Delphi collected works o.., p.895
Delphi Collected Works of Grant Allen, page 895
X. THE FROZEN POND.
The pond on the moor is frozen over. What an epoch in the history of all its inhabitants! For they are not mostly long-lived creatures, these pond-dwellers; a summer forms an appreciable part of their short existence. Theirs is but a precarious life at the best of times; they have always to steer close between the Scylla of drought and the Charybdis of freezing. Half their days are spent in enforced seclusion. In the summer the pond, which is their universe, is apt to dry up and fail them; in winter it stands its even chance of freezing solid and entombing them. To meet these two extreme contingencies, all the world of the pond has had to accommodate itself to the possible chances of its fickle environment. The newts, for example, come here to breed every spring. They must needs do so, indeed, because their young have gills like a salmon or a herring, and can only breathe in their earlier stages the diffuse oxygen held in suspension in water. Newts, in fact, start in life as fish, but develop, half-way through, into lizard-like animals with lungs and legs, because of the annual drying up of their native waters. All higher life, indeed, was originally aquatic; it is only just because ponds dry up in summer that the ancestors of beasts and birds and reptiles ever ventured on dry land, at first for a brief excursion, and afterwards for a permanence. We are all in the last resort the descendants of amphibians. There are two kinds of newt in this pond, each with its own peculiar plan for meeting the difficulty of winter quarters. The great crested newt, who is the most confirmed water-haunter of the two, retires to the mud at the bottom of the pond in late autumn, and there lies torpid as long as the frost lasts, returning to the surface to breathe when the weather improves again. But the smaller newt, a more adventurous soul, goes ashore in summer, when the pond dries up, and stops there for the winter, lurking in long grass at the bottoms of ditches, or hiding in caves and damp vaults or cellars.
There are no fish in the pond, of course, because it is not permanent; it dries up in August. But there are frogs and tadpoles by the thousand in due season; and, what is odder still, the frogs are there now, though you cannot see them. Indeed, frogs and newts are merely slight variations on the fishy type, evolved to meet this very want and to fill this very place in the economy of nature: practically speaking, they are fish which turn at last into terrestrial reptiles. During the earlier spring days, when the ponds are full, the parents lay their spawn among the sunk leaves of water-weeds; and soon the tadpoles emerge from their jelly-like eggs, and swarm at the edge in a seething black mass of bustling and jostling life. Then, as the pond gets low, and breathing becomes difficult, they proceed by degrees to drop their gills, and develop the rudimentary swim-bladder into a pair of true lungs. Soon four weak little legs with sprawling fingers bud out at their sides; and, hi, presto! they hop or crawl ashore as full-fledged air-breathers. At this point grave differences appear between them. The newts retain their tails through life, but the more advanced frogs drop or absorb theirs, and assume the shape of thorough-going land animals. In winter, however, the frogs return once more to the pond, and bury themselves in the oozy mud at the bottom, often huddled together in close-packed groups, for warmth and company. At first sight you might think they would be warmer on dry land; but this is not so, for they have little animal heat of their own, being cold-blooded creatures, and they would therefore get frozen whenever the surface temperature fell below freezing-point. But the pond seldom or never freezes solid; in other words, the degree of cold at the bottom never goes down to freezing; and so the frogs are comparatively safe in the mud of the bed. If you dig in the ooze in winter, you may turn up whole spadefuls of frogs and great crested newts in certain cosy corners, lying torpid and half dead, but waiting patiently for the returning sun of spring to warm them. So that even the frozen pond has a great deal more life in it than the casual townsman would at first imagine.
As for the snails and beetles, and other small fry of the pond, they mostly retire, like their enemies the frogs, to the depths for protection. The summer is their life; winter to them is merely a time to be dozed through and tided over. Many of the shorter-lived kinds, indeed, die out altogether at the first touch of autumn, leaving only their eggs or their pupæ to represent them through the cold season. In these cases, therefore, we might almost say that the species, not the individual, lies dormant through the winter. It ceases to exist altogether for the time, and is only vouched for by the eggs or spawn, so that each generation knows nothing by sight of the generation that preceded it.
But when spring comes round again, there is a sudden waking up into spasmodic activity on the part of the pond and all its inhabitants. The season has set in, and life is to the fore again. The greater newt, in imitation of the poet’s wanton lapwing, “gets himself another crest,” and adorns his breast with brilliant spots of crimson and orange. The mating proceeds apace; frogs pair and spawn; the water swarms once more with layer upon layer of wriggling black tadpoles. Now the great pond-snail floats at the top, and lays its oblong bunch of transparent eggs; now the water-crowfoot flowers; the diver beetles disport themselves amain; strange long-legged beasts that walk the water like insect Blondins, begin to stalk the surface on their living stilts; and dancing little “whirligigs,” who skim the pond, coquette and pirouette in interlacing circles. All nature is alive. Winter is forgotten; eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, are the order of the day in pond and hedgerow. Then the crested newt proceeds to devour his smaller relative, and the tadpole to elbow his neighbour out of existence; and all goes merrily as wedding bells in the world of the pond — till winter comes again.
XI. THE GNARLED PINE-TREE.
More than once in these papers I have mentioned, as I passed, the wind-swept and weather-beaten Scotch fir on which the night-jar perches, and which forms such a conspicuous object in the wide moorland view from our drawing-room windows. I love that Scotch fir, for its very irregularity and rude wildness of growth; a Carlyle among trees, it seems to me to breathe forth the essential spirit of these bold free uplands. Not that any one would call it beautiful who has framed his ideas of beauty on the neatness and trimness of park-like English scenery; it has nothing in common with the well-grown and low-feathering Douglas pines which the nursery gardener plants out as “specimen trees” on the smooth velvety sward of some lawn in the lowlands. No, no; my Scotch fir is gnarled and broken-boughed, a great gaunt soldier, scarred from many an encounter with fierce wintry winds, and holding its own even now, every January that passes, by dint of hard struggling against enormous odds with obstinate endurance. Life, for it, is a battle. And I love it for its scars, its toughness, its audacity. It has chosen for its post the highest summit of the ridge, where north-east and south-west alternately assault it; and it meets their assaults with undiminished courage, begotten of long familiarity with fire and flood, with lightning and tempest.
Has it never occurred to you how such a tree must grow? what attacks it must endure, what assaults of the evil one it must continually fight against? Its whole long life is one endless tale of manful struggle and dear-bought victory. What survives of it now in its prime — for it is still a young tree, as trees go on our upland — is at best but a maimed and mutilated relic. From its babyhood upward it has suffered, like man, an eternal martyrdom. It began life as a winged seed, blown about by the boisterous wind which shook it rudely adrift from the sheltering cone of its mountain-cradled mother. Many a sister seed floated lightly with the breeze to warm nooks in the valley, where the tree that sprang from it now grows tall and straight, and equally developed on every side into a noble Scotch fir of symmetrical dimensions. But adventures are to the adventurous; you and I, my tree, know it. You were caught in its fierce hands by some mighty sou’wester, that whirled you violently over the hilltop till you reached the very summit of the long straight spur; and there, where it dropped you, you fell and rooted in a wind-swept home on a wind-swept upland. Your growth was slow. For many and many a season your green sprouting top was browsed down by wandering cattle or gnawing rabbits; you had some thirty rings of annual growth, I take it, in your stunted rootstock, just below the level of the soil, before you could push yourself up three inches towards the free and open air of heaven. Year after year, as you strove to rise, those ever-present assailants cropped you close and stunted you; yet still you persevered, and nathless so endured, till, in one lucky season, you made just enough growth, under the sun’s warm rays, to overtop and outwit their continual aggression. Then, for a while, you grew apace; you put forth lush green buds, and you looked like a sturdy young tree indeed, with branches sprouting from each side, when, with infinite pains, you had reached to the height of a man’s shoulder.
But your course was still chequered. Life is hard on the hilltops. You had to stand stress and strain of wind and weather. Like every other tree on our open moor, I notice you are savagely blown from the south-west; for the south-west wind here is by far our most violent and dangerous enemy, blowing great guns at times up the narrow funnel-shaped valleys, and so much more to be dreaded than the bitter north-east, which is elsewhere so inhospitable. “Blown from the south-west,” we say as a matter of course in our bald human language; and so indeed it seems. I suppose most casual spectators who look upon you now really believe it is the direct blowing of the wind that so distorts and twists you. You and I know better. We know that each spring, as the sap rises in your veins, you put forth afresh lush green sprouts symmetrically from the buds at your growing points; and that if these sprouts were permitted to develop equally and evenly in every direction, you would have grown from the first as normally and formally as a spruce-fir or a puzzle-monkey. But not for us are such joys. We must grow as the tempests and the hail-storms permit us. Soon after you have begun each year to put forth your tender green shoots comes a frost — a nipping frost — whirled along on the wide wings of some angry sou’wester. We, your human neighbours, lie abed in our snug cottage, and tremble at the groaning and shivering of our beams, and silently wonder in the dark amid the noise how much of our red-tiled roof will remain over us by morning. (Five pounds’ worth of tiles went off, I recollect, in last Thursday week’s tempest.) But you, on your open hilltop, feel the fierce cold wind blow through and through you; till all the buds on your south-western face are chilled and killed; while even the others, more sheltered on the leeward side, have got nipped and checked, so that they develop irregularly. It is this lawless checking of growth in your budding and sprouting stage that really “blows you on one side,” as we roughly state it. Only on your sheltered half do you ever properly realize the ground-plan of your nature. Your growth is the resultant of the incident energies. And that, after all, is the case with most of us; especially with the stormy petrels of our human menagerie.
Yet even to you, too, have come the consolations of love. “Not we alone,” says the poet, “have yearnings hymeneal.” Late developed on your cold spur, checked and gnarled as you grew, there came to you yet a day when your branches burgeoned forth into tender pink cones, with dainty soft ovules, all athirst for pollen; while on your budding shoots grew thick rings of rich stamens, that flung their golden powder adrift on the air with a lavish profusion right strange in so slenderly endowed an economy. But it is always so in nature. These gnarled hard lives, as people think them, are gilded brightest by the glow and fire of love; these poorest of earth’s children are made richest at last in the holiest and best of her manifold blessings. It was nothing to you, I know, my tree, that the fire which swept over the heath some five years since charred all your lower branches and killed half your live bark; you had courage to resist and heart to prevail; and though those poor burnt boughs are dead and gone for all time, you still put forth smiling bundles of green needles above quite as bravely as ever. It was nothing to you that the great storm of last autumn rent one huge branch in twain, and tore off a dozen lesser arms from your bleeding trunk in a wild outburst of fury. The night-jar now sits and croons to you every evening in the afterglow from those self-same stumps; and struggling sheaths of young buds push through on the blown boughs that just escaped with their lives the fury of the tempest. No wonder the Eastern fancy sees curled dragons in the storms that so rend and assail us; but we like them, you and I, for the sake of the breadth, the height, the air, the space, the freedom. What matters it to us though fire rage and wind blow, so long as they leave us our love in peace, and permit us to spread our sheltering shade over our strong young saplings? The hilltops are free: the hilltops are open: from their peaks we can catch betimes some crimson glimpses of the sunrise and the morning.
So, now, my Scotch fir, gnarled and broken on the ridge, you know how I love you, and why I sympathize with you.
XII. IVY IN THE COPSE.
See what a beautiful creeping spray of ivy — dark green, with russet veins — from the ground beneath the copse here! How close it keeps to the earth! how exquisitely the leaves fit in with one another, like a living mosaic! That is why the ivy-leaf is shaped as we know it, with re-entrant angles, very abrupt and deep-lobed. The plant, as a whole, crawls snake-like over the ground in shady spots, or climbs up the face of stony cliffs, or mantles walls and ruins, or clambers boldly over the trunks of trees — which last, though its most conspicuous, is not by any means its commonest or most natural situation. It is a haunter of the shade; therefore it wants to utilize to the uttermost every inch of space and every ray of sunlight. So it clings close to the soil or to its upright support, and lays its leaves out flat, each occupying its own chosen spot of earth without encroaching on its neighbour’s demesne, and none ever standing in the light of another. That shows one at once the secret reason for the angular foliage: it is exactly adapted to the ivy’s habitat. All plants which grow in the same way, half trailing, half climbing, have leaves of similar shape. Three well-known examples, each bearing witness to the resemblance in their very names, are the ivy-leaved veronica, the ivy-leaved campanula, and the ivy-leaved toad-flax. Or look once more at the pretty climbing ivy-leaved geranium or pelargonium, so commonly grown in windows. Contrast all these angular leaves of prostrate creepers with the heart-shaped or arrow-headed foliage of the upright twining or tendril-making climbers, such as convolvulus, black bindweed, black bryony, and bittersweet, and you will recognize at once how different modes of life almost necessarily beget different types of leaf-arrangement.
Nay, more. If you watch the ivy itself in its various stages, you will see how the self-same plant adapts its different parts from time to time to every variation in the surrounding conditions. Here in the copse, left to itself, as nature made it, it spreads vaguely along the ground at first with its lower branches, developing small leaves as it goes, narrow-lobed and angular, which are pressed flat against the soil in such a way as to utilize all possible air and sunshine. They cover the ground without mutual interference. And they are evergreen, too, so as to make the best of the scanty light that struggles through the trees in early spring and late autumn, while the oaks and ashes are all bare and leafless. But the main stem, prying about, soon finds out for itself some upright bank or trunk, up which it climbs, adhering to its host by the aid of its innumerable short root-like excrescences. Here its foliage assumes still the same type as on the ground, but is not quite so closely appressed to the support, nor yet so sharply angular. The mode of the mosaic, too, has altered a little to suit the altered circumstances; the leaves now stand out more freely from the stem, yet in such a way as not to interfere with or overshadow each other. By-and-by, however, the ivy, as it grows, reaches the top of the bank, or some convenient flowering place on the friendly trunk; and then it begins to send up quite different blossoming branches. These rise straight into the air, without support on any side; unlike the creeping stems, they are stout enough and strong enough to stand alone — to bear their own weight and that of the prospective flowers and berries. Besides, they wish to be seen from all sides at once, so as to attract from far and near a whole circle of amicable birds and insects. And now observe that on these upright flowering branches the shape of the leaves changes entirely, so that you would hardly recognize them at first sight for ivy. They stand round the branch on all sides equally, and therefore have no longer any need to fit in and dovetail with one another. Each leaf is now somewhat oval in form, though sharply pointed; there are no more lobes or angles; and the outline as a whole is far fuller and usually unbroken. Yet they still avoid standing in one another’s light, and are so arranged in spirals round the stem as to interfere as little as possible with one another’s freehold.
The little yellowish-green flowers which top these branches appear in late autumn. They are not particularly conspicuous, and their petals are insignificant; yet they distil abundant honey on a disk in the centre, and they breathe forth a curious half-putrescent scent, which seems highly attractive to many carrion flies and other foul feeders. Hence you will find that butterflies seldom or never visit them; but they are frequented and fertilized by hundreds of smaller insects, for whose sake the copious honey is stored on the open disk, where it is easily accessible to even the stumpiest proboscis. Ivy, in short, is a democratic flower: it lays by no rich store of secret nectar in hidden recesses, like the honeysuckle or the nasturtium, where none but the Norman-nosed aristocrats of the insect world can reach it; it is all for the common plebs. “A fair field and no favour” is the motto it acts upon. When the berries have been thus fertilized, they lie by over winter, slowly ripening and swelling, to blacken at last in the succeeding summer. The ripe fruit is then eaten by birds, such as hawfinches and certain of the thrush tribe, which disperse the hard nut-like seeds undigested. Black or dark blue are rare colours for flowers, but common for fruits; partly perhaps because birds are less fond of bright reds and yellows than the æsthetic insects; but partly also because such dusky hues are readily seen on a tree or bush against the snows of winter, the grey brown of late autumn, or the delicate wan green of early spring foliage.
