Part 8

Something of that emotion as of ancestral memories, as of an awakened past, of an unloosening of the imagination, may well come to any imaginative nature encountering suddenly a wild-apple in blossom in some solitary place. To people of a Celtic race or having a dominant Celtic strain, in particular, perhaps; for to the Gael, the Cymru and the Breton the Apple-tree is associated with his most sacred traditional beliefs. Of old it was sacrosanct. It was the Celtic Tree of Life, what Yggdrasil was to the ancient dreamers of Scandinavia. He cannot think of it, but of the kingdom of eternal youth: of Emhain Abhlach, of Y Breasil, of Avalon, of drowned Avillion. It waves over the lost Edens. In Tir-na-n’Og its boughs, heavy with blossom, hang above the foam of the last pale waters of doom. The tired islander, who has put away hunger and weariness and dreams and the old secret desire of the sword, lays himself down below its branches in Flatheanas, and hears the wild harpers of Rinn in a drowsy hum like the hum of wild bees. Grey-haired men and women on the shores of Connemara look out across the dim wave and see the waving of its boughs. The Breton peasant, standing at twilight on the rock-strewn beaches of Tregastèl, will cross himself as he smells the fragrance of apple-blossom coming from sunken isles across the long rolling billows, and remember, perhaps, how of old in moonlit nights he has seen his keel drive through the yielding topmost branches of the woods of Avalon. Many poets have wandered in the secret valleys of Avillion, and have passed under boughs heavy with foam of dreams, and have forgotten all things and been uplifted in joy. In the glens of the Land of Heart’s Desire the tired singers of the world have become silent under the windless branches, snow-white in the moonshine, having found the Heart of Song.

The cross and death-coffer of apple-wood, the crown of wild-apple, the apple-staff, the poet’s tablets of apple-wood, all the apple-myths and apple-legends, how could one tell of them in a few words. They are in old songs and old tales of all lands. Our Gaelic literature alone is fragrant with apple-bloom, is lovely with the flickering shadow of the apple-leaf, mysterious with symbol of fruit and the apple-wood that holds life and death in one embrace. Many readers will at once recall that lovely old tale of Bailê the Sweet-spoken and Ailinn Honeymouth, whose love was so great that when in their beautiful youth they died and were buried, one in a grave to the north and one in a grave to the south, grave-wood grew into grave-wood, and green branches from the north and the south became one overhanging branch, under which the winds murmured of passion that winter-death could not kill nor the hot noons of summer lull into forgetfulness. There is an older and less-known _sgeul_ of how Ana, that most ancient goddess, the Mother, after she had fashioned all the gods, and had made man out of rock and sand and water and the breathing of her breath, made woman out of the body of a wave of the sea and out of foam of apple-blossom and out of the wandering wind. And there are many tales that, in this way or a like way, have in them the mysterious wind of the wild-apple, many poems on whose shadowy waters float the rose-flusht snow of the scattered blossoms of dreams and desires. Was not the apple-blossom first stained through the inappeasable longing of a poet-king, who, yet living, had reached Y Breasil? Ulad saw there a garth of white blossom, and of this he gathered, and warmed all night against his breast, and at dawn breathed into them. When the sunbreak slid a rising line along the dawn he saw that what had been white blooms, made warm by his breath and flusht by the beating of his heart, was a woman. And how at the end Fand became once more a drift of white blossom upon the deerskin. For, when the longing and the sorrow of all sorrows in the heart of Ulad wrapt his heart in flame, suddenly a wind-eddy scattered the blossoms upon the deerskin, so that they wavered hither and thither, but some were stained by the wandering fires of a rainbow that drifted out of the rose-red thickets of the dawn.

How far back do these apple-legends go? I know not. But when Aphrodite was born of the Idalian foam she held an apple in her hand, as Asia or Eve looked long upon the fruit of life and death in Eden. In Hades itself was it not the lure and the bitterness of Tantalus? All old poems and tales, as I have said, have it, whether as legend, or dream, or metaphor, or as a simile even, as in the seventh-century MS. of the _Caïn Adamnain_, where Adanman’s old mother cries _mo maccansa suut amail bis ubull fo’ tuind_ ... ‘my dear son yonder is like an apple on a wave’: [_i.e._] little is his hold on the earth. And those of us who have read, and remember, the _Prose Edda_, will recall how Iduna ‘keeps in a box, Apples, which the gods, when they feel old age approaching, have only to taste to become young again.’

Is that too a dream, or is there no Ragnarök for the gods to fear? This at least we know, that as the winter-tide, the death-tide, eternally recurs, so is the foam-white Dream continually rewoven, so everlastingly does Spring come again in the green garment that is the symbol of immortality and wearing the white coronals of blossom which stand for the soul’s inalienable hope, for the spirit’s incalculable joy. For Avalon is not a dream. It is with us still. It is here indeed, though set within no frontiers, and unlimned in any chart. And even the apples of Iduna grow within reach: the least of us may eat of the fruit ... till the coming of Ragnarök.

RUNNING WATERS

Is it because the wild-wood passion of Pan still lingers in our hearts, because still in our minds the voice of Syrinx floats in melancholy music, the music of regret and longing, that for most of us there is so potent a spell in running waters? We associate them with loneliness and beauty. Beauty and solitude ... these are still the shepherd-kings of the imagination, to compel our wandering memories, our thoughts, our dreams. There is a story of one snatched from the closing hand of death, who, when asked if he had been oppressed by dark confusion and terror, answered that he had known no terror and no confusion but only an all-embracing and intensifying silence, till at the last, deep within it as in a profound chasm, he had caught the low, continuous sound of running waters. That I can well believe. At the extremes of life thought naturally returns to the things that first communicated to the shaken mind of childhood the sense of mystery, the summons and the elation of that which reveals in beauty and utters the vibration of wonder. The first coming of snow, the noise of wind in trees, the gathering murmur of the tide heard in the night’s darkness and silence, music or songs borne across water, the first falling meteors with their terrifying suggestion that all these familiar stellar fires may likewise at any time be blown abroad by some obscure and awful wind, the furtive whisperings and inexplicable confused speech of running waters, of such are these primitive and unforgettable experiences.

The burn, the brook, the rivulet, what memories of them are possessed by those whose childhood has not been wholly spent in towns, or at those thronged seaside resorts where the bounteous green life of Nature is even more absent than in many cities, at least in those which have their wooded parks, in which there may be flowing or still waters, where the cushat may be heard among the cedars or beeches, and where, above the tall elms, the noisy coming and going of rooks seems to the exile the very voice of the country-side. The linn of brown foaming water, the amber surge of the hill-stream, the stealthy if swift rush of the brown flood beloved of the salmon, or the curve and sweep of the grass-green river flowing between meadows and under alders and past rocky fastnesses and linking green valleys as a winding snake barred with emerald, what memories these suggest to every lad or lass, to every man or woman who has ever thrown a cast or trailed a line, or, for that matter, who has lain on their leaning banks, book in hand, or lost in dreams, or wandered the dewy ways at dusk. Does not the very mention of torrent and cataract and waterfall evoke happy memories? One can hear the tumultuous surge between heather-held banks, and see the rock-rooted bracken shake with the ceaseless spray: can see the wild leap and foaming collapse, so habitual, so orderly in disorder, that the ring-ousel flies heedlessly from her fragile eggs which a handful of this whirling water would crush and sweep away: can recall, as in dreams the mind rebuilds the phantoms of natural imagery, the long, white, wavering smoke down the sheer slope of some mountain-bastion, or the filmy yet motionless veils of delicate gauze hung high on the breasts of silent and remote hills.

What differences there are in these running waters. We hear much of ‘blue’ rivers, of the silver flood of azure, and so forth. But few rivers or brooks or burns are blue. Their azure colour is a mirage wrought by distance and the angle of vision, affected by the play of wind, by the quality of light, by the blueness of the sky. Every German poet has sung of the blue Danube, the blue Rhine. These rivers have no quality of blueness, save by reflection from above, at a distance, and at a certain angle of vision. Waters flowing from the Lake of Geneva and from the Lake of Lucerne are blue even on grey days and if looked at on the shadow-side of a bridge. We have many grey-blue and blue-white and azure-shadowed running waters, but we have more that are grass-green and far more that are dappled hazel and nut-brown and golden-brown and amber-shot black-brown. It is not easy to say which of these running waters one loves best: nor need one, nor should one try. It would be like thinking of a garden-close filled with wallflower and mignonette, carnations and sweet-peas, dark violets and yellow pansies and blue love-in-a-mist, white tulips and lilies-of-the-valley and white roses, damask rose and the flusht morning-glory and the pink moss-rose and brier and eglantine, and saying which is best of these, which loveliest, which the most dear to the mind as well as to the eyes. But, still, we have doubtless each some happy choice, some hidden predilection. That will depend on memories and associations. I read somewhere recently that a certain traveller could not anywhere find, could nowhere recall, any stream or river for him so poetical, so lovely in quiet beauty as the Yorkshire Ouse. My knowledge of that river is restricted to a brief intimacy at and near York, and my recollection of it is of a broad turbid stream between muddy banks. But that does not interfere with the giving full credit to that traveller’s loyal affection. He would remember the Ouse among the sands of Egypt or by the yellow flow of the Hooghly or perhaps by the surge of some great river as the Mississippi, and it would flow through his mind in a serene pastoral beauty, bluer than any river that ever flowed in our grey North, and in a changeless light of May or June, with calling cuckoo and thridding swallow unmindful of seasons that come and go, and with green flag and tufted reed and trailing willow-branch as unfading as the memories to which they are for evermore wed. It would not be the Ouse that you or I look at from the muddy banks on a dull November day, or catch a glimpse of as the North Express whirls by. It would be the Ouse of boyhood and youth and the heart filled with a sweet trouble, perplext by a strange ache. It would be the Ouse at its loveliest, on a rare day, in an hour of the hours, flowing in midsummer-air fragrant with meadow-hay and wild-roses. It would be an Ouse more beautiful still: it would be subtly present in ‘the quiet waters’ of the Psalmist, wherever the painter limned that delicate unrest, wherever the poet sang of the Stream’s Secret. It would be, for him, the archetype of the flowing stream: _the_ river.

And so, each will have his preference, if it be only one of temperament rather than of sentiment. The deep, broad, swirling river has its incalculable fascination. Its mysterious volume, so great a flood from perhaps so insignificant a source, from mayhap some shallow pool among stagnant marsh-lands with nothing of stir or motion but the hovering dragon-fly, the wheeling and wailing lapwing, and the slow, voiceless passage of wayfaring cloud: its devious way, like an interminable procession or the continuous winding column of an army seen from a great height: its arrivals and departures at quiet towns and noisy and defiling cities: its destiny, its ultimate blending with the devouring tide and the overrunning wave ... all this has become the commonplace of the poet and the romancist. Thames filled with every craft possible to be seen betwixt the Nore and Oxford; the Forth, winding in still loops under the walls of Stirling and grey Cambuskenneth; the Clyde, running past the hills of Dumbarton and Argyll, already salt with the sea-flood pouring in by the ocean-gates of Arran and Ailsa; the deep flood of Tay or Shannon; these, and others, will always have a host to praise and magnify. But many of us will dream rather of chalk-streams in Devon, of the rippling amber-yellow flood of Derwent in the Peakland valleys, of Tweed and Teviot, of slow streams among woods and bright rivers going like cold flame through wide straths and lowlands: of small narrow waters whose very names are wedded to beauty and to ‘old, unhappy, far-off things,’ Otterbourne, the Water of Urr, the Water of Quair, Allan Water. Above all will some of us think of those peat-stained bracken-dyed burns, that leap and dance and sing down the steep ways of rock and heather in the Scotland of our love.

For my own part I find myself in so great agreement with a friend, who expresses better than I can do the love and haunting spell of the brown hill-water (which is neither a river nor exactly a stream nor yet a rivulet, but with something of each and more of what in the lowlands is a brook and in the highlands a burn, yet than the one is swifter and than the other is less debonair and impetuous) that I have been constrained to ask leave to let it appear here as a natural close of running waters at the end of this brief paper on a theme in whose very title lie old music and dream and subtly incalculable spell.

“THE HILL-WATER

“There is a little brook, I love it well: It hath so sweet a sound That even in dreams my ears could tell Its music anywhere. Often I wander there, And leave my book Unread upon the ground, Eager to quell In the hush’d air That dwells above its flowing forehead fair All that about my heart hath wound A trouble of care: Or, it may be, idly to spell Its runic music rare, And with its singing soul to share Its ancient lore profound: For sweet it is to be the echoing shell That lists and inly keeps that murmurous miracle.

“About it all day long In this June-tide There is a myriad song. From every side There comes a breath, a hum, a voice: The hill-wind fans it with a pleasant noise As of sweet rustling things That move on unseen wings, And from the pinewood near A floating whisper oftentimes I hear, As when, o’er pastoral meadows wide, Stealeth the drowsy music of a weir. The green reeds bend above it; The soft green grasses stoop and trail therein; The minnows dart and spin; The purple-gleaming swallows love it: And, hush, its innermost depths within, The vague prophetic murmur of the linn!

“But not in summertide alone I love to look Upon this rippling water in my glen: Most sweet, most dear my brook, And most my own, When the grey mists shroud every ben, And in its quiet place The stream doth bare her face And lets me pore deep down into her eyes, Her eyes of shadowy grey Wherein from day to day My soul is spellbound with a new surmise, Or doth some subtler meaning trace Reflected from unseen invisible skies.

“Dear mountain-solitary, dear lonely brook, Of hillside rains and dews the fragrant daughter, Sweet, sweet thy music when I bend above thee, When in thy fugitive face I look: Yet not the less I love thee, When, far away, and absent from thee long, I yearn, my dark hill-water, I yearn, I strain to hear thy song, Brown, wandering water, Dear, murmuring water!”

WILLIAM SHARP

THE SUMMER HERALDS

If the cuckoo, the swallow, and the nightjar be pre-eminently the birds of Summer (though, truly, the swift, the flycatcher, and the corncrake have as good a title) the rear-guard of Spring may be said to be the house-martin, the cushat, and the turtle. Even the delaying wheatear, or the still later butcher-bird may have come, and yet _Sweep-Sweep_ may not have been heard about the eaves of old houses or under and over the ruined clay of last year’s nests; the cushat’s voice may not have become habitual in the greening woods; and the tireless wings of the turtle may not have been seen clipping the invisible pathways between us and the horizons of the south. But, when these come, we know that Spring has traversed the whole country, and is now standing ankle-deep in thrift and moondaisies in the last rocky places fronting the north sea. No one doubts that summer is round the corner when the flycatcher hawks the happy hunting-grounds of the apple-blossom, when the swift wheels over the spire of the village church, and when the wild-dove is come again. The first call of the cuckoo unloosened the secret gates. We are across the frontier in that first gloaming when we hear

“The clamour musical of culver wings Beating the soft air of the dewy dusk.”

W. S.

To these familiar and loved harbingers from the south should be added yet another welcome friend who comes to us in the rear-guard of the Spring, though, rather, we should say he becomes visible now, for the Bat has never crossed the seas. The house-martin has not had time to forget the sands of Africa before her wing has dusked the white pansies on the sunside of old redbrick English manors: but the bat has only to stretch his far stronger yet incalculably less enduring pinions and then loop through the dusk from ivied cave or tree-hollow or the sombre silences of old barns, ruined towers, or ancient belfries sheltered from rain and wind.

The Awakening of the Bat ... yes, that too is a sign that Spring has gone by, singing on her northward way and weaving coronals of primrose and cowslip, or from her unfolded lap throwing clouds of blossom on this hawthorn or on this apple-orchard, or where the wind-a-quiver pear leans over the pasture from the garden-edge, or where in green hollows the wild-cherry holds the nest of a speckled thrush. She will be gone soon. Before the cuckoo’s sweet bells have jangled she will be treading the snows of yesteryear. But no, she never leaves the circling road, Persephone, Earth’s loveliest daughter. Onward forever she goes, young, immortal, singing the greening song of her ancient deathless magic far down below the horizons, beyond the lifting line of the ever upwelling world. And already Summer is awake. She hears the nightjar churring from the juniper to his mate on the hawthorn-bough, and in the dew among the green corn or from the seeding pastures the _crek-crāke! crek-crāke!_ of the ambiguous landrail. This morning, when she woke, the cushats were calling from the forest-avenues, the bumble-bee droned in the pale horns of the honeysuckle, and from a thicket newly covered with pink and white blossoms of the wild-rose a proud mavis saw her younglings at last take flight on confident wing.

A good symbol, that of the Awakening of the Bat. Darkness come out of the realm of sleep and dreams: the realm itself filled with the west wind and the dancing sunlight, sleep put away like a nomad’s winter-tent and dreams become realities. Often I have wondered how it is that so little is commonly known of the bat-lore of our own and other races. Doubtless there is some book which deals with this lore. There may be some familiar one for aught I know, but I have never met with or heard of it.

Recently I tried in vain to get some such book dealing with the folklore and mythology of the bat. And yet in the traditional lore of all countries there are many allusions to this ‘blind bird of the dusk.’ The Greeks, the Romans, the Celts of Europe, the westering Gaels, had many legends and superstitions connected with it. To-day the Finn, the Magyar, the Basque and the island Gael keep some of the folklore that has ebbed away from other nations, or become confused or remembered only by old folk in old out-of-the-way places. Somewhere I have notes of several bat-legends and fragments of bat-lore collected once for a friend, who after all went ‘to hunt the bat’ before he could use them. That was the phrase which started the quest. He had read it, or heard it I think, and wrote to me asking if I had ever heard the phrase ‘to hunt the bat’ as synonymous with death. I have heard it once or twice in the last few years, and once in a story where the teller, speaking of an outlaw who was a great deer-hunter in the wilds of Inverness, was found dead ‘with the fork of an ash-root through his breast, pinned like a red fox he was, and he by that time hunting the bat in the black silence.’ It would be inapposite, here, to linger on this theme, but I am tempted to record one or two of these bat-lore fragments which I recall: and perhaps, from the scarcity of such traditional flotsam and jetsam, some readers and bat-lovers may be interested.

The bat, commonly called in Gaelic _an ialtag_, or _dialtag_, though even in the one Shire of Argyll at least six other common names might as likely be heard, is occasionally poetically called the _Bàdharan-dhu_, the dark wandering one. I remember being told that the reason of the name was as follows. In the early days of the world the bat was blue as the kingfisher and with a breast white as that of the swallow, and its eyes were so large and luminous that because of this and its whirling flight its ancient name was a name signifying ‘flash-fire’--though now become, with the Gaelic poet who told me this, _dealan-dhu badhalaiche choille_, ‘the little black wandering flame of the woods.’ But on the day of the Crucifixion the bat mocked at the agony of the Saviour, and while the redbreast was trying to pull out a thorn, now from Christ’s hand, now from His foot, the bat whirled to and fro crying, ‘See how lovely I am! See how swift I am!’ Christ turned His eyes and looked at it, and the blue and the white went out of the bat like the ebbing wave out of a pool, and it became blind and black and whirled away till it met the rising of night and was drowned in that darkness for evermore. And that is why the bat is seen in the dusk and at night, and wheels to and fro in such aimless wandering flight, with his thin almost inaudible voice crying, ‘See how blind I am! See how ugly I am!’

From the same source I had _dealan-dhu bais_, the little black flame (or flash) of death, and a still stranger note to the effect that bats are the offspring of lightning and smitten trees: the connection being more obvious to Gaelic ears, because _dealan-bàs_ is one of the names of lightning.