Many furrows

by A. G. Gardiner

A LOG FIRE

I came in from the woods with a settled purpose. I would spend the evening in exalting the beauty of these wonderful November days in the country. The idea presented itself to me not merely as a pleasure but as a duty. Long enough had November been misjudged and slandered, usually by Cockney poets like Tom Hood, who looked at it through the fogs of a million coal fires. Bare justice demanded that the truth should out, that the world should be told of this beautiful though aged spinster of the months who clothed the landscape in such a radiant garment of sunshine, carpeted the beech-woods with such a glow of gold and russet, filled the hedgerows with the scarlet of the hips and haws, the wine-red of the blackthorn, and the yellow of the guelder rose, and awoke the thrushes from their late summer silence.

This fervour for my Lady November is no new passion. There are certain things about which I have never made up my mind, and about which, I suppose, I never shall make up my mind. That is to say I make it up, and then unmake it, after which I remake it, like the child on the sea-shore who sees his sand-castle swept away by one tide, and returns to build it for another tide to sweep away. Thus, if I say that I prefer Bach's Concerto for Two Violins to any piece of music I have ever heard, I do not guarantee that a year hence I may not be found swearing by the Londonderry air, or a Hebridean song (the Island Shieling Song, for example), or the Magic Flute, or something from Schumann. A year later I may be round to the intertwined loveliness of the two violins again. And if I affirm that the Brothers Karamazov is the greatest achievement of the imagination since Shakespeare, I do not promise not to say the same thing of something else, David Copperfield or Les Miserables, when, after a due interval, I express my view again. And so with pictures and authors and towns and trees and flowers—in short, all the things that appeal to the changing emotions or to that vague and unstable thing called taste.

So it is in regard to the merits of the months. I have been trying all my life to come to a final decision on this great question. It seems absurd that one should spend, as I have spent, fifty or sixty years doing little else but sample the months without arriving at a fixed and irrevocable conclusion as to which I like best. But that is the case. I am a mere Don Juan with the months. I go flirting about from one to the other, swearing that each is more beautiful than her rivals. When I am with June it seems absurd that there should be anything else than June, and when I am with August I would not sacrifice August with its waving cornfields and its sound of the reaper for half the calendar. But then comes September, and I chant Swinburne to her as though I had never loved another:

September! all glorious with gold as a king
In the raiment of triumph attired,
Outlightening the summer, outsweetening the spring,
It broods o'er the woodlands with limitless wing,
A presence of all men desired.

I do not doubt that I have declared that October, ruddy October, chill October, is the pick of the bunch, and I know that on the first bright day in February, when I see the snowdrops peeping out and hear the rooks in the elms, I shall be found declaring that this is the choicest moment of the year. And April—April with the trees bursting into green and the meadows "smo'ered wi' new grass," as they say in the dales, and the birds coming up from the south bringing tidings of the summer—well, what can one say of April, Shakespeare's April, Shakespeare's "sweet o' the year," except that there is none like her?

But I know that when May comes in and the orchards burst into foam, and the lilac, laburnum and pink hawthorn make every suburban street lyrical with colour and the beech-woods are clothed in that first tender green that seems to make the sunlight sing as it streams through and dapples the golden carpet of last year's leaves with light and shade, and the bees are humming like an orchestra in the cherry and damson trees and the birds are singing as though they are divinely drunk, and the first brood of young swallows are making their trial flights from the nest in the barn and

When nothing that asks for bliss
Asking aright is denied,
And half of the world a bridegroom is
And half the world a bride.

—then I know that I shall desert even My Lady April and give the palm to the undespoiled splendour of May, singing meanwhile with Francis Thompson:

By Goddés fay, by Goddés fay,
It is the month, the merry month,
It is the merry month of May.

In this shameless wandering of the affections I have come round once more to November, and I marvel, as I have marvelled many a year before, that the poets have left unsung the elderly beauties of this month, the quietude of its tones, the sombre dignity of its landscape, the sense of a noble passing, the fading colours, the falling leaves, the winds changing to a note of requiem among the dismantled branches—

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

And lamenting this neglect I resolved to pay my tribute. But first I must make up the fire, for though my Lady November is beautiful she is austere. She has frozen the pump and the grass is thick with hoar-frost, and to be just to her one must be warm. So I piled on the logs and prepared to be warm and enthusiastic.

Then I did a foolish thing, I sat down in an armchair and surrendered myself to the fire's comfortable companionship. There is nothing more friendly or talkative than a fire. Even a coal fire, if you look at it steadfastly, will become as communicative as a maiden aunt. It knows all the gossip of the family, especially the gossip about old, forgotten things. It will talk to you of events so remote that they seem to belong to the country of dreams. It will bring out faded portraits, and sing old songs, and burst into laughter that you have not heard perhaps for forty years, and revive antique jokes, and hand round steaming elderberry wine o' Christmas nights, and make shadowgraphs on the wall as if you were a little boy again, and send you sliding and skating under the glittering stars. It forgets nothing about you, and it tells its memories so cheerfully and serenely that it leaves nothing for tears. All this, even a coal-fire will do when it is really in the vein and you have time to sit and listen.

But a wood fire has a magic beyond this. Its very smell is an intoxication as rapturous as romance, compounded of all you have read of the backwoods, of memories of the charcoal-burners, and of Coal Munk Peter, of tales of the woodlands, Tristan and Iseult, and Robin Hood, and Good King Wenceslaus, and the Children of the New Forest, of Giles Winterbourne and Marty South, and all the delightful people with whom the mind loves to go a-gypsying far away from this foolish world. Of course, you have to be something of a sentimentalist or a romantic to feel all this—such a person as I once walked with for a month in the Black Forest, to whom the smell of the woodlands was as exciting as wine, and the sight of a charcoal-burner's camp a sort of apocalyptic vision. How well I remember those summer nights when, leaving the forest inn, we would plunge into the woodlands, he singing that haunting air Der Mai ist gekommen and interrupting it with a shout as he saw the glimmer of the charcoal-burner's fire through the boles of the pine trees....

But a wood fire is not only an idyll. It is an occupation. With a coal fire it is different. You put on a shovel of coals, and there's an end of it. But a wood fire will furnish light and pleasing employment for a whole evening. And by a wood fire I do not mean those splinters of wood that you buy in towns, but thumping logs—beech or apple or fir, as the case may be—a yard or two long and with the bark intact that you lay across the fire-dogs and turn round and round until they are burned through at the centre and fall into the embers beneath in a glorious blaze, sending out such a generous warmth as only comes from a wood fire. Once or twice I drew myself away from this seductive task and sat down at the table, determined to write such a moving panegyric on November as would make it the haughtiest month of the year. Once I even went outside to get inspiration from the stars and the moon that was flooding the valley with a mystic light and the hoar-frost that lay like a white garment over the orchard. I heard the hoot of the owl in the copse near by and the sound of the wind in the trees and the barking of a distant dog and came back to my task with a stern resolve to see it through. But the struggle was in vain. Always there was some nice readjustment of the logs necessary to call me to the charmed circle of the wood fire; always at the end I found myself planted in the arm-chair watching the changing scenery of the glowing embers.

So the article was not written after all. Perhaps it was as well, for I do not think I have the brush to do justice to My Lady November. It may be that that is why the wood fire had so easy a triumph.