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.”