A Taste for Honey (15 page)

“I captured it yesterday, in the early morning, before your Alice called for me. A few pirates were reconnoitering and a small squadron swooped. They'll never leave us alone, or any bees, as long as they are alive. I stunned them with sound, as you know, and picked up the few who actually fell on the lawn. They are now all dead except this one, though I gave them fine quarters and plenty of food. That, of course, is another mystery of the hive; it is what makes one of the greatest French apiarists say that the bee is not an individual, but only a loose, floating cell of that largely invisible organism or ‘field' which we call the hive and of which we are able to perceive only its material core—the honeycomb and the queen.

“Certainly they will not live if kept from their swarm; and these are no exception. In fact, like most products of fancy breeding, they are evidently in this respect, as in others, more highly strung, more hysterical.”

While he spoke he carefully carried the pinioned bee across the room. It, too, was obviously on the verge of death. Its legs moved slowly as if tangled in some invisible web. The antennae drooped. The bright, many-faceted eye already looked dulled. Mr. Mycroft put it down on the bench. It nearly fell over on its side, and then recovered itself; it began to crawl laboriously, blindly ahead. But it had to stop, out of what was obviously sheer exhaustion.

“Yes, its minute, invisible pipe-line to its mysterious source of its general life is nearly severed,” he said, looking at it.

“It will be dead in a few minutes,” I concurred.

“Still,” he said, “we are taking no risks,” and, rather unnecessarily, I thought, he spent a moment in securing the wings, by slipping with a fine brush a drop of spirit-gum under each wing and so sticking the wing to the body.

So moribund was the insect that it did not even buzz nor seem to feel that its wings were now glued tightly to its back. Mr. Mycroft waited until the gum had set. The bee remained still. Indeed, the only sign of life was that it did not roll over. I was watching it with considerable curiosity and carefulness, so that I did not see what Mr. Mycroft was doing. What I did see was that suddenly, for no apparent reason, the dying bee literally sprang to life. It was as though an electric shock had struck it. Perhaps no electric current could so have galvanized it. The whole small body seemed to swell, the drooping antennae writhed like tiny snakes. A vibration of such intense energy went through it that the wings tore themselves free from their sealing, leaving the veined, transparent vans still stuck to the back. The stumps whirred wildly. Luckily for us, the possessed mite could not rise. The frantic tremor pulsed through it again. The body curled over on itself in a paroxysm of violence, and it was dead. The body still remained upright and humped as it had died.

I looked up. With rubber stalls on both index fingers and thumbs, Mr. Mycroft was corking the phial again.

“Why doesn't it fall over?” was all I could find to say.

He answered me by picking up the forceps again and taking hold of the dead bee. It required quite a considerable pull, however, to raise the body from the bench. When it came away, there, quite clearly, was the long murderous sting torn from the body and left deeply buried in the hard-wood.

“The master passion strong in death,” he remarked, dropping the curled-up little husk into the ash-bin under the bench. With his free forceps picking out the sting from the wood, he dropped it into a small crucible glowing red-hot above a bunsen flame.

“One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning,” he continued, “and demonstration is always necessary. We both now know beyond any doubt that in that test-tube we have something which is precisely what we must have—a thing the essential nature of which is quite impossible to be perceived by us, while to the particular bee which we have to circumvent, it is as flagrant as a cup of vitriol.”

“And now?” I said.

I realized that the time had come when we must go ahead, apply our knowledge and free ourselves and the world of a deadly pest. I knew that by an hour or so of resolute and obedient action I should somehow be delivered from a living nightmare and be able once again to go back to my quiet, secure, happy life, into the steady sunshine from under this hideous cloud. I felt also a curious sense of assurance, which the demonstration had at least given me reason for—the feeling, I suppose, that a hunter, concealed in a tree and armed with the latest sporting rifle, must experience when, all unconscious that it is covered, a man-eater strolls into perfect range. I felt that our enemy was as powerful, as malignant, and as stupid in his vain ignorance of what he was up against, as a tiger. So it was not any longer timidity which made me hesitate.

I was hunting for words, though, when Mr. Mycroft, who had been with great care drawing the clear liquid out of the test-tube by means of a pipette-nosed flask, his task finished and test-tube and flask shut into a hermetically sealed drawer, looked up at me, remarking, “The chemical interest of this experiment (and, I own, that has been quite absorbing in its way) has not made me forget that this problem, though now solved materially, remains morally a very grave one.”

So saying, he went across the room, throwing wide the window as he passed, and opened one of the wire-covered drawers at the room's end. A dozen or so bees flew out. I ducked, but they made straight for the window. Looking out, I saw them swoop toward and enter one of the hives on the lawn.

“They are glad to get home,” he said, looking after them. “I hate distressing them, blind and obsessed as all bees are, imprisoned in their fossilized dream of instinctive service to the hive. Perhaps I need hardly tell you that time and again while I was making this extract—eliminating the coarse essential oils, which alone our crude olfactory nerve-ends can pick up; finding the actual essence, partly by help of that odd article and its tables and partly by testing out my various refinings—by using that small caged party of my own placid bees as tasters, or smellers, by watching the way they first reacted and then, as the brew became specific they became almost unaware, when the stuff, then crystal clear, brought near the pirates' detention drawer, made them nearly beat themselves to death against their wire-gauze bars—all that time the moral problem hung like a vast cloud on the horizon of my thought. Then, as the material problem was completely cleared out of the way, I turned on this other, and, to me, greater problem and found my mind as clear, as made up, and as convinced of its essential correctness as I am that the essence we hold is the stuff we need to fulfill our purpose.”

“What's your solution?” I asked. I was myself so puzzled that I was really willing to take advice and act on it.

“I see,” he said, looking at me, “you are kind enough now to trust me, so I am going to ask you one more favor.”

I must have registered some dismay, for he quickly added, “It is a very small one and between ourselves.”

He's going to seal me to secrecy, I thought. Well, we are certainly in the same boat. I had told him I should be silent. I would certainly promise again. Even if I were an inveterate gossip, this was the one subject for which my silence could be trusted.

I was, therefore, surprised when he said, “I am going to ask you to trust me enough not to ask as yet how I have solved the moral problem, but to adopt my solution. It will, I believe, help the difficult and still quite sufficiently dangerous parts we have both to play if the man whom we have to
try
cannot see any signs, however involuntary, of collusion between us. I have to convince him again, after having shaken him badly, that I am what he still on the whole believes me to be, so that he will dismiss me as only a possible and peculiarly defenseless victim.”

Well, it was a relief to follow, not to have to make up one's mind, to know that here was an authority who would accept the responsibility both for the material arrangements and the moral consequences. Perhaps I was too sanguine, too suggestible. Certainly my mood of physical readiness and mental acquiescence was not normal. I learned that later. It is, I think, a point of considerable importance, for it makes me far less responsible should any trouble arise in the future.

All the while he was talking, Mr. Mycroft was making preparations with a definiteness and a precision which, I must say, kept my sense of assurance from waning; for he evidently foresaw his moves (whatever these might be) as clearly as a chess player of champion rank sees, as the end-game begins, the exact positions his pieces will take up to bring about the checkmate. There was nothing unexpected in the flasks being taken out of its drawer now that all the bees were gone and the window was up again. He wiped the nozzle of the pipette duct with spirits, fitted its small cap on it tightly, and then slipped it into his pocket. The next move, however, was puzzling. He went to his filing shelves and collected from a number of periodicals a couple or so of loose pages, placing these in a drawer near the window. Then he looked at his watch.

“We are not rushed for time. We shall not leave here until 5:30. Timing is, however, important. We must arrive when the sun is low, but it must not be dusk. Still, you always have to give these village craftsmen time. So I said three and, as I supposed, it is now four. I would rather none of us went down to the village. We ought not to be seen on that errand. I left my commission when I returned from you in the gloaming last evening. But though old Smith is slow, I think he will turn up. I am pretty sure he will have done the task I set him and I know he will be silent. He's the sort that likes a secret piece of fun, all the more when he has no clear idea what it is all about.”

Naturally, I had no more notion than the unknown Smith as to the drift of these remarks. “A piece of fun” sounded almost the most inappropriate description that could be given of our adventure. Silence fell between us and while I was thinking of some way of trying to find out what he had meant, and beginning, even, to wonder whether he could have been so mad as to make a confidant of an outsider, I heard a limping step outside.

Mr. Mycroft went at once to the door, shutting it behind him; so I heard only a muffled word or two in the hall. The steps withdrew, and Mr. Mycroft returned, looking at a sheet of paper. I could just see that it was of quarto size and had a printed heading with a good deal of detail on it. After taking it and spreading it carefully on a drawing board which stood by the window, he turned it upside down so the heading, though well out of my eyes' range for reading, could now be seen running like a big footnote on the page. Holding it like this, with his free hand he opened the drawer in which he had put the loose pages and brought out what seemed a similar sheet, though with more writing on it; and this he placed wrong side up and a little above the first sheet. Then, taking a pen, he remained absorbed for some five minutes or so while he made what was, as far as I could judge, a small etching across what was now the top of the inverted sheet. He considered it a moment, compared it with something on the other sheet, and then went so quickly out of the room that I was unable to get a glance at it when he hurried by me. While I waited, I thought I heard the clack of a typewriter for a few moments, but was not sure.

He returned with his hands empty, simply saying, “Now we are ready. We have just time for a cup of tea. It is waiting us in the library.”

We drank in silence. I knew I was at a divide in my life, but my mood remained curiously set, and, as I swallowed the tea—for, after all, tea is one of the most comforting of drinks—I actually felt the enterprising temper begin again to assert itself. When Mr. Mycroft said, “We ought to be getting on,” I felt a curious mixture of two sensations. The one was like what I used to feel when taken by an uncle I liked to the Zoo. He knew one of the keepers in the lion house, so that we were let in behind the public cages and saw the keeper stroke a leopard. It was so pleased that it was both purring like a cat and at the same time tearing great splinters with its contracting claws out of the log on which it was sprawled. The other feeling I remembered experiencing when at school I was sent in to bat: everyone thought I should be bowled at once, but I actually hit a boundary and made twenty-three runs before I was stumped.

I do not recall what Mr. Mycroft talked about as we walked along, but a general impression remains that, like most powerful actors, he was building up his part. (I recall wondering whether that might have been his profession before he retired, and that after all he had not been a doctor. He certainly had a quite unusual and extraordinarily convincing way of taking parts.) I could not help seeing that now he was sinking himself into the character-mood he meant to impose on his audience; although that audience would only be two puzzled and more than a little uneasy men—one not knowing what kind of act he was going to put on but knowing that it was an act, and the other not knowing even who he was, but suspecting that he might be a fraud. I realized how much depended on his being able to put over that conviction of his actually being the part he was going to play—that this was so vital that even his play-acting must, in its detail, not be known even to me. For otherwise I would be prepared for his various actions, and my awareness of what was coming might destroy that sense of naturalness and spontaneity which he had to create, and which I, with my real ignorance must, and could only so, second.

I remember vaguely that he prattled about flowers and used a lot of technical terms. I don't think he intended me to listen. I know I didn't. He sailed up to Heregrove's door, seeming to pay no attention to the house, for he was apparently still engaged in a vivacious conversation with me, or rather pouring out an excited story into my uncomprehending ear. He would say frequently, “I was right. I thought I was—knew I was. And yet who would think it! I simply couldn't wait. Nor could he; nor would they; and you realize what that means! You don't surprise men like that into action unless you have a prize find—a perfect natural-history-museum piece.”