Nor, though at the time the thing filled me personally with genuine horror and loathing, did I condemn it, nor wish to see its like made impossible in the land. For the sybaritish, lotus-eating danger is too imminent in our midst for any such fabian trifling: it will be a woeful day for England when we have bred out of our young manhood the last instincts of the healthy brute.
I got into Runridge’s skiff, in the absence of its owner, and pushed off into mid-stream, letting the little craft drift whither it would. Wind and tide together were setting strongly up-country. Swiftly the reedy banks glided by, as we bore through the meadows that lie at the foot of the hills. The summer was gone, indeed; and gone with it that sense of striving towards achievement. The year seemed to be resting upon its oars, as I was doing. All its fruit was set: there remained nothing now but to wait and let it ripen. It was just this waiting and resting that made up autumn’s greatest charm.
I set my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands, and let the little boat choose a destiny for the idle pair of us. The bank was high to windward. We drifted in an almost unruffled calm, while overhead there sailed by an unending cloud of thistle-down, tiny verticals of sunlit silver, each gleaming star-like against the morning blue. Most of them took the broad river at a stride, disappearing over the opposite bank, but many fell upon the water. Thousands of them floated around me, and as far as eye could reach the water was grey and misty with them. And this was only one nook of earth in innumerable miles. How was it, I asked of the wind above me, that with such inexhaustible store of thistle-seed, she could not sow the whole land thick with thistles in a single season, and drive all other things from the fields? The answer was to be obtained for the mere raising of a hand. For it is not the thistle-seed that flies, but only the harmless thistle-down. Moreover, among the millions of air-ships that each thistle-patch sends off upon the wind throughout a breezy autumn day, not one in fifty ever bore a seed, or, if bearing it, contrived to carry its burden more than a yard or two. The curved seed-pod of the thistle is attached to its feathery volute only by the slenderest thread, and is brushed off by the lightest touch of the first grass-blade as it sails low over the sward. But the thistle-down, lightened of its counterpoise, bowls on for ever.
OCTOBER
I
With each October in every year for a long time past, I have watched for the going of the martins, but have never yet contrived to witness the moment of their flight. It has always happened in the same way. One day they have been as busy as ever about the roof-eaves, their chattering song pervading the house unceasingly from dark to dark. And then a morning comes, generally towards the end of the first week in the month, when I awaken to a curious sense of strangeness and loss. First I mark the unwonted silence outside the windows, and then I guess what has come about. Looking forth, I see that the little mud-houses, huddled together in a long row under the eaves, are deserted and silent at last.
But to-day, though I missed the departure of the martins as usual, I was not wholly disappointed. Getting up in the new silence and throwing the windows back, I looked along the roof-edge. Save for the chippering and fluttering of a few sparrows, there was nothing to be seen or heard in the dim grey light. But it seemed the little army could have been away only a few minutes before me, for while I looked, I saw the last of them depart. One single note of the remembered song broke out overhead; there was a whir of wings, and the little black-and-white bird lanced straight off, going due south unhesitatingly, as though the vanished throng of her companions was yet visible far away in the skies.
It was a still, grey, warm morning. There had been no dew. Everything, as presently I went along by the wood-side, was quite dry; and though it was barely eight o’clock, all the spiders in the bushes were hard at work weaving their snares. It was almost perfect spinning weather. On windy mornings, though the webs must be made, the task is difficult and the work seldom properly carried out. But to-day there was only a vague air moving from the south-west, and all the spiders had got to work betimes, and with light hearts.
The great charm in all nature study is to find out the truth for yourself at first hand. There are few things in my life I regret so keenly as the reading of nature books. This has robbed me of many a moment of pleasurable surprise; for to recognise a commonly accepted fact is poor substitute for its original discovery, although this discovery may have been made by others a thousand times before. Looking back over twenty years’ poking and prying in the woods and fields round about Windlecombe, I rejoice not so much at the many things I have found out, but at the fact of so many things still unread of, and still remaining to be discovered. This morning, as I went along by the bushes in the lee of the wood, and saw the spiders at work, it suddenly occurred to me that I knew little or nothing about them; and the recognition of this ignorance came to me as truest bliss. I fell to looking on at the ingenious, complicated work with almost as much anxiety and interest as the male spiders themselves.
For it appears to be only the female who spins a web. The big-bodied spider, so industriously occupied in every gap of the thicket, is always the female, though the male is never far off. You are sure to find him peering out from under one of the adjacent leaves, or treading timidly on the circumference of the web, trying to attract the attention, and thereafter, perhaps, the regard of its maker.