I
IN the spring of the year, July seems as far off as middle-age seems to
youth, and almost as undesirable. But when midsummer-day is past and
gone, whether in human life or the year’s progress, we look at things
with clearer, more widely ranging eyes. The man in his prime strength,
the season at the summit of its beauty—these are fairer things than the
childhood and the springtime that have gone to make them. For the
greater must be all the greater and more wonderful, because it contains
the wondrous less.
Here is the first day of July come, and ever since sunrise I have been
straying about the field-paths and lanes, wending home, indeed, only when
the fierce noontide heat and a ravening hunger combined to drive me
thither. There was this fierce, tropic quality in the sunlight from the
very first. Though the gilt arrow on the church dial pointed barely to
four o’clock, the level sunbeams struck hot and bright on the face; and
the dew in the grass by the laneside was shrinking visibly with every
moment. In an hour the last water-bell was gone from the shadiest nook
in the wood. Only the teasels could defy the thirsty sun, and these kept
their water-traps over-brimming, as if fed from a magic source, far into
the heat of the day.
There are many common things of the country-side—small facts to be
learned for the trouble of a glance—which are little known because the
glance is seldom given. As I passed along the hedge where the teasels
stood up straight as a row of church spires, the glitter of the water in
their leaf-cups caught my eye, and I stopped to look at them. I had
always thought of the teasels as natural drinking-places for the bees,
and other flying or creeping things; but now I saw that their use was
very different. Studying the plant carefully, the whole meaning of the
thing dawned on me at last. The teasel must be a flesh-eater, more
greedy and destructive than any spider in the land. In the cups a host
of creatures lay drowned; and upon the green, translucent leaves and
stems there crawled multitudes of others, all destined for the same fate.
There were in the water not only small insects, but bumble-bees, large
caterpillars and slugs, even broad-winged night-moths that had fallen to
the teasel’s snare. I saw also that the pools of water insulating every
stem served not as traps alone, but actually as digestive cells, wherein
the carcases of the teasel’s prey were gradually resolved into the slime
that lay at the bottom of each cup. Somehow, I conjectured, this must be
absorbed into the tissue of the plant; and cutting one of the stems
asunder, just where the water-holding leaves embraced it, I came upon
what seemed proof of this—a ring of apertures at the base of each
cup—sink holes, in fact—leading into the substance of the stem.
The path wound up a hill-side over a field of tares, rippling away before
me through the sea of purple blossom until it ended abruptly against the
blue sky far above. And here another minute wonder brought me to a halt.
Though it was so early, the hive-bees were out and about in their
thousands. The great field was besieged by them. The air throbbed with
their music. A madness for honey-making seemed upon them all; and yet,
of all the busy thousands upon thousands set loose amidst what seemed
illimitable forage-ground, nowhere could I see a hive-bee upon a flower.
I went down on hands and knees for a closer view, believing at first that
my eyes were playing false with me. But there was no doubt about it.
Though on every side the great furry bumble-bees were seizing upon, and
dragging open the purple blooms of the tares, the hive-bees never touched
these, for all they were in so huge a heat and flurry of work.
Now I knew that, while every other insect under heaven has its times of
relaxation, deeming moments given over to dancing in a sunbeam or basking
on a wall as moments not ill-spent, the honey-bee allows herself no such
wasteful delights. If she were here in this tare-field in her thousands,
and here she was, she came for no other purpose than a useful one.
Clearly, therefore, the hive-bees were getting nectar in abundance: yet
how, if they were not seeking it in the flowers?
Another minute’s careful watch resolved the mystery. The tare-plant can
almost rank with the slug-devouring teasel as a curiosity of the
country-side. Knowing well that the hive-bee’s tongue is not long enough
to reach the sweets at the bottom of its flower-cup, the tare provides a
special feast outside. At the base of each leaf-and flower-stalk, just
where these join on to the main stem, will be found a little green flap
or fin. In the centre of this fin is a valve, from which exudes a thick
sweet liquid. If you are quicker than the bee, you may see the tiny
globule shining in the sun as you turn the plant up. But even as you
look, a bee fusses in between your fingers, drinks up the liquid in a
moment, and hums off to the next stalk. If we can extend no more
sympathy to the bee in her folly of never-ending labours than to a
lily-of-the-field at toil, we must at least concede something for her
fearlessness. A peep into her own looking-glass is not always all of
virtue’s reward.
Over the field of purple tares, and on through the cornfields—wheat
waving high and green, with the scarlet poppies flushing midway down in
its murmuring depths. Who would have hawthorn and buttercups, the bridal
white and gold of spring, when he can have poppies by the million, and
roses, a wagon-load to be gathered from every hedgerow, if he will?
Where I stood, breast-high in the wheat-field, the poppies crowded thick
together among the green stems, making one unbroken sheet of colour that
I could hardly look upon in the full light of the summer sun. A little
way onward, and this blood-red flare was softened instantly: a dozen
yards away there was nothing but the rustling green of the wheat. Every
moment a lark rose out of the corn, singing, or dropped into it like a
stone silently out of the blue. The hedgerow on the far side of the
field shone with the roses, tremulous, uncertain, in the heated air.
Beyond, in the blue mist of woodlands, a blackbird chanted his joy of the
morning; and all round me in the distant ring of hills, there were
cuckoos chiming, each note clear but double, some of the songs perfect
still.
From the wheat, the path led me presently into the oat-fields, green too,
but of a cooler, greyer tinge; and full of a stealthy motion and the
sound of wind, though scarce a breath was moving overhead. There is
something eerie, mysterious, about a field of oats on a hot summer’s
morning. It is as though the ears bent together and whispered to each
other, passing the word on unceasingly from plant to plant. Looking over
the plane of grey-green awns, stretching away under the still sunshine,
you see low wavelets rise and fall, furrows come and go; the light
changes; or, suddenly, the whole expanse grows mute and still. A gentle,
inconstant breeze would produce exactly this effect; but you see it when
not a leaf moves in the highest treetops, when even the aspens have
hushed their quivering music under the noontide glare. No doubt, in a
minor degree, all plants show this movement, whether it be caused by the
travelling heat of the sun, or be simply due to the varying impetus of
growth. In a great field of corn closely drilled, there are always the
separate individualities of the plants comprising it to be reckoned with.
That these exist in fact, as well as in fancy, is difficult to
demonstrate. But that each field has a communal spirit—often different
from, or wholly antagonistic to, that of its near neighbour—is evident.
For how else to explain why all the ears of corn in one field lean
eastward, and all the ears in the next field may incline normally to the
west?
Coming homeward at last, surfeited of sunshine, eyes and ears outwearied
with the brilliance and the melody of the day, I stopped awhile in the
shadow of the church tower to consider an old familiar, yet perennially
interesting thing. Just as I, at fiercest noon, was returning to the
shelter of my own cool, ivy-mantled nest, the swifts that built in the
tower were lancing back to their homes in the gloom of the belfry.
Singly, in twos and threes together, every moment saw them arriving and
disappearing through the jalousies; but now none went forth again, though
they had been coming and going all the morning long. There they would
remain, I knew, quiet in the temperate dark of the old tower, until the
sun had got out of its furnace-like mood. And then they would be out and
about again, yet filled with a wholly different spirit. And towards
sunset they would be tearing round the sky in a madcap chevy-chase,
screaming like black imps let out of Inferno.