ALONG the trackless and uncharted airlines from the southern sun they came, a lone pair of swallows, arriving with weakly and uncertain flight from over the wastes of the sea. They rested on a gorse bush, their blue backs beautiful against the store of golden blossom guarded by the jade spikes. The last day of March had just blown with the wind into eternity. Symbols of summer and of loveliness, they came with young April, while yet the celandines were unbleached, while the wild white strawberry and ragged-robin were opening with the dog violet. On the headland the flowers struggle for both life and livelihood, the sward is cropped close by generations of sheep, and the sea-wind is damp and cold. Perhaps the swallows hoped to nest, as their ancestors had done centuries since, in the cave under the precipice at the headland’s snout, or that love for its protection after the wearying journey was new-born in their hearts. One cannot say; but the pair remained there.
Days of yellow sunshine and skies blue as their wings greeted them. Over the wave crests and the foamed troughs they sped, singing and twittering as they flew. Kestrel hawks with earth-red pinions hung over the slopes of the cliffs, searching with keen eyes for mouse or finch, but the swallows heeded not. Wheatears passed all day among the rabbit burrows and the curled cast feathers of the gulls, chiffchaffs iterated their little joy in singsong melody, shags squatted on the rocks below, preening metal-green plumage and ejecting plentiful fish-bones. The wanderer on the sheep-track, passing every day, joyed in the effortless thrust of those dark wings, the chestnut stain on the throat, the delicate fork of the tail. Winter was ended, and the blackthorn blossoming—there would be no more snow or ice after the white flowers, fragile as vapour thralled by frost, had come upon their ebon wilderness of spines. The heart could now look forward, not backwards to other fled springtimes. The first swallows had come from distant lands, and three weeks before the winged hosts were due! One of the greatest of nature-writers wrote, “The beautiful swallows, be tender to them.” In fancy Richard Jefferies, too, was wandering on the headland, and watching the early vagrants, breathing the fragrance of the wild thyme that came like an old memory with the wind. Always dearly loved are the singing birds of passage, returning with such feeble wings to the land that means love and life to them, and love and life and beauty to us. Each one is dear; all the swallows returned are a sign and a token of loveliness being made manifest before our eyes.
The early April days passed, like the clouds in the sky, softly and in sunlight, merging into the nights when Venus lighted the western seas, and belted Orion plunged into the ocean. In the sheltered places the arums grew, some with hastate leaves purple-spotted, and showing the crimson spadix like the tip of a club. Brighter grew the gorselands, till from the far sands they looked like swarming bees gold-dusty from the pollen of the sun. The stonechat with white-ringed neck and dark cap fluttered into the azure, jerked his song in mid-air, then dived in rapture to his mate perched upon a withered bramble. In a tuft the titlark was building her nest, while the yellowhammer trilled upon a rusted plough-share in the oatfield.
Sometimes the swallows flew to a village a mile inland, and twittered about an ancient barn with grass-grown thatch, haunted by white owls, and hiding in dimness a cider press that had not creaked in turning for half a century. Once they were seen wheeling above the mill pond, and by the mossy waterwheel, hovering along its cool gushings and arch of sun-stealing drops thrown fanwise from the mouldered rim. Everywhere the villagers hailed them with delight, and spoke in the inn at nights of their early adventuring. Such a thing had been unknown for many years; the oldest granfer had heard tell of it, but had never actually seen it before. The old man took a poet’s delight in the news, and peered with rheumy and faded blue eyes, hoping to see them when tapping along the lane to his “tater-patch.” It became a regular thing for the wanderer upon the headland to report their presence when he returned from the high solitude and the drone of the tide, and the yelping cries of gulls floating white in the sunshine above a sea of woad-blue.
Gulls selected nesting sites, and the sea-thrift raised pink buddings from its matted clumps. The ravens rolled in the wind uprushing from the rocks, and took sticks in black beaks to the ledge where they had nested throughout the years. The male bird watched upon a spar while his mate with throaty chucklings built anew the old mass of rubbish where her eggs would be laid. Sometimes he fed her with carrion filched from a pearly gull by the flashing and sunpointed foam, and she gabbled with pleasure. Ever and anon the fleeing specks of the swallows passed near, winding in and out, floating and diving, “garrulous as in Cæsar’s time.” Like kittens in distress the buzzards wailed, spreading vast brown canvas that enabled them to sail high among those silver and phantom galleons, the clouds. Steamers passing to the Severn basin left smoke trails on the horizon; the life of the sea and land, wild and civilised, went on; but no other swallows arrived. Light of heart the wanderer watched, and waited. Any day, new-born and blessed by Aurora, would see the arrival, any day now—two dark arrowheads fell with mighty swoop from heaven, arrowheads that did not miss their mark. There was a frail flutter of feathers in the sunshine, a red drop on the ancient sward, a scuttle of terrified rabbits, a faint scream trembling and dying in the blue. Then only the murmur of the sea far below and the humming of the single telegraph wire near the pathway. The peregrine falcons had taken the lone and beloved swallows.