A Taste for Honey (9 page)

“How did you manage to wound yourself like that when you fell?” Dr. Jones asked, turning round from examining my shin.

“How did I manage!” I exclaimed. “Look at those dead bees on the floor! I was attacked when at breakfast by a swarm and only got in here just in time. That, thank heaven, is the one sting I suffered. Half a dozen and your help would have come too late.”

“Attacked by a swarm coming into the house and going for you?” he replied, with obvious incredulity. “Besides, I have never seen anyone react in that way to bee venom. You must be highly allergic to such irritations.”

“Highly allergic to irritation!” I shot back. “Those bees were no normal bees. Those bees were sent—”

Dr. Jones turned to Alice and said, in the sort of aside voice which doctors use when they are getting a second opinion on a patient's statement, “Did you see any bees when you came in?”

“Well, sir, now you comes to ask me, p'r'aps there was a few about, as you might say, or maybe they was wapses, for we've hardly a waps till now, and of course we ought to be having 'em all along with the plums and such—”

“But you didn't see a swarm of bees?”

“I was just a-coming through the gate with me 'ands full up with parcels, for I'd slipped up to the village to pop in a little shopping before the shops get too full with the quality to get things quickly. As I say, perhaps there was a bit o' buzzing about, but what give me the turn was as soon as I'd put foot in the 'ouse to see the tablecloth all pulled awry, toast an' honey and egg on the carpet, napkin on the stairs, bedroom chair flung over and bathroom door shut 'n' locked, an' the 'ouse still as a death. My grandpa died of a fit just that way. Just flew off, you might say. So I rushed out to get 'elp and there by 'eaving's mercy were you a-going by.”

It was clear that, however long Alice talked, this would be the substance, the sole substance of it. Dr. Jones would list me as a prize allergic, thrown into a seizure by a single bee sting, which any normal person would take with as little fuss as stubbing his toe against a table. Well, perhaps it was best. The bees, baffled for a moment, and losing close track of their prey, had evidently veered off as swiftly as a line-squall. And even if my story were told, who would believe it?

“You had better keep that leg up today, and, if you like, I'll take a look at it this evening. You certainly are intensely allergic” (there came that irritating, glozing phrase) “to bees. You should keep out of their way. Must say you seem to have chosen a spot where you can do that. Except for these few, that you say came on a special visit to you, I don't know when I last saw bees about here, except a few down Waller's Lane. Perhaps they were cross because they were lonely, or perhaps people who are highly allergic attract their allergy, if it's a living creature.”

These speculations, evidently intended as pleasantries, did not amuse me. Obviously these bees could be no joking matter for me; on the contrary, they were nothing less than a matter of life and death. I was quite ready to keep indoors until I could think what to do, and the excuse of my stung leg was one small good out of what otherwise looked a wholly bad business. Dr. Jones and Alice helped me to the sofa which stands beside my south bedroom window. I thanked him and asked him not to trouble to call again unless I sent him a message. When he was gone and Alice was back, viewing me with a proprietary eye, I was able to effect another small stratagem.

“I feel chilly,” I said. “Please close all the windows and keep the door shut.”

“And I don't wonder you do feel a chill,” she agreed. “Why, when my pore, dear grandpa was taken with the fit that put him off, 'e went as cole as a stone. You'd 'a' 'ardly thought it was flesh, so cold and clammy-like. Cold flesh to cold earth, I can just hear my ma saying, and she was right.”

“Alice,” I struck in, “my head is aching a little. Please go downstairs and make me a little tea and some toast.”

“Mercy me, and you with no breakfast, all the time you've been lying here and lying there, as you might say.”

“Alice, I need the tea now,” I remarked, with all my weight on the ultimate word.

Alice was gone. Respect for command and pity for the wounded state acted as a double charge.

I was left to my thoughts. They could hardly be cheerful. Here was a desperately cunning man who, starting perhaps with some slight suspicion of me, now evidently for sport, if for no other reason, was set on killing me and in an abominably agonizing way, just to show off his malicious power and to experiment with an instrument of death, which, when perfected, he could employ with absolute precision and equal impunity. He had just missed, but only by bad luck (or Destiny). But the second shot would probably succeed; and there was no one who would believe my story or who, even if they believed, so long as they hesitated to act on it, arrest the man and destroy his diabolical bees, could give me any protection. I must skulk in the house, till the cold weather put my fiendish persecutors to sleep, dreading all through the summer every hum of a blow-fly—a miserable creature forced to hibernate all the warm weather and only able to go abroad and have any freedom and happiness of the slightest sort so long as the weather was raw and cold.

I heard Alice's step on the stairs. As I could not face more reminiscences of her ancestors' ends and the similarity of their fates to mine, I pretended to be dozing. I heard her come in, shut the door, and place the tray beside me, but after doing that she did not leave the room. I opened an eye warily and found her regarding me in a dubious way.

“Sorry, sir, to disturb you, and you 'aving 'ad such a morning. But downstairs, asking, as he can't remember, whether, 'as used to 'appen, he lent you a basket—you ain't a-going to faint again!”

My head was whirling.

“Alice,” I said, in what I fear was only what novelists call a hoarse whisper, for I had no control of my voice, “Alice, go down at once and get that man out of the house. You know I never allow visitors. And see,” I almost gasped, “he doesn't take anything with him.”

Alice was electrified.

“'Im a common thief! Well, I'd not put it pass 'im.”

She whisked out of the room, closing the door quickly behind her. I strained my ears, heard some short sentences, and then her foot was again upon the stair. I positively welcomed it.

“'E's gone, sir,” she said. “I was too quick for 'im. All I said was, ‘Master's lying up. I look after the 'ouse. There's no basket of yourn here,' and with that I shut the door'n him and watched 'im through the winder go off down the path.”

I lay uneasily all day upstairs. After she had served me my lunch, I told Alice to go back to her parents' house, where she lives.

“You can call in again about five,” I said.

She went off gladly, no doubt looking forward to retailing all the details of my accident and both noting and hearing how well it agreed with a number of fatal precedents.

As soon as she was well out of the house and I had seen her hat bob its course above the hedge on its way to the village, I hobbled off the sofa and scrambled down the stairs. The room had been tidied, but my jacket was still lying on the chair and the chair was standing by the door of the living room which opened into the hall. Anyone waiting at the front door would see the chair with the jacket on it. A couple of quiet steps, while whoever answered the door was away on some bogus message—I snatched up the jacket. It fell from my hands. I remembered quite clearly that when I took it down there had been a handkerchief in the breast pocket. It was gone.

The door was locked, thank heaven. Not that my tormentor was likely to attack me with any instrument but the secret, horrible, agonizing one he had forged—and a taste of which was making my whole leg at that moment throb and burn. But the locked door gave me a little comfort, in knowing that I was screened from any chance of his looking at me or walking in on me to gloat on his helpless victim. If I had seen that cold face regarding me I think I might have gone out of my mind.

I dragged myself heavily upstairs. It was all too clear. The monster had come along, cool in his assurance that no one could suspect him, just to see how his bolt had fared; expecting, hoping that he would have found me a bloated, purple corpse. Finding, however, that his first cast had failed to kill, he had quietly walked in and taken something which would have my scent. It was obvious, he was hard at working out some new plan whereby—as he could scarcely hope to inveigle me within his pawing range a second time—he might manage to get his hell hornets on my track again by giving them my scent.

Alice came back, gave me my tea, my light early dinner (God save me from nightmares; I had now enough raw material, God knew), and then, after “making me comfortable for the night,” as she put it (but which was a task beyond her, or anyone in the village, to effect), she went off. I didn't sleep much.

But why not send for Mr. Mycroft? Of course I thought of it again and again. But in a matter of life and death, such as this had suddenly become, might not any interference make it worse—only precipitate things? Could the old man really protect me with his gadgets? Wasn't the only safe thing to get right out of the village—go clean away—vanish quietly without telling anyone, leaving no address; just tell Alice one was called away on urgent business and then not come back?

Heregrove, I felt sure (it was, somehow, an additionally horrible thought) was killing me out of no particular spite, but just for fun, just because I happened, poor insect, to alight near him when he was trying out a new insecticide. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.” It was not a comforting line to dwell on. Yet, I suppose, this kind of thing always does happen when men get the gods' power to kill with absolute impunity. But why should it have happened to me? Why should I be driven out of my house, and even then not be safe? This fiend, for all I knew, might enjoy hunting me with his demonic pack, all over England. Every beast of prey is additionally excited when it sees its quarry break into flight.

It was that thought that decided me. As the light came, I went to my desk and wrote a very apologetic, very humble note. When Alice came I gave it to her as she brought me up my breakfast, for my leg was still as stiff as a staff.

“Down Waller's Lane,” she said, looking at the envelope. “Wait for a hanswer. I'd like to do that. They say that Mr. Mycroft's a perfect cure. Keeps himself to himself as others do and 'ave a right to. But he's an inventor person, they say. For 'is cook—”

“I want an answer as soon as possible,” I said.

“Very well, sir. I could get down and back while you was getting through your breakfast.”

I thanked her and watched her start on an errand which, obviously interesting as it was to her, was of far more moment to me.

Chapter VI

FLY MADE TO INTRODUCE WASP TO SPIDER

Indeed, I waited so uneasily that I only toyed with my breakfast. I saw that I was completely thrown out. The even tenor of my life, which I had arranged so carefully, was thrown into complete confusion. There was no honey on the table—that alone was enough to upset me and to remind me how completely my life had been invaded and over-set. But of course it would have been madness to have brought the deadly stuff out into the air to betray me to my enemies. I felt sick at the very thought of my favorite food. That, I reflected, bitterly, is some measure of my misery.

I would have had the whole batch buried, only I wondered whether, while that was being done, it wouldn't attract those fiends. Besides, Alice might think I was going mad. She had remarked how stuffy the house was, with all the windows close shut, and indeed it did seem rather odd on a lovely morning to be keeping everything closed up as though we were already in the middle of winter—winter which, though I usually dislike the season, I had now begun positively to desire. And already she and the doctor she had foolishly called in were now secretly agreed that I was cracky and liable to fits and “uniquely allergic” and fanciful and subject to frantic illusions and God knows what else. It would need only another couple of false steps, which in my strung-up condition I might all too easily take, and there would be dolorously delighted, hysterical Alice and sharp master medico Jones together (and, of course, with the noblest intentions) landing me in the asylum!

I could hear Alice tearfully but triumphantly indicating to the two magistrates who would commit me, how much my case resembled not only her grandfather's but also that queer old aunt's, who first thought she was being eaten by cockroaches and then that all her family were cockroaches and so tried to extirpate the gargantuan pests by throwing quicklime in their faces. She would add no end of confirmatory details—my queer, secretive ways, my morbid distaste for talk, my little rules for having my things just so and for not being intruded on. I could see Dr. Jones nodding his head approvingly; giving some silly, impressive Greek name to every bit of behavior which Alice retailed. I was, of course, an acute case of agoraphobia, in an advanced condition of schizophrenia. That taste for honey? Oh, that was conclusive—oncoming G.P.I. They always have a morbid appetite for carbohydrates, especially for the sugars. No safer symptom. A typical paresia-seizure in the bathroom. A spinal puncture must be made at once. A stiff dose of one of the arsenical compounds—dangerous, of course, but might save us (not
me
, please note) from worse things. The patient (of course I had already lost any personality, let alone rights) ought to be put under the heat treatment without delay. Keep him at a temperature of 105° for some time and his sanity might return. No, he couldn't take any responsibility if the patient was left at large.

I saw myself made the most awful of convicts in a moment by these four well-meaning nincompoops. I saw myself taken off in a closed car, holding onto my self-control, knowing I was being watched as a certified madman and every move or remark I made being immediately interpreted as confirming my lunacy. I saw us arrive at that abominably misnamed place, the asylum, no refuge but the one place the sane must dread with an almost insane terror. I saw myself taken in charge, I who had always resented and avoided and lived to escape the slightest control or authority or being managed. I saw myself holding on ever more tremblingly to my last shreds of independence and self-mastery. I saw the quiet, convincing conviction in every face round me that I was mad and was only an incurably deranged machine dumped in this junk-house of broken minds. I saw myself making my last stand, saying to myself, “Well, they shall not have a shred of excuse for thinking I'm in the slightest way different from any of their stupid selves, too stupid to be mad!”