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?’