A week of April has gone by—a week of rain and shine, and the singing of
the south wind by day; and, at nights, an intense dark calm full of the
sound of purling brooks.
The river runs high. All the streams are swollen. The low-lying meadows
are half green grass overspread with a pink mist of lady’s-smock, and
half glittering pools of water that bring down the blue of the sky under
your feet as you go. You can never forget the rain for an instant. On
this page, as I sit writing at the open window, the morning sun was
streaming a minute ago: now a ragged grey rain-cloud has come tumbling
over the hills, and I cannot see across the green for the torrent. It is
by almost as quickly as I can set down the words; and now the sunbeams
are pouring in at the window again: the whole village lies before me
drenched and sparkling, the street one long river of blinding light.
Tom Artlett, going by early this morning to his work and spying me in the
garden, called out that he had heard the cuckoo twice already; and it may
well be so. The ringing note of the wryneck—the ‘cuckoo’s mate’—has been
sounding in the elm-tops all the morning through, and the cuckoo is
seldom far behind her messenger. Nightingale and swift, swallow and
martin, they are all on their way northward now, and any day may bring
them. But time spent at this season in looking forward to the things
that will be, is always time wasted. Every hour in early April has its
own new revelation, and common eyes and ears can do no more than mark the
things that are.
Yesterday, in a blink of sunny calm between the showers, I took my midday
walk through the hazel-woods. The young leaves already tempered the
sunlight to the primroses and anemones that covered the woodland floor,
giving all a greenish tinge. Though the whole wood was full of
primroses, it was only by the edges of the fields, where they grew in
full sunshine, that their rich yellow colour had any significance. Here
under the hazels this was so diluted and explained away by the white of
the anemones, and again by the leaf-filtered sunbeams from above, that
the primroses no longer seemed yellow. At a few yards distant, in the
dimmest spots, you could scarce tell one flower from another but for its
shape.
Wherever I went in the wood, the soft droning song of the bees went with
me. You could hardly put one foot before the other without dashing the
cup from the lip of one of these winged wanderers. But though the
anemones and primroses grew so thick, so inextricably mingled together,
the honey-bees kept to the one species of flower. They clambered in and
out of the star-like anemones, sometimes two and three at a blossom
together. But the primroses were always passed over, by hive-bee and
humble-bee alike. Here and there, I picked one of the sulphur blossoms,
and tearing it apart, made sure that there was nectar in plenty—its
presence was plain even to human eye. The truth was, of course, that the
sweets of the primrose were placed so far down the trumpet-tube of the
flower, that no bee had tongue long enough to gather them, even if they
were to her mind.
Yet though the bees might scorn the primrose for much the same reason as
the fox contemned the grapes in the fable, there was one creature
specially told off by Nature to do the necessary work of fertilisation.
Now and again in the general low murmur of voices about me, I could
distinguish an alien note. This came from a large fly, in a light-brown
fluffy jacket, with transparent wings fantastically scalloped in black.
He jerked himself to and fro in the air from one primrose to another,
hovering a moment over each before settling and thrusting a tongue of
amazing length down the yellow throttle of the flower. His name I have
never heard, but I know that, until recent times, he continued to
conceal, not only his means of livelihood, but his very existence from
the vigilance of naturalists: Darwin himself failed to identify this
primrose-sprite with his special mission in fertilising work.
It is strange how familiarity with the commonest natural objects may
exist side by side with a pitiful ignorance about them. I had gathered
primroses every spring for half a lifetime through before I realised that
I bore, not one, but two kinds of blossom in my hand. The discovery, I
remember, came with something like a shock of surprise. Yet there was no
blinking the fact: the wonder, indeed, was that in all the thousands I
had gathered, as boy and youth and man, the thing had never before
occurred to me. There was no difference in the sulphur-hued faces of the
flowers. But while the deep, central tube of some was closed with a
little whorl of pale buff feathers, in others this tube was open, and
there stood just within it a slender stem topped with a small green
globe—it seemed at first sight, then, that the sexual principle in the
primrose was divided, each plant bearing only male, or only female
flowers. But investigating farther, I found that this was not so. Each
flower was truly hermaphrodite, only in one the male feathery anthers
were uppermost, and in the other the green pistil of the female appeared
above.
Thirty years it took me to discover these simple, obvious facts about a
thing I had handled every spring since childhood: how many decades more,
I wonder, must pass ere I shall clear up the final mystery about them, a
matter now to me dark as ever—how, with the primrose alone, this came to
be so; and, above all, why?