Part 7

I feared that the hedge-sparrows would desert the nest, which now surely was but an empty mock, with its one alien egg. In the ordinary way one will find the cuckoo’s egg amongst the others, in some cases exchanged for one belonging to the nest. When the young cuckoo is hatched, he displays great irritation if anything touches his back, and will not rest till the other occupants of the nest, whether eggs or fledgelings like himself, are cast out. The parent birds show an indifference to these unfortunates, and all their efforts are for the intruder.

Thus I was considerably surprised to find that the female sparrow was sitting on the strange egg. Had I, before the tragedy, taken the four eggs away, and placed instead an egg of a robin or a thrush, it is practically certain that it would have been ignored. Both parent birds were near when the female cuckoo was laying her egg, and kept flying round the nest, accompanied by a robin who may have been, like myself, a curious spectator in this domestic affair.

Five weeks afterwards the young cuckoo was many times the size of his wretched foster parents, and throughout the long days of June they worked in the hedges, seeking caterpillars, grubs, and spiders for their querulous nestling.

The migration of the young cuckoo in August is helped by a most interesting series of ingenious frauds. The old cuckoos depart for the south in July, and the younger birds making their way independently, day by day, are directed only by instinct. But the baby cannot feed itself (or probably will not, being a born parasite), and the poor little pair of birds who have slaved for it will not follow him when the wanderlust comes into his blood. The method of cadging a meal is as extraordinary as it is utterly callous.

The cad will fly ten or twelve miles a day in a southerly direction. At intervals he cries in an infantile, screaming voice. There is bound to be near a pair of birds with young, and should they hear the cry, they leave their own children and go and feed the wide-mouthed impostor. No small birds, _with fledgelings_, appear to be able to resist the call. They go and feed him. The fact that the young cuckoo bears a resemblance to a kestrel hawk, both in flight and colour, makes their charity all the more mysterious. Down to the south he wanders, his wings getting stronger every day, until the time comes when the sea shines in the distance, and his long journey begins. And throughout the days of his English stay, he lives on the foolish and charitable ones among the smaller, insectivorous birds.

Sometimes he is a positive blackguard. One year (1914) I found a cuckoo’s egg in a tiny nest of a common wren. When hatched, and only after much difficulty, he hoisted out all his companions, or squashed them, until he broke the nest (round like a ball, and with the hole about an inch or so in diameter in the side) and squatted insolently on top of it. The wrens, with their upright, barred little tails ever jerking with pride, fed him incessantly. The female worked so hard, and the cuckoo was so greedy, that eventually the top of her head was devoid of all feathers, and made quite raw by the beak of her wonder-child. But she was very brave, and was apparently quite indifferent to the risk she ran of one day disappearing altogether. I have often wondered if cuckoos have the power of projecting into other birds the maternal love, or instinct, that is so obviously deficient in themselves. This seems to be the logical conclusion to draw, even if it be incomprehensible to the man who in human life thinks in terms of matter and the individual, instead of the spirit and the species.

_1916._

DAYS OF AUTUMN

One morning in the hollows of the meadow land below the wood lay a silver mist. The sun sweeping upwards in its curve beat this away towards noon, but it was a sign. The fire of autumn was kindled: already the little notched leaves of the hawthorn were tinged with the rust of decay, already a bramble leaf was turning red: soon the flames would mount the mightier trees and fan their pale heat among the willows and ash trees round the lake, lick among the drooping elms and the lacquered oaks, and sweep in abandonment with yawning fire of colour through the old beech forest.

Years ago now, in the glamorous time of childhood, this coming of the mist in the morning with its fragrance arising from the earth peculiar to summer’s end--the fumous, clinging smell of a torch--filled me with great sadness. No birds sang in the woods. By the mere, about this time, hundreds of swallows would gather. Restlessly they clung to the sedges and the rushes, whose tips were beginning to brown and make faint whisper in the wind; now flinging themselves into the air, twittering, mounting high, wheeling and slipping, now descending like a shower of iron darts to the border of the lake. Sometimes on my way to school I went to watch them, being caught occasionally as I crept in through an unofficial entrance to the school, and punishment ensued. What use to explain the poignant feelings about autumn and the departure of my beautiful swallows to lands where I could not follow? More important to the boy were his forced learnings than his blundering and unconscious poetry; and the sunlight came through the window, making him miserable. In fancy he was roaming the old hills, or dreaming by the brook; and that was indolence--he would never fit himself for the conflict of a mature life in London by idleness and dreaming. So the little boy was often punished, and frequently occupied the lowest seat of his form.

As the days went on the swallows were more anxious. The cuckoos and the swifts had long since departed. Here and there in the fountain-shaped elms a yellow patch of leaves showed like a spilled plash of water imprisoning a sunbeam. The peggles on the hawthorns were reddening; and waving their pennants in the wind the dry rustling of the sedges came across the water with excited notes of the swallows. As one swept by, low in flight, the deep blue of his wings, their exquisite and soft uplift, the delicacy of the forked tail, were reflected on the surface; with a sighing sound he would pass and his liquid image glide on the mirrored surface below him.

The mornings were chilly, but the vagrants continued to hold their parliament in the rushes. Insect life was on the wane, adventure stirred their little hearts to excitement. Every passing of the wind beckoned a forlorn following of leaves from the trees, a spider seeking hibernation threw a prospecting line of silk against the face. With a tired sound the starred sycamore leaves, each condemned by the black patch of autumn, fluttered to the earth; by listening closely it was possible to hear the stalks break from the twigs. Flittering like chafer-beetles in a dusky summer night the vaned seeds risped and whirled away from the parent trees. As yet the conflagration had not caught the forest, only isolated flames browned a beech tree, scorched the branch of an ash with yellow or made a buff haze in the distant oaks. It seemed as though the funeral pyre of dead summer would blaze in majesty only when the swallows had left.

One afternoon their shriller notes told that the hour was approaching. So eager were they among themselves that I was permitted to approach within a yard of them. I could see their frail claws, and admire the slim outline of their bodies; a melancholy admiration, like that of age with a young heart for youth and beauty that it yearns to share; the swallows were much to me, but I was nothing to them. Suddenly with a rush of wings they swept up, soon to become a smudge against the sky. But the wind was not favourable, or the message anticipated had not arrived, for they returned to the sedges that never ceased to shiver of coming dreariness. The autumnal air was tranquil in its silence and solitude; the wings of gnats dancing their mazy columns assumed in the sunshine a fairy semblance. Over the waters sped the swallows, taking the last banquet, for once the long journey were commenced no halt would be made for food; the thousands of miles over sea and land must be passed without falter, urged and directed by the ancient instinct developed long before Zoroaster came from the plains of Iran with his Magian worship.

The next morning when I went to bid them farewell the lake was deserted. My friends had gone, and I had not said good-bye. During the night a wind had risen, and they had fled before it to the warm south. I prayed that their strength did not fail while the little things were over the cold gray sea. I could do no more. But my heart was heavy.

When the migrants have departed the fires of autumn throw their flames and falling shadows rapidly over the countryside. In the morning moisture drip-drips from the trees, their tops are wraithed in mist, and the jay screams as he lurks among the acorns. Every day the sun describes a lower curve and, red and small, looms through the vapours. But above he is spinning and carding the mist, warmth blows on the cheek as for a moment brightness streams down, and so happiness comes again. Once more the thoughts of desolation are dispelled like the mist, and hope rises anew to the heart. In the murmuring green of spring, the radiant birdsong of summer, it is indeed difficult to be sad. Though all human efforts seem without avail, the song and scent and colour of summer fills the yearning heart and assuages its broken hopes. But in autumn and winter, at least for a long time, no consolation was there anywhere. Underfoot the old paths were beaten into mire by the passing of feet; these were the leaves, each so perfect and veined and shaped, that had opened from buds to the croon of wild cloves and the tap-tap of woodpeckers. Nature seemed to care nothing for the things that were created: the hand that composed so lovingly decomposed as inevitably.

To youth the world seemed bitterly cruel and uncaring, for every form of life--except those idealists, the bees--survived by the death of another form. The declining days with their ebb of warmth killed the million million insects and butterflies whose hum had been so dim and happy in the summer.

By a dry mossy bank underneath a hedge of bullace in whose unleafed raggedness the sere and twisted chords of the traveller’s joy had grown, the willow herb flowers were still in bloom when October had yielded most of its blackberries. Below the pink flowers and on the same stem the long pods were splitting and their seeds, swung under down, drifting with the wind. As I watched, a humble bee, numbed with cold sought the sanctuary of a pink flower, clung for a moment swaying, then fell to the moss below and lay still on its side. The hooked legs moved feebly, the wings shivered; no warmth came from the weak sunshine, and so it died.

By night a mouse would consume its body--beautiful with the bar of tawny velvet on its duskiness. From the time of early spring, when first the willow wren had called by the stream, the bee had climbed over the flowers, bartering the gold grains of the pollen for the honey that it desired so eagerly. In April it had gone to the apple blossom in the orchard and heavy-odoured nettles filling the ditches; invaded the sanctities of all the flowers of summer’s lavishing. Busy was my hunchback bee, feeding on no other form of life, helping the birth of the seeds to which the hue and scent of the petals were servant, working for the future of her race, utterly selfless; humming a wander-song as the sun strengthened its vanes, now fretted by toil and labour.

Then there was no hope anywhere, no voice among the trees, nothing but the feeble winnowing of the leaves as they sank to the earth, and the dazed drone of a dying fly.

In the beechwood the split covers of the mast crushed under the feet, the leaves were crisped and curled. No cunning of sculptor in copper could fashion such as these. The beech tree is indeed the aristocrat of the forest, for it is superb at the fall. No leaves possess such a rich colour or have the appearance of majesty and preserved form. The elm leaves are drab and lifeless, the oak leaves blotched and frayed; from the horse chestnut the big green splayed leaves are either withered and rusted or drop when seemingly full of sap. The elderberry and the ash loosen their sprays at the first singe of autumn’s fire. But gradually dyed a deep golden-brown, and untouched by fungus or blight, the leaves of the beech preserve their outline and take on a silkiness and shining of surface. Seen against the blue sky the veins and arteries of each leaf are clear-cut and distinct; no degeneration in the beech tree. During the autumn the numerous summer tenants of the wood have quitted. There is silence in the cold air. Old and twisted, the beech trees have yielded generations of leaves uncurling from torch-like windings when first the swallows come across the sea; the rooks built in their massy summer greeneries; woodpeckers hewn a nesting place in the rotten boles, spreading a whiteness of chips on the moss beneath; starlings with wings of metallic gleaming stolen their old trysts, and jackdaws nested where the branches had decayed and gaped. Far down across the fields yonder the rooks are following the plough. The jackdaws have joined them, and as light ebbs at evening they will return in a long stream to the rookeries.

The starlings haunt the water-meadows, the mocking cry of the green “gallypot” is heard no more. Walking quietly through the solitude of the wood the wanderer may see a squirrel storing his granaries with mast and acorns, working earnestly lest the frost come early and bind the earth till the sun of March shall solve its graven pattern.

From the edge of the wood the field slopes downwards to the longpond, now covered with a haze in the sunshine. The rushes fringing its edge are rusted and bent like old Roman swords, the reeds like the spears of ancient Britons, thrown with Arthur’s sword, into the lake. By the pebbled shore the water is pure and clear and gloomy, the sunlight showing the moist brown velvet of the leaves upon its bed. Quietly feeding in the centre, a dozen moor-hens send ripples to the side, each wavelet bearing a shifting line of light over the leaves as it travels forward. Yonder the sallows have loosened their slips of leaves and the sunshine throws up their ruddy and yellow wands--broken segments of a rainbow trembling by the marge. A wren goes by, a fluttering moth of a bird, silent; sipping and twittering in sweet cadences a flock of goldfinches passes over towards the patch of thistledown in the meadow. A chuckling, rattling sound; the fieldfares and redwings have arrived from Scandinavian forests.

The path through the higher wood was covered with leaves, and bordered by bleached stalks of wild parsley and crumbling sorrel spires. From the tall grasses the sap went with summer, and like frail ghosts they drooped over the pathway. The sun was warm, as though it were celandine-time. Upright and pallid under the trees, and lit by the warm sunshine, the stalks of the year’s bluebells bore their skull-like caps filled with their black shining seeds. Even as the wind stirred the branches of the trees the old loved shadow lacings slipped and shuffled on the ground. The wind sounded as in summer, the loveliest goldy-brown brimmed the hollows under the oaks. The phantoms of summer were with me as I leant against a sapling, the cast feather of a chaffinch swung on a spider’s line encircling the trunk waved a gentle farewell. Where the shafts of sunlight lingered among the brambles their leaves were fired a lucent green; autumn is kind to the bramble, touching a leaf here and there only with blood red splash.

I waited under the oak, unable to leave the warmth and tranquillity. A cloud hid the sun. I wanted to see the beauteous light come again through the rifted clouds, to see the staining of the bramble leaves. Once more the sun gilded the bare branches, colouring the red berries of the holly that would feed the thrushes in winter, and lacquering the beech trees till they seemed like the tawny beards of vikings.

Somewhere in the wood was the ghost of Proserpine returned to see how her children were faring--under the leaves were the seeds that would bring forth bloom and beauty and fragrance in the spring; deep in the earth lay the cocoons and shells whence would arise the happy throng of summery moths and butterflies. For this is the purpose of autumn: rest and quietude for those who have laboured throughout the summer to ensure life for their kind. So now in autumn my hope is as firm as the oak. Every leaf that falls is pushed from its hold by a bud awaiting the mystic order to unfold itself in spring; every flower lives but to form its seeds. All through the centuries the spirits of the flowers and the wild things have been growing more beautiful in the knowledge of their service.

As I walked away a timid song sounded on the air. Somewhere a robin was singing. He was not made miserable by thought--he was happy every moment. He did not need to brood upon immortality--he lived unconscious of time--every moment was _lived_, the beauty of the earth and the sun, and his mate, all accepted without question. The robin lives like an immortal here, upon the earth that is so beautiful: and all the wisdom of the dead civilisations is nothing to what the robin’s song tells, if you will but listen.

SWALLOW BROW: _A Fantasy_

(_To P. T._)

That morning as she brushed her hair little Jo felt a great joy in her heart, for the sunlight was making bright the room. Her real name was Mary, but they called her Jo for short. She dropped her brush and leaned out, while a blackbird with a yellow bill flew to the top of one of the apple trees in the garden and commenced to flute in a rich, beautiful voice. Then a wild bee crawled on the window-sill and began to clean gauzy wings with his legs. Little Jo watched him with the eager look that some small children have when regarding the lesser works of God, and thought that his body was very velvety, with a sash tied round the middle of it. A lark sang over the cornfield behind the garden, and she wanted to sing and shout, for everything was so lovely in the world. But it was nearly time for breakfast, and mother would be angry if she went downstairs after her sisters and brothers had eaten their porridge, so with her heart singing like the gold-bill outside, she picked up her brush and peered into the mirror.

Her face stared back at her, with its dark eyes and shyly smiling mouth. Then a June rose seemed to hover in each cheek, shedding their petals to give her beauty: and her eyes shone.

“Oh, you are pretty,” she thought, touching the glass with her hand.

She was soon dressed, and ran downstairs, almost falling in her eagerness to move, for the sunshine that came from over the orchard was still spinning its thread of happiness in her heart, as it was in the heart of the lark who sang above the green corn.

All breakfast time she thought of the face looking back at her from behind the mirror, and hardly heard the talk about the two visitors coming that day.

After the meal, when Great-uncle Sufford had gone into his study to read the paper before going down to the meadow to paint, Michael pulled her hair and said roughly, for he was her eldest brother, “What were you grinning at during brekker, eh, kid?”

“Nothing,” replied Jo, wishing she had a stick to bang his ankles.

“Well, ugly-face, if you are contemplating ragging my room, or sewing my pyjamas up, or trying any nonsense, you look out,” he said with the dignity of one whose voice had broken six weeks and three days.

“I’m not ugly-face!” she cried.

“Ho, aren’t you! You’re worse!” He pulled her hair again.

“Oh, I hate you, Micky.”

She ran out of the room, and upstairs in her bedroom she stared mournfully at her own image. It was true, she was an ugly-face, as Michael had said! Oh, and she wanted to be pretty, just to please other people.

Her mouth trembled, and a tear rolled down her cheek. Another and another fell, until she could not see anything, for the mirror was all misty.

“Oh, I want to be beautiful,” she sobbed. “Dear God, make me nice-looking.”

A butterfly drifted in at the open window and flew towards her as though she were a flower. Then, feeling that the gold-dust that came from the great blue sky no longer warmed the white and black bars of his sails, he flickered out again.

Little Jo brushed her eyes, and tripped down the stairs, her misery gone. She ran into the kitchen garden, down the path, past the flowering beans and the cabbages, and through the gate into the cornfield. Soon she reached the brook and flung herself down suddenly at its edge.

She watched the water rippling past, and the green water-weed waving to her. A school of roach went by, the light showing their bright red fins. Little Jo wondered if the fishes knew that they had lovely red fins, and if it was nice to stir the water with them. Behind her the corn seemed to sigh as the wind swept over, as though it knew of coming midsummer, with its hum over the fields, for that meant that August would follow, and the reapers come with the horses and machines.

Then she wondered if the sun loved the brook, for it shook with silvery flashes, and sang a sweet song where it ran into an eddy just by her feet. She was always wondering things. She turned on her back and tried to see a lark in the sky. It was so warm lying there in the sun, and the bees from her Great-uncle Sufford’s hives went over to the clover fields. So warm, and the tiny brook-song so sweet, that her eyes closed. Still the water murmuring softly and the lovely summer sun kissing her. She wondered dreamily if you felt like that when you were in heaven: then remembered that she was ugly and with a small sigh fell asleep.

A swallow flew low over the water, dipping his chestnut breast in the stream. Immediately Jo sat up and clapped her hands.

“Swallow, swallow,” she cried, “how little you are!”

“Am I, my love?” twittered the bird, circling over her head.

“Your wings are so blue, little swallow.”

The bird dived from above and perched at the edge of the brook. Jo could see his slim wings folded over his tail. He took one dainty sip, and then sped, light as a spider’s thread, into the air.

“Come back, little swallow,” she called, “come and perch on my finger. Unless you are afraid,” she added wistfully.

“I will come,” said the swallow. She could feel the tiny claws just touching her fingers.

“We are not afraid of you, my love,” he twittered, “we know that you would not hurt us.”

“Who told you?” she asked in wonder.

“The blackbird who sings on the highest branch of the apple tree by your window, and the humble bees, and the goldfinch into whose nest you peered without touching, and the baby hare you stroked, and all the wild folk.”

“But do they know then how I love them, little swallow?”

“Why, yes,” the bird answered softly, “all the wild things know when a man or a child loves them. Do you not remember the sparrows eating from the hand of an old man in London when you went there one day last year? And how they had no fear of him, but when a lady approached wearing what is called by some a beautiful hat, they all flew away?”

“Yes, I remember, dear swallow.”

“Well, my love, those despised sparrows knew that on that hat were the skins of nineteen humming birds, and though they knew that they themselves would not be desired, or have to give up their lives for the cause of beauty, yet they did not like the woman.”

“Oh, I hate her, I hate her,” cried Jo.

“Hush,” said the swallow. “When she bought the hat she did not think of nineteen of our tiny brothers killed for a hat. She was really a kind woman, only she never thought very much.”