Part 19

“Bates,” he said at last, “stop that. You’ve taken one nest already, and if you or your grandson take another here, I’ll send you straight about your business. Do you think I took this garden to rob my blackbirds of their nests?”

“Lord save us,” cried Joseph, suddenly bewildered by this vehemence, “do I rightly understand you, Sir?”

“You needn’t understand me, if you can’t do so,” said the Poet, feeling a great dislike and dread for this terrible old man and his barbarian grandson; “but I mean to keep my blackbirds, so if you take another nest I’ll find another man.”

Joseph admitted to his wife afterwards that he was “clean took aback by this queer gentleman from London;” but, recovering himself quickly, he stuck his spade into the ground to lean upon, and began a further discourse.

“Begging your pardon, Sir, if I’ve in any ways offended you; but may be you ben’t quite accustomed to our country ways. You see, Sir, a garden’s a garden down our way: we grows fruit and vegetables in it for to eat. If the birds was to be master here, ’twouldn’t be no mortal manner of use our growing of ’em. Now I’ve heard tell as there’s gardens in London with nothing but wild animals in ’em, and maybe folks there understands the thing different to what we does.”

The Poet was inclined to think he was being made a fool of: this mild and worthy old man was quite too much for him. But he swallowed his temper and made an appeal to Joseph’s better feelings.

“Bates,” he said, in that gentle pathetic tone that his friends knew so well, “if you had lived in London for thirty years you would love to have the birds about you. Don’t people down here like to hear them sing? Don’t you feel a better man when you listen to a blackbird at dawn, as I did this morning?”

“Bless your heart, Sir,” answered Joseph, beginning to understand the situation, “I loves to hear ’em whistling, in their proper place! There’s a place for everything, as the Scripture says, and the garden’s no place for thieves; so we thinks down here, Sir, and if ’tis different where you come from, there’s no call for me to be argufying about it. We’ll let ’em be, Sir, we’ll let ’em be. I hope I knows my place.”

“Better than the birds, eh, Joseph,” said the mollified Poet. Joseph resumed his digging, and, as the newspapers say, the incident was closed.

Later in the morning the Parson dropped in to see his new parishioner, and was told of Mr. Bates’s loquacity.

“Well, well,” he said, “old Joseph is an oddity, and you must take him as you find him. But he’s quite right about the birds. They simply swarm here: the rooks and sparrows take your young peas, the bullfinches nip off your tender buds, and the blackbirds and thrushes won’t leave you a currant or a gooseberry to make your jam of.” Bessie looked up from her work with a face of alarm.

“You ask my wife,” continued the Parson. “One year when we were abroad in June, and there was no one to keep watch, she hadn’t a chance with anything except the plums. Next spring we took all the nests we could find, and even then we came off second-best. Of course we like to hear them singing, as you do, but when it comes to June, you know, you can thin them off with a gun, and that frightens the rest. I always shoot a few, and stick them up on the gooseberry bushes as scarecrows. I suppose you’re not much of a hand at a gun? I or my boys will do it for you with pleasure.”

“Oh, thank you,” cried Bessie, “I should be so sorry to have them killed, but we must have our jam now we’ve come to live in the country. When the time comes, I’m sure Gilbert will be most grateful to you.”

“No he won’t,” said the Poet:

“Though all the neighbours shoot thee round, I keep smooth plats of garden ground Where thou may’st warble, eat, and dwell.”

“Well, well,” said the Parson, rather puzzled, “there’s time enough, there’s time enough. Tackle your weeds first, and plant your borders, and if you want the policeman in June, here he is.” And the hearty Parson took his leave, the Poet escorting him down the garden, where a blackbird was still singing. They stopped and listened.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said the Parson. “It’s a pity they’re such rascals. I’m an enthusiastic gardener, and I have to choose between my garden and the birds, and I think you’ll have to choose too.”

“Is there no compromise?” asked the Poet mildly.

“Not for an enthusiast,” said the Parson, decidedly.

“Then my choice is made already,” said the Poet. And so they parted.

So the birds built where and when they pleased, and brought up crowds of hungry young ones; the old gardener kept his word and his place. They throve upon a juicy diet of grubs and caterpillars, and the garden throve in getting rid of these; so that by May it was such an Eden as even the Poet’s fancy had never dreamed of. His ear was daily soothed with a chorus of mellow song: he began to make a list of all the birds that visited his garden, to take notes of the food they seemed to love, and to record the dates of their nest-building, egg-laying, and hatching. His eyes were daily feasting on the apple-blossoms and lilacs, and there was promise of a full harvest of fruit on espaliers, standards, and garden-walls. The rowans were gay with heavy bunches of white flowers, which promised a glorious show of orange-red berries for August.

Joseph Bates had long ago given up engaging his master in conversation, and maintained in the garden an air of silent wisdom which quite baffled the Poet’s advances; but in the village, when asked by his friends about his employer, he would touch his forehead significantly, as implying that the good man was “weak in the upper storey.”

Bessie’s careful mind was already providing for the fruit-harvest; a huge cooking-vessel was procured, and scores of clean white jam-pots graced the larder shelves. The Poet wrote to a congenial friend, an ardent member of the Society for the Prevention of the Extinction of Birds, who, living in a London suburb, had come to believe that in the course of a few years the whole race of birds would be exterminated in this country through the greed and cruelty of that inferior animal Man. This enthusiast was now bidden to come in a month’s time, eat his fill of fruit, and bask in one garden where birds still built and sang and fed in unmolested freedom. Nor did the blackbirds watch the ripening treasure unmindful of the future; they, and the thrushes, and the starlings, while they did their duty towards the grubs and caterpillars, looked forward to a plentiful reward, and told their young of new treats and wonders that were yet in store for them.

And now a spell of fine sunny weather began to bring out a blush on the cherries and gooseberries and red currants; the roses burst into bloom; and the Poet and his wife were busy tending and weeding the garden they had learnt to love so well. In the warm afternoons he sat out reading, or walked up and down the path through the allotments listening to the birds and nursing his thoughts; and the villagers were quite content to see him doing this, for, as one of them expressed it to Joseph Bates, “he do make a better scarecrow than all the old hats and bonnets in the place.” So the Poet, with his white terrier at his heels (he kept no cat, I need hardly say), was all unknown to himself doing a work of grace for his neighbours.

He noticed, in these perambulations, that the birds now sang less frequently and heartily; but then there were more of them than ever, for the young ones were now all about the garden, and had grown so bold and tame that they would hardly get out of the Poet’s way as he moved gently along his paths. He loved them all, and thought of them almost as his own children; and no shadow of a foreboding crossed his mind that they, born in his garden, reared under his protection, could ever vex the even flow of his happiness.

One fine evening, just as the strawberries were ripening, the Member of the S.P.E.B. arrived on his visit. It was agreed that they should open the strawberry season next morning after breakfast; for that, as the Poet observed, is the real time to eat strawberries, “and the flavour is twice as good if you pick them yourself in the beds.” So in the fresh of the morning they all three went into the garden, and the Poet pointed out with pride the various places where the birds had built.

“We’ve had half a dozen blackbirds’ nests that we know of,” he said, “and probably there are others that we never found. See there—there’s a nice crop of blackbirds for a single season!”

Out of the strawberry beds, hustling and chuckling, there arose a whole school of youthful blackbirds, who had been having their first lessons in the art of sucking ripe fruit. The elders set off first, and the young ones followed unwillingly, one or two bolder spirits even yet dallying in the further corner of the bed.