A Taste for Honey (16 page)

We were at the door and he had rapped gaily on it, turned his back on it, and continued chuckling and repeating in a raised, excited voice.

“Yes, yes, Mr. Heregrove will be pleased at this; this means a tidy profit, if he cares for that, as well as no little distinction. The rights are all his. I have, of course, given him every credit, and I'll see he gets it. Most necessary to encourage amateurs, most necessary. The amount of good work lost by not doing so! Simply hopeless! Amateurs are always making discoveries and the professionals are too jealous to let the real finder have the credit.”

He swung round in the middle of his stream of high-pitched chatter and struck the door again a couple of sharp raps. There was no reply. No pause came in his flow of one-sided conversation; no sign showed in his beaming face, as he scanned mine or played with an envelope in his hand, that he was impatient, that he was actually pressing to his lair a desperate criminal who was probably lurking within earshot. I do not think he had to keep the mask on by anything which I should have called self-control. All his surface self now
was
the amiable, excited old zany. Only, deep behind any detection, looked out the unsleeping vigilance which was determined that its prey should not escape it. I saw how right he had been not to tell me, an inexperienced actor at best (though I had taken quiet parts at school and once did quite a good Portia), and certainly not incapable of stage-fright on this awkward “appearance,” not to let me know in any detail, the part he was to play. All the better could I fall in with my role, which, it was now clear, was to be the quite obviously mystified young man compelled to bring up again this absurdly eccentric old scholar. Collusion between us, not even a hunted murderer could suspect.

Suddenly, in the midst of one of these excited repetitions, he literally shot off at a tangent, skimming away from the door and round the corner of the house. Before I could follow I heard him cry, “Ah, you're here. Of course you would be. There were we, expecting to find you in the house. But you've guessed my news.”

At that point I myself reached the corner of the house and could see down the garden. Mr. Mycroft was waving a piece of paper in Heregrove's face—a face in which quite clearly a very dangerous look was simply being forced off by what in any other situation I would have had to call comical dismay. Quite obviously he had thought he was trapped. He had seen us approaching—had lurked in the house and then had stolen out to the back. For what desperate throw I did not like to think, but Mr. Mycroft had been too quick for him, must have heard his careful steps on the path and had run round to meet and balk him. The sun was level, the air already cool, the garden still, the hives silent. The queer, desolate place in that quietude had a strange, resigned beauty, as of someone who has decided that death is coming and who no longer dreads or questions it.

This sense, however, was certainly not in Heregrove's mind. What I can only call a sort of exasperated relief was springing up in him. He could not prevent himself from believing in the story which was being forced on him and in the character of the story-teller, who, even in his play-acting, was so much more powerful than his vain, mimicking, murderous, megalomaniac self.

“Ah,” said Mr. Mycroft, wheeling round as I came up, “I have given poor young Mr. Silchester such a time! He's my senior in the village and he said I simply could not go forcing myself on you again. You would call, and then I might return your call. If there was anything pressing I could write. But I simply could not wait. It wasn't fair to you. You must know. The big people hadn't hesitated; had been pressing. ‘Why,' I said, ‘why, Mr. Silchester, Mr. Heregrove would never forgive me for delay, and rightly, rightly.' Formal courtesy can be real unkindness, when good news is being withheld—simply for punctilio, for nothing else!”

I stood by, the picture of that confusion which I felt, though feeling it for utterly different reasons than Heregrove, when he eyed me, concluded. It was quite safe for me to look at him. I
could
only register what he
must
misinterpret. So I watched his face with a curious sense of my own impropriety, at the horrible incongruousness of the whole scene. I even found myself smiling in a sort of weak, sheepish way, which of course was the most convincing piece of acting possible in the circumstances. Yet it rose in me spontaneously while I watched Heregrove's face change from the desperate look of the hunted to the cruel assurance that he was, again, the hunter; that, far from confronting implacable hounds, he was faced by a couple of insane hares gamboling right up to the place where he, the fox, lay hidden.

By this time Mr. Mycroft had forced his piece of paper, so that Heregrove was actually holding it and being made to read it.

“Directly I got back last night I felt I must tell the big-wigs,” ran on Mr. Mycroft. “So, though I dislike long-distance calls, I rang up Miles. He knows I wouldn't do that—at his home, too—unless I had real news. I told him exactly of your find. For, to tell you the truth, Mr. Heregrove, I shall never bring myself to believe that that was chance! I know chance is said to be capable of making monkeys compose all Shakespeare by simply strumming typewriter keys; but I never could believe that, and anyhow, even for that, I understand, it is postulated that they shall have infinite time. Well, well, we haven't that,” he went on, breathlessly. “Nor did Miles think so. See, he wrote this note and ran out at once and posted it so I should get it this morning. Miles knows! And as he's been so long Secretary, a man in such a position can speak pretty definitely for the Council. He knows their mind and when they haven't one, he is it! And, see what he says.”

He went on craning over Heregrove's shrinking arm and tapping the paper with his finger.

“‘Full recognition … Not only valuable but important' … very scientific that, very. Knows the
£.s.d
. worth of this, but the scientific prestige is, of course, the thing.
Tulpia Heregrovia
will be in all the catalogues in a couple of seasons. You will have name and remuneration. Well, I expect you will value both, and in this case both are comfortably considerable. The Dutch are being forced off our market by these virus restriction regulations. There's a demand now for really new mutations, a demand which makes bulbs fetch really big prices. A daffodil bulb raiser near Hastings had a sport worth £500. Tulips go higher, and once you have one, you may have many, if you have, as it is clear you have, the hand for that kind of thing. You see the Institute offers you all facilities. You know it, no doubt. No better place to work. They have sponsored many a brilliant amateur like you and, if I may so put it, set him up in a highly thriving way. Why I was so precipitate is that the Council meets tomorrow. You see, Miles mentions the date. He feels as I do. At this quarterly meeting they make the grants-in-aid for new research and offer their laboratory equipment and expert assistance, greenhouses, and planting-out plots to selected amateurs. If we can telephone Miles tonight that you accept, it will be a feather in both our caps—to have found a brilliant amateur grower who did not even think of applying to the Society!”

Mr. Mycroft ran off into asteristical chuckles—if I may coin an adjective—beaming alternately at the paper and at Heregrove's face.

“Dear old Miles,” he ruminated, while evidently expecting at any moment Heregrove's affirmative. “You have, no doubt, seen that famous sign manual? It can do a lot, oh, quite a lot; though, as I always tell him, it is a hybrid sprung from an arabesque crossed with an anagram, and the only use of it is not to convey a name but to foil a forger. Well, I may telephone, ‘yes,' mayn't I?”

Heregrove was obviously completely bewildered. The story, supported by the letter, he could not refute or reasonably doubt. But it was clear to me that though he believed the story, he was determined to refuse the offer, however profitable he felt it might prove and however firm he was convinced that it must be.

“You see, Mr. Mycroft, as I have told you, I am not interested in flowers. I am ready to believe you and Dr. Miles, that I have something valuable here. Perhaps—” (and here I saw lying creep across his face) “perhaps I did not tell you the whole truth last time and I have a certain knowledge and taste for flower breeding. But I cannot leave here or go up to London or attend the Institute. That is quite impossible. I'll sell the plant outright, if we can find an impartial opinion to decide its price. But I have other, more important interests than raising new varieties of plants.”

I caught a certain contemptuous defiance and assurance in that last phrase. He was so certain of himself and his security that he was ready to tell us that he had more important work on hand than getting quite a considerable reputation and cash return. He was enjoying, even at a small risk of making us suspicious as to what that interest actually was, the tragic irony of telling us to our faces that killing us was more sport for him and of deeper delight than making new forms of life.

“I am sorry,” said Mr. Mycroft, “I am indeed sorry that we cannot persuade you to take this line.”

His voice expressed real regret. It convinced Heregrove, but, again, he was correct in judging the
expression
as being sincere, and hopelessly, fatally wrong in estimating the reason for that sadness. He thought he was faced by a fantastic, fanatical fancier, trying, all unconsciously, to make a tiger come into the house and play with a ball of wool. He was, in actual fact, face to face with his judge who was pleading with him to take a last chance—if, as it seemed to me, it was a spurious offer—to escape his doom. It was appallingly thrilling to me, this scene, which, with its tragicomic irony, seemed to me, as I watched it, to be more terrible than any trial scene, when the dry-mouthed prisoner at the bar sees the judge put on the black cap.

I could not foresee how it was to end in detail. But I could see that, however fantastic the dressing of the parts, perhaps because of that element of fantasy—because the doomed man thought himself to be the perfectly disguised and quite compassionless dealer of our dooms and that the man who pleaded with him could by no possibility be doing what he was actually doing—pleading with a murderer to turn from his way and holding over that murderer his secret and his fate—because the murderer looked with now obvious contempt at the man he was driving to condemn him, thinking that that man, his judge, was simply a helpless old fool and the murderer's victim No. 3. I could see more than the immediate crisis.

Because of this terrible ignorance, this complete, hopeless misapprehension of his situation, the scene suddenly filled me with an overwhelming sense of its general significance. Here in this grotesque play of stubborn misunderstanding, black hardheartedness dooming itself, and mercy pleading, as it only could, and maybe only can, in disguise and under symbols, in some way all our human tragedies, all mankind's doom, seemed to be performed before me at that moment in miniature. I was shaken more deeply than by this one savage and cunning brute's disaster. It shook me because I recognized suddenly, and terribly vividly for the moment, that this situation is in some way what we all confront in life: those people and events which we treat most contemptuously and thoughtlessly are just those which, watching us through their mask of insignificance, plead with us to understand and feel, and failing to impress and win us, have no choice but to condemn us, for we have really condemned ourselves. I own I cannot recapture that feeling, but in honesty I must record these thoughts which then went through my mind.

“Well, well.” Mr. Mycroft's crestfallen voice broke a silence which cannot really have been long but which to me seemed to have been indefinite—a queer, timeless interlude between two acts of our dangerous farce. His eyes had been fixed on Heregrove, with an intensity which I could interpret as a supreme interest; scientific curiosity blended with a high compassion, and which Heregrove, as confidently, had to mistake for an unbalanced obsession with some trivial specialty. Heregrove took the first step, however.

“I am busy, gentlemen, and, as I can't agree to your suggestion, I must say good evening.”

Then, grudgingly, and not to seem too suspiciously contemptuous, it was clear, he added in a perfunctory voice, “I'm obliged to you for calling my attention to the possibility.”

He began to turn away, but quite easily and in character, Mr. Mycroft fell in beside him, ambling along down the garden path, carrying his way and imposing his company with that renewed flow of rapid talk.

“A real disappointment. Perhaps you couldn't accept, I realize. But I know
you
realize it was kindly meant and am sure you are interested in what I shall still call your achievement. Rewards you may neglect, but research, I think, you will permit? Ah, there it is! You will, I know, allow me one more examination. The last was little more than a glance—just enough to make sure, not enough to appreciate. We collectors and breeders, Mr. Heregrove, you cannot imagine how each minute variation and mutational clue thrills us. What the layman hardly remembers—indeed, scarcely notices—thrills us as a new star thrills an astronomer.”

We had come abreast of the few tulips which Mr. Mycroft's skill had somehow turned into a pivot on which he made revolve his whole delicate and dangerous operation.

“As a breeder yourself, I need hardly tell you,” he continued, addressing Heregrove, who stood by uneasily with obviously rising savage impatience, but unable to see how at that moment he could break away, “I shall take no liberties with your treasure, a treasure no doubt not less valuable than the ever-famous black tulip. But,” and Mr. Mycroft bent toward the largest of the blooms, “I know you will permit.…”

He paused as though absent-mindedly engrossed in peering into the petals, but really, I could see, to be certain that he had excited and held the cupidity of the man, who, whatever his dreams of avarice and wealth won from murder, was still certainly very hard up. Heregrove, who, it had seemed a moment ago, would break clean away or at least stroll ahead, was caught, coming closer, lured and drawn as a trout is drawn in a curve by the fine line of the dry-fly fisherman, and himself also looking now, rather stupidly, I thought, at the flower.