The Lone Swallows

Part 1

THE LONE SWALLOWS

NEW NOVELS

PENDER AMONG THE RESIDENTS FORREST REID

THE CROSS-CUT COURTNEY RYLEY COOPER

THE BEST GIFT OF ALL ROWAN GLEN

AS OTHERS SEE US MARMADUKE PICKTHALL

THE PIT-PROP SYNDICATE FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS

ROSEANNE E. MARIA ALBANESI

THE LONE SWALLOWS

HENRY WILLIAMSON

“The beautiful swallows, be tender to them, for they symbol all that is best in nature and all that is best in our hearts.”

Richard Jefferies.

LONDON: 48 PALL MALL W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD. GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND

Copyright, 1922

Manufactured in Great Britain

COMPILER’S NOTE

Most of the papers in this volume are published for the first time. A few have appeared in The Daily Express, The London Evening News, The Field, The Saturday Review, The Outlook, The English Review, and The Wide World Magazine. I am indebted to the Editors of these publications for permission to reprint them; and I am personally grateful to Sir Theodore Cook, of The Field, and to Mr. Austin Harrison of The English Review for their encouragement and kindness in criticising and printing my earliest essays.

“Winter’s Eve,” the first attempt to describe the common sights and sounds of the English countryside, I include for reasons of sentiment. Nature writing, I have been told by some authorities on art, is regarded as a trivial thing--“nature,” according to those people, is but a frail base for art-creation. Those authorities, I discovered, did not know the difference between a linnet and a celandine. And they did not want to be told. But I imagine that, as children, they would have been delighted to see a linnet’s woven nest, and to be told that the celandine is the first of the wild flowers to fashion after a dreary winter a gold cup in the February meadows and woods. My own belief is that association with birds and flowers in childhood--when the brain is plastic and the mind is eager--tends to widen human sympathy in an adult life. The hope of civilisation (since we cannot remake the world’s history) is in the fraternity of nations, or so it seems to myself, whose adolescence was spent at the war; the hope of amity and goodwill of the nation is in the individual--in the human heart, which yearns for the good and the beautiful; and the individual is a child first, eager to learn, but unwilling to be taught. Therefore it would appear that the hope of civilisation is really in the child. Sometimes heredity may be too great a handicap, but a sweet environment is a gradual solvent of inherited vice; at least it will prevent hardness, whence springs un-understanding, and hate. It was on a Sunday in May, 1920, in a tramcar at Catford, a south-eastern suburb of London, that the seed of this thought was sown by the sight of children returning to the slums after a day in the country. How eager they were: and how their parents were happy! Immediately afterwards, in a visionary fervour, or, may be because I was very young, I wrote “London Children and Wild Flowers,” which Austin Harrison published, with Walter de la Mare as god-parent.

H. W.

SKIRR COTTAGE, 11th November, 1921.

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE LONE SWALLOWS 1

LADY DAY IN DEVON 8

THE INCOMING OF SUMMER 14

HAUNT OF THE EVEJAR 30

A DESERTED QUARRY IN FEBRUARY 39

VIGNETTES OF NATURE (i) 41

Part 2

VIGNETTES OF NATURE (ii) 43

HAWK NOTES 46

PROPHET BIRDS 50

A BIRD MYSTIC 53

SAMARITANS 57

SPORTSMEN OF THE RUBBISH-HEAPS 60

RUNAWAYS 65

LONDON CHILDREN AND WILD FLOWERS 68

MEADOW GRASSES 82

TIGER’S TEETH 96

THE OUTLAW 116

PEREGRINES IN LOVE 130

MIDSUMMER NIGHT 136

A FEATHERED WASTER 145

INVOCATION 150

COCKNEY BIRD TRIPPERS 154

“FULLNESS AFTER DEARTH” 157

CUCKOO NOTES 160

DAYS OF AUTUMN 166

SWALLOW BROW: A FANTASY 182

WINTER’S EVE 196

ERNIE 204

A SEED IN WASTE PLACES 212

THE CHANGE: A FANTASY 217

PROSERPINE’S MESSAGE 236

STRIX FLAMMEA 243

THE LONE SWALLOWS

Along the trackless and uncharted airlines from the southern sun they came, a lone pair of swallows, arriving with weakly and uncertain flight from over the wastes of the sea. They rested on a gorse bush, their blue backs beautiful against the store of golden blossom guarded by the jade spikes. The last day of March had just blown with the wind into eternity. Symbols of summer and of loveliness, they came with young April, while yet the celandines were unbleached, while the wild white strawberry and ragged-robin were opening with the dog violet. On the headland the flowers struggle for both life and livelihood, the sward is cropped close by generations of sheep, and the sea-wind is damp and cold. Perhaps the swallows hoped to nest, as their ancestors had done centuries since, in the cave under the precipice at the headland’s snout, or that love for its protection after the wearying journey was new-born in their hearts. One cannot say; but the pair remained there.

Part 3

Days of yellow sunshine and skies blue as their wings greeted them. Over the wave crests and the foamed troughs they sped, singing and twittering as they flew. Kestrel hawks with earth-red pinions hung over the slopes of the cliffs, searching with keen eyes for mouse or finch, but the swallows heeded not. Wheatears passed all day among the rabbit burrows and the curled cast feathers of the gulls, chiffchaffs iterated their little joy in singsong melody, shags squatted on the rocks below, preening metal-green plumage and ejecting plentiful fish-bones. The wanderer on the sheep-track, passing every day, joyed in the effortless thrust of those dark wings, the chestnut stain on the throat, the delicate fork of the tail. Winter was ended, and the blackthorn blossoming--there would be no more snow or ice after the white flowers, fragile as vapour thralled by frost, had come upon their ebon wilderness of spines. The heart could now look forward, not backwards to other fled springtimes. The first swallows had come from distant lands, and three weeks before the winged hosts were due! One of the greatest of nature-writers wrote, “The beautiful swallows, be tender to them.” In fancy Richard Jefferies, too, was wandering on the headland, and watching the early vagrants, breathing the fragrance of the wild thyme that came like an old memory with the wind. Always dearly loved are the singing birds of passage, returning with such feeble wings to the land that means love and life to them, and love and life and beauty to us. Each one is dear; all the swallows returned are a sign and a token of loveliness being made manifest before our eyes.

The early April days passed, like the clouds in the sky, softly and in sunlight, merging into the nights when Venus lighted the western seas, and belted Orion plunged into the ocean. In the sheltered places the arums grew, some with hastate leaves purple-spotted, and showing the crimson spadix like the tip of a club. Brighter grew the gorselands, till from the far sands they looked like swarming bees gold-dusty from the pollen of the sun. The stonechat with white-ringed neck and dark cap fluttered into the azure, jerked his song in mid-air, then dived in rapture to his mate perched upon a withered bramble. In a tuft the titlark was building her nest, while the yellowhammer trilled upon a rusted plough-share in the oatfield.

Sometimes the swallows flew to a village a mile inland, and twittered about an ancient barn with grass-grown thatch, haunted by white owls, and hiding in dimness a cider press that had not creaked in turning for half a century. Once they were seen wheeling above the mill pond, and by the mossy waterwheel, hovering along its cool gushings and arch of sun-stealing drops thrown fanwise from the mouldered rim. Everywhere the villagers hailed them with delight, and spoke in the inn at nights of their early adventuring. Such a thing had been unknown for many years; the oldest granfer had heard tell of it, but had never actually seen it before. The old man took a poet’s delight in the news, and peered with rheumy and faded blue eyes, hoping to see them when tapping along the lane to his “tater-patch.” It became a regular thing for the wanderer upon the headland to report their presence when he returned from the high solitude and the drone of the tide, and the yelping cries of gulls floating white in the sunshine above a sea of woad-blue.

Gulls selected nesting sites, and the sea-thrift raised pink buddings from its matted clumps. The ravens rolled in the wind uprushing from the rocks, and took sticks in black beaks to the ledge where they had nested throughout the years. The male bird watched upon a spar while his mate with throaty chucklings built anew the old mass of rubbish where her eggs would be laid. Sometimes he fed her with carrion filched from a pearly gull by the flashing and sunpointed foam, and she gabbled with pleasure. Ever and anon the fleeing specks of the swallows passed near, winding in and out, floating and diving, “garrulous as in Cæsar’s time.” Like kittens in distress the buzzards wailed, spreading vast brown canvas that enabled them to sail high among those silver and phantom galleons, the clouds. Steamers passing to the Severn basin left smoke trails on the horizon; the life of the sea and land, wild and civilised, went on; but no other swallows arrived. Light of heart the wanderer watched, and waited. Any day, new-born and blessed by Aurora, would see the arrival, any day now--two dark arrowheads fell with mighty swoop from heaven, arrowheads that did not miss their mark. There was a frail flutter of feathers in the sunshine, a red drop on the ancient sward, a scuttle of terrified rabbits, a faint scream trembling and dying in the blue. Then only the murmur of the sea far below and the humming of the single telegraph wire near the pathway. The peregrine falcons had taken the lone and beloved swallows.

Continue reading The Lone Swallows free in the Wunder reader →