Chapter IV

Yes, the summer is gone, in very truth. With every day now, and every hour of the day, the writing on the wall shows plainer. While the hushed, hot times endured, it was still possible to believe red autumn as far away as ever; for not a leaf in oak or elm has changed, nor will change, perhaps, for weeks to come. But the tell-tale winds of the equinox are upon us, bringing the very voice of autumn with them; and the acorns are falling by the river, and the thistle-down drifting white upon the hills.

I began this day badly—badly, that is to say, from my own private point of view; which is a point, it may well be, like Euclid’s, having position but no dimensions, yet a point nevertheless. Chancing to wake with the dawn, I saw that the day was beginning with a beautiful smoke-pearl trellis in the east, behind which welled up an ever-strengthening fountain of silver white. Coming presently out upon the green under this pure pale glow of morning, I was startled by a cry that came echoing from the misty twilight of the hills.

‘Hi-up! Hi-up! Voller, voller, voller!’

Hoarse, harsh, undeniably brutal it sounded in the sweet, snow-white lustre of the virgin light. And then came the shrill blare of the huntsman’s horn, the confused yelping and baying of the pack, and the dull thunder of beating hoofs, as the hunt drove over the hill-top, and fell to drawing Windle coverts.

At once the silent village awoke. Windows were thrown open and heads appeared. Dark figures burst from cottage doors and went pounding up the lane that led to the hills. Round the covert the horsemen gathered in a motionless ring, while the huntsman drove his pack through the undergrowth, for ever urging them forward with that fierce guttural note, which was more like the cry of a wolf than a man. At length a fine cub fox broke cover, and led the whole company a ding-dong chase over the hills, and out of sight and hearing for good.

Some hours later, I met Farmer Coles and his two sons returning from the sport, the youngest, a mere schoolboy, mounted on a pony, his head, as he rode, reaching scarce to his father’s saddle-peak. He was in huge high spirits, displaying the brush, his share of the spoil, to all acquaintance as he passed. And the face of this yellow-haired, chubby child was bedaubed with blood, thick zebra-like streaks of it smudged across his smooth forehead and rosy baby cheeks. He was going home delighted, to show to an admiring mother how he had been ‘blooded’ at his first cub-hunt; and in all that country-side, I thought to myself as I passed on, there was scarce a man or woman of station and breeding who would not have applauded son of theirs returning home in such a plight.

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