The Raft
queen fairy calling. There are all kinds of fairies hidden about here.
When you see them, they turn into rabbits and birds, and----” Because
Kay had covered her face, he stopped. “I'm--I'm an ass. It isn't really,
you know. I just tell myself that.”
“Then what is it?” asked Peter, slightly awed, for the voice kept on
singing.
The boy laughed. “It's the tiniest little river that's lost itself. It
creeps about under the bushes and wriggles through the leaves on its
tummy, trying to find a way out.”
“And does it find it?” asked Kay, plucking up her courage.
“You bet you. Wait till we get to the Happy Cottage.” And all of a
sudden they got there. It was as though the little river had led them,
for just where they broke out into the sunlight it rushed past them,
flashing silver and singing merrily, with all the words of its song
remembered. At first they saw a green, green stretch of grass, over
which the yellow of cowslips drifted like blown gold-dust. Then they
saw Friday Lane, with its tall oaks holding back the woods, like big
policemen marshaling a crowd when a procession is expected. And then
they saw the Happy Cottage--a bee-hive, with low-thatched roof, set down
in a refuge of flowers. It had one chimney, from which smoke was lazily
ascending; and it must be logs that the fire was burning, for the air
was filled with the indescribable homey smell that sets one dreaming
of all the country cottages, tucked away in gardens, and all the summer
happiness he has ever chanced on.
They followed the little stream right up to the high hedge which went
about the Happy Cottage; they crossed it by a plank, pushed open a gate
and entered. Flowers, flowers everywhere and the banjo-music of bees
humming. A red-tiled path, moss-grown and edged with box, led through a
wilderness of beauty, comfortably untrimmed and neglected. The door of
the cottage stood open; across its threshold lay a Great Dane, which
rose up and growled at sound of their footsteps. The boy called to him,
“All right, Canute, old dog. Come here, old fellow.”
Canute came with the solemn suspicion of majesty, ignoring the
strangers, and placed his great head against his master's breast, gazing
up attentively.
“Canute, this is Kay and this is Peter. They're my friends. You've got
to look after them. D'you understand?”
The dog blinked his eyes and turned away indifferently, as much as to
say, “Your friends! Humph! We'll see. Very sudden!”
“He's always like that with newcomers,” said the boy. “He's very
particular about my brother. Guess he's thinking what I said, that he
don't let the Faun Man know just anybody.” Fearful lest he should have
given offence, he made haste to add, “But you're not just anybody any
longer.”
The door opened without ceremony directly into the living-room. The
leaded windows were pushed back; roses stared in and bent inquisitively
across the sills, spilling their petals. The house was silent; it was
like stealing into someone's heart when the soul was absent. Guns on
the walls, brilliant little sketches, golf-sticks in a corner, old oak
furniture, a mandolin lying in a chair--everything betrayed the room's
habitation by a strong and alluring personality. Peter, looking round,
became conscious of a spirit of loneliness and yearning. On the walls
were pictures of many beautiful women, but in the house itself were no
signs of a woman's hands.
The boy explained. “He's not here to-day. He's gone to town. This
is where we play; it's upstairs that he works.” He volunteered no
information concerning the task at which the Faun Man worked. Casting
his eyes round the walls, he said, “Those are all his girls. Pretty! Oh,
yes. But they give me an awful lot of trouble. Want some tea? Yes?”
He went out into the kitchen at the back. He let the children follow
him, but refused their offers of help. “I'm a rare little cook, I can
tell you. Had to be on our ranch in America--there was no one else. You
just watch me.”
But Kay had been thinking. She had supposed that there were mothers
everywhere--that every boy had a----. She said, “Where are your mother
and sisters?”
He looked up from toasting some bread. “Haven't any.”
She laid her hand on his arm. “But--but didn't you ever have any?”
He answered cheerfully, not at all sorry for himself, “Nope. Not that I
remember.”
She glanced at her brother. “Peter and I've always been together.”
Peter added, “So that's why you thought girls cried for nothing? You
don't know anything about them. I shouldn't have been angry.”
The boy winked joyfully. “Oh, don't I know anything! Leave that to the
Faun Man. I know just as much as I want to. But say, I'd have liked to
have had your sister for my sister. I really would have.”
Kay leant over his shoulder as he knelt before the fire. “If I were your
sister, d'you know what I'd do for you? I'd tell you not to climb trees
and, if you did do it, I'd mend your clothes for you.”
He told them something of his history as they sat at table. How he'd
left England with his brother when he was so little that he couldn't
remember. How he'd lived on a cattle ranch and knew how to ride
anything. He tried to make them understand the freedom and the
solitariness of his life in those wide stretches, where there weren't
any street lamps but only stars, and where one gazed on green-gray grass
for miles and never saw a single house. And he told them of the places
he had been to--the queerly natural ghost corners of the earth, Alaska,
Mexico and the South Sea Islands. Every now and then his imagination
would gallop away with him. Then he'd twist his head and stoop forward,
as if listening for the first expression of doubt. Before it came, he
would try to forestall it by saying, “You know, that last part's not
really.”
When he had said it several times Kay laughed softly. The boy looked up,
a little offended. “What is it?”
Her eyes were dancing with happiness. “You're--you're a very pretence
person, aren't you? Peter and I, we're pretence persons. We're always
going to one place and telling ourselves we're going somewhere else.”
The boy sank his head between his hands. His words came timidly. “It
makes one happy to pretend, especially when one's always been lonely.
It's like climbing a tall tree--it belongs to anyone up there.” He
turned slowly, staring at his guests. They wondered what was in his
mind. At last he said, “I wish--I wish you'd call me Harry. And please
don't tell me where you come from. Let's be pretence persons---- I'd
like to be your friend.”
With the quaint solemnity of childhood, they clasped hands. Outside the
bees played their banjo-music, the flowers whispered, laying their faces
close together, and the stream ran singing past the cottage, with all
the words of its song remembered.
CHAPTER XXVI--THE HAUNTED WOOD
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