blowing from the west like a solid thing. The sea, which till then had
been calm, gradually began to get up. There was no sun, and from a gray
and infinite flatness it grew streaked and wrinkled. Then the wrinkles
began to amalgamate, every two or three wrinkles turning themselves into
one definite furrow, and the streaks formed themselves into sprayed
wave-caps. When I went to bed the ship was still fairly steady, but full
of wandering creaks and groans, and clothes hanging up on my cabin walls
whispered against the woodwork and oscillated backwards and forwards.
During the night, however, we began to pitch and roll in earnest, and,
waking once, I heard the scream of the screw whirling impotently out of
water, and the jar of straining wood and rivets. All next day the riot
of the skies and din of the seas grew greater, until, coming on to deck
after dinner, one had to dash at suitable moments over the open to gain
handhold before the next lurch. Eventually I found a corner sheltered
from the wind behind the smoking-room, and sat there with the gale
thundering madly above my head and yelling and thrumming in the
quivering rigging. The sky was quite clear and cloudless, and though
there was no moon the stars made a gray twilight overhead. As the ship
laboured on with reeling gait, the mast near above me would strike
wildly right and left through a hundred stars, scoring a black line
through the Pleiades and the Bear. For a moment Orion’s belt would be
framed between the yard-arms, the next it would plunge out of sight
behind me. Then Cassiopeia’s chair would waver over the bulwarks,
tremulously perched, and in a second, as if it was roped to some
celestial swing, would soar high to the zenith. Then the bulwarks
themselves would rise a black blot into the sky; the next moment they
reeled giddily downwards, and at my feet almost there raced by huge
dimnesses of gray sea and flying foam with veiled and luminous specks
of phosphorescent light glimmering like marine glow-worms.
Then suddenly from the deck below came a cry I have heard only once,
‘Man overboard!’ and in a moment--coming, it seemed, from nowhere--the
deck was alive with hurrying figures. The thump of the screw grew slow
and ceased, women screamed, and from a big chest near me three sailors
got out a flare-buoy--a wooden frame with a light attached to it. In a
few seconds it was lit and flung overboard, and flaring high it rose and
fell, a veritable dance of death, among the hills and valleys of the
sea. It was impossible at the pace we were going to reverse the engines
at once, for the strain would have endangered the lives of all on the
ship; but gradually as we slowed down this was done, and the churned
water from the screws hissed past us. The buoy was already far behind
us, but gradually we got nearer to it, and a boat was launched with
infinite difficulty and danger, and we lay there, the ship’s company
hanging on the lee bulwarks while it put out into the night and the
storm. There we waited, rolling and bowing to the waves for an hour
maybe, watching the flare and the light from the boat now riding high
against the horizon, now completely vanishing in the trough of some
wave. Then the flare burned out, and the boat returned. The search had
been fruitless. And slowly the thump of the screw worked its way to its
accustomed speed. The identity of the man was established, an entry was
made, and we went on again ever faster through the yellow twilight of
the stars and the big, pitiless sea.
* * * * *
The second moment was next morning. The wind had gone down, though the
sea still ran high, and all heaven and earth were one incredible blue. A
sun of transcendent brilliance flamed overhead, and not a cloud flecked
the huge azure dome. Below the great translucent waves were at play in
jovial boisterousness; the blue monsters flung themselves against the
black side of the ship and were shattered into a cloud of dazzling
white, which as it rose into the air was momently iridescent with
rainbow--a high-day of delight. About eleven of the morning a sudden
whisper and rumour ran round the ship, and by degrees the sequel of
that tragic hour last night was made known. The wife of the man who had
fallen overboard the night before was with child, and the shock had
brought on a premature delivery, and she had died. But the child lived,
and in all probability would do well. So June had its tale repeated
again, and when the weighted shroud slid into that ocean of brightness,
wavered subaqueously and disappeared, I could have sworn for a moment
that a sudden waft of the smell of sweet-peas pierced the pungency of
the sea.
So both lie there in the depths of the unquiet Bay, though leagues
apart. Will those two poor tabernacles of mortality, I cannot but
wonder, find some subtle mode of telegraphy in their green sea-caves,
and speak to each other, or go to each other across the ooze of the
depths, moved by some thresh of current? Or will they have to wait there
patiently in their crystal tombs till the sea gives up its dead, and
they float up as the chrysalis of the dragon-fly floats up through the
water, to find that the new heaven and the new earth are fair at the
dawning of the supreme day? Such was the incident of my home-coming: in
the midst of life there was death, and in the midst of death, life. It
is always so.
* * * * *
The long, dark evenings are beginning, but day after day unclouded
October weather, with its brisk air and its exquisite clarity and
luminousness, prevails. It reminds one of nothing in the world so much
as a boy’s soprano; nothing else in the world gives one the sense of
such absolute perfection and purity of vehicle--the one expressed in
terms of light, the other of sound. And as the boy’s voice rises and
fills the great spaces of some sunlit cathedral, so this light pervades
these aisles of yellowing trees and spaces of swelling downland. About
each there is the same piercing, pervading quality; about each there is
an utter absence of all passion or emotion. A woman’s voice, it seems to
me, is like the mature light of summer, broad, full of feeling, full of
the tenderness of sex. But in this October weather you have mere
brightness; in the air there is a certain chill, which gives the
precision that the warm, flower-blurred light of summer lacks. It
promises nothing like the languors and brightnesses of spring, it gives
no fulfilment like the noons of summer; it is just itself--exquisite,
meaningless, and at times horribly sad. For the year has turned; we have
had our bright and our beautiful times, and they are over, and soon will
be the season of long, dark evenings; and the blear-eyed peerings of the
remote sun through the fogs of November. In the winter, too, there is
something of the hibernating spirit about us; we dream and doze, and
vitality sometimes burns a little low, and age looks over our shoulder,
and we tend to be possessed with the Spirit of the falling leaf.
Now, the Spirit of the falling leaf is a most unprofitable demon. To
dwell on the thought of decay and age and death cannot, I believe, be
salutary for anybody. _Pereunt et imputantur._ That motto, surely, was
written by an atheist and an idiot. For, in the first place, the hours
that go so swiftly by do not perish--each hour that passes goes to form
the present; what we did or were then is exactly that which makes us
what we are now. And if we are to seriously give our minds to the
contemplation of what is written up against us in the ledger-book of the
hours that have passed, we shall, if we have any conscience at all,
only secure for ourselves paralysis in the future. No decently-minded
man, if he dwells on his missed opportunities with any honesty, can
possibly raise his head again. A lively repentance sets its face
steadily forwards, never backwards.
This Spirit of the falling leaf is my especial foe, and I detest him
with all the fervour of familiarity. Every autumn he whispers to me,
‘Look at the trees from which the yellow leaves are falling slowly,
slowly, but steadily. Soon they will be quite bare; their summer is
over, a year is gone. But they will renew their youth in the spring, the
green buds will burst again, and June will laugh among the revivified
branches, and the birds will again make there a melodious habitation.
But no spring will renew you; each year you are older; your spring is
past, and your summer days will not come again.’ And I turn cold.
Now, though the Spirit of the falling leaf may speak the truth, that is
one of the truths which it is our duty steadily to ignore. What is past
is past; but to-day, at any rate, lies in front of us; to-day is our
immediate and vital concern, and if we are fortunate enough to live
till to-morrow, to-morrow will be our vital concern. No, to talk with
the Spirit of the falling leaf is to invite paralysis of the soul. It is
wise to guard against such paralysis by that simple antidote which is
within the reach of everybody, and its name is Work.
‘How well I know what I mean to do
When the long dark autumn evenings come!’
There speaks the healthful man. Browning set himself to read Greek,
prose, he tells us, not poetry now, for he was old. Yet so green and
full of immortal youth were his years, that in his reverie, dwelling on
the past, no falling-leaf dirge comes to his lips, but the passionate
lyric rapture of love relived. But the point just now is that when the
autumn evenings were near he gave himself a task, set himself to do
something, opened a bottle of the only real tonic the world contains,
which is work. And most of us certainly need that tonic more in winter
than in summer. In summer the mere fact that we sit at the great banquet
of the spectacle of sun and flowers and green things is royal
entertainment. But the year turns, the lights burn lower, and we have to
employ ourselves; but, like children in the dark, we quake at the
gathering shadows.
What one sets one’s self to do matters nothing in comparison of the main
point, namely, that we set ourselves to do something, for any
employment, so long as it is not harmful, is essentially good. Many of
us have our ordinary work to do, which takes most of the day now days
are short. In the summer, perhaps, we were accustomed, when the day’s
work was over, to be out-of-doors; but now, in these lengthening nights,
we have to seek our employment inside. The great thing, then, is to do
something definite, and to do it seriously. To read the whole of
Shakespeare before next March is one employment that recommends itself
to me, but supposing the choice was made for me by another, who told me
that bridge was to be my winter employment, I should be quite content.
But in that case I should try very hard to get rid by March of the fatal
indecision which prompts one sometimes to make spades, sometimes no
trumps, out of practically the same hand. I should try to establish
once and for all the best suit to play if my partner doubles no trumps.
I should try to find out definitely what chance of success certain heavy
finesses have, and act accordingly, and I should consider that I had
wasted my winter if by next March I had not improved out of recognition.
But what I hope I should not do would be to play slackly, for in that
case one might as well talk to the Spirit of the falling leaf at once.
Meantime October is to me personally the month when I am most beset by
this spirit, for October is full of the sweet and tender memories of
certain people, very near to me, who are dead. Two days in particular
stand out, of which one was spent on the sea on my return from Naples,
and the other, October 27, will be here in a few days. On that day the
psalm for the evening, you will remember, is ‘When the Lord turned again
the captivity of Zion.’ It was the anthem, you know, in Winchester
Cathedral on the night when Henry Esmond returned, when his ‘dear
mistress’ looked up and saw the sunshine round his head as they sang
‘bringing their sheaves with them.’ And she came to him and blessed
him.
That immortal scene has in my own mind got so intertwined with my own
memories of the 27th of October that I cannot disentangle them. Twice, I
remember, I saw Margery again after a long absence on the 27th, and with
the tender memory of one who is dead there always wreathes itself the
other association of the return of someone beloved. Dimly, as if the
future would fulfil some dream of years ago, I picture some great joy
coming to me on that day. I think that on that day I shall return from
some captivity, and find that my life has been but a dream in the light
of what shall be; that I shall have a joyful reaping--God knows what or
how--for certain seed I have sown in tears; that some empty granary in
my heart shall be made full of golden grain.
September was a month of ‘mellow fruitfulness’ in England, and I have
returned to find my garden gone rampant. Somehow growth in autumn is
utterly unlike summer growth in its wild opulence, as if the dear plants
knew that it was nearly time for them to go to bed, but were determined
to have one great romp first. A huge nasturtium, like a boisterous
schoolboy, has sprung on to a Gloire de Dijon and is wrestling with it.
A canariensis which I thought was finished has played hide-and-seek all
over the trellis of the shelter until it met a wandering eccremocarpus,
which it instantly embraced like a long-lost brother, and the sunshine
of the flowers of the one is mixed with the orange trumpet of the other.
Phloxes are still in flower, sunflowers have topped the garden wall, and
the beautiful sylvestris is vigorous with pale leaf and snowy flower.
But--only fancy--that vile Jackmanni is dead. Quite dead. God forgive it
for a senseless fool.
* * * * *
These golden October days! Every morning I stray out before breakfast,
sometimes only into the garden, sometimes as far as the water-meadows,
to find the same glorious return of day. This morning the least pallor
of hoar-frost was on the grass, and the clean smell of the morning was
more exquisite than all the perfumes of Arabia. A tall chestnut had
grown very suddenly yellow--how delightful if our hair turned brilliant
gold (it does sometimes) when we grew old!--and the leaves were dropping
one by one, without twist or turn, in the calm air, till a heap of
unminted gold lay underneath the tree. Every now and then there was a
thump on the grass, and the green rind of the chestnut fruit, split by
the blow, jerked out its smooth and glossy globes. The chalk-streams
flowing through the meadows were full and brimming, streams of living
water, and the luxuriant grasses, grown to their longest, swam and
dabbled in the flawless crystal. How good it was to breathe the chill of
the morning, to look across the emerald of the meadows to the red town
in the hollow, full of clustering roofs, over which the mists lay thin
and level, pricked by the gray towers and solemn steeples which show
golden in the clearness of the upper air! Then back to breakfast, and to
this long quiet morning of work by the open window, interrupted only by
the rapturous contemplation of a man in the road trying to drive a
tandem. The leaders thought otherwise and went in different directions.
* * * * *
To-day is the 26th, and the march of these golden days has been suddenly
interrupted. Last night I awoke to hear a great wind rattling at the
panes, and snoring and fluting in the chimneys; and this morning,
instead of the yellow sunshine, I find a gray and tattered sky of low
storm-clouds, and sheets of driving rain flung against the windows. The
flowers in the garden cower beneath the stinging lashes of water, and
weep their petals silently away. A tree was blown down in the night not
far from the house--an elm growing in a hedgerow--and a cruel gaping
wound of torn earth has opened, with the fibres of the root like
tortured and exposed nerves standing out into the air. For thirty yards
round the field is littered with the pitiful debris--torn branches,
bunches of leaf, even a couple of bird’s-nests. For it, poor soul!
autumn has been the end of life, and spring will not build it anew.
All day the streaming heavens weep their violent and blinding tears, and
the loud gale fills me with vague and intolerable apprehension. Like a
lost soul it moans round the corners of the house, and through the
cracks of the closed windows it whistles in descending and ascending
chromatic scale. Now and then there comes a lull, but again it breaks
out in a hooting maniac chorus, as if Bedlam were loose. The tattoo of
the rain on the glass joins in the hurly-burly, and the swish and gurgle
of the water down the roof-pipes lends a chuckling evil accompaniment.
It is intolerable; there is the pain of hell and a certain hellish glee
in this scream and riot. It is as if some lost soul cried aloud from its
agony, yet exulted in its disobedience to God’s law. ‘Punish me, punish
me!’ it seems to say; ‘never will I repent. It was You who made me, You
who let my path on earth be hedged about with snare and temptation, and
when I fall into the pits You have allowed to be digged, You say that I
have sinned, and for that sin I burn in the fires of hell. But are You
more at Your ease on the golden throne before the crystal sea? You will
forgive me if I repent? A thousand thanks. But I will never repent, and
I will never forgive You.’
Hell is loose, and swarms round me. The poor souls whom the Will of God
caused to be made--have they not a right to resent their birth, if they
are born to pain only and hopeless struggling? And if for a while they
forget the evil plight into which they by no fault of theirs have been
born, by tasting pleasures which a code--to them merely arbitrary--has
labelled sinful, by what justice shall they be punished? Human justice
at least would be less merciless. Is it just to make a frail thing like
a man, place him in the midst of temptation, and then punish him because
he falls? Supposing I buy a doll at a toy shop, and place it insecurely
on the edge of a table and it falls off, is it just that I should then
whip it? Or go a step further, and grant that I can endow that doll with
consciousness, _so that it has an existence separate from mine_--may I
whip it then? Is it not the most elementary justice that I should
respect the free-will with which I have endowed it? But if it has a
consciousness which is yet not separate from mine, then I punish myself
if I punish it for transgressing laws which are of my own making. I, in
fact, have transgressed my own laws. In that case I had better repeal
them.
Now, possession of the devil is a very real thing, and though I hold
that in the majority of cases--they occur to each one of us every
day--the best thing to do is to run away if you possibly can, not stop
and argue, there are occasions, and this seemed to me to be one, where
you cannot run away, for you are with your back to the wall, and have to
fight. So I fought, and I am glad to be able to say that the devil was
sorry he spoke. For, as always, he is a very shallow fellow, and though
with his loud words--the gale to help him outside--he had seemed very
convincing for the moment, I think I never heard a sorrier argument than
his. He suggests, so I take it, the repeal of all moral laws: the
binding force of them is to vanish. What will happen then? The child
crossing the street will be driven over by the first carriage, and left
to lie there with broken limbs till the next ends its torture. I shall
go out of my house to-morrow and be clubbed by two men, who will rob me,
who in turn will be clubbed and robbed by three. In ten days--I wager my
immortal soul on this--the kingdoms of the world will be entirely in the
hands of a dozen men, all strong, all fearing each other, and desiring
to get rid of each other. For reasons of self-preservation they will
sign a contract that they will not kill, injure, or rob each other.
Moral law has therefore begun again, for it is necessary for the
preservation of human life. Next day they will sign another contract to
protect their women and children, and before the year is out they will
have found it necessary to have in force every human moral law that
exists to-day. If it were not so, those laws could never have existed.
Once more the spirit of good triumphs over the spirit of evil. God does
not punish us; it is our own punishment which we inflict on ourselves
each time that we, in ever so slight a degree, do anything which tends
towards that chaos which must exist without morality.
* * * * *
The gale has blown itself tired, and now, as I stand on the doorstep
about midnight, looking out, an extraordinary peace prevails. The moon
is high in heaven, bare of clouds, and the air is utterly calm and
windless. It seemed to me impossible only a few hours ago that so serene
a tranquillity should succeed the wild riot of to-day. And steadfast
remain the stars; they have not, as seemed almost inevitable, been
blown, like those heaps of dead leaves, about the floor of the skies, so
that one quarter was bare, while in another the Pleiades had been blown
against the Twins, and Orion sat on Cassiopeia’s chair.
* * * * *
The morning of the 27th was of the same pellucid serenity as the
midnight before. The trees were much barer than they had been
twenty-four hours before, and the inimitable tracery of the branches
against the sky was outlined with the precision of the South. The sun
was extraordinarily warm, and I sat out for an hour in the morning to
the chuckling of birds in the bushes and an unread paper. Then in the
afternoon I went to the cathedral for the evening service.
* * * * *
It has happened. For years past, as you know, I have felt certain it
would happen on this day, and when it happened I knew it could not have
been otherwise. Thus:
The service was at half-past three, and I got to the cathedral, I
suppose, some five minutes before it began, and was given a stall on the
south side. Through the windows behind me the sun streamed low--nearly
level--for it was not far from its setting, and I lived over again a
certain October 27, years ago, when I got home too late, and knew that
one of the sweetest and dearest souls that ever lived on earth had gone
home. It was just such a day as this, bright and unclouded, and even
then, on the day itself, I felt it wholly impossible to be sad. It was
all right with the world, then as always, and God, as always, was in His
heaven. We walked all together--those of us who were left--through the
woods, and it was right and meet that the sun shone, and that we
recalled and spoke of her merriness, and were ourselves merry with the
memory. Then my two strange meetings with Margery, also on this day,
intertwined themselves with the other: it was a day of home-coming.
At this point I became aware that I could not have been attending to the
service, for automatically, with the rest of the congregation, I rose
from my knees for the Psalms. No chant was played over, but a long pedal
note from the organ vibrated in the carved stalls, and at the first
chord the choir began. And they sang, ‘When the Lord turned again the
captivity of Zion, then were we like unto them that dreamed.’ I did not
need to open the big Prayer-Book, and for the first time I looked up.
Opposite me stood--Margery. And the sunlight was round her head.
It could not be Margery, for she is dead. Only when I looked up my brain
said ‘Margery.’
NOVEMBER
When the service was over, I waited by the west front watching the
congregation stream out of the gray gloom inside into the
primrose-coloured lights of sunset. There were two big collies sitting
patiently side by side on the edge of the grass, looking with liquid,
eager eyes at the people coming out. Suddenly two tails began to thump
ecstatically, but neither dog moved. It was She--I think I knew from
their eagerness it could be none else. With a smile lurking in her eyes,
she walked to them, and from where I was I could hear her say, ‘Dear
angels! come along,’ and two tawny streaks fled over the grass.