Part 15

And when I took a last look at the night some hours after, I beheld the faint glow, from the windows of the caravan upon the green, with dismal foreboding. A month of that prospect! And not only that, but something worse; for, upon the wings of the slow night wind, there drifted over to me the mournful thrumming of a guitar.

III

As it has turned out, the caravanners have proved very little trouble to any, and to myself least of all. In a day or two, they moved down to the riverside, choosing one of the wildest and leafiest corners of the old abandoned chalk-quarry; and for a week past I have seen nothing of them but a wisp of blue smoke from afar.

And, indeed, October in the country, if your design is to keep step and step with the month through all its bewildering changes, leaves you but scanty leisure for social traffic with your kind. Every day now there is something new to wonder at, and ponder over.

To-day the gossamer was flying. If you stood in one of the low-lying sheltered meadows, and turned your back to the light, the air seemed full of these ashen-grey flecks, some only the merest threads, others of the breadth of a finger and several inches long. I have always believed that the gossamer spiders sit in the hedgerows spinning these fairy draperies, and letting them go upon the breeze to little more use and purpose than when a child blows soap-bubbles for the mere delight of watching them soar. At least, what end could possibly be served by them, other than the sufficient and obvious one of bringing a note of austere, chilly delicacy into the riotous colour of an October day? But idling along this morning with literally thousands of these grey filaments tempering the rich gold of the sunshine far and near, I chanced to stretch forth a hand and capture one of them. Between my fingers there hung a shred of fabric infinitely finer than anything that ever came from loom devised by man; and within it sat the gossamer spider herself, a shining black atom, evidently vastly surprised and alarmed at the sudden termination of her flight. After that I pulled down a score or so of these gossamer air-ships, and although a few were tenantless, the most of them bore a passenger embarked on, who shall say how long and how hazardous a voyage? Yet, while none fell to earth as I watched, but seemed to have the power of rising ever higher and higher, it is certain that the gossamer spider’s flight must end with each day’s sun. The heavy autumn dews must sweep the air clear of them at first tinge of dusk.

If there is anything in the old saying that a plentiful berry harvest foretells a hard winter, then have we bitter times in store. The hedges are loaded with scarlet wherever you go, and yet in all this flaunting brilliance there seems to be no two shades of red alike The holly-berries approach more nearly than any to pure vermilion. Then come the hips, the rose-berries, with their tawny red; and the haws that are richer of hue than all others, perhaps, yet of a sombreness that quietens the eye for all its glow. Ruddy are the bryonies and the bittersweet. The rowans love to hold aloft their masses of pure flame, the rich rowan-colour that is always seen against the sky. Along the edge of the hazel copse, where the butcher’s broom grows, its curious oblong fruit gives another note of red. But they are all essentially different colours. Nature often duplicates herself in blues, yellows, and particularly in a certain shade of pale purple, of which the mallow is a common type. But among red flowers, red berries, finding one, you shall not find its exact counterpart in hue in all the country-side.

In southern England, the general lurid effect due to change of leafage in the forest trees belongs of right to November, but already there are abundant signs of what is coming. Though the woods, on a distant view, still look gloriously green, a nearer prospect reveals a touch of autumn in almost every tree. In the beech-woods nearly all the branches are tipped with brown. The elms have bright yellow patches oddly dispersed amidst foliage still of almost summer-like freshness. The willows by the river are full of golden pencillings. Only the oaks remain as yet uninfluenced by the changing times. The temperate autumn nights, that have checked the sap-flow of less hardy things, have had no influence on the oak-woods. They wait for the first real frosts—the knock-down blow.

And strangely, though October is nearing its end, the frosts do not come. The nights are still, moist, dark; and full of the twanging note of dorbeetles, and now and again the steady whir of passing wings. This is the sound made by the hosts of migrant birds, all journeying southward, travelling in silence and by stealth of night.

Coming out into the darkness, and hearing this mighty rushing note high overhead, you get a queer sense of underhand activity and concealed purpose in the world, as though scenery were being swiftly changed, a new piece hurriedly staged, under cover of the blinked lights. It tends towards a feeling that is rather foreign, not to say humbling, to your desires—that of being made a spectator rather than a participant in the great earth play. Or it may have another and a stranger effect. The sound of all that strenuous motion, the deep travel-note high in the darkness, may come to you with all the urging inspiration of a summons: you may restrain only with difficulty, and much assembling of prudence, the impulse to gird up and be off southward in the track of the flying host. The old nomadic instinct is not dead in humanity, as he well knows who keeps his feet to the green places of earth, and his heart tiding with the sun.

Now, too, the brown owl begins his hollow plaint in the woodlands. ‘Woo-hoo-hoo, woohoo!’ comes to you through the fast-falling dusk, the direction and intensity of the cry varying with astonishing swiftness, as you stop to listen on your homeward way. This is conceivably the ‘to-whoo’ that Shakespeare heard; and there is another note, which seems to be an answer to it, and which sounds something like ‘Ker-wick,’ and might by a stretch be allowed to stand for the ‘to-whit’ in the song. But ‘to-whit, to-whoo!’ in a single phrase, from a single throat—that seems to be a piece of owl language that has become obsolete with the centuries.

There is a stretch of lane here, running between high grassy banks densely overshadowed by trees, which is always dark on the clearest nights of any season, but of a Cimmerian blackness on these moonless evenings in late October. As if they knew their opportunity for service, the glowworms often light up the place from end to end, so that it is possible, steering by their tiny lamps alone, to keep out of the ditch that yawns invisibly on either hand. I came through the lane this evening, and counted near upon a score of these vague blotches of greenish radiance hovering amidst the dew soaked grass, each bright enough to show the time by a watch held near. As long as I can remember, glowworms have been plentiful in this stretch of dark, overshadowed lane, and very scarce in all other quarters of the village. New colonies of glowworms seem difficult to establish, although single lights do appear in places where they have not been seen before, and in ensuing year appear again and again, generally in slowly increasing numbers. It is not wonderful that glowworms should keep to the same grassy bank season after season, because, as all countrymen know, it is only the lampless male that flies. The female, who bears the light, and on whom the persistence of the race depends, lives and dies probably within no more than the same few square yards of tangled herbage. What seems really wonderful is that single glowworms of the female sex should occur in places far removed from old resorts of their kind, seeing how feeble are their means, and how slow their rate of travel.

I have said that the flocks of birds that can sometimes be heard in the quiet of October nights, passing seaward over the village, are generally silent, save for the dull, pulsating roar of their wings. As I lifted the latch of the garden-gate to-night, and stood a moment listening in the darkness, the old sound grew out of the silence of the hills, and there went swiftly by what seemed only a small flock; but now and again, as they passed, I could hear a note bandied to and fro in the company, a chuckling, voluble note, which I recognised instantly. They were fieldfares, the first-comers of their species. From now onward, I knew, their queer outlandish cry would mingle with the common sounds of the fields; and not only theirs, but the notes of all other foreign birds that winter here; for the field-fare is generally the last to come.

This cry in the darkness above me, however, was strange in a double sense; because, while the silent hosts were emigrants, only at the commencement of their long, perilous journey, this chattering company had safely arrived at its bourne, all the hazards of the voyage happily past. And it seemed only in the way of Nature, for bird or man, to set forth mute of voice upon a difficult and dangerous enterprise; while to win through safe and sound must provoke each alike to self-congratulation. My fieldfares were halloaing because they were out of the wood.

NOVEMBER

I

‘No mirth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member; No warmth, no shine, no butterflies, no bees— November!’

IT was the old vicar of Windlecombe who ironically quoted the lines, as we went along our favourite path together—the path that runs between Arun river and the woods.

The first frosts had come and gone, and left us in the midst of the usual revolutions and surprises. In a single day, the ash-trees had cast their whole weight of foliage to earth, green as in summer prime. Though as yet not a single leaf had fallen from the other forest trees, all had changed miraculously. The beech-woods looked like vast smouldering fires. Every elm stood up clothed to its finger-tips in shreds of gold-leaf. Here and there in the wood a dash of vivid scarlet showed where a sycamore had been found and struck by the frost. Larch, willow, maple, birch, each added to the glowing prospect its individual shade of tawny brown, or drab, or yellow. We walked in a land where, for once, the sunshine seemed a superfluous thing. To turn the eye away for a little while from all that intolerable radiance, and rest it on the oak-woods where alone a vestige of summer greenery endured, or on the cool grey stems of the stripped ash-trees, was a pleasure I found myself furtively snatching as we went along, although I left the sentiment discreetly unexpressed. The old vicar stopped, removed his great white panama, and mopped his forehead luxuriously.

‘No warmth, no shine!’ he repeated. ‘Now where in the world could the poor soul have lived who wrote that? And no bees! Why, I can hear them now—thousands of them!’

It was true enough, and with the bees were the November butterflies too, if he could only have seen them. In a sunny corner by the path-side stood an old pollard ash, its trunk rearing up out of the thicket high over our heads, like a huge doubled fist thrust into a green gauntlet of ivy. It was only one tree among innumerable others in the wood, and the same stirring scene was enacting round each of them. Though with everything else the season was autumn, for the ivy it was the heyday of spring. The great tree above us was smothered in golden blossom, the nectar glistening in the sunshine, a rich honey scent burdening the still air. There were not only hive-bees and butterflies rioting at this, the last outdoor feast of the year, but bumble-bees, wasps, drone-flies, every other creature that could fly and had escaped the chills of the November nights. The air was misty with the glint of their wings, and full of a deep sweet song. As we passed along by the wood, we were always either drawing into the zone of this ivy music or leaving it behind us, and never once did it forsake our path all the morning through.

We came at last to a spot where the woods fell back from the waterside, and a stretch of wild, hillocky grassland, overgrown with brier and bramble, bordered the stream. Between the willows that stood upon the bank dipping their yellow autumn tresses in the flood, I could see the placid breadth of the river, with its topsy-turvy vision of the glowing hills beyond—hills that, by reason of the interlacing boughs above, were directly invisible. A lark broke up almost from under our feet, and went slanting aloft into the blue sky, singing as though it were April. The Reverend put a hand upon my arm.

‘Well: what do you see?’ he asked. ‘Everything must be changed since we were here last, and—’

‘I see,’ said I, rather disturbed, ‘a painter’s easel straddled in front of your favourite creek—an easel with a three-legged stool before it, but no painter. I see also, a little farther on, a big white umbrella, with the top of a sombrero just showing above it, and a great cloud of tobacco smoke drifting out of it, but here again no other sign of painter or man. Shall we go back?’

But he was for pushing on. As we approached the umbrella, a throaty tenor voice was uplifted to a weird foreign strain:—

‘En passant par Square Montholon, La digue-digue donc! la digue-digue donc! Je rencontre une jeune tendron! La digue-digue—

‘Superb! _Su_-perb! If only I could excite myself to— Ah! if only that tumultuous thrill, which I know always presages—

‘la digue-digue donc! J’offre tout de suite ma main—ye La brigue-donc-dain-ye—’

Or at least so the gibberish sounded. But now it suddenly left off. A palette went rattling to the ground. The short squat figure of the owner of the caravan burst into view.

‘Grewes! I cannot do it, I really cannot! I am not sufficiently inspired to-day! I am not great enough! I— Oh! I beg your pardon! I thought it was my friend’s step. Why! the water-bearer, to be sure! How do you do?’

It was my first glimpse of Spelthorne by light of day, and I owned to myself frankly that the night had been kind to him. A fringe of yellow-grey hair escaped in all directions beyond the brim of his hat. He had a florid, puffy, indeterminate face, eyes at once selfish and sentimental, and a week-old beard still further ostracised a chin already too retiring. Like his companion, he wore a gold watch-chain of heavy calibre, with a bunch of seals and trinkets upon it; but his clothes, that in the darkness had seemed much tattered and torn, now appeared entirely disreputable. They were, moreover, covered with finger-marks of paint, to which he was now adding, as he ceremoniously welcomed us.

‘Art—what is it?’ he cried, removing his hat, and running his fingers through his hair, when presently, at his earnest invitation, the Reverend had sat himself down before the easel, and was making a grave show of inspecting the canvas on it. ‘And the artist—where is he?’ He made a dramatic pause.

‘Where indeed?’ quoth the Reverend, grimly staring before him.

‘You see this picture?’—wagging a chrome-yellow thumb over the canvas—‘nine-tenths of it are the work of one exalted day: the rest the unilluminated toil of a week! Strange that we should be made so! At one moment, like Prometheus, stealing the very fire from heaven, and at the next— Ah! but only an artist can really comprehend!’

He filled his pipe, with a resigned, quiet sadness.

‘Now Grewes—that is my friend who is travelling with me—’ he went on; ‘Grewes, poor fellow, he never realises the difficulties in his path because—because— Let me put it in the kindest way. Because—well, the truth is, poor Grewes has mistaken his calling. No better fellow in the world, you know! A hard plodder: always trying, always doing his best; but—but— You see, that brings us back to what I said just now: art and the artist—where will you find them? and what are they?’

A slight cough sounded in our rear. Looking round, I saw that the long lean man had returned to his easel unmarked by any of us. The Reverend got abruptly to his feet.

‘Well,’ said he, ‘you have a great responsibility. Supreme gifts in a man mean that much will be required of him. So bend your back to it. Good day!’

As we passed by the other easel, its owner looked up pleasantly, but his brush kept busily to work.

‘Don’t go yet,’ he entreated, ‘I am so glad to— But you won’t mind, will you, if I go on with— You see, I have not had very long at it this morning. Spelthorne, he was getting so anxious about the stew, that I—I had to run back to the caravan and— Or else he would have— It wouldn’t have done, of course, to let him go himself. When once he has got into the mood, the slightest little thing—’

He rambled on thus, scarcely ever finishing a sentence, and all the while dabbing away industriously at his sketch. He, too, I had never yet beheld in daylight; but, unlike his friend, sunshine rather improved his appearance than otherwise. It could not fill up the gaps in his coat, nor had it a lustrating effect upon his linen; yet it revealed in his long, cadaverous face, and in his mild, sad eyes, a delicacy, a sensibility, that I had not remarked in them before. As he talked, the old vicar studied his voice attentively.

‘Spelthorne,’ he went on, in his curious, disjointed, breathless way, ‘Spelthorne, his work is so immeasurably— He has such a demand for it that— And I am always so glad, of course, to do any little thing to save him trouble. I—I really think no man in the world ever had a better friend.’

The Reverend was standing close behind him now. He laid a hand gently on Grewes’s dilapidated shoulder.

‘Don’t hurry,’ he said, ‘at least don’t hurry with your mind. Above all, don’t worry: it is all coming beautifully. When did you see your doctor last?’

The question, unexpected as it was by myself, seemed to surprise Grewes infinitely more. The blood got up into two bright points in his cheeks. His brushes rattled against his palette. He looked round at the old vicar tremulously.

‘Doctor? Why, do you— What makes you think I— Oh! I am very well indeed; never better.’

He stopped, looking up into the sightless, kindly blue eyes that appeared to be as steadily gazing down into his. There was a moment’s silence. And then, if I ever saw real untrammelled joy spring into a human face, I saw it in his.

‘Do you really think so?’ he cried. ‘You think I— Well, sometimes lately I have thought myself that—’

Spelthorne’s voice grumbled out from behind the umbrella.

‘Now, my dear Grewes, have I not frequently told you that, though I am willing to lend you anything I have, I always expect—’

Grewes sprang to his feet.

‘It is his cadmium,’ he whispered, horrified. ‘I borrowed it, and never— How very annoying for him!’

‘Now there is a strange thing,’ said the Reverend musingly, as we trudged on our way together. ‘A man well on in a rapid decline, and neither knowing nor caring about it; as glad, indeed, to hear the thing confirmed as if some one had left him a legacy! A month, did you say? Then he may never go out of Windlecombe by the road.’

We made a long day’s round, taking meadow, riverside, wood, and downland in our walk, and reaching home again only when the lights were beginning to star the misty combe; for we had a special object in our journey. To the townsman it may well seem as fruitless a task to seek wild flowers in November, as to go ‘gathering nuts in May.’ Well, here is a list of what we found in one November day’s ramble about a single village in highland Sussex—fifty-seven distinct species, and of many we could have gathered, not single flowers, but whole handfuls, had we willed. Nor is the list an exhaustive one either for the district or the time of year. Bringing more eyesight, leisure, and diligence to the task, no doubt a fuller inventory could be made in any mild season.—

Dandelion. Hawkweed. Strawberry.

Furze. Penny Cress. Teasel.

Red Dead-nettle. Hedge Mustard. Sun Spurge.

White Dead-nettle. Dwarf Spurge. Hedge Parsley. Knapweed. Mallow. Rock-rose. Marguerite. Harebell. Crane’s-bill. Poppy. Daisy. Heather. Musk Thistle. Hogweed. Betony. Charlock. Yarrow. Viper’s Bugloss. Buttercup. Sheepsbit. Burnet Saxifrage. Red Clover. Marjoram. Sow-thistle. White Clover. Cudweed. Wild Pansy. Pimpernel. Groundsel. Shepherd’s Purse. Calamint. Nipplewort. Nonsuch. Blackberry. Small Bindweed. Ivy. Mayweed. Herb-Robert. Chickweed. Field Madder. Ragwort. Veronica. Sandwort. Silverweed.

White Campion. Persicary.

Red Campion. Mouse-ear.

II

There has come a spell of chilly, overcast weather, and the long dark evenings have settled upon us at a stroke. At twilight to-day, as I came into this silent-floored, comfortable room, and lit the candles on my work-table, it seemed strange that I should do so, and yet the ordinary life and traffic of the village be still going on outside. Hitherto, so it appeared, the village quiet had fallen always before the need for candlelight. I had looked out before drawing the curtains close, and heard not a step stirring, seen the windows dark in the lower storeys of the cottages, and here and there a pale light glimmering behind the drawn blinds of upper rooms, for your true Sussex villager hates to sleep in the dark. But to-night some new order of things seemed to have been suddenly ordained. Footsteps hurried or leisurely, voices old and young, the rumble of wheels, even the distant chime of Tom Clemmer’s hammer—all the sounds that go to make up the common rumour of work-a-day life in a village, were abroad in the air; though already the hills were lost in the gloaming: the white chrysanthemums by the garden-gate were nothing but a dim blotch on the murky autumn night.

I lit the candles—home-made candles of yellow beeswax—and set them on their little mats of plaited green leather. I got out a new quire of foolscap, sobering in its empty whiteness, its word-hungry look. I arranged the ruler, the old cut-glass inkpot, the painted leaden frog that serves for paperweight, the elephant that carries a penwiper as houdah, ash-tray and tobacco-jar and sheaf of favourite pipes, all in their proper stations. I drew the old oak elbow-chair sideways to the table—sideways because that was non-committal: too squarely business-like an approach in the outset, as I know of old time and cost, often scatters the fairies into the next county, and you may chew to shreds a whole quiverful of goose-quills before they again come crowding and whispering curiously about your ears.