A Taste for Honey (6 page)

“Well,” I had to own, “that is, I must say, peculiarly ingenious. But what happened when the gramophone stopped? You couldn't keep it on till nightfall?”

“I own I was a little uneasy. I kept it going the length of a full record and swept into a sack all the enemy aliens I could. But, apart from requiring them for purposes of research, there was no need. Dr. Cheeseman is right. When an insect's instinctive reaction has been completely thrown out, it cannot, as we do, recollect and carry on. It must go back to its original place, as a man after concussion often has post-lesion amnesia, sometimes of weeks or months or, in a number of well-known cases, of years. So, as they came to, those I hadn't bagged made off and my own broods were free to carry on.”

“Did they never come again?”

“Once or twice, but it looks as though some kind of conditioned reflex were being built up in them.”

“Well, you'll be free now. I don't know whether you've heard, as we haven't referred to the tragedy, but the coroner told Heregrove to destroy his hives. In the next week or so, at least, I presume the law will see that he has done so.”

Mr. Mycroft looked at me.

“I know more of bad men than of bad bees. Heregrove will get rid of the present hives, maybe. But, mark my words, he will not give up beekeeping and the new lot will not be less malignant, but more, if he can make them. A man like that gets the habit, the taste for malicious power. It grows, and it is harder to break than an addiction for morphia. I know.”

He evidently spoke with authority, of what sort I couldn't say. I was more anxious to clear up the bee mystery first.

“What is this note which cows them?” I asked.

“Well, as I have said,” he replied, “I am sorry not to be able to show you an actual songster. They are harder to come by nowadays than those rare birds in the next room, and far harder to keep. I'll show you, however, a prima donna in her coffin. In fact, here is the form which uttered the voice that routed a thousand murderers and, as you saw a moment ago, can make the most fanatical of all the world's workers down tools and idle as long as her music holds the air.”

As he took down a cardboard box which had evidently held note-paper, he added, “Queer, in the bird and animal world, the male sings and the female listens, but in these and some other moths—those, for example, like the purple emperor—with scent we cannot smell—” Suddenly he stopped. “
Am
I getting senile!” he exclaimed. “Would I have overlooked that twenty years ago? Well, this is just like the way a dream is recalled. Suddenly some incident of the day reminds us of a whole dream story which we would otherwise have clean forgotten.”

I was completely at a loss as to what he was talking about and waited while he scribbled down a note.

“Forgive me,” he said, looking up. “I think showing you this will have helped us more than all the rest of this valuable conversation.”

He opened the box. Spread out, fixed with a pin through the fat body, lay a very large moth, curiously marked on the head. “It is the biggest of all the British moths and now quite rare. I had great difficulty in getting a pair. The male is in another box.”

“Queerly marked,” I said.

“That gives it its name,” he replied. “The death's-head moth. But its really odd characteristic is its inaudible voice. It uses that not merely to attract the male but for a purpose as strange as the instrument itself—so as to hypnotize bees, and, when they are so hypnotized, to enter their hives safely and gorge itself on their honey. Fancy holding up a bank only by singing—having to stuff the notes into your mouth all the while, and the bank officials ready to knife you to death the moment your voice gave out! When it comes to the fantastic, we must give the prize to nature every time. We poor creatures who try to imagine the strange are always beaten by the sheer, inexhaustible fantasy of the natural. Well, that shows how I beat off Heregrove's attack and, as I've said, he had no way of telling whether his aerial torpedoes took effect or not. He just guessed that no one else who kept bees would ever suspect that here was a challenge; still less, know how to reply to it.”

“And now,” I said, firmly, getting up and going to the door, “I am much obliged for a day's most interesting visit. May I have my honey and get home? I presume, now that the sun is sloping and your hives are closing down, none of Heregrove's harpies will be about, even if he has not destroyed them.”

“Oh, you are safe enough,” he replied. “They won't attack except to protect their hive or to rob another. That is why they came here. That is Heregrove's pretty little game. They root out all other rivals for him. It is really a very neat case of savage instinct being made unconsciously to commit crimes by savage intelligence.”

I was nettled by his absorbed interest in his own wretched bees and then in Heregrove's supposed motives. I, obviously, came in only a bad third. Here he had detained me a whole day, under what, it was now clear, were false pretenses. Naturally I had assumed, when he said before lunch that I had better stay, that he said so because it would have been dangerous for me to leave.

“Why,” I broke in, “have you then kept me waiting about all day if it would have been quite safe for me to walk home?” I own there was irritation, natural irritation, in my voice.

He showed no surprise or resentment at my rather rough interruption.

“I saw you would not stay simply to hear my explanations,” he answered. “You have some of the impatience of a certain Proconsul Pontius who when in a famous, and, as it would seem, important interview, he found the discussion becoming abstract, terminated it with premature irritation, asking what is Truth and waiting not for an answer. So, as you chose to assume that I meant that you were in immediate danger of the bees and would not grasp that your danger really arose from your impatient unwillingness to understand the general character of the peril in which you stand, I permitted your misconception to serve your real interests and kept you here until you had had a fairly thorough demonstration of the factors impinging on your case.”

He said this in such peculiarly exasperatingly quiet tones that I need hardly say that his explanation had the reverse effect from soothing my feelings, already on edge. The insult of coolly patronizing me by a lecture on my character was deliberately added to the injury of having used up my whole day. I held my tongue, however, though I felt quite uncomfortably hot. All this explains and shows how natural was my final and, I still think, inevitable protest. He paused. As I have said, I held my tongue with difficulty. And then he went on indifferently, as though there were nothing to apologize for, speaking slowly, as though he hadn't already wasted enough of my time.

“Since showing you that death's-head moth, I think I ought to qualify what I have said. I know how impertinent advice from elders and strangers always seems, and, unfortunately, I am both, but may I request that you do not call on Heregrove without me? I should be very pleased to come with you. Indeed, that was the final point I was going to discuss with you, after which I was not going to detain you any longer.”

How could I fail to resent that? I had been treated like a child that has to be tricked to serve its elders' ends, and now, when I was highly and rightly vexed, as if the wasted time were not bad enough, this old dominie was going to force his company still further on the and, in fact, make an attempt to order my life. Who was this old stranger, pushing his advice on me and directing what I should do and whom I should see and in whose care? It was, of course, I felt, quite clear, that he had angled all the time to put me in a position in which I should be unable out of common politeness to refuse his request. He was a clever old crank of a busybody. I hate being managed and maneuvered. Even more, I dislike being made to change my ways and to do precisely the very thing which I live in the country just to avoid doing, taking strangers to call on one's acquaintance. I felt so vexed at this transparent stratagem, coming on the top of everything else—the silly old man with his senile sense of his own tactful finesse, thinking I shouldn't see through it (I was tired too, being kept waiting about all day)—that I felt a positive revulsion against him, and, I suppose by contrast, something almost like clannish protectiveness toward Heregrove.

What was this stranger, gossiper, romancer doing? Making all kinds of insinuations about one of our village—a man about whom I only knew, as a matter of fact, that his honey was always good and quite reasonably priced, and who, poor fellow, had just had his wife killed by his bees which kept me in honey. True, he might not have been very fond of her, but English law had decided, and rightly, that she was the victim of a horrible accident. Even someone you dislike, you can miss very much and be very sorry for, especially if he is suddenly killed in a horrible way. When I was a boy, we had a dog I never really liked. It used to bark and leap up on me—startling and dirtying. Yet when a car dashed over it and there it lay like a smashed bag, I felt not only quite sick, I was really sorry. These thoughts, of course, went in a flash through my mind. I was pretty certainly more tired than I realized.

Mr. Mycroft was standing before me with a rather assured expression on his face.

Before I had thought out the words, I found myself saying: “I'll pay for the honey. I'm a complete recluse and never introduce anyone to anyone else. As to my movements, I have never needed anyone to advise me on them.”

I stopped. I own I lacked the courage to meet Mr. Mycroft's eye now that I was being deliberately rude, so I couldn't judge how he took it. All I know is that he passed out of the room without a word. He was away for a few minutes, came back with a neatly made parcel with an ingenious handle made of the string, and named a ridiculously low figure. I fumbled a bit, and I am afraid was a little red as I paid.

All he said was, “The string will hold quite securely. It saves the trouble of a basket being returned.”

He held the door open and with a rather clumsy “Good day” I stepped out, hurried across the lawn, now in shadow, into the dusky path through the plantation and so down into the twilit sunken lane. My nerves must have been overstrung (perhaps I had been very discourteous). The whole place seemed unpleasantly still. Those silly, melodramatic lines from
The Ancient Mariner
kept running in my head:

Like one that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread
,

And having once turned round walks on
,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread
.

I didn't really feel at all comfortable until I was back in my own sitting room, with the lamp lit, the curtains drawn, and the door well bolted.

Chapter IV

FLY TO SPIDER

The next morning, however, I was quite cheerful. Only one thing seemed clear in the gay morning light. By observing my rightful impulse I had—at the cost of a moment's unpleasantness—escaped what might well have turned out to be a permanent invasion by a loquacious, opinionated, fantastic old bore—the very thing, I repeat, that one lives in the country to avoid, the special terror of town clubs and gardens. I was well stocked with honey. I put the whole question out of my head—even of what I would do when my supplies again ran out.

It seemed only a few days, however, before they did. It must, of course, have been a month, perhaps a little more. I remember that I evidently didn't want to notice that I was running low, for it was Alice who drew my attention to it and I was vexed with her. It was really her fault. She should have seen that it was quite clear I did not want to be troubled. But somehow the poorer people are and the stupider, the more they seem to expect you always to be reasonable and clear and sensible.

“You 'ave only 'alf a pot an' one comb now left, sir,” was her opening.

“I know,” I said, as a silencer. It was as ineffective as my effort to stem the obituaries of the late Mrs. Heregrove.

“An' you 'aven't, sir, rightly even that: the combs run so in this 'ot weather.”

I grunted. Human speech of any sort, however astringent, seemed only to act as warm water to a hemorrhage. “An' where you'll be getting your new lot I can't but be wondering. There's never a hive now all round the neighborhood. 'Iveless Hashton, that's what my young man he called it the other day, an' he's right. He's a cure, 'Iveless Hashton.”

This was too much, to have the cold and clotted wit of Alice's walker-out served to me after breakfast.

“Alice,” I said, with a firmness which I don't remember showing for a very long time, unless it was when I broke away from the tentacles of Mr. Mycroft, “Alice, please get on with your work”—the breakfast table was half cleared, half the china was already marshaled on its transport tray for the kitchen, half still held its position on the table—“and I will get on with mine.”

What that was, as I had been looking out the window when the attack had been launched, was not very clear, but I felt I must soften my rebuke by showing that we both had duties which forbade further waste of time. But Alice was wounded. I was being, I could see, not merely rude—that was an employer's right, but “not sensible,” and that is something which the rustic mind finds far more upsetting than insult. The wound led to a further hemorrhage of words.

“Well, sir, I was never one to hoffer advice hanywhere, not even in the right quarters” (advice again!), “but I did think it seemed positively silly-like to get yourself with no honey—you being that fond of it and suspicious-like of shop things, as indeed I'm myself; an' all I meant, and no imperence intended and never was, that I'd 'eard that, maybe, you might again be able to be getting yer honey at Heregrove's.”