i am come back again to the level uneventfulness of these pleasant days with a great sense of having ‘come home’ continually with me. this little stuccoed house with its little garden has become to me my angulus terr?; the deep vibration of ‘home,’ incommunicable, and to many unmeaning, is here; i can no longer imagine myself permanently anywhere else. all day long i continually find, as it were, intimate glances: the line of the downs, a group of trees, or a corner of my own room catches my eye as one catches the eye of a friend across a roomful of acquaintances. that glance says nothing in particular—it only means ‘i am i, you are you’—but it is only between friends that such a glance can ever pass; soul beckons to soul with gesture invisible to others, and a smile answers it, for it is friends who are our anchor in this swift-rushing stream of days{228} and years: secure there, though time eddies in froth and flying spray about our bows, it does not whirl us away, straw and flotsam, down the racing flood. and above us, when we look up from our anchorage through the flying wrack of storm-cloud and torn fringes of wind-swept vapour, there glimmer the steadfast and immutable stars.
i left capri, as you will have guessed, somewhat in a hurry; in fact, i firmly and speedily ran away as hard as i could. all september, so i see now, i had been living in the flimsiest paradise of a fool. i had thought it was possible to detach one’s self so utterly from the joys and frailties of the human race that one could take any liberties one chose, look at and live in beauty, and cease to be man. then suddenly the flesh twitched me, and like the flowers of klingsor’s garden my sexless paradise fell in red ruin of autumn leaf about my ears. for me, anyhow, such a paradise was not possible, and i had—only just—the sense to see that it was better to live decently and dully than—otherwise.
so i took ship at naples and came home by sea,{229} for why one should shut one’s self up in a grilling box of scarlet velvet and grind along a steel path to the din of rolling wheels, when the divine waterways are at the door, is more than i ever could imagine. two moments of the voyage i shall never forget.
out in the bay of biscay we had a couple of days of heavy gale, the wind 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{230} 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{231} 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{232} 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{233} 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{234} 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{235} 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{236} 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{237} 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{238} 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{239} 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.{240}
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{241} 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{242} 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{243} 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{244} 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{245} 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{246} 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{247} 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{248} 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,{249} 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{250} 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.{251}’
