A Taste for Honey (5 page)

“To visit the Heregroves themselves was, of course, out of the question, even more than making inquiries about them in the village. It is quite clear what he or they have done; though I must say it is so startling that it has shocked me back to a line of thought which I had told myself I had left for good. Heregrove has bred a bee to put all other beekeepers out of business. I confess it is an ingenious notion. I've confirmed it, though. I've already found that up till a few years ago there was quite a lot of beekeeping in this district. Now, as you know, you can't get honey anywhere locally.”

“But,” I broke in—for I must own my interest in this extraordinary story was getting the better of my self-concern, the whole tale was so mad, bad, and ridiculous—“but what an absurd amount of energy and ingenuity to spend just to corner the honey market of Ashton Clearwater.”

“Yes, I thought that, too, and it puzzled me,” he replied. “Of course, inventors are kittle cattle. For the sake of an experiment they'll ruin themselves, and to make a discovery they'll risk any number of people's lives, their own included. Still it puzzled me. Of course, after the attack on my hives I realized that a thing like this could and pretty certainly would grow. Apiarists are not used to suspecting people. Heregrove may have lit on this thing as a pure researcher and then have hunted about to see how he could make it pay. His super-bee may, indeed, have acted like a Renaissance ‘bravo' or a Frankenstein's monster and gone off killing on its own. That may have put the idea into his head. ‘Oh, Opportunity, thy guilt is great. 'Tis thou—'”

“Please,” I said, “I prefer at this point psychology to poetry and facts to anything.”

“Well,” he smiled, “I can tell you the Heregrove bees came literally out of the blue. Fortunately they are so stupid that even if he did send them specifically they could not tell him that their expedition of extermination had failed.”

“How did it fail? How could it?” I exclaimed.

“You want only facts,” he chuckled, “and no theories. That, of course, is not possible if you wish to understand. But the fact remains, as your ears and eyes tell you, the home team survived.”

“Then,” I said, with a sigh of relief, “they are not so deadly as we feared.”

“Oh, yes, they are,” he answered, quietly. “I told you I drove off the first attack from myself and when my poor Rollo was dead and I could do no more for him, I decided to see if I could save at least my bees. Wrapped in bee-veils and gloves, I charged the smoke-thrower with a peculiarly strong smoke I used once when I was attacked long ago in not dissimilar circumstances: what I then took to be an accident but now suspect was a similar discovery being used by a man not unlike our present customer. Discoveries are generally made twice over and often fall into undesirable hands and even come into undesirable brains.”

“But was the smoke enough?”

I wanted him to get on. Age and a long-practiced calm had made him more willing to view the past as equally interesting as the present than was I. I had spoiled my walk, missed my lunch, and had not even secured my honey. As a matter of fact, I was only staying on until I could learn how safe it was to go. I had no intention of leaving if there was any chance that in a quiet bend of the lane there might be a sudden hum and before one could even cover one's face one would be pricked to death with red-hot knitting needles. But I had no intention of staying, wasting more of my time, the moment I could be sure that the coast (or rather the sky) was clear.

“Yes, yes, the smoke worked. I mightn't be here if it hadn't. One crept up my leg and I smoked it only just in time. They're so devoted they'd work their way through anything. I doubt that gloves would be much protection for long against those super-stings. They are prodigious fighters, even normal bees. We'd have had no chance if they had been even a fifth our size.”

He saw my dulling eye, went over to the door, and called out, “Mrs. Simpkins, please lay another place and call us as soon as lunch is ready.” He turned back to me. “You will stay, won't you? Indeed, I don't want to be an alarmist, but I think you had better. I agree I have taken long in telling you how the land lies but cases such as these I have found can only be grasped—and caught” (he added after a pause) “if one understands much detail which at first sight seems irrelevant.”

From the back of the house I heard wheezing but quite reassuring complaints.

“Lunch as soon as it's ready! And it's ready and bin ready this twenty minute and mor'n. Well, there's the bit of cold salmond. An' the patridge pie's warmed up none too bad. Couldn't have kept it waiting yesterday but today it's taken it nicely. Cold gooseberry tart with the whipped cream—never expected it to whip today—”

The inventory was as good to my eye as to my ear and even better on the tongue. My host knew about food and also about wine. He talked both, well and fully, as if he wouldn't touch on shop at mealtimes. I was hungry at first, fell to, and fell in with his mood. But toward the end it struck me that it was a grim little meal, really. Here was I with an unknown man who had already dropped a number of most sinister hints and had shown me also in the other room enough venom to make me die in agony in less than a minute—and, what's more, for the coroner's inquest to dismiss my death as though I had been only bitten by a flea and taken it badly. It was the thought of the coroner which made me push back my plate.

“If you have finished,” my host said, rising, “I won't detain you for more than a few moments longer. We should, however, finish our discussion,” he added, dropping his voice, “out of the range of any easily frightened ears.”

Again I felt that queer, irrational disturbance when pleasure at flattery is mixed with misgiving as to the flattery's motive. I was already alarmed and had good reason to be. However, I repeated to myself: “Better know the worst; ostrich tactics are little use when you may be fatally stung in the back.”

Chapter III

ROLANDING THE OLIVER

“Briefly,” said my host, when we were once more seated in the laboratory, with the phials and the dead bees to lend point to his words, “the more I thought over Heregrove's work, the more I was sure he had more or less blundered on this discovery while experimenting with bee-breeding.”

“But how did you beat off the attack of his bees? Didn't they come back?”

“Yes, but by that time I was ready for them. That is why I think—deduction, I fear, yet often all we have—” (he chuckled rallyingly at me, and I feared a relapse into the past or, worse, into theorizing), “I think Heregrove doesn't know much about bees except their biology. Anyhow, I thought he didn't know much about bee psychology, about their patterns of behavior; though I'm not so sure even of that, now. It is pretty certain, though, that he didn't know that there is an answer to his pirate bee.

“I told you I was more interested in my bees themselves than in their honey. Come into my library a moment. I can best show you there. An actual illustration,” he added, gauging my impatience, “often saves time,” and then, with a glint of superiority which made me obey because I hate any unpleasantness, “especially when a mind, unfamiliar with a strange fact, must understand it unmistakably!”

By the window in the library hung a cage with a couple of small birds in it. I was going to walk in and take a chair, for I had been quite uncomfortably perched on a bench all the while in the laboratory, but suddenly my shoulder was held.

“Don't move,” whispered my queer beekeeper. “Look at the birds and don't speak loudly.”

“What am I to notice?” I muttered back, more crossly even than I had meant. All these antics vexed me.

“You notice nothing?” went on the level whisper. “Even when your attention is drawn to it?”

“I see two small birds,” I whispered back, playing perforce this ridiculous game. “And one is sitting on the upper perch and the other on the lower.”

Then the absurdity of being made to take part in an intelligence test like a backward schoolchild, by a perfect stranger, irritated me so that I wouldn't any longer go on whispering.

Aloud I asked, “Would you be good enough to tell me what we are looking at and what it is meant to convey?”

“Well, anyhow, that remark of yours has ended the performance,” he replied airily. “And, for clues: the familiar passage, ‘Look how the heavens' down to ‘muddied vesture of decay' from
The Merchant of Venice
, contains the explanation.” Then, seeing that my irritation was really mastering me, he stopped smiling and added, “Sir, you must pardon an old man. It is not senility, though, but something almost as out of date—patient thoroughness. When we entered, those birds were singing. At least one of them—the male, of course—was performing and the female was listening enraptured. No, you are not deaf—only a little unobservant with your eyes. One can see his throat swell and his beak open. No human ear—you get my Shakespearean quotation?—can catch one of those notes which his mate so appreciates.”

“Yes, Mr. Mycroft, yes,” I said, a little mollified (for it was a queer fact of which I had never heard before and I like queer facts). “But what have these birds to do with the bees? Are they to charm away the pirates?”

“You are pretty close to the truth,” he replied, surprisingly.

“How on earth can a bird we can't hear, sing away a bee which is probably deaf? I've heard of bee-catching birds but—”

“We don't know of any bird as yet which can serve this purpose, but this inaudible songster was unknown to our grandparents. And we now know of a spellbinding singer which can do what you ask. More remarkable than a bird: it is actually a moth, a moth which sings a humanly inaudible note! I had to show you the birds because experimenting with them gave me a piece of apparatus which may be of no little use to both of us. They gave me my first records. When I had learned how to make these, and the hen bird had kindly shown me by her absorbed attention that I had indeed caught the note, I then went on to the harder task of recording a far more difficult voice and trying it out on a far more difficult and awkward audience.”

We had gone back to the library. Mr. Mycroft, making me, I must confess, catch something of his interest—for I'm interested in gadgets—took out from an upper shelf what looked like a small homemade gramophone combined with a barograph. The drum had on it fuzzy lines like those I once saw on an earthquake chart. Beside the drum was a small hollow rod the use of which I couldn't imagine. He started the machine and the fine pen began its rapid scrawling on the paper as the drum slowly revolved.

“You are now listening to one of the most magical voices in the world,” remarked Mr. Mycroft, complacently.

“You can say so,” I replied, somewhat tartly. “But as you like quotations as clues to opinions, I can give you one from Hans Andersen's Magic Weavers: ‘The King hasn't got any clothes on at all,' cried the child.”

“Dickens will do as well,” he chuckled. “‘There ain't no such person as Mrs. Harris.' But there is a voice, even if, I regret to say, only a potted one, singing in this room so long as that needle pen trembles. Look.”

He threw open a panel in the outside wall and revealed the back of a glass hive in which the bees could be seen thickly crawling over the layers of comb. Stepping back, he swung the horn of the gramophone until it was trained on the glass panel in the wall. In two strides he was back again. With a single movement, the sheet of glass was swung back, the comb exposed to the air. We heard the industrious hum rise to an angry buzz of protest. I was about to make for the door when the buzz was cut short even more swiftly than it had arisen. Not, though, to sink back into the contented working hum. What is more, complete stillness held the hive. It was a bee version of the Sleeping Beauty's castle. Mr. Mycroft's hand stretched back. The whirring stopped and, with the last scratch of the pen, the hive came again to life. For a second the bees hesitated, like an audience just before it breaks out of its spell into applause. I did not, however, wait for their ovation. Without asking leave, I clapped shut the glass wall. In a few moments they were as busy as ever on their obsessing honey.

“You could have waited a little longer,” Mr. Mycroft remarked. “They are so dazed that they generally go straight back to work—work, for all workers, is the best escape from unpleasant questions and baffling experiences. Well, that is how I routed the invaders. We have air detectors against planes, but we have yet to find a note which will make enemy pilots forget they came to bomb us. When Heregrove's bees came back, I was ready with my bell-mouthed sound muskets turned to the sky. Down they swooped. As soon as they were in range—which I had found by experimenting with my own bees—I started up my inaudible order to desist. ‘Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter,' certainly if they save your hives. Already my bees and the invaders were fighting, but, at the first needle scratch on the drum, I saw them fall apart. My own dropped down to their alighting boards. Of the enemy, some lit on the flowers and trees; others settled on the lawn. It was then that I picked up enough specimens to make all the tests which I've shown you.”

“One moment,” I said. Up to that time I had stood like an open-mouthed simpleton being shown an invention which might be magic or might be normal mechanism, for all he could decide. But now I was on my own ground or at least not far from it. “One moment. Isn't there something wrong about all this? I'm rather interested in gramophones in my way and I sometimes read about them. I've understood that the best gramophone today will not record even the highest note audible to the fully hearing human ear. How about these super-notes?”

“I'm glad you know about these matters,” he replied, “for it makes it more interesting for me to describe to you this ingenious little toy. Perhaps you know that Galton made a whistle which blows a note which we can't hear but a dog will. That whistle set me on this line of research. You see the principle incorporated in that hollow rod on the far side of the machine by the drum. I won't go into details, but what happens is that air vibrations too fine and high for the ordinary gramophone recording or disk to render are stepped down when we are recording and then, through this simple but ingenious mechanism, stepped up again, so that the high, rare note is recreated. The same principle has been applied to moving pictures—to take through a filter a black and, white film which would have all the tones, though not all the tints, of the color spectrum of visible light, and then to run this seemingly only black and white film through a complementary filter, when a colored film would be seen. The principle was tried out to photograph the Delhi Durbar of King George V, but until now synchronization has held it up. The difficulties with sound are not so great, so I overcame them without wasting too much time.”