The most characteristic district of South Devon, the greenest, most
luxuriant in its vegetation, and perhaps the hottest in England, is
that bit of country between the Exe and the Axe which is watered by
the Clyst, the Otter, and the Sid. In any one of a dozen villages found
beside these pretty little rivers a man might spend a month, a year,
a lifetime, very agreeably, ceasing not to congratulate himself on the
good fortune which first led him into such a garden. Yet after a week
or two in this luxurious land I began to be dissatisfied with my
surroundings. It was June; the weather was exceptionally dry and sultry.
Vague thoughts, or "visitings" of mountains and moors and coasts would
intrude to make the confinement of deep lanes seem increasingly irksome.
Each day I wandered miles in some new direction, never knowing whither
the devious path would lead me, never inquiring of any person, nor
consulting map or guide, since to do that is to deprive oneself of the
pleasure of discovery; always with a secret wish to find some exit as
it were--some place beyond the everlasting wall of high hedges and green
trees, where there would be a wide horizon and wind blowing unobstructed
over leagues of open country to bring me back the sense of lost liberty.
I found only fresh woods and pastures new that were like the old; other
lanes leading to other farm-houses, each in its familiar pretty setting
of orchard and garden; and, finally, other ancient villages, each with
its ivy-grown grey church tower looking down on a green graveyard and
scattered cottages, mostly mud-built and thatched with straw. Finding no
outlook on any side I went back to the streams, oftenest to the Otter,
where, lying by the hour on the bank, I watched the speckled trout
below me and the dark-plumaged dipper with shining white breast standing
solitary and curtseying on a stone in the middle of the current.
Sometimes a kingfisher would flash by, and occasionally I came upon
a lonely grey heron; but no mammal bigger than a watervole appeared,
although I waited and watched for the much bigger beast that gives the
river its name. Still it was good to know that he was there, and had his
den somewhere in the steep rocky bank under the rough tangle of ivy and
bramble and roots of overhanging trees. One was shot by a farmer
during my stay, but my desire was for the living, not a dead otter.
Consequently, when the otter-hunt came with blaze of scarlet coats and
blowing of brass horns and noise of barking hounds and shouts of excited
people, it had no sooner got half a mile above Ottery St. Mary, where I
had joined the straggling procession, than, falling behind, the hunting
fury died out of me and I was relieved to hear that no quarry had been
found. The frightened moorhen stole back to her spotty eggs, the dipper
returned to his dipping and curtseying to his own image in the stream,
and I to my idle dreaming and watching.
The watching was not wholly in vain, since there were here revealed to
me things, or aspects of things, that were new. A great deal depends on
atmosphere and the angle of vision. For instance, I have often looked
at swans at the hour of sunset, on the water and off it, or flying, and
have frequently had them between me and the level sun, yet never have
I been favoured with the sight of the rose-coloured, the red, and the
golden-yellow varieties of that majestic waterfowl, whose natural colour
is white. On the other hand, who ever saw a carrion-crow with crimson
eyes? Yet that was one of the strange things I witnessed on the Otter.
Game is not everywhere strictly preserved in that part of Devon, and the
result is that the crow is not so abhorred and persecuted a fowl as
in many places, especially in the home counties, where the cult of the
sacred bird is almost universal. At one spot on the stream where my
rambles took me on most days a pair of crows invariably greeted my
approach with a loud harsh remonstrance, and would keep near me, flying
from tree to tree repeating their angry girdings until I left the place.
Their nest was in a large elm, and after some days I was pleased to see
that the young had been safely brought off. The old birds screamed at me
no more; then I came on one of their young in the meadow near the river.
His curious behaviour interested me so much that I stood and watched him
for half an hour or longer. It was a hot, windless day, and the bird
was by himself among the tall flowering grasses and buttercups of the
meadow--a queer gaunt unfinished hobbledehoy-looking fowl with a head
much too big for his body, a beak that resembled a huge nose, and a
very monstrous mouth. When I first noticed him he was amusing himself by
picking off the small insects from the flowers with his big beak, a most
unsuitable instrument, one would imagine, for so delicate a task. At the
same time he was hungering for more substantial fare, and every time a
rook flew by over him on its way to or from a neighbouring too populous
rookery, the young crow would open wide his immense red mouth and emit
his harsh, throaty hunger-call. The rook gone, he would drop once
more into his study of the buttercups, to pick from them whatever
unconsidered trifle in the way of provender he could find. Once a small
bird, a pied wagtail, flew near him, and he begged from it just as he
had done from the rooks: the little creature would have run the risk
of being itself swallowed had it attempted to deliver a packet of flies
into that cavernous mouth. I went nearer, moving cautiously, until I was
within about four yards of him, when, half turning, he opened his mouth
and squawked, actually asking me to feed him; then, growing suspicious,
he hopped awkwardly away in the grass. Eventually he permitted a nearer
approach, and slowly stooping I was just on the point of stroking his
back when, suddenly becoming alarmed, he swung himself into the air and
flapped laboriously off to a low hawthorn, twenty or thirty yards away,
into which he tumbled pell-mell like a bundle of old black rags.
Then I left him and thought no more about the crows except that
their young have a good deal to learn upon first coming forth into an
unfriendly world. But there was a second nest and family close by all
the time. A day or two later I discovered it accidentally in a very
curious way.
There was one spot where I was accustomed to linger for a few minutes,
sometimes for half an hour or so, during my daily walks. Here at the
foot of the low bank on the treeless side of the stream there was a
scanty patch of sedges, a most exposed and unsuitable place for any bird
to breed in, yet a venturesome moorhen had her nest there and was now
sitting on seven eggs. First I would take a peep at the eggs, for the
bird always quitted the nest on my approach; then I would gaze into the
dense tangle of tree, bramble, and ivy springing out of the mass 'of
black rock and red clay of the opposite bank. In the centre of this
rough tangle which overhung the stream there grew an old stunted and
crooked fir tree with its tufted top so shut out from the light by the
branches and foliage round it that it looked almost black. One evening I
sat down on the green bank opposite this tangle when the low sun behind
me shone level into the mass of rock and rough boles and branches, and
fixing my eyes on the black centre of the mass I encountered a pair of
crimson eyes staring back into mine. A level ray of light had lit up
that spot which I had always seen in deep shadow, revealing its secret.
After gazing steadily for some time I made out a crow's nest in the
dwarf pine top and the vague black forms of three young fully fledged
crows sitting or standing in it. The middle bird had the shining crimson
eyes; but in a few moments the illusory colour was gone and the eyes
were black.
It was certainly an extraordinary thing: the ragged-looking
black-plumaged bird on its ragged nest of sticks in the deep shade, with
one ray of intense sunlight on its huge nose-like beak and blood-red
eyes, a sight to be remembered for a lifetime! It recalled Zurbaran's
picture of the "Kneeling Monk," in which the man with everything about
him is steeped in the deepest gloom except his nose, on which one ray of
strong light has fallen. The picture of the monk is gloomy and austere
in a wonderful degree: the crow in his interior with sunlit big beak and
crimson eyes looked nothing less than diabolical.
I paid other visits to the spot at the same hour, and sat long and
watched the crows while they watched me, occasionally tossing pebbles on
to them to make them shift their positions, but the magical effect was
not produced again.
As to the cause of that extraordinary colour in the crow's eyes, one
might say that it was merely the reflected red light of the level sun.
We are familiar with the effect when polished and wet surfaces, such as
glass, stone, and water, shine crimson in the light of a setting sun;
but there is also the fact, which is not well known, that the eye may
show its own hidden red--the crimson colour which is at the back of
the retina and which is commonly supposed to be seen only with the
ophthalmoscope. Nevertheless I find on inquiry among friends and
acquaintances that there are instances of persons in which the iris
when directly in front of the observer with the light behind him, always
looks crimson, and in several of these cases the persons exhibiting
this colour, or danger signal, as it may be called, were subject to
brain trouble. It is curious to find that the crimson colour or light
has also been observed in dogs: one friend has told me of a pet King
Charles, a lively good-tempered little dog with brown eyes like any
other dog, which yet when they looked up, into yours in a room always
shone ruby-red instead of hyaline blue, or green, as is usually the
case. From other friends I heard of many other cases: one was of a
child, an infant in arms, whose eyes sometimes appeared crimson, another
of a cat with yellow eyes which shone crimson-red in certain lights.
Of human adults, I heard of two men great in the world of science, both
dead now, in whose eyes the red light had been seen just before and
during attacks of nervous breakdown. I heard also of four other persons,
not distinguished in any way, two of them sisters, who showed the red
light in the eyes: all of them suffered, from brain trouble and two of
them ended their lives in asylums for the insane.
Discussing these cases with my informants, we came to the conclusion
that the red light in the human eye is probably always a pathological
condition, a danger signal; but it is not perhaps safe to generalize
on these few instances, and I must add that all the medical men I
have spoken to on the subject shake their heads. One great man, an eye
specialist, went so far as to say that it is impossible, that the red
light in the eye was not seen by my informants but only imagined. The
ophthalmoscope, he said, will show you the crimson at the back of the
eye, but the colour is not and cannot be reflected on the surface of the
iris.