Peter Pan & Other Magical Adventures For Children - 10 Classic Fantasy Books in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). J. M. Barrie

strike at their friends, SLIGHTLY getting TOOTLES in the fourth rib while he himself is pinked by CURLY. It looks as if the boys were getting the worse of it, which is perhaps just as well at this point, because PETER, who will be the determining factor in the end, has a perplexing way of changing sides if he is winning too easily. HOOK'S iron claw makes a circle of black water round him from which opponents flee like fishes. There is only one prepared to enter that dreadful circle. His name is PAN. Strangely, it is not in the water that they meet. HOOK has risen tothe rock to breathe, and at the same moment PETER scales it on the opposite side. The rock is now wet and as slippery as a ball, and they have to crawl rather than climb. Suddenly they are face to face. PETER gnashes his pretty teeth with joy, and is gathering himself for the spring when he sees he is higher up the rock than his foe. Courteously he waits; HOOK sees his intention, and taking advantage of it claws twice. PETER is untouched, but unfairness is what he never can get used to, and in his bewilderment he rolls off the rock. The crocodile, whose tick has been drowned in the strife, rears its jaws, and HOOK, who has almost stepped into them, is pursued by it to land. All is quiet on the lagoon now, not a sound save little waves nibbling at the rock, which is smaller than when we last looked at it. Two boys appear with the dinghy, and the others despite their wounds climb into it. They send the cry 'Peter—Wendy' across the waters, but no answer comes.)

      NIBS. They must be swimming home.

      JOHN. Or flying.

      FIRST TWIN. Yes, that is it. Let us be off and call to them as we go.

      (The dinghy disappears with its load, whose hearts would sink it if they knew of the peril of WENDY and her captain. From near and far away come the cries 'Peter—Wendy' till we no longer hear them.

      Two small figures are now on the rock, but they have fainted. A mermaid who has dared to come back in the stillness stretches up her arms and is slowly pullingWENDY into the water to drown her. WENDY starts up just in time.)

      WENDY. Peter! (He rouses himself and looks around him.) Where are we, Peter?

      PETER. We are on the rock, but it is getting smaller. Soon the water will be over it. Listen!

      (They can hear the wash of the relentless little waves.)

      WENDY. We must go.

      PETER. Yes.

      WENDY. Shall we swim or fly?

      PETER. Wendy, do you think you could swim or fly to the island without me?

      WENDY. You know I couldn't, Peter, I am just a beginner.

      PETER. Hook wounded me twice. (He believes it; he is so good at pretend that he feels the pain, his arms hang limp.) I can neither swim nor fly.

      WENDY. Do you mean we shall both be drowned?

      PETER. Look how the water is rising!

      (They cover their faces with their hands. Something touches WENDY as lightly as a kiss.)

      PETER (with little interest). It must be the tail of the kite we made for Michael; you remember it tore itself outof his hands and floated away. (He looks up and sees the kite sailing overhead.) The kite! Why shouldn't it carry you? (He grips the tail and pulls, and the kite responds.)

      WENDY. Both of us!

      PETER. It can't lift two, Michael and Curly tried.

      (She knows very well that if it can lift her it can lift him also, for she has been told by the boys as a deadly secret that one of the queer things about him is that he is no weight at all. But it is a forbidden subject.)

      WENDY. I won't go without you. Let us draw lots which is to stay behind.

      PETER. And you a lady, never! (The tail is in her hands, and the kite is tugging hard. She holds out her mouth to PETER, but he knows they cannot do that.) Ready, Wendy!

      (The kite draws her out of sight across the lagoon. The waters are lapping over the rock now, and PETER knows that it will soon be submerged. Pale rays of light mingle with the moving clouds, and from the coral grottoes is to be heard a sound, at once the most musical and the most melancholy in the Never Land, the mermaids calling to the moon to rise. PETER is afraid at last, and a tremor runs through him, like a shudder passing over the lagoon; but on the lagoon one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and he feels just the one.)

      PETER (with a drum beating in his breast as if he were a real boy at last). To die will be an awfully big adventure.

      (The blind rises again, and the lagoon is now suffused with moonlight. He is on the rock still, but the water is over his feet. The nest is borne nearer, and the bird, after cooing a message to him, leaves it and wings her way upwards. PETER, who knows the bird language, slips into the nest, first removing the two eggs and placing them in STARKEY'S hat, which has been left on the stave.The hat drifts away from the rock, but he uses the stave as a mast. The wind is driving him toward the open sea. He takes off his shirt, which he had forgotten to remove while bathing, and unfurls it as a sail. His vessel tacks, and he passes from sight, naked and victorious. The bird returns and sits on the hat.)

      Act IV.

       The Home Under the Ground

       Table of Contents

      We see simultaneously the home under the ground, with the children in it and the wood above ground with the redskins on it. Below, the children are gobbling their evening meal; above, the redskins are squatting in their blankets near the little house guarding the children from the pirates. The only way of communicating between these two parties is by means of the hollow trees.

      The home has an earthen floor, which is handy for digging in if you want to go fishing; and owing to there being so many entrances there is not much wall space. The table at which the lost ones are sitting is a board on top of a live tree trunk, which has been cut flat but has such growing pains that the board rises as they eat, and they have sometimes to pause in their meals to cut a bit more off the trunk. Their seats are pumpkins or the large gay mushrooms of which we have seen an imitation one concealing the chimney. There is an enormous fireplace which is in almost any part of the room where you care to light it, and across this Wendy has stretched strings, made of fibre, from which she hangs her washing. There are also various tomfool things in the room of no use whatever.

      Michaels basket bed is nailed high up on the wall as if to protect him from the cat, but there is no indication at present of where the others sleep. At the back between two of the tree trunks is a grindstone, and near it is a lovely hole, the size of a band-box, with a gay curtain drawn across so that you cannot see what is inside. This is Tink's withdrawing-room and bed-chamber, and it is just as well that you cannot see inside, for it is so exquisite in its decoration and in the personal apparel spread out on the bed that you could scarcely resist making off with something. Tink is within at present, as one can guess from a glow showing through the chinks. It is her own glow, for though she has a chandelier for the look of the thing, of course she lights her residence herself. She is probably wasting valuable time just now wondering whether to put on the smoky blue or the apple-blossom.

      All the boys except Peter are here, and Wendy has the head of the table, smiling complacently at their captivating ways, but doing her best at the same time to see that they keep the rules about hands-off-the-table, no-two-to-speak-at-once, and so on. She is wearing romantic woodland garments, sewn by herself, with red berries in her hair which go charmingly with her complexion, as she knows; indeed she searched for red berries the morning after she reached the island. The boys are in picturesque attire of her contrivance, and if these don't always fit well the fault is not hers but the wearers, for they constantly put on each other's things when they put on anything at all. Michael is in his cradle on the wall. First Twin is apart on a high stool and wears a dunce's cap, another invention of Wendy's, but not wholly successful because everybody wants to be dunce.

      It is a pretend meal this evening, with nothing whatever on the table, not a mug, nor a crust, nor a spoon. They often have these suppers and like them on occasions