JUNE

I

THIS morning, for the first time in the year, I found myself

unconsciously taking the shady side of the way. It was a small thing,

truly; but it stood as an index of something great, perhaps the most

portentous thing that happens annually in the life of him who is a

countryman at heart and not merely by name. Summer had come in. It was

not only that the calendar told me the month was June. I felt it in the

sunbeams, saw it in the hedgerows and trees, read it in the pure azure of

the summer sky. I took the shady side of the lane unthinkingly, and

laughed because I did it;—not that I laughed for that alone, but because

gladness was welling up within me unbidden, irresistible: I laughed for

the same reason that the nightingale sang in the green brier-thicket hard

by.

I stopped to listen to the song. It was June, and the nightingales would

not be singing much longer. Perhaps in a week’s time, at the worst,

their music would be done. I silenced my footfall in the long grass by

the wayside, and crept up close to the nightingale’s bower.

Every year a nightingale came to this brier-bush, and sang there as she

was singing now. The hedge was a very old one, lifting its dense green

barrier ten feet or more against the sunny southern sky; and, in all the

years I could recall, the brier-bush had never been without its

nightingale. This one must have her nest close by, where all her

ancestors must have built their nests, for how many generations back, who

can say? The life of this old hedge, towering far above me, and nearly

as broad as it was high, could not be compassed by a man’s life. It was

thick and tall when the oldest in the village was but a child. At long

irregular intervals of years it had been trimmed, cut back; but the

growth of the gnarled old stems, where they sprang from the ground, had

not been checked. There its age stood recorded; and it would be little

wide of the truth to think of it as already thick and tall, already the

traditional singing-place of this race of nightingales, a full hundred

years ago.

The brier-bush stood on the shady side of the way. The nightingale had

her perch in the sunshine beyond, so that the song filtered down to me

through the tangle of intervening leaves. And yet it was not so much a

song as a detached, occasional reverie on the summer’s morning. There is

always this about the music of the summer migrant birds. They are

creatures of eternal sunshine. Their life is no give-and-take of good

and evil, like that of the birds who stay with us all the year through.

They have no need to hearten themselves with memories of bygone sunbeams,

to bring brightness from within when all without is lowering and grey.

Wisely following the sun about the world from season to season, they

ensure for themselves that the joy they sing of is never a memory, but

always the expression of the moment’s living fact: they have but to turn

the vision, the aspect of the hour, into its equivalent of music.

More than all, you see this truth exemplified in the songs of chaffinch

and willow-wren, which are so much alike in form, yet so strangely

different in the spirit. The hardy chaffinch began his bubbling,

rollicking song with the first warm day in March, and it was more than

half a fiction: to-day it has the same hard, set quality, like a

petrified laugh in the woods. But the little willow-wren is the slave of

no long habit of pretences. She has followed the sun from the south,

keeping up with his youth; and now, from the glowing wood-top, she sends

down her slender echo of chaffinch music, as if, though she would fain be

silent, she must sing for very joy of the light. There is in it all the

verve and gaiety of the chaffinch, yet infinitely softened and

etherealised. And the long bowling phrase is never finished: it falls

away and fails in the end, as if the singer suddenly realised her

impotence to convey in melody one fraction of the morning’s loveliness

and light.

Invisible through the dense tangle of the brier-bush, to me a voice and

nothing more, the nightingale sat in her nook on the sunny side of the

hedgerow, pouring out her song on the already song-burdened morning as a

gilder lays gold upon gold. All its sweetness, its wild purity, its

slow, sorrowful strength, and its sudden overtripping, overmastering joy,

drifted out upon the sunshine of the meadow, the varied phrases coming

turn and turn about with long intervening silences, as though the singer

ruminated on all the beauty before her, and unconsciously sang her

thoughts aloud. It was good to stand there in the cool shade, and

listen, and take the facts of the thronging meadow life and colour beyond

the hedgerow at such tuneful second-hand. But at length the nightingale

put such a call, such an insistence into her music, as sent me to the

meadow-gate a little way down the lane, just to see with my own eyes what

manner of beauty could be to her so great an inspiration. Shading my

eyes with my hands, I looked out over the mowing-grass, and thanked God

it was June.

Knee-deep, almost, the grass stood under the morning sun; intensely green

below, and above, white with the white of countless marguerites; and,

higher still, rich rose-red with myriads of tremulous sorrel-plumes. A

little way over the meadow, the green of the grass-blades was lost, and

the eye saw only the white of the great moon-daisies, and the sorrel-red.

Farther still, these two merged into one surface of formless pink, upon

which the breath of the slow western air drew a rippling pattern like

watered silk.

I passed through the gate, and waded into the grass to the farthest limit

of the oak-shadow. All round the meadow these shadows lay upon the

mowing-grass, blue and cool in the universal glare. It mattered nothing

which way the sunshine fell. The green oak-boughs stretched out so far

and so low that there was shadow beneath them everywhere. Just where I

stood there was a patch of poor and stony soil. The tall-growing plants

had shunned it, leaving it a little haven where the unconsidered trifles

could see sunshine and flourish in their little might. Faced with the

rich bewilderment of summer growth, a spot like this offers irresistible

attraction. To look for long on great magnificence unwearied is a power

not given to all. I know with what relief and pleasure, in other times,

I have turned my back on snow-pinnacled mountains and soothed dazed eyes

with a spot of grey-green lichen on a common stone. And now I turned

from the boundless meadow radiance before me as from glory intolerable,

and knelt to look awhile at the tiny, creviced beauties that lay among

the clods.

There were scarlet pimpernel and lily-bind, gold-eyed cinquefoil and blue

veronica—a score of nameless atoms starring the drab bare soil. Stooping

lower, I noticed what I had never marked before—how the red of the

pimpernel was centred with a crimson heart; crimson and scarlet—the

military colours that I had always thought execrable, because unnaturally

blended—here they were brought together, justified by the infallible

artistry of the sun. The veronica seemed all pure cobalt blue as I stood

gazing down upon it; but, looked at closely, each minute flower revealed

a complication of colour. The blue of its petals was not a simple tint

throughout, but was striped with a darker blue down in the cup. From its

centre of sulphur-yellow three spires uprose, the one rich purple, the

other two of a pale mauve. And, as if this were not enough beauty for so

small a thing, the slender stalk upon which each blossom trembled was a

shaft of delicate, translucent crimson, feathered over with white.

The cinquefoil was just as minutely wonderful in its way. Studded with

little flat golden blossoms, its ferny growth mingled everywhere with the

other rich-hued things, but it held itself aloof from them all. Even

under the full noontide sun it preserved its chilly, star-like quality.

Its pale silvery fronds seemed to quench the very sunbeams as they fell,

and to make a cold spot on the earth in the midst of all the glowing

soaring meadow-colour, like frost in fire. Many a time, in former years,

I had looked at the cinquefoil thus, and marvelled at the ice-cold virtue

of a thing that could so repel the fierce Tarquin of a summer sun.

Nursing the fancy, I would grant it nothing at length but a senseless

chastity done up in silver paper; as zealously guarded as little worth.

But now I took the pains to pluck a few of its flowers, and discovered

something new about it, something that raised its value to me a

hundredfold. In all the meadow there was scarce another blossom with so

sweet a scent; it was like the may, but at once more poignant and

delicate. And, thinking of the may, I straightway forgot all about the

cinquefoil, and turned to wander along the hedge.

The time had gone by when the hawthorn overran all the country-side with

its billows of white blossom. These blinding masses of white—snow-white

and cold as snow—are wonderful to look upon for a moment or two; but to

me the hawthorn is always more lovely at the beginning, and, most of all,

towards the end of its flowering life. At neither of these times is it

really white. The new-opened blossom of the may is full of pink anthers

that, in the aggregate, colour the whole bush. At this hour, for it is

no more than an hour, the hawthorn-hedge is besieged by hordes of

honey-sippers; hive-bees for the most part, but also every insect that

can fly. Each flower keeps its rosy blush only so long as it remains

unfertilised; and then colour and song forsake it together. The

full-blown hedges of hawthorn have nothing for the ear, as they have

little abiding solace to the eye.

But now again, as I roved along the narrow green way between the hedgerow

and the tall grass of the meadow, the may, as of old, was beautiful to

look upon. The pink anthers were dead, brown, shrivelled in their

drained chalices; but the petals themselves, as they faded, had taken

upon themselves a rich flush—the hectic of decay. Everywhere the

hedgerow was wreathed and posied with this soft tint, the colour of

old-rose. It was the colour of death, and that was often gay and bright

enough, I knew. It seemed an ill thing wherein to delight on such a

brave June morning. But the truth stuck fast in the mind, for all that:

these festoons of dying may were nearly as beautiful as the best that

youth and life could show.

Nearly—yet as I wandered on, creeping from bay to bay of green shadow,

and edging round the great jutting promontories of hedgerow-growth, I

came at once upon a sight and a sound that brought me to a more wondering

halt than ever. It was my brier-bush again, and the nightingale was

still singing, as I had heard her from the lane an hour ago. But now I

no longer stood outside her concert-hall. I was here with her on the

meadow side of her bower, and understood at last the full import of her

singing. While on the shaded northern flank of the hedge there was

nothing but greenery, here, on the sunny side, the brier-sprays were

putting forth antlered buds, and one of them, close to my hand, had

opened into the perfect flower. It was the first wild rose. If I had

been Rip van Winkle, there and then waking from an age-long sleep, I

should have known the day of the month, almost the very hour. Rarely,

six days of June may pass in southern England, but never a seventh,

without this master-sign of summer. Though storm and chill hold back the

music of the migrant birds, they cannot daunt the English roses.