I took medicine without a murmur”) is recalled by this scene in which Peter is all too willing to swallow medicine tainted by Hook. The contrasts and similarities between Mr. Darling (a cowardly liar when it comes to the subject of medicine) and Hook (a cowardly poisoner when he sees an opportunity) are frequently invoked.
9. His head almost filled the fourth wall of her little room. The “fourth wall” is a term commonly used to refer to the imaginary wall that divides audience from players and action onstage. The term is also used to designate the threshold that separates readers from fictional settings. As a dramatist, Barrie would have been deeply familiar with the term, and he no doubt invokes it explicitly. Yet he applies it only to Tinker Bell’s room rather than to the narrative (or play) itself, which, by appealing to its audience to save Tinker Bell, breaks down the fourth wall.
10. “Do you believe?” he cried. When Peter utters these words in the play, he reveals—by addressing the audience—that the events onstage are nothing but performance and illusion. And yet, ironically, just when the theatrical apparatus is laid bare and exposed as an illusion, Peter will demand faith in the spectacle onstage by asking for palpable proof of the audience’s faith in fairies. We are in the realm of what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the willing suspension of disbelief. Barrie himself was unsure of how audiences would react, and he was pleasantly surprised by the burst of spontaneous applause on opening night. In an earlier draft of the play, Peter asked the children to wave their handkerchiefs to demonstrate their faith in fairies. Maureen Duffy sees Peter’s appeal as a manipulative move on Barrie’s part, “a moment when Barrie shamelessly plays on a youthful audience to bolster his own ego by demonstrating just how effective his theatrical magic is” (Duffy 308).
11. begirt. The word means belted.
12. blaze. This means cut a mark in.
13. He was frightfully happy. Barrie’s language captures, in ingenious ways, the mental state of the child. “Frightfully happy” conveys the sense of excitement and delight children feel in situations of (make-believe) peril. Peter, we discover, is happiest when there is adventure and danger.
CHAPTER 14
The Pirate Ship
One green light squinting over Kidd’s Creek,1 which is near the mouth of the pirate river, marked where the brig, the Jolly Roger lay, low in the water; a rakish-looking craft2 foul to the hull, every beam in her detestable, like ground strewn with mangled feathers. She was the cannibal of the seas, and scarce needed that watchful eye, for she floated immune in the horror of her name.
She was wrapped in the blanket of night, through which no sound from her could have reached the shore. There was little sound, and none agreeable save the whir of the ship’s sewing machine at which Smee sat, ev
er industrious and obliging, the essence of the commonplace, pathetic Smee. I know not why he was so infinitely pathetic, unless it were because he was so pathetically unaware of it; but even strong men had to turn hastily from looking at him, and more than once on summer evenings he had touched the fount of Hook’s tears and made it flow. Of this, as of almost everything else, Smee was quite unconscious.
A few of the pirates leant over the bulwarks, drinking in the miasma of the night; others sprawled by barrels over games of dice and cards; and the exhausted four who had carried the little house lay prone on the deck, where even in their sleep they rolled skillfully to this side or that out of Hook’s reach, lest he should claw them mechanically in passing.
Hook trod the deck in thought. O man unfathomable. It was his hour of triumph. Peter had been removed for ever from his path, and all the other boys were on the brig, about to walk the plank. It was his grimmest deed since the days when he had brought Barbecue to heel; and knowing as we do how vain a tabernacle is man, could we be surprised had he now paced the deck unsteadily, bellied out by the winds of his success?
But there was no elation in his gait, which kept pace with the action of his sombre mind. Hook was profoundly dejected.
He was often thus when communing with himself on board ship in the quietude of the night. It was because he was so terribly alone. This inscrutable man3 never felt more alone than when surrounded by his dogs. They were socially inferior to him.
Hook was not his true name.4 To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in a blaze; but as those who read between the lines must already have guessed, he had been at a famous public school;5 and its traditions still clung to him like garments, with which indeed they are largely concerned. Thus it was offensive to him even now to board a ship in the same dress in which he grappled her, and he still adhered in his walk to the school’s distinguished slouch. But above all he retained the passion for good form.6
Good form! However much he may have degenerated, he still knew that this is all that really matters.
From far within him he heard a creaking as of rusty portals, and through them came a stern tap-tap-tap, like hammering in the night when one cannot sleep. “Have you been good form to-day?” was their eternal question.
“Fame, fame, that glittering bauble, it is mine,” he cried.
“Is it quite good form to be distinguished at anything?” the tap-tap from his school replied.
“I am the only man whom Barbecue feared,” he urged; “and Flint himself feared Barbecue.”
“Barbecue, Flint—what house?”7 came the cutting retort.
Most disquieting reflection of all, was it not bad form to think about good form?
His vitals were tortured by this problem. It was a claw within him sharper than the iron one; and as it tore him, the perspiration dripped down his tallow countenance and streaked his doublet. Ofttimes he drew his sleeve across his face, but there was no damming that trickle.
Ah, envy not Hook.
There came to him a presentiment of his early dissolution.8 It was as if Peter’s terrible oath had boarded the ship. Hook felt a gloomy desire to make his dying speech, lest presently there should be no time for it.
“Better for Hook,” he cried, “if he had had less ambition.” It was in his darkest hours only that he referred to himself in the third person.
“No little children love me.”9
Strange that he should think of this, which had never troubled him before; perhaps the sewing machine brought it to his mind. For long he muttered to himself, staring at Smee, who was hemming placidly, under the conviction that all children feared him.
Feared him! Feared Smee! There was not a child on board the brig that night who did not already love him. He had said horrid things to them and hit them with the palm of his hand because he could not hit with his fist; but they had only clung to him the more. Michael had tried on his spectacles.
To tell poor Smee that they thought him lovable! Hook itched to do it, but it seemed too brutal. Instead, he revolved this mystery in his mind: why do they find Smee lovable? He pursued the problem like the sleuth-hound that he was. If Smee was lovable, what was it that made him so? A terrible answer suddenly presented itself—“Good form?”
Had the bo’sun good form without knowing it, which is the best form of all?
He remembered that you have to prove you don’t know you have it before you are eligible for Pop.10
With a cry of rage he raised his iron hand over Smee’s head; but he did not tear. What arrested him was this reflection:
“To claw a man because he is good form, what would that be?”
“Bad form!”
The unhappy Hook was as impotent as he was damp, and he fell forward like a cut flower.
His dogs thinking him out of the way for a time, discipline instantly relaxed; and they broke into a bacchanalian dance,11 which brought him to his feet at once; all traces of human weakness gone, as if a bucket of water had passed over him.
“Quiet, you scugs,”12 he cried, “or I’ll cast anchor in you”; and at once the din was hushed. “Are all the children chained, so that they cannot fly away?”
“Ay, ay.”
“Then hoist them up.”
The wretched prisoners were dragged from the hold, all except Wendy, and ranged in line in front of him. For a time he seemed unconscious of their presence. He lolled at his ease, humming, not unmelodiously, snatches of a rude song, and fingering a pack of cards. Ever and anon the light from his cigar gave a touch of colour to his face.
“Now then, bullies,” he said briskly, “six of you walk the plank13 to-night, but I have room for two cabin boys. Which of you is it to be?”
“Don’t irritate him unnecessarily,” had been Wendy’s instructions in the hold; so Tootles stepped forward politely. Tootles hated the idea of signing under such a man, but an instinct told him that it would be prudent to lay the responsibility on an absent person; and though a somewhat silly boy, he knew that mothers alone are always willing to be the buf fer. All children know this about mothers, and despise them for it, but make constant use of it.
So Tootles explained prudently, “You see, sir, I don’t think my mother would like me to be a pirate. Would your mother like you to be a pirate, Slightly?”
He winked at Slightly, who said mournfully, “I don’t think so,” as if he wished things had been otherwise. “Would your mother like you to be a pirate, Twin?”
“I don’t think so,” said the first twin, as clever as the others. “Nibs, would—”
“Stow this gab,” roared Hook, and the spokesmen were dragged back. “You, boy,” he said, addressing John, “you look as if you had a little pluck in you. Didst never want to be a pirate, my hearty?”
Now John had sometimes experienced this hankering at maths.14 prep.; and he was struck by Hook’s picking him out.
“I once thought of calling myself Red-handed Jack,”15 he said diffidently.
“And a good name too. We’ll call you that here, bully, if you join.”
“What do you think, Michael?” asked John.
“What would you call me if I join?” Michael demanded.
“Blackbeard Joe.”
Michael was naturally impressed. “What do you think, John?” He wanted John to decide, and John wanted him to decide.
“Shall we still be respectful subjects of the King?” John inquired.
Through Hook’s teeth came the answer: “You would have to swear, ‘Down with the King.’ ”
Perhaps John had not behaved very well so far, but he shone out now.
“Then I refuse,” he cried, banging the barrel in front of Hook.
“And I refuse,” cried Michael.
“Rule Britannia!”16 squeaked Curly.
The infuriated pirates buffeted them in the mouth;17 and Hook roared out, “That seals your doom. Bring up their mother. Get the plank ready.”
They were only boys, and they went white as
they saw Jukes and Cecco preparing the fatal plank. But they tried to look brave when Wendy was brought up.
No words of mine can tell you how Wendy despised those pirates. To the boys there was at least some glamour in the pirate calling; but all that she saw was that the ship had not been tidied for years. There was not a porthole on the grimy glass of which you might not have written with your finger “Dirty pig”; and she had already written it on several. But as the boys gathered round her she had no thought, of course, save for them.
“So, my beauty,” said Hook, as if he spoke in syrup, “you are to see your children walk the plank.”
Fine gentleman though he was, the intensity of his communings had soiled his ruff,18 and suddenly he knew that she was gazing at it. With a hasty gesture he tried to hide it, but he was too late.
“Are they to die?” asked Wendy, with a look of such frightful contempt that he nearly fainted.
“They are,” he snarled. “Silence all,” he called gloatingly, “for a mother’s last words to her children.”
At this moment Wendy was grand. “These are my last words, dear boys,” she said firmly. “I feel that I have a message to you from your real mothers, and it is this: ‘We hope our sons will die like English gentlemen.’ ”
Even the pirates were awed; and Tootles cried out hysterically, “I am going to do what my mother hopes. What are you to do, Nibs?”
“What my mother hopes. What are you to do, Twin?”
“What my mother hopes. John, what are—?”
But Hook had found his voice again.
“Tie her up!” he shouted.
It was Smee who tied her to the mast. “See here, honey,” he whispered, “I’ll save you if you promise to be my mother.”
But not even for Smee would she make such a promise. “I would almost rather have no children at all,” she said disdainfully.
It is sad to know that not a boy was looking at her as Smee tied her to the mast; the eyes of all were on the plank: that last little walk they were about to take. They were no longer able to hope that they would walk it manfully, for the capacity to think had gone from them; they could stare and shiver only.