Part 5
Beyond the bridge, through a purple mist of branches, show silver glimpses of the river, then a broad stretch of meadow with dark pine woods above it, among which the young larch foliage floats in feathery clouds of green, and above these again, the brown and desolate moorland. Near the bridge a little party of wanderers have made their camp. The blue smoke of their fire drifts slowly this way, with the pleasant scent of burning pine wood, the pleasanter voices of girls and the shouts of children. It is a perfect day for camping in the open; with warm air, and blue sky, and soft white clouds sailing slowly over,--a day of clear shining after rain.
The air over the stream is full of insect life, of flies of many shapes and various hues, of browns, and drakes, and duns, so dear to the brown river trout; and, in counterfeit presentment at any rate, almost dearer to the soul of the trout-fisher. And as you watch the myriad wingèd things that sail along the water, that settle on the warm stones, or on the alder boughs, or even on your hand, you will think it small ground for wonder that the thickets by the stream should be so full of birds.
One might think that the roar of the river would be enough to drown all other sounds. But, clear above it rise the notes of tits and finches and warblers. The breezy chatter of the swallows, the call of the dipper, the woodwren's hasty little stave of song, the whistle of the blackbird, the mellow call of the cuckoo, are as plain as if the great voice of the river were not heard at all. In the next tree two finches have alighted; their restless movements and sharp challenge of alarm betraying only too plainly what they are so anxious to conceal, that their nest is somewhere near. Two beautiful birds they are; one with the red flush on his breast, the broad bar of white in either wing, the slate-blue feathers of his lifted crest. The other, hardly less charming, with all her colours pitched in soberer key. With anxious and persistent iteration of their one shrill note of protest, they flit from branch to branch; and when you rise, and peer into the tangle of ivy-mantled boughs above you, the birds grow more clamorous still. There is the nest, its mossy cup woven deftly among the slender twigs, studded all over with lichen points of silver--as ever, a miracle of beauty.
There are many birds preparing for the great event of the year. It is not for nothing, you may be sure, that that old blackbird has stayed out at the same corner of the hedge every day for a week past; there is some good reason for his stealing towards it now across the wood, a moving shadow, quiet for once. We can read the signs of the times in the notes of the birds no less than in the heightened colours of their plumage. It is a love-song pure and simple that yonder hedge sparrow, poised on a straying spray of bramble, is singing so softly to himself. The ringing call of an oxeye overhead never was more clear, and blithe, and musical. But the soft notes of a flock of long-tailed tits, not yet disbanded, have a still softer tone to-day. Their light-hearted gossip seems subdued and low, as if they knew the days were near when every woodlander will go about his work with all the stealth he may. There is a gold-crest rummaging among the ivy that clings about an old elm hard by, almost within arm's length, so near that the touch of vivid yellow on his crown gleams like very gold.
Smoke is still rising from the white ashes of the fire, but it is proof enough that the little group has moved away, and that no one is visible from the highway of the river, when a kingfisher flashes across the bridge, straight up the stream, a swift gleam of azure through the sunlit air. As you follow its flight to the bend where the river vanishes behind its fringing alders, you are aware of a moving point of light on one of the great boulders far out from shore. Then the shape of a dipper shows clearly on the top of the stone. A moment later it dives straight down into the water, reappearing some yards nearer this way, pausing on another great block of sandstone, to bow and curtsey, uttering now and then a loud, clear note, its white gorget glowing like a star, whiter even than the very foam of the river. Now it swims lightly across a smooth backwater. Now it works its way sidelong across a rapid rush of the current, stooping now and then to pick some dainty morsel from among the stones, and all the while moving slowly with the stream, until at last it stands on a stone in mid-channel, not thirty yards away--a graceful, charming, dainty little figure, the very naiad of the mountain stream.
But alas, there is another spectator of its movements. Across the meadow sails a dark, hawk-like figure, swift and silent, disappearing in the oak wood on the farther shore. In a moment every voice is hushed. Not a bird calls. Not even a wren dares to utter an alarm. There is a sudden rush of wings. A merlin dashes from the thicket by the shore, catches up the dipper in its cruel claws, and, alighting on a great flat stone, in the middle of the river, it buries its merciless bill again and again in the white breast of its struggling captive. What a picture! The sunlight is full on the blue back of the beautiful little falcon, as it leans forward a little, half hiding its prey under its drooping wings. Giving a swift glance to right and left--the sparkle of its keen eyes plain to see--it tears out a little cloud of feathers that flutter lightly down, and sail away upon the stream. Again the merlin looks up. Something has startled him. He gives one glance this way. He catches sight of a figure under the alder trees. Like a flash he is gone. The dead dipper falls into the water, sailing down the river, in which but a few minutes since it was playing, full of life and happiness, the white feathers from its blood-stained gorget floating away from it at every swirl of the current; a sorrowful little heap of ruffled plumage, whirling with the whirling stream.
WINSFORD: VOICES THREE.
On the slopes of a great hollow in the heart of Exmoor, a hot sun beats fiercely down. True that it is an April sky whose clouds and sunshine weave their changing web of lights and shadows over the landscape. True that the landscape, even yet, wears but little of the guise of springtime. But to-day no touch of east is in the air, and the smoke columns, rising slowly from the chimneys of the village, and showing so blue against the oak plantation on a distant shoulder of the moorland, are drifting slowly from the southward. From this upland country, over which the snow lay deep for two whole months, the grip of winter has been slow to loosen. But the trees and hedgerows are answering at last to the magical influence of the sunshine, and "the useful trouble of the rain." The grass of these rich meadow lands--for months past all burnt and brown, as if after a long, rainless summer--wears now its very loveliest hue. There is a fringe of pale blue violets along the edge of every woodland path. Stars of celandine are scattered over every field, and among the tangle of the withered hedge-row grasses. Marsh marigolds are gleaming in the wet earth about the roots of the alders by the river. Even at this distance, the great clumps of primroses show like points of light on the slope of the orchard by the vicarage. Surely never were there such beautiful masses of wood-sorrel as, with their vivid leaves and dainty, purple-veined flowers, brighten now the banks of every deep-worn lane.
The tall chestnut by the church, but yesterday just dusted over with fine points of gold, is now a very cloud of fresh young foliage. Each day strengthens the green hue of the larches crowning the bold spur beyond the village. Each day deepens the warm purple of fast-opening blossoms round the heads of the tall elms of the village, and the great oaks of this warm slope. Noble trees they are, these hoary patriarchs that the woodman's axe has spared. Their mighty branches, gnarled and twisted and storm-beaten, towering far up against the pale blue heaven, are shaggy with ages' growth of lichens. Moss grows thick over the furrowed rind, not of their broad stems alone, but almost of their topmost branches. In the crannies of the bark, fringed with grey-green tongues of fern, woodbine and briar and slim mountain-ash have found anchorage. Over their old arms the nuthatches wander up and down, calling to each other with that loud musical trill so characteristic of the springtime.
On every side, among the broad stumps of vanished forest monarchs, long dethroned, are springing the sturdy forms of another generation, young pines and oaks and beeches, that are doing their best to fill the places of the fallen, and although the giant sycamore that overhangs the path is still all bare and leafless, everywhere in the grass beneath its shadow, its children, tiny double blades of tender green, are springing, thousands strong.
It is a scene of marvellous beauty upon which the eye looks down from the welcome rest of this fallen tree beside the woodland path. Below, at the foot of the slope, the border line between the wild life of the covert and the order of the well-kept farm lands, runs a swift moorland stream, whose broad band of silver is broken again and again by the rude stone bridges of the village streets. Every reach of the river seems to have its several sound, that,
"Low at times, and loud at times And changing like a poet's rhymes,"
seems, with the rush of the wind among the rocking tops, and with the songs and call-notes of a hundred birds, to fill the hollow. In the pauses of the roar of the white lasher by the mill, a roar that sinks and swells with every flaw that blows, the ear may catch now the sound of the swift current brawling over its brown pebbles, now the swirl of water round a bar of shingle, now the chafing of the stream among the alder roots, and now the soft sound of ripples on a sandy shallow. Round the broad green knoll that rises from the river, filling all the centre of the valley, and almost islanded by wandering streams, cluster the houses of the hamlet, whose white walls and brown and moss-grown roofs of thatch, whose pointed gables and quaint deep-sunk dormer windows show plainly now among sheltering elms, that in the summer-time will hide them in a very bower of green.
High over the roofs of the village, high even above the topmost trees, rises the grey tower of the church. Round its turrets a troop of daws are fluttering. Is it only fancy, or is there really a note of protest and impatience in their snatches of clear-cut speech? For weeks past these bold frequenters of the church have been piling sticks upon the turret stair, by way of foundation for their great untidy nests. They had strewn a cartload of rubbish over the floor of the belfry, when the sexton arose in his wrath and blocked up all the tower windows and the loophole lights of the stairway, so that the daws were compelled to change their quarters to the roofs of the village. But they still linger round their ancestral homestead, and one pair, determined not to quit altogether the sacred precincts that have sheltered them and theirs for generations, have established themselves in a niche behind the iron pipe of the stove. It is a hole that might just contain the nest, but the birds have thought it necessary to fill up with sticks a yard or more of the space between the chimney and the tower wall, as if by way of outworks to their fortress.
A flood of sunshine is falling at this moment on the ancient tower, on the brown thatch of the old houses, on the purple lacework of the budding elms, until the whole beautiful picture stands clear-drawn against the soft background of the far hillside, still all in shadow. The sunlight glitters on the slate roofs of houses lower down, and flashes on the winding river until every reach of it is a sheet of burnished silver. Now it brightens yet more the vivid green of the meadows, now it touches the red slopes of distant corn-lands, and now it seems to linger on a far shoulder of the moor, whose brown heath and dead grey gorse bushes, and ancient thorn trees straggling up the hill, are transfigured to a very vision of glory by the dreamy, sunlit haze.
Dream-like, too, is the quiet that broods over this peaceful valley--a quiet even deepened by those Voices Three, of the wind, and the birds, and the river. No sound of toil or traffic rises from the village, save the clink of iron in the smithy, the thud of a woodman's axe among the young alders by the water, or, still more rarely, the lumbering of a cart along one of the deep lanes that slope upward to the moor, or that wander with the winding streams. The wind that sways the oak boughs overhead has a stormy sound. But this sheltered corner under the hill, with its screen of thick-growing fir and holly, is full of the warm south, of soft and gentle airs, scented with the sweet resinous fragrance of the pines.
And all the while, louder than the rush of the wind, clearer far than the sound of the river, there float from tree to tree the happy voices of the woodland singers. Everywhere among the leafless boughs the chiff-chaffs are calling. Here and there along the slope a tree pipit, rising high above his station upon some yet wintry branch, sinks slowly downward through the sunny air, singing as he sinks, till he alights again upon his windy perch. Loud above all other sounds there strikes in now and then the whistle of a blackbird, wild and clear, and at times the yet sweeter carol of the blackcap. Rooks call hoarsely to each other as they pass, on the way to their great settlement far down the river. At times the white pigeons of the vicarage, hovering a moment in mid-air, descend like a shower of snowflakes on their dovecot. From the shelter of the old Scotch firs at the far end of the wood, where the trees have long been left untouched, come now and then the deep notes of carrion crows, low-toned, sullen, unmirthful. They are ill neighbours for all the weaker children of the wood. Later on in the season, the edge of the Punch Bowl, that great hollow beyond the oak coppice, whose rim just shows against the sky line, the hollow where the red deer are so fond of lying, will be strewn with broken eggs of black game and pheasant, the spoil of raids in the heather and the covert. And here, too, scattered under the trees, are broken ringdoves' eggs, bearing plainly the marks of those black-coated, merciless marauders. From that corner too, out of the jungle of broom, and hazel, and wild-briar, comes at intervals the crow of a pheasant--a strident and far-reaching cry, different altogether from all other woodland voices. And in every tree along the slope willow warblers are crooning, over and over, their dainty snatches of sweet, low-toned song. It is a sleepy tune; a leisurely cadence of soft sounds, suggestive of sunshine and the summer, of
"Music, that gentlier on the spirit lies, Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes."
BREAN DOWN: FLOTSAM AND JETSAM.
It is a cold, grey world that lies waiting for the dawn--a misty sky, in which one pale planet glimmers; a hazy sea, whose fretted levels shine faintly in the moonlight; shadowy hills, along whose winding line, here darkened with clustering woodlands, and there whitened by still slumbering hamlets, a grey mist hangs. It hangs, too, like a vast canopy, over the wide plain, whose sunburnt meadows seem to melt away into an infinite distance; and along the wandering river whose brown flood loiters idly to the sea.
A silent world, for the most part. Even the voice of the river, that but now was chafing loud against the shingle bar piled high along the shore, is failing in the swift inrush of the tide. It is a slow moving and taciturn stream that, as it wound along the level fringes of the hills, long since forgot the sunshine and the laughter and the crystal clearness of its youth, when, under banks that were hung with fern and meadow-sweet, it sang over the brown pebbles of its bed, round
"... Many a fairy foreland, set With willow-weed and mallow."
But the tide, that is hushing the hoarse song of the river, swells louder every moment the troubled roar of the sea, whose grey waves are plunging in over the rattling shingle and the shining sand.
And as the light of dawning strengthens over the low grey hills to the eastward, other sounds break in upon the stillness. Far off across the moor a curlew calls. A heron who all night long, it may be, has been keeping his lone vigil in the marshes, and who is now flying leisurely home-ward to the hills, lets fall a muttered croak in passing--midnight revellers both. But the white gulls that rise and fall and toy like butterflies above the broadening stream calling to each other with discordant voices, are children of the sunshine.
Of the sunshine, too, is the music of a lark, who, high up in the grey mist, brooding like a fate over the brown and thirsty meadows, seems to hover at the very gates of dawn. Yet there is a sound of the sea even on his silvery tongue. Among the sweet notes of his familiar "babble of green fields," he brings in at times the cry of the curlew and the whistle of the plover.
A breath of the sea there is, too, in the chatter of the starling on the roof above. The croak of the heron and the call of the whimbrel are common speech with him. And now he even imitates the creak of the cordage on the coasting smack swinging in the stream yonder, where two men are busy setting the old brown sails.
From the cliffs that break the round swell of the hill a line of daws are streaming, eager, clamorous, on the wing for their hunting ground upon the moor. One troop has wheeled aside to alight among the boughs of a cherry-tree in a little walled-in space of garden at some distance from the house. The farmer, who has just appeared, with his milking-pail upon his shoulder, and who looks up to nod a friendly greeting, pauses a moment in the doorway to watch the marauders at their work, while the old sheep-dog waits wondering at his side.
Suddenly, far out on the moor, beyond the cattle that stand motionless, expectant, all looking this way, a tall figure looms out of the mist, and across the fields comes a strange cry:
"Leave your meadow grasses mellow, Mellow, mellow; Quit your cowslips, cowslips yellow."
The old dog hears, and bounds forward to his work. But the sleek and sober herd, never turning their heads to look behind them, move slowly, as by common impulse, converging fanwise to the gate. Men in white smocks, and with shining pails upon their backs, are striding through the meadows towards the farm. And all the while the milking call sounds at intervals across the fields:--
"Quit your pipes of parsley hollow, Hollow, hollow; Come uppe Lightfoot, rise and follow; Lightfoot, Whitefoot, From your clovers lift the head."
But along the side of the green headland that, beyond the old farm-buildings stretches a mile or more into the sea, silence still reigns, save for the sound of the waves, for the plaintive cry of a curlew or the clamour of a troop of gulls.
When a gleam of sunshine breaks the grey veil of cloud, changing the sombre hues of the mud flats to warm tones of brown and purple, turning to gold the broad beach and the ragged sand-hills, birds, unseen before, start swiftly into view. Here a tall curlew stalks solemnly along, erect and watchful. There an inky crow is picking dainty morsels from the ooze. And here a party of trim black-headed gulls have collected round some treasure trove left by the last tide. A troop of sandpipers sweeps along, now flashing in a hundred points of silver in the sunlight; now, as they wheel, all lost again in the brown hues of their haunts. As far as the eye can reach are scattered gulls, shieldrakes, oyster-catchers, rock-doves even, foraging by the edge of the water, falling back before the rising tide.
But sounds of life are faint, even now. Among the boulders pipits flit at times with feeble cries. And a brood of young kestrels lately fledged, sail and soar along the cliff farther on, and scream as if in defiance of the wind, against which their keen wings are beating. The rocky brows that overhang the shore are thick with grasses and sweet bedstraw, with flags and mullein, and tall evening primrose. In the crannies campion and sea-pink are rooted. Here a yellow poppy trembles in the wind, and there a great cluster of samphire fills a rocky cleft. There are tufts of it quite low down, but it is a plant that always grows above high-water mark, and many a shipwrecked sailor, thrown ashore among the rocks, has taken heart again when, in the darkness, his despairing grasp has tightened on those strangely smelling leaves. It is St. Peter's plant--Saint Pierre, sampier, samphire.
Now the shrill screaming of the kestrels rises louder still, the fierce cry of the old birds mingling with the plaintive clamour of their brood. Now one of them, sweeping round the headland, poises a moment in the air, his wings motionless, his tail spread wide, his figure dark upon the western sky. Slowly stooping, he alights on the crown of a rocky pinnacle, a crag that stands out from the cliff like the tower of some old stronghold; and, with feet spread wide, clutching with his strong claws the rifted rock, his head lowered to the wind, stands a splendid figure, as still as if he were the living rock. Many a keen-eyed falcon has looked out over the sea from that high watch tower, round whose base wander grey arms of ivy, gnarled and wrinkled, centuries old.
Nor do hawks alone find sanctuary here. So quiet is this lonely shore, so complete its solitude, that among these cliffs even the raven and the peregrine are safe.
In the shelter of a long line of sand-hills that centuries have heaped over the old sea-wall, there stands a solitary cottage. Its brown eaves just peer over the dyke of sand. No window looks to seaward through its massy wall. It is close above high-water mark. Often, on wild nights of winter,
"The startled waves leap over it; the storm Smites it with all the scourges of the rain, And steadily against its solid form Press the great shoulders of the hurricane."
Close by it runs a belt of shingle, and, beyond, there stretches away to the brown sea a wide sweep of sand, on whose wet surface the heron and the curlew leave their traces, where whole armies of sandpipers weave a maze of tiny footprints. To them this barren shore is a land of plenty. This open beach is to them the very safest of sanctuaries. No wildfowler can get within range of them unobserved. Their only foes are the herring-gull--the pirate of the sea--or the keen-eyed falcon that has his hold in yonder cliff.
Except at times of very high tides--even then only when accompanied by stormy weather--the sea never quite reaches to the sand-hills; but in summer especially, a mirage is occasionally seen on this wide beach,--a phantom sea, in whose smooth surface are reflected the jagged line of sand-hills, the church of the distant village, and the few houses scattered at far intervals along the coast.