They Could Not Wait Longer; Love Was Strong In Their
Little Hearts - Stronger Than The Winter.
After a while the
hedge-sparrows, too, began to sing on the top of the gorse-hedge about
the garden.
By-and-by a chaffinch boldly raised his voice, ending with
the old story, 'Sweet, will you, will you kiss - me - dear?' Then there
came a hoar-frost, and the earth, which had been black, became white, as
its evaporated vapours began to gather and drops of rain to fall. Even
then the obstinate weather refused to quite yield, wrapping its cloak, as
it were, around it in bitter enmity. But in a day or two white clouds lit
up with sunshine appeared drifting over from the southward, and that was
the end. The old pensioner came to the door for his bread and cheese:
'The wind's in the south' he said, 'and I hopes she'll stay there' Five
dull yellow spots on the hedge - gorse bloom - that had remained unchanged
for so many weeks, took a fresh colour and became golden. By the constant
passing of the waggons and carts along the road that had been so silent
it was evident that the busy time of spring was here. There would be
rough weather, doubtless, now and again, but it would not again be
winter.
Dark patches of cloud - spots of ink on the sky, the 'messengers' - go
drifting by; and after them will follow the water-carriers, harnessed to
the south and west winds, drilling the long rows of rain like seed into
the earth. After a time there will be a rainbow. Through the bars of my
prison I can see the catkins thick and sallow-grey on the willows across
the field, visible even at that distance; so great the change in a few
days, the hand of spring grows firm and takes a strong grasp of the
hedges. My prison bars are but a sixteenth of an inch thick; I could snap
them with a fillip - only the window-pane, to me as impenetrable as the
twenty-foot wall of the Tower of London. A cart has just gone past
bearing a strange load among the carts of spring; they are talking of
poling the hops. In it there sat an old man, with the fixed stare, the
animal-like eye, of extreme age; he is over ninety. About him there were
some few chairs and articles of furniture, and he was propped against a
bed. He was being moved - literally carted - to another house, not home,
and he said he could not go without his bed; he had slept on it for
seventy-three years. Last Sunday his son - himself old - was carted to the
churchyard, as is the country custom, in an open van; to-day the father,
still living, goes to what will be to him a strange land. His home is
broken up - he will potter no more with maize for the chicken; the gorse
hedges will become solid walls of golden bloom, but there will never
again be a spring for him. It is very hard, is it not, at ninety? It is
not the tyranny of any one that has done it; it is the tyranny of
circumstance, the lot of man. The song of the Greeks is full of sorrow;
man was to them the creature of grief, yet theirs was the land of violets
and pellucid air. This has been a land of frost and snow, and here too,
it is the same. A stranger, I see, is already digging the old man's
garden.
How happy the trees must be to hear the song of birds again in their
branches! After the silence and the leaflessness, to have the birds back
once more and to feel them busy at the nest-building; how glad to give
them the moss and fibres and the crutch of the boughs to build in!
Pleasant it is now to watch the sunlit clouds sailing onwards; it is like
sitting by the sea. There is voyaging to and fro of birds; the strong
wood-pigeon goes over - a long course in the air, from hill to distant
copse; a blackbird starts from an ash, and, now inclining this way and
now that, traverses the meadows to the thick corner hedge; finches go by,
and the air is full of larks that sing without ceasing. The touch of the
wind, the moisture of the dew, the sun-stained raindrop, have in them the
magic force of life - a marvellous something that was not there before.
Under it the narrow blade of grass comes up freshly green between the old
white fibres the rook pulled; the sycamore bud swells and opens, and
takes the eye instantly in the still dark wood; the starlings go to the
hollow pollards; the lambs leap in the mead. You never know what a day
may bring forth - what new thing will come next. Yesterday I saw the
ploughman and his team, and the earth gleam smoothed behind the share;
to-day a butterfly has gone past; the farm-folk are bringing home the
fagots from the hedgerows; to-morrow there will be a merry, merry note in
the ash copse, the chiffchaffs' ringing call to arms, to arms, ye leaves!
By-and-by a bennet, a bloom of the grass; in time to come the furrow, as
it were, shall open, and the great buttercup of the waters will show a
broad palm of gold. You never know what will come to the net of the eye
next - a bud, a flower, a nest, a curled fern, or whether it will be in
the woodland or by the meadow path, at the water's side or on the dead
dry heap of fagots. There is no settled succession, no fixed and formal
order - always the unexpected; and you cannot say, 'I will go and find
this or that.' The sowing of life in the spring time is not in the set
straight line of the drill, nor shall you find wild flowers by a foot
measure.
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