by Unknown
Wendy Girl.
Peter Do you like her?
Wendy Yes! (Desperate) Peter, don’t you see whose child she is?
Peter Of course I do. She’s your mother’s child. I say, I like her too!
Wendy (crying) Why?
Peter ’Cos now your mother can let you stay longer with me for Spring Cleaning. (Agony of Wendy)
Wendy Peter. I – I have something to tell you.
Peter (running to her gaily) Is it a secret?
Wendy Oh! Peter, when Captain Hook carried us away –
Peter Who’s Captain Hook? Is it a story? Tell it me.
Wendy (aghast) Do you mean to say you’ve even forgotten Captain Hook, and how you killed him and saved all our lives?
Peter (fidgeting) I forget them after I kill them.
Wendy Oh, Peter, your forget everything!
Peter Everything except mother Wendy. (hugs her)
Wendy Oh!
Peter Come on Wendy.
Wendy (miserably) Where to?
Peter To the Little House. (A little strong) Have you forgotten it is Spring Cleaning time – it’s you that forgets.
Wendy Peter, Peter! by this time the little house must have rotted all away.
Peter So it has, but there are new ones, even littler.
Wendy Did you build them yourself?
Peter Oh no, I just found them. You see the little house was a Mother and it has young ones.
Wendy You sweet.
Peter So come on. (‘Pulling her) I’m Captain.
Wendy I can’t come, Peter – I have forgotten how to fly.
Peter I’ll soon teach you again. (Blows fairy dust on her)
Wendy Peter, Peter, you are wasting the fairy dust.
Peter (At last alarmed) What is it, Wendy? Is something wrong? Don’t cheat me mother Wendy, – I’m only a little boy.
Wendy I can’t come with you, Peter – because I’m no longer young and innocent.
Peter (with a cry) Yes you are.
Wendy I’m going to turn up the light, and then you will see for yourself.
Peter (frightened – hastily) Wendy, don’t turn up the light.
Wendy Yes. But first I want to say to you for the last time something I said often and often in the dear Never Never Land. Peter, what are your exact feelings for me?
Peter Those of a devoted son, Wendy. (Silently she lets her hand play with his hair – she caresses his face, smiling through her tears – then she turns lamp up near the fire and faces him – a bewildered understanding comes to him – she puts out her arms – but he shrinks back) What is it? What is it?
Wendy Peter, I’m grown up – I couldn’t help it! (He backs again) I’m a married woman Peter – and that little girl is my baby.
Peter (after pause – fiercely) What does she call you?
Wendy (softly, after pause) Mother.
Peter Mother! (He takes step toward the child with a little dagger in his hand upraised, then is about to fly away, then flings self on floor and sobs)
Wendy Peter, Peter! Oh! (Knows not what to do, rushes in agony from the room – long pause in which nothing is heard but Peter’s sobs. Nana is restless. Peter is on the same spot as when crying about his Shadow in Act I. Presently his sobbing wakes Jane. She sits up.)
Jane Boy, why are you crying?
(Peter rises – they bow as in Act I.)
Jane What’s your name?
Peter Peter Pan.
Jane I just thought it would be you.
Peter I came for my mother to take her to the Never Never Land to do my Spring Cleaning.
Jane Yes I know, I’ve been waiting for you.
Peter Will you be my mother?
Jane Oh, yes. (Simply)
(She gets out of bed and stands beside him, arms round him in a child’s conception of a mother – Peter very happy. The lamp flickers and goes out as night-light did)
Peter I hear Wendy coming – Hide!
(They hide. Then Peter is seen teaching Jane to fly. They are very gay. Wendy enters and stands right, taking in situation and much more. They don’t see her.)
Peter Hooray! Hooray!
Jane (flying) Oh! Lucky me!
Peter And you’ll come with me?
Jane If Mummy says I may.
Wendy Oh!
Jane May I, Mummy?
Wendy May I come too?
Peter You can’t fly.
Jane It’s just for a week.
Peter And I do so need a mother.
Wendy (nobly yielding) Yes my love, you may go. (Kisses and squeals of rapture, Wendy puts slippers and cloak on Jane and suddenly Peter and Jane fly out hand in hand right in to the night, Wendy waving to them – Nana wakens, rises, is weak on legs, barks feebly – Wendy comes and gets on her knees beside Nana.)
Wendy Don’t be anxious Nana. This is how I planned it if he ever came back. Every Spring Cleaning, except when he forgets, I’ll let Jane fly away with him to the darling Never Never Land, and when she grows up I hope she will have a little daughter, who will fly away with him in turn – and in this way may I go on for ever and ever, dear Nana, so long as children are young and innocent.
(Gradual darkness – then two little lights seen moving slowly through the heavens)
CURTAIN
PANTALOON
The scene makes believe to be the private home of Pantaloon and Columbine, though whether they ever did have a private home is uncertain.
In the English version (and with that alone are we concerning ourselves) these two were figures in the harlequinade, which in Victorian days gave a finish to pantomime as vital as a tail to a dog. Now they are vanished from the boards; or at best they wander through the canvas streets, in everybody’s way, at heart afraid of their own policeman, really dead, and waiting, like the faithful old horse, for some one to push them over. Here at the theatre is perhaps a scrap of Columbine’s skirt, torn off as she squeezed through the wings for the last time, or even placed there intentionally by her as a souvenir: Columbine to her public, a kiss hanging on a nail.
They are very illusive. One has to toss to find out what was their relation to each other: whether Pantaloon, for instance, was Columbine’s father. He was an old, old urchin of the streets over whom some fairy wand had been waved, rather carelessly, and this makes him a child of art; now we must all be nice to children of art, and the nicest thing we can do for Pantaloon is to bring the penny down heads and give him a delightful daughter. So Columbine was Pantaloon’s daughter.
It would be cruel to her to make her his wife, because then she could not have a love-affair.
The mother is dead, to give the little home a touch of pathos.
We have now proved that Pantaloon and his daughter did have a home, and as soon as we know that, we know more. We know, for instance, that as half a crown seemed almost a competency to them, their home must have been in a poor locality and conveniently small. We know also that the sitting-room and kitchen combined must have been on the ground floor. We know it, because in the harlequinade they were always flying from the policeman or bashing his helmet, and Pantaloon would have taken ill with a chamber that was not easily commanded by the policeman on his beat. Even Columbine, we may be sure, refined as she was and incapable of the pettiest larceny, liked the homely feeling of dodging the policeman’s eye as she sat at meals. Lastly, we know that directly opposite the little home was a sausage-shop, the pleasantest of all sights to Pantaloon, who, next to his daughter, loved a sausage. It is being almost too intimate to tell that Columbine hated sausages; she hated them as a literary hand’s daughter might hate manuscripts. But like a loving child she never told her hate, and spent great part of her time toasting sausages to a turn before the fire, and eating her own one bravely when she must, but concealing it in the oddest places when she could.
We should now be able to reconstitute Pantaloon’s parlour. It is agreeably stuffy, with two windows and a recess between them, from which one may peep both ways for the polic
eman. The furniture is in horsehair, no rents showing, because careful Columbine has covered them with antimacassars. All the chairs (but not the sofa) are as sound of limb as they look except one, and Columbine, who is as light as an air balloon, can sit on this one even with her feet off the floor. Though the time is summer there is a fire burning, so that Pantaloon need never eat his sausages raw, which he might do inadvertently if Columbine did not take them gently from his hand. There is a cosy round table with a waxcloth cover adhering to it like a sticking-plaster, and this table is set for tea. Histrionic dignity is given to the room by a large wicker trunk in which Pantaloon’s treasures are packed when he travels by rail, and on it is a printed intimation that he is one of the brightest wits on earth. Columbine could be crushed, concertina-like, into half of this trunk, and it may be that she sometimes travels thus to save her ticket. Between the windows hangs a glass case, such as those at inns wherein Piscator preserves his stuffed pike, but this one contains a poker. It is interesting to note that Pantaloon is sufficiently catholic in his tastes to spare a favourable eye for other arts than his own. There are various paintings on the walls, all of himself, with the exception of a small one of his wife. These represent him not in humorous act but for all time, as, for instance, leaning on a bracket and reading a book, with one finger laid lightly against his nose.
So far our work of reconstitution has been easy, but we now come to the teaser. In all these pictures save one (to be referred to in its proper place) Pantaloon is presented not on the stage but in private life, yet he is garbed and powdered as we know him in the harlequinade. If they are genuine portraits, therefore, they tell us something profoundly odd about the home life of Pantaloon; nothing less than this, that as he was on the stage, so he was off it, clothes, powder, and all; he was not acting a part in the harlequinade, he was merely being himself. It was undoubtedly this strange discovery that set us writing a play about him.
Of course bitter controversy may come of this, for not every one will agree that we are right. It is well known among the cognoscenti that actors in general are not the same off the stage as on; that they dress for their parts, speak words written for them which they do not necessarily believe, and afterwards wash the whole thing off and then go to clubs and coolly cross their legs. I accept this to be so (though I think it a pity), but Pantaloon was never an actor in their sense; he would have scorned to speak words written for him by any whippersnapper; what he said and did before the footlights were the result of mature conviction and represented his philosophy of life. It is the more easy to believe this of him because we are so anxious to believe it of Columbine. Otherwise she could not wear her pretty skirts in our play, and that would be unbearable.
If this noble and simple consistency was the mark of Pantaloon and Columbine (as we have now proved up to the hilt), it must have distinguished no less the other members of the harlequinade. There were two others, the Harlequin and the Clown.
In far-back days, when the world was so young that pieces of the original egg-shell still adhered to it, one boy was so desperately poor that he alone of children could not don fancy dress on fair days. Presently the other children were sorry for this drab one, so each of them clipped a little bit off his own clothing and gave it to him. These were sewn together and made into a costume for him, by the jolly little tailors who in our days have quite gone out, and that is why Harlequin has come down to us in patchwork. He was a lovely boy with no brains at all (not that this matters), while the Clown was all brain.
It has been our whim to make Pantaloon and Columbine our chief figures, but we have had to go for them, as it were, to the kitchen; the true head of the harlequinade was the Clown. You could not become a clown by taking thought, you had to be born one. It was just a chance. If the Clown had wished to walk over the others they would have spread themselves on the ground so that he should be able to do it without inconveniencing himself. Any money they had they got from him, and it was usually pennies. If they displeased him he caned them. He had too much power and it brutalised him, as we shall see, but in fairness it should be told that he owed his supremacy entirely to his funniness. The family worshipped funniness, and he was the funniest.
It is not necessary for our play to reconstitute the homes of Harlequin and Clown, but it could be done. Harlequin, as a bachelor with no means but with a secret conviction that he was a gentleman, had a sitting-and-bed combined at the top of a house too near Jermyn Street for his purse. He made up by not eating very much, which was good for his figure. He always carried his wand, which had curious magical qualities, for instance it could make him invisible; but in the street he seldom asked this of it, having indeed a friendly desire to be looked at. He had delightful manners and an honest heart. The Clown, who, of course, had appearances to keep up, knew the value of a good address, and undoubtedly lived in the Cromwell Road. He smoked cigars with bands round them, and his togs were cut in Savile Row.
Clown and Pantaloon were a garrulous pair, but Columbine and Harlequin never spoke. I don’t know whether they were what we call dumb. Perhaps if they had tried to talk with their tongues they could have done so, but they never thought of it. They were such exquisite dancers that they did all their talking with their legs. There is nothing that may be said which they could not express with this leg or that. It is the loveliest of all languages, and as soft as the fall of snow.
When the curtain rises we see Columbine alone in the little house, very happy and gay, for she has no notion that her tragic hour is about to strike. She is dressed precisely as we may have seen her on the stage. It is the pink skirt, the white one being usually kept for Sunday, which is also washing-day; and we almost wish this had been Sunday, just to show Columbine in white at the tub, washing the pink without letting a single soap-sud pop on to the white. She is toasting bread rhythmically by the fire, and hides the toasting-fork as the policeman passes suspiciously outside. Presently she is in a whirl of emotion because she has heard Harlequin’s knock. She rushes to the window and hides (they were always hiding), she blows kisses, and in her excitement she is everywhere and nowhere at once, like a kitten that leaps at nothing and stops halfway. She has the short quick steps of a bird on a lawn. Long before we have time to describe her movements she has bobbed out of sight beneath the table to await Harlequin funnily, for we must never forget that they are a funny family. With a whirl of his wand that is itself a dance, Harlequin makes the door fly open. He enters, says the stage direction, but what it means is that somehow he is now in the room. He probably knows that Columbine is beneath the table, as she hides so often and there are so few places in the room to hide in, but he searches for her elsewhere, even in a jug, to her extreme mirth, for of course she is peeping at him. He taps the wicker basket with his wand and the lid flies open. Still no Columbine! He sits dejectedly on a chair by the table, with one foot toward the spot where we last saw her head. This is irresistible. She kisses the foot. She is out from beneath the table now, and he is pursuing her round the room. They are as wayward as leaves in a gale. The cunning fellow pretends he does not want her, and now it is she who is pursuing him. There is something entrancing in his hand. It is a ring. It is the engagement-ring at last! She falters, she blushes, but she snatches at the ring. He tantalises her, holding it beyond her reach, but soon she has pulled down his hand and the ring is on her finger. They are dancing ecstatically when Pantaloon comes in and has to drop his stick because she leaps into his arms. If she were not so flurried she would see that the aged man has brought excitement with him also.
Pantaloon. Ah, Fairy! Fond of her dad, is she? Sweetest little daughter ever an old ‘un had.
(He sees Harlequin and is genial to him, while Harlequin pirouettes a How-d’ye-do.)
You here, Boy; welcome, Boy.
(He is about to remove his hat in the ordinary way, but Harlequin, to save his prospective fatherin-law any little trouble, waves his wand and the hat goes to rest on a door-peg. The little service so humbly te
ndered pleases Pantaloon, and he surveys Harlequin with kindly condescension.)
Thank you, Boy. You are a good fellow, Boy, and an artist too, in your limited way, not here (tapping his head), not in a brainy way, but lower down (thoughtfully, and including Columbine in his downward survey). That’s where your personality lies — lower down.
(At the noble word personality Columbine thankfully crosses herself, and then indicates that tea is ready.)
Tea, Fairy? I have such glorious news; but I will have a dish of tea first. You will join us, Boy? Sit down.
(They sit down to tea, the lovers exchanging shy, happy glances, but soon Pantaloon rises petulantly.)
Fairy, there are no sausages! Tea without a sausage. I am bitterly disappointed. And on a day, too, when I have great news. It’s almost more than I can bear. No sausages!