screen-wall of our Castle rises, for Yardley had once a Castle of its
own, and picturesque remnants of the Keep, the great gateway, and the
walls remain with us. Forty feet from the bed of the moat on this side
the walls rise, and the moat must have been the site of the gardens
of the ducal house, curving to right and left for a couple of hundred
yards, and his lordship saw his chance for indulging in one of the most
transfiguring fads of his day by making two high and broad terraces
against the walls, thereby creating an imposing range of those hanging
gardens that we hear so much of in old gardening books. The Oriental
tradition of hanging gardens may have been brought to Europe with one of
those wares of Orientalism that were the result of the later crusades;
for assuredly at one time the reported splendours of Babylon, Nineveh,
and Eckbatana in this direction were emulated by the great in many
places of the West, where the need for the protection of the great
Norman castles was beginning to wane, and the high, bare walls springing
from the fosses, dry and flooded, looked gaunt and grim just where
people wanted a more genial outlook.
Powis Castle is the best example I can think of in this connection.
No one who has seen the hanging gardens of these old walls can fail to
appreciate how splendidly effective must have been the appearance of the
terraces of Yardley when viewed from the moat below. But in the course
of time, as the roads improved, making locomotion easier, the ducal
mansion was abandoned in favour of another some miles nearer the coast,
and the note of exclusiveness being gone from the shadow of the Castle
walls, the terraces ceased to be cultivated; the moat being on a level
with the High Street, it became attractive as a site of everyday
houses, until in the course of time there sprang up a row, and then
a public-house or two, and corporate offices and law-courts that only
required a hanging garden at assize times, when smugglers and highwaymen
were found guilty of crimes that made such a place desirable--all these
backed themselves into the moat until it had to be recognised as a
public lane though a _cul-de-sac_ as it is to-day. At the foot of the
once beautiful terraces outhouses and stables were built as they were
needed, with the happiest irregularity, but joined by a flint wall over
which the straggling survivors of the trees and fruits of the days gone
by hang skeleton branches. One doorway between two of the stables opens
upon a fine stairway made of solid blocks of Portland stone, leading
into a gap in the screen-wall of the Castle, the terrace being to right
and left, and giving access to the grounds beyond, the appreciative
possessor of which writes these lines. _Sic transit gloria_. Another
stone stairway serves the same purpose at a different place; but all the
other ascents are of brick and probably only date back to the eighteenth
century. They lead to some elevated but depressing chicken-runs.
I called the attention of our chief local antiquarian to the succession
of broad terraces and suggested their decorative origin. He shook his
head and assured me that they were ages older than the ducal residence
in the High Street. They belonged to the Norman period and were coeval
with the Castle walls. When I told him that I was at a loss to know why
the Norman builder should first raise a screen-wall forty feet up from
a moat, to make it difficult for an enemy to scale, and then go to an
amazing amount of trouble to make it easily accessible to quite a large
attacking force by a long range of terraces, he smiled the smile of
the local antiquarian--a kindly toleration of the absurdities of the
tyro--saying,--
“My dear sir, they would not mind such an attack. They could always
repel it by throwing stones down from the top--it's ten feet thick
there--yes, heavy stones, and melted lead, and boiling water.”
I did not want to throw cold water upon his researches as to the defence
of a mediæval stronghold, so I thanked him for his information. He
disclaimed all pretensions to exclusive knowledge, and said that he
would be happy to tell me anything else that I wanted to learn about
such things.
I could not resist expressing my fear to him, as we were parting,
that the Water Company would not sanction the domestic supply from the
kitchen boiler being used outside the house for defensive purposes; but
he stilled my doubts by an assurance that in those days there was no
Water Company. This was well enough so far as it went, but when I asked
where the Castle folk got their water if there was no Company to supply
it, he was slightly staggered, I could see; but, recovering himself,
he said there would certainly have been a Sussex dew-pond within the
precincts, and, as every one knew, this was never known to dry up.
I did not say that in this respect they had something in common with
local antiquarians; but asked him if it was true that swallows spent the
winter in the mud at the bottom of these ponds. He told me gravely that
he doubted if this could be; for there was not enough mud in even the
largest dew-pond to accommodate all the swallows. So I saw that he was
as sound a naturalist as he was an antiquarian.
By the way, I wonder how White of Selborne got that idea about the
swallows hibernating in the mud at the bottom of ponds. When so keen a
naturalist as White could believe that, one feels tempted to ask what is
truth, and if it really is to be found, as the swallows are not, at
the bottom of a well. One could understand Dr. Johnson's crediting the
swallow theory, and discrediting the story of the great earthquake at
Lisbon, for he had his own lines of credence and incredulity, and he was
what somebody called “a harbitrary gent”; but for White to have accepted
and promulgated such an absurdity is indeed an amazing thing.
But, for that matter, who, until trustworthy evidence was forthcoming a
few months ago, ever fancied that English swallows went as far south as
the Cape of Good Hope? This is now, however, an established fact; but
I doubt if White of Selborne would have accepted it, no matter what
evidence was claimed for its accuracy. Several times when aboard ship
off the Cape I have made pets of swallows that came to us and remained
in the chief saloon so long as there was a fly to be found; and once in
the month of October, on the island of St. Helena, I watched the sudden
appearance of a number of the same birds; but it was never suggested
that they had come from England. I think I have seen them at Madeira
in the month of January, but I am not quite certain about my dates in
regard to this island; but I know that when riding through Baines' Kloof
in South Africa, quite early in January, swallows were flying about me
in scores.
[Illustration: 0059]
What a pity it seems that people with a reputation for wisdom were for
so long content to think of the swallows only as the messengers of
a love poem: the “swallow sister--oh, fleet, sweet swallow,” or the
“swallow, swallow, flying, flying south”--instead of piling up data
respecting the wonder of their ways! The same may be said of the
nightingale, and may the Lord have mercy on the souls of those who say
it!
Are we to be told to be ready to exchange _Itylus_ for a celluloid tab
with a date on It? or Keats's _Ode_ for a corrected notation of the
nightingale's trills? At the same time might not a poet now and again
take to heart the final lines--the summing up of the next most beautiful
Ode in the language--
“Beauty is Truth, Truth beauty?
Every fact in Nature seems to me to lead in the direction of poetry,
and to increase the wonder of that of which man is but an insignificant
part. We are only beginning to know a little about the part we were
designed to play in Nature, but the more we know the more surprised,
and, indeed, alarmed, we must be when by a revelation its exact position
is made known to us. We have not yet learned to live. We have been fools
enough to cultivate the forgetting of how to do things that we were
able to do thousands of years ago. The half of our senses have been
atrophied. It is many years since we first began to take leave of our
senses and we have been at it ever since. It is about time that we
started recognising that an acquaintance with the facts of Nature is the
beginning of wisdom. We crystallised our ignorance in phrases that have
been passed on from father to son, and quoted at every opportunity. We
refer to people being “blind as a bat,” and to others being--as “bold
as a lion,” or “harmless as a dove.” Did it never strike the inventor of
any of these similes that it would be well before scattering them abroad
to find out if they were founded on fact? The eyesight of the bat is a
miracle. How such a creature can get a living for the whole year during
the summer months is amazing. The lion is a cowardly brute that runs
away yelling at the sight of a rhinoceros and submits without complaint
to the insults of the elephant. A troop of doves will do more harm to a
wheat-field in an hour than does a thunderstorm.
And the curious thing is that in those quarters where one would
expect to find wisdom respecting such incidents of Nature one finds
foolishness. Ten centuries of gamekeepers advertise their ignorance
in documentary evidence nailed to the barn doors; they have been
slaughtering their best friends all these years and they continue doing
so.
After formulating this indictment I opened my _Country Life_, and found
in its pages a confirmation of my evidence by my friend F. C. G., who is
proving himself in his maturity as accomplished a Naturalist as, in his
adolescence, he was a caricaturist in the _Westminster Gazette_. These
are his lines:--
THE GAMEKEEPER'S GIBBET
Two stoats, a weasel, and a jay,
In varied stages of decay,
Are hanging on the gibbet-tree
For all the woodland folk to see,
And tattered rags swing to and fro
Remains of what was once a crow.
What were their crimes that when they died
The Earth was not allowed to hide
Their mangled corpses out of sight,
Instead of dangling in the light?
They didn't sin against the Law
Of “Naturered in tooth and claw,”
But 'gainst the edicts of the keeper
Who plays the part of Death the Reaper,
And doth with deadly gun determine
What creatures shall be classed as vermin.
Whether we gibbets find, or grace,
Depends on accident of place,
For what is vice in Turkestan
May be a virtue in Japan.
F. C. G.
And what about gardeners? Why, quite recently I was solemnly assured by
one of the profession that I should “kill without mercy”--those were his
words--every frog or toad I found in a greenhouse!
But for that matter, don't we remember the harsh decrees of our pastors
and masters when as children we yielded to an instinct that had not
yet been atrophied, and slaughtered all the flies that approached us. I
remember that, after a perceptor's reasoning with me through the medium
of a superannuated razor-strop, I was told that to kill a bluebottle was
a sin. Now science has come to the rescue of the new generation from
the consequences of the ignorance of the old, and the boy who kills
most flies in the course of a season is handsomely rewarded. What is
pronounced a sin in one generation is looked on as a virtue in the
next.
I recollect seeing it stated in a _Zoology for the Use of Schools_,
compiled by an F.R.S., with long quotations from Milton at the head of
every chapter, that the reason why some fishes of the Tropics were so
gorgeously coloured was to enable them to be more easily seen by the
voracious enemy that was pursuing them. That was why God had endowed the
glowworm with his glow--to give him a better chance of attracting the
attention of the nightingale or any other bird that did not go to roost
before dark! And God had also given the firefly its spark that it might
display its hospitality to the same birds that had been entertained by
the glow-worm! My Informant had not mastered the alphabet of Nature.
Long after I had tried to see things through Darwin's eyes I was
perplexed by watching a cat trying to get the better of a sparrow in the
garden. I noticed that every time it had crouched to make its pounce
the cat waved its tail. Why on earth it should try to make itself
conspicuous in this way when it was flattening itself into the earth
that was nearest to it in colour, and writhing towards its prey, seemed
to me remarkable. Once, however, I was able to watch the cat approach
when I was seated beyond where the sparrow was digging up worms, and the
cat had slipped among the lower boughs of an ash covered with trembling
leaves.
There among the trembling leaves I saw another trembling leaf--the
soothing, swaying end of my cat's tail; but if I had not known that it
was there I should not have noticed it apart from the moving leaves. The
bird with all its vigilance was deceived, and it was in the cat's jaws
in another moment.
And I had been calling that cat--and, incidentally, Darwin--a fool for
several years! I do not know what my Zoologist “for the Use of Schools”
would have made of the transaction. Would he have said that a cat
abhorred the sin of lying, and scorned to take advantage of the bird,
but gave that graceful swing to its tail to make the bird aware of its
menacing proximity?
I lived for eleven years in a house in Kensington with quite a spacious
garden behind it, and was blest for several years by the company of a
pair of blackbirds that made their nest among the converging twigs of a
high lilac. No cat could climb that tree in spring, as I perceived when
I had watched the frustrated attempts of the splendid blue Persian who
was my constant companion. Of course I lived in that garden for hours
every day during the months of April, May, June, and July, and we
guarded the nest very closely, even going so far as to disturb the
balance of Nature by sending the cat away on a visit when the young
birds were being fledged. But one month of May arrived, and though I
noticed the parent blackbirds occasionally among the trees and shrubs,
I never once saw them approaching the old nest, which, as in previous
seasons, was smothered out of sight in the foliage about it, for a
poplar towered above the lilac, and was well furnished.
I remarked to my man that I was afraid our blackbirds had deserted us
this year, and he agreed with me. But one day early in June I saw the
cat look wistfully up the lilac.
“He hasn't forgotten the nest that was there,” I said. “But I'm sure
he'll find out in which of the neighbouring gardens the new one has been
built.”
But every day he came out and gazed up as if into the depths of the
foliage above our heads.
“Ornithology is his hobby,” said I, “but he's not so smart as I fancied,
or he would be hustling around the other gardens where he should know
murder can be done with impunity.”
The next day my man brought out a pair of steps, and placing them firmly
under the lilac, ascended to the level of where the nest had been in
former years.
At once there came the warning chuckle of the blackbirds from the boughs
of the poplar.
“Why, bless my soul! There are four young ones in the nest, and they're
nearly ready to fly,” sang out the investigator from above, and the
parents corroborated every word from the poplar.
I was amazed. It seemed impossible that I could have sat writing under
that tree day after day for two months, watching for signs that the
birds were there, and yet fail to notice them at their work either of
hatching or feeding. It was not carelessness or indifference they had
eluded; it was vigilance. I had looked daily for their coming, and
there was no fine day in which I was not in the garden for four hours,
practically immovable, and the nest was not more than ten feet from the
ground, yet I had remained in ignorance of all that was going on above
my head!
With such an experience I do not think that it becomes me to sneer too
definitely at the stupidity of gamekeepers or farmers. It is when I read
as I do from week to week in _Country Life_ of the laborious tactics
of those photographers who have brought us into closer touch with the
secret life of birds than all the preceding generations of naturalists
succeeded in doing, that I feel more charitably disposed toward the men
who mistake friends for foes in the air.
Every year I give prizes to the younger members of our household
to induce them to keep their eyes and their ears open to their
fellow-creatures who may be seen and heard at times. The hearing of the
earliest cuckoo meets with its reward, quite apart from the gratifying
of an aesthetic sense by the quoting of Wordsworth. The sighting of the
first swallows is quoted somewhat lower on the chocolate exchange,
but the market recovers almost to a point of buoyancy on hearing the
nightingale. The cuckoo is an uncertain customer and requires some
looking after; but the swallows are marvellously punctual. We have never
seen them in our neighbourhood before April the nineteenth. For five
years the Twenty-first is recorded as their day. The nightingale does
not visit our garden, which is practically in the middle of the town;
but half a mile away one is heard almost every year. Upon one happy
occasion it was seen as well as heard, which constituted a standard of
recognition not entertained before.
I asked for an opinion of the bird from the two girls who had had this
stroke of luck.
Each took a different standpoint in regard to its attainments.
“I never heard anything so lovely in all my life,” said Rosamund, aged
ten. “It made you long to--to--I don't know what. It was lovely.”
“And what was your opinion, Olive?” I asked of the second little girl.
My Olive branch looked puzzled for a few minutes, but she had the sense
to perceive that comparative criticism is safe, when a departure from
the beaten track is contemplated. Her departure was parabolic.
“I didn't think it half as pretty a bird as Miss Midleton's parrot,” she
said with conviction.
Miss Midleton's parrot is a gorgeous conglomeration of crimson and blue,
like the 'at of 'arriet, that should be looked at through smoked glasses
and heard not at all.
I think that I shall have Olive educated to take her place in a poultry
run; while Rosamund looks after the rose garden.
*****
My antiquary came to me early on the day after I had asked him for
information about the hanging gardens.
“I've been talking to my friend Thompson on the subject of those hanging
gardens of the Duke's,” said he; “and I thought that you would like to
hear what he says. He agrees with me--I fancied he would. The Duke had
no power to hang any one in his gardens, Thompson says; and even if he
had the power, the pear-trees that we see there now weren't big enough
to hang a man on.”
“A man--a man! My dear sir, I wasn't thinking of his hanging men there:
it was clothes--clothes--linen--pants--shirts--pajamas, and the like.”
“Oh, that's quite another matter,” said he.
I agreed with him.
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
In a foregoing page I brought those who are ready to submit to my
guidance up to the boundary wall of my Garden of Peace by the stone
staircases sloping between the terraces of the old hanging gardens of
the Castle moat. With apologies for such a furtive approach I hasten to
admit them through the entrance that is in keeping with their rank and
station. I bow them through the Barbican Entrance, which is of itself a
stately tower, albeit on the threshold of modernity, having been built
in the reign of Edward II., really not more than six hundred years ago.
I feel inclined to apologise for mentioning this structure of yesterday
when I bring my friends on a few yards to the real thing--the true
Castle gateway, gloriously gaunt and grim, with the grooves for the
portcullis and the hinges on which the iron-barbed gate once swung.
There is no suggestion in its architecture of that effeminacy of the
Perpendicular Period, which may be seen in the projecting parapet of
the Barbican, pierced to allow of the molten lead of my antiquary being
ladled out over the enemy who has not been baffled by the raising of the
drawbridge. Molten lead is well enough in its way, and no doubt, when
brought up nice and warm from the kitchen, and allowed to drop through
the apertures, it was more or less irritating as it ran off the edge of
the helmets below and began to trickle down the backs of an attacking
party. The body-armour was never skintight, and molten lead has had at
all times an annoying way of finding out the joinings in a week-day coat
of mail; we know how annoying the drip of a neighbour's umbrella can be
when it gets through the defence of one's mackintosh collar and meanders
down one's back.--No, not a word should be said against molten lead as a
sedative; but even its greatest admirers must allow that as a medium
of discouragement to an enemy of ordinary sensitiveness it lacked the
robustness of the falling Rock.
The Decorative note of the Perpendicular period may have been in harmony
with such trifling as is incidental to molten lead, but the stern and
uncompromising Early Norman gate would defend itself only with the
Rock. That was its character; and when a few hundredweight of solid
unsculptured stone were dropped from its machicolated parapet upon the
armed men who were fiddling with the lock of the gate below, the people
in the High Street could hardly have heard themselves chatting across
that thoroughfare on account of the noise, and tourists must have
fancied that there was a boiler or two being repaired by a conscientious
staff anxious to break the riveting record.
Everything remains of the Castle gateway except the Gate. The structure
is some forty feet high and twelve feet thick. The screen-wall was
joined to it on both sides, and when you pass under the arch and through
a more humble doorway in the wall you are at the entrance to my Garden
of Peace.
This oaken door has a little history of its own. For several years after
I came to Yardley Parva I used to stand opposite to it in one of the
many narrow lanes leading to the ramparts of the town. I knew that
the building to which it belonged, and where some humble industry was
carried on, embodied the ancient church of Ste. Ursula-in-Foro. The
stone doorway is illus- trated in an old record of the town, and I saw
where the stone had been worn away by the Crusaders sharpening the barbs
of their arrows on it for luck. I had three carefully thought-out plans
for acquiring this door and doorway; but on consideration I came to the
conclusion that they were impracticable, unless another Samson were to
come among us with all the experience of his Gaza feat.
I had ceased to pass through that ancient lane; it had become too much
for me; when suddenly I noticed building operations going on at the
place; a Cinema palace was actually being constructed on the consecrated
site of the ancient church! Happily the door and the doorway were not
treated as material for the housebreaker; they were removed into the
cellar of the owner of the property, and from him they were bought by me
for a small sum--much less than I should have had to pay for the shaped
stones alone. The oak door I set in the wall of my house, and the
doorway I brought down my garden where it now features as an arch
spanning one of the paths.
But my good fortune did not end here; for a few years later a fine
keystone with a sculptured head of Ste. Ursula was dug up in the little
garden behind the site of the tiny church, and was presented to me with
the most important fragments of two deeply-carved capitals such as one
now and again sees at the entrance to a Saxon Church; and so at last
these precious relics of mediaeval piety are joined together after
a disjunctive interval of perhaps five or six hundred years, and,
moreover, on a spot not more than a few hundred feet from where they had
originally been placed.