But fairy-stories! How surprising and entrancing are even those which people make up and put in books, while round us every day a fairy-story far more wonderful is being told not only for us to read, but enacted for us to see. It is only familiarity with it which robs us of the sense of its wonder, for imagine, if we could make ourselves ignorant again of what happens to bulbs when we put them in the earth, how the possibilities of flying-machines would grow flat and stale before the opening of the daffodil. For a man’s capacity for happiness is in great measure the same as his capacity for wonder and interest, and considering that there is absolutely nothing round us which does not teem with wonder if only we had the sense to see it, it argues very ill for our——
A wild shriek from the hillside opposite (distance forty yards) interrupted me.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ cried Helen; ‘but I cut a centipede in half. They are going in opposite directions.’
‘Dig another hole!’ I shouted. ‘Then go back when the halves have gone away. Yes, very distressing, but you can’t avoid everything.’
‘Murderer!’ said Helen.
This was feminine logic. I had not cut the centipede in half!
It was one of those golden October days of which we have now had some half-dozen. Every night there is a little frost, so that morning both looks and smells exquisitely clean, and it is hardly possible to regret the turn of the year; though dahlias are blackened, the trees blaze with copper and gold, for in this week of windless days scarce a leaf has fallen, and the stems are as thick with foliage as they were in the summer, and to my mind doubly beautiful. And this work of bulb-planting seems to bridge over the winter, for we are already at work on spring. But in November, Helen and I mean to turn our faces townwards again, for it is possible there to be unaware of the transition to winter, which is so patently before one’s eyes in the country, and which, with the best will in the world, it is impossible not to find rather depressing. Some people, I know, label the squalls of February March as execrable, and flee the country then. But we both love them. These are the last despairing efforts of winter. His hand is already loosed from the earth; he strikes wildly, knowing that there are but few blows left in him. But in the autumn he is gaining strength every day: it is life whose hold is being loosed. And that is not exhilarating to watch. True, it is only a mimic death-bed, but personally we don’t want to sit by the bedside. In London there is no bedside. The shorter the day, the earlier the lamps are lit. Those avenues of shining eyes, which are not shocked whatever they see.... And the fogs—the mysterious fogs! I suppose we are Cockneys.
Helen gave out first in the matter of bulbs, and came and sat by me.
‘How very dirty you are!’ she said. ‘And have you been planting bulbs with your nose?’
‘Not at present. But it tickled, and so I rubbed it.’