A Taste for Honey

by H. F. Heard

  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 li
fe. 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.”

  “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.”