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A strange, sweet wind freighted with stray bird-notes wandered aimlessly. Nothing was said. Dick led the way and set the intervals of the carrying. When he swung the canoe from his shoulders the others slipped their tump-lines. Then all rubbed their faces with the broad caribou-leaf to keep off the early flies, and lay back, arms extended, breathing deep, resting like boxers between the rounds.
There was a light powdering of snow on grass and trees. Yet still there were breathings and bird-notes in the air, and tones of color in the distance, which obscurely prophesied the spring. Through the wood behind the house the snow-drops were rising, in a white invading host, over the ground covered with the red-brown deposit of innumerable autumns.
I learned at that hour in any case what "acclamation" might mean, and have again before me the vast high-piled auditory thundering applause at the beautiful pink lady's clear bird-notes; a thrilling, a tremendous experience and my sole other memory of concert-going, at that age, save the impression of a strange huddled hour in some smaller public place, some very minor hall, under dim lamps and again in my mother's company, where we were so near the improvised platform that my nose was brushed by the petticoats of the distinguished amateur who sang "Casta Diva," a very fine fair woman with a great heaving of bosom and flirt of crinoline, and that the ringletted Italian gentleman in black velvet and a romantic voluminous cloak who represented, or rather who professionally and uncontrollably was, an Improvisatore, had for me the effect, as I crouched gaping, of quite bellowing down my throat.
Athwart the low, confused twittering of bird-notes which had infused the solemn silence with a vague hint of life, strident sounds grew dominant a crow calling to his mate from tree to tree a short, sharp symphony of swallows a cock announcing the coming of the dawn.
"Already packing!" said the Irishman, as they turned their steps homeward, "that sounds like the first note of a fare-thee-well." "A true and fairly-well made remark, oh, Son of Erin!" "Your voice is glad as the bird-notes of my own Isle, which means you'll smile as you say farewell." And so in gay chit-chat Time seemed as naught until the villa was reached.
'In summer, when the shawes be shene, And leaves be large and long, It is full merry in fair forest To hear the fowles' song. 'The wood-wele sang, and wolde not cease, Sitting upon the spray; So loud, it wakened Robin Hood In the greenwood where he lay. And Shakespeare are not his scraps of song saturated with these same bird-notes?
"If she really is Madame Torrebianca," he told himself, with a thrill and a craving, "I shall see her on Sunday." The flowers, beyond there, in the sun, the droning of the bees, the liquid bird-notes, the perfumes in the still soft air, all seemed to melt and become part of his thought of her, rendering it more poignant, more insidiously sweet. At last he started up, in a kind of anger.
'With a hey lillelu and a how lo lan, And the birk and the broom blooms bonnie. Or 'She sat down below a thorn, Fine flowers in the valley, And there has she her sweet babe born, And the green leaves they grow rarely. Or even those 'fal-la-las, and other nonsense refrains, which, if they were not meant to imitate bird-notes, for what were they meant?
The sunshine broke into colour, it laughed, it danced, it almost rioted, among the flowers; but in the prim alleys, and on the formal hedges of box, and the quaintly-clipped yews, and the old purple brick walls, where fruit trees were trellised, it lay fast, fast asleep. Without the walls, in the deep cool greenery of the park, there was a perpetual drip-drip of bird-notes.
This morning I was up and out at half-past four, as perfect a morning as I ever saw: mists yet huddled in the low spots, the sun coming up over the hill, and all the earth fresh with moisture, sweet with good odours, and musical with early bird-notes. It is the time of the spring just after the last seeding and before the early haying: a catch-breath in the farmer's year.
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