Peter Pan 7

Tonight, I am reading Peter Pan by James Matthew Barrie. Chapter 7, "The Home Under The Ground," describes the individual houses Peter Pan makes for The Darlings. This audio is perfect for children or adults who want to relax, discover magic, or embark on an adventure before a great night's sleep.

Transcript

Chapter 7.

The Home Under the Ground One of the first things Peter did next day was to measure Wendy and John and Michael for hollow trees.

Hook,

You remember,

Had sneered at the boys for thinking they needed a tree apiece,

But this was ignorance,

For unless your tree fitted you,

It was difficult to go up and down,

And no two of the boys were quite the same size.

Once you fitted,

You drew in your breath at the top,

And down you went at exactly the right speed,

While to ascend you drew in and let out alternately,

And so wriggled up.

Of course,

When you have mastered the action,

You are able to do things without thinking of them,

And nothing can be more graceful.

But you simply must fit,

And Peter measures you for your tree as carefully as for a suit of clothes,

The only difference being that the clothes are made to fit you,

While you have to be made to fit the tree.

Usually,

It is done quite easily,

As by your wearing too many garments or too few,

But if you are bumpy in awkward places,

Or the only available tree is an odd shape,

Peter does some things to you,

And after that you fit.

Once you fit,

Great care must be taken to go on fitting,

And this,

As Wendy was to discover to her delight,

Keeps a whole family in perfect condition.

Wendy and Michael fitted their trees at the first try,

But John had to be altered a little.

After a few days' practice,

They could go up and down as gaily as buckets in a well,

And how ardently they grew to love their home under the ground,

Especially Wendy.

It consisted of one large room,

As all houses should do,

With a floor in which you can dig if you wanted to go fishing,

And in this floor grew stout mushrooms of a charming color,

Which were used as stools.

Another tree tried hard to grow in the center of the room,

But every morning they sawed the trunk through,

Level with the floor.

By tea time it was always about two feet high,

And then they could put a door on top of it,

The whole thus becoming a table.

As soon as they cleared away,

They sawed off the trunk again,

And thus there was more room to play.

There was an enormous fireplace which was in almost any part of the room where you cared to light it,

And across this Wendy stretched strings made of fiber from which she suspended her washing.

The bed was tilted against the wall by day and let down at 6.

30 when it filled nearly half the room,

And all the boys slept in it except Michael,

Lying like sardines in a tin.

There was a strict rule against turning round until one gave the signal when all turned at once.

Michael should have used it also,

But Wendy would have a baby,

And he was the littlest,

And you know how women are,

And the short and long of it is that he was hung up in a basket.

It was rough and simple,

And not unlike what baby bears would have been made of an underground house of the same circumstances,

But there was one recess in the wall,

No larger than a birdcage,

Which was the private apartment of Tinkerbell.

It could be shut off from the rest of the house by a tiny curtain,

Which Tink,

Who was most fastidious,

Always kept drawn when dressing or undressing.

No woman,

However large,

Could have had a more exquisite boudoir and bedchamber combined.

The couch,

As she always called it,

Was a genuine queen mab,

With club legs,

And she varied the bedspreads according to what fruit blossom was in the season.

Her mirror was a Puss in Boots,

Of which there are only three,

Unchipped,

Known to fairy dealers.

The washstand was pie-crust and reversible,

The chest of drawers an authentic Charming VI,

And the carpet and rugs the best,

The early period of Marjorie and Robin.

There was a chandelier from Tiddlywinks for the look of the thing,

But of course she lit the residence herself.

Tink was very contemptuous of the rest of the house,

As indeed was perhaps inevitable,

And her chamber,

Though beautiful,

Looked rather conceited,

Having the appearance of a nose permanently turned up.

I suppose it was all especially entrancing to Wendy,

Because those rampageous boys of hers gave her so much to do.

Really there were whole weeks when,

Except perhaps with the stocking in the evening,

She was never above ground.

The cooking,

I can tell you,

Kept her nose to the pot,

And even if there was nothing in it,

Even if there was no pot,

She had to keep watching that it came a-boil just the same.

You never exactly knew whether there would be a real meal or just a make-believe meal.

It all depended upon Peter's whim.

He could eat,

Really eat,

If it was part of a game.

But he could not stodge just to feel stodgy,

Which is what most children like better than anything else.

The next best thing being to talk about it.

Make-believe was so real to him that during a meal of it,

You could see him getting rounder.

Of course it was trying,

But you simply had to follow his lead,

And if you could prove to him that you were getting loose for your tree,

He let you stodge.

Wendy's favorite time for sewing and darning was after they'd all gone to bed.

Then as she expressed it,

She had a breathing time for herself,

And she occupied it making new things for them,

And putting double pieces on the knees,

For they were almost frightfully hard on their knees.

When she sat down to a basket full of their stockings,

Every heel had a hole in it.

She would fling up her arms and exclaim,

Oh dear,

I am sure I sometimes think spinsters are to be envied.

Her face beamed when she exclaimed this.

You remember about her pet wolf?

Well,

It very soon discovered that she had come to the island and it found her out,

And they just ran into each other's arms.

After that it followed her about everywhere.

As time wore on,

She did think much about the beloved parents she had left behind her.

This is a difficult question,

Because it is quite impossible to say how much time does wear on in Neverland,

Where it is calculated by moons and suns,

And there are ever so many more of them than on the mainland.

But I am afraid that Wendy did not really worry about her father and mother.

She was absolutely confident that they would always keep the window open for her to fly back in,

And this gave her complete ease of mind.

What did disturb her at times was that John remembered his parents vaguely only,

As people he had once known,

While Michael was quite willing to believe that she really was his mother.

These things scared her a little,

And nobly anxious to do her duty,

She tried to fix the old life in their minds by setting them examination papers on it,

As like as possible to the one she used to do at school.

The other boys thought this awfully interesting and insisted on joining,

And they made slates for themselves,

And sat around the table,

Writing and thinking hard about the questions she had written on another slate and passed around.

They were the most ordinary questions.

What was the color of mother's eyes?

Which was taller,

Father or mother?

Was mother blonde or brunette?

Answer all three questions if possible.

A.

Write an essay of not less than 40 words on how I spent my last holidays,

Or the characters of father and mother compared.

Only one of these is to be attempted,

Or 1.

Describe mother's laugh,

2.

Describe father's laugh,

3.

Describe mother's party dress,

4.

Describe the kennel and its inmate.

They were just everyday questions like these,

And when you could not answer them you were told to make a cross,

And it was really dreadful that a number of crosses even John made.

Of course the only boy who replied to every question was Slightly,

And no one could have been more hopeful of coming out first,

But his answers were perfectly ridiculous,

And he really came out last,

A melancholy thing.

Peter did not compete.

For one thing he despised all mothers except Wendy,

And for another he was the only boy on the island who could not write nor spell.

Not the smallest word,

He was above all of that sort of thing.

By the way,

The questions were all written in the past tense.

What was the color of mother's eyes,

And so on?

Wendy,

You see,

Had been forgetting too.

Adventures,

Of course,

As we shall see,

Were of daily occurrence,

But about this time Peter invented,

With Wendy's help,

A new game that fascinated him enormously,

Until he suddenly had no more interest in it,

Which,

As you've been told,

Was what always happened with his games.

It consisted in pretending not to have adventures,

And doing the sort of thing John and Michael had been doing all their lives,

Sitting on stools flinging balls in the air,

Pushing each other,

Going out for walks and coming back without even seeing so much as a grizzly.

To see Peter doing nothing on a stool was a great sight.

He could not help looking solemn at such times.

To sit still seemed to him such a comic thing to do.

He boasted that he'd gone walking for the good of his health.

For several sons,

These were the most novel of all adventures to him,

And John and Michael had to pretend to be delighted also,

Otherwise he would have treated them severely.

He often went out alone,

And when he came back,

You were never absolutely certain whether he'd had an adventure or not.

He might have forgotten it completely that he said nothing about it.

Sometimes he came home with his head bandaged,

And when Wendy cooed over him and bathed it in lukewarm water while he told a dazzling tale,

But she never was quite sure,

You know.

There were,

However,

Many adventures which she knew to be true because she was in them herselves,

And then there were still more that were at least partly true,

For the other boys were in them,

And they said they were wholly true.

To describe them all would require a large book,

As large as the English-Latin,

Latin-English dictionary,

And the most we can do is to give one as a specimen of an average hour on the island.

The difficulty is which one to choose.

We might tell how Peter saved Tiger Lily's life in the Mermaid's Lagoon and so made her his ally,

Or we could tell of the cake the pirates cooked so that the boys might eat it and get sick,

And how they placed it in one cunning spot after another,

But always Wendy snatched it from the hands of her children so that,

In time,

It lost its succulents and became as hard as a stone,

And was used as a missile,

And Hook fell over it in the dark.

Or suppose we tell of the birds that were Peter's friends,

Particularly of the neverbird that built in a tree overhanging the lagoon,

And how the nest fell in the water,

And still the bird sat on her eggs,

And Peter gave orders that she was not to be disturbed.

This was a pretty story,

And the end shows how grateful a bird can be,

But if we tell it,

We must also tell the whole adventure of the lagoon,

Which would of course be telling two adventures rather than just one.

A shorter adventure,

And quite as exciting,

Was Tinkerbell's attempt,

With the help of some street fairies,

To have the sleeping Wendy conveyed on a great floating leaf to the mainland.

Fortunately,

The leaf gave way and Wendy woke,

Thinking it was bath time,

And swam back.

Or again,

We might choose Peter's defiance of the lions,

When he drew a circle round them on the ground with an arrow,

And dared them to cross it.

And though he waited for hours,

With the other boys,

And Wendy looking on breathlessly from trees,

Not one of them dared to accept the challenge.

Which of these adventures shall we choose?

The best way will be to toss for it.

I have tossed,

And the lagoon has won.

This almost makes one wish that the gulch,

Or the cake,

Or Tink's leaf had won.

Of course,

I could do it again,

And make it best out of three,

However,

Perhaps fairest to stick to the lagoon.