Bee

by Anatole France

  George was lost in deep thought: “We must protect those who toil on the land,” and Honcy-Bee said: “One should spin for the poor.”

  And thus chatting and meditating they went on their way through meadows starred with flowers. A fringe of blue mountains lay against the distant horizon. George pointed towards the east.

  “Is that a great steel shield I see over there?”

  “Oh no,” said Honey-Bee, “it’s a round silver clasp, as big as the moon.”

  “It is neither a steel shield nor a silver clasp, my children,” replied the Duchess, “but a lake glittering in the sunshine. The surface of this lake, which seen from here is as smooth as a mirror, is stirred by innumerable ripples. Its borders which appear as distinct as it cut in metal are really covered by reeds with feathery plumes and irises whose flower is like a human glance between the blades of swords. Every morning a white mist rises over the lake which shines like armour under the midday sun. But none must approach it for in it dwell the nixies who lure passers by into their crystal abodes.”

  At this moment the bell of the Hermitage was heard.

  “Let us dismount,” said the Duchess, “and walk to the chapel. It was neither on elephants nor camels that the wise men of the East approached the manger.”

  They heard the hermit’s mass. A hideous old crone covered with rags knelt beside the Duchesss, who on leaving the church offered her holy water.

  “Accept it, good mother,” she said.

  George was amazed.

  “Do you not know,” said the Duchess, “that in the poor you honour the chosen of our Lord Jesus Christ? A beggar such as this as well as the good Duke of Rochesnoires held you at the font when you were baptized; and your little sister, Honey-Bee, also had one of these poor creatures as godmother.”

  The old crone who seemed to have guessed the boy’s thoughts leaned towards him.

  “Fair prince,” she cried mockingly, “may you conquer as many kingdoms as I have lost. I was the queen of the Island of Pearls and the Mountains of Gold; each day my table was served with fourteen different kinds of fish, and a negro page bore my train.”

  “And by what misfortune have you lost your islands and your mountains, good woman?” asked the Duchess.

  “I vexed the dwarfs, and they carried me far away from my dominions.”

  “Are the dwarfs so powerful?” George asked.

  “As they live in the earth,” the old woman answered, “they know the virtue of precious stones, they work in metals, and they unseal the hidden sources of the springs.”

  “And what did you do to vex them?” asked the Duchess.

  “On a December night,” said the old woman, “one of them came to ask permission to prepare a great midnight banquet in the kitchen of the castle, which, vaster than a chapter-house, was furnished with casseroles, frying-pans, earthen saucepans, kettles, pans, portable-ovens, gridirons, boilers, dripping-pans, dutch-ovens, fish-kettles, copper-pans, pastry-moulds, copper-jugs, goblets of gold and silver, and mottled wood, not to mention iron roasting-jacks, artistically forged, and the huge black cauldron which hung from the pothook. He promised neither to disturb nor to damage anything. I refused his request, and he disappeared muttering vague threats. The third night, it being Christmas, this same dwarf returned to the chamber where I slept. He was accompanied by innumerable others, who pulled me out of bed and carried me to an unknown land in my nightgown. ‘Such,’ they said as they left me, ‘such is the punishment of the rich who refuse even a part of their treasure to the industrious and kindly dwarf folk who work in gold and cause the springs to flow.’”

  Thus said the toothless old woman, and the Duchess having comforted her with words and money, she and the two children retraced their way to the castle.

  VI

  Which tells of what can be seen from the Keep of Clarides

  It was one day shortly after this that Honey-Bee and George, without being observed, climbed the steps of the watch-tower which stands in the middle of the Castle of Clarides. Having reached the platform they shouted at the top of their voices and clapped their hands.

  Their view extended down the hillside divided into brown and green squares of cultivated fields. Woods and mountains lay dimly blue against the distant horizon.

  “Little sister,” cried George, “little sister, look at the whole wide world!”

  “The world is very big,” said Honey-Bee. “My teachers,” said George, “have taught me that it is very big; but, as Gertrude our housekeeper says, one must see to believe.”

  They went the round of the platform.

  “Here is something wonderful, little brother,” cried Honey-Bee. “The castle stands in the middle of the earth and we are on the watch-tower in the middle of the castle, and so we are standing in the middle of the earth. Ha! ha! ha!”

  And, indeed, the horizon formed a circle about the children of which the watch-tower was the centre.

  “We are in the middle of the earth! Ha! ha! ha!” George repeated.

  Whereupon they both started a-thinking.

  “What a pity that the world is so big!” said Honey-Bee, “one might get lost and be separated from one’s friends.”

  George shrugged his shoulders.

  “How lucky that the world is so big! One can go in search of adventures. When I am grown up I mean to conquer the mountains that stand at the ends of the earth. That is where the moon rises; I shall seize her as she passes, and I will give her to you, Honey-Bee.”

  “Yes,” said Honey-Bee, “give her to me and I will put her in my hair.”

  Then they busied themselves searching for the places they knew as on a map.

  “I recognise everything,” said Honey-Bee, who recognised nothing, “but what are those little square stones scattered over the hillside?”

  “Houses,” George replied. “Those are houses. Don’t you recognise the capital of the Duchy of Clarides, little sister? After all, it is a great city; it has three streets, and one can drive through one of them. Don’t you remember that we passed through it last week when we went to the Hermitage?”

  “And what is that winding brook?”

  “That is the river. See the old stone bridge down there?”

  “The bridge under which we fished for crayfish?”

  “That’s the one; and in one of the niches stands the statue of the ‘Woman without a Head.’ One cannot see her from here because she is too small.”

  “I remember. But why hasn’t she got a head?”

  “Probably because she has lost it.”

  Without saying if this explanation was satisfactory, Honey-Bee gazed at the horizon.

  “Little brother, little brother, just see what sparkles by the side of the blue mountains? It is the lake.”

  “It is the lake.”

  They then remembered what the Duchess had told them of these beautiful and dangerous waters where the nixies dwell.

  “We will go there,” said Honey-Bee.

  George was aghast. He stared at her with his mouth wide open.

  “But the Duchess has forbidden us to go out alone, so how can we go to this lake which is at the end of the earth?”

  “How can we go? I don’t know. It’s you who ought to know, for you are a man and you have a grammar-master.”

  This piqued George who replied that one might be a man, and even a very brave man, and yet not know all the roads on earth. Whereupon Honey-Bee said drily with a little air of scorn which made him blush to his ears:

  “I never said I would conquer the blue mountains or take down the moon. I don’t know the way to the lake, but I mean to find it!”

  George pretended to laugh.

  “You laugh like a cucumber.”

  “Cucumbers neither laugh nor cry.”

  “If they did laugh they would laugh like you. I shall go alon
g to the lake. And while I search for the beautiful waters in which the nixies live you shall stay alone at home like a good girl. I will leave you my needle-work and my doll. Take care of them, George, take good care of them.”

  George was proud, and he was conscious of the humiliation with which Honey-Bee covered him.

  Gloomily and with head bowed he cried in a hollow voice:

  “Very well, then, we will go to the lake.”

  VII

  In which is described how George and Honey-Bee went to the lake

  The next day after the midday meal, the Duchess having gone to her own room George took Honey-Bee by the hand. “Now come!” he said. “Where?” “Hush!”

  They crept down stairs and crossed the courtyard. After they had passed the postern, Honey-Bee again asked where they were going.

  “To the lake,” George said resolutely. Honey-Bee opened her mouth wide but remained speechless. To go so far without permission and in satin shoes! For her shoes were of satin. There was no sense in it.

  “We must go and there is no need to be sensible.”

  Such was George’s proud reply. She had once humiliated him and now she pretended to be astonished.

  This time it was he who disdainfully sent her back to her dolls. Girls always tempt one on to adventures and then run away. So mean! She could remain. He’d go alone.

  She clung to his arm; he pushed her away.

  She hung about his neck.

  “Little brother,” she sobbed, “I will follow you.”

  He allowed himself to be moved by such touching repentance.

  “Come then, but not through the town; we may be seen. We will follow the ramparts and then we can reach the highway by a cross road.”

  And so they went hand in hand while George explained his plans.

  “We will follow the road we took to the Hermitage and then we shall be sure to see the lake, just as we did the other day, and then we can cross the fields in a bee line.”

  “A bee line” is the pretty rustic way of saying a straight line; and they both laughed because of the young girl’s name which fitted in so oddly.

  Honey-Bee picked flowers along the ditches; she made a posy of marshmallows, white mullein, asters and chrysanthemums; the flowers faded in her little hands and it was pitiful to see them when Honey-Bee crossed the old stone bridge. As she did not know what to do with them she decided to throw them into the water to refresh them, but finally she preferred to give them to the ‘Woman without a Head.’

  She begged George to lift her in his arms so as to make her tall enough, and she placed her armful of wild flowers between the folded hands of the old stone figure.

  After she was far away she looked back and saw a pigeon resting on the shoulder of the statue.

  When they had been walking some time, said Honey-bee, “I am thirsty.”

  “So am I,” George replied, “but the river is far behind us, and I see neither brook nor fountain.”

  “The sun is so hot that he has drunk them all up. What shall we do?”

  So they talked and lamented when they saw a peasant woman approach who carried a basket of fruit.

  “Cherries!” cried George. “How unlucky: I have no money to buy any.”

  “I have money,” said Honey-Bee.

  She pulled out of her pocket a little purse in which were five pieces of gold.

  “Good woman,” she said to the peasant, “will you give me as many cherries as my frock will hold?”

  And she raised her little skirt with her two hands. The woman threw in two or three handfuls of cherries. With one hand Honey-Bee held the uplifted skirt and with the other she offered the woman a gold piece.

  “Is that enough?”

  The woman clutched the gold piece which would amply have paid not only for the cherries in the basket but for the tree on which they grew and the plot of land on which the tree stood.

  The artful one replied:

  “I’m satisfied, if only to oblige you, little princess.”

  “Well then, put some more cherries in my brother’s cap,” said Honey-Bee, “and you shall have another gold piece.”

  This was done. The peasant woman went on her way meditating in what old stocking or under what mattress she should hide her two gold pieces.

  And the two children followed the road eating the cherries and throwing the stones to the right and the left. George chose the cherries that hung two by two on one stem and made earrings for his little sister, and he laughed to see the lovely twin fruit dangle its vermillion beauty against her cheeks.

  A pebble stopped their joyous progress. It had got into Honey-Bee’s little shoe and she began to limp. At every step she took, her golden curls bobbed against her cheek, and so limping she sat down on a bank by the roadside. Her brother knelt down and took off the satin shoe. He shook it and out dropped a little white pebble.

  “Little brother,” she said as she looked at her feet, “the next time we go to the lake we’ll put on boots.”

  The sun was already sinking against the radiant sky; a soft breeze caressed their cheeks and necks, and so, cheered and refreshed, the two little travellers proceeded on their way. To make walking easier they went hand in hand, and they laughed to see their moving shadows melt together before them. They sang:

  Maid Marian, setting forth to find

  The mill, with sacks of corn to grind,

  Her donkey, Jan, bestrode.

  My dainty maiden, Marian,

  She mounted on her donkey, Jan,

  And took the mill-ward road.*

  Marian’ s’en allant au moulin,

  Pour y faire moudre son grain,

  Ell monta sur son âne,

  Ma p’tite mam’sell’ Marianne!

  Ell’ monta sur son âne Martin

  Pour aller au moulin.

  But Honey-Bee stopped:

  “I have lost my shoe, my satin shoe,” she cried. And so it was. The little shoe, whose silken laces had become loose in walking, lay in the road covered-with dust. Then as she looked back and saw the towers of the castle of Clarides fade into the distant twilight her heart sank and the tears came to her eyes.

  “The wolves will eat us,” she cried, “and our mother will never see us again and she will die of grief.”

  But George comforted her as he put on her shoe.

  “When the castle bell rings for supper we shall have returned to Clarides. Come!”

  The miller saw her coming nigh

  And could not well forbear to cry,

  Your donkey you must tether.

  My dainty maiden, Marian,

  Tether you here your donkey, Jan,

  Who brought us twain together.*

  Le meunier qui la voit venir

  Ne peut s’empêcher de lui dire:

  Attachez là votre âne,

  Ma p’tite Mam’sell’ Marianne,

  Attachez là votre âne Martin

  Qui vous mène au moulin.

  “The lake, Honey-Bee! See the lake, the lake, the lake!”

  “Yes, George, the lake!”

  George shouted “hurrah” and flung his hat in the air. Honey-Bee was too proper to fling hers up also, so taking off the shoe that wouldn’t stay on she threw it joyfully over her head.

  There lay the lake in the depths of the valley and its curved and sloping banks made a framework of foliage and flowers about its silver waves. It lay there clear and tranquil, and one could see the swaying of the indistinct green of its banks.

  But the children could find no path through the underbrush that would lead to its beautiful waters.

  While they were searching for one their legs were nipped by some geese driven by a little girl dressed in a sheepskin and carrying a switch. George asked her name.

  “Gilberte.”
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  “Well, then, Gilberte, how can one go to the lake?”

  “Folks doesn’t go.”

  “Why?”

  “Because …”

  “But supposing folks did?”

  “If folks did there’d be a path, and one would take that path.”

  George could think of no adequate reply to this guardian of the geese.

  “Let’s go,” he said, “farther on we shall be sure to find a way through the woods.”

  “And we will pick nuts and eat them,” said Honey-Bee, “for I am hungry. The next time we go to the lake we must bring a satchel full of good things to eat.”

  “That we will, little sister,” said George. “And I quite agree with Francoeur, our squire, who when he went to Rome, took a ham with him, in case he should hunger, and a flask lest he should be thirsty. But hurry, for it is growing late, though I don’t know the time.”

  “The shepherdesses know by looking at the sun,” said Honey-Bee; “but I am not a shepherdess. Yet it seems to me that when we left the sun was over our head, and now it is down there, far behind the town and castle of Clarides. I wonder if this happens every day and what it means?”

  While they looked at the sun a cloud of dust rose up from the high road, and they saw some cavaliers with glittering weapons ride past at full speed. The children hid in the underbrush in great terror. “They are thieves or probably ogres,” they thought. They were really guards sent by the Duchess of Clarides in search of the little truants.

  The two little adventurers found a footpath in the underbrush, not a lovers’ lane, for it was impossible to walk side by side holding hands as is the fashion of lovers. Nor could the print of human footsteps be seen, but only indentations left by innumerable tiny cloven feet.

  “Those are the feet of little devils,” said Honey-Bee.

  “Or deer,” suggested George.

  The matter was never explained. But what is certain is that the footpath descended in a gentle slope towards the edge of the lake which lay before the two children in all its languorous and silent beauty. The willows surrounded its banks with their tender foliage. The slender blades of the reeds with their delicate plumes swayed lightly over the water. They formed tremulous islands about which the water-lilies spread their great heart-shaped leaves and snow-white flowers. Over these blossoming islands dragon-flies, all emerald or azure, with wings of flame, sped their shrill flight in suddenly altered curves.