Moorland Idylls - Grant Allen 4 стр.

Beautiful as quails are, both to look upon and to eat, they are not personally amiable or admirable creatures. Their character is full of those piquant antitheses which seventeenth-century satire delighted to discover in the human subject. They are gregarious, but unsociable; fond of company, yet notoriously pugnacious; abandoned polygamists, with frequent lapses into the strictest monogamy; fighters destitute of the sense of honour; faithless spouses, but devoted, affectionate, and careful mothers. I fancy, too, they must have a wonderful instinct in the matter of commissariat, increased, no doubt, by ages of strategical evolution: for it can be by no means easy to find supplies for so large an army on the march; yet quails seem always so to time their arrival at each temporary stopping-place as exactly to fall in with some glut in the insect-market. Only a few days before they came here, for example, not a beetle was to be seen upon the parched-up heath; but day before yesterday it rained insects, so to speak; and last night one could hardly take a step down the Long Valley without crushing small beetles underfoot, against ones will, by the dozen. The quails must somehow have got wind of the fact that there was corn in Egypt, be it by scent, or scouts, or some mysterious instinct; and here they are to-night, swarming up in their thousands, to enter into possession of their ancestral heritage. You should see them wage war on the helpless longicorn! I hope they will nest here, as it is amusing to watch them. Each little Turk of a husband keeps a perfect harem of demure brown hens, looking slily askance from the corners of their eyes, and watches over them close by with all the jealousy of a Mahmoud or a Sultan Soleyman. The rival who tries to poach on his lordships preserves has, indeed, a hard time of it; he will retire, well pecked, from his rash encounter. Quails, in fact, are still in the Mohammedan stage of social evolution, while our more advanced and enlightened English partridges have attained already to a civilized and Western domestic economy.

VIII.

IN LEAFLESS WOODS

Yes: these bare boughs, I take it, are not all pure loss. They have their consolations; they have their artistic and intellectual value. They show us, after all, the true inwardness of the tree; they enable us to realize, as none could otherwise do, the infinite diversity of architecture and ground-plan in the design and execution of the forest denizens. While dense masses of foliage clothe and obscure the boughs with their gay greenery we can gain but a rough idea of the underlying structure. But just as a Leonardo or a Luca Signorelli must needs pry beneath skin and muscle to discover the actual framework and bony supports of the body, so the lover of the trees desires from time to time to catch some glimpse of the very limbs and joints of oak or maple to get rid of the green covering in favour of the naked underlying reality. So only can one enjoy the delicate lissom twigs of the silver birch, etched in tender grey against the hard blue sky; so only can one observe the forked upright branches of the Lombardy poplar, like natural candelabra, in striking contrast with the long hanging boughs of the weeping-willow, divided and subdivided into pendulous twigs, and losing themselves at last in fine spray of living threads, like a wind-driven cataract. Every kind of forest-dweller has thus its own special beauty of architectural plan; and every one of them can be realized in all its naked grace and variety of outline only when relieved of the glorious green weight that so richly concealed it.

And bare boughs are instructive, too, as well as beautiful. They suggest to one the endless vicissitudes and cataclysms in the history of growth; they show us how the knotted trunk acquires its final form, and by what course of evolution branch added to branch builds up at last the whole noble shape of the buttressed beech or the spreading horse-chestnut. Take, for example, our dear old friend the ash. In summer you can hardly discern through a canopy of green the outline of his bent boughs, curved downwards by their own weight of heavy feathery foliage, each leaf a little branch with numerous spreading leaflets. But when autumn comes, and the heavy leaves drop off one by one, you get revealed at once the peculiar beauty of his mode of growth that delicious combination of angular and curved form which makes the ash the acknowledged king of the winter woodland. All the branches dip gracefully in a long arch towards the end, and then rise again with an abrupt curve; this hooked type of terminal bough being so distinctive and so well marked an ashy feature that you can tell an ash by it afar off in its wintry nakedness as you whirl by in a train at a miles distance, especially if it happens to be silhouetted against the sky on a bare ridge or hilltop. The growth of the oak, on the other hand, so gnarled and irregular, is quite equally characteristic; while the disposition of the buds soon reveals the fact that this very irregularity itself owes its origin in the last resort to a survival of the fittest among many abortive branches. For the oak tries, as it were, to grow symmetrically like a conifer; but frost and wind play such havoc with its delicate young shoots that it never succeeds in realizing its ideal, but grows habitually distorted against its will by external agencies.

Nor does our winter leave us wholly leafless. Even in England we have a fair sprinkling of native-born evergreens. And I really dont know that I would wish them more frequent; for nothing can be more monotonous, more sickly sweet, than the unvarying green of tropical forests; while the grateful contrast of drooping birch twigs or big-budded bare oak branches with the dark and sombre verdure of our northern Scotch firs, is in itself one of the chief charms of English winter. During the Tertiary period, indeed, our English woods were full of large-leaved evergreens of the southern types camphors and cinnamons, and rhododendrons and liquidambars; but with the coming on of the Great Ice Age those lush southern forms were driven southward for ever, leaving us only the Scotch fir, the yew, and the juniper, with a few broader-leaved kinds of shiny evergreen, of which holly, ivy, and box are the most familiar examples. These, with the exotic laurels and aucubas, the daphnes and the laurustinuses, are quite enough to diversify pleasantly our northern scenery. Then our recent acquisitions of exotic conifers, like the Douglas pines, the sequoias, and the beautiful glaucous firs, the greenest of things blue, the bluest of things green, which now abound in plantations, have done much to redeem the surviving reproach of the glacial epoch.

Grant Allen

Moorland Idylls

I.

THE NIGHT-JAR

We sat late on the verandah last night, listening to the low trilling croon of the night-jar. It was a balmy evening, one of the few this summer; the sunset was lingering over the heather-clad moors, and the lonely bird sat perched on one bough of the wind-swept pine-tree by Martins Corner, calling pathetically to his mate with that deep passionate cry of his. I know not why, but the voice of the night-jar seems to me fuller of unspoken poetry than that of any more musical and articulate songster. Away down in the valley a nightingale was pouring his full throat among the oak-brush; but we hardly heeded him. Up on the open moorland, in the twilight solitude, that grey bird of dusk sat keening and sobbing his monotonous love-plaint; and it moved us more than all the nightingales gamut. I think it must be because we feel instinctively he is in terrible earnest. Those profound catches in the throat are the very note of true love; they have in them something of high human passion. And we could see the bird himself, too, on his half-leafless perch, craning his neck as he crooned, and looking eagerly for his lady-love. It was a delicious moment. We murmured as we sat George Merediths lines

We were fortunate indeed in our mise-en-scène; for the poets picture had realized itself before us. And, as usual, art had reacted upon nature. The cry, that was so beautiful and romantic in itself, gained an added touch of beauty and romance from the great word-painters exquisite images.

Perhaps, too, some part of the charm in the night-jar and his kind may be due to the sense that here at least we stand face to face with a genuine relic of the older, the wilder, and the freer England. He is a bird of the night, of the heather and the bracken, of the unbroken waste, of the unpeopled solitude. When man invades his high home, he moves afield before the intruder. Here on the great moors we hear him nightly in summer; but only when no other sound assails the ear, save the boom of the cockchafer, and the myriad hum of the flies and moths of dusk among the heather. He belongs, in fact, to that elder fauna which inhabited England before the whirr of wheels and the snort of steam drove the wild things far from us. The perky sparrow can accommodate himself without an effort to the bustle of towns, and can dispute for grains of corn under the horses hoofs in Cheapside; the rook can follow close the ploughmans heels, in search of worms turned up by the share in the furrows; but the night-jar lives aloof among the solitary fern-wastes, and flies amain before the intrusion of our boisterous humanity.

Fern-owls the country people hereabouts call them; and very owl-like indeed they are in outer appearance, with their soft mottled plumage, all brown and grey and melting white, as is the wont of nocturnal or crepuscular creatures. But they are not owls at all by descent, for all that, being in reality big fly-hunting cousins of the swifts and the humming-birds. All birds that hawk after insects on the wing have a wide gaping mouth; the house martins have it, and the swallows, and the swifts; but in the night-jar this width of gape is pushed to a singular and almost grotesque extreme, though not of course beyond the limit laid by the needs and habits of the animal. It is the enormous mouth, fringed with its strange line of coarse bristles along the beak, that has gained for our night-jar its common European name of goatsucker. And indeed, if you watch close on southern upland farms, among the Apennines or the Atlas, you will see the night-jars at twilight hovering close by the udders of the goats and cattle as they lie stretched in the meadows. But they are not milking them, as the Italian peasant firmly believes; it is as friends and allies that they come, not as enemies. Peer hard through the gloom, on a moonlit evening, and you can make out at last that nocturnal flies are annoying the beasts, and that as fast as they gather the night-jar snaps them up, while the cattle seem to recognize this friendly office by never whisking their tails so long as the bird attends to them. It is a mutual convenience, an early form of that consorting for purposes of common advantage which reaches at last its highest development in the nest of ants, with their associated beetles and their cow-like aphides.

Here in England, our night-jar is but a summer migrant, a visitor to the moors while insects abound; and we listen for him eagerly in warm May weather. He comes to us from South Africa, where he winters among the Zulus, or, rather, escapes the chill of winter altogether in the opposite hemisphere. For he must have insects, flying insects on the wing, and plenty of them. We welcome his first churring among the pines and bracken as a sign of summer; for he is a prudent bird, and seldom makes a mistake, knowing the marks of the weather well, like Mr. Robert Scott, and delaying his arrival till insects have hatched out in sufficient numbers from the cocoons over the heather-clad uplands. You see him but rarely, for he loves the dusk, and, though far from a timid bird, he usually alights on the ground, hardly perching on a tree, I think, except to utter his love-call. When he does perch, it is always lengthwise to the bough, not crosswise, as is the fashion with most other birds; he seems afraid of falling; and then, this position also assorts better with his passionate attitude of craning expectancy as he leans forward on the branch to summon his helpmate. If you disturb him from the ground, he rises with flapping wings in an awkward and noisy way, bringing his pinions together above his body, somewhat after the lapwings fashion; but when he hawks on the open after flies, with his big mouth agape, his long arcs of flight are equable, swift, and graceful. Night-jars are fearless beasts; they rear their young in the open, without pretence or concealment. The two veined and marbled eggs are laid boldly in some hard patch among the brake and gorse, on the bare ground, without a nest of any sort; and though they are beautifully coloured when you come to examine them in detail, they so closely imitate the soil and the dry heath around in general effect, that you may easily pass them by, even when you have marked their approximate place by disturbing the sitting mother. Few British birds, indeed, show higher and closer adaptation to special conditions than our dreamy night-jars, essential insect-hawkers of the dusk on open and treeless uplands. Their large and mysterious eyes, their gaping mouths, their straining fringe of bristles, their delicate owl-like plumage, their swift and silent flight, their agile movements, their eerie cry, their curious love-sick nature all mark them out as marvellously modified nocturnal variants on the general type of the swifts and trogons. They are, in fact, specialized descendants of the same primitive ancestral form, whose bodies and souls have undergone weird and beautiful changes in adaptation to a wild and poetical life in the shades of dusk on the unpeopled moorlands. For birds of twilight have always passionate cries and passionate natures; not accident alone has given us the whip-poor-will and the nightingale.

II.

PROPHETIC AUTUMN

The year used once to begin in March. That was simple and natural to let it start on its course with the first warmer breath of returning spring. It begins now in January which has nothing to recommend it. I am not sure that Nature does not show us it really begins on the first of October.