III
I often wonder how it is that the old saying, about March and its leonine or lamb-like incomings and outgoings, should have kept so sturdily its place in popular credence. Looking through a pile of old note-books ranging back over a couple of decades or so, I find that, in the majority of years, March has both begun and ended in the lamb-like character. The lion appears only in the rôle of an interloper, a go-between; for, almost invariably, there has been a period of chilly, riotous weather sometime after the middle of the month.
So it has come about this season. Yesterday was a day without a flaw; and as the sun began at last to mellow and decline, dragging a net of shining golden haze behind it over the western hills, I gave up a day-long, though still unfinished task, and went to sit awhile on the churchyard wall.
The north-west wall is the last rampart of Windlecombe. It is made of flint, with an oval, red-brick coping of generous breadth: there is none in the parish, as far as I know, but can be comfortable upon it. Sitting thereon side-saddle-wise, you have a view, on the one hand, of the grey stones and evergreenery of the churchyard, and, on the other, your glance can wander unchecked straight down the combe to the river, then forward over the brook-country to the far-off Stavisham woods. As yet the light had abated scarce a jot of its dynamic brilliance. Shadows were long, and the white house-fronts had taken on a leaven of rosy sweetness; but in the most retiring nooks it was still broad day. I turned my back on the serene prospect of level plain, where here and there the sunlight picked out a glittering coil of river, and set myself to the contemplation of a remarkable fellowship near at hand.
Close by the wall stood an almond-tree, its wide-spreading branches covered to the tips with pink blossom, and behind it glowered and gloomed a venerable yew. The one tree, as it were, reached out glad, welcoming arms to the spring, squandering its all to make one hour of joyous festival at the return of the prodigal light; the other turned but a niggardly side-eye on all the inflowing radiance of the season. It seemed to be trying to do its least and worst, to discount the extravagant jubilation of its neighbour. For very shame it could not wholly resist the call of the sunshine. Grudgingly it put forth, at the tip of each sombre green frond, a sparse sprig of lighter green. And because the almond-tree threw down its spent blossom in largesse of rosy litter upon the grass below, this dour-natured vegetable, turning its necessities to virtuous account, now shed the dead brown buds of the foregoing year, sending this rubbish fluttering to earth with the same hesitant, sidelong action with which the almond petals fell, as though in a mockery of imitation.
As I sat on the wall with my back to the declining sun,—humouring this, and many similar far-fetched, vain conceits as the best antidote I knew against the day’s long overstrain of fancy,—high overhead in the church tower hard by, the bell began its quiet summons for evensong. Through gaps in the thicket of ilex and laurel, I saw, first, the tall, gaunt figure of the Reverend go by on the litten-path with his vast, confident stride, the pallid threadpaper of a curate flickering at his heels. After them came Miss Sweet, the rich and lonely spinster up at the great house, mincing along under a puce sunshade, with an extended handful of ivory books; then Mrs. Coles from the farm, as ever, hot and out of breath; finally, at a respectful interval carefully calculated, three or four of the village women dribbled through, and disappeared into the north porch after the rest.
The usual weekly congregation being now complete, the bell stopped. The harmonium gave out one low, sonorous note, which on weekdays was the beginning and end of its share in the service. For the next twenty minutes, no other sound drifted over to me but the clucking and whistling of the starlings on the chancel roof. And then, having become again immersed in the affair of the yew and almond trees, both now alike steeped by the setting sun in the same rose-red dye, I was startled by a hand on my arm. The Reverend stood at my side, ruddy-faced, red-bearded, the very blackness of his clothes changed mysteriously to the like glowing hue. His kind eyes looked straight into mine, just as if he could see them.
‘A fine evening, isn’t it?’ he said, ‘just one rich flood of crimson without form—only a great light spreading up the sky from where the sun has disappeared; spreading up and gradually paling and changing until there is nothing but pure blue, with one silver peg of a star sticking in it—is it not so?’
‘Why, no, it is not quite that,’ said I, considering, ‘the star is there sure enough, and the great red light. But the red does not merge into blue, it melts gradually into a wonderful, luminous, metallic green, with the star, almost white, swimming in the midst of it. Far overhead the sky is blue enough, and up there more stars are blinking out every moment. But the green! If you could only see its—’
‘Snow!’ interrupted the old vicar placidly.
‘What!’
‘Snow. Wind first, a gale perhaps; and then the snow. You will see. What says the almond-tree here?’
‘It says,’ I contended, ‘but one word. Spring!—abounding new life and growth; sunshine kindling stronger and stronger every day; the winter gone and already half forgotten. With every pink bloom it promises nightingales, and white flannels and straw hats and—’
‘Ah! And you never will grow up now: you’re too old. The almond-blossom?—it lies in my memory always side by side with the snowdrop and the Christmas-rose. Snow-flowers, all three! Wait a little, and be convinced. But now look, and tell me which way the chimney-smoke is blowing.’
‘Blowing! There is not a breath of—’
There was more than a breath down there in the fair-way of the combe, although here we could feel nothing of it. Under the deep red dusk I could make out the smoke-plumes from the village chimneys all driving off at a sharp right-angle to the south. Even as I looked, there came a sudden flaw of wind overhead that set the yew boughs rocking, and its voice was the old-remembered voice. The north wind again! Somewhere in its black tangled depths the yew-tree creaked derisively. The Reverend put his arm through mine.
‘But it is mercifully late,’ he said, as we turned homeward together. ‘Artlett need not fear for his lambs now, nor I for mine. Is the sky already overcast? Or am I only blinder than usual?’
IV
After that day I was house-bound for near upon a week. Later than its wont by a good hour, the dawn broke every day; but as in darkness so with the grey wan light, the wind never abated one iota of its whistling fury; the soft thud-thud of the flying snow reverberated on the panes; the white drifts at the street corners mounted steadily higher and higher; in the fireplace, where I already thought soon to start my summer fernery, I had the logs crackling and glowing with more than their old wintry might. Poor almond-blossom! I thought to myself again and again, as I sat industriously scratching away in the strange dumbness and the thin, queer light that fills the room in snowy weather.
Yet this was not so ill a wind but that some good was blown my way. I found myself overhauling arrears of work at a surprising rate. When the wind fell at last, backing steadily to west, then to south-west, and there came a night of drenching rain—rain that felt like hot tea to a hand held out in it—I was ready for any sort of idleness and any wandering company.
Two long days and nights the world lay under that simmering, steaming cataract. And then such a morning—almost the last morning of the month—rose over Windlecombe as made the mere awakening in one’s bed seem like a sort of first act in a miracle play.
The sun had hardly breasted Windle Hill before I was out and clear of the village: its last red tinge had faded into night when I turned my tired steps homeward, and so to bed once more.
Lying there cosily, with the delicious ache of thirty miles in my bones, and in my ears the lilt of a thousand melodies, all the glad day’s journey projected itself like swiftly changing pictures thrown upon the screen of the starry night. The Downs first—the green sea of hills that seemed to heave and subside as the violet cloud-shadows lazily drove from crest to crest; the unending sheep-bell music, and lark-song, and the playing of the gulls high up in the blue, like scraps of white paper fluttering in the breeze. Then down the steep hill-side to the sunny flats, where the plovers were at their love-play—each pair rising and falling, somersaulting together, crying continually, coming to rest a moment, then up again at the old interminable gambols.
Here in the deep ditches the frogs croaked. There was a golden rim of marsh-marigold to every strip of water, over which you must peer if you would study the submerged life below. And what a life there was down in each crystal deep! Queer water-beetles wove a bright pattern on the surface of the slow-moving, almost stagnant stream; and their shadows made just the same pattern on the sunlit weed of the bottom, though here it was black instead of bright. Down there were mimic forests or jungles of ferny, bronze-green growth, all in gentle undulating motion as the water glided imperceptibly by. Shoals of minnows cruised about in the sunny open, or lay in wait singly in the shadowy glades. These single fish seemed to be for ever quarrelling; either making sudden raid on the lairs of their neighbours, or being attacked in their turn. When they banded themselves together, evidently making common peace the better to rout a common enemy, and swam boldly in the sunshine, I could see that each fish was faintly tinged with blue and green and orange-red, the identical colours, although vague and subdued, of the kingfisher, their traditional foe.
Then came up the vision of a long white road barred with tree-shadows, flowing between thorn-hedges already full of a green promise of leafage, and edged with butterfly-haunted flowers. Little cottages passed by, ankle-deep in blue forget-me-nots, and aflare with blossoming creepers. Deep pine-woods took the road and folded it in fragrant gloom, then set it forth in the sunshine again to wander over gorse-clad heaths, or amidst spangled meadows. I saw the inn, where I sat awhile in a company of travelling ‘rinders’—men who strip the bark from the felled oaks for the tanneries-who would now be camping, like Robin and his merry rascals, a month long in the woods.
I dozed off, and woke again where, in the drowsy afternoon sunshine, I had rested under a great pollard ash weighed down with ivy. Upon the grass about my feet there shone an infinity of small, rounded objects, much as if Aladdin had passed by and thrown down a handful of superfluous rubies. Everywhere their soft carmine lustre gemmed the sward. Year by year I have found the like on meadow-paths, wood-rides, by the church tower, sometimes in the very streets of the village, and have never known how they came into being. You may have broken asunder the ivy-berries a hundred times, and noted the pale-hued seeds within, yet never guessed that here was the mining-ground for your treasure. It is the sun and air that make rubies of the fallen ivy seeds.
And, for a last vision, as I lay watching the starshine travelling across the square of the window, I saw within it a picture, and heard again a note of music, perhaps the most wonderful thing in the whole day’s idle round. It was a keeper’s cottage at the entrance to a wood. On the steep thatch, white pigeons hobbled amorously; and behind, in a green bower of elder, a wild bird sang. I could see the bird; I knew it to be a common song-thrush; but the song was the song of a nightingale—not the loud, silver-toned warble that the poets love, but the low, slow, sorrowful keening that always seems as if torn from the very heart of the bird. And here is a pretty problem. If the nightingale were already with us, singing in every brake, there would be nothing strange in the thrush—prone as he is to imitation—borrowing a stanza from the new melody here and there. But it is more than strange that he should do so at the present time, seeing that, for eight or nine months back, there has been no nightingale music in the land. Yet we, who are mute fowl, are all thinking of April now, and what it has in store for us: can the thrush be thinking of April too? And, as with us, can old memories of nightingales be stirring in him?—in him that alone can sing his thoughts aloud?
