The Open Air | Page 6

not tell you
about lest you should be frightened. Since we have felt your hands, and
you have touched us, we have felt so much more. Perhaps that was why
I was not very happy till you came, for I was thinking quite as much
about your people as about us, and how all the flowers of all those
thousand years, and all the songs, and the sunny days were gone, and

all the people were gone too, who had heard the blackbirds whistle in
the oak the lightning struck. And those that are alive now--there will be
cuckoos calling, and the eggs in the thrushes' nests, and blackbirds
whistling, and blue cornflowers, a thousand years after every one of
them is gone.
"So that is why it is so sweet this minute, and why I want you, and your
people, dear, to be happy now and to have all these things, and to agree
so as not to be so anxious and careworn, but to come out with us, or sit
by us, and listen to the blackbirds, and hear the wind rustle us, and be
happy. Oh, I wish I could make them happy, and do away with all their
care and anxiety, and give you all heaps and heaps of flowers! Don't go
away, darling, do you lie still, and I will talk and sing to you, and you
can pick some more flowers when you get up. There is a beautiful
shadow there, and I heard the streamlet say that he would sing a little to
you; he is not very big, he cannot sing very loud. By-and-by, I know,
the sun will make us as dry as dry, and darker, and then the reapers will
come while the spiders are spinning their silk again--this time it will
come floating in the blue air, for the air seems blue if you look up.
"It is a great joy to your people, dear, when the reaping time arrives: the
harvest is a great joy to you when the thistledown comes rolling along
in the wind. So that I shall be happy even when the reapers cut me
down, because I know it is for you, and your people, my love. The
strong men will come to us gladly, and the women, and the little
children will sit in the shade and gather great white trumpets of
convolvulus, and come to tell their mothers how they saw the young
partridges in the next field. But there is one thing we do not like, and
that is, all the labour and the misery. Why cannot your people have us
without so much labour, and why are so many of you unhappy? Why
cannot they be all happy with us as you are, dear? For hundreds and
hundreds of years now the wheat every year has been sorrowful for
your people, and I think we get more sorrowful every year about it,
because as I was telling you just now the flowers go, and the swallows
go, the old, old oaks go, and that oak will go, under the shade of which
you are lying, Guido; and if your people do not gather the flowers now,
and watch the swallows, and listen to the blackbirds whistling, as you
are listening now while I talk, then Guido, my love, they will never
pick any flowers, nor hear any birds' songs. They think they will, they

think that when they have toiled, and worked a long time, almost all
their lives, then they will come to the flowers, and the birds, and be
joyful in the sunshine. But no, it will not be so, for then they will be old
themselves, and their ears dull, and their eyes dim, so that the birds will
sound a great distance off, and the flowers will not seem bright.
"Of course, we know that the greatest part of your people cannot help
themselves, and must labour on like the reapers till their ears are full of
the dust of age. That only makes us more sorrowful, and anxious that
things should be different. I do not suppose we should think about them
had we not been in man's hand so long that now we have got to feel
with man. Every year makes it more pitiful because then there are more
flowers gone, and added to the vast numbers of those gone before, and
never gathered or looked at, though they could have given so much
pleasure. And all the work and labour, and thinking, and reading and
learning that your people do ends in nothing--not even one flower. We
cannot understand why it should be so. There are thousands of
wheat-ears in this field, more than you would know how to write down
with your pencil,