THE CORNCRAKE.
The corncrake has arrived. As I turned in at the gate last night he reported himself in the usual way. So now we are in for it. The priceless boon of silence in the hours of darkness will be denied to us for many weeks to come.
I do not know how to describe his utterance. It could not without extravagance be called a note, still less a chirp, and least of all a song. It is not a bark—not quite. It is hardly a growl or a grunt or a snort; I should be sorry to call it a bray or a yelp. And yet I am not going to admit that it is a quack or a bleat; and it isn't a screech or a squeal or a sob. Nor is it a croak, though now we are getting nearer to it. The puzzling thing about it is that it was clearly meant by Nature to be an interjection. Uttered once, suddenly, from the far side of a hedge it would admirably convey such a sentiment as, "Hi!" "What ho!" or "Here we are again!" But in practice it is the one sound in the whole landscape that never interjects. It is a monument of barren reiteration.
I wonder why he does it. No doubt he has some end in view. He must get something out of it—some bodily ease or mental stimulus or spiritual consolation. But he must surely have been born with a prodigious passion for monotony. It may surprise you to learn that in the course of the season he will make that same remark over two million times. I have worked it out. Two million is a conservative estimate. It only allows for eight hours' work out of the twenty-four, for a term of six weeks: so that it is well within the mark.
Our corncrake—I don't know what the usual standard may be—does ninety-eight to the minute. He is as regular as the ticking of a clock. You can't hustle him and you can't wear him out. At times when I have thought he might be getting tired and thirsty I have imagined that he was slowing down; but he never gets below ninety-six; and in his most active and feverish moments he very rarely touches the hundred. At short measured intervals he punctuates the night with his dry delivery, unhasting yet unresting, his sole idea to get his forty-seven-thousand up without a break before the morning. He just doesn't know the meaning of the word emphasis; he has absolutely no sense of rhythm. Once I tried to believe that he was talking in three-four time, or at least that he was occasionally accenting a note. But he never does. He gets no louder or softer, higher or lower, quicker or slower—he just keeps on.
You need not suppose that I have meekly sat down under this thing. This is his sixth year, and I have been at war with him all the time. But finally he holds the field, and my only hope now is that his powers may begin to fail as old age creeps on. Even if he dropped to eighty a minute it would be an intense relief. But I dare say he means to bequeath the pitch to a successor at his death—perhaps to a relative.
At first I used to throw things at him out of the bedroom window—hairbrushes and slippers and books and all sorts of odds and ends. I had to go round with a basket after breakfast collecting them. But it was no good; he never dropped a beat. Then I deliberately devastated the garden, with a view to deprive him of cover. I had all the bushes taken up and the flowerbeds removed, and I laid down, just under my bedroom window, a wide expanse of tar-macadam, as bald and flat as a mirror—a beetle couldn't have hidden himself on it. (I had to call this a hard tennis-court for the sake of appearances. We do as a matter of fact play on it sometimes.) But it had no effect on the corncrake. Of course the truth is that I never have the least idea where he is; no one has. No one has over seen him or ever will. He is endowed with great ventriloquial powers. That is a provision of Nature, and if you will reflect a moment you will see that it must be so. For, granted that he is to go on talking like that, if he could not throw his voice about from place to place and thus make it impossible to get at him, the species would become extinct.
There is nothing more that I can do, and it is only fair to admit that the whole thing is my own fault. When I built my house six years ago I might have shown a little common foresight in this matter. I got everything else right as far as I could. My rooms are well placed for sunshine and they have the best of the view. The water-supply is good; there is plenty of fall for the drainage system; we are well out of the motor dust. But I omitted one precaution. I should have had the ground surveyed for corncrakes.