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The corncrake after awhile stopped quite suddenly with a jerk, and for quite five minutes there was silence. "If this continues for another five," I said to myself, "I'll be asleep." I felt it coming over me. I had hardly murmured the words when the cow turned up again. I should say she had been somewhere and had had a drink. She was in better voice than ever.
The butterflies flitted before them and danced up and down in the sunny air, displaying their gorgeous wings; the yellowhammer flew out from amongst the nettles, and betrayed the place where his sober-hued little mate was sitting upon her grassy nest; a stoat ran across the road with a bird in his mouth, and disappeared in the bank unchased; the corncrake sang his harsh song in the park, seemingly close beneath the pales; and two squirrels ran along the road right in front of them, and then sat down with their little bushy tails cocked up, watching the boys ever so long before they darted up the beech-tree bole, and hid behind the great branches.
Humanity, at least, has been unanimous in its condemnation of the cat as part of nature's chorus. Poems have been written in praise of the corncrake as a singer, but never of the cat. All the associations we have with cats have not accustomed us to that discordant howl. It converts love itself into a torment such as can be found only in the pages of a twentieth-century novel.
Through a hayfield half cut, 'twas I went, where the moon throwed a shadow beside each uplifted pook, and the air was heavy with the scent, and a corncrake somewhere was making a noise like sharpening a scythe. A few trout were rising at the night moths, but nothing moved of any account in the open, and I pushed forward where the hayfield ended at the edge of the woods.
By this time the whole glade would be awake, expressing views concerning that corncrake that would have wounded a less callous nature. "Blow me tight, Bill," some vulgar little hedge-sparrow would chirp out, in the midst of the hubbub, "if I don't believe the gent thinks 'e's a- singing." "'Tain't 'is fault," Bill would reply, with mock sympathy.
And so as I lay squatted there beneath a sloe-bush, and the tones of a voice grating as those of the corncrake came to me through the chinks in the wall, I knew that Weems was at large once more, and pressing on with his errand. I might have expected him, and yet his arrival was a bit of a surprise; and on the spur of the moment I could not for the life of me think what was best to do.
Music, vocal or otherwise, is always a matter of taste, and individual appreciation of birdsong varies like the rest. One man finds the cuckoo's cry intolerably wearisome. Another sees no romance in the gargling of doves, while comparatively few care for the piercing scream of the starling or the rasping note of the corncrake. Yet few birds perform to a more hostile audience than the owl.
In the rye the quail would be calling, and, in the grass, the corncrake, and over them would be wheeling flocks of twittering linnets. Also, the jacksnipe would be uttering its croak, and the lark executing its roulades where it had become lost in the sunshine, and cranes sending forth their trumpet-like challenge as they deployed towards the zenith in triangle-shaped flocks.
If poets knew how many millions of birds fall victims to their longing and love for their homes, how many of them freeze on the way, what agonies they endure on getting home in March and at the beginning of April, they would have sung their praises long ago! ... Put yourself in the place of a corncrake who does not fly but walks all the way, or of a wild goose who gives himself up to man to escape being frozen.... Life is hard in this world!
From this roadside I have seldom heard the corncrake, and never once the grasshopper lark. These two birds are so characteristic of the meadows in southwestern counties that a summer evening seems silent to me without the "crake, crake!" of the one and the singular sibilous rattle of the other.
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