XIII.A DESPERATE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE.
Alas, alas! most of the pretty white foxgloves we planted out by the boggy hollow just below the tennis-lawn have come to nothing. The heather and bracken of the moor have outgrown them and throttled them. They made a hard fight for life, in their petty Thermopylæ—one or two of them, indeed, are still battling with inexhaustible courage against the countless hordes of sturdy natives that choke and overshadow them; but die they must in the end, unless I step in betimes as earthly providence to thin out the furze and enrich the niggard soil for the struggling strangers. They remind me of the Pilgrim Fathers in Massachusetts. Foxgloves, you know, cannot compete with ling or Scotch heather on its native heath. They are denizens of a deeper and richer mould, growing generally on fat wayside banks or in the ditches by hedgerows—always the wealthiest and most luxuriantly manured of any wild places, because there birds perch, and wild animals take refuge, and snails and beetles die, and robins perish, that hedgerow weeds may batten on their decaying bodies. The hedge, in point of fact, is the main shelter and asylum for beasties great and small in our workaday England. There the hedgehog skulks, and the field-mouse hides, and the sparrow builds her nest, and the slow-worm suns himself; there the rabbit burrows, and the thrush sits mocking, and the dormouse dreams, and the lizard lies in wait for the dancing midges. All the waste richness of the field finds its rest at last by the roots of the whitethorn, to reappear in due time as red campion and herb-robert, as faint-scented may and tall military spikes of purple foxglove.
But when you sow or transplant these lush herbs of the hedgerow on to the bare and open heath, they come into competition at once with other and far hardier upland bushes. The plants of the moor are indeed unlike such pampered odalisques of the deep banks and rich lowlands. Stern children of the heights, their stems are hard and wiry, their leaves small and dry; their flowers feel like tissue-paper; their growing shoots have none of that luxuriant tenderness, that translucent delicacy, which characterizes the long sprays of hedgerow dog-rose and hedgerow bramble. All is arid and parsimonious, as in some Highland cottage. Our daintily bred foxgloves, decayed gentlewomen, stunted and dwarfed in that inhospitable soil, can scarce find nutriment in the thirsty sand to send up a feeble parody of their purple spikes; in long droughts they droop and fail for lack of a drop of water. You must make a deep pocket of garden mould in the midst of the heath if you want them to thrive; and even then, unless you keep constantly cutting down the heather and gorse about them, they are overtopped and outlived by the native vegetation.
To dwellers in towns, that mere phrase, “the struggle for life among plants,” seems a quaint exaggeration. They cannot believe that creatures so rooted and so passive as plants can struggle at all for anything. The pitched battles of the animals they can understand, because they can see the kestrel swooping down upon the linnet, the weasel scenting the spoor of the rabbit to his burrow. But the pitched battle of the plants sounds to them but a violent metaphor, a poetical trick of language, a notion falsely pressed into the service of the naturalist by some mistaken analogy. In reality, those few of us who have fully read ourselves into the confidence and intimacy of the beautiful green things, know well that nowhere on earth is the struggle for life so real, so intense, so continuous, so merciless as among the herbs and flowers. Every weed in the meadows, every creeper in the woodland, is battling for its own hand each day and all day long against a crushing competition. It is battling for food and drink, for air and sunlight, for a place to stand in, for a right to existence. Its rivals around are striving hard with their roots to deprive it of its fair share of water and of manure; are striving hard with their leaves to forestall it in access to carbonic acid and sunshine; are striving hard with their flowers to entice away the friendly bee and the fertilizing beetle; are striving hard with their winged or protected seeds to anticipate the vacant spots on which it fain would cast its own feeble offspring. A struggle for theHinterlandgoes on without ceasing. The very fact that plants can hardly move at all from the spot where they grow makes the competition in the end all the fiercer. They are perpetually intriguing among stones and crannies to insinuate their roots here, and to get beforehand on their rivals with their seedlings there; they fight for drops of water after summer showers, like the victims shut up in the Black Hole of Calcutta; they spread their leaves close in rosettes along the ground, so as to monopolize space and kill down competition; they press upward toward the sun so as to catch the first glance of the bountiful rays, and to grasp before their neighbours at every floating speck of carbonic acid.
This is no poetic fancy. It is sober and literal biological truth. The green fields around us are one vast field of battle. And you can realize it at once if you only think what we mean by a flower-garden. We want to induce peonies and hollyhocks and geraniums and roses to smile around our houses, and what do we do for them? We “make a bed,” as we say; in other words, we begin by clearing away all the stouter and better-adapted native competitors. Go, dock and thistle; go, grass and nettle! We will have pansies here, and sweet-peas, and gilly-flowers! So we root them all up, turn and break the stiff clods, put in rich leaf-mould, manure it from the farmyard, and plant at measured distances the components of our nosegay. Tall white garden lilies take the place of knotweed; the larkspur mocks the sky where the dandelion spread before its golden constellations. Yet even so, we have not permanently secured our end. Original sin reappears as ragwort and hawkweed. Every day or two we must go round and “weed the beds,” as we say; the very familiarity of phrase and act blinds our minds to the truth that what we are really doing is to limit the struggle, to check the competition. We pull up here a shepherd’s-purse and there a chickweed, that the Iceland poppies may have room to raise their black-capped buds, and that the groundsel may not steal all the light and air from our shrinking nemophilas. Relax your care for a week or two, and what then do you find? The goosefoots and couch-grasses have lived down the mignonette; the russet docks are overshadowing your white Japanese anemones. Abandon the garden for a year, and the native vegetation has avenged itself on the intruders in a war of extermination. The thistles have cut off the lilies-of-the-valley, as Israel cut off the Canaanites; not a spike remains of your sky-blue monkshood before the purple standard of the victorious burdocks. Here and there, it is true, some hardy perennial, some stout iris or sweet-william, armed with its sword-shaped foliage, will continue the unequal strife for a miserable year or two of guerrilla warfare, like Hereward Wake in the Isle of Ely; but sooner or later the stronger will win, and your garden will become a mere nursery of weeds, whose flying thistle-down will invade and usurp the neighbouring meadows.
Plants, in point of fact, have more needs than animals; therefore, perforce, they struggle harder. The beasts require but food and drink; the herbs require from the soil water and nitrogenous matter for their roots; they require from the air, carbon, which is their true solid food, for their leaves; they need sunlight, which is the motive power, for their growth and assimilation; insects to fertilize them, birds or breezes to disperse their seeds. For all these they struggle ceaselessly among themselves; and the struggle is all the deadlier because it is carried on at such very close quarters.
XIV.COLTSFOOT FLOWERS.
Downby the streamlet in the Frying Pan, in the heavy clay soil of the bank, I see this morning the flower-scapes of the coltsfoot are lifting betimes their curious bent heads. Two days more, and they will star the bare earth with their golden blossoms. That is a sure sign that winter is over, the labourers will tell you, weatherwise in their ancestral lore; and, indeed, the coltsfoot is a prudent and a wary herb, which I have seldom known go wrong in its calculation of probabilities. It makes its own weather forecast, independently of the Meteorological Office, and it backs its opinion. As long as it thinks frost is likely to recur, it “lies low,” like Br’er Rabbit; but as soon as it feels pretty confident the worst is past, and no more hard weather will come to nip it in the bud, it boldly sends up its leafless flower-stem, looking more like a shoot of asparagus than anything else, with which most people are familiar. I have never seen it make a serious mistake, even in the sunniest and most treacherous English spring weather.
Who gave it its wisdom?—to parody Mr. Swinburne. How did it come so well to time itself as the earliest among our conspicuous spring flowers? Well, coltsfoot is a composite, belonging to the same minor group as the common ragworts—its very leaf, indeed, being a good deal like some of the larger ragworts in type, especially those handsome exotics of the race, so much cultivated in greenhouses under the name of cinerarias. But living in cold northern climates, on the banks of streams, in deep clay soil, where it spreads most vigorously, it has learned by experience to accommodate itself to its environment. It did so, in fact, many thousand years before Mr. Herbert Spencer taught poor recent humanity that latter-day catchword. Growing in thickset places, by running water, where its own large leaves and those of its neighbours would overshadow and hide its dainty blossoms in the height of summer, it has acquired the odd trick of sending them up naked, on the naked clay, in very early spring, when they court and easily attract the attention of the first spring insects to visit and fertilize them. In order to do this it must lay by material the summer before, and that material the prudent plants bury deep out of harm’s way, in their creeping underground rootstock. Owing to the dampness and chilliness of the clay, which suits its constitution best, coltsfoot hides its rootstock exceptionally deep in the earth, and this precaution affords it, on the whole, a safe protection alike against cold and against burrowing enemies. As long as the frozen earth remains chilly underneath, the buds make no stir; but as soon as the subsoil begins to rise in temperature to a very modest point the flower-heads grow apace from the buried material, exactly as hyacinths do from a bulb when placed in water in a slightly warm atmosphere. And such a raising of temperature in the subsoil is one of the surest signs that winter has spent itself.
The flower-stem of coltsfoot rises bare and leafless, save for a few small scales, such as one sees on asparagus; but it is thickly covered with a warm cottony wool, to keep out winter, and the buds are bent down so as to protect them at once from chill and from injury. Each stem terminates in a single pretty fluffy yellow flower-head, composed of innumerable golden florets of two kinds—those of the ray very narrow and ragged, giving the entire head its characteristic tasselled appearance; while those of the central disk are much larger, and bell-shaped. The entire blossom looks like a dandelion at first sight to a careless observer; but when you come to examine it closely, it is a far more dignified and beautiful flower. The tone of its yellow is richer, yet mellower, and its fluffy little ray-florets have a Japanesque charm in their flowing looseness.
So long as the flowers continue to bloom, you see no leaves; whence it comes about that many people know well the blossoms of coltsfoot in spring, and the foliage in summer, without having the faintest idea that they belong to one another. But if you keep your eye on the place where the yellow stars arose, after the flowers have withered and the white heads have blown away in copious flights, their wee feathery fruitlets, you will see by-and-by some big broad angular leaves, very thick and noticeable, rising high into the air from the same buried rootstock in the self-same position. Few leaves are more remarkable, with their heart-shaped bases and their obtrusive angles; while the under side is thickly covered throughout with a cottony wool, loose, white, and abundant. They are big, because they overtop the other leaves about, and so gain free access to the air and sunshine. They have elbow-room to spread in. Their business (like that of all leaves) is to catch and eat carbonic acid, which the sunlight assimilates for them. For this reason they are green above, with a transparent skin, which skin forms a water-layer for absorbing the gas and conducting it to the living green tissue beneath, where it is duly digested and assimilated. But why the cotton below? Well, the upper and under surfaces of leaves perform in nature quite different functions. The upper side, which is thick and firm, eats carbonic acid and receives the incident sunlight to digest it; but the under side, which is looser and spongier, gives off vapour of water—transpires, as we say—by innumerable little mouths, which are its outward breathing-pores. Now, these pores must not be allowed to get clogged with dew; so in wet meadows and by river-banks, where everything reeks with dew from sunset till late in the succeeding morning, almost all the plants protect the breathing-pores on their under side by such an unwettable felt of thickly matted cotton. Meadow-sweet is a familiar English example, and so is a close relation of our coltsfoot, the butterbur.
XV.A HEATHER EPISODE.
I flungmyself on the heath outside the house just now, with my friend the Editor. He edits a London literary journal, and disbelieves in everything. He is critical and sceptical. When he inherits glory (as he surely must do in time, for his is the noblest and purest and best of souls at bottom, in spite of its gruffness), I believe he will gaze about him at the golden floor and the walls of chrysoprase, and murmur to himself, “Humph! Not all it’s cracked up to be!” Yet he is as tender as a woman, and as simple as a child; though he has found out the fact that the world is hollow, and that the human doll is stuffed with sawdust.
We lay beside a clump of tall flaming rose-bay—fire-weed, as they call it over yonder in America. There, in the great woodlands, on whose lap I was nursed, a wandering child of the primeval forest, you may see whole vast sheets of that flamboyant willow-herb covering the ground for miles on bare glades in the pinewood. Most visitors fancy it gets its common American name from its blaze of colour; and, indeed, it often spreads like a sea of flame over acres and acres of hillside together. But the prosaic backwoodsman gave it its beautiful title for a more practical reason: because it grows apace wherever a forest fire has killed out and laid waste the native vegetation. Like most of the willow-herbs, it has a floating seed winged with cottony threads, which waft it through the air on pinions of gossamer; and thus it alights on the newly burnt soil, and springs up amain after the first cool shower. Within twelve months it has almost obliterated the signs of devastation on the ground under foot; only the great charred stems and gaunt blackened branches rise above its smiling mass of green leaves and bright blossoms, to tell anew the half-forgotten tale of ruin and disaster.
Here in England the rose-bay is a less frequent denizen, for it loves the wilds, and feels most at home in deep rich meadow bottoms unoccupied by tillage. Now, in Britain these conditions do not often occur since the Norman conquest; still, I have seen vast sheets of its tall pink pyramids of bloom at John Evelyn’s Wootton; while even up here, on our heathery uplands, it fights hard for life among the gorse and bracken. Its beautiful spikes of irregular flowers, wide open below and tapering at the top into tiny knobs of bud, are among the loveliest elements in the natural flora of my poor three acres.
We were lying beside them, then, out of the eye of the sun, under the shadow of one bare and weather-beaten pine-tree, when talk fell by chance on the small brown lizards that skulk among the sandy soil of our hilltop. I said, and I believe, that the lizard population of the British Isles must outnumber the human by many, many millions. For every sandy heath is just a London of lizards. They pullulate in the ling like slum-children in Whitechapel. They were about us, I remarked, as thick as Hyde Park demonstrators; only, instead of demonstrating, they prefer to lie low and conceal their identity. The policeman hawks and the owls on night duty have taught them that wisdom—stern Draconian officers of nature’s executive, who know no gentler punishment than the death penalty for the slightest misdemeanour.
The Editor smiled that sceptical smile which is the terror of young contributors of Notes on Novels. He rejected the lizards like unsuitable copy. He didn’t believe in them. He doubted there were any on the heath at all. He had walked over square miles of English moorland, but never a lizard had he seen, out of all their millions. Imagination, he observed, was an invaluable property to poets and naturalists. It was part of their stock-in-trade. He didn’t seek to deprive them of it. As Falstaff says, a man may surely labour at his vocation.
I was put on my mettle. For once in my life, I did a rash thing; I ventured to prophesy. “If you wish,” I cried, “I’ll catch a lizard, and show you.” The Editor’s face was a study to behold. Phil May would have paid him ten guineas for the copyright. “As you like,” he answered grimly. “Produce your lizards.”
Fortune favours the brave. But I confess I trembled. Never before had I bragged; and now I wondered whether Fortune or Nemesis would carry it. ’Twas two to one on Nemesis. Yet the gods, as Swinburne tells us in “Les Noyades,” are sometimes kindly. We lay still on the heather—still as mice—and waited. Presently, to my great and unexpected joy, a sound as of life!—a rustling among the bilberry bushes! One sharp brown head, and then another, with beady black eyes as keen as a beagle’s, peeped forth from the miniature jungle of brake and cross-leaved heath in the bank beside us. I raised my lids, and looked mutely at the Editor. He followed my glance, and saw the tiny lithe creatures glide slowly from their covert, and crawl with heads held slyly on one side, and then on the other, into the open patch, on which we lay like statues. How they listened and looked! How they raised their quaint small heads, on the alert against the first faint breath of danger! I sat still as a mouse again, holding my breath in suspense, and waiting anxiously for developments. Then a miracle happened. Miraclesdohappen now and again, as once at Bolsena, to convince the sceptical. My hand lay motionless on the ground at my side. I would not have moved it just then for a sovereign. One wee brown lizard, gazing cautiously around, crept over it with sly care, and, finding it all right, walked up my sleeve as far as the elbow. I checked my heart and watched him. Never in my life before had such a thing happened to me—but I did not say so to the sceptical Editor; on the contrary, I looked as totally unconcerned as if I had been accustomed to lizards taking tours on me daily from my childhood upward. “Are you convinced?” I asked, with a bland smile of triumph. Even the Editor admitted, with a grudging sniff, that seeing is believing.
And, indeed, therearedozens of lizards to the square yard in England, though I never before knew one of them to assail me of its own accord. I have caught them a hundred times by force or fraud among the heaths and sand-pits. The commonest sort hereabouts is the dingy brown viviparous lizard, which lays no eggs, but brings forth its young alive, and tends them like a mother. It is an agile, wee thing, that creeps from its hole or nest during the noontide hours, and basks lazily in the sun in search of insects. But let a fly come near it, and quick as lightning it turns its tiny head, darts upon him like fate, and crunches him up between those sharp small teeth with the ferocity of a crocodile. We have sand-lizards, too, a far timider and wilder species; they bite your hand when caught, and refuse to live in captivity at the bottom of a flowerpot like their viviparous cousins. These pretty wee reptiles are often delicately spotted or banded with green; they lay a dozen leathery eggs in a hole in the sand, where the sun hatches out the poor abandoned little orphans without the aid of their unnatural mother. Still, they are much daintier in their colouring than the more domestic brown kind; and, after all, in a lizard I demand beauty rather than advanced moral qualities. I may be wrong; but such is my opinion. It is all very well to be ethical at Exeter Hall; but too sensitive a conscience is surely out of place in the struggle for life on the open moorland.
XVI.THE CHRYSALIS YEAR.
Inwarm spots under hedges, I see, the first spring insects now begin to appear, timidly and tentatively, from the shelter of their cocoons. Some few of them, indeed, like the lady-birds, the wasps, and the bumble-bees, have struggled through the winter in the winged or perfect form, having hibernated among warm moss or under the bark of trees in favoured situations. These adventurous kinds passed through their larval and pupal stages last year, and a tithe of them live on with difficulty through the winter frosts, to become the mothers and founders of fresh insect communities as April comes round again. But by far the greater number eat and grow as grubs or caterpillars through the summer months, and when autumn approaches turn into cocoons or chrysalides, to lie by for the winter in a snug retreat, well wrapped up in a warm silky or woollen coverlet, and protected underground from snow or hoarfrost. As soon as cold weather approaches, these prudent insects retire from public life, cease from active pursuits, melt themselves up into a sort of organic pulp, lose almost every distinguishable organ or feature, and remain dormant, in a state of indefinite protoplasm, which gradually takes shape again as moth, beetle, or butterfly. Mummies we sometimes call them, but they are not even mummies, for they lose almost entirely their form and limbs; they tide over the winter for the most part in an all but structureless mass, which yet encloses the potentiality of rebuilding in due course the shape and members of the ancestral insect. Slowly new limbs grow out within the protecting chrysalis case, wings bud from the side, and the grub or caterpillar changes by degrees into the totally unlike image of the beetle or butterfly. As soon as warmer weather sets in, the winged forms emerge with the first sunny day from their broken shell. I have seen nettle-butterflies abroad in a spell of genial warmth in the last week of January; a brimstone has been tempted forth to seek his lady-love on St. Valentine’s Day; and fritillaries are abundant in early March sunshine. Lesser insects, whose names are enshrined in scientific Latin alone, often emerge from their mummy-cases even earlier than these familiar and conspicuous lepidoptera.
The moment they peep forth, lo and behold! they find the plant world, for its part, ready decked to greet them. The very same morning that sees the first butterfly and the first bee on the wing, sees also the first crocus opening wide its shining cup in the full sun to woo them. The brimstone is no sooner out than the coltsfoot and the celandine and the bulbous buttercup spread their gold to allure him. And has it ever struck you that the plants, no less than the animals, pass through the winter period in the chrysalis condition? This is no mere figurative flower of speech; it is the scientific statement of a real and profound analogy. During the summer months the leaves of the crocus, the tulip, and the hyacinth have been eating and laying by, exactly as the caterpillar did, to provide material for next year’s flowering season. When winter blows cold, the leaves die down—the plant, as it were, retires underground into its bulb, like the caterpillar into the cocoon, and there remains, formless and organless, a mere pupa-like potentiality of future buds and blossoms. But when warm weather recurs, the bulb once more begins to germinate: it takes fresh form as a vigorous flower-head. Observe, too, that the flowering stem, like the winged stage of the insect, is the sexual epoch of the plant, an avatar told off, as the butterfly by the caterpillar, to produce the seeds which are the eggs of the species. In each case a certain definite period of time is passed in laying by material, in eating and storing only; then comes a quiescent epoch of rest and rebuilding; and this again is followed by a mature stage of marriage and reproduction. Notice, too, in either instance, that the reproductive stage is more beautifully formed and more attractively coloured than the mere accumulative and storing mechanism.
What is thus true of the crocus and of the butterfly is true, to a great extent, of all plants and animals in temperate or cold climates. They enter every winter into a chrysalis stage, from which in early spring they emerge once more, still more beautiful than before, freshly adorned for the mating and nesting period. Trees lose their leaves, and withdraw their protoplasmic and starchy material in a shapeless mass into the permanent tissues; but they hold it there, ready to manufacture it once more into bright green foliage and tasselled catkins, into blushing apple-blossoms, or tall spikes of horse-chestnut flower, or pink bloom of elms, with the first spring sunshine. Squirrels hibernate; moles sleep away the dead of winter; frogs retire to the depths of ponds; slugs bury themselves in the soil; dormice doze in well-lined crannies among the boles of hazels. Many species only tide over the cold weather, indeed, in the most potential form, as eggs or seeds; they are annuals, like the poppy or the aphides of roses. In such cases the whole race is represented for some months by its germs alone: one generation never sees or knows the existence of another. In other instances, somewhat higher, the species survives as pupa or as bulb, adult, no doubt, though in a relatively formless or indefinite shape, yet ready to come forth full-fledged and perfect at the first faint breath of returning summer. Still other kinds, again, struggle through as mature and fully formed insects, or birds, or mammals, and as evergreen trees or shrubs, though they live for the most part a life of low grade, and on accumulated materials. Nature is almost dormant in our zone through the winter months; life is then one vast and varied chrysalis.
XVII.A SUMMER STROLL.
Myfriend the Poet and I walk the world together on somewhat different principles. It is a fixed belief of his that illusion is far more beautiful than reality. He likes to see the distant hills through some dim veil of mist; he likes to believe the skylark feeds on dew and sunshine, and he is revolted when I explain to him, in spite of Shelley, the actual staples of its unromantic diet. To him, it seems, everything loses just half its beauty when he knows all about it. Analysis, he says, is destructive of pleasure. Only in an imagined and unrealized world can he find the pure elements that delight his fancy.
But to me the actual world as it stands is beautiful. I love to descry the very contour of the hills; I love to watch from afar the saucer-shaped combes on the flanks of the South Downs, when the afternoon light floods and bathes them in its glory. Illusion to my mind is less lovely than reality. Nothing on earth seems more beautiful than Truth. I love to catch her face behind the clouds that conceal her.
And now it is the plain unvarnished Truth I am going to give you in this Moorland Idyll. I am going to tell you just what we saw to-day, without one episode or incident save what really occurred to us. I could not make that stroll more exquisite than I found it, if I tried till Doomsday. It was an idyll of real life. May many more so come to me!
We strayed together—the Poet, Elsie, Lucy, and myself—across the moor to Highfield, in search of strawberries. Highfield lies some two miles off, at the beginning of the valley; a lost old-world farm, in a dell of the moors, with a market-garden. You poor Londoners, when you go to buy strawberries, go to buy them prosaically at a commercial fruiterer’s in a noisy street; but we moorlanders go with our basket in our hands to some lonely grange across the heather-clad upland. The first part of our walk lay high over the ridge, where the heath was burnt in the Jubilee year by the great fire; you can still plainly mark the point up to which the flames made a clear sweep of the heather, and the point where they left off, held in check by the beaters. For heather is really a forest-tree of some fifty years’ growth; and the waste where the fire raged is still covered to this day with a shorter crop of young seedling gorse and ling and whortleberry, while the older vegetation unburnt beyond rises tall and bush-like. The blasted part, too, shows by far the finest and deepest purple of any; not because the flowers are really bigger or thicker, but because where the plants are still short the Tyrian purple of the Scotch heather is seen to greatest advantage; whereas, when they rise higher, the Scotch heather is overtopped by the bushier and coarser and taller-growing ling, with its somewhat insipid pale pink blossoms. The Poet thinks the fire makes the heath burn brighter. I think myself it keeps the ling lower.
Anyhow, that spur is one blaze of glory. Not a spot on the moor flares so splendid a purple. We passed through it, single file, by the narrow footpath, where the ling rises knee-high on either side, and the little brown lizards dart wildly to their holes at first sound of a footfall. Along the ridge, past the broom-bushes, now hanging with silvery pods, we continued on the path till we reached the white beam-tree. There the trail diverges a little suddenly to the left; a cock-pheasant broke with a shrill cry on the wing; his whirr as he rose startled the shallow valley. A wood-pigeon, alarmed at his alarm, flapped afield from the pinewood; the low cooing of his fellows from the larches beyond died away at the sound of his warning signal. Then we turned into the middle trail, where it dips towards the lowland.
All at once Elsie started, and gave a little cry—“A fox! a fox!” And, sure enough, there was one. He ran on before us, with his red brush depressed, fifty yards or more along the path on the open. Seldom have I caught a longer or clearer view of him unhunted in England. We were but ten yards behind, and had fairly surprised him. However, he took his discovery like a gentleman, and instead of skulking away to right or left, where the heath rose high, he ran on along the open, so as to give us a fine stare at him. Lucy, who is a visitor, unused to country ways, save as townsfolk know them, had never seen a live fox in the wild state before, and the incident charmed her. He was so lithe and red, and he ran so well, with his sharp head held low, and with the wild air of his species.
By the chestnut plantation, where a grassy little lane dips close between the trees, cropped and cut for hop-poles, we began to descend in real earnest to the valley. A rabbit just dashed across the sward on the slope of path; his twinkling white tail scarce betrayed him for a moment. Two hawks hovered above, but held off for fear of us. Rustlings in the fallen foliage beneath the sapling chestnuts to right and left gave sign of other rabbits, unseen, but scurrying burrow-ward. As we reached the open we disturbed a young covey of nursling partridges. Most of them disappeared after their prudent mother before we could catch a glimpse of them; but one poor little chick, belated and terrified, darted with its tiny half-naked wings erect in an agony of alarm in the opposite direction. It found covert in the chestnuts, its tiny heart throbbing. Alas, that it should have conceived at so early an age so justly unfavourable an idea of humanity!
Beyond the plantation we turned aside into a field, and oh! such a field! Have I words to picture it? It had been sown for grass; but no grass was there. “Bad season,” says the farmer. “Thank Heaven for these slovenly farms,” says the botanist. Blue cornflowers grew in it, thick as stars in heaven; and huge spikes of viper’s bugloss as tall as a man’s waist and more lovely than a turquoise. Who shall describe their hue, their form, their fashion? A great spotted stem, like a lizard’s skin, green flecked with russet brown, and uncanny to look upon; on either side, long twisted spirals of red-and-blue blossoms, each curled like a scorpion’s tail, very strange and lurid. The individual blossom is bright blue, when fully opened, with crimson stamens; the buds are deep red; the dead flowers dry violet. Altogether, a most weird and witch-like plant. I think one might use it with great advantage for incantations and sorcery. The Poet decided to try its effect next time he would rid himself of a discarded lady-love. We plucked great armfuls, and carried them along with us as far as Highfield. Other flowers were there, too, of less poetic interest—bright yellow corn-marigolds, and scented white campion; scarlet poppies by the score, with waving panicles of not a few tall grasses. We gathered of them all, and they stand before me now, gladdening my eyes as I write, in the coarse red pots of plain Hampshire earthenware.
They had no strawberries left, after all, at Highfield. We had our walk for nothing—if that be nothing! So we used the empty basket to carry back our trophies. But, returning by the lane, we filled our vacant arms once more with foxgloves; and the fox himself crossed our path for a second again at the self-same turning, without seeking to reclaim them. Even the Poet admitted we had saved one day from Time’s devouring maw. And that’s how we live, up here in the moorland.
XVIII.A MOORLAND FIRE.
Thefrosts of last winter—that terrible, pitiless winter—killed down two-thirds of the gorse in England; and now that summer has come again, the dry brown branches stand bare and leafless in mute accusation in every moor and common in the country. Only an exceptionally hardy bush here and there puts forth, in a straggling and tentative fashion, a few timid shoots, or struggles ineffectually into feeble bloom on a protected bough or so. The bumble-bees wander about, disconsolate, like the hungry sheep in “Lycidas,” and are not fed; thousands and thousands of them have died this spring from so unexpected a failure of their staple food-stuff. Honey and pollen have been quoted for the bees at starvation prices. We have natural selection here on a large scale in actual action before our very eyes: only the hardiest furze-bushes have this year survived the bitter frost; only the busiest, strongest, and most enterprising bumble-bees are now surviving the serious loss of their accustomed provender. Even heather has suffered much, which is a surprising fact, for heather belongs to a high sub-arctic type, that spreads in both its familiar British forms far north into Scotland, Scandinavia, and even Russia; while gorse, a shrub of much more southern and western nature, is rare in the Highlands, unknown in Norway or Sweden, and, in its smaller form, at least, incapable of enduring the severe winters of Germany to the east of the Rhine.
As a consequence of this dryness and deadness of the gorse, and to some extent of the heather-tops, heath fires have raged this spring in England with a fierceness and commonness I have never seen equalled. Every year, of course, especially about Eastertide, when furze and heather are normally at their driest, owing to the winter sleep, heath fires are frequent enough in times of drought on all sandy moorlands; but, as a rule, they cease altogether for the year when the gorse begins to burgeon and the heath to send up its long green summer shoots. As the sap mounts in the plants, and the spiky leaves grow green, the amount of moisture in stem and branches suffices to preserve the commons and moors from the danger of burning. This summer, however, the dead dry gorse-bushes catch a spark like tinder; and in the district where I live, among pines and heather, we have been nightly surrounded for many weeks by constant heath fires. Sometimes, perhaps, they are kindled of malice prepense, or out of pure boyish mischief; more often, however, I fancy they are due to mere human carelessness in flinging down a match among the arid fuel. A bicyclist’s cigarette thrown lightly by the roadside, a labourer’s pipe turned out casually upon the footpath—any such small thing is enough to set it going; and once lighted, the flames spread before the wind with astonishing rapidity, licking up with their fiery tongues whole leagues of dry gorse, and leaping with frantic glee and in crackling haste from bough to bough of the pines and hollies.
It is a strange sight, indeed, to see at night one of these lurid deluges, sweeping onward irresistibly, amid clouds of smoke and loud snapping of boughs, on its work of devastation. Terrible as it all is, it is yet beautiful while it lasts: the red sibilant flames, the fierce glare on the sky, the beaters beating it down on its leeward edge with branches of pine-trees, and silhouetted in black against the bright glow of the fire, all unite to make up a weird and intensely impressive picture. But to the beasts and birds whose home is on the moor, it is a cataclysm inexpressible, appalling, unthinkable. Lizards run before the advancing phalanx of flames in trembling terror till it catches them by the hundred, and calcines them as they run into fine white ashes; rats squeal from their holes in the bank with piteous screams of agony, as they are slowly roasted alive by the remorseless inundation; rabbits wait in silence in their stifling burrows, and are burned without one sound, for, true to their instincts, they prefer to meet death in their own scorching homes, rather than expose themselves to the dogs who follow every fire, and pounce with mad joy on hapless creatures that run for dear life from its devouring onslaught.
Next day—ah! next day—the area over which the flames have swept is pitiful to behold: blackened soil, charred bushes, naked boughs of burnt fir-trees. Among them, one morning, I saw a poor belated squirrel, exposed on the open, and picking his way painfully over the smoking ground. Beneath his paws the loose black peat still smouldered sullenly. With dazed and doubtful steps, like a stupefied thing, he picked his way among the burning tufts. He had lost his mate, no doubt—his mate, and his little ones. The whole world he knew had been blotted out and effaced in one wild half-hour of indescribable terrors. Now he walked gingerly on tip-toe over the burning soil, as you and I might walk over the ashes of Mayfair if a fissure eruption had spread hot sheets of lava above the site of London. Just such a catastrophe to my squirrel was that awful night’s work. He was stunned and mazed by it. I thought, indeed, for a time, he was half dead and roasted, till a dog ran after him; then, quick as lightning, he darted up a charred tree, and looked down from the bare boughs upon his baffled pursuer. But none of the usual sly triumph was there in his look; the manifold experiences of that deadly night had killed all slyness and all archness out of him for ever. He wandered like a ghost among the blackened branches; his universe was gone; his life was blasted. I never saw a more pathetic sight, nor one that brought home to me in sadder colours the ruthlessness of nature.
XIX.THE ARCADIAN DONKEY.
Onthe slope by the mountain-ashes, where the ridge curves downward into the combe with the plantation of young larch-trees, I met Peter Rashleigh leading his donkey—Arcades ambo. “Jenny looks fat enough, Peter,” I said with a nod as I passed on the narrow footpath; “and yet there isn’t much grass up here for her to feed upon.” “Lard bless your soul, sir,” Peter answered with an expansive smile, “grass ain’t what she wants. It don’t noways agree with her. She’s all the better with bracken and furzen-tops. Furzen-tops is good, like mobled queen.” And I believe he was right, too. Jenny’s ancestors from all time have been unaccustomed to rich meadow-feeding, and when their descendants nowadays are turned out into a field of clover they overeat themselves at once, and suffer agonies of mind from the unexpected repletion.
All the dwellers on our moor, in like manner, are poor relations, so to speak, as the donkey is to the horse. They are losers in the struggle for life, yet not quite hopeless losers; creatures that have adapted themselves to the worst positions, which more favoured and successful races could not endure for a moment. The naked Fuegian picks up a living somehow among snow and ice on barren rocks, where a well-clad European would starve and freeze, finding nothing to subsist upon. Just so on the moor; heather, furze, and bracken eke out a precarious livelihood on the sandy soil, where grasses and garden flowers die out at once, unless we artificially enrich the earth for them with leaf-mould from the bottoms and good manure from the farmyards.
More than that, you may take it as a general rule that where grass will grow there is no chance for heather. Not that the heather doesn’t like rich soil, and flourish in it amazingly—when it can get it. If you sow it in garden borders, and keep it well weeded, it will thrive apace, as it never throve in its poor native loam, among the stones and rubble. But the weeding is the secret of its success under such conditions. It isn’t that the heather won’t grow in rich soil, any more than that beggars can’t live on pheasant; but grasses and dandelions, daisies and clovers, can easily give it points in such spots, and beat it. In a very few weeks you will find the lowland plants have grown tall and lush, while the poor distanced heather has been overtopped and crowded out by its sturdier competitors. That is the reason why waterside irises, or Alpine gentians, will grow in garden beds under quite different circumstances from those under which we find them in the state of nature; the whole secret lies in the fact that we restrict competition. Cultivation means merely digging out the native herbs, and keeping them out, once ousted, in favour of other plants which we choose to protect against all their rivals. In rich lowland soils the grasses and other soft succulent herbs outgrow such tough shrubs as ling and Scotch heather. But in the poverty-stricken loam of the uplands, the grasses and garden weeds find no food to batten upon; and there the heather, to the manner born, gets at last a fair field and no favour. It is adapted to the moors, as the camel is to the desert; both have been driven to accommodate themselves to a wretched and thirsty environment; but both have made a virtue of necessity, and risen to the occasion with commendable ingenuity.
Everything about the heather shows long-continued adaptation to arid conditions. Its stems are wiry; its leaves are small, very dry, uninviting as foodstuffs, curled under at the edge, and so arranged in every way as to defy evaporation. Rain sinks so rapidly through the sandy soil the plant inhabits that it does its best to economize every drop, just as we human inhabitants of the moorland economize it by constructing big tanks for the storage of the rain-water that falls on our roof-trees. Warping winds sweep ever across the wold with parching effect; so the heather makes its foliage small, square, and thickly covered by a hard epidermis, as a protection against undue or excessive dryness. It aims at being drought-proof. Its purple bells, in like manner, instead of being soft and fleshy, as is the case with the corollas of meadow-blossoms like the corn-poppy, or woodland flowers like the wild hyacinth, are hard and dry, so as to waste no water; dainty waxen petals, like those of the dog-rose or the cherry-blossom, would wilt and wither at once before the harsh, dry blasts that career unchecked over the open moorland. Yet the heather-bells, though quite dead and papery to the touch, are brilliantly coloured to attract the upland bees, and form such wide patches of purple and pink as you can nowhere match among the largely wind-fertilized herbage of the too grass-green water-meadows. Upland conditions, indeed, always produce rich flowers. The most beautiful flora in Europe is that of the Alps, just below the snow-line; it has been developed by the stray Alpine moths and butterflies. Larger masses of colour are needed to attract these free-flying insects than serve to catch the eyes of the more business-like and regular bees who go their rounds in lowland districts.
Is not the donkey himself a product of somewhat similar conditions? Oriental in his origin, he seems to be merely the modern representative of those ancestral horses which did not succeed in the struggle for existence. Every intermediate stage has now been discovered between the true horses, with their flowing tails and silky coats, and the true donkeys, with their tufted tails and shaggy hair, the middle terms being chiefly found in the northern plains of Asia. Now, our horses, I take it, are the descendants of those original horse-and-donkey-like creatures which took to the grassy meadows, and so waxed fat, and kicked, and developed exceedingly; while our donkeys, I imagine, are the poor, patient offspring of those less lucky brothers or cousins which were pushed by degrees into the deserts and arid hills, and there grew accustomed to a very sparse diet of the essentially prickly and thorny shrubs which always inhabit such spots, just as gorse and heather inhabit our British uplands. That is why the donkey thrives so excellently to this day on thistles and nettle-tops: they represent the ancestral food of his kind for many generations. Certainly, at the present time, wherever we find horses wild it is in broad, grass-clad plains, or steppes, or pampas; wherever we find donkeys, or donkey-like animals, wild, it is among desert or half-desert rocks, and on arid hillsides. It would seem as though the horse was in the last resort a donkey grown big and strong by dint of good living and free space to roam over; while the donkey, on the other hand, is in the last resort a horse grown small and ill-proportioned through want of good food and insufficient elbow-room. It is noteworthy that in small islands, like the Shetlands, small breeds of horses are developed in adaptation to the environment; though, the food being still good pasture in a well-watered country, they retain in most respects their horse-like aspect. But a vengeance o’ Jenny’s case! I have wandered far afield from Peter Rashleigh’s donkey, to have got so soon into evolutionary biology!