“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 were they, who had called her that? He felt jealous of them. They knew 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?”