Part 7 (1/2)
A thrush is making music on a tall tree beyond the garden hedge, and I am more grateful for the distance that divides us than for the song; for, just now, he does not sing so well as sometimes of an evening, when he is most fluent, and a listener, deceived by his sweetness and melody, writes to the papers to say that he has heard the nightingale. Just now his song is sc.r.a.ppy, composed of phrases that follow no order and do not fit or harmonize, and is like a poor imitation of an inferior mocking-bird's song.
Between the sc.r.a.ps of loud thrush-music I listen to catch the thin, somewhat reedy sound of a yellow-hammer singing in the middle of the adjoining gra.s.sy field. It comes well from the open expanse of purpling gra.s.s, and reminds me of a favourite gra.s.shopper in a distant sunny land. O happy gra.s.shopper! singing all day in the trees and tall herbage, in a country where every village urchin is not sent afield to ”study natural history” with green net and a good store of pins, shall I ever again hear thy breezy music, and see thee among the green leaves, beautiful with steel-blue and creamy-white body, and dim purple over and vivid red underwings?
The bird of the pasture-land is singing still, perhaps, but all at once I have ceased to hear him, for something has come to lift me above his low gra.s.sy level, something faint and at first only the suspicion of a sound; then a silvery lisping, far off and aerial, touching the sense as lightly as the wind-borne down of dandelion.
If any place for any soul there be Disrobed and disentrammelled, doubtless it is from such a place and such a soul that this sublimated music falls. The singer, one can imagine, has never known or has forgotten earth; and if it is visible to him, how small it must seem from that alt.i.tude, ”spinning like a fretful midge” beneath him in the vast void!
It is the lark singing in the blue infinite heaven, at this distance with something ethereal and heavenly in his voice; but now the wide circling wings that brought him for a few moments within hearing, have borne him beyond it again; and missing it, the suns.h.i.+ne looks less brilliant than before, and all other bird-voices seem by comparison dull and of the earth.
Certainly there is nothing spiritual in the song of the chaffinch. There he sits within sight, motionless, a little bird-shaped automaton, made to go off at intervals of twelve or thirteen seconds; but unfortunately one hears with the song the whirr and buzz of the internal machinery. It is not now as in April, when it is sufficient in a song that it shall be joyous; in the leafy month, when roses are in bloom, one grows critical, and asks for sweetness and expression, and a better art than this vigorous garden singer displays in that little double flourish with which he concludes his little hurry-scurry lyric. He has practised that same flourish for five thousand years--to be quite within the mark--and it is still far from perfect, still little better than a kind of musical sneeze. So long is art!
Perhaps in some subtle way, beyond the psychologist's power to trace, he has become aware of my opinion of his performance--the unspoken detraction which yet affects its object; and, feeling hurt in his fringilline _amour propre_, he has all at once taken himself off. Never mind; a better singer has succeeded him. I have heard and seen the little wren a dozen times to-day; now he has come to the upper part of the tree I am lying under, and although so near his voice sounds scarcely louder than before. This is also a lyric, but of another kind.
It is not plaintive, nor pa.s.sionate; nor is it so spontaneous as the warbling of the robin--that most perfect feathered impressionist; nor is it endeared to me by early a.s.sociations since I listened in boyhood to the songs of other wrens. In what, then, does its charm consist? I do not know. Certainly it is delicate, and may even be described as brilliant, in its limited way perfect, and to other greater songs like the small pimpernel to a poppy or a hollyhock. Unambitious, yet finished, it has the charm of distinction. The wren is the least self-conscious of our singers. Somewhere among the higher green translucent leaves the little brown barred thing is quietly sitting, busy for the nonce about nothing, dreaming his summer dream, and unknowingly telling it aloud. When shall we have symbols to express as perfectly our summer-feeling--our dream?
That small song has served to remind me of two small books I brought into the garden to read--the works of two modern minor poets whose ”wren-like warblings,” I imagined, would suit my mood and the genial morning better than the stirring or subtle thoughts of greater singers.
Possibly in that I was mistaken; for there until now lie the books neglected on a lawn chair within reach of my hand. The chair was dragged hither half-an-hour ago by a maiden all in white, who appeared half inclined to share the mulberry shade with me. She did not continue long in that mind. In a lively manner, she began speaking of some trivial thing; but after a very few moments all interest in the subject evaporated, and she sat humming some idle air, tapping the turf with her fantastic shoe. Presently she picked up one of my books, opened it at random and read a line or two, her vermilion under-lip curling slightly; then threw it down again, and glanced at me out of the corners of her eyes; then hummed again, and finally became silent, and sat bending forward a little, her dark l.u.s.trous eyes gazing with strange intentness through the slight screen of foliage into the vacant s.p.a.ce beyond. What to see? The poet has omitted to tell us to what the maiden's fancy lightly turns in spring. Doubtless it turns to thoughts of something real. Life is real; so is pa.s.sion--the quickening of the blood, the wild pulsation. But the pleasures and pains of the printed book are not real, and are to reality like j.a.panese flowers made of coloured bits of tissue paper to the living fragrant flowers that bloom to-day and perish to-morrow; they are a simulacrum, a mockery, and present to us a pale phantasmagoric world, peopled with bloodless men and women that chatter meaningless things and laugh without joy. The feeling of unreality affects us all at times, but in very different degrees. And perhaps I was too long a doer, herding too much with narrow foreheads, drinking too deeply of the sweet and bitter cup, to experience that pure unfailing delight in literature which some have. Its charm, I fancy, is greatest to those in whom the natural man, deprived in early life of his proper aliment, grows sickly and pale, and perishes at last of inanition. There is ample room then for the latter higher growth--the unnatural cultivated man. Lovers of literature are accustomed to say that they find certain works ”helpful” to them; and doubtless, being all intellect, they are right. But we, the less highly developed, are compounded of two natures, and while this spiritual pabulum sustains one, the other and larger nature is starved; for the larger nature is earthly, and draws its sustenance from the earth. I must look at a leaf, or smell the sod, or touch a rough pebble, or hear some natural sound, if only the chirp of a cricket, or feel the sun or wind or rain on my face. The book itself may spoil the pleasure it was designed to give me, and instead of satisfying my hunger, increase it until the craving and sensation of emptiness becomes intolerable. Not any day spent in a library would I live again, but rather some lurid day of labour and anxiety, of strife, or peril, or pa.s.sion.
Occupied with this profound question, I scarcely noticed when my shade-sharer, with whom I sympathised only too keenly in her restless mood, rose and, lifting the light green curtain, pa.s.sed out into the suns.h.i.+ne and was gone. Nor did I notice when the little wren ceased singing overhead. At length recalled to myself I began to wonder at the unusual silence in the garden, until, casting my eyes on the lawn, I discovered the reason; for there, moving about in their various ways, most of the birds were collected in a loose miscellaneous flock, a kind of happy family. There were the starlings, returned from the fields, and looking like little speckled rooks; some sparrows, and a couple of robins hopping about in their wild startled manner; in strange contrast to these last appeared that little feathered clodhopper, the chaffinch, plodding over the turf as if he had hobnailed boots on his feet; last, but not least, came statuesque blackbirds and thrushes, moving, when they moved, like automata. They all appear to be finding something to eat; but I Watch the thrushes princ.i.p.ally, for these are more at home on the moist earth than the others, and have keener senses, and seek for n.o.bler game. I see one suddenly thrust his beak into the turf and draw from it a huge earthworm, a wriggling serpent, so long that although he holds his head high, a third of the pink cylindrical body still rests in its run. What will he do with it? We know how wandering Waterton treated the boa which he courageously grasped by the tail as it retreated into the bushes. Naturally, it turned on him, and, lifting high its head, came swiftly towards his face with wide-open jaws; and at this supreme moment, without releasing his hold on its tail, with his free hand he s.n.a.t.c.hed off his large felt hat and thrust it down the monster's throat, and so saved himself.
Just as I am intently watching to see how my hatless little Waterton will deal with _his_ serpent, a startling bark, following by a canine shriek, then a yell, resound through the silent garden; and over the lawn rush those three demoniacal fox-terriers, Snap, Puzzy, and Babs, all determined to catch something. Away fly the birds, and though now high overhead, the baffled brutes continue wildly careering about the grounds, vexing the air with their frantic barkings. No more birds to-day! But now the peace-breakers have discovered me, and come tearing across the lawn, and on to the half-way chair, then to the hammock, scrambling over each other to inflict their unwelcome caresses on my hands and face.
Ah well, let them have their way and do their worst, since the birds are gone, and I shall go soon. It is a consolation to think that they are not my pets; that I shall not grieve, like their mistress, when their brief barking period is over; that I care just so much and no more for them than for any other living creature, not excepting the _fer-de-lance_, ”quoiled in the path like rope in a s.h.i.+p,” or the broad-winged vulture ”scaling the heavens by invisible stairs.” None are out of place where Nature placed them, nor unbeautiful; none are unlovable, since their various qualities--the rage of the one and the gentleness of the other--are but harmonious lights and shades in the ever-changing living picture that is so perfect.
BIRDS IN A CORNISH VILLAGE
I
TAKING STOCK OF THE BIRDS
Having begun, or first written, this book in one village, which was near London, I am now finis.h.i.+ng, or re-writing, it in another in ”the westest part of all the land,” over three hundred miles from the first. Here I had to go over this ancient work of twenty-three years ago, which was also my first English bird book, to prepare it for a new edition; and after all necessary corrections, omissions and additions of fresh matter made in the foregoing parts, it seemed best to throw out the whole of the concluding portion, which dealt mainly with the question of bird-preservation as it presented itself at that time and is now out of date, thanks to the legislation of recent years and to the growth in this country of the feeling or desire for birds during the last two or three decades. In place of this discarded matter I propose to give here the results of recent observations on the bird life of a Cornish village.
My residence in the Cornish Village (or villages) was during May and June, 1915, and again from October of the same year to June, 1916. These were months of ill-health, so that I was prevented from pursuing my customary outdoor rambling life; but, like that poor creature the barnyard fowl that can't use its wings, instinctively, or from old habit, I used my eyes in keeping a watch on the feathered (and flying) people about me.
The village, Lelant, is on the Hayle estuary, and to see the Atlantic one has but to walk past the grey old church at the end of the street, where the ground rises, to find oneself in a wilderness of towans, as the sand-hills are there called, clothed in their rough, grey-green marram gra.s.s and spreading on either hand round the bay of St. Ives. A beautiful sight, for the sea on a sunny day is of that marvellous blue colour seen only in Cornwall; far out on a rock on the right hand stands the s.h.i.+ning white G.o.drevy lighthouse, and on the left, on the opposite side of the bay, the little ancient fis.h.i.+ng-town of St. Ives.
The river or estuary, in sight of the doors and windows of the village, was haunted every day by numbers of gulls and curlews. These last numbered about one hundred and fifty birds, and were always there except at full tide, when they would fly away to the fields and moors. Of all my bird neighbours I think that these gave me most pleasure, especially at night, when lying awake I would listen by the hour to the perpetual curlew conversation going on in the dark--an endless series of clear modulated notes and trills, with a beautiful expression of wildness and freedom, a reminder of lonely seash.o.r.es and mountains and moorlands in the north country. What wonder that Stevenson, sick in his tropical island--sick for his cold grey home so many thousands of miles away, wished once more to hear the whaup crying over the graves of his forefathers, and to hear no more at all!
Of bird music by day there was little; you would hear more of it in one morning in that small rustic village in Berks.h.i.+re where the first part of this book was written than in a whole summer in one of these West Cornwall villages, so few comparatively are the songsters. Nor was this scarcity in the village only; it was everywhere, as I found when able to get out for a few hours during my two spring seasons in the place. Close by were the extensive woods of Trevalloe, where I was struck by the extraordinary silence and where I listened in vain for a single note from blackcap, garden-warbler, willow-wren, wood-wren, or redstart. The thrushes, chaffinch, chiff-chaff, and greenfinch were occasionally heard; outside the wood the buntings, chats, and the skylark were few and far between.
This scarcity of small birds is, I think, due in the first place to the extraordinary abundance of the jackdaw, the diligent seeker after small birds' nests, and to the autumn and winter pastime of bush-beating to which men and boys are given in these parts, and which the Cornish authorities refuse to suppress.
After a time, when, owing to increasing debility, I was confined more and more to the village, I began to concentrate my attention on a few common species that were always present, particularly on the three commonest--rook, daw, and starling; the first two residents, the starling, a winter visitor from September to April.
In October, I started feeding the birds at the house where I was staying as a guest, throwing the sc.r.a.ps on a lawn at the back which sloped down towards the estuary. First came all the small birds in the immediate neighbourhood--robin, dunnock, wagtail, chaffinch, throstle, blackbird, and blue and ox-eye t.i.ts. Then followed troops of starlings, and soon all the rooks and daws in the village began to see what was going on and come too, and this attracted the gulls from the estuary--I wished that it had drawn the curlews; and all these big ones were so greedy and bold, so noisy and formidable-looking that the small birds were quite driven out; all except the starlings that came in hungry crowds and were determined to get their share.
At the beginning of December I had to move to a nursing-home at the Convent of the Sisters of the Cross at the adjacent village of Hayle, just across the estuary. The Convent buildings and grounds and gardens are fortunately outside the ugly village, and my room had an exceptionally big window occupying almost the whole wall on one side, with an outlook to the south over the green fields and moors towards Helston. An ideal sick-room for a man who can't be happy without the company of birds, and here, even when lying on my bed before I was able to sit or stand by the window, a large portion of the sky, rainy or blue, was visible, and rooks and daws and gulls and troops of starlings, and the curlews from the river, were seen coming and going all day long.