A Taste for Honey (11 page)

I knew all too well he was right.

“I must tell you,” I agreed, “Heregrove came here, called here, the very day he tried to murder me, only a couple of hours after the attempt!”

“Yes, your Alice told me of what she, though ignorant of the fullness of his nerve, called his ‘imperence.' She evidently has something of an animal's intuitive mistrust of malignancy, though she thinks your actual attack was a subjective experience: an interesting case, showing where intuition is sound but helpless, because reason is too rudimentary to argue accurately and attention too bird-witted rightly to observe.”

“But, Mr. Mycroft, she could not have told you the worst. When I went downstairs, after he had gone, I discovered that, while he had sent her upstairs on a fake message to me, he had taken the handkerchief out of my jacket pocket, which was lying in sight of the door! Do you see?”

“You needn't explain,” he interrupted. “I know I seem to you long-winded, but I won't waste your time on unnecessary details if I can help it, in this case. Time matters here. I'll tell you: the purloining of your handkerchief does not, I think, matter immediately by adding any instant additional peril to that in which you already stand. We have time there. Nor need you explain to me about your coat. When in one of my thinkings aloud, which grated on you so much at our first meeting, I suddenly called myself senile, or at least questioned myself as to whether I might not be becoming so, it was because I had not foreseen that move of Heregrove's. You remember?”

“Yes, we were talking about insects being able to hear sounds that we cannot and how a number of insects track great distances also by smell.”

“Well, that was why I begged you not to go to Heregrove's place alone. I was sure he would want you to come, and I was equally sure, if he could get you by yourself, he would try to put some mark on you whereby his bees could track you down. You played into his hands perfectly. Now, will you tell me exactly what he did?”

I gave Mr. Mycroft precisely the account which I have put down before. I saw his face light up.

“Fascinating,” was his first and, I thought, rather heartless comment. He saw that my feelings were hurt and added at once, “I repeat, you did all of us an invaluable service by going there and taking the risk—making Heregrove show his hand before he was perfectly prepared. I believe you made the gun go off half-cock or half-charged. He wasn't quite ready, or he would have found some way of asking you up. But he could not resist when, as he thought (all murderers of that sort are megalomaniacs), Destiny had put you deliberately in his hands. He will know more of Destiny before he has finished. Meanwhile, we must not let our counter-preparations suffer from the same fault. You see now, we
must
call on him. The coat trick failed. As a precaution, have that jacket burned. Tonight put it well into the center of your weed-and-grass bonfire which I saw smoking at your garden's end. At night, mind you. Some virulent essential oils, like that of the pestilential poison oak of the southwestern United States, actually become more pungent and irritating when burning, and that would simply mean that you were signaling to your vampires, asking them to come over and attack you again. Now for your hand.”

I showed him the fingers which had been stained. No trace remained which even my nose could detect after all my scrubbings. But he insisted on getting some medical alcohol and rubbing the skin till it was sore.

“Now for something to throw off the scent, or rather to bury it under a load it couldn't pierce through,” he remarked, drawing a small bottle from his pocket. “I brought this little mixture with me because I thought Heregrove would have tried some way of ‘putting the doom on you,' as our ancestors would have phrased it, and quite accurately, too. I have noticed it throws out any animal's olfactory sense more completely than any one scent. It is citronella, valerian, and aniseed oils in equal parts.”

Rubbing it on my fingers, which were almost inflamed by the alcohol, he added, “Now, please go up and wash. We don't want Heregrove to smell us, or he is quite shrewd enough to ‘smell our rat.' We only want to be sure to put his bees off. They will certainly smell the anointing I have given you and be of the opinion that you are not the man they wanted so furiously, so little time ago, to kill. The voice may be the voice of Jacob but the smell will be the smell of Esau.”

Quotations again; how the old man's mind ran on! I didn't want to attend to his sallies. My mind was in a most unpleasant whirl. It was all too obvious that he was pushing me, caparisoning me, I might almost say, as his mount, to go at once into action, to call straightway on Heregrove.

“I say,” I began lamely, hoping, perhaps only to gain time.

He saw my tendency and was quite clear and quick.

“Yes, we must go at once. He must not gain a moment's more time, if we can help it. The fact that you come back again will be, to his cocksure vanity, final proof that you have not been able to put two and two together and so don't suspect in the least his designs. Even should you mention being attacked, he will show you a wondering sympathy, talk of the mysteries of instinct, of how, unless he's with someone they dislike, he's always safe with the bees—they are his friends, like his dear little mare (which, incidentally, he poisoned), and how he can sympathize, having lost his dear wife in the same strange way. The fact that you bring round an amiable if boring old gentleman, also anxious to purchase honey, will put the final seal on your ignorance. You hardly introduce fresh customers to a salesman who you know has just tried to shanghai you.”

“All right,” I said resignedly.

Only the feeling that I had no choice but to decide to go back to that den or to be driven out of my house and perhaps out of my mind or out of my body—only such a grim, clear decision made me agree to act. But even then, when I assented, that was not enough for my strange champion.

“No,” he said, turning his head on one side and looking at me. “You must play your part a trifle more convincingly than that. As it is, you look as though
you
were the man with the noose closing round his throat. In spite of all Heregrove's insane self-assurance, that look of yours would raise doubts in his mind, and if he doubts, we are done.”

I tried to smile, but it was a pale smirk of a thing.

“I'm sorry,” said Mr. Mycroft. “You must
feel
that smile, if it is to be any good to us. You see, we shall be watched while we are there, not merely by a couple of very shrewd if deluded human eyes. We shall be under the instinctive surveillance of hundreds of little detectives who will be judging us, not by our look but by our smell, and who will try to kill us the moment we seem sufficiently, or rather smell sufficiently, suspicious. You've heard about the ‘smell of fear'? It's the adrenalin which fright puts into our sweat when we begin, as we say, to get into a cold sweat of fear, and, indeed, long before we know we are even feeling clammy. It is this smell which all animals, especially bees, find intensely provocative, and, if it gets strong, quite maddening. The bees we are about to visit are sufficiently crazy already not to be given the slightest further excuse for feeling provoked. It won't be much comfort to us if we are killed by their attacking us a little prematurely, according to Heregrove's plans.”

“Oh, let me out of this,” I broke in.

“No,” he replied. “This, as you know, is the only possible line of safety. We must grasp this nettle. And the more we delay, the worse it will be; quite apart from the fact that Heregrove may strike again, if we give him any more time.” Then the note of command changed to one of constructive assistance. “But I thought this necessary initiative against our enemy might require more of you than you could quite command at will. Whatever you might wish, and however necessary you might see it to be, I saw it might well be impossible for you to get yourself to feel that this is a fine, boyish adventure. And as you must believe this, as your part in our act, if you are to convince the greater part of our audience—and if they hiss us, we are lost—just swallow this. It's only benzedrine hydrate. Does no harm. Not a thing to live on, but it does pull one through little scenes like this and makes one's acting convincing.”

I gazed with some misgiving at the small white tablet. I hate drugs. If I get into a mood I stay in it until it moves off. I don't believe in making efforts with oneself; after all, does one ever know what one is doing and why things go on inside oneself? But I suppose every criminal going to the scaffold gulps down willingly enough his small regulation tot of brandy, even though he has always hated the taste up till then. I got it down, and Mr. Mycroft kept me walking up and down for some time while he ran over our final dispositions. As he talked, it seemed to me increasingly clear that he was a master mind, Heregrove simply a malicious fool and that we had him in our grasp.

The mood held even when we found ourselves at his door and, if anything, grew even stronger when I listened while Mr. Mycroft took the whole game out of my hands and played it, I had to own, incomparably. All vestige of the leisurely old bore had vanished. He was as sparklingly vivacious and at the same time as charmingly ingenuous as a schoolboy. No doubt he was an amazing actor, but it was equally clear to me that he was really in high spirits, an old hunter, finding itself once again following a breast-high scent, a veteran adventurer looking once more into the bright eyes of danger. Romantic similes and well-worn ones, too, I know, but I must set down things as they happened, and that was exactly how I saw him then. It explains a little the extraordinary ascendancy he was able to have over me.

Heregrove, on opening, had not looked hospitable, though he pulled his face together and was obviously both determined to appear at his ease and uninclined to think that we looked dangerous or even suspicious. Obviously we did not. Here was that young fool who had already once put his silly head into the trap and now again, as stupid as a pop-eyed trout, which takes the same hook five minutes after it has got off it safe back into deep water, was returning for another visit to the man who was determined to murder him in cold blood. And he brings with him an old, capering zany, also after honey, and who also might serve well as Demonstration Case No. 3 of the perfect, trackless killer.

Mr. Mycroft was, as it happens, asking about honey. He had introduced himself and he had spoken with disarming frankness about his failure to keep bees himself. He supposed he hadn't the knack and was too old now to learn. His only wish had been to keep himself in honey. He had no knowledge of the strange insects and confessed that he found it hard to understand their normal ways, let alone their crotchets, their likes and dislikes and their complaints, of which there seemed to be no end and each one more mysterious than the last. Then his young friend here had told him that he had an acquaintance up at this end of the village who had kept him supplied for a long while now with excellent honey.

“Perhaps it's a breach of village etiquette for me to call. Each community has its rules, which the outsider must learn. So I persuaded Mr. Silchester to come along with me this afternoon.”

There was nothing very cunning in the opening, but it was delivered with an indefinable air, with that quiet, cheerful assurance which creates an atmosphere in which the other side simply has to accept your initiative and to believe at its face value what you say.

“Oh, come in, come in,” said Heregrove.

He was obviously having to give ground, as a man with a weaker wrist, poorer eye, and less skill has to yield ground to a more powerful fencer. I was surprised to find myself feeling that we were the attacking party, and Heregrove in danger of us, not we of him. We entered that dreary living room, and he made an effort, having landed us there, to get away.

“I'll just go down and get you the honey. It's at the bottom of the garden, as Mr. Silchester knows.”

That appeal to me, somehow, gave another fillip to my still rising courage. I certainly now should not smell of fear as long as I realized that our enemy, however consciously still unaware, was subconsciously so uneasy that he had to call me in to confirm his right to get unsuspected away from an old, effusive man and a dolt of a young one.

Mr. Mycroft, however, was as quick as a fencer taking an opening of his enemy's guard.

“I spied your garden as we talked outside. I think, too, I noticed that you have some uncommon stripings on your tulips. I wish I knew as much of bees as I do about tulips. I will take a modest wager you have a very interesting mutation there. Perhaps chance aiding skill? The chromosome study of tulips, I confess, fascinates me.”

With his rapid conjuror's patter, Mr. Mycroft gently, firmly irresistibly, forced his company on the retreating Heregrove. I followed, and so we three went down the garden path, up which I had last come so short a time before, little better than a fugitive and, as it happened, branded with the mark of death. When we reached the egregious bunch of late, mid-summer tulips—which, of course, I had never before noticed—Heregrove muttered something about knowing nothing about flowers, and indeed the flower beds fully confirmed him. But Mr. Mycroft would have none of this “false modesty,” as he rallyingly called it.

“Obviously, my dear sir, you are not one of those wearisome, prettysome cottage gardeners, but, whether by luck or no, here is a plant well worth an expert botanist's interest. I can't claim to be that, but I can claim to be able to recognize a remarkable sport when I see one.”

He bent, examined the plant, looked into the rather closely folded petals, at the anthers or stamens or whatever botanists call that sort of tonsil things which flowers have in their throats.

Then, suddenly, “But we are forgetting our honey,” he said, straightening himself up.

Heregrove had stopped, standing closely beside him. He was quite clearly taken in by his apparently bona fide enthusiasm and quite as clearly at a loss how to manage this lively old bore and keep him at the proper distance from places where his long nose might scent things less sweet and harmless than the faint, clean perfume of the tulip.