Life at its beginning and its end is bounded by a haunted wood. When no one is watching, children creep back to it to play with the fairies and to listen to the angels’ footsteps. As the road of their journey lengthens, they return more rarely. Remembering less and less, they build themselves cities of imperative endeavor. But at night the wood comes marching to their walls, tall trees moving silently as clouds and little trees treading softly. The green host halts and calls—in the voice of memory, poetry, religion, legend or, as the Greeks put it, in the faint pipes and stampeding feet of Pan.
We have all heard it. Out of fear of ridicule we do not talk about it. Do we revisit the wood, it is when sleep, or the dream of death, has claimed us and made us again children.
Because secrecy adds to happiness, Kay and Peter told no one of their discovery. In the early morning they would tricycle out through red-brick suburbs, where nurse-girls wheeled fretful babies in prams and wondered what love meant. Having spent their day in fairyland, they would tricycle back through those same brick suburbs where tethered people found romance in twilit reality. They almost feared to speak aloud of their doings, lest speech should break the spell—lest, were they to tell, they might search in vain for Friday Lane, Canute, and Harry of the mouth-organ, and find them vanished.
On their first visits they did not meet the Faun Man; in proportion as they failed to meet him, they grew more curious about him. Sometimes they were quite certain he was there, but Harry—— He was strangely reluctant to share him—as reluctant as Peter was to share his sister. And yet, in-all the rest of his secrets he was generous. He showed them how to find beneath stones in the river the homes of fishes—tiny fellows, who darted away with agitated tails the moment you took the roofs off their houses. And he showed them how you could make whistles out of boughs, if you chose the right ones. He taught them to mimick the notes of birds, so that they would follow through the woods, answering and hopping, twisting from side to side their perky heads. He was the Pied Piper of the open world, and willing to make them his confederates. “Where—where did you learn?” They asked him. Sometimes he looked away from them, narrowing his eyes; sometimes he answered, “The Faun Man—he taught me.” So the Faun Man became a kind of god, whose handiwork was seen in many wonders, but who never showed himself.
It was a scorching afternoon. In London water-carts were going up and down; the less refined portion of mankind had removed their collars and had knotted handkerchiefs about their necks. Along Green Lanes and as far as Jolly Butcher’s Hill, costers tempted villadom to extravagance, crying, “Strarberries. Fresh strarberries,” in voices grown cracked from over-use and thirst. It made one’s throat dry to listen to them. The tricycle seemed to feel its weight of years; despite frequent oiling, it insisted on running heavily. At Aunt Jehane’s house they halted for a rest; then, on again. The country drowsed: big trees in the meadows seemed to fold their hands; birds had hidden themselves; there was scarcely a sound.
When they came to the gate leading into Friday Lane, Harry wasn’t there. Pushing the machine behind a hedge, they went in search of him. They called his name and paused to listen. He had tricked them before, trying to make them believe that they wouldn’t find him, then startling them into laughter by playing his mouth-organ in a tree right above their heads. They persuaded themselves that that was what was happening now. Every few steps they would stop and look up into the boughs, shouting, “We’ve found you. We know where you’re hiding. You may as well come down.” If he heard them, he refused to fall into their trap.
They came to the Haunted Wood and entered. In its dark green shadows, where all things trod softly, they dared not shout. They whispered their assertion that they had guessed his whereabouts. Only the little river answered, now mocking them secretly, now babbling hoarsely, alarmed that it would never get out. They began to tiptoe. Fear of the silence seized them. A branch cracked; they only just saved themselves from running. It seemed as though a magician had waved his wand, casting a spell; everything slept. Everything except the river—and at last, because its voice was solitary, it became terrible, like that of a dying man in a shuttered room, who muttered deliriously and tossed upon his bed.
The green stretch of grass, with the cowslips scattered over it, brought relief to their suspense. But, here again, there was no welcome. Bees hummed above the flowers, quite indifferent to their presence. The bee-hive cottage stood with door and windows wide, as though its inhabitants had been called away suddenly and would never return. Beneath the smiling of the summer stillness lay the threat that something evil had happened. Even Canute had vanished.
They stole round the house and at last crossed the threshold. Everything was as they remembered it, even to the mandolin lying across the chair. They listened. Voices! Yes, certainly. Then laughter, clear and pleasant; it broke off in the middle, as if someone paused for breath. It came from the Faun Man’s room overhead, which Harry had never invited them to enter. Hand-in-hand they’ climbed the stairs—steep and narrow stairs, which ended abruptly in a white door. They tapped. A man answered. Peter raised the latch.
The ceiling sloped down from the centre, giving to the room the appearance of a tent. There were two lattice-windows, on opposite sides, which opened outward on to the thatch. Against one of them stood a desk, littered with papers, from which a rush-bottomed chair had been pushed back. A pen, lying on a sheet of partly written foolscap, had rolled across it, leaving blots, as if the writer had put it down and turned hastily at the sound of someone’s entrance. In one corner of the room there was a high-peaked saddle and on the walls a strange collection of memories and travel—a study of a girl’s head by Rossetti, old Indian muskets used in frontier warfares, a pair of sabres, a college oar with the names of the crew gilded on it, and everywhere the faces of women. Among them one face occurred often—Peter had noticed its frequence on the walls downstairs. And now he saw the living woman before him.
She was dressed in white, lying on a rose-colored couch, stretched out carelessly full-length, with her small feet crossed. Her age might have been anywhere from twenty upward. It didn’t matter—one forgot years and only thought of youth in looking at her. Was not Helen past mid-life when two continents went to war for her beauty? Somehow she reminded one of Helen—was it the way in which experience mixed with artlessness in her expression? The mind went back. Dr. Faustus might have addressed his sonorous lines to her:
“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss:
Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies:
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips.”
She was golden, splendidly negligent of what was happening about her, insolently languid with a lazy ease that seemed to take all the world into her confidence and actually shut all the world out. She was a lonely tower of snow and ice, rosy in the sunlight, luring, cold and inaccessible. Her eyes were intensely blue and innocent. She had fine teeth and an almost childish mouth, which was contradicted by the powerful molding of her chin and throat, and the capability of her hands. One wondered what difference it would make to her if she were ever to be roused by love or anger. She was built on heroic lines, long and full and gracious, yet she seemed to prefer to be treated as a plaything. One arm was curled beneath her golden head, the other hung down listlessly and was held by a man who was pressing the hand to his mouth. Peter noticed in a flash how the woman paid no attention to what the man was doing. And the man——
Peter had never seen anyone quite like him. He was tall and strong and slender. Even though he was kneeling, Peter knew that he must be of great height. His face was smooth, lean and tanned. His lips were thin—unusually red and delicate for a man’s. His nose was straight and arched at the nostrils. His ears were set far back and pointed. But it was by his eyes that Peter recognized him as the Faun Man. They were brown and filmed over with blue like a dog’s, showing scarcely any white. They had a dumb appeal in them, a hunger and melancholy because of something which was never found, which the eager happiness of the rest of his appearance disguised. They had a trick of veiling themselves, of becoming dull and focusless, as though the spirit, whose windows they were, had drawn down the blinds and lay drugged with sleep and satiety. Then suddenly they would flash, become torches, all enthusiasm, crying out that there was no truce in the forward march of desire. At such times the face became extremely young—as young as his long fine hands. Only the black hair, brushed straight back from the forehead without a parting, betrayed his age by the gray which grew about the temples.
The golden woman withdrew her hand from his, and raised herself on her elbow at the children’s entrance. She gazed at them doubtfully, like a young pantheress disturbed. Her red mouth pouted. Her blue eyes feigned a laughing shyness. Only one small foot, tapping against the other, told of her impatience. “Oh, it isn’t—— I thought it was Harry. Who are they, Lorie?”
Her voice was soft and caressing. She spoke in the “little language” which mothers learn in the nursery. In her way of talking there was a guttural quality which marked her foreign parentage.
The Faun Man, unabashed by the unexpected company, bent toward her and kissed her arm. “I don’t know,” he laughed. Then he turned with a smile that was all courtesy and kindness, “Won’t you tell us? Who are you?”
Peter didn’t answer at once. He was fascinated. He had never seen a man’s ears move like that. As the Faun Man had asked his question, his ears had pricked up as a dog’s do when he pays attention. And then there was something about his voice—— It was so sad and intense.
It hurt by its longing. It didn’t seem right to meet this man in a house. Peter both distrusted and liked him—the way we do nature.
The white room became a blur as he gazed into the soft brown eyes. Woods and meadows, seen distant in the sunlight, became flat like painted canvases hung across the windows. Real things grew vague, or took on the aspect of artificiality. The question came again. “Tell us, little chap. Who are you?”
Peter’s brain cleared. “If you please, we’re friends of Harry, the boy with the mouth-organ.”
The golden woman leant forward, resting her hand intimately on the Faun Man’s shoulder. She was interested and her face became gentle. “Harry’s friends! But we’re in disgrace with Harry. He’s run away with Canute because—because he’s jealous. He wants his big brother all to himself—— What shall we do with them, Lorie? I think we’ll have to make them our pals.”
Kay had been hiding behind Peter in the doorway. She looked round him timidly, still ready for escape. “But—but will Harry come back?”
The concern in her voice made the woman clap her hands. “He always comes back. Men always do come back, don’t they, Lorie?” She slipped her feet off the couch and came across the room. “What a dear little girl!”
Kay looked up at her, willing to be frightened. Then her arms reached up and the woman stooped over her. “You’re nice,” she said.
“Have you been here often?” It was the Faun Man speaking.
Peter thought. He tried to reckon. “Not often, but several times.”
The Faun Man took him by the shoulders, looking down on him. Seen that way, from below, he seemed tremendously high. “You needn’t be afraid, young ‘un; I’m not angry. You won’t get Harry into a row. Where d’you come from?”
“Come from!” Peter laid his fingers on the thin brown hand. “Would you mind very much if I didn’t tell? You see, Harry doesn’t know. It’s such fun—we’re just pretence people. We tricycle out from—from nowhere on a tandem, Kay and I. And then we meet Harry and leave the trike behind a hedge and go into the Haunted Wood together. You see, if Harry doesn’t know who we are, it’s almost as though we were fairies, and as though he were a fairy, and we—— You know what I mean: we meet in fairyland, and can do what we like with the world.”
The Faun Man turned his head. “Eve, did you hear that? He wants to do what he likes with the world. He’s one of us.”
But Eve had Kay on her lap and her lips were in her silky hair. Something had happened to her—something difficult to express. She had melted. With the child pressed against her bosom, she looked a mother—very young and good. As the Faun Man watched her, his eyes became tender—oddly tender.
“Eve. Eve.”
He went over to her and took her hand. She lifted her face to his. “If you hadn’t kept me waiting——” He got no further.
There was a pause.
“I was thinking the same,” she said; “and yet——”
“And yet?” he questioned.
She drew Kay nearer to her. “Where’s the good of talking. We’ve talked so often—so often.”
He went to the open window and stared out. A butterfly flew in and alighted on his forehead. He took no notice; he stood rigid like a man of stone. A little muscle in his cheek kept twitching; his arms hung straight down and the fingers worked against the palms of his hands. Seen on either side of him, in two narrow strips, was the basking unimprisoned country, which rolled on marvelously, this visible landscape building into the next, and the next into all the others that lay beyond the horizon, continents, seas and wonderlands, like a carpet of ever-changing pattern wrapped about the world for his feet to tread. And he, without bonds, was a prisoner.
He swung round. To Peter’s surprise he was laughing. His dark face was narrow in mockery. “Come on, young ‘un,” he said; “let’s get out.”
He had to double himself up to pass down the low-ceilinged stairway. Peter followed; in leaving the room, he glanced back. The golden woman had raised her eyes—the eyes of a child who has been selfish and has wounded itself. She was fondling Kay, as though she thought that her kindness to the little girl would atone for her unkindness to the man.
As he crossed the living-room, the Faun Man picked up the mandolin from the chair. He did not walk through the garden; he walked into it. That was his way with everything. Leaving the path, he pressed waist-deep through roses and fuchsias, scattering their blooms and petals. Like soldiers approving his lawlessness, sunflowers swayed their golden heads and nodded. Swarms of winged insects, whose homes he had disturbed, rose up in busy protest. His face was wrinkled with determination to be glad—to be glad whatever might lie in the future. In the heart of the fragrant nature-world he halted, and sat down on the hard-baked earth. He looked like a great supple hound with his legs crouched under him. Through the walls of their house of leaves and blossoms they could see the window of the room they had left.
The Faun Man commenced to tune his mandolin. “Ever been in love, Peter?”
The boy reddened. He didn’t know why he reddened. Perhaps he was proud that he should be asked such a question. Perhaps he was a little angry because—well, because everyone he had ever met seemed a little ashamed of love—everyone except the Faun Man. So he answered, “Only with my little sister.”
The man laughed. “That isn’t what I meant. That’s different. Love’s something that burns and freezes. It fills you and leaves you hungry. It makes you forget all other affections and keeps you always remembering itself. It makes you kindest when it’s most cruel. It demands everything you possess; and you’re most eager to give when it gives you nothing back. It’s hell and it’s heaven. No, I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a small child pulling the wings off a fly, and then crying because it’s sorry, and didn’t know what it was doing. Ah, Peter, Peter, you haven’t met love yet.” He bent forward and tapped him on the arm. “Be wise. Run away when you see love coming.”
Peter felt embarrassed. The Faun Man closed one eye and watched him—watched how the sun splashed through the creeping shadows and fell on the boy’s flushed face and curly hair. “Here’s a little song about love,” he said. “A very high class song, written not improbably by the poet Shelley.”
He struck the strings of the mandolin, playing a little jingling introduction and then commenced, lifting his long face to the window in the thatch, singing through his nose and burlesquing all that had happened:
“If yer gal ain’t all yer thought ‘er,
And fer everyfing yer’ve bought ‘er
She don’t seem to care a ‘appenny pot o’ glue;
If she tells yer she won’t miss yer
And she doesn’t want ter kiss yer,
Though yer’ve cuddled ‘er from ‘Ammersmif ter Kew;
If yer little side excurshiums
To lands of pink nasturtiums
Don’t make ‘er ‘arf so soft as they make you,
Why, never get down-’earted,
For that’s the way love started—
Adam ended wery ‘appy—and that’s true.”
He had scarcely finished, when the golden woman came to the lattice in the thatch. She stood framed there, with the whiteness of the room as a background. Her hands were crossed upon her breast. The shining masses, wrapped about her head and forehead, accentuated her vivid paleness. She looked as idealized as a girl on canvas, put there by her lover in a bid for immortality. She glanced this way and that to discover the Faun Man. She leant out, listening and searching. She could not detect him.
“Lorie,” she cried, addressing the garden, “you’re unkind. I hate you when you’re flippant.” She waited for him to answer. Nothing but silence, and the little river whispering to itself beyond the hedge. “Lorie, I suppose you think I’ve got no right to talk about being flippant, because—— But I’m not flippant. I like you, and—— But I can’t help myself if God made me as I am.” Again she waited. “Lorie, I’ll be awfully nice to you if you’ll only show yourself. I do so want to see——”
The Faun Man stood up ecstatically, with his arms stretched out to her. It was absurd to call him a man. The pollen of flowers had smirched his face and hands. His head was bare, and the hair had fallen forward over his forehead.
“I’m crying for the moon,” he chanted, “and because she won’t come down to me I’m calling her names—saying that she’s a Gorgonzola cheese flying through the heavens.”
“My Lord,” laughed the golden woman—she pronounced it Looard, in her most foreign accent; “what an imagination you have!”
“Jump down,” urged the Faun Man; “I’ll catch you, little Eve. I’d catch you and carry you anywhere.”
She thought and slowly shook her head, as if she had been considering his suggestion as a feasible, if unconventional, plan of descent. “I’d rather trust the stairs.”
“You’d rather trust anything than trust me,” he said ruefully; “but I don’t care, so long as you do come down.” She was leaving the window, when she turned back. “What was that silly song you were singing?”
He answered her promptly. “Words by Shelley. Accompanied by Lorenzo Arran. Title, ‘A Bloke and ‘is ‘Arriet.’ Scene laid in London. All rights reserved.” She pulled a face, exceedingly provocative and naughty. “Words by Shelley, indeed! But I can believe all the rest.”
She vanished.
The Faun Man turned to Peter. “You see, young fellow, it’s as I told you. Love’s always like that. It comes to a window and looks down at you. You hold out your arms to it and say, I want you.’ Love came to the window that you might say that; but the moment you say it, love shakes its head. If you told it to walk decently down the stairs to you, it would immediately fling itself over the sill and toboggan down the thatch. You’re fool enough to say to it, ‘Slide down the thatch,’ and it immediately walks decently down the stairs. If I were you, Peter, I’d never fall in love with anybody.”
Then Peter surprised himself; he mimicked something he had just heard. “My Looard!” he said, “I’m never going to.”
The Faun Man held his sides and threw back his head, laughing loudly. That was how the golden woman found him when she came with her arm about Kay’s neck. She halted on the path, six feet away, smiling at him across the barricade of flowers. She cuddled the little girl closer to her. “Aren’t men funny, Kay?” And then, slanting her face and stooping with her neck, “Lorie, you queer boy, what’s the matter now?”
The Faun Man waded through the roses to her, catching her by the shoulders and bending over her. “Peter’s the matter. I was telling him never to fall in love with anybody, because—well, because love’s cruel and only looks out of a window in order to go away and leave the window vacant. And what d’you think he said? I’m never going to.’ He said it sharply like that, as if I’d been telling him never to be a pickpocket. Fancy a little boy having made up his mind never to walk in the sunlight because the sunlight scorches.”
“Ah, but he did not mean it.” She spoke as though Peter had been unkind, and had said that he would not love her. “But he did not mean it,” she repeated, tilting Peter’s face up in her hollowed hand. “And love isn’t cruel—he mustn’t believe what Lorie says. Love is the flowers and the dusk falling, and the sound of birds and rivers, and the dearness of little children. Love is—— How shall I put it? Love is eyes in the head. Without love one can see nothing.”
Peter gazed into her eyes. She was charming. He felt as though he had hurt her. And he felt that, if he had hurt her, he ought to go all across the world on his knees and hands till he obtained her forgiveness. He remembered afterward that, when her eyes were on his, he saw nothing but blue—just her eyes and nothing else.
“He didn’t mean it, did he?” she coaxed.
In a very small voice he answered, “I did mean it. You see, there’s Kay; I have to love her.”
“But some man may love Kay presently—may take her away from you. What then?”
Peter had never thought of that. He wouldn’t think of it now, just as years later he refused to face up to it. “Kay would never allow anyone to take her. Would you, Kay?” Kay shook her head. “I only want Peter.”
She freed herself from the golden woman and went and stood beside her brother with her arm about him—an arm so small that it wouldn’t come all the way round.
The man and woman stared at them. Here was something outside their experience. They had found hard knocks in the world and occasional stolen glimpses of tenderness—not a tenderness which one could carry about as a thing expected, could arrange life by, and refer to as to a timepiece in the pocket. Both were conscious of a hollowness in their living. And the woman—she had dreaded permanency in affection lest it should become a chain to gall her.
A shadowy hurdler, very distant as yet, over trees and fields and hedges, evening came vaulting. No one could hear his footsteps, only the panting of his breath. He was racing from the great red door in the west, from which he had slipped out—racing, with his head turned across his shoulder, as though he feared to see a presence on the burning threshold and to hear a voice that would call him. The small applauding hands of leaves moved gently. The red door sank lower. Snared in the branches of the Haunted Wood, it came to rest.
Far away and out of sight, deep-toned and mellow, came the lowing of cattle and the staccato barking of a dog, driving the herd to the milking. One by one live things of the country-side commenced to wake and stir. Rabbits hopped out among the cowslips and nibbled at the turf. Birds, like children put to bed and frightened of being left, called “Good-night. Good-night. Good-night,” over and over. From watch-towers of tall trees mother-birds answered, “Good-night. Good-night. Good-night.” The world had become maternal. The spirit of life’s brevity, of parting, of remembrance, of regret, of happiness withheld was in the air. The golden woman felt her loneliness. Looking at the children, so defiant in their sureness of one another, she recalled her lost opportunities.
An arm stole about her. A brown hand covered hers. She leant back her head so that it lay against the Faun Man’s jacket. So many things seemed worth the seeking in this world—so few worth the keeping when found. For the moment she liked to fancy that her search was at an end.
Peter spoke. “If you please, I think we must be going. I’ve got to get Kay back, you know. Even now, I’ll have to light the lamps.”
“But—but we haven’t seen Harry.”
A light woke in the golden woman’s eyes. She was about to speak; the Faun Man pressed his hand against her mouth. “You can see him to-morrow, little girl, if Peter will bring you.”
“But where is he?”
The Faun Man swept the horizon. “Somewhere over there. He’s gone away into the wood with Canute, because we hurt his feelings.”
“But what’s he doing?” Kay insisted.
The Faun Man looked at the golden woman; his eyes asked, “Shall we tell?” They turned back to Kay. “What’s he doing? Sitting with his head in his hands. Crying, perhaps—— Do boys cry, Peter? He doesn’t like his brother and this little woman to be together. The poor old chap doesn’t think we do each other any good.”
“And do we?” The golden woman spoke softly.
The Faun Man became very solemn. His voice was husky. “We don’t. But we could.”
She twisted round in his embrace so that she met him breast to breast. “Ah, there’s the voice of every tragedy! We don’t. But we could—— And we know we could; and yet we don’t.”
Down the garden, over the plank-bridge, across the meadow, through the Haunted Wood they went together: the boy and girl, like lovers with arms encircling; the man and woman, like brother and sister, holding hands, brushing shoulders, and following. As they entered into Friday Lane, Kay looked back. At the foot of a big oak Canute was lying, his nose between his fore-paws, his eyes red-rimmed with vigilance.
She tugged on Peter’s arm. “Why he must be up there. Oh, do let’s be nice to him. Just one minute. Let’s.”
But when they approached, the dog’s back bristled and he growled. He lifted his black lip, showing the whiteness of his fangs. His sullen eyes were on the golden woman. Like one embittered, who had ceased to believe that virtue could be found anywhere, he regarded all four of them in anger.
The Faun Man shrugged his shoulders. “When he climbs trees that means he’s getting better. There’s no sense in worrying him; he won’t come down till he’s ready.”
“Good-night,” Kay called to him with piping shrillness.
“Good-night,” called Peter.
And again, when the tree was growing small in the distance, Kay shouted, “Good-night, Harry. We’ve missed you.”
From up in the clouds, very faint and little, came the sound of a mouth-organ playing the wander-tune of romance:
“I’ve been ship-wrecked off Patagonia,
Home and Colonia
Antipodonia;
I’ve shot cannibals,
Funny-looking animals,
Top-knot coons.
I’ve bought diamonds...”
Their memories set the tune to words.
The old tandem trike was trundled out from its hiding place behind the hedge. The Faun Man lifted Kay on to her seat at the back; Peter mounted. All was ready.
“So you’re riding away from fairyland,” sighed the golden woman. “Foolish! Foolish! It’s so easy to do that—— And when you’ve gone and until you come again, there won’t be any fairyland. It’s so easy to ride away; so difficult to come back.”
Kay thought that a doubt was being cast on Peter’s cleverness. “It isn’t difficult at all,” she protested; “not if you have a tandem tricycle and a big brother like Peter.”
The golden woman laughed with her hand against her throat. “But I hav’n’t a tandem tricycle, and I hav’n’t a big brother like Peter.”
Kay knew she hadn’t; she wondered what made the golden woman say that, and—— yes, why she choked at the end of her words.
“Good-by till we come again.”
They rang their bells as a parting salutation. The wheels began to turn. They disappeared between the hedges down the road, a vision of plunging legs, bent backs and flying hair.
The man and woman were left alone on the highway between the Haunted Wood and the town, to both of which these children had such ready access.
Slowly, slowly the sun was vanishing; once a ball of fire; now the boldness of sight on which an eye-lid was closing; at last a glory to be taken on faith and conjecture. The country became vague as though seen through water. Its greenness had a coolness which was more than color; which had to be realized by a spiritual sense. The evening dimness, like the hand of death, removed sharp temporary edges from the landscape and revealed an expression which was timeless, which had been always there. Birds had ceased calling. The moon floated out—the soul of the night, high-lifted and inspired. Trees sought to touch her with their fingers; she slipped by them, unhurried by their effort.
He had said so much to her in the past with his eager lips and words. Now, for some time, he had been saying everything, while seeming to say nothing.
He held her pressed against him. “Ah dearest——”
She stirred. “But I’m not good.”
“You are. But you’re not kind to me often.”
“Not often,” she murmured.
He stooped; in the darkness he could say it—the old, old question which, through repetition, had lost its generosity and splendor. “Am I never going to make you love me?”
She turned her face away, so that his kiss fell on her neck. “I don’t know, don’t know, Lorie? How should I? I don’t want to hurt you. You do believe me when I say that? But I’m fickle. I’m not at all what you think me. I’m all wrong somewhere inside—cold and bad-hearted.”
He laid his cheek against hers, holding her more tightly. “Little Eve. Please! You shan’t accuse yourself. It wounds.”
She broke away, but only that she might return of herself. She caught him by the lapels of his coat and tiptoed against him. “But I am. Harry’s quite right to hate me. I send you on long journeys, and you can’t forget me. I won’t love you myself, and I keep you from loving another woman. You offer me your soul, and I allow you to go thirsty. I torture you, and give you nothing.”
He spoke very gently, for the first time honest. “I can put it in fewer words: you want to be loved; you won’t pay the price of loving. Isn’t that it?”
She pressed her golden head against his shoulder in ashamed assent. Behind her shuttered eyes she had the vision of a long white road leading up to a city, of a curly-headed boy and an elfin-girl steering through the traffic beneath street lamps. She wanted to have the palm without the dust, to be a mother without the sacrifice of having children. Seeing the vision of children going from her, and knowing that he would understand, she whispered, “One day I shall be old—and I shall have missed all that.”
“Poor little Eve! Poor little girl!”
He picked her up in his arms and commenced to walk through the twilight, across fields, to the cottage.
She raised her hand and touched his cheek. “You wonderful, strong Faun Man.”
He halted in his stride and bent over her; then went on into the shadows.
At the Faun Man’s birth an angel and a witch attended. The angel brought him the supreme gift of making people love him. The witch made the gift fatal, by wishing that he might be loved not as a man, but as a woman is loved—with jealousy. So his friends were all enemies to each other because they had to share him. Even Canute was like that; he had to be chained when admirers were calling.
Strange company invaded the Happy Cottage. Women predominated—women who tried to treat the Faun Man as their property. They wore fluffy gowns and had fluffy manners; even their voices were fluffy. Their attitude was that of princesses who had journeyed into the wilderness to borrow something. They were a little annoyed by the country, and found it dirty. Very few of them addressed him as Mr. Arran; each invented a pet-name for him, which seemed to make him hers peculiarly. They were all consumed with a desire to touch him and to go on touching him, beating about him like birds about a lighthouse which shines out hospitably, but permits no entrance. Most of them mingled with their admiration a concerned and respectful sorrow. His lonely manner of living moved them to the depths. They formed individual and brilliant plans for the glorious reconstruction of his future—plans which these female geographers handed to him boastfully, as though they were maps of fascinating lands which awaited his exploring. For satisfactory exploration the presence of the female geographer was necessary.
Peter was usually forewarned that an invasion was in progress by the crescendo cackling which rushed out from doors and windows into the basking stillness of the garden. Then he would hear the mild protest of the Faun Man, “But, my dear lady, my dear lady—but really——” Harry would meet him by the hedge, his face flushed and his mouth sulky. Jerking his thumb across his shoulder he would whisper, “The Hissing Geese! Hark at ‘em! Ain’t it sickening?” Sometimes he’d call them the H. G. for brevity. He called them that because of the way in which they sat round his brother with their necks stretched out, all making sounds. He hated them unreasonably, and hated them to excess when they tried to curry favor with him by kissing. And yet, it was silly of him; with a few years added to his age, he would have found most of them pretty and quite suitable for loving.
Surliness on these occasions gave Harry a strong sympathy for Canute. If he had been a dog and unrestrained by chivalry, nothing would have pleased him better than to have bitten the ladies’ legs. He felt that it was unjust to chain Canute up as a reward for his loyalty. So usually, when Kay and Peter had arrived, the three of them would sneak round the cottage to the kennel and attempt a rescue. Then came the exciting escape through the garden, crouching low and stealing behind the flowers so as not to be observed, holding on to the collar of the Great Dane for fear he should break away and glut his anger. Sometimes they were heard above the rattle of tea-cups and the ladies would bunch themselves in the cottage window, like a nosegay, with the Faun Man in their centre. Then would follow a series of high-pitched questions and exclamations, fired off for the sake of noise. “What dear children! Is that your sister? Are they both your brothers? What a perfectly sweet dog!”
The “perfectly sweet dog” would growl and show his fangs, as much as to say, “Leave me out of it. Look after your legs. I wish I had half a chance of showing you how perfectly sweet I am.”
Where did they all come from, these amorous butterfly excursionists? Harry kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t going to tell, only—— Well, he hinted that they might be insincere experiments of the golden woman, sent to supplant her—sent because she knew they couldn’t do it. “And jolly good care she takes not to send the right one. Trust her.” Harry said it in a growl which he copied from Canute.
It wasn’t until they had entered the Haunted Wood and the green wall of bushes and make-believe had shut out intruders, that his ruffled spirit regained its levity. Then he’d light a fire, and play at Indians who had taken their revenge in scalps. Presently, if the Faun Man had been lucky in getting rid of his worries, he would join them. They would boil a kettle and have tea in the open, after which the Faun Man would light his pipe and smoke it, lying flat on his back. They knew what to expect. Soon he would sit up, press his tobacco down with a lean finger, pluck a twig out of the fire and use it as a match. Then, very deliberately, he would begin, “I remember, once upon a time.”
What a lot of magnificent things had happened once upon a time that he could remember! He had chased cattle thieves across the border and had come up with them, intending to shoot if necessary, only to find them such human fellows that he’d parted friends. “Human” was his word for describing the kind of people he liked, many of whom were disreputable. One night, when camping in the Canadian Rockies, a hundred miles from anywhere, a stranger had crept from the forest and shared his supper and blanket. They had talked of London, London street-songs and Leicester Square, till the stars were going out. Next morning he was wakened by a member of the North West Mounted Police who was hunting a murderer. The fugitive had already vanished. “A pity he’d killed some one,” said the Faun Man; “he was one of the most charmin’ chaps I ever met. Oh yes, he was caught and hanged.”
The Faun Man had played hide-and-seek with death in many quaint corners of the world—getting his “liver into whack,” he called it, and gathering “local color.” What local color might be, and why anyone should want to gather it, Peter didn’t understand. But he learnt that its gathering took you down into Mexico in search of secret gold, where Indians hid behind rocks and potted at you with poisoned arrows, and that it took you up to Fort Mackenzie with dogs to the very edge of the Arctic. While he listened to these stories of adventure, the shadows of the Haunted Wood lengthened, the river sang more boldly, evening fell, and the fire, from a pyramid of leaping flames, became a hollow land of scarlet which grew slowly gray, fluttering with little tufts of ashen moss and ashen feathers, until it at last lay charred and dead.
The Faun Man captured Peter’s imagination and affections. He filled him with strange new longings. He sent his spirit reaching out after unattainable perfections, whose lure and desire are both the glamour and torture of childhood. He made Peter want to be a man, so that he might be like him. The Faun Man was a stained-glass window which, when looked through, tinted and intensified life’s values. Peter was going through the experience of hero-worship which comes to most boys when sex is dawning, and they have not yet realized that its sole and splendid meaning is that woman shares the same world.
And yet there were moments when Peter almost feared his friend; his character was a sand-desert in which the track followed yesterday was soon wiped out. One day he would cry, “Ah, I know him!” and the next, “I know nothing.” The whole passionate urgency of a child’s heart in friendship is to know everything.
But the Faun Man was too big and elusive to be known by one person. Four walls could not contain him. He came into a house like a half-tamed animal—but where had he been, where had he come from? He had tricks, curious tricks, which linked him to the creatures which make their homes in the leaves and holes of the earth. He seldom sat on chairs, but huddled himself on the floor while he talked to you. He could sit for an hour, saying nothing. In the middle of a conversation he would jump up and go out without apology, as if he heard a voice which you had not heard. And he had. The sound of the wind told him something, the altered note of a thrush, the little shudder, scarcely perceptible, that ran through the flowers; to him they all said something. If you asked him what they said, he could not tell you. So it was no good wanting him to belong to you; he belonged out there.
To Peter, who had always been smiled at for his compassion, it was comforting to find some one as compassionate as himself. It removed the dread of abnormality. There was a nightingale which used to come every evening to sing in an apple-tree near the Happy Cottage. They used to wait for the romance of its silver voice slanting across the velvet dusk, as though it were a thing to be seen rather than heard. One night they waited; it did not come.
The Faun Man grew nervous. He could not rest; at last he went in search of it with Peter. Beneath the apple-tree they found it still warm, with its wings stretched out. And then the unexpected happened. Kneeling in the twilight beside the dead singer, as though music had departed forever from the earth, the Faun Man wept.
And yet the same man could be harsh in anger—that was how Peter found the fairy. On entering the cottage one afternoon he heard the sound of sobbing upstairs and a voice protesting, “I didn’t mean to do it. She drove me mad—you and she together. You don’t care for me—don’t care for me; and I love you better than anything in the world. Oh, do forgive me, kind Faun Man.”
A pause. Peter knew she was on her knees before him, kissing his hands. It was as though he could see her doing it. “But you did mean to do it, Cherry.” It was the Faun Man speaking deliberately and coldly. “You did it on purpose. It was stupid and babyish of you. It didn’t do her any harm, and it didn’t do you any good. I don’t want to see you, and I don’t like you any longer.”
A passionate voice declared, “If you say that again, I’ll kill myself.”
Again a pause. The door overhead opened; a wild thing came tearing down the stairs. Peter had a vision of something in skirts, something with an intense white face, tragic gray eyes and a mass of black flying hair. He was bumped into. In stepping backward he tripped against a chair. When he picked himself up and looked out into the garden she had disappeared—all he heard was the running of her swift feet growing fainter and fainter.
He gazed about the room, wondering what he ought to do. Should he steal back quietly to where he had left Kay and Harry, and pretend that he had seen nothing? His attention was arrested. So that was what had caused the disturbance? Every portrait of the golden woman had been torn from its place on the wall and trampled. While he hesitated, he heard the Faun Man descending. It was too late to go now.
The Faun Man entered without seeing him. His face was stern; two deep lines stretched like cuts from the nostrils to the corners of his mouth. He looked leaner than ever. He was already stooping over the ruined portraits when Peter addressed him. “Won’t you ever forgive her? Please do. Never to forgive a person, not forever and forever, seems so dreadful.”
The Faun Man jumped; his eyes, when they turned on Peter, were the eyes of a stranger. “And where did you come from? And who asked you for your opinion? You’d better get out.”
When he came to the plank which crossed the little river, Peter halted. Down Friday Lane he could hear the mouth-organ and, looking, could see Harry beating time with one hand while Kay danced to it. No, he didn’t want to join them. Harry would laugh at him for paying heed to one of the Faun Man’s moods. And Kay—why, if she guessed that he was unhappy, of course she’d become unhappy, too——. And that girl—she’d said that she was going to kill herself. He ran across the meadow to the Haunted Wood. She must be there. She shouldn’t do it.
Just where he entered, he stooped and picked up something white. She had dropped her handkerchief, so he knew that he was on the right track. He followed on tiptoe, afraid lest, if he overtook her suddenly, he might scare her. In the stealth of the pursuit a novel excitement came upon him. His eyes were glowing. His breath came and went pantingly. He had removed his cap; his curly hair lay ruffled on his forehead. He went forward timidly, half-minded to turn back, ashamed lest he might find her looking at him. As he penetrated deeper, the stillness grew and magnified ievery sound. Overhead the branches were woven closer together, shutting the sunlight out. An air of secrecy gathered round him. Birds, hopping out of his path under bushes, looked back at him knowingly. They knew what he did not know himself.
Out of sight, beyond him, there was the sound of moving. Leaves rustled; silence settled down. They rustled again. He followed. Then he heard the voice of the river—a little voice which grew louder. It sang to itself softly. It seemed to be trying to say something. Did it sing in lurement or warning? Now it seemed to be saying, “Turn back, turn back, turn back”; and now——. But he couldn’t make out the words.
He lifted his face above a clump of shrub-oak and found his eyes peering into hers. She was too startled to jump back from him; she gazed wide-eyed, with lips parted and one hand plucking at her breast. She saw a boy, swift and straight as an arrow, a boy who seemed to stand tiptoe with eagerness, who had the grace and strength of a Greek runner and the smooth skin and gentle mouth of a girl.
And Peter in looking at her saw a white face, sensitive as a flower’s; and a mouth, red as a cherry, long and drooping and curved; and two great gray eyes, clear and wistful in expression; and over the eyes, dark brows, like a bird’s wings spread for flight. Her black hair had broken loose and hung about her shoulders, giving her a touch of wildness. Across the whiteness of her forehead it brooded like a cloud. In the green church of the wood she seemed sacred to Peter.
She laughed throatily, breaking the suspense. “Oh, it’s only you.”
Peter stepped out of the underbrush. Then he saw that she had removed her shoes and stockings, and was standing on the edge of the little river. Her feet were wet and as small as her hands. They looked cold as marble in the green dusk. Why was it? More than anything else, the sight of her feet made him unhappy for her, made him want to care for her, made him want to bring a smile to her mouth.
“Yes, it’s only me,” he said; “but—but I wish it wasn’t. I’m sorry.”
She tossed her head, as though she were indignant with him for being sorry, but she looked at him slantingly, curiously and kindly. “Why should you be sorry? You don’t know who I am? You’re not sorry; you only say that.”
He protested. “But I am. I didn’t mean to overhear; but, you know, I heard what you said—— I was afraid you’d do it.”
She sat down, trailing her feet in the water. She was smiling now, secretly and to herself, as if she didn’t want him to know it. “It’s too little,” she pouted. “I couldn’t drown in that.”
Peter seated himself at her side, with his knees drawn up to his chin. When he spoke, it was with an air of grave confession. “I’m awfully glad it was too little.”
She turned her head, looking at him from under her long lashes provocatively; but he was staring straight before him with vacant eyes, as if something very sweet and awful were happening. She reached out her hand and touched him; she noticed how he trembled. “And if it hadn’t been too little, it wouldn’t have mattered—not to you.”
He didn’t answer her immediately. When he spoke it was slowly, as if each word hurt as he dragged it out. “It would have mattered, because then you wouldn’t have been in the world.”
“But you didn’t know that I was in the world this morning.”
He shook his head, as much as to tell her that her objection was quite beside the question. “I know that. But I think I should have missed you just the same, without knowing exactly what I was missing.”
She laughed outright, swaying against him and burying her hands in the green things growing. “You are funny—yes, and dear. I never met a boy like you. You didn’t really think——?”
He gazed at her wonderingly. Each time he looked at her, he found something new that was beautiful. It was her throat this time, long and delicate like a Lent lily. As he watched it, he could see how the laughter bubbled up inside it; he longed, with the instinct of a child, to lay his fingers on it.
“You didn’t really think——?”
He nodded. “That you were going to kill yourself? Yes—and weren’t you?”
She ceased laughing. “I don’t think so. I’m such a coward. And then,” she commenced laughing again, “killing yourself is such a worry—you can only do it once and, if you’re not careful, you don’t look pretty. I always want to look pretty. Do—do you think I’m pretty?”
He choked and swallowed. His mouth was dry. He couldn’t bring his voice to the surface. She drooped her face away from him, pretending to take offense. “You don’t. I can see that. You needn’t tell me.”
His words came with a rush. “I do! I do! I think, when God made you, He must have said to Himself, ‘I’ll make the most beautiful person—the most beautiful person I ever made.’ It was something like that He said.”
His quivering earnestness made her solemn. She hadn’t meant to stir him so deeply. “What an odd way of saying things you have. I don’t suppose God cared much about my making. He just had me manufactured with the rest.”
A warm hand slipped into hers and a shy voice whispered, “He made you Himself. I’m certain.”
She gazed at him, at the narrow sloping shoulders and the shining curly head. She felt very much a woman at the moment—years older than the handful of months which at most must separate them. She laid her cheek against his and slid her arm about him. “I’m so glad you’re not a man.”
He stared straight before him. “I shall be soon.”
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen next birthday.”
She drew him nearer to her. He was so young as that! “How old d’you think I am?”
He searched her face, trying to make her as near his own age as possible, and not to be mistaken. “Sixteen?” he suggested.
“Almost seventeen,” she said; “I’ll soon be twenty, And then——”
“And then,” he interrupted, “I’ll be eighteen—almost a man.”
She withdrew her face from his. “Stupid. I don’t want you to be a man. When you’re a man, I shan’t like you; you’ll become hard and masterful like... like the rest.”
“I shan’t.”
She relented. “No. I don’t think you will. But then it’ll be all different.”
Yes, it would all be different. Peter had been a child when, in the early summer, he had stumbled on the Happy Cottage. Until then he would have been perfectly contented to have gone on living at Topbury and to have been fifteen forever. It had scarcely occurred to him that childhood was a preparation which would soon be ended. He had never looked ahead—never realized that he, with all the generations of boys who had lived before him, must one day be a man. In a vague way he had known that once his father and mother had been young and protected, as he and Kay were young and protected. But it had seemed a fanciful legend. And now the great change, which formerly he would have dreaded, he yearned for. The ignorance and inexperience of being young, the habit grown people had of treating him as a person of no serious importance, galled him. It had begun with the Faun Man and his desire to be like him. It was ridiculous when he imagined his own appearance, but he wanted to be respected. These longings had not come home to him before—they had been a gradual growth of weeks and months. It was contact with a vitalizing personality that had done it, and listening to talks of strange lands and the doings of strong men. And now this girl——. To her he was no more than amusing. She could do and say to him things that she would never do or say to men. Yes, when he was older it would all be different. She had wakened him forever from the long and irrecoverable sleep of childhood. He might dose again, but he could never sink back into its deep unruffled calm and indifference. Was it this that the river had tried to tell him, when he had heard it singing, “Turn back, turn back, turn back”? It still sang, going round the white feet of the girl in little waves and eddies, but its voice was indistinct, like that of an old prophet, who mumbles a forgotten and disregarded message.
The girl at his side stirred. “What do they call you?”
And he returned the question. She leant her head away from him on her shoulder. “What do you think they call me? What name would suit me best? But you’d never guess. They call me Cherry, because my lips are red.”
Cherry, because her lips were red! And who werethey, who had called her that? He felt jealous of them.Theyknew so much about her; he knew nothing. And here was the supreme marvel, that for years she had been walking in the same world and, until now, he had found no hint of her. He might have passed her in the street—might have come often within touching distance of her. Some of this he tried to say to her; she listened with a faint smile about her mouth. He fell silent, fearing that he had amused her by his sentiment.
She patted his hand. “D’you know, you’re rather wonderful? You put such private thoughts into words. Do you always think behind things like that?” Without waiting for him to reply, she continued, “But you never passed me in the street. You couldn’t have met me any earlier, because I’ve lived always in America. I was born there. That’s where I met——.” She did not name the Faun Man, but her face clouded. “I must be getting back,” she ended vaguely.
Outside the wood he would lose her—lose her because she had belonged to other people first. He would become again a schoolboy, tricycling out into the country with Kay. It would take years to become a man.
She stood up. “You must go now.”
How sweet and slight she looked, like a tall white flower swaying in the shadows. He had read in books of spirit-women who, in the bygone days of romance, had lifted up their faces from amid the bracken to lure knights aside from their quest; and the knights, having once kissed them, had lost them and hungered for their lips forever. He wanted to speak—wanted to say something true, wanted to tell her of this dynamic change that she had worked for him. All that he could say was, “Cherry”; and then, “But how shall I find you?”
“Find me!” she laughed, tiptoeing on her bare feet with her hands clasped behind her head. “Oh, you’ll find me,” she nodded.
“But promise.”
She half-closed her eyes, as though tired by his urgency. Then she threw her hands to her side. “I like you, Peter. I promise.”
Picking up her shoes and stockings she pushed back the bushes. “You’re not to follow.”
He listened. Was she standing there, hidden by the screen of leaves? He had not heard the rustle of her going. Suddenly the branches were thrust back, and again he saw her. Her eyes were alight with merriment and her mouth was puckered. “Oh, little Peter, if you’d only been older——”
Like a secret door in a green wall closing, the branches swished back. The wood muttered to itself as she went from him, and then fell so silent that it seemed to stand with its finger pressed against its mouth.