Autumn

I

I THINK autumn lived a long time ago. It is homesick for some life that it lived before. The tides fall so low, as though the very soul had fallen out of them; and the water drops over the dam in the creek as though it had ever so far to fall — about three o’clock in the afternoon, which has become a very stale hour. Suds form where the water splashes down, and drift on the surface out of the harbor. They go out to sea, God smooth them. In the late autumn, in the late summer afternoon.

They go drifting out to sea, and get out of notice, and out of record. There the light breeze from the red rocks meets them; fellow sufferers, though one is younger in little quick ripples. Theirs are the red rocks around them, and the trees where they show past, some of them green and some reddish and some with fewer leaves. It is a great release to them, this low falling of the tide in the bay. The bottom is nearer the top, and rocks that have not showed for a long time are out of water. The tide sucks very quietly by them going out. Buoys droop.

Outside, I know not. Whether deep water receives this order of stuff that is coming out, like an adventurer to shore returned, or a son home again, or a private back on the rounds of commonplace duty, I do not know. The sea is blue unless an outside fog gray it. It is blue unless three o’clock or four begin to cover it up.

Autumn was a chieftain. He built a cache up in an old pond, which lets a dribble go out under a footbridge through a cleft in dry sand out onto wet sand and down onto the sea. He had a cache there in the old days. The open harbor around the point was for those who walk in the spring; the bay was for summer. Autumn chose the place up in the backed-up pond, where mortals would not walk because it was too clammy and horrid, and there was a bend of trees, leaving no beach or footing.

Autumn had ships that moved over the sea from far places. They came in from outside. Sometimes gently they took their leave. The ships were waves: they knew their equations.

Now a wave is too much favored to routine. It has never varied its ritual. It has different sizes, various fashions, and many compromises. But it is not receptive to a new idea. Its own is good. Motion out of stillness. There is its creed. There it sticks. Beware.

Waves only forget themselves when crossed by lesser things, the worse the more unexpected. Rocks that come up under them. Beaches that get under their feet and stay there. No wave can stand a beach. It is like a cautious man to an uncautious, and an uncautious man in the nostrils of a cautious. They go all to pieces, rolling over and over, clutching their adversary.

II

Autumn sat in its den and watched its waves coming in, laughing a little at them. Waves are so ponderous in midocean, and they are crestfallen so completely at a bit of sloping sand. And here let me say this about waves. Given a tempest, and they are not round things as some landsmen may think to believe. They are Gothic. High, straight sides are niched and recessed, with battlement and pinnacle, and flying buttresses, and spires pointed. So has the wind carved them.

They are stuck all over with smaller waves and fractures and apertures and parapets spindle-shaped. A tempest at sea is a war of castles, an Armageddon of architecture. The schools of the East, with the bulbous Orient, clash off-guard upon the wakeful shafts and cornices of Europe. Such internecine warfare strikes the ocean. It is a riot of walls and towers, and a clinching of schools and tastes of design. Thus gloriously does the wave moving employ bits of water left unmoved, only raised to some glimpse of instant gargoyle and dropped again. Warfare among waves is warfare that is. Waves’ facilities see to that.

Now autumn sat in its cove, where the water of the marsh dribbles out, and let the red and brown leaves which were become a bit stiff and prickly scratch its back. It sat in worry and concern for its wave-ships out on the sea. When the wind blew offshore it sent its ships out, thin and light laden. When the wind blew onshore it let them come in big. Would all our receivings were as large, our payments as small.

And — come to think of it — why does not the sea with necessity overcrowd the land? You never see a big wave pick up and leave the beach. You see many from afar come and thump on the beach. Autumn, old rascal, you should have got rich.

Spring and summer do not have much trade because they work inland. Autumn is the merchant among the seasons, tearing leaves off his ledger book, which is bound by trees, as each wave comes and dumps its rich cargo on the beach. The leaf flutters down from the binding very slowly, keeping the count. Ching Lee, trader in old days, and odds and ends — such is autumn.

Sometimes the waves — which I have said are autumn’s hulls and argosies — met in mid-seas. A squadron of them assembled where some cyclone held a disarmament conference, commencing in the orthodox manner of increasing everyone’s ordnance as a starter. But they got nowhere in their aspirations. For as soon as they were prorogued for northern latitudes and had dispersed a little, he that blew onshore was most turbulent, while the others swore peace among nations; but as soon as the others swung around and became onshore they were just as bad as the first. But they were masters of the ocean, holding only rival waves fit antagonists.

In this manner the elements disposed themselves, and time went its rounds without noticing anything new in ever so long.

Autumn encroached on winter and summer a little; but not much — for he saw no more honor in being anything but himself than man sees in being an angle or a height or the boundary of California or fish for eight or any other interesting quantity or relation. It did not appeal. Had you suggested, he would have laughed. He was content to sit in watch, while his wave-ships at sea tumbled and rumpled one another, just as man is willing to spend his life fighting man and confounding his own efforts.

Autumn saw nothing funny in it, and sat there just as though one always sat in a wet pool and scraped his feet on thorns.

He even dispatched cross-winds to meet the incoming waves and ‘give them employment,’ by way of being both efficient and philanthropic at the same time. He sent stray night airs working in navy yards building what nobody wanted so that all would be rich.

But what a fool autumn was. The waves thought that they would all be sure to have work if they limited their hours of labor and items of production. There were great long calms, where the sun rose way up half into the heavens and saw not a body lifted. Overwork was saved, and undernourishment produced. Life was stale, no end.

And when autumn saw that there was almost nothing living, he got up in anger, and blew his nose: so that early-morning birds were startled, and branches of trees rubbed and creaked together. Even far out in mid-sea no turrets were seen in high-battled pageant. Accordingly, winds were dispatched from the African shore and the shore of Argentine, tooting waves out and bugling and enrolling. Armadas gathered again from the four shores. Moving cities quaked in midocean under artisan-waves wizardry. Action took hold again, spitting and dispensing rain. Armies of seas gunned at each other across storm centres, ejecting wads of clouds. At home the grasses trembled and the drain gurgled audibly coursing through the sand and over backs of shells down to the seaweedy shore. High clouds hastened in from out-to-sea without telling their business, and others hastened back toward the sea, solid masses sometimes summoned at once and working inseparably. It was a tense moment halfway between earth and sky. Few noticed the sky whiter, even on days called blue.

The equinox gathered and flipped its farthest tail. Upon that, the seas themselves gathered and mounted and bulked and marched swelling toward the shore, in battle array, spears at the sky. They massed, and got bearings, and came carrying the flag before them, with commerce ready soon after to follow. Light winds in their rear ran to and fro carrying messages from wing to wing, and doughnuts — which the sun from a commissary high above the lines fed out in concentric circles. They came as blazoned frigates to conquer idleness. It was a grand array of formality and wave-cities, reared to shade Babel, marching on the land. But what is this? What has happened, before even the outer reefs and the Eastern Heresies are reached? Who has betrayed them?

Note and behold the thermometer has been falling. Where there should be the frothy anger of spray are gems of crystal. The heart of the wave is freezing. The constitution of wavemotion is endangered. Burst, you turreted cities, upon the mainland. You are there. All right. But you are ice. The minaret gleams solid. The flagstaff is a rod of clinking ice. The parapets encase. The sea’s seas touch at the ice field’s breastworks; but stop, and slink under, creeping a way under the heavy floes, subdued. The blue is white. Wave motion stuck to its ritual and formula, and that formula is transfixed. Its talent it thought to bury; and now that talent is locked fast under lock and key. Winter, never known in the world before, is come.

III

Autumn left. It visits now by courtesy only in season. There are great gaps when on no part of the terrestrial globe may autumn be found.

So it is that autumn, when it comes, is homesick for its golden age. It is a season of dear remembrances. Inland it is often abrupt. The leaves go from green to brown, with hardly a stop. The prairie grass transforms. But in its old haunts, in a cove backed off from the sea behind a shoal of sand, it has its own color; green and red and crimsontint. It has its old sighs, great wind reviving in flushed memory out of north of west. It has its stars; but they cannot be mentioned with no tear shed. It has itself — for just a little time each harvest season.

The last flower pays the tribute of its life to a once master. The leaves dropping one by one count the waves that drop their cargo on the beach, owed in sentiment’s debt. Feeling for the low-drawn water, the drain runs out under the foot-plank down the bared beach to the sea. In the important creek beyond the point, the water drops the long descent to the fallen tide, as though its heart had gone. It drops there; and, dropping, churns the water between its feet that forms suds, which drift out the still harbor to the sea, between rows of silent sand beaches and trees. There the scum meets the red rocks and the low ledges, usually submerged, which have not looked up and said ‘ hello ’ to one another since the last low prayer meeting a year ago. Beyond that, they move past to the sea, and are lost count of.

Indoors, men noticing the dried leaves scooped against the corners of their dwelling, and hearing the wave’s foot on the far shore, sniff the unmistakable memory in the air, and, glancing only casually at the bare branch bowing outside the window against the night sky, swig great gulps of cider, for an old time’s sake.