ONE morning in the hollows of the meadow land below the wood lay a silver mist. The sun sweeping upwards in its curve beat this away towards noon, but it was a sign. The fire of autumn was kindled: already the little notched leaves of the hawthorn were tinged with the rust of decay, already a bramble leaf was turning red: soon the flames would mount the mightier trees and fan their pale heat among the willows and ash trees round the lake, lick among the drooping elms and the lacquered oaks, and sweep in abandonment with yawning fire of colour through the old beech forest.
Years ago now, in the glamorous time of childhood, this coming of the mist in the morning with its fragrance arising from the earth peculiar to summer’s end—the fumous, clinging smell of a torch—filled me with great sadness. No birds sang in the woods. By the mere, about this time, hundreds of swallows would gather. Restlessly they clung to the sedges and the rushes, whose tips were beginning to brown and make faint whisper in the wind; now flinging themselves into the air, twittering, mounting high, wheeling and slipping, now descending like a shower of iron darts to the border of the lake. Sometimes on my way to school I went to watch them, being caught occasionally as I crept in through an unofficial entrance to the school, and punishment ensued. What use to explain the poignant feelings about autumn and the departure of my beautiful swallows to lands where I could not follow? More important to the boy were his forced learnings than his blundering and unconscious poetry; and the sunlight came through the window, making him miserable. In fancy he was roaming the old hills, or dreaming by the brook; and that was indolence—he would never fit himself for the conflict of a mature life in London by idleness and dreaming. So the little boy was often punished, and frequently occupied the lowest seat of his form.
As the days went on the swallows were more anxious. The cuckoos and the swifts had long since departed. Here and there in the fountain-shaped elms a yellow patch of leaves showed like a spilled plash of water imprisoning a sunbeam. The peggles on the hawthorns were reddening; and waving their pennants in the wind the dry rustling of the sedges came across the water with excited notes of the swallows. As one swept by, low in flight, the deep blue of his wings, their exquisite and soft uplift, the delicacy of the forked tail, were reflected on the surface; with a sighing sound he would pass and his liquid image glide on the mirrored surface below him.
The mornings were chilly, but the vagrants continued to hold their parliament in the rushes. Insect life was on the wane, adventure stirred their little hearts to excitement. Every passing of the wind beckoned a forlorn following of leaves from the trees, a spider seeking hibernation threw a prospecting line of silk against the face. With a tired sound the starred sycamore leaves, each condemned by the black patch of autumn, fluttered to the earth; by listening closely it was possible to hear the stalks break from the twigs. Flittering like chafer-beetles in a dusky summer night the vaned seeds risped and whirled away from the parent trees. As yet the conflagration had not caught the forest, only isolated flames browned a beech tree, scorched the branch of an ash with yellow or made a buff haze in the distant oaks. It seemed as though the funeral pyre of dead summer would blaze in majesty only when the swallows had left.
One afternoon their shriller notes told that the hour was approaching. So eager were they among themselves that I was permitted to approach within a yard of them. I could see their frail claws, and admire the slim outline of their bodies; a melancholy admiration, like that of age with a young heart for youth and beauty that it yearns to share; the swallows were much to me, but I was nothing to them. Suddenly with a rush of wings they swept up, soon to become a smudge against the sky. But the wind was not favourable, or the message anticipated had not arrived, for they returned to the sedges that never ceased to shiver of coming dreariness. The autumnal air was tranquil in its silence and solitude; the wings of gnats dancing their mazy columns assumed in the sunshine a fairy semblance. Over the waters sped the swallows, taking the last banquet, for once the long journey were commenced no halt would be made for food; the thousands of miles over sea and land must be passed without falter, urged and directed by the ancient instinct developed long before Zoroaster came from the plains of Iran with his Magian worship.
The next morning when I went to bid them farewell the lake was deserted. My friends had gone, and I had not said good-bye. During the night a wind had risen, and they had fled before it to the warm south. I prayed that their strength did not fail while the little things were over the cold gray sea. I could do no more. But my heart was heavy.
When the migrants have departed the fires of autumn throw their flames and falling shadows rapidly over the countryside. In the morning moisture drip-drips from the trees, their tops are wraithed in mist, and the jay screams as he lurks among the acorns. Every day the sun describes a lower curve and, red and small, looms through the vapours. But above he is spinning and carding the mist, warmth blows on the cheek as for a moment brightness streams down, and so happiness comes again. Once more the thoughts of desolation are dispelled like the mist, and hope rises anew to the heart. In the murmuring green of spring, the radiant birdsong of summer, it is indeed difficult to be sad. Though all human efforts seem without avail, the song and scent and colour of summer fills the yearning heart and assuages its broken hopes. But in autumn and winter, at least for a long time, no consolation was there anywhere. Underfoot the old paths were beaten into mire by the passing of feet; these were the leaves, each so perfect and veined and shaped, that had opened from buds to the croon of wild cloves and the tap-tap of woodpeckers. Nature seemed to care nothing for the things that were created: the hand that composed so lovingly decomposed as inevitably.
To youth the world seemed bitterly cruel and uncaring, for every form of life—except those idealists, the bees—survived by the death of another form. The declining days with their ebb of warmth killed the million million insects and butterflies whose hum had been so dim and happy in the summer.
By a dry mossy bank underneath a hedge of bullace in whose unleafed raggedness the sere and twisted chords of the traveller’s joy had grown, the willow herb flowers were still in bloom when October had yielded most of its blackberries. Below the pink flowers and on the same stem the long pods were splitting and their seeds, swung under down, drifting with the wind. As I watched, a humble bee, numbed with cold sought the sanctuary of a pink flower, clung for a moment swaying, then fell to the moss below and lay still on its side. The hooked legs moved feebly, the wings shivered; no warmth came from the weak sunshine, and so it died.
By night a mouse would consume its body—beautiful with the bar of tawny velvet on its duskiness. From the time of early spring, when first the willow wren had called by the stream, the bee had climbed over the flowers, bartering the gold grains of the pollen for the honey that it desired so eagerly. In April it had gone to the apple blossom in the orchard and heavy-odoured nettles filling the ditches; invaded the sanctities of all the flowers of summer’s lavishing. Busy was my hunchback bee, feeding on no other form of life, helping the birth of the seeds to which the hue and scent of the petals were servant, working for the future of her race, utterly selfless; humming a wander-song as the sun strengthened its vanes, now fretted by toil and labour.
Then there was no hope anywhere, no voice among the trees, nothing but the feeble winnowing of the leaves as they sank to the earth, and the dazed drone of a dying fly.
In the beechwood the split covers of the mast crushed under the feet, the leaves were crisped and curled. No cunning of sculptor in copper could fashion such as these. The beech tree is indeed the aristocrat of the forest, for it is superb at the fall. No leaves possess such a rich colour or have the appearance of majesty and preserved form. The elm leaves are drab and lifeless, the oak leaves blotched and frayed; from the horse chestnut the big green splayed leaves are either withered and rusted or drop when seemingly full of sap. The elderberry and the ash loosen their sprays at the first singe of autumn’s fire. But gradually dyed a deep golden-brown, and untouched by fungus or blight, the leaves of the beech preserve their outline and take on a silkiness and shining of surface. Seen against the blue sky the veins and arteries of each leaf are clear-cut and distinct; no degeneration in the beech tree. During the autumn the numerous summer tenants of the wood have quitted. There is silence in the cold air. Old and twisted, the beech trees have yielded generations of leaves uncurling from torch-like windings when first the swallows come across the sea; the rooks built in their massy summer greeneries; woodpeckers hewn a nesting place in the rotten boles, spreading a whiteness of chips on the moss beneath; starlings with wings of metallic gleaming stolen their old trysts, and jackdaws nested where the branches had decayed and gaped. Far down across the fields yonder the rooks are following the plough. The jackdaws have joined them, and as light ebbs at evening they will return in a long stream to the rookeries.
The starlings haunt the water-meadows, the mocking cry of the green “gallypot” is heard no more. Walking quietly through the solitude of the wood the wanderer may see a squirrel storing his granaries with mast and acorns, working earnestly lest the frost come early and bind the earth till the sun of March shall solve its graven pattern.
From the edge of the wood the field slopes downwards to the longpond, now covered with a haze in the sunshine. The rushes fringing its edge are rusted and bent like old Roman swords, the reeds like the spears of ancient Britons, thrown with Arthur’s sword, into the lake. By the pebbled shore the water is pure and clear and gloomy, the sunlight showing the moist brown velvet of the leaves upon its bed. Quietly feeding in the centre, a dozen moor-hens send ripples to the side, each wavelet bearing a shifting line of light over the leaves as it travels forward. Yonder the sallows have loosened their slips of leaves and the sunshine throws up their ruddy and yellow wands—broken segments of a rainbow trembling by the marge. A wren goes by, a fluttering moth of a bird, silent; sipping and twittering in sweet cadences a flock of goldfinches passes over towards the patch of thistledown in the meadow. A chuckling, rattling sound; the fieldfares and redwings have arrived from Scandinavian forests.
The path through the higher wood was covered with leaves, and bordered by bleached stalks of wild parsley and crumbling sorrel spires. From the tall grasses the sap went with summer, and like frail ghosts they drooped over the pathway. The sun was warm, as though it were celandine-time. Upright and pallid under the trees, and lit by the warm sunshine, the stalks of the year’s bluebells bore their skull-like caps filled with their black shining seeds. Even as the wind stirred the branches of the trees the old loved shadow lacings slipped and shuffled on the ground. The wind sounded as in summer, the loveliest goldy-brown brimmed the hollows under the oaks. The phantoms of summer were with me as I leant against a sapling, the cast feather of a chaffinch swung on a spider’s line encircling the trunk waved a gentle farewell. Where the shafts of sunlight lingered among the brambles their leaves were fired a lucent green; autumn is kind to the bramble, touching a leaf here and there only with blood red splash.
I waited under the oak, unable to leave the warmth and tranquillity. A cloud hid the sun. I wanted to see the beauteous light come again through the rifted clouds, to see the staining of the bramble leaves. Once more the sun gilded the bare branches, colouring the red berries of the holly that would feed the thrushes in winter, and lacquering the beech trees till they seemed like the tawny beards of vikings.
Somewhere in the wood was the ghost of Proserpine returned to see how her children were faring—under the leaves were the seeds that would bring forth bloom and beauty and fragrance in the spring; deep in the earth lay the cocoons and shells whence would arise the happy throng of summery moths and butterflies. For this is the purpose of autumn: rest and quietude for those who have laboured throughout the summer to ensure life for their kind. So now in autumn my hope is as firm as the oak. Every leaf that falls is pushed from its hold by a bud awaiting the mystic order to unfold itself in spring; every flower lives but to form its seeds. All through the centuries the spirits of the flowers and the wild things have been growing more beautiful in the knowledge of their service.
As I walked away a timid song sounded on the air. Somewhere a robin was singing. He was not made miserable by thought—he was happy every moment. He did not need to brood upon immortality—he lived unconscious of time—every moment was lived, the beauty of the earth and the sun, and his mate, all accepted without question. The robin lives like an immortal here, upon the earth that is so beautiful: and all the wisdom of the dead civilisations is nothing to what the robin’s song tells, if you will but listen.