Mauve

“ Rosy mauve. From the tube, very long, the labellum opens squarely, purple, with a clouded throat and dusky yellow ‘eyes.’
L.-C. Arnoldiana (L. purpurata × Catt. labiata) . Large, clear mauve. Petals much attenuated at the ends, which gives them a sort of ‘fly-away’ appearance. The fine expanded lip, of carmine crimson, is clouded with a deeper tint round the orange throat.
L. × Claptonensis (L. elegans × L. Dormaniana) .—Small, white with a rosy flush. The long shovel lip is brilliantly crimson, fading to a white edge. ”

“ But already a change to pale apple-green and mauve is imminent. A single tern flashes a lonely wing along a grey-green line that may be where sky and [Pg 338] sea meet, or may be the illusion of the tide refluent from green depths. On the weedy rocks I cannot see even a sleeping seamew: on the havened stretch of yellow-white sand a dotterel runs to and fro in sudden aimless starts, but as suddenly is still, is all but unseen with her breast against a rock covered with the blue-bloom of mussels, and now is like a shadow licked up by twilight. ”

“ Much like the last, but more commonplace looking, for the flowers are smaller and the plant much larger. It is about a foot high and grows among rocks, and the general effect of dull mauve is rather pretty, though not bright in color. ”

“ Sepals and very broad leaf-like petals rosy mauve, the yellow of the throat subdued, a fine patch of crimson lake on the labellum, with darker lines, leaving a wide margin of rosy mauve.
Robin Measures.—Rosy. The lip spreads so broad that its disc forms a perfect circle. The yellow of the throat is only a slight stain, and the fine crimson patch on the lip leaves a handsome margin of rose. ”

“ Giant bunches of black and [181] mauve grapes, like the pictured spoils of the Promised Land, lie on soft beds of feathery moss, but the familiar greens of the velvety carpet shade into orange and pink. A weird marine plant shoves long black stems, crowned with a circle of azure blue eyes, which convey an uncanny sensation of being regarded with sleepless vigilance by mysterious sentinels, transformed and spellbound in ocean depths. Tree-fern and hart's-tongue show verdant fronds, flushed with autumnal red or gold, and a dense growth of starry flowers suggests a bed of many-coloured tulips. ”

“ Generally the plant depends upon others or cracks or crevices in rock for foothold. It shares the grasp the spongy moss may take on the slippery surface, or when the root, thin as whipcord, of a certain fig-tree has crept across the face of the grey rock forming a ridge or barricade against which decayed vegetation accumulates, there the BAEA flourishes, displaying an indeterminate line of mauve flowers above oval, crimpled leaves. Mauve, green and grey—the mauve of the Victorian age, the green of the cowslip, the grey of glistering, weathering granite.
The whole of the rock face is a study. ”

“ There is a strong appeal in this picture when we think of the homecoming of this little company—the tired young lambs following their mothers, the tired dog that will now have a long rest, and the kind old shepherd with the helpless lamb under his arm.
Through both these pictures Mauve has expressed the same sympathy with, and love for, nature and its many changes of season and weather. It is difficult indeed to choose one for study in preference to the other, and it is perhaps for that reason that they are usually studied together. ”

“ A military rendezvousZilcken relates that Mauve, when residing at The Hague, painted much with William Maris; but when sketching in company they nearly always seated themselves back to back; for Maris, a brilliant colorist, chose to outline his trees boldly against a glowing sky, while Mauve preferred a landscape illuminated by a diffused light, the trembling foliage bathed in an atmosphere of fine transparency, the skies lightly colored, aërial, and silvery. ”

“ For the first scene I thought of some soft material like delaine—either blue or mauve—for you and Miss Major. Then, in the second part, something dark—and in the third, just white. You see, if your frocks are simple, they will throw out mine the more."
Patricia spoke with serene unconsciousness; and this was the note which controlled her talk all through. ”

“ The male is of a beautiful bright blue colour, but as in the same sex of the previous two species, it is not quite constant in tint. In some specimens we find a distinct mauve shade, and in others, but more rarely, the blue colour is tinged with greenish (Plate 118, Fig. 11) : the veins become distinctly black on the outer margins, and appear to run through the white fringes on all the wings. Often there are black dots on the outer margin of the hind wings. The female is dark brown, sometimes slaty-black, with orange spots or crescents on the outer margins ”

“ Another immigrant from Europe and Asia sparingly naturalized in waste places and roadsides in Canada, the United States, and Mexico is the COMMON HIGH MALLOW, CHEESEFLOWER, or ROUND DOCK (Malva sylvestris) . Its purplish-rose flowers, from which the French have derived their word mauve, first applied to this plant, appear in small clusters on slender pedicels from the leaf axils along a leafy, rather weak, but ascending stem, maybe only a foot high, or perhaps a yard, throughout the summer months. ”

“ Let us go on, then, with the story of our hive; let us take it up where we left it; and raise, as high as we may, a fold of the festooned curtain in whose midst a strange sweat, white as snow and airier than the down of a wing, is beginning to break over the swarm. For the wax that is now being born is not like the wax that we know; it is immaculate, it has no weight; seeming truly to be the soul of the honey, that itself is the spirit of flowers. ”

“ Everything looks different to what it did on that morning; a faint chill bleakness lies over the landscape, the trees shiver a little as the leaves fall rustling to the ground, the bit of sea in the distance is not blue at all, but a dull greyish-green, the birds are all cross, or asleep, and there is no pleasant hum of insects on the evening air. Perhaps it is I who am out of sorts, not Nature. ”

“ Very soon the bear’s head reappeared; like a shadow his bulk moved across the opening, and again he raised himself on the threshold for a look. He probably smelled me, as I certainly smelled him, rank and doggy; [133] but a sleeping man gives off very little scent (of a non-alarming kind, I think) , and Mooween’s inquisitiveness had made a bold beast out of a timid one. He had a fine autumn coat; the short velvety fur rippled or gleamed as the moonlight touched it, giving to its lustrous black an apparent fringe of frosty white, like the pelt of a silver fox. ”

“ He knows the thickness of his skin, and they know it. When the honey is at last exposed, and begins to disappear in great hungry mouthfuls, the bees also fall upon it, to gorge themselves with the fruit of their hard labor before Mooween shall have eaten it all. ”

“ Outside it is cold. The young woman has walked quickly; the veil is moist from her cold breath. Little drops of water shine in the lace. The lover seizes her and presses his burning lips to her liquid breath. The moist veil, which discolors and carries the dreadful odor of chemical dye, penetrates into the young man's mouth, moistens his mustache. He does not taste the lips of his beloved, he tastes the dye of this lace moistened with cold breath. And yet, like the poet, we would all exclaim:
Oh! the taste of the kisses first snatched through the veil. ”

“ Innumerable turtle-doves cooing on the heights, or wheeling about, fly from tree to tree, and seem to exchange messages of love. One feels a sensation that all around this deep water, throughout all this plain, up to the foot of the mountains, there is yet more water; the deceitful water of the marsh, sleeping yet living ”

“ First the green grass and the flowers, bending beneath the gentle breeze, turn their deep eyes and spotted cups towards him in salutation, and all the creeping things and birds, that love the low herbs, dew-besprent, are there: and as the mist goes up, majestically slow, other forms of bird and beast are seen, and dark trunks of trees, and great stems beside them, looking like trees, until his eyes have traced them up to the great moose, the big-horned stag, the grizzly bear, and the vast-moving mammoth. ”

“ Every shade of red, rose, yellow, blue, green, and violet are there, in a little patch of water which shows us the heavens, and space, and dreamland, and the flight of the birds as they skim across its face. ”

“ Dreamers maintain that the sea hides in its bosom vast tracts of blue where those who are drowned roam among the big fishes, amid strange forests and crystal grottoes. The river has only black depths where one rots in the slime. It is beautiful, however, when it sparkles in the light of the rising sun and gently laps its banks covered with whispering reeds. ”

“ When hungry, Mooween has as many devices as a fox for getting a meal. He tries flipping frogs from among the lily pads in the same way that he catches salmon. That failing, he takes to creeping through the water-grass, like a mink, and striking his game dead with a blow of his paw. ”

“ The beaver has a rich birthright, though born in a windowless hut of mud. Close to the primitive place of his birth the wild folk of both woods and water meet and often mingle; around it are the ever-changing, never-ending scenes and silences of the water or the shore. He grows up with the many-sided wild, playing amid the enameled flowers, the great boulders,—the Ice King's marbles,—and the fallen logs in the edge of the mysterious forest; learning to swim and slide; listening to the strong, harmonious stir of wind and water; living with the stars in the sky and the stars in the pond ”

“ Straight before him among the faded greens and bewildering browns of the lily-pads was a motionless, elongated brown object very like the curved back of a beaver, and a foot or more from it, in the shadow of a clump of grass, something shone with a peculiar liquid gleam. It was an eye—a great, round, wild eye—staring full into his own—the eye of a moose—and the curving object like the back of a beaver was naught else than the enormous nose, or muffle, of a full-grown bull. ”

“ A white rabbit in his winter pelage drifted up the path toward them and leaped frightened into the junipers just as a snowy owl, tilting and banking in the pines overhead, darted down at him.
Up against the face of the heavens they heard a bird's call ”

“ All day long the hounds gave tongue in the woods, as they followed the fox or the wild boar, and every night dazzling fireworks mingled their burning plumes with the boars, while the illuminated windows of the drawing-room cast long rays of light onto the wide lawns, where shadows were moving to and fro.
It was autumn, the russet-colored season of the year, and the leaves were whirling about on the grass like flights of birds. One noticed the smell of damp earth in the air, of the naked earth, like one smells the odor of the bare skin, when a woman's dress falls off her, after a ball. ”

“ The atmosphere is delightful, relaxing and dangerous. Over all the banks which separate the vast still pools, amid all the thick grasses, swarms, crawls, jumps, and creeps a whole world of slimy, repugnant, cold-blooded animals. I love those cold, subtle animals that are generally avoided and dreaded; for me there is something sacred about them.
At the hour of sunset the marsh intoxicates and excites me. After having been all day a silent pond lying hushed in the heat, it becomes at the moment of twilight, a fairy-like and enchanted country. ”

“ For we may walk for hours over the moors without so much as a sight or sound of a human being, hearing only the swish of the wind in the heather, the cheep of the Meadow Pipit, the angry cry of the Lapwing as we approach too near to her eggs or brood, the distant complaint of the Curlew, or the sad sweet whistle of the Golden Plover, when suddenly a sharp sound startles us. ”

“ Looking upwards at the sun as near as the light would permit, we saw the sky continually changing colour, according to the numbers in the passing clouds of insects. Opposite the sun the prevailing hue was a silver white, continually flashing. The hum produced by so many millions of wings is indescribable, sounding something like a singing in our ears. ”

“ These little lovers of sunshine contrive, through a constant and simultaneous beating of their wings, to maintain in their hive a degree of warmth that shall equal that of a day in spring. And they owe this to the honey, which is itself no more than a ray of heat which has passed through their bodies, and now gives its generous blood to the hive. ”

“ Little cared the beavers whether it was night or day in the wide, frozen, perilous world above the ice-roof, whether the sun shone from the bitter blue, or the wolf-haunted moonlight lay upon the snow, or the madness of the blizzard made the woods cower before its fury. ”

“ As the mystic dusk robes the familiar scenery with a pall, we hear the insect world, if it be the proper season, conversing in a thousand tongues, startled anon by the shrill cry of a night bird, and possibly we wonder if the momentary shadow on the orb of the moon was the vagrant pinion of Minerva’s bird, or the flashing stroke of the eagle, put to flight from his eyry slumber. ”

“ The first time that we open a hive there comes over us an emotion akin to that we might feel at profaning some unknown object, charged perhaps with dreadful surprise, as a tomb. A legend of menace and peril still clings to the bees. ”

“ First, when they are traveling—and Mooween is the most restless tramp in all the woods—you will see that the cubs follow the mother closely and imitate her every action with ludicrous exactness, sniffing where she sniffs, jumping where she jumps, rising on their hind legs, with forearms hanging loosely and pointed noses thrust sharp up into the wind, on the instant that she rises, and then drawing silently away from the shore into the shelter of the friendly alders when some subtle warning tells the mother’s nose that the coast ahead is not perfectly clear. ”