If I tell the plain, honest truth about the day which has just ended, and
call it a day of adventure and excitement from its first grey gleam to
its tranquil golden close, I am not sure that there are many who will
understand me, save the one who shared it with me almost hour by hour.
For nothing really happened on this day, as the world estimates events.
Over an obscure Sussex village, a mid-April sun shone out of a cloudless
sky; certain migrant birds arrived in the neighbourhood; certain wild
flowers and insects were observed for the first time; there was nothing
more. No wandering stranger appeared in the street, to bring us all to
our doors; no big-gun practice was going on thirty miles away at
Portsmouth, outraging our blue sky with incongruous thunder; nor did even
the gilt arrow on the church-clock slip an hour at midday, as it often
does, and send us scurrying home to dinner before the time. To all save
two in Windlecombe, the day was just an ordinary working week-day; but,
to these, it was no less a day than the one on which the year comes
suddenly into its full young prime.
For me it began when the grey eastern sky took its first tint of morning
rose. There is no sweeter sound than the song of the house-martins, and
this it was that roused me now. In the darkness they had come, straight
to their old nesting-site under the eaves; and now they filled the room
with their quaint, voluble melody, and wove a mazy pattern against the
sky as they circled to and fro.
While I dressed, I watched them dipping and crying in the sunny air; and,
peering out through the window now and again, I could see them all along
under the eaves, clinging to the rough bricks of the wall, where they had
left their mud-houses last October. But of these none remained now. Not
to break down the martins’ nests in early spring, before the sparrows
begin to stuff them with grass, is to prepare for the little
black-and-white voyagers’ war instead of welcome. And they seem quite as
happy and content if, returning, they find nothing but a clay-mark on the
wall.
Later, by an hour at most, I had the Reverend by the arm, not so much to
guide, as to restrain him, for he went ever a little before me through
the meadow with the sure, swift stride of a mountain-goat. There was but
one thing that could betray his affliction to a close observer. While I
went blinking in the intolerable glory of the sunshine above us, and the
scarce lesser glory of the buttercups below, he strode onward, his calm
old face turned straight up to the sun, his blue eyes meeting it
unflinchingly from under their shaggy arches of white. He might be
Gabriel looking into the very focus of heaven, I thought, as I stole a
glance at him a little fearsomely. Indeed, I never quite limited his
vision to that of his poor, purblind, human eyes.
‘It will be down in the little birch-clump near the Conyers,’ he said.
‘That is where the first nightingale always comes. It will take us a
good five minutes, and why are you not talking to me? Come! do not keep
all the brave, beautiful things to yourself!’
How to tell him of all the things I saw in a single yard of meadow about
us! But I got to work with the will, if not the power.
‘We are walking,’ said I, ‘through buttercups a foot high; and almost
with every step we send a cloud of little blue-and-copper butterflies
chevying before us. Listen to the grasshoppers piping! The buttercups
make a sort of thick scum of gold as on the surface of a green lake.
Down below, like pebbles on the lake-bottom lie the daisies—their white
discs touch each other in all directions; nay, they overlap, they are
heaped upon one another. An insect might crawl over them from side to
side of the great meadow and never tread on anything but daisy-white.
And the dandelions! There are millions of them, I think, filling the air
with a perfume like choice old wine. And smell these, Reverend! Do you
know what they are?’
‘Cowslips! They must be in full bloom now: they were always fine
cowslips in this field. But you should pull them—never pick them. Then
you get all their beauty, the crimson at the base of the stem, and—
Hark!’
From the oak-clad hill-side to the northward, clear and slow on the
gentle air, came the cuckoo’s double chime. The old vicar faced about,
and took off his hat ceremoniously. I did the like. It was no
superstitious greeting of the bird on its first appearance. We were not
thinking even of the ancient Sussex legend—that an old witch goes to
Heathfield Fair every fourteenth day of April, with all the year’s
cuckoos in her bag, and there lets them fly. On our part, it was merely
a precautionary measure against a very ancient rustic pleasantry. Farmer
Coles of Windlecombe loved his joke, and that was Farmer Coles’s wood.
Though we had no real doubt that we were listening to our first cuckoo,
it was well to be on the safe side.
The path now left the full fair-way of the meadow, and meandered along by
the edge of the wood. I was bidden to go on with my chronicle.
‘The bluebells are out as thick as ever I saw them, Reverend. Under the
shadow of the trees they look like purple smoke stealing up the hillside;
and where a bar of sunshine pierces through, the colour seems to leap
into the dim air like a tongue of flame. How the rabbits play! Every
moment they break cover and dart across the open spaces, two or three
together. There goes a spotted woodpecker!—I saw his black-and-white
coat and crimson plume as he swung through the bar of light. They are
scarce here. Here comes something flitting along that I wish you could
see—you know how the orange-tip—’
‘The butterfly with his wings on fire? Don’t grizzle over me, man! I
_can_ see it!—lazily looping along, though you think he will fall to
earth a cinder any moment at your feet. He is like Nero fiddling, I
always think. There must be chervil growing close by.’
‘Yes, a great bank of it, and the butterfly has gone.’
‘Well: he is only settling there. Look how the mottled green and white
on the under side of his wings, now he has closed them, exactly match the
colours of the chervil. All his fire is quenched till you disturb him,
and then off he goes, burning himself up as unconcernedly as ever.’
We rounded the corner of the wood, and came upon a little open stretch of
heathland. The sulky sweet fragrance of the gorse so loaded the air as
to make one’s breath come hard. Over the gorse, linnets sang their
slender, tweeting melody. The blossom-laden bushes spread away before us
like great heaving waves of gold, flowing up to the hill-brow and over
out of sight. Where the crests of yellow bloom stood against the sky,
they made the sky a deeper blue. But between the gorse-brakes the
heather showed no sign. It crouched low upon the earth, looking black
and dreary and dead, as though a forest fire had lately swept by.
‘Dead!’ cried the Reverend scornfully. ‘Turn up a frond of it, and look
at the under side of the leaves. Each leaf is black above, but see how
green and sappy and full of life it really is, if you look at it aright.
One misses a lot in life by taking too lofty a standpoint. The heather
in April may be black to you, but it is green enough to the hiding mice.’
We went along in silence for a minute or two.
‘And what about the trees?’ he asked presently. ‘Is it death or life
there? The cuckoo never will wait for his green leaves, you know.’
‘Green leaves I see, but leafage nowhere. All the wood-top is chequered
into different clear zones of green, or grey, or russet, or soft sad
yellow—buds bursting and leaves just promising everywhere; but leaves, as
I want them, none. How slow it all is! I can understand the cuckoo’s
impatience. Flying all the way from Africa only to find—’
He had ceased to listen. He had turned swiftly towards the sun-bathed
meadows. He put up a thin hand—blue-veined, almost transparent—against
the light. He visibly started.
‘I heard the throb of a wing—a new sound. It must be—’
‘Yes, there it is! The first swallow! Wheeling and darting over the
buttercups yonder, like a bit of bright, blue-tempered steel!’
And as I uttered the words, there drifted out of the thorn-hedge hard by
us the note we had come to seek. All the ringing music of the woodland
seemed to grow mute at the sound. Wild and pure, with a force and a
lingering sweetness indescribable, the nightingale’s song poured out of
the thicket, dwelling upon the one silver, clarion note, moment after
moment, as though it would never cease. At my side two gaunt arms rose
tremblingly into the sunshine:
‘They are all here!’—the voice was husky, faltering—‘All! all! I have
heard them again, every one of them, the good God be praised! Though I
never hoped to— Yes, one by one, I bade them all a long farewell last
year!’