Part 9

“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.

The other name I heard as a child, and it long puzzled me. Beuban-an-Athar-Uaibhreach: literally, the malformed one of the Haughty Father. Now why should the bat be called beuban, a thing spoiled, wilfully malformed? ‘An t’ Athair Uaibhreach’ (of which an athar is the genitive) is one of the evasive names used by the Gael for Satan ... for that proud and glorious angel, the Father of Evil, who fell from his high estate through inconquerable pride. Why, then, was the bat the malformed creature of Satan? It was years afterwards before I had the story told me, for my old nurse (from whom I heard the phrase) did not think the tale fitting for a child’s ears. When Judas hanged himself on a tree, so the tale ran, and his soul went out lamenting on the wind, the Haughty Father flung that wretched spirit contemptuously back into the world. But first he twisted it and altered it four hundred and forty-four times, till it was neither human nor bird nor beast, but was likest a foul rat with leathern wings. ‘Stay there till the last day,’ he said, ‘in blindness and darkness, and be accursed for ever’ ... and that is why the bat (the triollachan dhorchadas, ‘the little waverer of the dark,’ or triollachan fheasgair, or little waverer of the dusk, as a more merciful legend has it) flies as he does, maimed, blind, accursed and feared, and shrieking in his phantom voice Gu la’ bais! Gu la’ bais! (‘till the day of death’ ... i.e., the Last Day).

In some parts of Argyll the bat is said to live for three generations of an eagle, six generations of a stag, and nine generations of a man. With less poetic exactitude I have been told that it lives thirteen years in flight and thirty-three years in all! ... though equally authentic information avers that the average life of the bat is twenty-one years. A forester told me once that he did not think any bat lived longer than nine years, but he thought fifteen as likely as nine. On the other hand, he himself spoke, and as though for all he knew it might well be so, of an old tradition that a bat lives to a hundred years. This, I may add, I have heard again and again. The other day a fisherman from the island of Lismore gave the unexpected answer: ‘How old will the ialtag be? Well, now, just exactly what the age of Judas was the hour he kissed Christ and betrayed Him, and not a day more and not a day less.’ Nothing explicit as to that, however, could be obtained. A gardener told me once a rhyme about how to get at the age of man, but I have forgotten it except that it was to the effect that a losgunn (a toad) was twice the age of an easgunn (an eel), and that a dialtag (bat) was twice the age of a losgunn, and that am fiadh (the stag) was twice the age of a dialtag, ‘and put ten to that and you’ll have the allotted age of man’ [i.e., an eel is supposed to live about seven years to seven and a half years: a frog or toad to about fifteen: a bat to about thirty: a deer to about sixty. I should add, however, that my informant was not sure if in the third instance it wasn’t a iolair (eagle) instead of a deer].

One of the strangest English names for the bat (among over a score only less strange) is the Athern-bird--a Somerset term, I believe, whose meaning I do not know.

But now to return to the rear-guard of Spring of whom we spoke first. Yet the folklore of the house-martin is so familiar that it need not be alluded to. We all know that it is time to think of summer when the martin clings once more to her last year’s clay-house under the eaves.

It is when the wild-doves are heard in the woods that one realises the Spring-Summer borderland is being crossed. When the cushat calls, all the clans of the bushes are at home, runs a Highland saying: meaning that every mavis and merle and finch is busy with hatching the young brood, or busier still feeding the callow nestlings. But when the voice of the turtle is heard in the land, then Summer has come over the sea on the south wind, and is weaving roses for her coronal and will be with us while we are yet unaware.

What a quantity of old lore one might collect about the dove, and as for the allusions in ancient and modern literature they must be legion--from the familiar Scriptural phrase about the turtle to Chaucer’s ‘the wedded turtil with her heartë trewe,’ from Greek myth or Roman poem to Tennyson’s ‘moan of doves in immemorial elms.’ Doubtless much of the dove-lore is so well known that it would be superfluous to repeat it here. As the symbol of peace, of the Spirit, the dove herself is universally familiar. The turtle is also a symbol of mourning, and of old, as among the oak-groves of Dodona or before the fane of Hierapolis, was held sacred as the bird of prophecy, of the soul, and of the life after death. It is because of the loving faithfulness of the cushat that this bird was long ago dedicated to Venus; and it was because Venus presided over both birth and death that the dove became associated of old with scenes so opposite as marriage festivals and funeral rites. We are all familiar with the legend that the soul of a dying person may be seen departing like a flying dove, and so it was that even a tame pigeon came to be an unwelcome sight at the window where any one lay in serious illness. In a word, the peasant-invalid might take the bird to be a death-messenger, the bird of the grave. The most singular of these folk-superstitions, I think, is that in whose exercise a living pigeon used to be placed on the head of a dying man in order to attract the pain to the bird and so ease the sufferer. One wonders what became of the unfortunate pigeon.

The strangest of the northern legends is that Swedish one which makes the wild-dove the confidant of Baldur, the Scandinavian god of song and beautiful love, before he died ‘the white death’ when the ancient world receded for ever at the advent of Christ. Still do they murmur in the woods of the immortal passion, the deathless love of the old gods, they who long ago passed away one knows not whither, with Baldur going before them harping, and singing a strange song. One Gaelic poetic name for the cushat is poetry itself; Caoirean-na-coille, ‘the murmur of the woods.’ The subtlest legend is that old world Finnish identification of Aino the dove-maiden and Vaino, the male-Venus of the North, like Venus sea-born, like Venus the offspring of Zeus and Destiny, and as Aino or Vaino now the singer, now the presiding deity at marriage festival or during the lamentations for the dead.

How little we know of this Vaino of the Kalevala, or of that not less mysterious ancient Teutonic nature-god Wunsch, or of our Gaelic Angus Og, son of heaven and earth; each of whom has the wild-dove for his own, his symbol and his mortal image. Each wove grass and plants and greenness of trees out of the earth and the rain, out of the sunshine and the wind; each spun flowers out of dew and moonlight and the rose and saffron of dawns and sunsets. Each, too, created strength in the hearts of men and power in their bodies, and wove beauty on the faces of women and children. Each became, thus, the god of happiness, of youth, of joy. And to each, finally, the doves were dedicated as their sacred birds, their mortal image among the illusions of the world. So here we pass back, pass away from the later tradition of mourning and death, to the old joyousness of Spring, of Spring who creates grass and plant and flower, the strength of men and the beauty of women and the gladness of children, Spring who turns when the apple-blossom fades and lets loose the doves of Summer.

THE SEA-SPELL

Old magical writers speak of the elemental affinity which is the veiled door in each of us. Find that door, and you will be on the secret road to the soul, they say in effect. Some are children of fire, and some of air, some are of earth, and some of water. They even resolve mortal strength and weakness, our virtue and our evil, into the movement of these elements. This virtue, it is of fire: this quality, it is of air: this frailty, it is of water. Howsoever this may be, some of us are assuredly of that ancient clan in whose blood, as an old legend has it, is the water of the sea. Many legends, many poems, many sayings tell of the Chloinn-na-Mhara, the children of the sea. I have heard them from fishermen, from inland-shepherds, from moorlanders in inland solitudes where the only visitors from the mysterious far-off deep are the wandering sea-mews or the cloud that has climbed out of the south. Some tell of the terror of the sea, some of its mysteriousness, some of the evil and of the evil things that belong to it and are in it, some of its beauty, some of its fascination (as the Greeks of old-time told of the sirens, who were the voices and fatal music and the strange and perilous loveliness of alien waters), some of the subtle and secret spell deep-buried in the hearts of certain men and women, the Chloinn-na-Mhara, a spell that will brood there, and give no peace, but will compel the spirit to the loneliness of the wind, and the outward life to the wayward turbulence of the wave. More than two thousand years ago the great Pindar had these in mind when he wrote of that strange tribe among men ‘who scorn the things of home, and gaze on things that are afar off, and chase a cheating prey with hopes that shall never be fulfilled.’

Elsewhere I have written much of this sea-spell, of the Brònavara (to Anglicise an island word), or Sorrow of the Sea, and do not wish to write here of that strange passion or sinister affinity: but of that other and happier Spell of the Sea which so many of us feel, with pleasure always, with delight often, at times with exultation, as though in our very heart were the sharp briny splash of the blue wave tossing its white crest, or of the green billow falling like a tower of jade in a seething flood. But, first, I recall that old legend to which I have alluded. Perhaps some folklorist may recognise it as gathered out of the drift common to many shores, may trace it even to those Asian inlands where so many of our most ancient tales mysteriously arose; but I have nowhere met with it in print, nor seen nor heard allusion to it, other than in a crude fashioning on the lips of simple Gaelic folk, nor even there for years upon years. There were once four cities (the Western Gael will generally call them Gorias and Falias, Finias and Murias), the greatest and most beautiful of the cities of those ancient tribes of beauty, the offspring of angels and the daughters of earth. The fair women were beautiful, but lived like flowers, and like flowers faded and were no more, for they were filled with happiness, as cups of ivory filled with sunlit dancing wine, but were soulless. Eve, that sorrowful loveliness, was not yet born. Adam was not yet lifted out of the dust of Eden. Finias was the gate of Eden to the South, Murias to the West: in the North, Falias was crowned by a great star: in the East, Gorias, the city of gems, flashed like sunrise. There the deathless clan of the sky loved the children of Lilith. On the day when Adam uttered the sacred name and became king of the world, a great sighing was heard in Gorias in the East and in Finias in the South, in Murias in the West and in Falias in the North: and when morn was come the women were no more awakened by the stirring of wings and the sunrise-flight of their angelic lovers. They came no more. And when Eve awoke by the side of Adam, and he looked on her, and saw the immortal mystery in the eyes of this mortal loveliness, lamentations and farewells and voices of twilight were heard in Murias by the margin of the sea and in Gorias high-set among her peaks; in the secret gardens of Falias, and where the moonlight hung like a spear above the towers of Finias upon the great plain. The children of Lilith were gone away upon the wind, as lifted dust, as dew, as shadow, as the unreturning leaf. Adam rose, and bade Eve go to the four solitudes, and bring back the four ancient secrets of the world. So Eve went to Gorias, and found nothing there but a flame of fire. She lifted it and hid it in her heart. At noon she came to Finias, and found nothing there but a spear of white light. She took it and hid it in her mind. At dusk she came to Falias, and found nothing there but a star in the darkness. She hid the darkness, and the star within the darkness, in her womb. At moonrise she came to Murias, by the shores of the ocean. There she saw nothing but a wandering light. So she stooped, and lifted a wave of the sea and hid it in her blood. And when Eve was come again to Adam, she gave him the flame she had found in Gorias, and the spear of light she had found in Finias. ‘In Falias,’ she said, ‘I found that which I cannot give, but the darkness I have hidden shall be your darkness, and the star shall be your star.’ ‘Tell me what you found in Murias by the sea?’ asked Adam. ‘Nothing,’ answered Eve. But Adam knew that she lied. ‘I saw a wandering light,’ she said. He sighed, and believed. But Eve kept the wave of the sea hidden in her blood. So has it been that a multitude of women have been homeless as the wave, and their heritage salt as the sea: and that some among their sons and daughters have been possessed by that vain cold fire, and that inappeasable trouble, and the restlessness of water. So it is that to the end of time some shall have the salt sea in the blood, and the troubled wave in the heart, and be homeless.

But thoughts like these, legends like these, are for the twilight hour, or for the silent people who live in isles and remote places. For most of us, for those of us who do not dwell by lonely shores and seldom behold the sea but in the quiet seasons, it is either a delight or an oppression. Some can no more love it, or can have any well-being or composure near it, than others can be well or content where vast moors reach from skyline to skyline, or amid the green solemnities of forests, or where stillness inhabits the hollows of hills. But for those who do love it, what a joy it is! The Sea ... the very words have magic. It is like the sound of a horn in woods, like the sound of a bugle in the dusk, like the cry of wind leaping the long bastions of silence. To many of us there is no call like it, no other such clarion of gladness.

But when one speaks of the sea it is as though one should speak of summer or winter, of spring or autumn. It has many aspects: it is not here what it is yonder, yonder it is not what it is afar off: here, even, it is not in August what it is when the March winds, those steel-blue coursers, are unleashed; the grey-green calms of January differ from the purple-grey calms of September, and November leaning in mist across the dusk of wavering horizons is other than azure-robed and cirrus-crowned May moving joyously across a glorious tossing wilderness of blue and white. The blue sea frothed with wind has ever been a salutation of joy. Æschylos sounded the note of rapture which has since echoed through poetry and romance: that ‘multitudinous laughter’ struck a vibration which time has never dulled nor lessened. It has been an exultation above all in the literatures of the north. Scandinavian poetry is full of the salt brine; there is not a viking-saga that is not wet with the spray of surging seas. Through all the primitive tales and songs of the Gael one feels the intoxication of the blue wine of the running wave. In the Icelandic sagas it is like a clashing of shields. It calls through the Ossianic chants like a tide. Every Gaelic song of exile has the sound of it, as in the convolutions of a shell. The first Gaelic poet rejoiced at the call of the sea, and bowed before the chanting of a divine voice. In his madness, Cuchulain fought with the racing billows on the Irish Coast, striving with them as joy-intoxicated foes, laughing against their laughter: to the dark waves of Coruisk, in the Isle of Skye, he rushed with a drawn sword, calling to these wise warriors of the sea to advance in their proud hosts that he might slay them. Sigurd and Brynhild, Gunhild and Olaf, Torquil and Swaran and Haco, do they not sound like the names of waves? How good that old-world rejoicing in the great green wilderness of waters, in the foam-swept blue meads, in the cry of the wind and the chant of the billows and the sharp sting of flying scud? It is of to-day also. A multitude of us rejoice as those of old rejoiced, though we have changed in so much with all the incalculable change of the years. To-day as then the poets of the isles ... the poet in the heart of each of us who loves the glory and beauty and in any degree feels the strong spell of the sea ... answer to that clarion-music: as in this Evoë! by one of the latest among them:--

“Oceanward, the sea-horses sweep magnificently, champing and whirling white foam about their green flanks, and tossing on high their manes of sunlit rainbow-gold, dazzling white and multitudinous far as sight can reach.

“O, champing horses of my soul, toss, toss on high your sunlit manes, your manes of rainbow-gold, dazzling-white and multitudinous, for I too rejoice, rejoice!”

And who of us will forget that great English poet of to-day, that supreme singer of--

“Sky, and shore, and cloud, and waste, and sea,”

who has written so often and so magically of the spell of the sea and of the elation of those who commit themselves to the sway and rhythm of its moving waters:--

“The grey sky gleams and the grey seas glimmer, Pale and sweet as a dream’s delight, As a dream’s where darkness and light seem dimmer, Touched by dawn or subdued by night. The dark wind, stern and sublime and sad, Swings the rollers to westward, clad With lustrous shadow that lures the swimmer, Lures and lulls him with dreams of light.

“Light, and sleep, and delight, and wonder, Change, and rest, and a charm of cloud, Fill the world of the skies whereunder Heaves and quivers and pants aloud All the world of the waters, hoary Now, but clothed with its own live glory, That mates the lightning and mocks the thunder With light more living and word more proud.