Part 13

Besides ‘Watling Street,’ our Anglo-Saxon forbears had _Iringes Weg_ or _Wec_ and _Bil-Idun’s Weg_; Iringe and Bil-Idun having been famous descendants of the Waetla already alluded to. They were warders of the Bridge of Asgard, the Scandinavian Heaven. In time this Asgard-Bridge came to be given as a name to the Milky Way ... though the later poets applied the epithet also to the Rainbow. Readers of Grimm’s _Teutonic Mythology_ will remember that he cites many collateral instances. Thus the Vikings knew the Galaxy as _Wuotanes Straza_, or ‘Woden’s Street’; the Dutch have in common use _Vronelden Street_, ‘the women’s Street’; and the German peasants commonly call it _Jakob’s Weg_. The Westphalian term is singular and suggestive, ‘Weather Street.’ One wonders if there is any common idea that weather is in any way as closely associated with the Milky Way as are the vernal floods and the autumnal rains with the Pleiades. Probably the bestowal of the name is due to the fact that when the Galaxy is clear and bright and scintillant the weather is serene and dry. A more poetic designation is that of the Finns, who delight in the term _Linnunrata_, the Birds’ Way, either from an old Finnish and Esthonian legend that once by a miracle all the songs of all the birds of the world were turned into a cloud of snow-white tiny wings, or from the more likely belief that it is the road of winged spirits on their passage from earth to heaven. This is, of course, a very ancient conception. The ancient Hindûs revealed it in the phrase ‘the Path of Ahriman’: the ancient Norse as ‘the Path of the Ghosts’ going to Valhalla: the ancient Gaels as the Hero-Way, leading from Earth to Flatheanas, the Abode of Eternal Youth. It is strange and suggestive that not only the North American aborigines called it ‘the Trail to Ponemah’ (the Hereafter), but that people so rude as the Eskimo and the Bushmen of South Africa call it ‘the Ashen Path,’ the road of fire-ember signals, for the ghosts of the dead. Even the Patagonians speak of the Milky Way as the white pampas where their dead are immortal huntsmen rejoicing in the pursuit of countless ostriches.

But of all popular names I do not think any is more apt and pleasant than that common to the Swedish peasantry, who call the Galaxy _Winter Gatan_--_i.e._, ‘Winter Street.’ It is the Winter Street we must all travel some day, if the old poets say true, when the green grass grows on our quiet beds, when the loudest wind will not fret the silence in our tired minds, and when day and night are become old forgotten dreams. May we too find it the Pathway of Peace ... not the least beautiful of the names of the Milky Way, not the least beautiful of the legends connected with that lovely wonder of our nocturnal skies.

SEPTEMBER

September: the very name has magic. In an old book, half in Latin half in English, about the months, which I came upon in a forgotten moth-eaten library years ago, and in part copied, and to my regret have not seen or heard of since, or anywhere been able to trace, I remember a singular passage about this month. Much had been said about the flowers of ‘these golden weekes that doe lye between the thunderous heates of summer and the windy gloomes of winter’; of those flowers and plants which bloom in gardens, and those, as the harebell and poppy and late-flowering gorse, which light the green garths of meadow and woodland; as the bryony, which trails among the broken copses and interweaves the ruddy masses of bramble; as the traveller’s-joy, which hangs its frail wreaths of phantom-snow along the crests of every hedgerow of beech and hornbeam. Of the changing colours of the trees, too, the old writer had much to say: of the limes ‘that become wan and spotted as a doe,’ of the mountain-ash ‘that has its long fingers dyed redd and browne,’ of ‘the wyche-elme whose gold is let loose on the wind after nighte-frosts and cold dawnes.’ Nor did he forget that ‘greate beautie of mistes’ which we all know; and he reached eloquence when he spoke of the apple-orchards and of the wall-fruits of ‘olde manor-gardenns’--‘the peache that women and poetes doe make the queene of fruites,’ ‘the rich glowe and savour of the apricock,’ ‘the delicate jargonell that keepes the sweetes of France in olde warme English gardenns.’ Of wild-fruit, also, he had dainty words and phrases. Blackberries, ‘the darke-blue bilberry,’ the sloe ‘whose excellent purple bloode maketh so fine a comfort,’ ‘the dusky clustres of the hasel,’ ‘the green-smockt filberte,’ and so forth. Even upon mushrooms he had words of sun and wind and dew, so lightsome were they, ardent and joyous, with a swift movement--as though writ by one who remembered gathering ‘musherooms’ in a sun-sweet dawn after a night of heavy dews, in company with another who laughed often in gladness and was dearest and fairest of all dear and fair things. ‘Howbeit,’ he added, after sorrowing that ‘many doe feare these goodly musherooms as poysonis dampe weedes,’ ‘this dothe in nowise abate the exceedynge excellence of Goddes providence that out of the grasse and dewe where nothing was, and where onlie the lytell worme turned in his sporte, come as at the shakynge of bells these delicate meates.’

Then, after some old-world lore about ‘the wayes of nature with beastes and byrdes’ in this month, he goes further afield. ‘And this monthe,’ he says, ‘is the monthe of dreames, and when there is a darke (or secret) fyre in the heartes of poetes, and when the god of Love is fierce and tyrannick in imaginings and dreames, and they doe saye in deedes also, yett not after the midwaye of the monthe; butt whye I know not.’

We hear so much of the poet-loved and poet-sung month of May, and the very name of June is sweet as its roses and white lilies and lavender, that it is become a romantic convention to associate them with ‘dreames’ and the ‘tyrannick’ season of ‘the god of Love.’ But I am convinced that the old Elizabethan or Jacobean naturalist was right. May and June are months of joy, but September is the month of ‘dreames’ and ‘darke fyre.’ Ask those who love nature as the poet is supposed to love her, with something of ecstasy perhaps, certainly with underglow of passion: ask those in whom the imagination is as a quickening and waning but never absent flame: ask this man who travels from month to month seeking what he shall never find, or this woman whose memories and dreams are many, howsoever few her hopes ... and the chance will be that if asked to name the month of the heart’s love, it will be September. I do not altogether know why this should be so, if so it is. There is that in June which has a time-defying magic: May has her sweet affinities with Spring in the human heart: in April are the flutes of Pan: March is stormy with the clarions of the winds: October can be wild with all wildness or be the calm mirror of the passing of the loveliness of the green-world. There is not a month that has not its own signal beauty, so that many love best February, because through her surge of rains appear days of blue wonder, with the song of the missel-thrush tost like spray from bare boughs--or November, because in the grey silence one may hear the fall of the sere leaves, and see mist and wan blueness make a new magic among deserted woods--or January, when all the visible world lies in a white trance, strange and still and miraculous as death transfigured to a brief and terrible loveliness on the face of one suddenly quiet from the fever of youth and proud beauty. There is not a month when the gold of the sun and the silver of the moon are not woven, when the rose of sunset does not lie upon hills which reddened to the rose of dawn, when the rainbow is not let loose from the tangled nets of rain and wind, when the morning-star and the evening-star do not rise and set.

And yet, for some, there is no month that has the veiled magic of September.

‘The month of peace,’ ‘the month of beauty,’ it is called in many Gaelic songs and tales; and often, ‘Summer-end.’ I remember an old _rann_, perhaps still said or sung before the peat-fires, that it was in this month God created Peace; again, an island-tale of Christ as a shepherd and the months as sheep strayed upon the hills of time. The Shepherd went out upon the hills, and gathered them one by one, and led them to the fold: but, before the fold was reached, a great wind of snow came down out of the corries, and on the left a wild flood arose, and on the narrow path there was room only, and that hardly, for the Shepherd. So He looked to see which one of the twelve He might perchance save, by lifting it in His strong arms and going with it alone to the fold. He looked long, for all were the children of His Father. Then He lifted September, saying, ‘Even so, because thou art the month of fulfilment, and because thy secret name is Peace.’ But when He came out of the darkness to the fold, the Shepherd went back between the wild lips of flood and tempest, and brought to the fold June, saying, ‘Because thy secret name is Joy’: and, in turn, one by one, He brought each to the fold, saying unto each, in this order, ‘May, because thy secret name is Love’; ‘April, because thou art made of tears and laughter’; ‘July, because thou art Beauty’; ‘August, thou quiet Mother’; ‘October, because thy name is Content’; ‘March, because thy name is Strife’; ‘February, because thy name is Hope’; ‘November, because thy name is Silence’; ‘January, because thou art Death’; and at the last, ‘December, whom I have left to the end, for neither tempest could whelm nor flood drown thee, for thy name is the Resurrection and the Life.’

And when the tale was told, some one would say, ‘But how, then, was September chosen first?’

And the teller would say, ‘Because its secret name is Peace, and Peace is the secret name of Christ.’

It is no wonder the poets have loved so well this month whose name has in it all the witchery of the North. There is the majesty of the hill-solitudes in it, when the moorlands are like a purple sea. It has the freshness of the dew-white bramble-copses, of the bracken become russet and pale gold, of the wandering frostfire along the highways of the leaf, that mysterious breath whose touch is silent flame. It is the month when the sweet, poignant second-song of the robin stirs the heart as a child’s gladness among tears. ‘The singer of September,’ a Gaelic poet calls it, and many will recall the lovely lines of the old half-forgotten Elizabethan poet on the bird

“That hath the bugle eyes and ruddy breast And is the yellow autumn’s nightingale.”

It is strange how much bird-lore and beast-lore lie with September. The moorcock, the stag, the otter, the sea-wandering salmon, the corncrake, and the cuckoo and the swift, I know not how many others, have their tale told or their farewell sung to the sound and colour of September. The poets have loved it for the unreturning feet of Summer whose vanishing echoes are in its haunted aisles, and for the mysterious silences of the veiled arrivals of Winter. It is the month of the year’s fulfillings--

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close-bosom’d friend of the maturing sun.”

And yet there are other Septembers than the Septembers of memory, than the Septembers of the imagination. For three years past the month has come with rains from the sea and cold winds out of the east and north. The robin’s song has been poignantly sweet as of yore, but the dream-glow has been rare upon the hill and valley, and in the woods and on the moor-slopes the leaf has hung bannerets of dusky yellow, and the bracken burned dully without amber and flamelit bronze. This year, though, there has been some return of those September days which we believe in while yet a long way off, as we believe in May, as we feel assured of June. This last June was truly a month of roses, and in May the east wind slept: but last year the roses trailed along flooded byways, and the east wind nipped bud and blossom through the bleak days of ‘the merry month,’ and a colourless and forlorn September must have chilled even that ‘darke fyre in the heartes of poetes’ of which the old naturalist wrote. There have been days of peace this year, and of the whole beauty of Summer-end. In the isles, among the hills, on forest lands and uplands, and by the long plains and valleys of the south, the September blue--which is part a flame of azure and part a haze of the dust of pearls--has lain over land and sea like a benediction. How purple the western moors, what depths of floating violet and pale translucencies of amethyst on the transfigured mountains. What loveliness of pale blue mist in the hollows of quiet valleys; what richness of reds and ambers where the scarlet-fruited ash hangs over the unruffled brown pool; what profuse gold and ungathered amber where the yellow gorse climbs the hillside and the armies of the bracken invade every windy solitude. How lovely those mornings when the dew is frost-white and the gossamer is myriad in intricate interlacings that seem woven of aerial diamond-dust. What peace in that vast serenity of blue where not the smallest cloud is seen, where only seaward the gannet may hang immeasurably high like a winged star, or, above inland pastures, the windhover poise in his miraculous suspense.

But, alas, only ‘days.’ It has not been the September of the heart’s desire, of the poet’s dream. The advance-guard of the equinox has again and again come in force: the grey wind has wailed from height to height, and moaned among the woods. Even in the gardens the wall-fruits have hardly given the wonted rich warmth, though the apples have made a brave show. Yesterday there was a hush in the wind; a delicate frost lingered after a roseflusht dawn; and the inward light came out of the heather, the bracken and the gorse, out of the yellow limes and the amber planes and the changing oaks, and upon the hillside turned the great pine on the further crag into a column of pale gold and made the lichened boulders like the half-sunken gates of buried cities of topaz and jasper and chalcedony. But to-day vast masses of sombre cloud have been swung inland from the Atlantic, and the gale has the wild mournful sough that we look for in the dark months. It is in the firelight that one must recapture September. It lies hidden in that warm heart, amid the red and yellow flowers of flame: and in that other heart, which, also, has its ‘darke fyre,’ that heart in whose lands lit by neither sun nor moon are the secret glens where old dreams live again, and where the dreams of the hour are radiant in their new wonder and their new beauty.

THE CHILDREN OF WIND AND THE CLAN OF PEACE

I was abroad on the moors one day in the company of a shepherd, and we were talking of the lapwing that were plentiful there, and were that day wailing continuously in an uneasy wavering flight. I had seen them act thus, in this excess of alarm, in this prolonged restless excitement, when the hill-falcons were hovering overhead in the nesting season: and, again, just before the unloosening of wind and rain and the sudden fires of the thundercloud. But John Logan the shepherd told me that now it was neither coming lightnings nor drifting hawk nor eagle that made all this trouble among the ‘peewits.’ “The wind’s goin’ to mak’ a sudden veer,” he said--adding abruptly a little later, “an’ by the same token we’ll have rain upon us soon.”

I looked at the cold blue of the sky, and at the drift of the few clouds trailing out of the east or south-east, and could see no sign of any change of wind or likelihood of rain.

“What makes you think that?” I asked.

“Weel,” he answered literally, “I don’t think it. It’s the peewits an’ the craws that ken swifter than oursels; it’s they that tell, an’ I think they’re better at the business than thae folk wha haver awa’ in the papers, an’ are sometimes richt because they canna help it an’ oftener wrang because it’s maistly guesswork.”

“Well, what do the peewits and the crows say?--though I haven’t seen crow or rook or corbie for the last hour.”

“Thae peewits an’ a’ the plovers are a’ the same. If the win’s gaun to leap out of the east intae the sooth-wast, or slide quickly from the north intae the wast, they’ll gang on wheelin’ an’ wailin’ like yon for an hour or mair, an’ that afore there’s the least sign o’ a change. An’ as for the craws ... weel, if ye had been lookin’ up a wee whilie ago ye’d ’a seen a baker’s dozen go by, slantin’ on the edge o’ the win’, like boats before a stiff breeze. Aye, an’ see there! ... there’s a wheen mair comin’ up overhead.”

I glanced skyward, and saw some eight or ten rooks flying high and evidently making for the mountain-range about two miles away to our left.

“D’ye see that ... thae falling birds?”

“Yes,” I answered, noticing a singular occasional fall in the general steady flight, as though the suddenly wheeling bird had been shot: “and what o’ that, John?”

“It’s just this: when ye see craws flyin’ steady like that an’ then yince in a while drapping oot like yon, ye may tak’ it as meanin’ there’s heavy rain no that great way aff: onyways, when ye see the like when thae black deils are fleein’ straight for the hills, ye maun feel sure frae the double sign that ye’ll hae a good chance o’ being drookit afore twa-three hours.”

One question led to another, and I heard much crow and corbie lore from John Logan, some of it already familiar to me and some new to me or vaguely half-known--as the legend that the corbies or ravens, and with them all the crow-kind, were originally white, but at the time of the Deluge were turned sooty-black because the head of the clan, when sent out by Noah from the Ark, did not return, but stayed to feed on the bodies of the drowned. “So the blackness of death was put on them, as my old mother has it in her own Gaelic.”

“Your old mother, John?” I queried surprisedly: “I did not know you had any one at your croft.”

“Aye, but I have that, though she’s a poor frail auld body an’ never gangs further frae the hoose than the byre an’ the hen-yaird. If ye want to hear more aboot thae birds an’ the auld stories forenenst them, she’d mak’ you welcome, an’ we’d be glad an’ prood to offer ye tea: an’ I’ll just tell ye this, that ye’ll gie her muckle pleasure if ye’ll hae a crack wi’ her in the Gaelic, an’ let her tell her auld tales in’t. She’s Hielan’, ye ken: tho’ my faither was oot o’ Forfar, Glen Isla way. She’s never got hold o’ the English yet varra weel, an’ to my sorrow I’ve never learnt the auld tongue, takin’ after my faither in that, dour lowland body as he was. I ken enough to follow her sangs, an’ a few words forbye, just enough to gie us a change as ye micht say.”

I gladly accepted the shepherd’s courteous offer; and so it was that an hour later we found ourselves at Scaur-vàn, as his croft was called, from its nearness to a great bleached crag that rose out of the heather like a light-ship in a lonely sea. By this time, his prognostications--or those rather of the wheeling and wailing lapwings, and the mountain-flying rooks--had come true. Across the wide desolate moors a grey wind soughed mournfully from the south-west, driving before it long slanting rains and sheets of drifting mist. I was glad to be out of the cold wet, and in the warm comfort of a room lit with a glowing peat-fire on which lay one or two spurtling logs of pine.

A dear old woman rose at my entrance. I could see she was of great age, because her face was like a white parchment seamed with a myriad wrinkles, and her hands were so sere and thin that they were like wan leaves of October. But she was fairly active, and her eyes were clear--and even, if the expression may be used, with a certain quiet fire in their core--and her features were comely, with a light on them as of serene peace. The old-fashioned white mutch she wore enhanced this general impression, and I remember smiling to myself at the quaint conceit that old Mrs. Logan was like a bed-spirit of ancient slumber looking out from an opening of frilled white curtains.

It was pleasant to sit and watch her, as with deft hands she prepared the tea and laid on the table scones and butter and grey farrels of oatcake, while, outside, the wet wind moaned and every now and then a swirl of rain splashed against the narrow panes of the window, in whose inset stood three pots of geranium whose scarlet flowers caught the red flicker of the fire-flaucht and warmed the grey dusk gathering without.

Later, we began to speak of the things of which her son John and I had talked on the moor: and then of much else in connection with the legendary lore of the birds and beasts of the hills and high moorlands.

As it was so much easier for her (and so far more vivid and idiomatic) she spoke in Gaelic, delighted to find one who could understand the ancient speech: for in that part of the country, though in the Highlands, no Gaelic is spoken, or only a few words or phrases connected with sport, sheep-driving, and the like. I had won her heart by saying to her soon after the tea--up to which time she had spoken in the slow and calculated but refined Highland-English of the north-west--_Tha mi cinnteach gu bheil sibh aois mhòr_ ... ‘I am sure that you have the great age on you.’ She had feared that because I had ‘the English way’ I would not know, or remember, or care to remember, the old tongue: and she took my hand and stroked it while she said with a quiet dignity of pleasure, _Is taitneach leam nach ’eil ’ur Gàidhlig air meirgeadh_ ... (in effect) ‘It is well pleased I am that your Gaelic has not become rusty.’

It was after the tea-things had been set aside, and old Mrs. Logan had said reverently, _Iarramaid beannachadh_ (‘Let us ask a blessing’), that she told me, among other legendary things and fragments of old natural-history folklore, the following legend (or holy Christmas tale, as she called it) as to how the first crows were black and the first doves white.

I will tell it as simply but also with what beauty I can, because her own words, which I recall only as the fluctuating remembrance from a dream and so must translate from the terms of dream into the terms of prose, though simple were beautiful with ancient idiom.

Thus she began:--_Feumaidh sinn dol air ar n’-ais dlùth fichead ceud bliadhna_, which is to say, ‘We must go back near two thousand (_lit_: _twenty hundred_) years.’

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