[Original]
FEBRUARY DAYS
The snow has gone from the landscape and the sun, at the hour of setting, has got round to the wood that crowns the hill on the other side of the valley. Soon it will set on the slope of the hill and then down on the plain. Then we shall know that spring has come. Two days ago a blackbird, from the paddock below the orchard, added his golden baritone to the tenor of the thrush who had been shouting good news from the beech tree across the road for weeks past. I don't know why the thrush should glimpse the dawn of the year before the blackbird, unless it is that his habit of choosing the topmost branches of the tree gives him a better view of the world than that which the golden-throated fellow gets on the lower branches that he always affects. It may be the same habit of living in the top storey that accounts for the early activity of the rooks. They are noisy neighbours, but never so noisy as in these late February days, when they are breaking up into families and quarrelling over their slatternly household arrangements in the topmost branches of the elm trees. They are comic ruffians who wash all their dirty linen in public, and seem almost as disorderly and bad-tempered as the human family itself. If they had only a little of our ingenuity in mutual slaughter there would be no need for my friend the farmer to light bonfires underneath the trees in order to drive the female from the eggs and save his crops.
A much more amiable little fellow, the great tit, has just added his modest assurance that spring is coming. He is not much of a singer, but he is good hearing to anyone whose thoughts are turning to his garden and the pests that lurk therein for the undoing of his toil. The tit is as industrious a worker in the garden as the starling, and, unlike the starling, he has no taste for my cherries. A pair of blue tits have been observed to carry a caterpillar to their nest, on an average every two minutes for the greater part of the day. That is the sort of bird that deserves encouragement—a bird that loves caterpillars and does not love cherries. There are very few creatures with so clean a record. So hang out the cocoanut as a sign of goodwill.
And yet, as I write, I am reminded that in this imperfect world where no unmixed blessing is vouchsafed to us, even the tit does not escape the general law of qualified beneficence. For an hour past I have been agreeably aware of the proximity of a great tit who, from a hedge below the orchard, has been singing his little see-saw song with unremitting industry. Now behold him. There he goes flitting and pirouetting with that innocent grace which, as he skips in and out of the hedge just in front of you, suggests that he is inviting you to a game of hide-and-seek. But not now. Now he is revealing the evil that dwells in the best of us. Now he reminds us that he too is a part of that nature which feeds so relentlessly on itself. See him over the hives, glancing about in his own erratic way and taking his bearings. Then, certain that the coast is clear, he nips down and taps upon one of the hives with his beak. He skips away to await results. The trick succeeds; the doorkeeper of the hive comes out to enquire into the disturbance, and down swoops the great tit and away he flies with his capture. An artful fellow in spite of his air of innocence.
There is no affectation of innocence about that robust fellow the starling. He is almost as candid a ruffian as the rook, and three months hence I shall hate him with an intensity that would match Caligula's “Oh, that the Romans had only one neck!” For then he will come out of the beech woods on the hillside for his great annual spring offensive against my cherry trees, and in two or three days he will leave them an obscene picture of devastation, every twig with its desecrated fruit and the stones left bleaching in the sun. But in these days of February I can be just even to my enemy. I can admit without reserve that he is not all bad any more than the other winsome little fellow is all good. See him on autumn or winter days when he has mobilised his forces for his forages in the fields, and is carrying out those wonderful evolutions in the sky that are such a miracle of order and rhythm. Far off, the cloud approaches like a swirl of dust in the sky, expanding, contracting, changing formation, breaking up into battalions, merging into columns, opening out on a wide front, throwing out flanks and advance guards and rear guards, every complication unravelled in perfect order, every movement as serene and assured as if the whole cloud moved to the beat of some invisible conductor below—a very symphony of the air, in which motion merges into music, until it seems that you are not watching a flight of birds, but listening with the inner ear to great waves of soundless harmony. And then, the overture over, down the cloud descends upon the fields, and the farmers' pests vanish before the invasion. And if you will follow them into the fields you will find infinite tiny holes that they have drilled and from which they have extracted the lurking enemy of the drops, and you will remember that it is to their beneficial activities that we owe the extermination of the May beetle, whose devastations were so menacing a generation ago. And after the flock has broken up and he has paired, and the responsibilities of housekeeping have begun he continues his worthy labours. When spring has come you can see him dart from his nest in the hollow of the tree and make a journey a minute to the neighbouring field, returning each time with a chafer-grub or a wire-worm or some other succulent, but pestiferous morsel for the young and clamorous family at home. That acute observer, Mr G. G. Desmond, says that he has counted eighteen such journeys in fifteen minutes. What matter a few cherries for a fellow of such benignant spirit?
But wait, my dear sir, wait until June brings the ripening cherries and see how much of this magnanimity of February is left.
Sir, I refuse to be intimidated by June or any other consideration. Sufficient unto the day—— And to-day I will think only good of the sturdy fellow in the coat of mail. To-day I will think only of the brave news that is abroad. It has got into the hives. On fine days such as this stray bees sail out for water, bringing the agreeable tidings that all is well within, that the queen bee is laying her eggs, “according to plan,” and that moisture is wanted in the hive. There are a score of hives in the orchard, and they have all weathered the winter and its perils. We saw the traces of one of those perils when the snow still lay on the ground. Around each hive were the footmarks of a mouse. He had come from a neighbouring hedge, visited each hive in turn, found there was no admission and had returned to the hedge no doubt hungrier than he came. Poor little wretch! to be near such riches, lashings of sweetness and great boulders of wax, and not be able to get bite or sup. I see him trotting back through the snow to his hole, a very dejected mouse. Oh, these new-fangled hives that don't give a fellow a chance.