Reason. If the door is shut tight and a person is in the room the shut door means that the person in the room wishes to be left alone.
The author of this odd manifesto (here reproduced with strict textual exactitude from the frayed original) was the author of the foregoing story, then just three months short of nine years old. The door on which it appeared was that of the room in which, on a small typewriter, she wrote down the adventures of Eepersip; and the week in which it appeared was that in which these adventures had their beginning.
She finished them, in the same room, three months later, early in the March of her ninth completed year and a few days after her birthday. One of her curious, slightly un-American inventions, I must here explain, was the concept of her own birthday as an annual occasion for handing out things to the other members of her family. She planned this story from the beginning as a gift for her mother on March 4. Would her mother “like” it, though? On that point there would have to be a disinterested opinion—as it happened, mine. With intense secrecy, behind the latched door of that room guarded by the constrained preparatory notice, she read me the instalments as they were produced.
My candid guess was that her mother would indeed “like” it. I liked it myself, if only as unconscious expression of a radiant physical vitality—so much I found in it of the mighty swimmer, the enjoyable young comrade of trail and river, always ready to swing a paddle tirelessly or carry ungrumbling a full fair share of pack. I liked it, too, as her answer to the one year which she had ever been called upon to spend in undeniably tawdry surroundings.
But, alas, there came interruptions—one of them in the shape of the only appreciable illness she has ever had—and these pulled down her average daily output. On her big days the small typist clicked off fresh copy to the extent of from four to five thousand words; but still the appointed morning caught her some pages short of the end. The tale came to Finis a few days later. Its length, in that first incarnation, was some 40,000 words, or not far from what it is now.
Up to that point there had been, of course, no thought of print. It was I who introduced the question of print; and it had at that time no connection whatever with publication. The author of the story never had (and never has) experienced any school system, public or private, her education having been exclusively the homemade one devised by her mother; and I was beginning to think it high time that print became a part of it. It was, in fine, my idea that we ought to have a piece of her work put into type in some small shop where she could set part of it herself, pull her own proofs, learn more about proofreading by correcting them, and see the whole thing through to the binding of a small armful of copies for her friends.
But before anything of that sort was done I wanted her to have the practice of revising her first copy as carefully as possible and putting it into strictly printable condition—as, indeed, she was eager to do. Accordingly she took it away with her in the summer, worked on it from early July through September in the intervals of swimming, canoeing, mountain-climbing, and plain daydreaming, and brought it back, on the 5th of October, 1923, ready for print. Twenty-four hours later we left it in a burning building from which nothing got out but the lucky human occupants.
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 heartrending 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
