The Kentucky Warbler

by James Lane Allen

He said to himself, looking all round him, that he had the outdoor loneliness and blindness of Silas Marner this wonderful morning.

Propped against the tree he sat still a while, thinking of the long day before him and of how he should spend it in this thin empty pasture, abandoned by the wild creatures. But as he deliberated, suddenly and then more and more he awoke to things going on around him.

A few feet away and on a level with his eyes a little fellow descended from high over-head. A little green gymnast trying to reach the ground by means of his own rope which he manufactured out of his body as he came down. How could he do it? How had he learned the very first time to make the rope strong enough to bear his weight instead of its giving way and letting him drop? Something seized one of Webster's ankles with a pair of small jaws like pincers and reminded him that his foot was in the way: it had better move on. A black ant suddenly rushed angrily over his knee. A cricket leaped in the grass. One autumn one of them had started its song behind the wainscoting, Elinor had pushed her toe against the woodwork and silenced it. A few feet away a bunch of white clover blossomed: a honey bee was searching it. Webster found on the back of one of his hands, which was pressed against the grass, a tiny crimson coach—a mere dot of a crimson coach being moved along he could not see how. The colour was most gorgeous and the material of the finest velvet. He let it go on its way across his hand withersoever it might be journeying. Directly opposite his eyes, some forty feet from the ground, was a round hole in a rotten tree-trunk. Webster wondered whether a bird ever pecked a square hole in anything. Suddenly from behind him a red-headed bird flew to the dead tree-trunk and alighted near the hole: he recognised the wood-pecker. And he remembered that this was the first bird Wilson had killed that first day he entered the American forest: he was glad that it was the first he encountered! No sooner had the wood-pecker alighted than the head of another bird appeared at the hole and the wood-pecker took to his heels—to his wings. Webster wished he had known what this other bird was: it had a black band across its chest and wore a speckled jacket and a dull reddish cap on the back of its head. A disturbance reached him from a nearby treetop, a wailing voice, a gulping sound, as if something up there were sick and full of suffering and were trying to take its medicine. He watched the spot and presently a crow flew out of the thick leaves: the crow's family seemed not in good health. A ground squirrel jumped to the end of a rotting log some yards away but at sight of him shrieked and darted in again. The whole pasture was alive.

Webster had all this time become conscious that another sound had been reaching his ear at regular intervals from the high branches of the trees, first in one place and then in another. His eyes had followed the voice but he could see no bird. The sound was like this:

Se—u—re?

That was the first half of the song—a question. A few moments later the other half followed, perhaps from another tree—the answer:

Se—u—u.

Here was a mystery: what was the bird? Could it be the bluebird!—his ignorance again, the comicality of his ignorance! Webster had never seen or heard a bluebird. He recalled what the professor had told them—that Alexander Wilson had written the first poem on the American bluebird, perhaps still the best poem; and he had given them the poem to memorise if they liked, saying that they might not think it good poetry, but at least it was the poetry of a man who thought he could criticise Robert Burns! Webster had memorised the verses and as he now searched the forest boughs for this invisible bluebird, he repeated to himself some of Wilson's lines:

"When all the gay scenes of summer are o'er
And autumn slow enters so silent and sallow
And millions of warblers that charmed us before
Have fled in the train of the sun-seeking swallow;
The bluebird, forsaken, but true to his home
Still lingers and looks for a milder tomorrow
Till forced by the horrors of winter to roam,
He sings his adieu in a lone note of sorrow."

Again that long fine strain cast far out upon the air like a silken reel: