The Real Peter Pan Read Free Page A

The sun has gone, but the moon has not come. What has come is a cold shiver across the waters which has sent all the wiser mermaids to their coral recesses. They know that evil is creeping over the lagoon.
    Peter of course is the first to scent it … The pirates are coming. (This is the moment for Hook and Peter.)
    HOOK ‘Pan! Into the water, Smee. Starkey, mind the boat. Take him dead or alive!’
    The fight is short and sharp … 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 to the 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. Allis 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’.
    When their voices die away there comes cold silence over the lagoon, and then a feeble cry.
    ‘Help, help!’
    Two small figures are beating against the rock; the girl has fainted and lies on the boy’s arm. With a last effort Peter pulls her up the rock and then lies down beside her. Even as he also faints he sees that the water is rising. He knows that they will soon be drowned, but he can do no more.
    As they lay side by side a mermaid who had dared to come back in the stillness stretches up her arms and begins slowly pulling Wendy into the water to drown her. Peter, feeling her slip from him, wakes with a start, and is just in time to draw her back.
    Wendy rouses herself and looks around her. ‘Peter! Where are we, Peter?
    ‘We are on the rock, Wendy, but it is growing smaller. Soon the water will be over it. Listen!’ They can hear the wash of the relentless little waves.
    ‘I can’t help you, Wendy. Hook wounded me. I can neither fly nor swim.’
    ‘Do you mean we shall both be drowned?’
    ‘Look how the water is rising.’
    They put their hands over their eyes to shut out the sight. They think they will soon be no more. As they sit there something brushes against Peter as light as a kiss, and stays there, as if saying timidly, ‘Can I be of any use?’ It is the tail of a kite, which Michael had made some days before. It had torn itself out of his hand and floated away.
    ‘Michael’s kite,’ Peter says without interest, but next moment he has seized the tail, and is pulling the kite toward him.
    ‘It lifted Michael off the ground,’ he cries. ‘Why should it not carry you?’
    ‘Both of us!’
    ‘It can’t lift two; Michael and Curly tried.’
    Wendy knows that if it can lift her it can also lift Peter too, for she has the secret from the boys – Peter is no weight at all. But it is a deadly secret…
    ‘Let us draw lots,’ Wendy says bravely.
    ‘And you a lady; never.’
    Already he had tied the tail round her. She clings to him; she refuses to go without him; but with a ‘Good-bye, Wendy,’ he pushes her from the rock; and in a few minutes she is borne out of sight.
    Peter is alone on the lagoon, but with something much more exciting in mind than flying to safety on a kite string.
    The waters are lapping over the rock now, and Peter is aware that it will soon be submerged. Pale rays of light mingle with