CHAPTER THE FOURTH

Two hundred years is not a long time to look back upon in the history of Yardley Parva: but it must have been about two hundred years ago that there were in the High Street some houses of distinction. They belonged to noblemen who had also mansions in the county, but who were too sociable and not sufficiently fond of books to be resigned to such isolation from their order as a mansion residence made compulsory. In the little town they were in touch with society of a sort: they could have their whist or piquet or faro with their own set every afternoon, and compare their thirsts at dinner later in the day.

One of these modest residences of a ducal family faces the street to-day, after suffering many vicissitudes, but with the character of its façade unimpaired. The spacious ground-floor has been turned into shops—it would be more correct to say that the shops had been turned into the ground-floor, for structurally there has been no drastic removal of walls or beams, it has not been subjected to any violent evisceration, only to a minor gastric operation—say for appendicitis. On the upper floors the beautiful proportions of the rooms remain uninjured, and the mantelpieces and the cornices have also been preserved.

The back of this house gives on to a part of the dry moat from which the screen-wall of our Castle rises, for Yardley had once a Castle of its own, and picturesque remnants of the Keep, the great gateway, and the walls remain with us. Forty feet from the bed of the moat on this side the walls rise, and the moat must have been the site of the gardens of the ducal house, curving to right and left for a couple of hundred yards, and his lordship saw his chance for indulging in one of the most transfiguring fads of his day by making two high and broad terraces against the walls, thereby creating an imposing range of those hanging gardens that we hear so much of in old gardening books. The Oriental tradition of hanging gardens may have been brought to Europe with one of those wares of Orientalism that were the result of the later crusades; for assuredly at one time the reported splendours of Babylon, Nineveh, and Eckbatana in this direction were emulated by the great in many places of the West, where the need for the protection of the great Norman castles was beginning to wane, and the high, bare walls springing from the fosses, dry and flooded, looked gaunt and grim just where people wanted a more genial outlook.

Powis Castle is the best example I can think of in this connection. No one who has seen the hanging gardens of these old walls can fail to appreciate how splendidly effective must have been the appearance of the terraces of Yardley when viewed from the moat below. But in the course of time, as the roads improved, making locomotion easier, the ducal mansion was abandoned in favour of another some miles nearer the coast, and the note of exclusiveness being gone from the shadow of the Castle walls, the terraces ceased to be cultivated; the moat being on a level with the High Street, it became attractive as a site of everyday houses, until in the course of time there sprang up a row, and then a public-house or two, and corporate offices and law-courts that only required a hanging garden at assize times, when smugglers and highwaymen were found guilty of crimes that made such a place desirable—all these backed themselves into the moat until it had to be recognised as a public lane though a cul-de-sac as it is to-day. At the foot of the once beautiful terraces outhouses and stables were built as they were needed, with the happiest irregularity, but joined by a flint wall over which the straggling survivors of the trees and fruits of the days gone by hang skeleton branches. One doorway between two of the stables opens upon a fine stairway made of solid blocks of Portland stone, leading into a gap in the screen-wall of the Castle, the terrace being to right and left, and giving access to the grounds beyond, the appreciative possessor of which writes these lines. Sic transit gloria. Another stone stairway serves the same purpose at a different place; but all the other ascents are of brick and probably only date back to the eighteenth century. They lead to some elevated but depressing chicken-runs.

I called the attention of our chief local antiquarian to the succession of broad terraces and suggested their decorative origin. He shook his head and assured me that they were ages older than the ducal residence in the High Street. They belonged to the Norman period and were coeval with the Castle walls. When I told him that I was at a loss to know why the Norman builder should first raise a screen-wall forty feet up from a moat, to make it difficult for an enemy to scale, and then go to an amazing amount of trouble to make it easily accessible to quite a large attacking force by a long range of terraces, he smiled the smile of the local antiquarian—a kindly toleration of the absurdities of the tyro—saying,—

“My dear sir, they would not mind such an attack. They could always repel it by throwing stones down from the top—it's ten feet thick there—yes, heavy stones, and melted lead, and boiling water.”

I did not want to throw cold water upon his researches as to the defence of a mediæval stronghold, so I thanked him for his information. He disclaimed all pretensions to exclusive knowledge, and said that he would be happy to tell me anything else that I wanted to learn about such things.

I could not resist expressing my fear to him, as we were parting, that the Water Company would not sanction the domestic supply from the kitchen boiler being used outside the house for defensive purposes; but he stilled my doubts by an assurance that in those days there was no Water Company. This was well enough so far as it went, but when I asked where the Castle folk got their water if there was no Company to supply it, he was slightly staggered, I could see; but, recovering himself, he said there would certainly have been a Sussex dew-pond within the precincts, and, as every one knew, this was never known to dry up.

I did not say that in this respect they had something in common with local antiquarians; but asked him if it was true that swallows spent the winter in the mud at the bottom of these ponds. He told me gravely that he doubted if this could be; for there was not enough mud in even the largest dew-pond to accommodate all the swallows. So I saw that he was as sound a naturalist as he was an antiquarian.

By the way, I wonder how White of Selborne got that idea about the swallows hibernating in the mud at the bottom of ponds. When so keen a naturalist as White could believe that, one feels tempted to ask what is truth, and if it really is to be found, as the swallows are not, at the bottom of a well. One could understand Dr. Johnson's crediting the swallow theory, and discrediting the story of the great earthquake at Lisbon, for he had his own lines of credence and incredulity, and he was what somebody called “a harbitrary gent”; but for White to have accepted and promulgated such an absurdity is indeed an amazing thing.

But, for that matter, who, until trustworthy evidence was forthcoming a few months ago, ever fancied that English swallows went as far south as the Cape of Good Hope? This is now, however, an established fact; but I doubt if White of Selborne would have accepted it, no matter what evidence was claimed for its accuracy. Several times when aboard ship off the Cape I have made pets of swallows that came to us and remained in the chief saloon so long as there was a fly to be found; and once in the month of October, on the island of St. Helena, I watched the sudden appearance of a number of the same birds; but it was never suggested that they had come from England. I think I have seen them at Madeira in the month of January, but I am not quite certain about my dates in regard to this island; but I know that when riding through Baines' Kloof in South Africa, quite early in January, swallows were flying about me in scores.

0059

What a pity it seems that people with a reputation for wisdom were for so long content to think of the swallows only as the messengers of a love poem: the “swallow sister—oh, fleet, sweet swallow,” or the “swallow, swallow, flying, flying south”—instead of piling up data respecting the wonder of their ways! The same may be said of the nightingale, and may the Lord have mercy on the souls of those who say it!

Are we to be told to be ready to exchange Itylus for a celluloid tab with a date on It? or Keats's Ode for a corrected notation of the nightingale's trills? At the same time might not a poet now and again take to heart the final lines—the summing up of the next most beautiful Ode in the language—

“Beauty is Truth, Truth beauty?

Every fact in Nature seems to me to lead in the direction of poetry, and to increase the wonder of that of which man is but an insignificant part. We are only beginning to know a little about the part we were designed to play in Nature, but the more we know the more surprised, and, indeed, alarmed, we must be when by a revelation its exact position is made known to us. We have not yet learned to live. We have been fools enough to cultivate the forgetting of how to do things that we were able to do thousands of years ago. The half of our senses have been atrophied. It is many years since we first began to take leave of our senses and we have been at it ever since. It is about time that we started recognising that an acquaintance with the facts of Nature is the beginning of wisdom. We crystallised our ignorance in phrases that have been passed on from father to son, and quoted at every opportunity. We refer to people being “blind as a bat,” and to others being—as “bold as a lion,” or “harmless as a dove.” Did it never strike the inventor of any of these similes that it would be well before scattering them abroad to find out if they were founded on fact? The eyesight of the bat is a miracle. How such a creature can get a living for the whole year during the summer months is amazing. The lion is a cowardly brute that runs away yelling at the sight of a rhinoceros and submits without complaint to the insults of the elephant. A troop of doves will do more harm to a wheat-field in an hour than does a thunderstorm.

And the curious thing is that in those quarters where one would expect to find wisdom respecting such incidents of Nature one finds foolishness. Ten centuries of gamekeepers advertise their ignorance in documentary evidence nailed to the barn doors; they have been slaughtering their best friends all these years and they continue doing so.

After formulating this indictment I opened my Country Life, and found in its pages a confirmation of my evidence by my friend F. C. G., who is proving himself in his maturity as accomplished a Naturalist as, in his adolescence, he was a caricaturist in the Westminster Gazette. These are his lines:—

THE GAMEKEEPER'S GIBBET

F. C. G.

And what about gardeners? Why, quite recently I was solemnly assured by one of the profession that I should “kill without mercy”—those were his words—every frog or toad I found in a greenhouse!

But for that matter, don't we remember the harsh decrees of our pastors and masters when as children we yielded to an instinct that had not yet been atrophied, and slaughtered all the flies that approached us. I remember that, after a perceptor's reasoning with me through the medium of a superannuated razor-strop, I was told that to kill a bluebottle was a sin. Now science has come to the rescue of the new generation from the consequences of the ignorance of the old, and the boy who kills most flies in the course of a season is handsomely rewarded. What is pronounced a sin in one generation is looked on as a virtue in the next.

I recollect seeing it stated in a Zoology for the Use of Schools, compiled by an F.R.S., with long quotations from Milton at the head of every chapter, that the reason why some fishes of the Tropics were so gorgeously coloured was to enable them to be more easily seen by the voracious enemy that was pursuing them. That was why God had endowed the glowworm with his glow—to give him a better chance of attracting the attention of the nightingale or any other bird that did not go to roost before dark! And God had also given the firefly its spark that it might display its hospitality to the same birds that had been entertained by the glow-worm! My Informant had not mastered the alphabet of Nature.

Long after I had tried to see things through Darwin's eyes I was perplexed by watching a cat trying to get the better of a sparrow in the garden. I noticed that every time it had crouched to make its pounce the cat waved its tail. Why on earth it should try to make itself conspicuous in this way when it was flattening itself into the earth that was nearest to it in colour, and writhing towards its prey, seemed to me remarkable. Once, however, I was able to watch the cat approach when I was seated beyond where the sparrow was digging up worms, and the cat had slipped among the lower boughs of an ash covered with trembling leaves.

There among the trembling leaves I saw another trembling leaf—the soothing, swaying end of my cat's tail; but if I had not known that it was there I should not have noticed it apart from the moving leaves. The bird with all its vigilance was deceived, and it was in the cat's jaws in another moment.

And I had been calling that cat—and, incidentally, Darwin—a fool for several years! I do not know what my Zoologist “for the Use of Schools” would have made of the transaction. Would he have said that a cat abhorred the sin of lying, and scorned to take advantage of the bird, but gave that graceful swing to its tail to make the bird aware of its menacing proximity?

I lived for eleven years in a house in Kensington with quite a spacious garden behind it, and was blest for several years by the company of a pair of blackbirds that made their nest among the converging twigs of a high lilac. No cat could climb that tree in spring, as I perceived when I had watched the frustrated attempts of the splendid blue Persian who was my constant companion. Of course I lived in that garden for hours every day during the months of April, May, June, and July, and we guarded the nest very closely, even going so far as to disturb the balance of Nature by sending the cat away on a visit when the young birds were being fledged. But one month of May arrived, and though I noticed the parent blackbirds occasionally among the trees and shrubs, I never once saw them approaching the old nest, which, as in previous seasons, was smothered out of sight in the foliage about it, for a poplar towered above the lilac, and was well furnished.

I remarked to my man that I was afraid our blackbirds had deserted us this year, and he agreed with me. But one day early in June I saw the cat look wistfully up the lilac.

“He hasn't forgotten the nest that was there,” I said. “But I'm sure he'll find out in which of the neighbouring gardens the new one has been built.”

But every day he came out and gazed up as if into the depths of the foliage above our heads.

“Ornithology is his hobby,” said I, “but he's not so smart as I fancied, or he would be hustling around the other gardens where he should know murder can be done with impunity.”

The next day my man brought out a pair of steps, and placing them firmly under the lilac, ascended to the level of where the nest had been in former years.

At once there came the warning chuckle of the blackbirds from the boughs of the poplar.

“Why, bless my soul! There are four young ones in the nest, and they're nearly ready to fly,” sang out the investigator from above, and the parents corroborated every word from the poplar.

I was amazed. It seemed impossible that I could have sat writing under that tree day after day for two months, watching for signs that the birds were there, and yet fail to notice them at their work either of hatching or feeding. It was not carelessness or indifference they had eluded; it was vigilance. I had looked daily for their coming, and there was no fine day in which I was not in the garden for four hours, practically immovable, and the nest was not more than ten feet from the ground, yet I had remained in ignorance of all that was going on above my head!

With such an experience I do not think that it becomes me to sneer too definitely at the stupidity of gamekeepers or farmers. It is when I read as I do from week to week in Country Life of the laborious tactics of those photographers who have brought us into closer touch with the secret life of birds than all the preceding generations of naturalists succeeded in doing, that I feel more charitably disposed toward the men who mistake friends for foes in the air.

Every year I give prizes to the younger members of our household to induce them to keep their eyes and their ears open to their fellow-creatures who may be seen and heard at times. The hearing of the earliest cuckoo meets with its reward, quite apart from the gratifying of an aesthetic sense by the quoting of Wordsworth. The sighting of the first swallows is quoted somewhat lower on the chocolate exchange, but the market recovers almost to a point of buoyancy on hearing the nightingale. The cuckoo is an uncertain customer and requires some looking after; but the swallows are marvellously punctual. We have never seen them in our neighbourhood before April the nineteenth. For five years the Twenty-first is recorded as their day. The nightingale does not visit our garden, which is practically in the middle of the town; but half a mile away one is heard almost every year. Upon one happy occasion it was seen as well as heard, which constituted a standard of recognition not entertained before.

I asked for an opinion of the bird from the two girls who had had this stroke of luck.

Each took a different standpoint in regard to its attainments.

“I never heard anything so lovely in all my life,” said Rosamund, aged ten. “It made you long to—to—I don't know what. It was lovely.”

“And what was your opinion, Olive?” I asked of the second little girl.

My Olive branch looked puzzled for a few minutes, but she had the sense to perceive that comparative criticism is safe, when a departure from the beaten track is contemplated. Her departure was parabolic.

“I didn't think it half as pretty a bird as Miss Midleton's parrot,” she said with conviction.

Miss Midleton's parrot is a gorgeous conglomeration of crimson and blue, like the 'at of 'arriet, that should be looked at through smoked glasses and heard not at all.

I think that I shall have Olive educated to take her place in a poultry run; while Rosamund looks after the rose garden.

My antiquary came to me early on the day after I had asked him for information about the hanging gardens.

“I've been talking to my friend Thompson on the subject of those hanging gardens of the Duke's,” said he; “and I thought that you would like to hear what he says. He agrees with me—I fancied he would. The Duke had no power to hang any one in his gardens, Thompson says; and even if he had the power, the pear-trees that we see there now weren't big enough to hang a man on.”

“A man—a man! My dear sir, I wasn't thinking of his hanging men there: it was clothes—clothes—linen—pants—shirts—pajamas, and the like.”

“Oh, that's quite another matter,” said he.

I agreed with him.