From the point of view of an admittedly fond parent—for I can make no slightest pretension to the ability to contemplate all this with a stranger’s or a critic’s detachment—it was heart-rending to watch the nine-year-old author torture her memory to the end of reconstituting the tale in its first shape. There were, during the next weeks, a good many blank hours at the typewriter, and it was slowly and painfully that page followed page. At this rate, it was going to take about three years merely to salvage what had once been manufactured out of the void in three months.
Then, one day in December, everything was suddenly different. As an experiment of despair, Barbara had stopped trying to remember the shape of sentences, the precise order and phraseology of details, and had begun to let the material come back as it listed. And to her astonishment it came in a freshet, like northern rivers when the ice goes out. When, a few days later, we put work aside to organize our makeshift Christmas, she was still in a happy glow, the first third of the fantasy existed again, and the story was running over its banks.
There followed one interruption after another, and it was not until the autumn of 1924 that the second draft was completed. In the late winter of 1924-25, Barbara worked patiently through the first third, putting it in what she hoped would be final shape. The manuscript had to be laid away in May of 1925, and was not touched again for nine months. Then, in February and March, 1926, she did her revision of the second and third parts, made a few minor improvements in Part I, and typed out a fair copy of the whole—the copy from which this little book is set.
To what extent is this twelve-year-old manuscript identical with the nine-year-old story? To a far greater extent, I am sure, than seems compatible with the huge number of hours spent on it since it was completed ; for it happens that a disproportionate number of those hours has gone into laborious, at times unconscious, recovery of the precise effects which were in the lost original. The differences are not where a stranger to the author would naturally look for them: that is, in the diction and the build of sentences. Barbara’s vocabulary at nine was, of course, a stratified arrangement of deposits from Walter de la Mare[2] and George Macdonald,[3] W. H. Hudson[4] and Mark Twain, Shelley and Scott; that is to say, it was just what it is now except for the later addition of words which could not be in this story anyhow—the words of history, of science. And certainly the fundamental ideas and emotions of the story have undergone no change. The fact is, it was conceived and written at the end of a phase which could not return—that phase of normal childhood in which nature means nearly everything and civilization nearly nothing. The whole purport of Eepersip’s existence is simply a healthy nine-year-old consciousness made articulate—something that an eleven-year-old could recover only by a feat of the memory, and an adult mind only by an improbable tour de force of the imagination. Barbara, in short, designed this curious narrative at the last moment when to do so would have been at all open to her. By no human possibility could it have been in her head at eleven if she had not had it down on paper at nine.
The chief differences, then, between the printed and the destroyed versions represent the inevitable development of the author’s taste in minor particulars, and they are these: (1) There is appreciably less of the pursuit-and-escape device, and correspondingly more of the sheer revelling in natural beauty; (2) a great many exact measurements, in the form of dates, distances, rates, heights, and depths, have been omitted as realistic and therefore trivializing; (3) there is a somewhat maturer attempt to keep the fauna and flora consistent with latitude, altitude, and season; and (4) the lapse of time is managed rather more consciously and coherently than it was in the first place. If, in the treatment of these and other details of the story, there seems to he a progressive increase in maturity, that is a consequence and a measure of the nine months' interval between the author’s revision of Part I and her revision of Parts II and III.
It will be observed that the differences involve little or no addition. The one piece of addition is in the episode of Eepersip’s young sister Fleuriss, which is considerably more developed. The obvious reason for this is that the author’s own young sister, at the time of the first draft, existed only as an insistent demand on Barbara’s part; whereas in the period of the revision she was a dream fulfilled, subject to adoring daily observation.
As to ordinary literacy, there is no perceptible difference, and has been none since the typewritten by-products of Barbara’s sixth and seventh years. In short, what the reader is here given is an articulate eight and nine-year-old child’s outpouring of her own dreams and longings in a fanciful tale, superficially revised by the hand of a twelve-year-old girl whose life on its more artificial side is made up principally of books and music.
It was the youthful author’s idea, not mine, that her story should be accompanied by a word of explanation from her father. I do not know how, when, or exactly why she formulated such a requirement, any more than I can explain where she got many another of the ideas with which she has been known to startle or confound me. Long after the story had been completed and while it was undergoing revision, there arrived a day on which I was told that the requirement existed: that Barbara had secretly been counting on me, and with pleasure in the thought. Pleasure! If I could give that and so easily, and to her, it not mine to make a gesture of resistance. I insist only that what I have to say shall be placed where it can stand between no reader and the story.
It would be neither good manners nor good sense for me to attempt any sort of appraisal of this chronicle of Eepersip’s adventures in the spacious rooms of her House without Windows. I have been too near to the whole thing, and am too near the chronicler. The most that I can now add without impropriety is a statement of why the first thought, a book to be manufactured but by no means published, gave way after all to a different idea.