When the Poet called his wife “lassie” she knew he was in a happy frame of mind, and was happy herself. It was long since she had heard the word; illness, overwork, and the dull surroundings of a London suburban villa, had taken all the spring out of his body, and all its natural joyousness from his mind. I call him Poet because it was the name by which his best friends knew him; I cannot be sure that he ever wrote poetry, and certainly he never published any; but they called him Poet because he was dreamy, and hated the fag and the noise of London, and pined for the country, and loved to talk of his old Yorkshire home and its plants and animals, and its beck curling under heathery banks on the edge of the moor. He was indeed only a London clerk, released at last from long years of drudgery by a happy stroke of good fortune.
They had just arrived from London to take possession of their cottage and garden in the country. It was a frosty evening early in March, and the sun was just setting as they went up the garden together; it lit up the bare boughs of a tree which stood just in front of the cottage.
“Look here, Bessie,” said the Poet; “that is a rowan tree, and it was the sight of that rowan that fixed me. The cottage was snug, the garden was good, but the rowans—there are three of them—were irresistible. There were three just outside our garden in Yorkshire, and every August the berries turned orange-red and made a glory before my window. Next August you shall see them, and you’ll see nothing quite so good till then.”
Bessie, London born and bred, was glad to get into the house, and make herself snug before the fire, where the kettle was singing an invitation to tea. She too was ready to welcome the slow and gentle ways of the country, and to be rid of perpetual bell-ringing, and postmen’s knocks, and piano-practising next door, and the rattle of carts and cabs; but I doubt if the rowans would have decided her choice. I think she thought more of the useful fruits of the garden—of the currants and gooseberries of which good store of jam should be made in the summer, of the vegetables they would grow for themselves, and the strawberries they would invite their London friends to come and share.
Next morning quite early the Poet threw his window wide open and looked out into his garden. It was not a trim and commonplace garden; it was an acre of good ground that had grown by degrees into a garden, as in the course of ages of village life one owner after another had turned it to his own purposes. The Poet looked over a bit of lawn, in the corner of which stood one of his favourite rowans, to an old bulging stone wall, buttressed up with supports of red brick of various shades, and covered with ivy. Over the top of it he could see the church tower, also ivy-clad, the yews of the churchyard, and the elms in the close beyond, in the tops of which the rooks were already busy and noisy. A thick and tall yew hedge separated the lawn from the village allotments, where one or two early labourers were collecting the winter’s rubbish into heaps and setting them alight; the shadow of the hedge upon the lawn was sharply marked by a silvery grey border of frost. On these things the Poet’s eye lingered with wonderful content for a while, and then wandered across the allotments over meadow and rich red ploughland to the line of hills that shut in his view to the south. There came into his mind the name he used to give to the moors above his Yorkshire dale in his young days when his mother read the Pilgrim’s Progress to her children—the Delectable Mountains.
He was suddenly recalled to his garden by a low melodious pipe, as of a bird practising its voice for better use in warmer days; it came from one of the rowans. Sometimes the notes were almost whispered; sometimes they rose for an instant into a full and mellow sweetness, and then died away again. They were never continuous—only fragments of song; as if the bird were talking in the sweetest of contralto voices to a friend whose answers were unheard. No other bird was singing, and the rooks were too far away in the elms to break harshly with their cawing on the blackbird’s quiet strain.
The Poet listened for a while enraptured, watching the dark form of the singer, and the “orange-tawny” bill from which the notes came so softly, so hesitatingly; and then drew in his head and began to dress, still keeping the window open, and repeating to himself—
“O Blackbird, sing me something well:
Though all the neighbours shoot thee round,
I keep smooth plats of garden ground