Part 2
The rising club of the wild arum is purple within its sheath; soon the “lords-and-ladies” will attract the children to their “river.” The stream is singing a mazed melody of soft sounds; by listening intently each can be distinguished. Different notes arise from the shattering of a crystal bubble upon the stones, the hollow dripple of a pebble rolled over the shallows, the foamy swirling past willow trunks moss-covered, the splashing into dwarfed trout-pools. Where a sunbeam loads the ripples a gold network drifts over the sand, holding a twig in its eddy; or the wind stirs the leaves, and a million sunpoints are thrown upwards like a silvery flight of starlings. From the mud precious doubloons have been raised by the root-divers of the kingcups, and are cast thickly by the bank.
Behind the hedge the gorse grows, stretching up the hill in spiky profusion of rusted jade and orange. Under the roots a colony of rabbits has been founded, and the does are scratching fur from hind legs to line the dug-outs where their little ones will be yeaned. A long-tailed titmouse spies a furry fragment, seizes it, and carries it to her nest in a distant bramble. With faint rustling of wings a linnet alights upon a bush, and sings to the mate who is weaving her cradle. Among the apple blossoms below, soft cadences are borne in the sunshine--the goldfinches cannot cease the telling of their happiness. A greenfinch answers with wistful, long-drawn note, and a corn bunting repeats his song again and again. Primroses, daisies, and the scentless violet grow on the turf under the spinney, where the larches have concealed their brittleness with emerald buds. A high twitter comes from one, and almost immediately a bird smaller than a wren flits moth-like to the ground. Its crest is a pencil-mark of fire. At the extreme end of a branch a ball of moss and lichen moulded with spider webs and caterpillar cocoons is suspended. Here the Golden-crowned Knight and his lady love will flitter throughout the days of summer, leading their children from the swinging castle as the voice of the cuckoo falters in June. Flocks of these birds roamed the pine forest during leafless days, when their shrill needle-lances of sound scarce pierced the wind’s moaning. Now in coppices and spinneys they seek the unchivalrous spider and the insects that crawl upon the sprays. Here under the trees is shade and solitude. I will stay and dream. But I want more beauty, and am restless; to me floats the voice of the stream for ever calling; I must return to the sunlit waters and the bended sedges.
All the loveliness of fled summers returns to the mind. The spread disk of the dandelion, so richly hued, is more beautiful now, bearing in its colour so many hopes of the past. A common flower, a despised weed, yet a symbol of that pulsing golden happiness that is the heritage unclaimed of so many. The bees and the birds need no philosopher’s stone, they have something better in the sweet air, they live every moment happily. In careless childhood the dandelions were beheaded with a stick; they are now a token of joy, these common weeds, taking shallow root wherever the wind flings their seeds. Summer to me would be incomplete without the dandelions. For what they symbol, would that there were more in the drifted dust of the cities. The music of the brook has risen from a murmur to a dull thunder, and a humming sounds under the maples. The miller has lifted the weedy hatch, and the ponderous stone wheels are crushing the grain. In the pond the tench lie unseen, but the light flames upon the scarlet fins of the roach as they pass. Silently the flume slides forward, then gushes into the troughs of the great elm waterwheel. Jets of water spurt from its old mossy planking, and a rain of drops is flung from the trundling rim. Inside the miller feeds the hoppers, and upon a beam perch two swallows, unheedful of the shake and the thunder. A dust floats in the millhouse, hazing the glass windows and giving to the cobwebs a snowy purity--embroidering the robes of the corn-spirit. For centuries the wheat has been ground between the fixed bed-stone and the runner, for centuries the stream has worked for mankind, its splashing imprisoning the light of the southern sun falling athwart the wheel. I thought of the men that in the past had laboured for the wheat, of the times the millpeck had grooved the stones, and the millstaff proven their setting. The millwheel is very old and will soon turn no more, but still the human sorrow and the hunger goes on.
Across the way stand dark yew trees beneath whose stillness the grave-stones, patched with gray and orange lichens, throw their shadows upon the grass. The suns of summer have bleached them, autumnal rains washed them, wintry frosts worked graven patterns upon the ancient letterings. The stream flowed then as now, many times had the swallows returned to their mortared houses under the rafters and up the broad chimneys--think of all the beauty repeated. Centuries of apple blossom, scented beanfields and floating thistledown; all the happiness of harvest garnered; all the hunger and the misery of man, ever striving with his neighbour. Can you not see what the dandelion tells? The swallows on the beam know no passage of time--they look forward to no happiness--they have no illusions--all is for them now. The calendar is not for them. Joyous they are, and wild; their hopes are not for to-morrow--the to-morrow of the mounded earth--but for to-day.
Summer comes in with their return, though the calendar shall deny. Summer: the very name brings to the heart a feeling of joy. There is so much for all, so much beauty of thought stored in the raggedest dandelion. Sunshine, the swallow, and the celandine: to know these in childhood is to take to the heart the glory of summer for ever.
HAUNT OF THE EVEJAR
_i_
When the first white flake falls from the hawthorn the immigrant birds of passage all have come to the countryside. Almost the last to arrive this year on the south-western coast of England were the mysterious nightjars, birds ever surrounded by romance on account of their weird song and phantom habits; and for me, after the experience I had in the late spring, birds of wonder and having a special claim to my affections.
It was night, and on the broad smooth sands, whence the tide had ebbed, shone a curved moon. As I passed by the ocean’s edge its outline shook in the sandy pools, blackened and tarnished by seaweed and still foam-bubbles. No clouds drifted in heaven, there was no wind, the stars were pale in the luminous sky. Somewhere in front of me a curlew, disturbed at his nocturnal feeding, whistled plaintively. A mile away lay Baggy like a badger asleep.
High above this promontory is an established air-line, or hereditary route for immigrant birds. Along this track travel the chiffchaffs and wheatears in March, the martins, warblers, and all the singing hosts in April. Sometimes the night wind bears a million feeble cries as the tired travellers pass over. It is a place of enthralling wonder in the youth of the year--and of sadness when autumnal days bring a weary return.
The night was quiet, the wavelets broke on the sand, a great sigh filled the air. From a sighing it swelled to a rushing of wind, it grew in volume like a drift of leaves in wintry blasts. Then soft thuds overbore the strange noise. I stood still. From afar and near came little croakings, as though of exhaustion and pain. Dark bunches lay on the sands. I picked one up; it was warm and feathery, its wings fluttered feebly. The nightjars, called of olden time goatsuckers, on account of a wide gape and owl-like eyes, had returned to the land for their yearly nuptials.
There were hundreds of them on the shore. All were too weak to move. I was filled with a great tenderness for them; they showed no fear; I liked to think they knew I would not harm them. The night went on; an owl bayed on the gorse slopes behind. Soon they left, with flapping flight, sometimes hopping. Towards dawn the valley and the hills were filled with their notes rising and falling like the whirring of a spinning wheel, the love song of the evejar.
The bee-swallow, as the nightjar is also called, pairs for life. It is a faithful idealist, like the owl, the falcon, and the long-tailed titmouse. It feeds on moths and chafer-beetles; and lays two eggs among the bracken.
Next morning the sun burned in an azure sky. The gulls wheeled over the surf, seeking poor soddened bundles of feathers that only a little while since had been filled with hope and spurred by love to cross the ocean, but had fallen into the water and been drowned.
_ii_
Returning from inland fields, three gulls with tranquil evening flight passed over the hill towards the headland. A sheep path wound irregularly over the hill, amongst the heather and the uncurling brakeferns. From here the western ocean was seen afar, until it met the clouded heaven. A subdued roar, a growling under-current of sound, floated up the hillside, although the sea was calm. Night and day, for thousands of years, the same ceaseless mutter of the shifting tides upon the sands, the same pounding of the headland as the tons of gray-green water slid over the rocks and into its hidden caverns.
A small wind moved the heather, and shook a dog-violet with its face turned to the westering sun. It was the tail of the sea-breeze. The air over the fields was cold, and soon it would move down to the sands to explore the darkling sea still warm with the fervour of the sunbeams. A late bee droned among the birds-foot trefoil on the pathway, eager to gather more honey for the winter. The yellow flowers grew low down, and some were stained with deep, tawny orange, as though Antares, the dull red star of summer, had joined its blessing of colour with the greatest gift of beauty and life bestowed by the sun. Near them grew the germander speedwell, also lowly (for the salt winds that sweep the hill care nothing for the humble things of the earth) their sweet blue eyes turned in wonder to the great flower of the sky. A lark with crest upraised waited upon a hummock of mould thrown up by a rabbit--her nest was somewhere near, hidden in a tangle of burnet-rose. The bee left the trefoil, and droned away down the hill. A blackbird sang in the valley below, where gorse, blackthorn, bramble, and stunted holly choked an ancient waterbourne between the steep hills. It was evening, and he chanted to the departing splendour. Alone sang the sable artist, serene on a twig of blackthorn, having no illusions about life, fretted by no unnecessary labour or research, for ever happy in the sunshine or sleeping restfully as the stars burned above the lonely valley.
Over the sea a golden beam of light trailed from a cloud and lit the gray waters. The massed vapours opened and other beams cast their gilt on the waves. A full rigged sailing ship, vague in the distance, entered the sacred gleam and became a barque of glory passing into the unknown. Nearer the shore, where the white lines of surf crept up the sands, a silver glitter danced and threw a million silver points for the mind to dream upon--as though an Immortal had flung the Golden Fleece for mortal eyes to see. Slowly the sun sank seawards; the beams were dulled; the ship became once more a drab wanderer on its human mission; a wild mew came down from heaven. With dark wings motionless, a buzzard sailed circlewise, although the hour of hunting was over. Higher and higher the great bird soared, controlling the winds of evening. In his mastery of the air he joyed, as though desiring to outsoar the stars that soon would glimmer over a quiet world. Below on the flats a flock of ring-plover ran to their feeding; their nests were among the pebbles and bleached seaweed near the dunes of the Burrows. Although unseen, their presence was known by the sweetness of their call-notes.
Like a cannon-ball heated to a crimson glow was the sun behind the vapours where a fume of vague light appeared over the hills to eastward. More sinister grew the outline of the headland, a beast replete and resting its shaggy head on sunken paws. No gulls drifted to their nocturnal roosting; the buzzard had plunged into the hidden pinewood to his eyrie. Here a vast collection of sticks, rabbits’ bones, rats’ tails, beetle skins and skulls of voles, carried there during a score of years, and resting in a fir, supported his brooding mate and her three blotched eggs.
When the moon was up an evejar rose from the patch of swaled gorse; the creamy marks on its wings and tail were visible in the confluence of light from the gates of heaven--the flood of the moon’s white fires and the lingering afterglow over the Atlantic. In anguish at the violation of its hymeneal sanctities the skep-swallow returned and wheeled, beating its wings together. No sound disturbed the silence, no movement stirred the bracken; only a mouse rustled in the dried brambles, only a chafer beetle, booming through the dusk, sought a dew-drop on a leaf of foxglove. The birds, wedded for all time, returned together and settled on the ground. Then the male bird mounted a stump of gorse, crouched low, and poured forth a reeling song. Like the risp of a grasshopper it came, like a shaken matchbox, like a crowstarver’s clappers heard afar. Against the moon the evejar sang his song, whispering huskily of his ecstacies during the pause. Sometimes he waited for the shy answer of his love--she who had journeyed over foreign wastes with him to the remembered valleyside of heather. Soft was her rapturous murmur in the summer night, a gentle reassurance of faith and hope, while the stars shone in the sky above them. Like spun and argent coins the moths went down to the dew-sweetened flowers. Only a reverent watcher and the pure face of the moon saw their espousal.
A DESERTED QUARRY IN FEBRUARY
Many celandines are now showing a yellow cup to the sun; a dearly loved flower the celandine, braving the frosts and the loneliness, with only the windrifted leaves of a dead year for company. But its courage makes it beautiful--one of the first of the players in the country orchestra of scent and colour and loveliness to take its seat in the amphitheatre of spring.
On the railway embankment the coltsfoot flowers are rising. How can one be sad when Proserpine will shortly float over the meadows and the woodlands? Now we must lift our hearts above earthly unhappiness, and, with Nature, be joyous.
What matter the fallings of so many leaves in the past when to-day the wild and happy humble bees are passing in the sunshine, dusty from the pollen of the willow-palm? That the symphony of summer must die in autumn’s cadences is inevitable, but now the grass is rising on the crumbled brick rim of the deserted limekiln, and on the pile of chalk a wagtail calls to his mate.
There are the sweet notes of the finches who are fluttering round the weeds of the wasteland, and the distant caw of rooks. A great cloud rushes in the sky; the light is checked. It is cold once more. But every day the sun swings in a higher curve; over the sea the call has gone, and even now the migrants in Africa and Egypt are restless.
Very soon the chiffchaff will pipe his monotonous tune by the lake, and the wheatears will be back on the sward of the downlands. A few weeks and the cuckoo will call in the forest and the swallows glide around the barns and the ricks--“all the living staircase of the spring, step by step, upwards to the great gallery of the summer.”
VIGNETTES OF NATURE
_i_
From their tussocks upon the sward the pink flowers of the sea-thrift are rising. In one clump a pippit has its nest. The male bird rises high in the air, then falls suddenly, singing his little sweet song; he regains height by mad flutterings, sing-sing-singing all the time. In the matted turf the leaves of the wild thyme give a faint fragrance to the hands. Near by is the skull of a finch, whitened by the sun and the rains. Perhaps the falcons left it there, or one of the buzzards; or a herring gull chased and killed the bird, for gulls are prepared for any villainy. But it is still of use to something. A small spider lurks within its shadowed emptiness.
Reclining by the precipice edge one morning in May I was made curious by a sudden sweeping of gulls from the cliff-face (where they nest) to the sea. Two or three hundred, white in the sunshine, flapped and glided in a narrow circle by the rocks far below.
I looked carefully, but could see nothing. The spiral of tumbling whiteness and wild noise continued. Something in the green water was causing intense excitement. From all directions other sea-birds swept up; only the black shags squatted indifferently on their favourite rock. Then I saw a smooth, dark form swirling in the water, and heard a hoarse bark; the next moment it had dived. It was a seal. Presently the glistening animal rolled on the surface with a huge dogfish held in his jaws. The gulls screamed; a shrill clamouring broke out as the seal, having bitten the fish in two, threw one part into the air, caught it endways, and swallowed it. Round the Point he swam, while the birds fought over the remains. Presently he appeared with a writhing conger-eel, which with the greatest ease he bit up into little pieces.
An old fisherman, known as The Tiger, told me that the seal had been there for the last twenty years, and that so far as was known it had no mate. It showed no fear of a boat, and often came up alongside one, inspected it with filmy eyes, and quietly disappeared.
_ii_
In spring the gulls throng to their colony upon the headland. When disturbed, they cry wildly, and circle in the air. Once as I lay in the sun listening to the sea-fret a sharp chattering overbore the wailing of the gulls, and a pair of peregrine falcons swept by.
In but a moment, it seemed, they were half a mile high, flying with incredible swiftness, the male chasing the larger female. From the direction of Lundy Island a pair of stock-doves came across the sea, no mean fliers. They saw the wheeling falcons, and fear doubled their wing-beats.
I watched the hawks in their mad love chase, and then the tiercel saw the doves, closed his pinions, and fell from a thousand feet to the terrified doves in a few seconds. I have seen scout machines diving in France, but the peregrines, one behind the other in echelon, seemed to stoop with greater speed than the fastest of them.
In fear the gulls fled to their crannies in the cliff-face. There was a flurry of feathers as the male hawk struck the leading pigeon; he dropped it, swerved, and struck the other, while his mate clawed his first kill. Upwards, with the dove suspended in her talons, she climbed. A heavy black raven flapped to the dove whose blood was staining the green sea as it lifted in the swell.
The peregrine screamed--_check, check, check_--and dropped on the heavier pirate, who, as the hawk came above him, rolled over and held up his javelin beak. The hawk slipped, regained height, stooped again, was met with the great beak, and then flashed away chattering towards the mainland, followed by his mate.
The next moment a crowd of gulls splashed and quarrelled over the dead pigeon, the raven a sombre fellow amid their whiteness; the rabbits crept from their burrows; and in the sunshine the tiny pippits jerked towards heaven in weak flight, then fell, singing and trilling. And life in the springtime went on.
HAWK NOTES
A cloud from the sea dragged over the mountain so that the buzzards wheeling in the upper air were hidden, and only their mewling cries came down. I suppose they outsoared the cold autumnal vapours; they often sail in the heavenly freeness a mile and more above the earth, broad wings for ever lifted by the winds.
These big hawks are quite common in the West Country; I have seen as many as ten pairs on the wing at once. They are clumsy in the lower air, flapping heavily and beating over the slopes of heather and gorse very much like an owl. But when they attain to high solitude they are transformed. Sometimes as they turn the sun throws a golden lustre on their pinions.
All the British hawks that I have seen--kestrel, sparrowhawk, merlin, peregrine falcon, buzzard, and marsh harrier--hover to find their prey. Their hovering may be prolonged, or for an instant only. The kestrel leans on the wind, the sparrowhawk (I am referring to those that hunt in the open) dashes down wind, swings up, poises, then dashes down at his prey. The peregrine falcon hangs high above the cliff slope or the inland fields. He and his mate, hunting together, are like two black anchor-heads. Even in a considerable wind they are not disturbed. They remain fixed till something is seen, and then they fall, head first, swifter and swifter, plunging at an enormous rate. If they are within three hundred yards, and the day is still, you may hear the hissing of the stoop. They strike their victim and smash it, or miss altogether, abandoning after three failed stoops. The male usually follows the female should she miss.
Buzzards--spanning nearly four feet--are the most graceful hoverers. They hang, with wings arched back, a few yards over the rabbit runs through the gorse and the bracken. A fairly steady breeze is needed to keep them stable. I have watched for more than a minute a buzzard hanging thus, moving only its tail. The secret of its poising is that it _falls_ continually on the wind, pressing its breast into the flow to counteract the lifting impulse of its wings.
Once I saw a buzzard glide down a hill at about eight miles an hour, a yard from the ground, its feet hanging below, ready to grasp something. Its slow slip downwards (“glide” would convey too rapid a motion) amazed me--it might have been sliding on a wire. Eventually it alighted, and rose with a lashing snake. The reptile was too much for it; the buzzard rushed about in middle air, turning and screaming. Eventually the snake fell to the ground.
I know an eyrie in a pinewood composed of nearly two hundredweight of sticks. It is about seven feet across, and quite as deep. For half a century and more it has been repaired every spring. Years ago I took the three eggs and lay for a long time in the nest, trembling with joy. The old birds were frightened to come near. I still have those eggs.
The buzzards nested there this year, but I could not climb up. The nest was at a terrible height. Underneath were hundreds of rabbits’ skulls, rats’ tails, beetle skins, and the feathers of small birds. Perhaps in the years to come when I go there I shall be terrified to see an eager face looking over the nest, and a shrill, triumphant voice exclaiming, “I say, father, I’ve got three eggs. What a bit of luck!”
PROPHET BIRDS
One September morning there wheeled a great concourse of gulls over the headland. Through the mist their cries came wild and plaintive. Old men in the village said that it meant a big storm.
I did not believe that birds could prophesy. Having studied the phenomena of nature for many years, I have come to know that everything happens by chance. For instance, during the autumn of 1920 severe wintry weather was forecasted because the hawthorn peggles were plentiful, and the granaries of squirrels were more numerous than usual. Quite a number of journals and periodicals stated these “portents” quite seriously. What illusions! The spring of that year was mild, the hawthorn blossom beautiful, and unravaged by frost. Hence the peggles. As for the squirrels, they found a goodly fall of beechen mast, and promptly stored it!
But to return to the gulls over Baggy Point. There must have been two or three thousand of them, floating and wailing. “A master storm be cumin’,” said the granfers.