"Yes," said Frohman.
"Well, I have it, all right," said Barrie, "but I am sure it will not be a commercial success. But it is a dream-child of mine, and I am so anxious to see it on the stage that I have written another play which I will be glad to give you and which will compensate you for any loss on the one I am so eager to see produced."
"Don't bother about that," said Frohman. "I will produce both plays."
Now the extraordinary thing about this episode is that the play about whose success Barrie was so doubtful was "Peter Pan," which made several fortunes. The manuscript he offered Frohman to indemnify him from loss was "Alice-Sit-By-The-Fire," which lasted only a season. Such is the estimate that the author often puts on his own work!
When Frohman first read "Peter Pan" he was so entranced that he could not resist telling all his friends about it. He would stop them in the street and act out the scenes. Yet it required the most stupendous courage and confidence to put on a play that, from the manuscript, sounded like a combination of circus and extravaganza; a play in which children flew in and out of rooms, crocodiles swallowed alarm-clocks, a man exchanged places with his dog in its kennel, and various other seemingly absurd and ridiculous things happened.
But Charles believed in Barrie. He had gone to an extraordinary expense to produce "Peter Pan" in England. He duplicated it in the United States. No other character in all her repertory made such a swift appeal to Miss Adams as Peter Pan. She saw in him the idealization of everything that was wonderful and wistful in childhood.
The way she prepared for the part was characteristic of her attitude toward her work. She took the manuscript with her up to the Catskills. She isolated herself for a month; she walked, rode, communed with nature, but all the while she was studying and absorbing the character which was to mean so much to her career. In the great friendly open spaces in which little Peter himself delighted, and where he was king, she found her inspiration for interpretation of the wondrous boy.
The try-out was made in Washington at the old National Theater. It went with considerable success, although the first-night audience was somewhat mystified and did not know exactly what to say or do.
It was when the play was launched on November 6, 1905, at the Empire Theater in New York, that little Peter really came into his own. The human birds, the droll humor, the daring allegory, above all the appealing, almost tragic, spectacle of Peter playing his pipe up in the tree-tops of the Never-Never Land, all contributed to an event that was memorable in more ways than one.
On this night developed the remarkable and thrilling feature in "Peter Pan" which made the adorable dream-child the best beloved of all American children. It came when Peter rushed forward to the footlights in the frantic attempt to save the life of his devoted little Tinker Bell, and asked: