| To the Five
A Dedication
Some disquieting confessions must be made in printing at last
the play of Peter Pan; among them this, that I have no recollection
of having written it. Of that, however, anon. What I want to do
first is to give Peter to the Five, without whom he never would
have existed. I hope, my dear sirs, that in memory of what we
have been to each other you will accept this dedication with your
friend’s love. The play of Peter is streaky with you still,
though none may see this save ourselves. A score of Acts had to
be left out, and you were in them all. We first brought Peter
down, didn’t we, with a blunt-headed arrow in Kensington
Gardens? I seem to remember that we believed we had killed him,
though he was only winded, and that after a spasm of exultation
in our prowess the more soft-hearted among us wept and all of
us thought of the police. There was not one of you who would not
have sworn as an eye-witness to this occurrence; no doubt I was
abetting, but you used to provide corroboration that was never
given to you by me. As for myself, I suppose I always knew that
I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as
savages with two sticks produce a flame. That is all he is, the
spark I got from you.
We had good sport of him before we clipped him small to make
him fit the boards. Some of you were not born when the story began
and yet were hefty figures before we saw that the game was up.
Do you remember a garden at Burpham and the initiation there of
No. 4 when he was six weeks old, and three of you grudged letting
him in so young? Have you, No. 3, forgotten the white violets
at the Cistercian abbey in which we cassocked our first fairies
(all little friends of St. Benedict), or your cry to the Gods,
‘Do I just kill one pirate all the time?’ Do you remember
Marooners’ Hut in the haunted groves of Waverley, and the
St. Bernard dog in a tiger’s mask who so frequently attacked
you, and the literary record of that summer, The Boy Castaways,
which is so much the best and the rarest of this author’s
works? What was it that made us eventually give to the public
in the thin form of a play that which had been woven for ourselves
alone? Alas, I know what it was, I was losing my grip. One by
one as you swung monkey-wise from branch to branch in the wood
of make-believe you reached the tree of knowledge. Sometimes you
swung back into the wood, as the unthinking may at a cross-road
take a familiar path that no longer leads to home; or you perched
ostentatiously on its boughs to please me, pretending that you
still belonged; soon you knew it only as the vanished wood, for
it vanishes if one needs to look for it. A time came when I saw
that No. 1 [George], the most gallant of you all, ceased to believe
that he was ploughing woods incarnadine, and with an apologetic
eye for me derided the lingering faith of No. 2 [Jack]; when even
No. 3 [Peter] questioned gloomily whether he did not really spend
his nights in bed. There were still two who knew no better, but
their day was dawning. In these circumstances, I suppose, was
begun the writing of the play of Peter. That was a quarter of
a century ago, and I clutch my brows in vain to remember whether
it was a last desperate throw to retain the five of you for a
little longer, or merely a cold decision to turn you into bread
and butter.
This brings us back to my uncomfortable admission that I have
no recollection of writing the play of Peter Pan, now being published
for the first time so long after he made his bow upon the stage.
You had played it until you tired of it, and tossed it in the
air and gored it and left it derelict in the mud and went on your
way singing other songs; and then I stole back and sewed some
of the gory fragments together with a pen-nib. That is what must
have happened, but I cannot remember doing it. I remember writing
the story of Peter and Wendy many years after the production of
the play, but I might have cribbed that from some typed copy.
I can haul back to mind the writing of almost every other assay
of mine, however forgotten by the pretty public; but this play
of Peter, no.
Even my beginning as an amateur playwright, that noble mouthful,
Bandelero the Bandit, I remember every detail of its composition
in my school days at Dumfries. Not less vivid is my first little
piece, produced by Mr. Toole. It was called Ibsen’s Ghost,
and was a parody of the mightiest craftsman that ever wrote for
our kind friends in front. To save the management the cost of
typing I wrote out the ‘parts,’ after being told what
parts were, and I can still recall my first words, spoken so plaintively
by a now famous actress, ‘To run away from my second husband
just as I ran away from my first, it feels quite like old times.’
On the first night a man in the pit found Ibsen’s Ghost
so diverting that he had to be removed in hysterics. After that
no one seems to have thought of it at all. But what a man to carry
about with one! How odd, too, that these trifles should adhere
to the mind that cannot remember the long job of writing Peter.
It does seem almost suspicious, especially as I have not the original
MS. of Peter Pan (except a few stray pages) with which to support
my claim. I have indeed another MS., lately made, but that ‘proves
nothing.’ I know not whether I lost that original MS. or
destroyed it or happily gave it away. I talk ot dedicating the
play to you, but how can I prove it is mine? How ought I to act
if some other hand, who could also have made a copy, thinks it
worth while to contest the cold rights? Cold they are to me now
as that laughter of yours in which Peter came into being long
before he was caught and written down. There is Peter still, but
to me he lies sunk in the gay Black Lake.
Any one of you five brothers has a better claim to the authorship
than most, and I would not fight you for it, but yo should have
launched your case long ago in the days when you most admired
me, which were in the first year of the play, owing to a rumnour’s
reaching you that my spoils were one-and-sixpence a night. This
was untrue, but it did give me a standing among you. You watched
for my next play with peeled eyes, not for entertainment but lest
it contained some chance witticism of yours that could be challenged
as collaboration; indeed I believe there still exists a legal
document, full of the Aforesaid and Henceforward to be called
Part-Author, in which for some such snatching I was tied down
to pay No. 2 one halfpenny daily throughout the run of the piece.
During the rehearsals of Peter (and it is evidence in my favour
that I was admitted to them) a depressed man in overalls, carrying
a mug of tea or a paint-pot, used often to appear by my side in
the shadowy stalls and say to me, ‘The gallery boys won’t
stand it.’ He then mysteriously faded away as if he were
the theatre ghost. This hopelessness of his is what all dramatists
are said to feel at such times, so perhaps he was the author.
Again, a large number of children whom I have seen playing Peter
in their homes with careless mastership, constantly putting in
beter words, could have thrown it off with ease. It was for such
as they that after the first production I had to add something
to the play at the request of parents (who thus showed that they
thought me the responsible person) about no one being able to
fly until the fairy dust had been blown on him; so many chldren
having gone home and tried it from their beds and needed surgical
attention.
Notwithstanding other possibilities, I think I wrote Peter, and
if so it must have been in the usual inky way. Some of it, I like
to think, was done in that native place which is the dearest spot
on earth to me, though my last heart-beats shall be with my beloved
solitary London that was so hard to reach. I must have sat at
a table with that great dog waiting for me to stop, not complaining,
for he knew it was thus we made our living, but giving me a look
when he found he was to be in the play, with his sex changed.
In after years when the actor who was Nana had to go to the wars
hje first taught his wife how to take his place as the dog till
he came back, and I am glad that I see nothing funny in this;
it seems to me to belong to the play. I offer this obtuseness
on my part as my first proof that I am the author.
Some say that we are different people at different periods of
our lives, changing not through effort of will, which is a brave
affair, but in the easy course of nature every ten years or so.
I suppose this theory might explain my present trouble, but I
don’t hold with it; I think one remains the same person
throughout, merely passing, as it were, in these lapses of time
from one room to another, but all in the same house. If we unlock
the rooms of the far past we can peer in and see ourselves, busily
occupied in beginning to become you and me. Thus, if I am the
author in question the way he is to go should already be showing
in the occupant of my first compartment, at whom I now take the
liberty to peep. Here he is at the age of seven or so with his
fellow-conspirator Robb, both in glengarry bonnets. They are giving
an entertainment in a tiny old washing-house that still stands.
The charge for admission is preens, a bool, or a peerie (I taught
you a good deal of Scotch, so possibly you can follow that), and
apparently the culminating Act consists in our trying to put each
other into the boiler, though some say that I also addressed the
spell-bound audience. This washing-house is not only the theatre
of my first play, but has a still closer connection with Peter.
It is the original of the little house the Lost Boys built in
the Never Land for Wendy, the chief difference being that it never
wore John’s tall hat as a chimney. If Robb had owned a lum
hat I have no doubt that it would have been placed on the washing-house.
Here is that boy again some four years older, and the reading
he is munching feverishly is about desert islands; he calls them
wrecked islands. He buys his sanguinary tales surreptitiously
in penny numbers. I see a change coming over him; he is blanching
as he reads in the high-class magazine, Chatterbox, a fulmination
against such literature, and sees that unless his greed for islands
is quenched he is for ever lost. With gloaming he steals out of
the house, his library bulging beneath his palpitating waistcoat.
I follow like his shadow, as indeed I am, and watch him dig a
hole in a field at Pathhead farm and bury his islands in it; it
was ages ago, but I could walk straight to that hole in the field
now and delve for the remains. I peep into the next compartment.
There he is again, ten years older, and undergraduate now and
craving to be a real explorer, one of those who do things instead
of prating of them, but otherwise unaltered; he might be painted
at twenty on top of a mast, in his hand a spy-glass through which
he rakes the horizon for an elusive strand. I go from room to
room, and he is now a man, real exploration abandoned (though
only because no one would have him). Soon he is even concocting
other plays, and quaking a little lest some low person counts
how many islands there are in them. I note that with the years
the islands grow more sinister, but it is only because he has
now to write with the left hand, the right having given out; evidently
one thinks more darkly down the left arm. go to the keyhole of
the compartment where he and I join up, and you may see us wondering
whether they would stand one more island. This journey through
the house may not convince any one that I wrote Peter, but it
does suggest me as a likely person. I pause to ask myself whether
I read Chatterbox again, suffered the old agony, and buried that
MS. of the play in a hole in a field.
Of course this is over-charged. Perhaps we do change; except
a little something in us which is no larger than a mote in the
eye, and that, like it, dances in front of us beguiling us all
our days. I cannot cut the hair by which it hangs.
The strongest evidence that I am the author is to be found, I
think, in a now melancholy volume, the aforementioned The Boy
Castaways; so you must excuse me for parading that work here.
Officer of the Court, call The Boy Castaways. The witness steps
forward and proves to be a book you remember well though you have
not glanced at it these many years. I pulled it out of a bookcase
just now not without difficulty, for its recent occupation has
been to support the shelf above. I suppose, though I am uncertain,
that it was I and not you who hammered it into that place of utility.
It is a little battered and bent after the manner of those who
shoulder burdens, and ought (to our shame) to remind us of the
witnesses who sometimes get an hour off from the cells to give
evidence before his Lordship. I have said that it is the rarest
of my printed works, as it must be, for the only edition was limited
to two copies, of which one (there was always some devilry in
any matter connected with Peter) instantly lost itself in a railway
carriage. This is the survivor. The idlers in court may have assumed
that it is a handwritten screed, and are impressed by its bulk.
It is printed by Constable’s (how handsomely you did us,
dear Blaikie), it contains thirty-five illustrations and is bound
in cloth with a picture stamped on the cover of the three eldest
of you ‘setting out to be wrecked.’ This record is
supposed to be edited by the youngest of the three, and I must
have granted him that honour to make up for his being so often
lifted bodily out of our adventures by his nurse, who kept breaking
into them for the fell purpose of giving him a midday rest. No.
4 [Michael] rested so much at this period that he was merely an
honorary member of the band, waving his foot to you for luck when
you set off with bow and arrow to shoot his dinner for him; and
one may rummage the book in vain for any trace of No. 5 [Nico].
Here is the title-page, except that you are numbered instead of
named –
THE BOY
CASTAWAYS
OF BLACK LAKE ISLAND
Being a record of the Terrible
Adventures of Three Brothers
in the summer of 1901
faithfully set forth
by No. 3.
LONDON
Published by J. M. Barrie
in the Gloucester Road
1901
There is a long preface by No. 3 in which we gather your ages
at this first flight. ‘No. 1 was eight and a month, No.
2 was approaching his seventh lustrum, and I was a good bit past
four.’ Of his two elders, while commending their fearless
dispositions, the editor complains that they wanted to do all
the shooting and carried the whole equipment of arrows inside
their shirts. he is attractively modest about himself, ‘Of
No. 3 I prefer to say nothing, hoping that the tale as it is unwound
will show that he was a boy of deeds rather than of words,’
a quality which he hints did not unduly protrude upon the brows
of Nos. 1 and 2. His preface ends on a high note, ‘I should
say that the work was in the first instance compiled as a record
simply at which we could whet our memories, and that it is now
published for No. 4’s benefit. If it teaches him by example
lessons in fortitude and manly endurance we shall consider that
we were not wrecked in vain.’
Published to whet your memories. Does it whet them? Do you hear
once more, like some long-forgotten whistle beneath your window
(Robb at dawn calling me to the fishing!) the not quite mortal
blows that still echo in some of the chapter headings? ‘Chapter
II, No. 1 teaches Wilkinson (his master) a Stern Lesson--We Run
away to Sea. Chapter III, A Fearful Hurricane – Wreck of
the Anna Pink – We go crazy from Want of Food – Proposal
to eat No. 3 – Land Ahoy.’ Such are two chapters out
of sixteen. Are these again your javelins cutting tunes in the
blue haze of the pines; do you sweat as you scale the dreadful
Valley of Rolling Stones, and cleanse your hands of pirate blood
by scouring them carelessly in Mother Earth? Can you still make
a fire (you could do it once, Mr. Seton-Thompson taught us in,
surely an odd place, the Reform Club) by rubbing those sticks
together? Was it the travail of hut-building that subsequently
advised Peter to find a ‘home under the ground’? The
bottle and mugs in that lurid picture, ‘Last night on the
Island,’ seem to suggest that you had changed from Lost
Boys into pirates, which was probably also a tendency of Peter’s.
Listen again to our stolen saw-mill, man’s proudest invention;
when he made the saw-mill he beat the birds for music in a wood.
The illustrations (full-paged) in The Boy Castaways are all photographs
taken by myself; some of them indeed of phenomena that had to
be invented afterwards, for you were always off doing the wrong
things when I pressed the button. I see that we combined instruction
with amusement; perhaps we had given our kingly word to that effect.
How otherwise account for such wording to the pictures as these:
‘It is undoubtedly,’ says No. 1 in a fir tree that
is bearing unwonted fruit, recently tied to it, ‘the Cocos
nucifera, for observe the slender columns supporting the crown
of leaves which fall with a grace that no art can imitate.’
‘Truly,’ continues No. 1 under the same tree in another
forest as he leans upon his trusty gun, ‘though the perils
of these happenings are great, yet would I rejoice to endure still
greater privations to be thus rewarded by such wondrous studies
of Nature.’ He is soon back to the practical, however, ‘recognising
the Mango (Magnifera indica) by its lancet-shaped leaves and the
cucumber-shaped fruit.’ No. 1 was certainly the right sort
of voyager to be wrecked with, though if my memory fails me not,
No. 2, to whom these strutting observations were addressed, sometimes
protested because none of them was given to him. No. 3 being the
author is in surprisingly few of the pictures, but this, you may
remember, was because the lady already darkly referred to used
to pluck him from our midst for his siesta at 12 o’clock,
which was the hour that best suited the camera. With a skill on
which he has never been complimented the photographer sometimes
got No. 3 nominally included in a wild-life picture when he was
really in a humdrum house kicking on the sofa. Thus in a scene
representing Nos. 1 and 2 sitting scowling outside the hut it
is untruly written that they scowled because ‘their brother
was within singing and playing on a barbaric instrument. The music,’
the unseen No. 3 is represented as saying (obviously forestalling
No. 1), ‘is rude and to a cultured ear discordant, but the
songs like those of the Arabs are full of poetic imagery.’
He was perhaps allowed to say this sulkily on the sofa.
Though The Boy Castaways has sixteen chapter-headings, there
is no other letterpress; an absence which possible purchasers
might complain of, though there are surely worse ways of writing
a book than this. These headings anticipate much of the play of
Peter Pan, but there were many incidents of our Kensington Gardens
days that never got into the book, such as our Antarctic exploits
when we reached the Pole in advance of our friend Captain Scott
and cut our initials on it for him to find, a strange foreshadowing
of what was really to happen. In The Boy Castaways Captain Hook
has arrived but is called Captain Swarthy, and he seems from the
pictures to have been a black man. This character, as you do not
need to be told, is held by those in the know to be autobiographical.
You had many tussles with him (though you never, I think, got
his right arm) before you reached the terrible chapter (which
might be taken from the play) entitled ‘We Board the Pirate
Ship at Dawn – A Rakish Craft – No. 1 Hew-them-Down
and No. 2 of the Red Hatchet – A Holocaust of Pirates –
Rescue of Peter.’ (Hullo, Peter rescued instead of rescuing
others? I know what that means and so do you, but we are not going
to give away all our secrets.) The scene of the Holocaust is the
Black Lake (afterwards, when we let women in, the Mermaids’
Lagoon). The pirate captain’s end was not in the mouth of
a crocodile though we had crocodiles on the spot (‘while
No. 2 was removing the crocodiles from the stream No. 1 shot a
few parrots, Psittacidae, for our evening meal’). I think
our captain had divers deaths owing to unseemly competition among
you, each wanting to slay him single-handed. On a special occasion,
such as when No. 3 pulled out the tooth himself, you gave the
deed to him, but took it from him while he rested. The only pictorial
representation in the book of Swarthy’s fate is in two parts.
In one, called briefly ‘We string him up,’ Nos. 1
and 2, stern as Athos, are hauling him up a tree by a rope, his
face snarling as if it were a grinning mask (which indeed it was),
and his garments very like some of my own stuffed with bracken.
The other, the same scene next day, is called ‘The Vultures
had Picked him Clean,’ and tells its own tale.
The dog in The Boy Castaways seems never to have been called
Nana but was evidently in training for that post. He originally
belonged to Swarthy (or to Captain Marryat?), and the first picture
of him, lean, skulking, and hunched (how did I get that effect?),
‘patrolling the island’ in that monster’s interests,
gives little indication of the domestic paragon he was to become.
We lured him away to the better life, and there is, later, a touching
picture, a clear forecast of the Darling nursery, entitled ‘We
trained the dog to watch over us while we slept.’ In this
he also is sleeping, in a position that is a careful copy of his
charges; indeed any trouble we had with him was because, once
he knew he was in a story, he thought his safest course was to
imitate you in everything you did. How anxious he was to show
that he understood the game, and more generous than you, he never
pretended that he was the one who killed Captain Swarthy. I must
not imply that he was entirely without initiative, for it was
his own idea to bark warningly a minute or two before twelve o’clock
as a signal to No. 3 that his keeper was probably on her way for
him (Disappearance of No. 3); and he became so used to living
in the world of Pretend that when we reached the hut of a morning
he was often there waiting for us, looking, it is true, rather
idiotic, but with a new bark he had invented which puzzled us
until we decided that he was demanding the password. He was always
willing to do any extra jobs, such as becoming the tiger in mask,
and when after a fierce engagement you carried home that mask
in triumph, he joined in the procession proudly and never let
on that the trophy had ever been part of him. Long afterwards
he saw the play from a box in the theatre, and as familiar scenes
were unrolled before his eyes I have never seen a dog so bothered.
At one matinee we even let him for a moment take the place of
the actor who played Nana, and I don’t know that any members
of the audience ever noticed the change, though he introduced
some ‘business’ that was new to them but old to you
and me. Heigh-ho, I suspect that in this reminiscence I am mixing
him up with his successor, for such a one there had to be, the
loyal Newfoundland who, perhaps in the following year, applied,
so to say, for the part by bringing hedgehogs to the hut in his
mouth as offerings for our evening repasts. The head and coat
of him were copied for the Nana of the play.
They do seem to be emerging out of our island, don’t they,
the little people of the play, all except that sly one, the chief
figure, who draws farther and farther into the wood as we advance
upon him? He so dislikes being tracked, as if there were something
odd about him, that when he dies he means to get up and blow away
the particle that will be his ashes.
Wendy has not yet appeared, but she has been trying to come ever
since that loyal nurse cast the humorous shadow of woman upon
the scene and made us feel that it might be fun to let in a disturbing
element. Perhaps she would have bored her way in at last whether
we wanted her or not. It may be that even Peter did not really
bring her to the Never Land of hi free will, but merely pretended
to do so because she would not stay away. Even Tinker Bell had
reached our island before we left it. It was one evening when
we climbed the wood carrying No. 4 to show him what the trail
was like by twilight. As our lanterns twinkled among the leaves
No. 4 saw a twinkle stand still for a moment and he waved his
foot gaily to it, thus creating Tink. It must not be thought,
however, that there were any other sentimental passages between
No. 4 and Tink; indeed, as he got to know her better he suspected
her of frequenting the hut to see what we had been having for
supper, and to partake of the same, and he pursued her with malignancy.
A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force
open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular
you don’t find it, but something falls out at the back that
is often more interesting. It is in this way that I get my desultory
reading, which includes the few stray leaves of the original MS.
of Peter that I have said I do possess, though even they, when
returned to the drawer, are gone again, as if that touch of devilry
lurked in them still. They show that in early days I hacked at
and added to the play. In the drawer I find some scraps of Mr.
Crook’s delightful music, and other incomplete matter relating
to Peter. Here is the reply of a boy whom I favoured with a seat
in my box and injudiciously asked at the end what he had liked
best. ‘What I think I liked best,’ he said, ‘was
tearing up the programme and dropping the bits on people’s
heads.’ Thus am I often laid low. A copy of my favourite
programme of the play is still in the drawer. In the first or
second year of Peter No. 4 could not attend through illness, so
we took the play to his nursery, far away in the country, an array
of vehicles almost as glorious as a travelling circus; the leading
parts were played by the youngest children in the London company,
and No. 4, aged five, looked on solemnly at the performance from
his bed and never smiled once. That was my first and only appearance
on the real stage, and this copy of the programme shows I was
thought so meanly of as an actor that they printed my name in
smaller letters than the others.
I have said little here of Nos. 4 and 5, and it is high time
I had finished. They had a long summer day, and I turn round twice
and now they are off to school. On Monday, as it seems, I was
escorting No. 5 to a children’s party and brushing his hair
in the ante-room; and by Thursday he is placing me against the
wall of an underground station and saying, ‘Now I am going
to get the tickets; don’t move till I come back for you
or you’ll lose yourself.’ No. 4 jumps from being astride
my shoulders fishing, I knee-deep in the stream, to becoming,
while still a schoolboy, the sternest of my literary critics.
Anything he shook his head over I abandoned, and conceivably the
world has thus been deprived of masterpieces. There was for instance
an unfortunate little tragedy which I liked until I foolishly
told No. 4 its subject, when he frowned and said he had better
have a look at it. He read it, and then, patting me on the back,
as only he and No. 1 could touch me, said, ‘You know you
can’t do this sort of thing.’ End of a tragedian.
Sometimes, however, No. 4 liked my efforts, and I walked in the
azure that day when he returned Dear Brutus to me with the comment
‘Not so bad.’ In earlier days, when he was ten, I
offered him the MS. of my book Margaret Ogilvy. ‘Oh, thanks,’
he said almost immediately, and added, ‘Of course my desk
is awfully full.’ I reminded him that he could take out
some of its more ridiculous contents. He said, ‘I have read
it already in the book.’ This I had not known, and I was
secretly elated, but I said that people sometimes liked to preserve
this kind of thing as a curiosity. He said ‘Oh’ again.
I said tartly that he was not compelled to take it if he didn’t
want it. He said, ‘Of course I want it, but my desk ––
’ Then he wriggled out of the room and came back in a few
minutes dragging in No. 5 and announcing triumphantly, ‘No.
5 will have it.’
The rebuffs I have got from all of you! They were especially
crushing in those early days when one by one you came out of your
belief in fairies and lowered on me as the deceiver. My grandest
triumpth, the best thing in the play of Peter Pan (though it is
not in it), is that long after No. 4 had ceased to believe, I
brought him back to the faith for at least two minutes. We were
on our way in a boat to fish the Outer Hebrides (where we caught
Mary Rose), and though it was a journey of days he wore his fishing
basket on his back all the time, so as to be able to begin at
once. His one pain was the absence of Johnny Mackay, for Johnny
was the loved gillie of the previous summer who had taught him
everything that is worth knowing (which is a matter of flies)
but could not be with us this time as he would have had to cross
and re-cross Scotland to reach us. As the boat drew near the Kyle
of Localsh pier I told Nos. 4 and 5 it was such a famous wishing
pier that they had now but to wish and they should have. No. 5
believed at once and expressed a wish to meet himself (I afterwards
found him on the pier searching faces confidently), but No. 4
thought it more of my untimely nonsense and doggedly declined
to humour me. ‘Whom do you want to see most, No. 4?’
‘Of course I would like most to see Johnny Mackay.’
‘Well, then, wish for him.’ ‘Oh, rot.’
‘It can’t do any harm to wish.’ Contemptuously
he wished, and as the ropes were thrown on the pier he saw Johnny
waiting for him, loaded with angling paraphernalia. I know no
one less like a fairy than Johnny Mackay, but for two minutes
No. 4 was quivering in another world than ours. When he came to
he gave me a smile which meant that we understood each other,
and thereafter neglected me for a month, being always with Johnny.
As I have said, this episode is not in the play; so though I dedicate
Peter Pan to you I keep the smile, with the few other broken fragments
of immortality that have come my way. |
