There were hundreds of them on the shore. All were too weak to move. I was filled with a great tenderness for them; they showed no fear; I liked to think they knew I would not harm them. The night went on; an owl bayed on the gorse slopes behind. Soon they left, with flapping flight, sometimes hopping. Towards dawn the valley and the hills were filled with their notes rising and falling like the whirring of a spinning wheel, the love song of the evejar.
The bee-swallow, as the nightjar is also called, pairs for life. It is a faithful idealist, like the owl, the falcon, and the long-tailed titmouse. It feeds on moths and chafer-beetles; and lays two eggs among the bracken.
Next morning the sun burned in an azure sky. The gulls wheeled over the surf, seeking poor soddened bundles of feathers that only a little while since had been filled with hope and spurred by love to cross the ocean, but had fallen into the water and been drowned.
ii
Returning from inland fields, three gulls with tranquil evening flight passed over the hill towards the headland. A sheep path wound irregularly over the hill, amongst the heather and the uncurling brakeferns. From here the western ocean was seen afar, until it met the clouded heaven. A subdued roar, a growling under-current of sound, floated up the hillside, although the sea was calm. Night and day, for thousands of years, the same ceaseless mutter of the shifting tides upon the sands, the same pounding of the headland as the tons of gray-green water slid over the rocks and into its hidden caverns.
A small wind moved the heather, and shook a dog-violet with its face turned to the westering sun. It was the tail of the sea-breeze. The air over the fields was cold, and soon it would move down to the sands to explore the darkling sea still warm with the fervour of the sunbeams. A late bee droned among the birds-foot trefoil on the pathway, eager to gather more honey for the winter. The yellow flowers grew low down, and some were stained with deep, tawny orange, as though Antares, the dull red star of summer, had joined its blessing of colour with the greatest gift of beauty and life bestowed by the sun. Near them grew the germander speedwell, also lowly (for the salt winds that sweep the hill care nothing for the humble things of the earth) their sweet blue eyes turned in wonder to the great flower of the sky. A lark with crest upraised waited upon a hummock of mould thrown up by a rabbit—her nest was somewhere near, hidden in a tangle of burnet-rose. The bee left the trefoil, and droned away down the hill. A blackbird sang in the valley below, where gorse, blackthorn, bramble, and stunted holly choked an ancient waterbourne between the steep hills. It was evening, and he chanted to the departing splendour. Alone sang the sable artist, serene on a twig of blackthorn, having no illusions about life, fretted by no unnecessary labour or research, for ever happy in the sunshine or sleeping restfully as the stars burned above the lonely valley.
Over the sea a golden beam of light trailed from a cloud and lit the gray waters. The massed vapours opened and other beams cast their gilt on the waves. A full rigged sailing ship, vague in the distance, entered the sacred gleam and became a barque of glory passing into the unknown. Nearer the shore, where the white lines of surf crept up the sands, a silver glitter danced and threw a million silver points for the mind to dream upon—as though an Immortal had flung the Golden Fleece for mortal eyes to see. Slowly the sun sank seawards; the beams were dulled; the ship became once more a drab wanderer on its human mission; a wild mew came down from heaven. With dark wings motionless, a buzzard sailed circlewise, although the hour of hunting was over. Higher and higher the great bird soared, controlling the winds of evening. In his mastery of the air he joyed, as though desiring to outsoar the stars that soon would glimmer over a quiet world. Below on the flats a flock of ring-plover ran to their feeding; their nests were among the pebbles and bleached seaweed near the dunes of the Burrows. Although unseen, their presence was known by the sweetness of their call-notes.
Like a cannon-ball heated to a crimson glow was the sun behind the vapours where a fume of vague light appeared over the hills to eastward. More sinister grew the outline of the headland, a beast replete and resting its shaggy head on sunken paws. No gulls drifted to their nocturnal roosting; the buzzard had plunged into the hidden pinewood to his eyrie. Here a vast collection of sticks, rabbits’ bones, rats’ tails, beetle skins and skulls of voles, carried there during a score of years, and resting in a fir, supported his brooding mate and her three blotched eggs.
When the moon was up an evejar rose from the patch of swaled gorse; the creamy marks on its wings and tail were visible in the confluence of light from the gates of heaven—the flood of the moon’s white fires and the lingering afterglow over the Atlantic. In anguish at the violation of its hymeneal sanctities the skep-swallow returned and wheeled, beating its wings together. No sound disturbed the silence, no movement stirred the bracken; only a mouse rustled in the dried brambles, only a chafer beetle, booming through the dusk, sought a dew-drop on a leaf of foxglove. The birds, wedded for all time, returned together and settled on the ground. Then the male bird mounted a stump of gorse, crouched low, and poured forth a reeling song. Like the risp of a grasshopper it came, like a shaken matchbox, like a crowstarver’s clappers heard afar. Against the moon the evejar sang his song, whispering huskily of his ecstacies during the pause. Sometimes he waited for the shy answer of his love—she who had journeyed over foreign wastes with him to the remembered valleyside of heather. Soft was her rapturous murmur in the summer night, a gentle reassurance of faith and hope, while the stars shone in the sky above them. Like spun and argent coins the moths went down to the dew-sweetened flowers. Only a reverent watcher and the pure face of the moon saw their espousal.