Thirty years it took me to discover these simple, obvious facts about a thing I had handled every spring since childhood: how many decades more, I wonder, must pass ere I shall clear up the final mystery about them, a matter now to me dark as ever—how, with the primrose alone, this came to be so; and, above all, why?
III
If I tell the plain, honest truth about the day which has just ended, and call it a day of adventure and excitement from its first grey gleam to its tranquil golden close, I am not sure that there are many who will understand me, save the one who shared it with me almost hour by hour.
For nothing really happened on this day, as the world estimates events. Over an obscure Sussex village, a mid-April sun shone out of a cloudless sky; certain migrant birds arrived in the neighbourhood; certain wild flowers and insects were observed for the first time; there was nothing more. No wandering stranger appeared in the street, to bring us all to our doors; no big-gun practice was going on thirty miles away at Portsmouth, outraging our blue sky with incongruous thunder; nor did even the gilt arrow on the church-clock slip an hour at midday, as it often does, and send us scurrying home to dinner before the time. To all save two in Windlecombe, the day was just an ordinary working week-day; but, to these, it was no less a day than the one on which the year comes suddenly into its full young prime.
For me it began when the grey eastern sky took its first tint of morning rose. There is no sweeter sound than the song of the house-martins, and this it was that roused me now. In the darkness they had come, straight to their old nesting-site under the eaves; and now they filled the room with their quaint, voluble melody, and wove a mazy pattern against the sky as they circled to and fro.
While I dressed, I watched them dipping and crying in the sunny air; and, peering out through the window now and again, I could see them all along under the eaves, clinging to the rough bricks of the wall, where they had left their mud-houses last October. But of these none remained now. Not to break down the martins’ nests in early spring, before the sparrows begin to stuff them with grass, is to prepare for the little black-and-white voyagers’ war instead of welcome. And they seem quite as happy and content if, returning, they find nothing but a clay-mark on the wall.
Later, by an hour at most, I had the Reverend by the arm, not so much to guide, as to restrain him, for he went ever a little before me through the meadow with the sure, swift stride of a mountain-goat. There was but one thing that could betray his affliction to a close observer. While I went blinking in the intolerable glory of the sunshine above us, and the scarce lesser glory of the buttercups below, he strode onward, his calm old face turned straight up to the sun, his blue eyes meeting it unflinchingly from under their shaggy arches of white. He might be Gabriel looking into the very focus of heaven, I thought, as I stole a glance at him a little fearsomely. Indeed, I never quite limited his vision to that of his poor, purblind, human eyes.
‘It will be down in the little birch-clump near the Conyers,’ he said. ‘That is where the first nightingale always comes. It will take us a good five minutes, and why are you not talking to me? Come! do not keep all the brave, beautiful things to yourself!’
How to tell him of all the things I saw in a single yard of meadow about us! But I got to work with the will, if not the power.
‘We are walking,’ said I, ‘through buttercups a foot high; and almost with every step we send a cloud of little blue-and-copper butterflies chevying before us. Listen to the grasshoppers piping! The buttercups make a sort of thick scum of gold as on the surface of a green lake. Down below, like pebbles on the lake-bottom lie the daisies—their white discs touch each other in all directions; nay, they overlap, they are heaped upon one another. An insect might crawl over them from side to side of the great meadow and never tread on anything but daisy-white. And the dandelions! There are millions of them, I think, filling the air with a perfume like choice old wine. And smell these, Reverend! Do you know what they are?’