Part 16

Her heart still murmured with sadness as she went down the path towards home, past Great-uncle Sufford and a strange man, both painting at their easels. Jo wanted to look at his picture, but she thought that he might think her rude. At first he frightened her when he jumped up and exclaimed, “Oh, let me sketch your head, little lady. Beautiful, glorious!” speaking rapidly to himself, “such an angle, and glorious uplift!” But his eyes looked kind, and already she liked him. And Great-uncle Sufford was laughing.

“Don’t be frightened,” he said, “but just let Mr. Norman sketch your forehead. My child, I have only just noticed it. You have the most perfect brows I have ever seen, blue-black like a swallow wing, and such an angle! Norman, you must make your picture worthy of Jo.”

So she stood before him, smiling and with shining eyes, and once more the spirit of the wild rose was in her cheeks. The strange painter-man liked her!

Now, behind the hedge Michael, her eldest brother, was crouching, having crept sinuous and Indian-like, down to the hedge to track the two artists. He watched with disgust what was happening, and determined to take it out of Mary later on. Michael was already disgusted because another stupid girl had arrived in the house a little while ago, and was staying a week.

“Now, I must thank you,” beamed the bearded stranger, “for your beauty has inspired me, you sweet fairy. Now we’ll all go home, and you must meet my little daughter Elsie.”

He picked her up and kissed her lightly and Jo kissed him back, although his face tickled, for he was kind and had said that she was a fairy.

WINTER’S EVE

(To T. H. H. T.)

“Woo--oo--oo--.”

Long drawn out as though the note is bubbling through water, it quavers from the dark wood yonder, seen in the dim light of the stars. From the other wood, across the grass land, a plain hoot floats back. Woo-loo, woo-loo! No sound of wings beating--the flight of the wood owl is silent, his broad wings, covered with the softest down, fan the air as he proceeds through the wood.

Woo--oo! Woo--oo! There is mystery in the cry. All other creatures are silent, except the field mice and voles running over the ground. They cannot be seen by the human eye, but I can hear their squeaks. Again the faraway answer haunts across the darkness over the grass. The leaves have fallen long ago, they lie black and rotting on the ground. Those that drifted down when summer died have already merged into the earth whence will come the bluebells in April. But a short time since they were scurrying over the grass and among the bramble bushes, all crisp and brown. The wind caught them up and whirled them in their thousands: then came the time of wintry rains and mists. Their brittleness went, they sank into the earth.

The owl is silent. He has fanned his way from branch to branch, peering to the ground. The slightest movement is watched by his large eyes. A little dark thing running quickly over the leaves, a silent glide to the ground, wings fanning the air, the clutch of a powerful foot, a faint shriek as talons sink into the warm body, and then to the trees again. The mouse is swallowed whole. The faintest of squeaks from behind, the owl’s head turns and he peers down on the ground. The eyes are fixed, but the head can be turned completely round. Those large ears, hidden by the tiny feathers--the ear-cavity being twice the size of an eye--take in every sound, even as the eyes can see in the dark night. The faint squeak came from a rat that runs swiftly on the trail of another. The next moment his body is seized in a grip of death--he, too, screams, and is borne upward, limp and dead, to be devoured at leisure. The owl’s beak opens to a wide gape, and a deep contralto hoot, bubbling and quavering, carries to his mate who hunts in the distant copse.

Heard thus in the loneliness of the winter night, there seems infinite sadness in the deep mellow cries of these night fliers. To hear an owl hooting repeatedly around the cottage at night is supposed, in the country, to portend death. It is easy to imagine how such a superstition arose. The species of owl that hoots, sounding like the call of a lost soul from the blur of the forest, remains concealed during the day, perched up against the bole of a fir tree, or in the cavity of a hollow oak or elm. At night they are seen occasionally and by chance, as their broad wings beat against the sky. Any such cries, lonesome and ghostly, coming in the dark, can mean but one thing to the countryman--death.

What fantasies are called up on a night like this, leaning up against the barred gate, alone! Away in front, the dark, level grass land--beyond, the forest. A sky bright with stars gleaming and winking, high up, unattainable. There is Sirius, the largest star, flaming with sudden molten crimson, then flashing a blue spearhead of light. Possibly there is a mist around that sun, so many millions of miles away, that breaks up the light as the prism of glass does the colours of the spectrum. Over the thick blackness in front a figure is moving-or am I imagining things? Just a faint feeling of fear, the nerves strung up, caused perhaps by slumbering instinct. Thousands of years ago a figure coming stealthily nearer in the darkness might mean an enemy. I glance over my shoulder; there is a feeling that some one might leap on to my back. But as he draws nearer I can hear his footfalls in the frosty grass and his laboured breath--it is one of the farm hands going home from the inn. He climbs over the gate, starts violently as he sees me standing here, and bids me good-night. I answer, adding that I have been listening to the owls. He politely tells me that there are a “good few on ’em about,” but to himself says that I am mazed. Then he passes on, his steps get fainter and fainter, and I am alone.

Yak wrik! Yak-yak-wrik! low over my head. A blood-curdling noise if ever there was one. The latter part of the screech, the wrik, is considerably higher in tone than the former part. The barn owl passed over the gate, just above my head and only when he startled me with his cry--not long and sobbing as the wood owl, but sharp and high-pitched--did I know that he had gone. A white mistiness in the night, wings beating slower than those of his hooting brother, and the white or barn owl had drifted over the grass, hunting the mice and field vole.

The barn owl is more common than the wood or brown owl. The former is snow white on its breast and under its wings. The wings themselves, and the back, made it one of our most beautiful birds. They are of an amber-yellow colour, shaded with ash gray, and streaked with small white and brown markings. The pinion feathers and the broad soft feathers of the tail are yellowy-white, barred with light brown. Most remarkable of all is the face, which is heart-shaped, surrounded by a line of gray and yellow featherlets standing out like a ruffle. The eyes are black, a contrast to the pure white of the down that surrounds them. In the summer evening he can be seen beating up the hedges, pouncing as he goes. When hungry, his capacity is enormous--nine or ten mice. He swallows the mice and small birds whole--the indigestible part being cast up later in the form of a grayish pellet. If a hollow tree, where these birds are likely to sleep during the day, be tapped fairly loudly, it will often drive its tenant into the light. Its exit will invariably be hailed by a chattering chorus of tomtits or finches, who will pursue it. In the bright sunlight the sight is dazzled, but in dull weather it would be able to see quite easily.

A wind-blown copse crowns a hill a mile away from the park, and one day in summer I found the skeleton of a barn owl flung among the thorns. Of the dark eyes--each a wonderful instrument--nothing was left, only a little dust collected in the empty orbits. Ants and flies had long completed their work. The white of the breast feathers was turned a dull gray by the rain’s bedragglement; the muscles of the shoulder had withered, though the sinews were dry and silky. The feet were clenched as though the bird had died in agony after the shot had rung out and it sunk to the ground. An owl rarely dies immediately it is shot; it lies back, if badly hit, resting lightly on its downy wings and stares with a mournful anguish, as though puzzled, and conscious that this is farewell to its mate. Owls pair for life, and, like most birds, their lives are ideal. It seemed to me, regarding the skeleton, a sadness that all that was left of a beautiful bird was a wasted bundle of bones and feathers, flung among the thorns.

Woo-loo-woo-loo-woo-o-oo! the brown owl calls in the night. And while I am here on earth, let me be in the fields where I can see the bright stars, and dream as my birds of mystery pass in silence and alone.

1914.

ERNIE

My Devon hermitage is only a sixteenth-century cottage rented at four pounds a year. There are two bedrooms, very small and lime-washed, and a living room with a stone floor and open hearth. A simple place, built of cob, and thatched, with a walled-in garden before it, and then the village street. The churchyard with its elm-rookery is on one side, a small brook below the wall. Even in the hot summer the water runs; I have made a pool of stones where the swallows and martins can go for the mud to build their homes. Beautiful it is to see, in the shadow of the trees, these birds alighting softly on a boulder, or by the pool’s edge, and shovelling the red mortar on their beaks. They are timid, restless things, rising into the air at the least noise. I have passed many hours in watching them, noting the number of times they came in a minute, and how they mix fragments of dried grass and straw with the mud before taking the material aloft. All the while the water murmured, and the birds answered with gentle song. They soon came to know me, and minded not my presence; and I kept away marauding village cats--lean animals with pointed ears and staring eyes; a race existing on rats.

Sometimes a little boy comes and stands by me, and watches them too. He is a funny little fellow, about two and a half years old, with yellow curls and solemn brown eyes. His name is Ernie, and his father is a labourer, a very kind man. He used to spend all his money in the inn, but suddenly took a wife, and drank no more. When Ernie is a naughty boy, he threatens to go “up to pub,” and Ernie wails immediately, and is good again.

“I got this one,” says Ernie, coming to the cottage door, and holding out in a filthy paw a piece of cake. “You ain’t got this one, ave ee?”

“Go away, Ernie, I’m writing.”

“You ain’t got this one,” he replies, munching the cake, “ave ee, Mis’r Wisson?”

I feel more comfortable in the company of children than with “grown-ups”; and to discourage his talk I put my tongue out, and make a hideous face.

“Ah’ll cut ees tongue off, ah wull,” he gravely warns, repeating what his mother has said to him when he has done it to her--a frequent happening, I fear; I taught him to do it.

“Good-bye,” I shout.