9

1905–1906

By the spring of 1905, the Davies family had settled into a comfortable, almost idyllic existence at their new home in the country, Egerton House. Dolly Ponsonby went to visit them in February, writing in her diary:

‘Feb 13. [1905] To Berkhampstead to stay with Sylvia & Arthur. They have a beautiful Elizabethan house in a street: the outlook is dreary, but nothing could be more perfect than the inside, especially for so large a family. There are huge nurseries & a schoolroom with mullioned windows which occupy the whole length of the rooms – odd-shaped bedrooms with beams & sloping floors – & all so charmingly done as only Sylvia can do things, with harmonious chintzes & lovely bits of Chippendale furniture. It seems very ideal – a cheap school where the elder boys go & a kindergarten for Michael. … Spent a happy day with Sylvia, who is as dear as ever she was. I like to see her at luncheon at the head of her long table in the beautiful Hall with its huge windows & great 16th century chimney piece – serving food to 4 beautiful boys who all have perfect manners & are most agreeable companions, especially George. Arthur came down in the evening, looking handsome and severe.’

Arthur and his five sons in 1905. l to r: Jack (aged 10), Michael (5), Peter (8), George (12); Nico (1) is in his father's arms. In Peter and Wendy, Barrie described Peter Pan's anguish as he gazed at the Darling family reunited after the children's adventures in the Never Land: ‘There could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a strange boy who was staring in at the window. [Peter Pan] had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be for ever barred.’

Arthur was in no sense the typical Edwardian father of the Mr Darling variety. Dolly Ponsonby wrote of him, ‘He was so tender and gentle with children that I never met one who feared him, in spite of his rather severe though wonderful looks.’1 He never inflicted corporal punishment on his sons, and on the sole occasion when he was moved to curtail an excess of Jack's obstreperousness with a swift kick up his backside, he totally unmanned the boy by coming to him later in the day and apologizing for what he had done. In many ways, Arthur had a more parental instinct than Sylvia. Jack later gave his own wife the impression that ‘Sylvia wore her children as other women wore pearls or fox-furs. They were beautiful children, but beautiful as a background to her beauty. If one of the boys was ill, it was never Sylvia who held their heads or took their temperatures – it was always Arthur who did that kind of thing.’² Dolly Ponsonby recalled a passing fragment of conversation indicative of their priorities. ‘I remember a funny sort of conservatory through which you passed to go into the little garden – it was filled with plants and flowers by Sylvia. Mary [Hodgson] would put the prams there – and Sylvia said, “I do wish they wouldn't leave the prams here.” And Arthur said, “I think the prams are more beautiful than the flowers.”’³

Egerton House

Michael playing Romeo to Sylvia's Juliet at Dives (JMB)

Simplicity was one of Arthur's great virtues; considerable patience was another, for although he had put twenty-five miles between his family and Leinster Corner, Barrie had begun to make frequent visits to Egerton House. Nor was there any respite in his invitations to Sylvia and her boys. He had already taken Sylvia to Paris on several occasions, and at Easter 1905 he invited her to Dives, a fashionable resort on the Normandy coast. Arthur knew that Sylvia's character was more complex than his own. She had, in Peter's words, an ‘innate and underlying tendency towards melancholy, a constant awareness of the lacrimae rerum’,⁴ counterbalanced by an appetite for luxury that Arthur neither shared nor could hope to satisfy. She once teased his sister Margaret's socialist principles by exclaiming, ‘I should love to have money. I should like to have gold stays and a scented bed and real lace pillows!’ Barrie was in a position to gratify those whims. Denis Mackail wrote, ‘He was rich; in a way he was extraordinarily innocent; and if Sylvia Davies used him – which she was undoubtedly doing by this time – as a kind of extra nurse, extremely useful fairy-godmother, or sometimes even errand boy, it wasn't in her character to resist that amount of temptation. More, for her, never existed.’ Mary Hodgson later told Peter, ‘Your mother consented to go to France on condition that one or more of her boys should go with her. Your father was more than willing, where your mother's happiness was concerned.’ Jack and Michael therefore accompanied Sylvia to Dives, where Barrie entertained them in his own inimitable style. He bought Michael a costume so that he could photograph him playing Romeo to Sylvia's Juliet on the balcony of their hotel, then in the evenings took Sylvia to the Casino at Trouville, observing in his notebook: ‘Sylvia gambling – loses – gambles children.’

Jack, Michael, Barrie and Sylvia at L'Hostellerie de Guillaume Le Conquérant, Dives, in April 1905

While Barrie was away in France, Peter Pan ended its first run at the Duke of York's to make way for Alice Sit-by-the-Fire and a one-act curtain-raiser, Pantaloon. Alice had been the play offered to Frohman as collateral against any losses incurred in staging Peter Pan. The outcome was the exact reverse. Despite Ellen Terry's fine performance, Alice barely survived its run, whereas the demand for Peter Pan was such that Frohman confidently announced that it would re-open the following December, with advance bookings commencing in May.

The prospect of a Peter Pan revival, in addition to the forthcoming American production, afforded Barrie the opportunity of revising the play, and he went down to Black Lake in early June to work on it. Mary Barrie had gone to France on a motoring trip with her friend Molly Muir, and although E. V. Lucas and his family were staying at the cottage, Barrie felt in need of a boy's company to spur his creativity. He therefore invited Sylvia and Michael to stay for a fortnight.

The Allahakbarries Cricket Team at Black Lake in 1905, with Michael as their mascot. Back row, 1 to r: Maurice Hewlett, Barrie, Harry Graham, E. V. Lucas. Front row: H. J. Ford, A. E. W. Mason, Charles Tennyson, C. Turley Smith

Michael was now approaching his fifth birthday, and was, in Peter's opinion, ‘with his long curls just about at his most beautiful’. His mind still roamed freely in the wood of make-believe, which gave rise to a constant succession of nightmares that were to plague him throughout his boyhood. His cousin, Daphne du Maurier, remembered her own nanny telling her about these ‘terrible nightmares. She told me that Michael used to wake up and think he could see strange people and things coming in through the window, which probably stemmed from Peter Pan.’5 Unlike George and Jack, Michael had been brought up to believe in Peter Pan as other children believe in Father Christmas. He knew that ‘Uncle Jim’ (as he had now begun to call Barrie) had written a play about Peter, and that the Peter in the play was an actress pretending to be a boy, but he also knew that there was a real Peter Pan, who sometimes visited the woods at Black Lake. Michael had been scarcely a year old during ‘that strange and terrible summer’ of 1901, and this was his first opportunity to explore for himself the haunted groves, primeval forests and South Seas lagoon of The Boy Castaways. Barrie had begun to fear that he might have lost his touch with children; in Tommy and Grizel he had written of a father in not dissimilar circumstances, who is about to introduce his son to the haunts of his own childhood:

Michael and Barrie on the lawn at Black Lake, July 1905

‘To-morrow he was to bring his boy to show him the old lair and other fondly remembered spots, to-night he must revisit them alone. So he set out blithely, but to his bewilderment he could not find the lair. It had not been a tiny hollow where muddy water gathered, he remembered an impregnable fortress full of men whose armour rattled as they came and went, so this could not be the lair. He had taken the wrong way to it, for the way was across a lagoon, up a deep-flowing river, then by horse till the rocky ledge terrified all four-footed things; no, up a grassy slope had never been the way. He came night after night trying different ways, but he could not find the golden ladder, though all the time he knew that the lair lay somewhere over there. … Then at last he said sadly to his boy, “I shall never be able to show you the lair, for I cannot find the way to it,” and the boy was touched, and he said, “Take my hand, father, and I will lead you to the lair; I found the way long ago for myself.”’

Michael at Black Lake (JMB)

Michael and Barrie

One of two surviving letters from Barrie to Michael. The remainder, numbering several thousands, were destroyed by Peter in 1952 because they were ‘too much’

Barrie had originally planned to incorporate Black Lake into Peter Pan, featuring it as the setting for a mermaid's lagoon scene, but he had never got further than a few preliminary notes. The Lake was, in reality, little more than the ‘tiny hollow where muddy water gathered’, but with Michael providing the golden ladder, it once again became a South Seas lagoon, and Barrie set to work on a new Act III for Peter Pan, in which Peter and Wendy are marooned on a rock after an encounter with Captain Hook and his pirates. The tide is rising and threatens to drown them both. Peter insists that Wendy escapes by clinging to the tail of the kite; there is room for two, but Peter, who is ‘never one to choose the easy way’, has a strange smile about his face as he perceives the prospect of a new and tantalizing adventure. The kite draws Wendy out of sight across the lagoon, leaving Peter alone on the rock:

Michael by the shore (JMB)

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. Next moment he is standing erect on the rock again.

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

*      *      *

On November 6th, 1905, Peter Pan opened in New York, with Maude Adams in the title role. The American critics proved, as always, less averse to Barrie's sentimentality than their British counterparts, and the magazine Outlook welcomed the play ‘like a breath of fresh air’. Mark Twain wrote to Maude Adams: ‘It is my belief that Peter Pan is a great and refining and uplifting benefaction to this sordid and money-mad age; and that the next best play is a long way behind it.’6 The American public embraced Peter Pan with a fervour that made its London success seem almost trivial. It became the topic of much earnest analysis and intellectual vivisection among adults: the play was treated with a seriousness that mystified and amused its author – every aspect of it was lapped up and swallowed whole, except possibly its humour. The Never Land symbolized the New World, while Peter Pan – the Great White Father – was seen to represent the Spirit of Youth and Freedom, hailing the children of the Old World to leave their antiquated nurseries and fly away to the Never Land of Liberty. Audiences suddenly became ‘nursery-conscious, fairy-conscious, pirate-conscious’ and, not least, ‘Redskin-conscious’,⁷ since Peter's intimacy with Tiger Lily and the Lost Boys' alliance with the Red Indians was seen to have a special and meaningful significance. Children, however, were oblivious to all these subtle profundities: like their English peers, they contented themselves with falling in love with Peter and pined to fly away with him and indulge themselves in killing off pirates.

New York programme for Peter Pan

Only a handful of lines were changed for the benefit of the American public: Hook's ‘Down with King Edward!’ became ‘Down with the Stars and Stripes!’, and the singing of ‘Yankee Doodle’ replaced ‘God Save the King’. Peter's conceit at his victory over Hook took on an American flavour, and the Napoleonic tableau was expanded as a tribute to Frohman, who had a large bust of the Emperor in his New York office, and wore a Napoleonic ring:

(PETER, now drunk with glory, pulls down the pirate flag and hoists his own – He marches about the deck in an ecstasy of glee)

PETER. Oh, I'm a wonder! … Abe Lincoln, are you looking at me! Paul Jones, do you see me! (He looks up for Abe, and down for Paul) George Washington, what do you think? I'm the wonderfullest boy that ever was, and I don't say it in boasting, but just because I can't tell a lie!

(The BOYS and WENDY … with exclamations of admiration for him, almost worshipping him…)

WENDY. Oh, Peter, is there anything in the world you couldn't do?

PETER. There's nothing, nothing!

ALL. He's Napoleon – Napoleon!

PETER. That's who I am – Napoleon! He was little too!

After recording the longest single engagement in the history of the Empire Theater, Frohman toured Maude Adams in Peter Pan across the whole continent of North America. The play had become as a mission to him: he felt it his duty to bring Peter Pan into the life of every child in the country – not just in the large cities, but in remote outposts and ‘one-horse towns’ of what was then still the Wild West. It was a source of considerable satisfaction to the Davies boys to know that their own humble games of Red Indians, acted out in the comfortable woods of Black Lake, were being performed within the heart of real Indian Territory. For Maude Adams, the creation of Peter in America was no less a vocation than it was for Frohman, and over the next two decades her performance was witnessed by over two million people, from New Yorkers to the shattered populace of San Francisco (where the play opened ten days after the earthquake in 1906), from Southerners in Selma, Alabama, who took exception to Peter Pan's relationship with Tiger Lily, to Canadians in the frozen wastes of Northwest Territory. Frohman's biographers wrote: ‘Peter Pan … became a nation-wide vogue. Children were named after [him]; articles of wearing-apparel were labeled with his now familiar title; the whole country talked and loved the unforgetable little character who now became not merely a stage figure, but … the best beloved of all American children.’

Maude Adams as Peter Pan

While Peter Pan played to packed houses on Broadway, the first London revival began rehearsals in November 1905. For reasons that have never been made fully clear, Nina Boucicault was dropped from the cast, and replaced by the inferior Cecilia Loftus. Gerald du Maurier again played Mr Darling and Captain Hook, though he had begun to tire of the double role. His daughter Daphne wrote, ‘Two performances a day was no joke, in a play that lasted nearly four hours, and playing to crowded houses of screaming, excited children was trying to the voice and to the temper. “There's only one thing I'd rather not be doing,” said Gerald in a fit of irritation, “and that's sweeping the floors of a mortuary at a shilling a week.”’8

Barrie invited Sylvia to Paris in the New Year, but she declined as both Michael and Nico were in bed with colds. He wrote to her on January 3rd, 1906:

My Dearest Jocelyn,

As if I could be angry with you for caring for your children! I don't think it would have been the thing to leave them just now, and we can go to Paris any time.

I hope Nicholas is getting better and that Michael is obstreperous once again. How I love that boy. … Whenever they are able for P. Pan, it awaits them.

Your loving,

    J.M.B.

Michael received a poem from Barrie a few days later:

Nico and Michael (JMB)

A's any Asses that don't love my Mick,

B's what I fling at them, namely a Brick.

C's Combinations, with Michael inside,

D's Normandy's Dives where he once did reside.

E's Evian water, his favourite drink.

F is his Friend – who is that, do you think?

G stands for George, his elderly brother.

H for 14 and 2, that alarmed his mother.

I stands for Imp, which applies to the lot of you.

J is for Jack, who is sometimes too hot for you.

K is for Kads who don't do as you wish,

L's the eel caught at Dives when we went out to fish.

M's your dear Mary, who's always awake,

N's Nick, who's your sweet mother's smallest mistake.

O's the Oil you are told for to take like a man,

P stands for Peter, and Peter for Pan.

Q are the Questions Mick asks for to pose me,

R my Replies, which are vain, for he knows me.

S stands for Sylvia, Michael's delight,

T is his Tu'penny when tucked in at night.

U is U silly who are reading this letter,

V is your Vanity, you couldn't do better.

W's old Wilk, who is still trouncing boys,

X is the X's sent Mick with his toys.

Y is the Yawns I give till we meet,

Z are the Zanies who are not at his feet.

J.M.B.

Michael's illness persisted throughout the early spring, and as he was unable to come up to London and see Peter Pan, Barrie and Frohman took Peter Pan to see him, complete with scenery and a special programme printed for the occasion:

‘The performance [of Peter Pan] that is most vivid to me (and cannot be quite forgotten by you) is the one we presented to Michael in his bed. It was in the first or second year of Peter, and as Michael could not go to it, we took it to Michael, 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 Michael, aged five, looked on solemnly from his bed and never smiled once. That was my only appearance in a professional performance, … and a copy of the special programme which I still have (my favourite programme of the play) shows that I was thought so meanly of that my name is printed in smaller letters than the others.’9

Peter gave a description of the play in a letter to his grandfather, the Reverend John Llewelyn Davies, who was going to be eighty the following day. Peter himself was celebrating his own ninth birthday:

Egerton House, Berkhamsted.

Feb. 25th [1906]

Dear Grandfather,

I hope you will have a nice birthday, it is my birthday today, and although I am not quite so old as you, I hope to be soon. … Some actors and actresses from Peter Pan came down on Father's birthday in two large motor cars, to act the nursery. Peter Pan is about a boy [who] ran away from home the day he was born, and lived in the Never-never-never-Land. One day he came back to the house of some people called the Darlings, and in the night took away the three children away [sic]. The father was so sorry he had taken the dog, Nana, out of the room that he lived in the kennel. Then one day they came back, and Wendy, the girl, was allowed to go to Peter, every Spring cleaning.

Wishing you many happy returns of the day, from Peter.

P.S. I am sending you a programme of Peter Pan in Michael's nursery.

Nico Davies wrote in 1975: ‘There was never the remotest feeling that Uncle Jim liked A better than B, though in due course we all knew that George and Michael were The Ones – George because he had started it all, and Michael … because he was the cleverest of us, the most original, the potential genius. … I haven't the skill to answer* about J.M.B. being ‘in love’ with George & Michael. Roughly, yes – I would agree: he was in love with each of them: as he was in love with my mother: when you come to Mary Ansell it's a different ‘feeling’: … for myself, Peter & Jack at our different times different again – nearer to normal deep affection.’

George, aged 12, with his rabbit, ‘Mr’ (JMB)

Peter (JMB)

Barrie's letter to Peter on his ninth birthday was as affectionate as usual:

25 Feb. 1906.

My dear Peter,

Hurrah for your birthday. Nine years ago the world was a dreary blank. It was like the round of tissue paper the clown holds up for the lady in the circus to leap through, and then you came banging through it with a Houp-la! and we have all been busy ever since.

I expect twenty years from now there will be a half holiday given at the Berkhampstead School on the 25 of Feb. because it is the birthday of the famous pupil, Mr (now Lieut-General) Peter Davies, V.C.

I am to get a knife tomorrow to send you. I expect it will draw blood before you lose it. If you are still on friendly terms with Primus &c, give them my comps.

Your loving friend,

    J.M.B.

Programme specially printed for PETER PAN in Michael's Nursery

Sylvia and Michael (JMB)

It would be wrong to suppose that all Barrie's time and energy was devoted to the Davies family. A glance at Denis Mackail's lengthy biography shows that these early months of 1906 were, as ever, crammed with diverse activity: organizing a banquet in honour of Frederick Greenwood's seventy-fifth birthday; wooing the friendship of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who had recently returned from his first Antarctic expedition; trying to protect his agent and friend, Arthur Addison Bright, from prosecution for misappropriating £28,000 of his clients' earnings – including £16,000 belonging to Barrie; following his fellow writer A. E. W. Mason on election campaigns (Mason was standing for election as Liberal M.P. for Coventry, and Barrie was noting down the tricks of the political trade for use in his next play, What Every Woman Knows); becoming godfather to one of the Lost Boys in the cast of Peter Pan, the American actress, Pauline Chase; organizing and subscribing to numerous charities (he was wealthy enough by now to be generous to the point of prodigality, helping virtually anyone who cared to plead a worthy case); accompanying his wife to her mother's funeral; writing a couple of one-act plays: Josephine, a political burlesque lampooning Joseph Chamberlain, and Punch, in which he satirized Bernard Shaw – both plays written, rehearsed, performed (and taken off) within the space of six weeks; corresponding with Frohman about the American production of Alice Sit-by-the-Fire, which was to star Ethel Barrymore; writing to Maude Adams – ‘I feel sure you are the most entrancing little boy that ever was by sea or shore, and I hear of things you do in the part which are so absolutely what Peter did that it makes me gay. … I must see you as Peter, and so, dear little Maudie, good-night’;10 and, in the same week, flirting by post with one of the most beautiful women in England, Her Grace the Duchess of Sutherland:

Pauline Chase as one of the Lost Boys (First Twin), doing her famous pillow dance. In 1906 she became Barrie's god-daughter and played Peter Pan annually until 1914

Dear Duchess,

May I come to dinner on Thursday or Friday? I am dining beside a duchess on Sunday. I want to come very much either of these days. On Sunday I am dining with a duchess. I was away for the week-end at Berkhamsted, and next week-end I am dining with a duchess. I hope you are all well in your sphere of life. What ups and downs we have. For instance, next Sunday I am

Yours sincerely

    J.M.B.

It was to prove the beginning of a long flirtation, not merely with Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland, but with the aristocracy as a whole, and was to earn him, from some, the label of a snob. For the moment, however, he retained his sense of humour and purpose, for though the dinner engagement was doubtless a pleasurable affair, Barrie was also measuring up Her Grace for future characterization in What Every Woman Knows.

Towards the end of May, Barrie once again invited Sylvia to Paris, and this time she accepted. Arthur wrote to his sister Margaret at Kirkby Lonsdale:

Margaret Llewelyn Davies, founder member of the Women's Co-operative Guild and close friend of Virginia Woolf

Egerton House,

Berkhamsted.

May 26th, 1906.

Dearest Margaret,

I had been hoping to manage a visit to Kirkby with Michael this Whitsuntide, to fit in with Sylvia's outing, but I am doomed to spend Whitsuntide less agreeably – in lying up for a small operation. I have a slight swelling in the side of the face, which is beyond the dentist's skill, and on his advice I consulted an expert in cheek and jaw. He is going to perform on Friday, and I shall stay at a nursing place till the following Tuesday. Probably the cause of the trouble is the root of an old dead tooth, possibly a minute fragment of a tooth long ago pulled out. … There is no ground for anxiety, but I can imagine pleasanter ways of spending money in June. … I expect to be more or less recovered after a week.

Sylvia will probably leave with her friends for Paris on Tuesday (June 5) if I am fit to be left. [Margaret has scrawled her opinion in the margin: ‘I'm sure she won't!’] Crompton is kindly willing to come here on that day with me. …

Yours affectly,

    A.Ll.D.

Sylvia's dilemma was resolved for her by Barrie's agent, Arthur Addison Bright, who had gone to Switzerland, telling his client that ‘the mountain air would give him sleep’.11 Faced with the humiliation of imminent prosecution, Bright shot himself, and Barrie was obliged to travel to Lucerne and identify the body. He blamed himself for the tragedy, believing that his own vagueness over money matters had been Bright's temptation – he had not even noticed the £16,000 missing until it was pointed out to him. He contributed a short obituary in The Times on June 1st, in which he described Bright as a man ‘so beautiful and modest [in] nature that it may be said of him, he had never time to be much interested in himself he was so interested in his friends’. The irony was presumably unintentional.

On the same day, June 1st, Sylvia wrote to Arthur's sister Margaret telling her that ‘Arthur seems pretty well and … I hope to get him home soon’, but the following day Arthur was giving more ominous news:

12, Beaumont St., W.

June 2, 1906.

Dearest Margaret,

I am sorry to say that I have bad news. The swelling in my face turns out on investigation not to be an abscess, as was hoped, but a growth. It is of a very serious kind, called sarcoma, and requires a grave operation. … I am afraid it means removing half the upper jaw and palate. … Poor Sylvia! I have told her everything except the name of the disease and the details of the operation. She is brave and infinitely kind and dear. After the operation I shall be incapacitated for about 6 weeks, and unable to speak properly for 3 or 4 months – and there will always be an impediment in my speech. I think of our future and the boys.

We shall be very glad if you will come up on Monday and help us through this trying time – to me ‘glad life's arrears of pain, darkness and toil.’ My 43 years, and especially the last 14, leaves me no ground of complaint as to my life. But this needs fortitude. We both try our best.

My love to Father.

Your affect. brother,

    A.Ll.D.

Dolly Ponsonby wrote in her diary:

One of dozens of letters sent out by Barrie to Arthur's friends and colleagues. This one, to Sir Charles Dilke, reads: ‘Dear Sir, Mr Arthur Llewelyn Davies has asked me to let a few friends know of his present condition. Only a week ago he knew that he was suffering from the disease called Sarcoma’. The letter continues for a further four pages, concluding ‘He has been quite splendid all through this painful time.’

‘Monday 4 June. Got a letter from M.D. [Margaret Llewelyn Davies] to tell me the most tragic news about Arthur D. – That he has a terrible disease, sarcoma in the face, & will have to have part of his jaw & roof of his mouth removed – It is simply unbelievable! … That splendid, selfless, brave Arthur, who has slaved & worked all these years – to have his career absolutely changed if not wrecked by this – oh, it is incomprehensible!’

Barrie was in the midst of sorting out the chaos created by Bright's suicide when he heard the news of Arthur's impending operation. In Tommy and Grizel he had written, ‘A burning house and Grizel among the flames, and he would have been the first on the ladder.’ If ever Barrie had his chance to show Sylvia and Arthur what they and their boys meant to him, it was now. He immediately dropped everything, cancelled all other plans, assumed full responsibility for meeting the enormous medical fees involved in securing Arthur the finest treatment available, then took up a more or less permanent vigil in his hospital room, performing any task or request that Sylvia and Arthur might ask of him, however menial or mundane. Before undergoing the operation, Arthur wrote to his father on June 4th: ‘Barrie has been wonderful to us – we look on him as a brother.’ Peter Davies commented in the family Morgue:

Crompton Llewelyn Davies. Like his brother Theodore, who drowned in 1905, Crompton was one of the most remarkable men of his generation. ‘He combined wit, passion, wisdom, scorn, gentleness, and integrity, in a degree that I have never known equalled’ wrote Bertrand Russell in his Autobiography. ‘In 1921 it was Crompton who drafted the treaty of peace that established Irish self-government, though this was never publicly known.’

‘J.M.B. stepped in to play the leading part; and played it in the grand manner. … I can sympathise in a way with the point of view that it was the last straw for Arthur that he should have had to accept charity from the strange little genius who had become such an increasing irritation to him in recent years. But on the whole I disagree. We don't really know how deep the irritation went; and even if it went deep, I am convinced that the kindness and devotion of which J.M.B. gave such overwhelming proof from now on, far more than outweighed all that, and that the money and promise of future financial responsibility he was so ready with – and with what charm and tact he must have overcome any resistance! – were an incalculable comfort to the doomed Arthur as well as to Sylvia in her anguish.’

Arthur's note of ‘things I think about’

Crompton, Arthur's younger brother, wrote to their father at Kirkby Lonsdale on June 8th, giving a report of the operation: ‘They removed his cheek bone – apparently had intended to do so all along. … After coming round he is likely to be in some pain, and they will give him morphia as soon as possible. … His courage and serenity was so great that it gave others courage, I felt – and instead of requiring help he seemed able to give it.’ Barrie telegraphed Arthur's father that evening – ‘HE IS CONSCIOUS NOW AND SYLVIA SAT [AN] HOUR WITH HIM’ – then stayed by his bedside through the night, reading him the newspaper or simply holding his hand. Arthur was unable to talk, his face being completely bandaged, but he managed to communicate with Barrie by making spidery notes:

Among the things I think about

Michael going to school

Porthgwarra and S's blue dress

Burpham garden

Kirkby view across valley…

Jack bathing

Peter answering chaff

Nicholas in the garden

George always

While Arthur slept, Barrie made notes of his own:

— The 1,000 Nightingales. A hero who is dying. ‘Poor devil, he'll be dead in six months’ … He in his rooms awaiting end – schemes abandoned – still he's a man, dying a man. … Everything going splendidly for him (love &c) when audience hears of his doom.

— There's an ironical little God smiling at us. Favours – then gives twist of string & down we fall.

Arthur

* I had written to Nico asking him whether he felt that Barrie had been platonically in love with George and Michael. In a later letter he wrote, ‘I'm 200% certain there was never a desire to kiss (other than the cheek!), though things obviously went through his mind – often producing magic – which never go through the more ordinary minds of such as myself. … All I can say for certain is that I … never heard one word or saw one glimmer of anything approaching homosexuality or paedophilia: had he had either of these leanings in however slight a symptom I would have been aware. He was an innocent – which is why he could write Peter Pan.’