Moorland Idylls

And, indeed, there are dozens 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

In warm 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

My friend 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

The frosts 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

On the 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.