Sometimes he is a positive blackguard. One year (1914) I found a cuckoo’s egg in a tiny nest of a common wren. When hatched, and only after much difficulty, he hoisted out all his companions, or squashed them, until he broke the nest (round like a ball, and with the hole about an inch or so in diameter in the side) and squatted insolently on top of it. The wrens, with their upright, barred little tails ever jerking with pride, fed him incessantly. The female worked so hard, and the cuckoo was so greedy, that eventually the top of her head was devoid of all feathers, and made quite raw by the beak of her wonder-child. But she was very brave, and was apparently quite indifferent to the risk she ran of one day disappearing altogether. I have often wondered if cuckoos have the power of projecting into other birds the maternal love, or instinct, that is so obviously deficient in themselves. This seems to be the logical conclusion to draw, even if it be incomprehensible to the man who in human life thinks in terms of matter and the individual, instead of the spirit and the species.
1916.
DAYS OF AUTUMN
One morning in the hollows of the meadow land below the wood lay a silver mist. The sun sweeping upwards in its curve beat this away towards noon, but it was a sign. The fire of autumn was kindled: already the little notched leaves of the hawthorn were tinged with the rust of decay, already a bramble leaf was turning red: soon the flames would mount the mightier trees and fan their pale heat among the willows and ash trees round the lake, lick among the drooping elms and the lacquered oaks, and sweep in abandonment with yawning fire of colour through the old beech forest.
Years ago now, in the glamorous time of childhood, this coming of the mist in the morning with its fragrance arising from the earth peculiar to summer’s end—the fumous, clinging smell of a torch—filled me with great sadness. No birds sang in the woods. By the mere, about this time, hundreds of swallows would gather. Restlessly they clung to the sedges and the rushes, whose tips were beginning to brown and make faint whisper in the wind; now flinging themselves into the air, twittering, mounting high, wheeling and slipping, now descending like a shower of iron darts to the border of the lake. Sometimes on my way to school I went to watch them, being caught occasionally as I crept in through an unofficial entrance to the school, and punishment ensued. What use to explain the poignant feelings about autumn and the departure of my beautiful swallows to lands where I could not follow? More important to the boy were his forced learnings than his blundering and unconscious poetry; and the sunlight came through the window, making him miserable. In fancy he was roaming the old hills, or dreaming by the brook; and that was indolence—he would never fit himself for the conflict of a mature life in London by idleness and dreaming. So the little boy was often punished, and frequently occupied the lowest seat of his form.
As the days went on the swallows were more anxious. The cuckoos and the swifts had long since departed. Here and there in the fountain-shaped elms a yellow patch of leaves showed like a spilled plash of water imprisoning a sunbeam. The peggles on the hawthorns were reddening; and waving their pennants in the wind the dry rustling of the sedges came across the water with excited notes of the swallows. As one swept by, low in flight, the deep blue of his wings, their exquisite and soft uplift, the delicacy of the forked tail, were reflected on the surface; with a sighing sound he would pass and his liquid image glide on the mirrored surface below him.
The mornings were chilly, but the vagrants continued to hold their parliament in the rushes. Insect life was on the wane, adventure stirred their little hearts to excitement. Every passing of the wind beckoned a forlorn following of leaves from the trees, a spider seeking hibernation threw a prospecting line of silk against the face. With a tired sound the starred sycamore leaves, each condemned by the black patch of autumn, fluttered to the earth; by listening closely it was possible to hear the stalks break from the twigs. Flittering like chafer-beetles in a dusky summer night the vaned seeds risped and whirled away from the parent trees. As yet the conflagration had not caught the forest, only isolated flames browned a beech tree, scorched the branch of an ash with yellow or made a buff haze in the distant oaks. It seemed as though the funeral pyre of dead summer would blaze in majesty only when the swallows had left.
One afternoon their shriller notes told that the hour was approaching. So eager were they among themselves that I was permitted to approach within a yard of them. I could see their frail claws, and admire the slim outline of their bodies; a melancholy admiration, like that of age with a young heart for youth and beauty that it yearns to share; the swallows were much to me, but I was nothing to them. Suddenly with a rush of wings they swept up, soon to become a smudge against the sky. But the wind was not favourable, or the message anticipated had not arrived, for they returned to the sedges that never ceased to shiver of coming dreariness. The autumnal air was tranquil in its silence and solitude; the wings of gnats dancing their mazy columns assumed in the sunshine a fairy semblance. Over the waters sped the swallows, taking the last banquet, for once the long journey were commenced no halt would be made for food; the thousands of miles over sea and land must be passed without falter, urged and directed by the ancient instinct developed long before Zoroaster came from the plains of Iran with his Magian worship.
The next morning when I went to bid them farewell the lake was deserted. My friends had gone, and I had not said good-bye. During the night a wind had risen, and they had fled before it to the warm south. I prayed that their strength did not fail while the little things were over the cold gray sea. I could do no more. But my heart was heavy.
When the migrants have departed the fires of autumn throw their flames and falling shadows rapidly over the countryside. In the morning moisture drip-drips from the trees, their tops are wraithed in mist, and the jay screams as he lurks among the acorns. Every day the sun describes a lower curve and, red and small, looms through the vapours. But above he is spinning and carding the mist, warmth blows on the cheek as for a moment brightness streams down, and so happiness comes again. Once more the thoughts of desolation are dispelled like the mist, and hope rises anew to the heart. In the murmuring green of spring, the radiant birdsong of summer, it is indeed difficult to be sad. Though all human efforts seem without avail, the song and scent and colour of summer fills the yearning heart and assuages its broken hopes. But in autumn and winter, at least for a long time, no consolation was there anywhere. Underfoot the old paths were beaten into mire by the passing of feet; these were the leaves, each so perfect and veined and shaped, that had opened from buds to the croon of wild cloves and the tap-tap of woodpeckers. Nature seemed to care nothing for the things that were created: the hand that composed so lovingly decomposed as inevitably.