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.