Part 6

I dozed off, and woke again where, in the drowsy afternoon sunshine, I had rested under a great pollard ash weighed down with ivy. Upon the grass about my feet there shone an infinity of small, rounded objects, much as if Aladdin had passed by and thrown down a handful of superfluous rubies. Everywhere their soft carmine lustre gemmed the sward. Year by year I have found the like on meadow-paths, wood-rides, by the church tower, sometimes in the very streets of the village, and have never known how they came into being. You may have broken asunder the ivy-berries a hundred times, and noted the pale-hued seeds within, yet never guessed that here was the mining-ground for your treasure. It is the sun and air that make rubies of the fallen ivy seeds.

And, for a last vision, as I lay watching the starshine travelling across the square of the window, I saw within it a picture, and heard again a note of music, perhaps the most wonderful thing in the whole day’s idle round. It was a keeper’s cottage at the entrance to a wood. On the steep thatch, white pigeons hobbled amorously; and behind, in a green bower of elder, a wild bird sang. I could see the bird; I knew it to be a common song-thrush; but the song was the song of a nightingale—not the loud, silver-toned warble that the poets love, but the low, slow, sorrowful keening that always seems as if torn from the very heart of the bird. And here is a pretty problem. If the nightingale were already with us, singing in every brake, there would be nothing strange in the thrush—prone as he is to imitation—borrowing a stanza from the new melody here and there. But it is more than strange that he should do so at the present time, seeing that, for eight or nine months back, there has been no nightingale music in the land. Yet we, who are mute fowl, are all thinking of April now, and what it has in store for us: can the thrush be thinking of April too? And, as with us, can old memories of nightingales be stirring in him?—in him that alone can sing his thoughts aloud?

[Picture: “The Rinders”]

APRIL

I

SUNDAY morning in Windlecombe, especially when the season is early April and the weather fine, is, of all mornings, the one not to be spent indoors.

To-day, until the church-bell had ceased its quiet tolling, and the last belated worshipper had hurried up the street, I stood just within the screen of box-hedge that divides my garden from the public way, so as not to obtrude my old coat and pipe and week-day boots on those more ecclesiastically minded. And then, bareheaded, hands thrust deep into trouser-pockets, and pipe leaving a grey trail of smoke behind on the tranquil air, I lounged out upon the green—deserted and still in the sweet April sunshine—to study Windlecombe under one of its most inviting aspects—its seventh-day spirit of earned sloth and unstrung, loitering ease.

Though the old vicar has held his post here for nearly half a century, and is better acquainted with the parish than almost any other, there is just this one aspect of life in Windlecombe which must be to him for ever a sealed book. When once he has got his little flock together for morning service, with the church-door shut upon them, the village and all its doings pass, for the time being, out of his ken. On wet Sundays, and on the great church festivals, he knows that many accustomed corners—my own included—will be as infallibly occupied as they are at other times unvaryingly empty: and thereof he never makes either complaint or question. He goes on his way, never doubting but there is some saving good somewhere in the worst of us, and whole-heartedly loving us all; while we, the black sheep, who would sacrifice for him our right hands, our money, our very lives even, anything but our fine Sunday mornings, go our ways too, satisfied—if there is meaning in looks—of his secret sympathy. For there never was human man, whether lay or clerical, who, of a fine Sunday morning, believed himself so nearly at one with his Maker on his knees in a dusty pew, as abroad in the vast green church of an English country-side.

I had gone no more than a dozen paces over the level, worn grass of the green, when I stopped to look about me, knowing well what I should see. Like rabbits coming out of their burrows after the gunner has passed on, the non-churchgoing folk began to appear. I saw young Daniel Dray and young Tom Clemmer go off with a bag of ferrets and their faithful terriers at their heels. Dewie Artlett arrived at the well-head—the traditional meeting-place for Windlecombe lovers—and stood waiting there with a big nosegay of primroses in his hand and another in his cap. He was joined a moment later by one of the girls from the farm, and off they went together for a morning’s sweethearting in the lanes. At the far end of the green, the inn-door came clattering open, and that genial reprobate, the inn-keeper, appeared in his shirt-sleeves, blinking up at the sky as though but lately out of his bed. Other doors here and there were thrust back, each giving egress to some happy loiterer in his Sunday best. Within five minutes, almost every garden-gate had a pair of brown arms comfortably resting on it, and voices began to pass the time of day to and fro in the whole sunny length of the street. By easy stages, stopping for a word here and there by an open door, or a chat with some old acquaintance sunning himself amidst his cabbages, I got to the foot of the hill and so to the river. The ferryman sat in his boat, but as he returned me for my greeting only a stare and a scarce-perceptible shake of the head, I knew that our common enemy was in ambush close by. I made off along the river-path, and turned into the woods.

There was a blackbird singing somewhere in the budding thicket, and I managed to get quite close to his perch without being seen. To the songs of birds like the thrush, the skylark, the robin, you may listen for five minutes; and, beautiful as they are, in that short space of time you will have learnt all that the song has to tell. But the blackbird’s song is very different. It has an endless succession of changes in rhythm, power and quality. You may listen to it for an hour, and never hear a phrase repeated in its exact form. The difference between the blackbird’s song, and that of nearly all other birds, is the difference between the singing of a happy schoolgirl and that of a prima donna. While both have melody, one alone has finished artistry. Until you have stayed in a wood with a blackbird a whole sunny April morning through, and got from him the truth of things as he alone can tell it, you do not really know that spring is here.

Now, by the riverside copse, as I leaned on the old, lichen-gilded timbers of the fence, listening to the pure, unhurried notes, the fact that it was really April at last was suddenly borne in upon me. In the daybreak and eventide choruses of birds, the thrushes, by dint of sheer numbers and vehemence, easily overpower all other singers. Now and again you can catch and isolate a matchless phrase of blackbird music; but to hear the song in perfection, you must wait until the day is wearing on towards noon, and he seeks solitude for his singing.

If bird-song is a language, then the blackbird must be the supreme orator of the woods. Though you understand not a syllable of what he is pouring forth, there is no doubt of its ever-varying meaning. In the midst of a succession of quite simple phrases, each consisting of three or four notes at the most, he suddenly gives you a passage whose melodious complexity is almost bewildering. He constantly varies the pace of his delivery. He embellishes his song with grace-notes—beautiful silver-chiming triplets in the midst of his lowest, most leisurely strains. There is emphasis, attack, a sort of blustering use of sheer power of utterance; or he may run over a slow, quiet tune at his lightest tongue-tip. At times, indeed, it is well-nigh impossible to believe that you are not listening to two birds together, of totally different qualities of voice, alternating their melodies.

How long I should have tarried there, furtively renewing this old acquaintance, I know not; but it seems my cover was incomplete, and the song came to its usual termination. It stopped short in the midst of one of its brightest stanzas, and I knew my presence had been observed. The blackbird made off. There was first the defiant, yet fearsome cluck-cluck-cluck until he was clear of the bushes and free to fly, and then away he went through the sunshine to the far bank of the river, hurling over his shoulder as he went the usual mocking laughter-peal.

II

A week of April has gone by—a week of rain and shine, and the singing of the south wind by day; and, at nights, an intense dark calm full of the sound of purling brooks.

The river runs high. All the streams are swollen. The low-lying meadows are half green grass overspread with a pink mist of lady’s-smock, and half glittering pools of water that bring down the blue of the sky under your feet as you go. You can never forget the rain for an instant. On this page, as I sit writing at the open window, the morning sun was streaming a minute ago: now a ragged grey rain-cloud has come tumbling over the hills, and I cannot see across the green for the torrent. It is by almost as quickly as I can set down the words; and now the sunbeams are pouring in at the window again: the whole village lies before me drenched and sparkling, the street one long river of blinding light.

Tom Artlett, going by early this morning to his work and spying me in the garden, called out that he had heard the cuckoo twice already; and it may well be so. The ringing note of the wryneck—the ‘cuckoo’s mate’—has been sounding in the elm-tops all the morning through, and the cuckoo is seldom far behind her messenger. Nightingale and swift, swallow and martin, they are all on their way northward now, and any day may bring them. But time spent at this season in looking forward to the things that will be, is always time wasted. Every hour in early April has its own new revelation, and common eyes and ears can do no more than mark the things that are.

Yesterday, in a blink of sunny calm between the showers, I took my midday walk through the hazel-woods. The young leaves already tempered the sunlight to the primroses and anemones that covered the woodland floor, giving all a greenish tinge. Though the whole wood was full of primroses, it was only by the edges of the fields, where they grew in full sunshine, that their rich yellow colour had any significance. Here under the hazels this was so diluted and explained away by the white of the anemones, and again by the leaf-filtered sunbeams from above, that the primroses no longer seemed yellow. At a few yards distant, in the dimmest spots, you could scarce tell one flower from another but for its shape.

Wherever I went in the wood, the soft droning song of the bees went with me. You could hardly put one foot before the other without dashing the cup from the lip of one of these winged wanderers. But though the anemones and primroses grew so thick, so inextricably mingled together, the honey-bees kept to the one species of flower. They clambered in and out of the star-like anemones, sometimes two and three at a blossom together. But the primroses were always passed over, by hive-bee and humble-bee alike. Here and there, I picked one of the sulphur blossoms, and tearing it apart, made sure that there was nectar in plenty—its presence was plain even to human eye. The truth was, of course, that the sweets of the primrose were placed so far down the trumpet-tube of the flower, that no bee had tongue long enough to gather them, even if they were to her mind.

Yet though the bees might scorn the primrose for much the same reason as the fox contemned the grapes in the fable, there was one creature specially told off by Nature to do the necessary work of fertilisation. Now and again in the general low murmur of voices about me, I could distinguish an alien note. This came from a large fly, in a light-brown fluffy jacket, with transparent wings fantastically scalloped in black. He jerked himself to and fro in the air from one primrose to another, hovering a moment over each before settling and thrusting a tongue of amazing length down the yellow throttle of the flower. His name I have never heard, but I know that, until recent times, he continued to conceal, not only his means of livelihood, but his very existence from the vigilance of naturalists: Darwin himself failed to identify this primrose-sprite with his special mission in fertilising work.

It is strange how familiarity with the commonest natural objects may exist side by side with a pitiful ignorance about them. I had gathered primroses every spring for half a lifetime through before I realised that I bore, not one, but two kinds of blossom in my hand. The discovery, I remember, came with something like a shock of surprise. Yet there was no blinking the fact: the wonder, indeed, was that in all the thousands I had gathered, as boy and youth and man, the thing had never before occurred to me. There was no difference in the sulphur-hued faces of the flowers. But while the deep, central tube of some was closed with a little whorl of pale buff feathers, in others this tube was open, and there stood just within it a slender stem topped with a small green globe—it seemed at first sight, then, that the sexual principle in the primrose was divided, each plant bearing only male, or only female flowers. But investigating farther, I found that this was not so. Each flower was truly hermaphrodite, only in one the male feathery anthers were uppermost, and in the other the green pistil of the female appeared above.

Thirty years it took me to discover these simple, obvious facts about a thing I had handled every spring since childhood: how many decades more, I wonder, must pass ere I shall clear up the final mystery about them, a matter now to me dark as ever—how, with the primrose alone, this came to be so; and, above all, why?

III

If I tell the plain, honest truth about the day which has just ended, and call it a day of adventure and excitement from its first grey gleam to its tranquil golden close, I am not sure that there are many who will understand me, save the one who shared it with me almost hour by hour.

For nothing really happened on this day, as the world estimates events. Over an obscure Sussex village, a mid-April sun shone out of a cloudless sky; certain migrant birds arrived in the neighbourhood; certain wild flowers and insects were observed for the first time; there was nothing more. No wandering stranger appeared in the street, to bring us all to our doors; no big-gun practice was going on thirty miles away at Portsmouth, outraging our blue sky with incongruous thunder; nor did even the gilt arrow on the church-clock slip an hour at midday, as it often does, and send us scurrying home to dinner before the time. To all save two in Windlecombe, the day was just an ordinary working week-day; but, to these, it was no less a day than the one on which the year comes suddenly into its full young prime.

For me it began when the grey eastern sky took its first tint of morning rose. There is no sweeter sound than the song of the house-martins, and this it was that roused me now. In the darkness they had come, straight to their old nesting-site under the eaves; and now they filled the room with their quaint, voluble melody, and wove a mazy pattern against the sky as they circled to and fro.

While I dressed, I watched them dipping and crying in the sunny air; and, peering out through the window now and again, I could see them all along under the eaves, clinging to the rough bricks of the wall, where they had left their mud-houses last October. But of these none remained now. Not to break down the martins’ nests in early spring, before the sparrows begin to stuff them with grass, is to prepare for the little black-and-white voyagers’ war instead of welcome. And they seem quite as happy and content if, returning, they find nothing but a clay-mark on the wall.

Later, by an hour at most, I had the Reverend by the arm, not so much to guide, as to restrain him, for he went ever a little before me through the meadow with the sure, swift stride of a mountain-goat. There was but one thing that could betray his affliction to a close observer. While I went blinking in the intolerable glory of the sunshine above us, and the scarce lesser glory of the buttercups below, he strode onward, his calm old face turned straight up to the sun, his blue eyes meeting it unflinchingly from under their shaggy arches of white. He might be Gabriel looking into the very focus of heaven, I thought, as I stole a glance at him a little fearsomely. Indeed, I never quite limited his vision to that of his poor, purblind, human eyes.

‘It will be down in the little birch-clump near the Conyers,’ he said. ‘That is where the first nightingale always comes. It will take us a good five minutes, and why are you not talking to me? Come! do not keep all the brave, beautiful things to yourself!’

How to tell him of all the things I saw in a single yard of meadow about us! But I got to work with the will, if not the power.

‘We are walking,’ said I, ‘through buttercups a foot high; and almost with every step we send a cloud of little blue-and-copper butterflies chevying before us. Listen to the grasshoppers piping! The buttercups make a sort of thick scum of gold as on the surface of a green lake. Down below, like pebbles on the lake-bottom lie the daisies—their white discs touch each other in all directions; nay, they overlap, they are heaped upon one another. An insect might crawl over them from side to side of the great meadow and never tread on anything but daisy-white. And the dandelions! There are millions of them, I think, filling the air with a perfume like choice old wine. And smell these, Reverend! Do you know what they are?’

‘Cowslips! They must be in full bloom now: they were always fine cowslips in this field. But you should pull them—never pick them. Then you get all their beauty, the crimson at the base of the stem, and— Hark!’

From the oak-clad hill-side to the northward, clear and slow on the gentle air, came the cuckoo’s double chime. The old vicar faced about, and took off his hat ceremoniously. I did the like. It was no superstitious greeting of the bird on its first appearance. We were not thinking even of the ancient Sussex legend—that an old witch goes to Heathfield Fair every fourteenth day of April, with all the year’s cuckoos in her bag, and there lets them fly. On our part, it was merely a precautionary measure against a very ancient rustic pleasantry. Farmer Coles of Windlecombe loved his joke, and that was Farmer Coles’s wood. Though we had no real doubt that we were listening to our first cuckoo, it was well to be on the safe side.

The path now left the full fair-way of the meadow, and meandered along by the edge of the wood. I was bidden to go on with my chronicle.

‘The bluebells are out as thick as ever I saw them, Reverend. Under the shadow of the trees they look like purple smoke stealing up the hillside; and where a bar of sunshine pierces through, the colour seems to leap into the dim air like a tongue of flame. How the rabbits play! Every moment they break cover and dart across the open spaces, two or three together. There goes a spotted woodpecker!—I saw his black-and-white coat and crimson plume as he swung through the bar of light. They are scarce here. Here comes something flitting along that I wish you could see—you know how the orange-tip—’

‘The butterfly with his wings on fire? Don’t grizzle over me, man! I _can_ see it!—lazily looping along, though you think he will fall to earth a cinder any moment at your feet. He is like Nero fiddling, I always think. There must be chervil growing close by.’

‘Yes, a great bank of it, and the butterfly has gone.’

‘Well: he is only settling there. Look how the mottled green and white on the under side of his wings, now he has closed them, exactly match the colours of the chervil. All his fire is quenched till you disturb him, and then off he goes, burning himself up as unconcernedly as ever.’

We rounded the corner of the wood, and came upon a little open stretch of heathland. The sulky sweet fragrance of the gorse so loaded the air as to make one’s breath come hard. Over the gorse, linnets sang their slender, tweeting melody. The blossom-laden bushes spread away before us like great heaving waves of gold, flowing up to the hill-brow and over out of sight. Where the crests of yellow bloom stood against the sky, they made the sky a deeper blue. But between the gorse-brakes the heather showed no sign. It crouched low upon the earth, looking black and dreary and dead, as though a forest fire had lately swept by.

‘Dead!’ cried the Reverend scornfully. ‘Turn up a frond of it, and look at the under side of the leaves. Each leaf is black above, but see how green and sappy and full of life it really is, if you look at it aright. One misses a lot in life by taking too lofty a standpoint. The heather in April may be black to you, but it is green enough to the hiding mice.’

We went along in silence for a minute or two.

‘And what about the trees?’ he asked presently. ‘Is it death or life there? The cuckoo never will wait for his green leaves, you know.’

‘Green leaves I see, but leafage nowhere. All the wood-top is chequered into different clear zones of green, or grey, or russet, or soft sad yellow—buds bursting and leaves just promising everywhere; but leaves, as I want them, none. How slow it all is! I can understand the cuckoo’s impatience. Flying all the way from Africa only to find—’

He had ceased to listen. He had turned swiftly towards the sun-bathed meadows. He put up a thin hand—blue-veined, almost transparent—against the light. He visibly started.

‘I heard the throb of a wing—a new sound. It must be—’

‘Yes, there it is! The first swallow! Wheeling and darting over the buttercups yonder, like a bit of bright, blue-tempered steel!’

And as I uttered the words, there drifted out of the thorn-hedge hard by us the note we had come to seek. All the ringing music of the woodland seemed to grow mute at the sound. Wild and pure, with a force and a lingering sweetness indescribable, the nightingale’s song poured out of the thicket, dwelling upon the one silver, clarion note, moment after moment, as though it would never cease. At my side two gaunt arms rose tremblingly into the sunshine:

‘They are all here!’—the voice was husky, faltering—‘All! all! I have heard them again, every one of them, the good God be praised! Though I never hoped to— Yes, one by one, I bade them all a long farewell last year!’

IV

Down in the village, when I left it this morning, hardly a breath was stirring under the warm April sun; but the wind is never still for more than an hour or two, here on the top of Windle Hill. At first, there was only a gentle wayward air out of the blue south-west. But already the wind is freshening as the sun lifts; and, with the growing heat, it is sure to strengthen. Midday may find half a gale singing in the long grass-bents around me, the gold tassels of the cowslips lashing to and fro in the grip of a madcap breeze.