After that day I was house-bound for near upon a week. Later than its
wont by a good hour, the dawn broke every day; but as in darkness so with
the grey wan light, the wind never abated one iota of its whistling fury;
the soft thud-thud of the flying snow reverberated on the panes; the
white drifts at the street corners mounted steadily higher and higher; in
the fireplace, where I already thought soon to start my summer fernery, I
had the logs crackling and glowing with more than their old wintry might.
Poor almond-blossom! I thought to myself again and again, as I sat
industriously scratching away in the strange dumbness and the thin, queer
light that fills the room in snowy weather.
Yet this was not so ill a wind but that some good was blown my way. I
found myself overhauling arrears of work at a surprising rate. When the
wind fell at last, backing steadily to west, then to south-west, and
there came a night of drenching rain—rain that felt like hot tea to a
hand held out in it—I was ready for any sort of idleness and any
wandering company.
Two long days and nights the world lay under that simmering, steaming
cataract. And then such a morning—almost the last morning of the
month—rose over Windlecombe as made the mere awakening in one’s bed seem
like a sort of first act in a miracle play.
The sun had hardly breasted Windle Hill before I was out and clear of the
village: its last red tinge had faded into night when I turned my tired
steps homeward, and so to bed once more.
Lying there cosily, with the delicious ache of thirty miles in my bones,
and in my ears the lilt of a thousand melodies, all the glad day’s
journey projected itself like swiftly changing pictures thrown upon the
screen of the starry night. The Downs first—the green sea of hills that
seemed to heave and subside as the violet cloud-shadows lazily drove from
crest to crest; the unending sheep-bell music, and lark-song, and the
playing of the gulls high up in the blue, like scraps of white paper
fluttering in the breeze. Then down the steep hill-side to the sunny
flats, where the plovers were at their love-play—each pair rising and
falling, somersaulting together, crying continually, coming to rest a
moment, then up again at the old interminable gambols.
Here in the deep ditches the frogs croaked. There was a golden rim of
marsh-marigold to every strip of water, over which you must peer if you
would study the submerged life below. And what a life there was down in
each crystal deep! Queer water-beetles wove a bright pattern on the
surface of the slow-moving, almost stagnant stream; and their shadows
made just the same pattern on the sunlit weed of the bottom, though here
it was black instead of bright. Down there were mimic forests or jungles
of ferny, bronze-green growth, all in gentle undulating motion as the
water glided imperceptibly by. Shoals of minnows cruised about in the
sunny open, or lay in wait singly in the shadowy glades. These single
fish seemed to be for ever quarrelling; either making sudden raid on the
lairs of their neighbours, or being attacked in their turn. When they
banded themselves together, evidently making common peace the better to
rout a common enemy, and swam boldly in the sunshine, I could see that
each fish was faintly tinged with blue and green and orange-red, the
identical colours, although vague and subdued, of the kingfisher, their
traditional foe.
Then came up the vision of a long white road barred with tree-shadows,
flowing between thorn-hedges already full of a green promise of leafage,
and edged with butterfly-haunted flowers. Little cottages passed by,
ankle-deep in blue forget-me-nots, and aflare with blossoming creepers.
Deep pine-woods took the road and folded it in fragrant gloom, then set
it forth in the sunshine again to wander over gorse-clad heaths, or
amidst spangled meadows. I saw the inn, where I sat awhile in a company
of travelling ‘rinders’—men who strip the bark from the felled oaks for
the tanneries-who would now be camping, like Robin and his merry rascals,
a month long in the woods.
I dozed off, and woke again where, in the drowsy afternoon sunshine, I
had rested under a great pollard ash weighed down with ivy. Upon the
grass about my feet there shone an infinity of small, rounded objects,
much as if Aladdin had passed by and thrown down a handful of superfluous
rubies. Everywhere their soft carmine lustre gemmed the sward. Year by
year I have found the like on meadow-paths, wood-rides, by the church
tower, sometimes in the very streets of the village, and have never known
how they came into being. You may have broken asunder the ivy-berries a
hundred times, and noted the pale-hued seeds within, yet never guessed
that here was the mining-ground for your treasure. It is the sun and air
that make rubies of the fallen ivy seeds.
And, for a last vision, as I lay watching the starshine travelling across
the square of the window, I saw within it a picture, and heard again a
note of music, perhaps the most wonderful thing in the whole day’s idle
round. It was a keeper’s cottage at the entrance to a wood. On the
steep thatch, white pigeons hobbled amorously; and behind, in a green
bower of elder, a wild bird sang. I could see the bird; I knew it to be
a common song-thrush; but the song was the song of a nightingale—not the
loud, silver-toned warble that the poets love, but the low, slow,
sorrowful keening that always seems as if torn from the very heart of the
bird. And here is a pretty problem. If the nightingale were already
with us, singing in every brake, there would be nothing strange in the
thrush—prone as he is to imitation—borrowing a stanza from the new melody
here and there. But it is more than strange that he should do so at the
present time, seeing that, for eight or nine months back, there has been
no nightingale music in the land. Yet we, who are mute fowl, are all
thinking of April now, and what it has in store for us: can the thrush be
thinking of April too? And, as with us, can old memories of nightingales
be stirring in him?—in him that alone can sing his thoughts aloud?
[Picture: “The Rinders”]