ST. MARTIN’S SUMMER
In November I returned for a day to a lonely cottage which I had known
in the summer; and all its poppies were gone. Here and there, in the
garden, could be found a violet, a primrose, a wood sorrel, flowering;
the forget-me-nots and columbines had multiplied and their leaves were
dense in the borders; the broad row of cabbages gleamed blue in a
brief angry light after rain; the black currant leaves were of pure,
translucent amber at the ends of the branches. In the little copses the
oaks made golden islands in the lakes of leafless ash, and the world
was very little in a lasting mist.
Yet it was not impossible to reach greedily ahead to spring, and I
was doing so, in spite of the incredibly early fall of night amid the
whirling and crying of lapwings, when, suddenly, a dead elm tree spoke
of the summer that was past. Dead, it had been worn by the summer
landscape as a memorial, as a “reminiscential amulet.” It alone was now
still the same, and strangely it spoke of the summer which it had not
shared; and I recalled swiftly a night and daybreak of July.
All night we had sat silent with our books. There was no other company
within a mile save that of the tall clock, with a face like a harvest
moon, which did not tick, but stood silent with hands together
pointing at twelve o’clock, seeming to rest, and to be content with
resting, at the tranquil and many-thoughted midnight which it had so
often celebrated alone until we came. But we were glad of the clock.
It allowed us to measure the rich summer night only by the changing
enchantments of Burton’s and Cervantes’s and Hudson’s page, and by the
increasing depth of the silence which the owl and restless lapwing
broke no more than one red ship breaks the purple of a wide sea. It
is a commonplace that each one of us is alone, that every piece of
ground where a man stands is a desert island with footprints of unknown
creatures all round its shore. Once or twice in a life we cry out that
we know the footprints; we even see the boats of the strangers putting
out from the shore; we detect a neighbouring island through the haze,
and creatures of like bearing to ourselves moving there. On that night
a high tide had washed every footprint away, and we were satisfied,
raising not a languid telescope to the horizon, nor even studying the
sands at our feet.
Not less strangely or sweetly than it creeps in among dreams, came in
the whisper of the first swallows of the dawn among our books; and
Cleopatra, the cat, slipped out through the window and left me.
But it happened that I rose and drew a curtain aside to see whether she
went to the woods or to the barn. The night was over. The pool at the
bottom of the garden was glazed and dim and slightly crumpled, like the
eye of a dead bird; and all its willows were grim.
In the garden there was a bee. A little wind broke up the poppies petal
by petal, so that they vanished like fair children in the midst of
their perfections--cut off, and marked in the memory chiefly by the
blank they leave, and not by an abundance such as older people entail
upon us to mimic life. Hardly had I ceased to watch them than it was
day. The cattle in a distant meadow stood still at the edge of their
own shadows as if at the edges of pools. The dead elm tree seemed
but a skull-capped, foolish jester who set a sharper edge upon our
appetite for summer and the sun. The corn, the woods, rejoiced. The
green woodpecker laughed and shone in his flight, which undulated as
if he had been crossing invisible hedges. A south-west wind arose and
rain fell softly, yet not so soothingly but that an odd thought thrust
itself into my mind.
I thought of how Cervantes was not enjoying it, and in a moment I saw
him and Burton and Wordsworth and Charles Lamb close by, crouching and
grey, as if they had been buried alive, under knotted cables of oak
root, deep under the earth which was then bearing carnation and wild
rose. The wind found out the dead elm tree and took counsel in its
branches and moaned, although the broad light now reigned steadfastly
over leagues of shining fields.