The Real Peter Pan Read Online Free Page B

her babe, but the whole thing entranced him; he tried to keep his excitement down by taking huge draughts of water; he forgot all his niceties of conduct; he sat in holy rapture with the toy between his paws, took it to bed with him, ate it in the night, and searched for it so longingly next day that I had to go out and buy him the man with the scythe…
    The dame in the temple of toys which we frequent thinks I want them for a little boy and calls him ‘the precious’ and ‘the lamb’, the while Porthos is standing gravely by my side. She is a motherly soul, but over-talkative.
    ‘And how is the dear lamb today?’ she begins, beaming.
    ‘Well, ma’am, well,’ I say, keeping tight grip on his collar.
    ‘This blighty weather is not affecting his darling appetite?’
    ‘No, ma’am, not at all.’ (She would be considerably surprised if informed that he dined today on a sheepshead, a loaf, and three cabbages, and is suspected of a leg of mutton.)
    ‘I hope he loves his toys.’
    ‘He carries them about with him everywhere, ma’am.’ (Has the one we bought yesterday with him now, though you might not think it to look at him.)
    ‘What do you say to a box of tools this time?’
    ‘I think not, ma’am.’
    ‘Is the deary fond of digging?’
    ‘Very partial to digging.’ (We shall find the leg of mutton some day.)
    ‘Then perhaps a weeny spade and pail?’
    Once Porthos was let off his leash in the gardens, his master would play with him, and soon children would gather round to watch. The huge dog, up on his hind legs, was as tall as the little man in thebowler hat. Man and dog boxed, circled, and stopped to go off running, then walked on again to play hide-and-seek among the trees.
    Pamela Maude, daughter of West End actors Cyril Maude and Winifred Emery, who were starring at the time in Barrie’s hit play The Little Minister remembered: ‘Mr Barrie had a pale face and large eyes and shadows round them; he looked fragile. But he was strong when he wrestled with Porthos.’
    But then all of a sudden he’d stop and become like ordinary people again and make jerky jokes or do tricks with match-boxes or talk about cricket. He tried to show Pamela’s sister Margery how to bowl and to bat, but she always refused to learn; she stood with a stubborn look on her face and her hands on her hips. ‘I am a girl,’ she said, ‘and girls don’t play crickets.’
    Mr Barrie’s face showed he thought girls were stupid.
    Pamela remembered that his wife Mary ‘was lovely’.
    Her cheeks were the colour of a wild rose and we liked to stare at her. She wore pretty clothes that seemed different to those worn by other people, dresses in brown and green that some woodland fairy-lady could have worn. She made us think of the Flower Ladies in our books, which were illustrated by Walter Crane – she was ‘Queen Summer’. But we could not feel at ease with her. She did not talk to us and she never smiled when we were with her.
    Mary, the daughter of a licensed victualler and a woman who kept a boarding house on the south coast, had given up a promising career in the theatre to become Barrie’s wife. She had even had her own company at one time. The sight of children about her husband soon began to arouse mixed feelings. ‘I am not quite happy with them,’ she wrote with honesty.
    Something about them puts me off, their humanness to tell the truth. They are little people. I have never been really happy with people. Some constraint tightens me up when I am with them. They seem so inside themselves, so unwilling to reveal their real selves. I am always asking for something they won’t give me; I try to pierce into their reserves; sometimes I feel I am succeeding, but they close in again, and I am left outside.
    Truth was that Mary far preferred dogs to children. ‘An animal is so helplessly itself … perhaps my love for the dogs, in the beginning, was a sort of mother-love…’
    Few had much either good or bad to say