If bird-song is a language, then the blackbird must be the supreme orator of the woods. Though you understand not a syllable of what he is pouring forth, there is no doubt of its ever-varying meaning. In the midst of a succession of quite simple phrases, each consisting of three or four notes at the most, he suddenly gives you a passage whose melodious complexity is almost bewildering. He constantly varies the pace of his delivery. He embellishes his song with grace-notes—beautiful silver-chiming triplets in the midst of his lowest, most leisurely strains. There is emphasis, attack, a sort of blustering use of sheer power of utterance; or he may run over a slow, quiet tune at his lightest tongue-tip. At times, indeed, it is well-nigh impossible to believe that you are not listening to two birds together, of totally different qualities of voice, alternating their melodies.
How long I should have tarried there, furtively renewing this old acquaintance, I know not; but it seems my cover was incomplete, and the song came to its usual termination. It stopped short in the midst of one of its brightest stanzas, and I knew my presence had been observed. The blackbird made off. There was first the defiant, yet fearsome cluck-cluck-cluck until he was clear of the bushes and free to fly, and then away he went through the sunshine to the far bank of the river, hurling over his shoulder as he went the usual mocking laughter-peal.
II
A week of April has gone by—a week of rain and shine, and the singing of the south wind by day; and, at nights, an intense dark calm full of the sound of purling brooks.
The river runs high. All the streams are swollen. The low-lying meadows are half green grass overspread with a pink mist of lady’s-smock, and half glittering pools of water that bring down the blue of the sky under your feet as you go. You can never forget the rain for an instant. On this page, as I sit writing at the open window, the morning sun was streaming a minute ago: now a ragged grey rain-cloud has come tumbling over the hills, and I cannot see across the green for the torrent. It is by almost as quickly as I can set down the words; and now the sunbeams are pouring in at the window again: the whole village lies before me drenched and sparkling, the street one long river of blinding light.
Tom Artlett, going by early this morning to his work and spying me in the garden, called out that he had heard the cuckoo twice already; and it may well be so. The ringing note of the wryneck—the ‘cuckoo’s mate’—has been sounding in the elm-tops all the morning through, and the cuckoo is seldom far behind her messenger. Nightingale and swift, swallow and martin, they are all on their way northward now, and any day may bring them. But time spent at this season in looking forward to the things that will be, is always time wasted. Every hour in early April has its own new revelation, and common eyes and ears can do no more than mark the things that are.
Yesterday, in a blink of sunny calm between the showers, I took my midday walk through the hazel-woods. The young leaves already tempered the sunlight to the primroses and anemones that covered the woodland floor, giving all a greenish tinge. Though the whole wood was full of primroses, it was only by the edges of the fields, where they grew in full sunshine, that their rich yellow colour had any significance. Here under the hazels this was so diluted and explained away by the white of the anemones, and again by the leaf-filtered sunbeams from above, that the primroses no longer seemed yellow. At a few yards distant, in the dimmest spots, you could scarce tell one flower from another but for its shape.
Wherever I went in the wood, the soft droning song of the bees went with me. You could hardly put one foot before the other without dashing the cup from the lip of one of these winged wanderers. But though the anemones and primroses grew so thick, so inextricably mingled together, the honey-bees kept to the one species of flower. They clambered in and out of the star-like anemones, sometimes two and three at a blossom together. But the primroses were always passed over, by hive-bee and humble-bee alike. Here and there, I picked one of the sulphur blossoms, and tearing it apart, made sure that there was nectar in plenty—its presence was plain even to human eye. The truth was, of course, that the sweets of the primrose were placed so far down the trumpet-tube of the flower, that no bee had tongue long enough to gather them, even if they were to her mind.
Yet though the bees might scorn the primrose for much the same reason as the fox contemned the grapes in the fable, there was one creature specially told off by Nature to do the necessary work of fertilisation. Now and again in the general low murmur of voices about me, I could distinguish an alien note. This came from a large fly, in a light-brown fluffy jacket, with transparent wings fantastically scalloped in black. He jerked himself to and fro in the air from one primrose to another, hovering a moment over each before settling and thrusting a tongue of amazing length down the yellow throttle of the flower. His name I have never heard, but I know that, until recent times, he continued to conceal, not only his means of livelihood, but his very existence from the vigilance of naturalists: Darwin himself failed to identify this primrose-sprite with his special mission in fertilising work.
It is strange how familiarity with the commonest natural objects may exist side by side with a pitiful ignorance about them. I had gathered primroses every spring for half a lifetime through before I realised that I bore, not one, but two kinds of blossom in my hand. The discovery, I remember, came with something like a shock of surprise. Yet there was no blinking the fact: the wonder, indeed, was that in all the thousands I had gathered, as boy and youth and man, the thing had never before occurred to me. There was no difference in the sulphur-hued faces of the flowers. But while the deep, central tube of some was closed with a little whorl of pale buff feathers, in others this tube was open, and there stood just within it a slender stem topped with a small green globe—it seemed at first sight, then, that the sexual principle in the primrose was divided, each plant bearing only male, or only female flowers. But investigating farther, I found that this was not so. Each flower was truly hermaphrodite, only in one the male feathery anthers were uppermost, and in the other the green pistil of the female appeared above.