LONDON CHILDREN AND WILD FLOWERS
(To W. de la M.)
THE sphere-blooms of the dandelion have left their anchorage and are floating away in the warm wind. That same wind bears with it a vague scent, for the wild flowers are open to the sun, while the white buds of the may-tree and the lilac-blossom of the keeper’s cottage yonder have come before their time. The yellow celandine petals have gone from the meadow, already their little heart-shaped leaves are tinged at the edge with the rust of decay; the brighter buttercups drink deeply of the poured sun-wine, and the red sorrel and pale cuckoo flowers move as the wind comes more strongly. No form of flower life remains for long. When I came here but a few weeks since the celandine was everywhere; a brave flower, for it rises so early, and is one of the first signs of life stirring again in the cold earth. Then the wood-anemones shone like stars among the brown leaves under the hazel wands and ashpoles of the covert, and on the raised bank near the vermin tree where the marauder stoats and pirate crows hang, the sweet violets drooped their heads, shy in their loveliness. I passed by that bank to-day, but the sweet violets have gone, even as the wood-anemones are withering. Nothing remains for long. But the first swift screams high in the azure, his black curved wings bearing him in fast circles, less graceful than the swallow, who floats on the bosom of the wind, then falls and turns sharply rather than sweeps through the air with the effortless thrusts of the swift. So in the place of the violet’s scent I have the scream of the swift, and the cuckoo calls above the dying wind-flowers.
I leant against a wooden fence, placed to keep the cattle in the meadow from straying into the covert behind, and to guard them from the brook that ran at the edge of the hazels. High nettles hid the lower rails of the fence, growing straight and green, and giving off a heavy odour from their flowers. From afar a cuckoo was calling, but near me the only sounds were the burring of the dusky humble bees at the nettle flowers, and the soft voice of the brook. A great cloud shadow came rushing over the meadow, the wind lost its warmth, and a few drops pattered on the hawthorn. Immediately a blackbird sang on the topmost bough of an oak tree in the wood, and a wren trilled from some hidden bush. Gently the rain fell, plashing on the veined leaves of the hazels; a yellow-green wave of light descended the distant hills and followed the black shadow over cornfield, meadow, and webbed pattern of hop field, washing the red oast-houses with instant colour. The swift sunlight swept down to the meadow, the shadow passed onwards, and again the sun gave its vitalising rays to the grass and the wild flowers.
The blackbird left the oak tree and dropped down to continue his search among the moist leaf-mould; the wren was silent. Just behind, and dividing the field from the pheasant wood, the brook, its waters swelling with light, brimmed smoothly round a curve. A sweet little whispering call, oft repeated and so gentle that it might have been the voice of the brook, came from the ashpoles beyond. A long-tailed tit was gathering the down from the hazel catkins, calling, or rather murmuring, in shy ecstatic love to her mate as she did so. The sunlight—rendered whiter and purer by the wind from the far hills—streamed down through the nut trees and the opening buds of ash; as the leaves rustled they caught the sunbeams, and were turned a lucent green. Mingling with the tender notes of my little bottle-bird gathering her material was the voice of the brook, almost inaudible, but lifting the heart with sudden joy for its poem.
I watched the two birds, so happy with each other, and heedless of anything but the immediate joyful moment, carry the down to a quick-set hedge, snowy with blossom, dividing the meadow from the wheatfield. They disappeared for a moment among its greeneries and spiky thorns, and then flew back to the covert, still murmuring to each other in their wheezy, subdued tones. In the hedge the house was nearly completed, and had been fashioned with wondrous skill. Outside the birds had woven gray lichen from the apple trees with the green moss found under the oaks, and gradually a long, bottle-shaped nest had grown among the thorns. Several hundreds of feathers had been borne from the farmyard—distant over a mile—each journey made with the feeble jerky flight. Think of the infinite labour and searching before the cradle is ready for the dozen minute eggs that will nestle in its soft cup! The little chap and his adoring wife were not alarmed at my presence: I stood within two yards of their nest, but they flew into the hedge and out again without fear or distress.
A wild bee hummed among the nettles, content and self-sufficient; a crow slanted overhead, veering as he saw me, for crows and gamekeepers hate each other equally; a dead leaf fluttered into the water and was carried in a foam-capped whirlpool under the roots of the hawthorn. Three willow-wrens came to the tree, and sought the insects that walked over the broad platform of the leaves; one flew to the surface of the brook and seized a horse-fly struggling in the water. The stream sang and sang, carrying the leaf that had left the tree for ever; the sunlight flashed a burnished ripple, was gone again, and the bees brushed against the nettles, wondering if they should stay there or gather their harvest from the bluebells, lit by the shuffling shadow mazes, whose honey lay ready for loading. All the morning the bells on the green towers of stalk had been pealing their chimes of fragrance to the bees; the busy harvesters went heavily past, drawing their song-inspiration from the infinite flame of the sun, passing from bell to bell with an eagerness that must cause the wild hyacinths to rejoice—for would they not shortly vanish like the celandines and the wind-flowers? Nothing remains for long. A brief life, and they have gone whither all things that draw upon the earth-energy must go. Though the blackbird sing so leisurely, the flowers stand gently timorous in their fragility, the veined leaf stain itself with the sunbeams, and I am exalted in the “light and fire of summer,” yet for all there is only so little of time. Therefore, it seemed to me, by the brimming water, so pitiable that millions were confined in factory and office, breathing the air fouled by exhaust of petrol engine and chimney, while the brook rippled so sweetly, and the living air formed a passionate stream with the energy of the sunbeams.
Dreaming by the brook, I thought of other woods nearer London, which are so dear because of old association with the friend of my boyhood. There still the nightingale returns, the jay lurks, and the mysterious nightjar wheels when the chafer-beetles flit against the oak leaves at twilight. And yet, less than half a mile away, is a busy tram terminus. The wild things in freedom love their haunts and are not easily driven away, but in the higher wood—beautiful in spring with apple blossom, uncurling brakefern, silver birch and sheen of bluebell—no birds sang as alone I walked among its violated sanctities. It was the hour of solitude, when the sun almost was quenched and the moon had not yet come above the dim hills. The paths were beaten into mire by the passing and re-passing of a thousand feet, acres of bluebells had been uprooted and taken away, many trampled and crushed, or gathered and cast carelessly on the paths. The apple blossom was stripped from the trees. In his instinctive effort to possess beauty, man invariably destroys it—for is not all beauty ever elusive? It is the subconscious, or deeper than subconscious, realisation of this elusiveness of beauty that causes the sadness of its contemplation—the blossoms were gone, a whole spring-life of them, carried away by the people who had come from Walworth, Shoreditch, and Woolwich. Branches of those graceful trees, the silver birches, had been torn and wrenched off; not content with decimating the flowers, grasping hands had broken the smaller trees. A week ago, before the fatal beauty of the apple bloom had drawn the hordes from their strongholds, I found dozens of thrushes’ and blackbirds’ nests—some with eggs, others with fledgelings—all these disappeared on that Sunday. No beauty remains inviolate for long.
I walked slowly to the tram terminus, where the crowded cars waited to bear the many people back to London, thinking that soon the woods would be down, and houses with their inevitable laurel and rhododendron bushes crowd together in regular patches; the sooner, perhaps, the better. Memory of former days was only too poignantly present.
In the cars sat the women and the men, each one clasping a flower or a fragment of blossom—of hawthorn, apple, or chestnut tree; the little children wriggled and chattered, holding in their arms great bunches of bluebells with their sappy stalks gleaming white where the sun had not stained them; boys with purple-dusty grass bennets and girls with lilac-coloured cuckoo flowers and drooping buttercups. A phantom carillon still chimed from the wild hyacinths, though their towers were fallen and the belfries wrecked. I looked at the transfigured faces of the children—old or young, they were all children—who breathed in the smoke and worked in the shadow, and saw that the beauty of the wild flowers had passed into their eyes; although the woods were ravaged, the spoiling and pillaging had not been in vain. For two or three days wilting flowers and stolen blossom would remind them of the sunlight and the fresh air, of the cloud shadow that swept up and the warmth that followed when the beams of light lacquered the branches of the trees.
I was filled with an ecstasy; the car, ordinarily so drab with its burden of artisans and factory workers, seemed illumined and vitalised with yellow, the colour of happiness; a radiance hovered about the children, as though the buttercups had dislustred their gold upon the air. I wanted to shout my joy aloud. Here was a manifestation of my hopes for mankind, the thoughts ever with me; at night when only the stars are in the sky, or when the moon is old and like a scarred shield nailed under the rafters of heaven; at dawn, when the light flows over the eastern bar of the world till it drains into the western sunset. One thought by night and one thought by day—my hope is for the happiness of mankind. Could words of mine but tell you of the dream that lurks by the brook in summer, or with the clouds floating with snowy sails in cerulean waters! There the Immortals are waiting. See the joy and happiness that is with every swallow flying low over a lake, his liquid image gliding under him. What is all the philosophy in the world to the joy of the beautiful swallow? Civilisations have risen and crumbled, faded into nothingness, like footprints in the desert obliterated by sand. The sweet little whispering call of my long-tailed titmice fashioning their bottle nest, so happy in the sunshine, is a wiser and more profound utterance than all the philosophy collected from the books of the world....
The tram drew nearer London with its ragged children; had I doubted it before, no longer was the ideal of the artist obscured from me—you must hear it. It must be the ideal of man to beautify the lives of those who pass nearly all their days in the places whence the wild birds and the flowers have gone for evermore.
I thought of these things as the voice of the brook mingled with the love-whisper of my little bottle-birds, and the bees droned their anthem to the pealing chimes of the bluebells. For every year the flowers come, the migrants travel across the great dim sea, the wheat sways and bends as the wind rushes over, and the silver-burning sun swings across the sky; but never enough of these do the little ones in the city see; life does not remain for long. And I saw the children of the trams reflected in the light-burthened brook, and was glad, even though the buttercups had gone from the meadow, and the wandering bees sought in vain in those other woods for the loveliness of the stained apple blossom.