Chapter 40

RETURN OF THE SWALLOW

THE swallows are back! Their arrival is always one of the gladnesses of the year. We are reminded of Kingsley’s old gamekeeper at Allfowlsness — ‘as good an old Scotsman as ever knit stockings on a winter’s night’. He lived all alone upon the Ness, in a turf hut thatched with heather and fringed round with great stones slung across the roof with ropes lest the winter gales should blow the hut away. On the day on which the birds left on their annual flight, he stood bare-headed, waving his cap to them and wishing them a merry journey. Then, settling down by his big log fire, he read his Bible and knitted his stockings till the birds came back. And the great day of his long year was the sunny Spring day on which he welcomed them.

The pleasure of seeing the swallows return is one of those primal and basic joys that weave all the ages into a common web. Some time ago a Greek lad, George Demetrios by name, left his native land and settled in Boston. He had been reared in Macedonia, not far from Mount Olympus. After spending some years in America, he wrote a book entitled, When I Was a Boy in Greece.

Among other things he tells how, with other Greek boys, he celebrated the return of spring: We went from house to a stick and sang the song that Sappho herself may have heard—

She is here! She is here!
The swallow that brings in the beautiful year!
Throw open the door! Throw open the door!
We are children again; we are old no more!

The pleasure that we feel, therefore, when we watch the swallows skimming hither and thither in the spring-time is a pleasure that we share with all the world and all the ages. Plato smiled as he greeted his first swallow every year: Paul saw the swallows just as, an] just where, Demetrios saw them: ever lived, or ever will live: and half the ecstasy that we feel is rooted in the sense of fellowship, communion, fraternity that is so subtly suggested.

Of late years a good deal of attention has been devoted to the wandering habits of migratory birds and some particularly interesting facts have been elicited. But we were late in waking up to the fact that these feathered gipsies bear mystic messages from land to land. Had we opened our eyes a little earlier, the entire history of our civilization would have had to be very differently told. One of the greatest military disasters of all time, for example, was Napoleon’s loss of his enormous army in the course of his tragic retreat from Moscow.

But Frank Buckland, the eminent naturalist, has pointed out that Napoleon led his battalions to destruction in defiance of the clearest and most eloquent warnings. ‘For,’ Buckland says, ‘if Napoleon had condescended to observe the flights of storks and of cranes passing over his fated regiments, subsequent events in the politics of Europe might have been very different. Those storks and cranes, knowing of the approach of a deadly winter, were winging their way to the south with all speed: Napoleon rashly hurried his armies into the frigid latitudes that the birds were leaving.’ Thus was precipitated the catastrophe from which the tyrant never recovered.

Why does the swallow migrate? How do the birds know when to turn their faces to the ocean? How do they know in which direction to go? Nobody knows; and, what is more, the swallow does not know. If we are inclined to marvel at this mystery, it may intrigue us to turn our eyes inward in order to discover that we ourselves behave very much as the swallow does. We act without knowing why we act. We move through life guided by a force that we cannot explain. By what strange impulse is a man moved to follow a particular profession-that and no other? By what freak of fate does he marry a particular woman-this and no other? By what stroke of fortune does he settle in a particular country or city or town? Looking back on life, it seems almost like a drift: we seemed to have reached our ultimate position by the veriest chance. Yet few men would be prepared to recognize chance as the dominant factor in their lives. Like the swallow’s flight it has turned out too well to be attributed to the mere accident of circumstance.

The fact is, of course, that the swallow knows instinctively when and where to go. But what is instinct? And to what extent are we ourselves piloted through life’s maze of confusion by the same subtle and indefinable force? Browning makes Paracelsus cry

I see my way as birds their trackless way.
I shall arrive! what time, what circuit first,
I ask not; but unless God send his hail
Or blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow,
In some time, his good time, I shall arrive:
He guides me and the bird. In his good time!

And what of the greatest of all our migratory instincts—the instinct of immortality? For, after all, the sense of immortality is essentially an instinct and not an argument. Nobody can prove it; yet there are millions who, unable to prove it, nevertheless feel it. And, as the swallow’s instinct guides it across uncharted seas, so it guides them among the shocks and surprises of existence.

There must be multitudes who, unable to reason out the logic of the invisible, will pillow their heads on the great hope that the flight of the swallows affords. ‘Beautiful swallows!’ Richard Jefferies, the naturalist, fondly exclaims, ‘they symbolize all that is best in Nature and all that is best in our own hearts!’ That being so, it is little wonder that we feel a peculiar rapture in greeting the birds again.

By Dr. F. W. Boreham