The Ultimate Nightingale

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

THE broad beans were in flower. We did not know it then. We only thought that there must be magic in the very breath of Warwickshire.

‘There will certainly be nightingales,’ said Anthea.

‘How could there not be?’ said I.

A fortnight of such reassurances lay behind us. Everywhere we had heard tales of nightingales in incredible abundance, coupled with laments at this year’s shortage. In refreshing contrast to traditional self-centredness, each village was convinced that the one just beyond had somehow escaped this unhappy dearth. The Next Village was always bordered by a wood where you could hear them singing all night long. The most positive and alluring statements of all came from a cobbler whose tiny shop overhung the river that divided the town. His account of the legendary wood was so rich in enchantment, that it was like being talked to by one of Pamela Bianco’s drawings.

An audience marooned in stockingfeet, while the story-teller affixes revolving rubber heels to its shoes, is a highly specialized temptation. Reluctantly he allowed us to pay him and depart. With a wealth of detail he described every turn of the road we were to follow.

As we strapped our packs on our backs again outside the door, Anthea turned suddenly and said, ‘But everywhere we go, people call the Next Village by a different name. How is a body ever to reach it? By the time you arrive, it has always moved on somewhere else.’

I said, ‘Come, Anthea,’ with severity. It seemed a pity to befog an honest tradesman, especially when he looked so like Erasmus according to Holbein.

The cobbler stared thoughtfully through Anthea. Then he said, ‘Yes, miss, quite so — jam yesterday and jam to-morrow, but never jam to-day!’

We both went back and shook hands with him. Incidentally we had a glimpse of his bookshelf. There was only one, and it was rather small. But how delightfully different from the prescribed Five Feet of Indispensable Instruction! Everything that was not detective stories was forest lore and nonsense rhymes and wonder-books.

‘A nightingale would be an anticlimax now,’ said Anthea; ‘let’s not hunt any more.’

But we did. By the time we reached Stratford, we had collected fifty-one different versions of the only possible place. Daytimes we did whatever errands we could not avoid, with much sitting on stiles by way of antidote. In the evenings we followed one set of directions after another. Fortunately, they were all within two miles of Stratford. Day and night we spent a good deal of ingenuity in avoiding parties of tourists. Ours, we told ourselves and each other, was not a tourist point of view. The very sight of a sight-seeing party made one’s feet ache and one’s knees wobble. How they could! We shook our heads and sighed tolerantly. The Birthplace? We lifted our eyebrows and murmured, ‘Poor Shakespeare — that hideous daily invasion! ’ And then the souvenirs — we shuddered silently. Tourists always looked so hot and so purposeful. Let the poor souls perspire an they would. But for us, the nightingale.

Our appointed time to leave Stratford came and went. We remained. By the end of three weeks we could have charted the deeps and shallows of every lane and meadow within walking distance. The longer we stayed, the farther people sent us. The unheard song took on a remoteness, which led us on and on, however unavailingly.

Meanwhile we were beginning to have glimpses of a hitherto unsuspected Stratford. Lasting friendships were made. Rose gardens invited us. Music beckoned. Drama commanded. Now for the first time, we dared to think of Shakespeare. It was with an odd, shamed sense of relief that we found that our new friends refused to take our quest for nightingales seriously. Yes, nightingales did undoubtedly often sing in the rose arbor, they said. But they probably would n’t if we lay in wait for them. And anyway, why bother? There could never be much joy in anything so hideously prearranged. Why not find all that we expected of the nightingale and more by quietly and comfortably reading Josephine Preston Peabody’s ‘The Nightingale Unheard’? In any case, they simply would not be chivied into singing when they did n’t feel like it.

There was only one thing that troubled us about these really enchanting persons. They not only did not sadly endure the Birthplace, Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, and the rest, but frankly gloried in them. Nor did they stop there. They spent time, money, research, enthusiasm, in keeping these places safe and well preserved. They even spoke of tourists with disconcerting tolerance, because they contributed so generously to this end. More than that, they insisted that there was something touching and fine in the average tourist’s feeling for Shakespeare and for any least thing that even might have been his. And as for the crowds — Shakespeare was never a man to stand aloof, they said.

There was no hushed reverence in the way they spoke of Shakespeare. What they expressed was a living, hearty love. We began to wonder. Perhaps there really was something in Stratford as worth while as nightingales. Might the tourists — horrid thought! — have had the finer impulse, after all? So there came a day when we stopped exploring the countryside for the unheard nightingale.

That night, we came over the bridge at sunset. We had never dreamed that Stratford could be like this. Gradually and steadily, it put aside all the disfiguring mannerisms of the day, and withdrew into a quietude that seemed as wholly at one with the sky as the deepening afterglow. Even the grimacing crowds of souvenirs in the shopfronts became no more than the forgotten, uncouth playthings of some exiled Caliban. Glimmering casements began to answer t he blue night, star for star. A century slipped away at each turn of the road, as we followed the narrowing streets to the Inn. Faint lights and blurring shadows imposed their own design upon the beautiful cross-timbering. It was as if we saw it for the first time. To-night we came in like wondering children.

Our rooms were in a small and ancient cottage back of the Inn. Its age was the subject, of learned dispute. Quite obviously it looked upon the Tudor Inn as a newcomer. The treads of our black oak stairway were worn into deep hollows, which candlelight often disguised to our undoing. But now we did not stumble. The lovely austerity of the little white-walled, dark-beamed chambers was like a spring fragrance always. To-night the casements opened on the rising moon. We were in Chaucer’s England. There was expectancy in the way the moonlight fell. We stood and waited, without knowing why. The invisible Chaucer waited with us.

The moon rode higher now. We slipped, by imperceptible degrees, from the fourteenth century into the fifteenth. Now the moonlight, pale primrose before, deepened into daffodil gold. We had reached the sixteenth century. But we knew that Chaucer was still waiting for Shakespeare.

‘They should have been boys together,’ said Anthea, ‘instead of letting two hundred years keep them apart.’

Elizabethan moonbeams damascened the ancient floor. The transcendent sanity that was Shakespeare entered the chamber. It came like a cleansing wind. Our prized antipathies, our mean, clever little deridings blew out of our minds forever — a pinch of dust whirling away into nothingness. Then he and Chaucer were gone. But we could almost hear them call good-bye to each other at the turn of the lane.

There was a long, dynamic silence.

‘I shall go to the Birthplace tomorrow,’ said Anthea meekly.

‘And the Grammar School,’ I murmured.

Anthea considered. ' Of course, tourists are — tourists; but then, so are we. I do hope Shakespeare won’t insist on our liking us as well as we do the cobbler and the tea-grocer’s boy. I suppose that’s snobbish, though.’ Suddenly the curves of her mouth expressed a nimble self-derision. ‘With all our keeping so smugly aloof, we’ve been every bit as souvenir-mad as the rest of them, only we’ve hunted nightingales instead of post-cards — What could be more unspeakable?’

We stood abased. Then, ‘Do you suppose we shall never hear one, after all our trying?’ she said wistfully.

We must have slept very soundly that night. Through the vague twilight of a dream wound a glimmering thread of light. You could feel rather than see it weaving in and out of the tree branches, in and out of the shadows on the grass. And all the time it kept spinning itself into brighter and brighter strands. They wound and unwound, streamed and curled and floated, always just out of reach. But you must watch very intently and breathlessly, following and following the design. . . .

I was sitting up in bed, intent, breathless, following — what? The glimmering strands of light were still floating and falling around me, — the vanishing filaments of a half-forgotten dream. Light? No, song! I must not go to the window. It would stop. Was it music, or was it light, after all? Streaming, curling, floating — flowergold, moon-gold, sun-gold — gone!

The little cockney maid was bringing Anthea’s tea when I woke in the morning. She continually suspected Stratford of trying to undermine her fierce loyalty to London. The tilt of her alert nose, the obstinate angle of her chin said defiantly, ‘Try it on if you dare!’ As she came across the narrow strip of hallway to my door, I was wondering whether I really had sat up in bed and heard — what I thought I heard, or whether that, too, was part of the dream.

‘Kerridge, did anything wake you last night?’ Anthea’s tone was cautious, very. Dreams could be so plausible.

Kerridge put down my cup. Then she slowly, unwillingly nodded. ‘Yes, miss, they’d of woken you many a night, if you ’ad n’t come ’ome late-like, too tired to ’ear ’em. ’T is nightingales, miss. They sing ’ere somethink chronic! ’

Her tone condemned the shameless intruders. But there was a light in her eye — London had surrendered.