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.