JULY
I
In the spring of the year, July seems as far off as middle-age seems to youth, and almost as undesirable. But when midsummer-day is past and gone, whether in human life or the year’s progress, we look at things with clearer, more widely ranging eyes. The man in his prime strength, the season at the summit of its beauty—these are fairer things than the childhood and the springtime that have gone to make them. For the greater must be all the greater and more wonderful, because it contains the wondrous less.
Here is the first day of July come, and ever since sunrise I have been straying about the field-paths and lanes, wending home, indeed, only when the fierce noontide heat and a ravening hunger combined to drive me thither. There was this fierce, tropic quality in the sunlight from the very first. Though the gilt arrow on the church dial pointed barely to four o’clock, the level sunbeams struck hot and bright on the face; and the dew in the grass by the laneside was shrinking visibly with every moment. In an hour the last water-bell was gone from the shadiest nook in the wood. Only the teasels could defy the thirsty sun, and these kept their water-traps over-brimming, as if fed from a magic source, far into the heat of the day.
There are many common things of the country-side—small facts to be learned for the trouble of a glance—which are little known because the glance is seldom given. As I passed along the hedge where the teasels stood up straight as a row of church spires, the glitter of the water in their leaf-cups caught my eye, and I stopped to look at them. I had always thought of the teasels as natural drinking-places for the bees, and other flying or creeping things; but now I saw that their use was very different. Studying the plant carefully, the whole meaning of the thing dawned on me at last. The teasel must be a flesh-eater, more greedy and destructive than any spider in the land. In the cups a host of creatures lay drowned; and upon the green, translucent leaves and stems there crawled multitudes of others, all destined for the same fate. There were in the water not only small insects, but bumble-bees, large caterpillars and slugs, even broad-winged night-moths that had fallen to the teasel’s snare. I saw also that the pools of water insulating every stem served not as traps alone, but actually as digestive cells, wherein the carcases of the teasel’s prey were gradually resolved into the slime that lay at the bottom of each cup. Somehow, I conjectured, this must be absorbed into the tissue of the plant; and cutting one of the stems asunder, just where the water-holding leaves embraced it, I came upon what seemed proof of this—a ring of apertures at the base of each cup—sink holes, in fact—leading into the substance of the stem.
The path wound up a hill-side over a field of tares, rippling away before me through the sea of purple blossom until it ended abruptly against the blue sky far above. And here another minute wonder brought me to a halt. Though it was so early, the hive-bees were out and about in their thousands. The great field was besieged by them. The air throbbed with their music. A madness for honey-making seemed upon them all; and yet, of all the busy thousands upon thousands set loose amidst what seemed illimitable forage-ground, nowhere could I see a hive-bee upon a flower. I went down on hands and knees for a closer view, believing at first that my eyes were playing false with me. But there was no doubt about it. Though on every side the great furry bumble-bees were seizing upon, and dragging open the purple blooms of the tares, the hive-bees never touched these, for all they were in so huge a heat and flurry of work.
Now I knew that, while every other insect under heaven has its times of relaxation, deeming moments given over to dancing in a sunbeam or basking on a wall as moments not ill-spent, the honey-bee allows herself no such wasteful delights. If she were here in this tare-field in her thousands, and here she was, she came for no other purpose than a useful one. Clearly, therefore, the hive-bees were getting nectar in abundance: yet how, if they were not seeking it in the flowers?
Another minute’s careful watch resolved the mystery. The tare-plant can almost rank with the slug-devouring teasel as a curiosity of the country-side. Knowing well that the hive-bee’s tongue is not long enough to reach the sweets at the bottom of its flower-cup, the tare provides a special feast outside. At the base of each leaf-and flower-stalk, just where these join on to the main stem, will be found a little green flap or fin. In the centre of this fin is a valve, from which exudes a thick sweet liquid. If you are quicker than the bee, you may see the tiny globule shining in the sun as you turn the plant up. But even as you look, a bee fusses in between your fingers, drinks up the liquid in a moment, and hums off to the next stalk. If we can extend no more sympathy to the bee in her folly of never-ending labours than to a lily-of-the-field at toil, we must at least concede something for her fearlessness. A peep into her own looking-glass is not always all of virtue’s reward.
Over the field of purple tares, and on through the cornfields—wheat waving high and green, with the scarlet poppies flushing midway down in its murmuring depths. Who would have hawthorn and buttercups, the bridal white and gold of spring, when he can have poppies by the million, and roses, a wagon-load to be gathered from every hedgerow, if he will? Where I stood, breast-high in the wheat-field, the poppies crowded thick together among the green stems, making one unbroken sheet of colour that I could hardly look upon in the full light of the summer sun. A little way onward, and this blood-red flare was softened instantly: a dozen yards away there was nothing but the rustling green of the wheat. Every moment a lark rose out of the corn, singing, or dropped into it like a stone silently out of the blue. The hedgerow on the far side of the field shone with the roses, tremulous, uncertain, in the heated air. Beyond, in the blue mist of woodlands, a blackbird chanted his joy of the morning; and all round me in the distant ring of hills, there were cuckoos chiming, each note clear but double, some of the songs perfect still.
From the wheat, the path led me presently into the oat-fields, green too, but of a cooler, greyer tinge; and full of a stealthy motion and the sound of wind, though scarce a breath was moving overhead. There is something eerie, mysterious, about a field of oats on a hot summer’s morning. It is as though the ears bent together and whispered to each other, passing the word on unceasingly from plant to plant. Looking over the plane of grey-green awns, stretching away under the still sunshine, you see low wavelets rise and fall, furrows come and go; the light changes; or, suddenly, the whole expanse grows mute and still. A gentle, inconstant breeze would produce exactly this effect; but you see it when not a leaf moves in the highest treetops, when even the aspens have hushed their quivering music under the noontide glare. No doubt, in a minor degree, all plants show this movement, whether it be caused by the travelling heat of the sun, or be simply due to the varying impetus of growth. In a great field of corn closely drilled, there are always the separate individualities of the plants comprising it to be reckoned with. That these exist in fact, as well as in fancy, is difficult to demonstrate. But that each field has a communal spirit—often different from, or wholly antagonistic to, that of its near neighbour—is evident. For how else to explain why all the ears of corn in one field lean eastward, and all the ears in the next field may incline normally to the west?