The Raft
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