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.

LADY DAY IN DEVON

The rooks are now busy in the elms of the churchyard, and drifting thwartwise the wind with sticks for their nests. Sometimes a young male bird comes with food for his mate as she pleaches the twigs with claw and beak; she flutters her wings like a fledgeling, gapes widely, and squawks with satisfaction. Daws come to the trees, perching head to the south-west breeze, ejaculating sharply. Periodical visitants are the starlings, their songs of mimicry swelling with sudden rush and wheezing. One bird has learnt the chattering cry of a kestrel, the mating call, and deceives the rooks into thinking that one of the brown mouse-hawks is near. That rooks are thieves among themselves is well known, stealing sticks from their neighbours. To-day I watched one taking material that a young and enthusiastic sister brought with difficulty every five minutes or so from the distant beech clump. The thief was an artist, she was subtle, and cunning. A quick hop took her to the young bird’s pile, she seized a stick, and drifted upwards into the wind, swung round in a half circle and brought it to her own nest in the same tree with a soft caa-caa, as though implying relief at reaching home again. Her mate, judging by his white face, is an ancient bird; he is wise; he does no work; he fetches no food for his toiling wife; but perches near the nest, approving her method of labour, and guarding its results. He is the nearest approach to a bird “fence” that it would be possible to find.

A lane of red mud leads through the beech-clump. Life here is hard, but the celandines show their spoke-rays to the sun and wind-washed heaven, braving the half-gales that come across the Atlantic and twirl the fallen numbers of autumn’s leaves among their yellow flowers. A tawny owl lives in a pollard hornbeam in this clump; he comes regularly at dusk to my cottage and hoots with mournful insistence to the barn owls that roost under the thatch. Rabbits’ bones and fur, finches’ feathers, and the fragile skulls of mice hang in the crevices of the tree, hundreds of them, some fresh and white, others hidden under the brown dust of decay that trickles from the old tree’s dead heart. Tap his home, and he flaps out, pursued by any small birds searching for spiders or grubs in the spinney. The trees are dwarfed, bent by the salt winds; a few larches grew here, but never more the sap will rise and burst in emerald foam on their wispy branches. Constant buffeting with the winds of the ocean has killed them. A magpie is prospecting the mazed brittleness of one of them for a nesting site; she appears nearly every morning.

Beyond the clump is a combe, or valley, where every year a pair of carrion crows nest. They fly away as soon as they see me, four hundred yards below--they are crafty, and leave nothing to chance. In the stone hedges the celandines, flowers much bigger than those around London, shine like spilled meteor fragments against their leaves. Primroses grow with them, and the white blossom of the wild strawberry, and in places the stitchwort is in bloom. A flock of linnets sings in a hawthorn, a silver twittering of song coming as the wind rests; with a rustling of wings the flock leaves for the bloom of the gorse which everywhere is scenting the air. The apple trees in the orchard close below are beginning to bud, already goldfinches haunt their lichened branches, now fighting with gold-barred wings aflutter, now pausing to pipe sweet whispers of coming vernal glory, when the blossoms shall spill in showers of loveliness. Afar are the Burrows, and over their sogged wastes the green plovers wheel and fall, uttering wild calls to the wind, while their mates stand below, diving with broad pinions to earth as though they would die for love. High above a buzzard is sailing. To the right a great horse draws a plough against the skyline, and a dozen gulls follow in its wake; behind them trip and whistle four dishwashers, or wagtails. They say in the village that three pairs of ravens are nesting on the headland this year; I have seen but one. In this district a raven has only once been known to kill or “eye-pick” lambs, but that was many years ago, and then their breeding ledge was robbed in revenge. The raven has come near to extermination, like the peregrine falcon; but here both of these mighty fliers rarely molest the belongings of man; the one feeds on offal and dead rabbits that the stoats have left, and the other takes stock-doves, oystercatchers, wild duck, snipe, and ring-plover. In the early spring they stoop at gulls and diving birds just for exuberance of spirit. Certainly every tide leaves its dead among the seaweed and the beach-wrack: gulls and auks with their backs torn and ripped by the swift blue-hawks.

THE INCOMING OF SUMMER

Where by the stream the towers of the wild hyacinth bore their clustered bells, sought by that gold-vestured hunchback the wild bee, the willow wren sang his little melody, pausing awhile to watch the running water. The early purple orchids grew with the bluebells, their spurs upraised, their green leaves mottled with purple. Already the blackthorn had put forth its blossoms, a sign of frostless nights and warm days; already the blackbird had planted its nest in the alder bush. Now the year would advance till the grain was bronzed and the red arms of the reaper-and-binder whirled among its baked stems. Following the green and silver windings of the water the blue swallows hovered and fell, but the cuckoo’s voice had not yet called from the pheasant coverts. Any dawn would be welcomed by his mellow note, for over the sea and the land the winged hosts were passing, urged by the love they bore the thicket or the hedgerow that had weaned them, and for which in parched lands they had pined. From the time of the early sweet violet the migrants had been returning, and their journeyings would continue till the time of the first poppy.

The willow birds perched on the wands of the sallows, and the swallows twittered as they glided. Two singing notes, oft repeated, came from an ash tree where an olivine chiffchaff was piping his simple music. Throughout the gusty winds of March dust-laden and with only the celandines to tell of hope, he had been piping by the brook, a wanderer whose notes would be heard till the blackberries of October. The allotted span of the celandines was over, their rayed spokes of yellow were bleached--the wheatears were flitting upon the swarded downlands. The flowers had gathered to themselves all the light that the sun of early spring had flung between swift clouds, the seeds were formed, their hopes fulfilled. In their place came wild strawberries and herb robert, the dog-violet and the speedwell.

The meadow grasses were not yet tall enough to sigh at the wind’s soft passing, but a red admiral had been joying in the sunlight for many days. Down by the streamlet the moor-hen had woven her rushy nest, bending an arch of withered sedges over her labour to hide the speckled eggs. In the mud of the pebbled shallows her webbed feet left a track as she sought for beetles. Small spoors, the imprint of little claws, showed where a vole had made quick passage across a mud-bank. In the turfy bank its retreats were tunnelled, leading to a domed hollow lined with grasses--here her young would shortly nestle. From the stream and the shallow the rushes were rising, green spearpoints scarce sturdy enough to conceal the nest of the wild duck. Now they were thin and over-sharpened, as though exhausted by the effort of straining upwards to the light to which the sacrificial flowers would be offered in June; then they would be “thick and sappy,” annealed; in winter the cattle would tread their dried stems upon the beaten floors of the shippen.

Over pebbles, wine-stained, gray, rusted and brown, the stream tumbled, around mossy boulders and under branches, swaying dreamily the drowned poa grasses. Brook-trout lurked for the gnats that sometimes brushed the surface with trailing legs. Where the wind was stayed by arch of hazel and willow the midges danced their nuptials, in ghostèd assembly rising and falling. The time of the mayflies was not yet, their brief pageant would be heralded by the myriad trumpets of summer’s insects; summer was still shyly virginal. No sunbeam had yet touched the buttercup, unblazoned was the shield of the meadow by gules of poppy, azure of cornflower, or argent of feverfew. Fragile were the greeneries of the hedge above the brooklet, sweet the primroses under the stubbed roots of the ash trees. Loveliest is the year when “sumer is icumen in,” when the willow wren, slim as he perches on an amber wand, sings all the love in his heart.

Something is moving in the nettles which the bullocks have not trampled. Their hooves have impressed cloven hollows at the marge, but the nettles are unspoiled. A tangled song comes from the middle of the patch, incoherent and unceasing. The pointed leaves quiver as the motion continues. Presently a little bird with a fawn breast jerks into the air, flutters a moment, and then disappears. It is a whitethroat, and till now his presence in the countryside was unknown. Ecstasy, uncontrolled and rising from his heart like the spring in the hillside, has all his being enthralled. The trembling of the nettles and the husky voice continue, and a brown bird passes over the nettled sanctuary. It is a wren carrying a leaf to the house that after two days’ labour is nearly built. Swiftly he pushes the oak leaf into place, then mounts a dry bramble jutting above the pleached ash and hazel branches, and from his pine-spindle of a beak pours a ringing melody. The fervour of the crackey’s song is so intense that in comparison with his size and minute cocked tail it appears an impossibility--he is a Swinburnian singer. His vernal feelings are so strong that in the interval of vocal exclamation he fashions many spare nests, most of them loosely and carelessly made. The shanty in the dead ivy around the oak is constructed of withered leaves that harmonise with its surroundings; he has another in a hayrick near, formed of dried grasses; a third in a green bush composed wholly of moss fetched from a bank in the sunken lane.

The whitethroat and his mate have jerked away, the willow bird slipped upstream, the cock-wren with cocked tail is stuttering an alarm. Down by the water’s edge a reddish animal nibbles a shoot held in its paws. Perceiving that it has no hostile bearing, the wren is silent. At the slightest movement the vole will dive with a musical and hollow plop into the water and swim to concealment. Quietly it finishes the sappy stalk, then creeps under a thick stem of cow-parsley, the florets of which are budding. Finches pass over, calling to each other, and a silver chirruping announces a wagtail. He alights on a smooth gray boulder, slender in outline and poised on fragile legs, flaunting a breast of daffodil. The hen-bird follows, and they perch together. Their long tails move as though to maintain an earthly balance, so faery-frail are they. She leaves him, flitting in wavy flight to another boulder. He follows, but she is restless. Downstream they pass, stopping for a moment on a jutting fragment of rock in the stone hedge, peering into a cavity. Throughout the summer the gray wagtails will haunt the brook, for within the cave foundations of their nest are already laid, fibres sought inside the pollard willows.

Those galleons the clouds have sailed into the north-eastern main, and no canvas or furled rigging are visible. For weeks no treasure of rain has been brought for the earth to spend with lavish abandon on verdant raiment, no largesse of shower has been thrown to the humble chickweed or vagrant sorrel. But on the surface of the land green things are stained with sap and charged with alchemising sunbeams. The secret of the philosopher’s stone, anciently sought to change baser metals to gold, has remained undiscovered through the ages, nor has the countryman ever found the crock of spade guineas at the rainbow’s end. These would bring luck; even now we strive to find their counterpart. In the cities, perhaps: youth storing the gold that one day will mean happiness: towards the evening of life, maybe, with sight dulled to a flower and the song of the swallow never heard. Sunlight is all to the flowers. It distils for them their scents and sweet nectars, it fashions their petals and ambrosial pollen. The sun loads the galleons of the airy fullness with the rain drawn from the ocean, unlading its cargoes upon the million wharves of the earth.

Peeping from ivy-bowered seclusion for sight of flashing hawk, a robin slips like a copper oak leaf from its nest. Inside the lined cup of bent and horsehair five naked fledgelings lie sleeping. By the pale cuckoo flowers the mother searches, capturing with swift movements insects that toil among the rootlets. She returns with a beakful, but her children will not rouse from slumber. A chirping comes from the hedge above, where a drab hedge-sparrow has her brood. She inspects with grave demeanour their orange gapes and divides the food among them. They gulp, then plead vainly with hoarse squeaks for more. Over the hedge she drops, joining the host of wrens, whitethroats, blackbirds, thrushes, and red mice, all looking for food.

The rising club of the wild arum is purple within its sheath; soon the “lords-and-ladies” will attract the children to their “river.” The stream is singing a mazed melody of soft sounds; by listening intently each can be distinguished. Different notes arise from the shattering of a crystal bubble upon the stones, the hollow dripple of a pebble rolled over the shallows, the foamy swirling past willow trunks moss-covered, the splashing into dwarfed trout-pools. Where a sunbeam loads the ripples a gold network drifts over the sand, holding a twig in its eddy; or the wind stirs the leaves, and a million sunpoints are thrown upwards like a silvery flight of starlings. From the mud precious doubloons have been raised by the root-divers of the kingcups, and are cast thickly by the bank.

Behind the hedge the gorse grows, stretching up the hill in spiky profusion of rusted jade and orange. Under the roots a colony of rabbits has been founded, and the does are scratching fur from hind legs to line the dug-outs where their little ones will be yeaned. A long-tailed titmouse spies a furry fragment, seizes it, and carries it to her nest in a distant bramble. With faint rustling of wings a linnet alights upon a bush, and sings to the mate who is weaving her cradle. Among the apple blossoms below, soft cadences are borne in the sunshine--the goldfinches cannot cease the telling of their happiness. A greenfinch answers with wistful, long-drawn note, and a corn bunting repeats his song again and again. Primroses, daisies, and the scentless violet grow on the turf under the spinney, where the larches have concealed their brittleness with emerald buds. A high twitter comes from one, and almost immediately a bird smaller than a wren flits moth-like to the ground. Its crest is a pencil-mark of fire. At the extreme end of a branch a ball of moss and lichen moulded with spider webs and caterpillar cocoons is suspended. Here the Golden-crowned Knight and his lady love will flitter throughout the days of summer, leading their children from the swinging castle as the voice of the cuckoo falters in June. Flocks of these birds roamed the pine forest during leafless days, when their shrill needle-lances of sound scarce pierced the wind’s moaning. Now in coppices and spinneys they seek the unchivalrous spider and the insects that crawl upon the sprays. Here under the trees is shade and solitude. I will stay and dream. But I want more beauty, and am restless; to me floats the voice of the stream for ever calling; I must return to the sunlit waters and the bended sedges.

All the loveliness of fled summers returns to the mind. The spread disk of the dandelion, so richly hued, is more beautiful now, bearing in its colour so many hopes of the past. A common flower, a despised weed, yet a symbol of that pulsing golden happiness that is the heritage unclaimed of so many. The bees and the birds need no philosopher’s stone, they have something better in the sweet air, they live every moment happily. In careless childhood the dandelions were beheaded with a stick; they are now a token of joy, these common weeds, taking shallow root wherever the wind flings their seeds. Summer to me would be incomplete without the dandelions. For what they symbol, would that there were more in the drifted dust of the cities. The music of the brook has risen from a murmur to a dull thunder, and a humming sounds under the maples. The miller has lifted the weedy hatch, and the ponderous stone wheels are crushing the grain. In the pond the tench lie unseen, but the light flames upon the scarlet fins of the roach as they pass. Silently the flume slides forward, then gushes into the troughs of the great elm waterwheel. Jets of water spurt from its old mossy planking, and a rain of drops is flung from the trundling rim. Inside the miller feeds the hoppers, and upon a beam perch two swallows, unheedful of the shake and the thunder. A dust floats in the millhouse, hazing the glass windows and giving to the cobwebs a snowy purity--embroidering the robes of the corn-spirit. For centuries the wheat has been ground between the fixed bed-stone and the runner, for centuries the stream has worked for mankind, its splashing imprisoning the light of the southern sun falling athwart the wheel. I thought of the men that in the past had laboured for the wheat, of the times the millpeck had grooved the stones, and the millstaff proven their setting. The millwheel is very old and will soon turn no more, but still the human sorrow and the hunger goes on.

Across the way stand dark yew trees beneath whose stillness the grave-stones, patched with gray and orange lichens, throw their shadows upon the grass. The suns of summer have bleached them, autumnal rains washed them, wintry frosts worked graven patterns upon the ancient letterings. The stream flowed then as now, many times had the swallows returned to their mortared houses under the rafters and up the broad chimneys--think of all the beauty repeated. Centuries of apple blossom, scented beanfields and floating thistledown; all the happiness of harvest garnered; all the hunger and the misery of man, ever striving with his neighbour. Can you not see what the dandelion tells? The swallows on the beam know no passage of time--they look forward to no happiness--they have no illusions--all is for them now. The calendar is not for them. Joyous they are, and wild; their hopes are not for to-morrow--the to-morrow of the mounded earth--but for to-day.

Summer comes in with their return, though the calendar shall deny. Summer: the very name brings to the heart a feeling of joy. There is so much for all, so much beauty of thought stored in the raggedest dandelion. Sunshine, the swallow, and the celandine: to know these in childhood is to take to the heart the glory of summer for ever.

HAUNT OF THE EVEJAR

When the first white flake falls from the hawthorn the immigrant birds of passage all have come to the countryside. Almost the last to arrive this year on the south-western coast of England were the mysterious nightjars, birds ever surrounded by romance on account of their weird song and phantom habits; and for me, after the experience I had in the late spring, birds of wonder and having a special claim to my affections.

It was night, and on the broad smooth sands, whence the tide had ebbed, shone a curved moon. As I passed by the ocean’s edge its outline shook in the sandy pools, blackened and tarnished by seaweed and still foam-bubbles. No clouds drifted in heaven, there was no wind, the stars were pale in the luminous sky. Somewhere in front of me a curlew, disturbed at his nocturnal feeding, whistled plaintively. A mile away lay Baggy like a badger asleep.

High above this promontory is an established air-line, or hereditary route for immigrant birds. Along this track travel the chiffchaffs and wheatears in March, the martins, warblers, and all the singing hosts in April. Sometimes the night wind bears a million feeble cries as the tired travellers pass over. It is a place of enthralling wonder in the youth of the year--and of sadness when autumnal days bring a weary return.

The night was quiet, the wavelets broke on the sand, a great sigh filled the air. From a sighing it swelled to a rushing of wind, it grew in volume like a drift of leaves in wintry blasts. Then soft thuds overbore the strange noise. I stood still. From afar and near came little croakings, as though of exhaustion and pain. Dark bunches lay on the sands. I picked one up; it was warm and feathery, its wings fluttered feebly. The nightjars, called of olden time goatsuckers, on account of a wide gape and owl-like eyes, had returned to the land for their yearly nuptials.

There were hundreds of them on the shore. All were too weak to move. I was filled with a great tenderness for them; they showed no fear; I liked to think they knew I would not harm them. The night went on; an owl bayed on the gorse slopes behind. Soon they left, with flapping flight, sometimes hopping. Towards dawn the valley and the hills were filled with their notes rising and falling like the whirring of a spinning wheel, the love song of the evejar.