Selected Stories by Rudyard Kipling

by Rudyard Kipling

  She found the Gate in a sulky uproar. The youngsters told off to the pillars had refused to chew scrap-wax because it made their jaws ache, and were clamouring for virgin stuff.

  ‘Anything to finish the job!’ said the badgered Guards. ‘Hang up, some of you, and make wax for these slack-jawed sisters.’

  Before a bee can make wax she must fill herself with honey. Then she climbs to safe foothold and hangs, while other gorged bees hang on to her in a cluster. There they wait in silence till the wax comes. The scales are either taken out of the maker’s pockets by the workers, or tinkle down on the workers while they wait. The workers chew them (they are useless unchewed) into the all-supporting, all-embracing Wax of the Hive.

  But now, no sooner was the wax cluster in position than the workers below broke out again.

  ‘Come down!’ they cried. ‘Come down and work! Come on, you Levantine parasites! Don’t think to enjoy yourselves up there while we’re sweating down here!’

  The cluster shivered, as from hooked fore-foot to hooked hind-foot it telegraphed uneasiness. At last a worker sprang up, grabbed the lowest wax-maker, and swung, kicking, above her companions.

  ‘I can make wax too!’ she bawled. ‘Give me a full gorge and I’ll make tons of it.’

  ‘Make it, then,’ said the bee she had grappled. The spoken word snapped the current through the cluster. It shook and glistened like a cat’s fur in the dark. ‘Unhook!’ it murmured. ‘No wax for anyone today.’

  ‘You lazy thieves! Hang up at once and produce our wax,’ said the bees below.

  ‘Impossible! The sweat’s gone. To make your wax we must have stillness, warmth, and food. Unhook! Unhook!’

  They broke up as they murmured, and disappeared among the other bees, from whom, of course, they were undistinguishable.

  ‘’Seems as if we’d have to chew scrap-wax for these pillars, after all,’ said a worker.

  ‘Not by a whole comb,’ cried the young bee who had broken the cluster. ‘Listen here! I’ve studied the question more than twenty minutes. It’s as simple as falling off a daisy. You’ve heard of Cheshire, Root and Langstroth?’

  They had not, but they shouted ‘Good old Langstroth!’ just the same.

  ‘Those three know all that there is to be known about making hives. One or t’other of ’em must have made ours, and if they’ve made it, they’re bound to look after it. Ours is a “Guaranteed Patent Hive”. You can see it on the label behind.’

  ‘Good old guarantee! Hurrah for the label behind!’ roared the bees.

  ‘Well, such being the case, I say that when we find they’ve betrayed us, we can exact from them a terrible vengeance.’

  ‘Good old vengeance! Good old Root! ’Nuff said! Chuck it!’ The crowd cheered and broke away as Melissa dived through.

  ‘D’you know where Langstroth, Root and Cheshire live if you happen to want ’em?’ she asked of the proud and panting orator.

  ‘Gum me if I know they ever lived at all! But aren’t they beautiful names to buzz about? Did you see how it worked up the sisterhood?’

  ‘Yes, but it didn’t defend the Gate,’ she replied.

  ‘Ah, perhaps that’s true, but think how delicate my position is, sister. I’ve a magnificent appetite, and I don’t like working. It’s bad for the mind. My instinct tells me that I can act as a restraining influence on others. They would have been worse, but for me.’

  But Melissa had already risen clear, and was heading for a breadth of virgin white clover, which to an overtired bee is as soothing as plain knitting to a woman.

  ‘I think I’ll take this load to the nurseries,’ she said, when she had finished. ‘It was always quiet there in my day,’ and she topped off with two little pats of pollen for the babies.

  She was met on the fourth brood-comb by a rush of excited sisters all buzzing together.

  ‘One at a time! Let me put down my load. Now, what is it, Sacharissa?’ she said.

  ‘Grey Sister – that fluffy one, I mean – she came and said we ought to be out in the sunshine gathering honey, because life was short. She said any old bee could attend to our babies, and some day old bees would. That isn’t true, Melissa, is it? No old bees can take us away from our babies, can they?’

  ‘Of course not. You feed the babies while your heads are soft. When your heads harden, you go on to field-work. Anyone knows that.’

  ‘We told her so! We told her so; but she only waved her feelers, and said we could all lay eggs like Queens if we chose. And I’m afraid lots of the weaker sisters believe her, and are trying to do it. So unsettling!’

  Sacharissa sped to a sealed worker-cell whose lid pulsated, as the bee within began to cut its way out.

  ‘Come along, precious!’ she murmured, and thinned the frail top from the other side. A pale, damp, creased thing hoisted itself feebly on to the comb. Sacharissa’s note changed at once. ‘No time to waste! Go up the frame and preen yourself!’ she said. ‘Report for nursing-duty in my ward tomorrow evening at six. Stop a minute. What’s the matter with your third right leg?’

  The young bee held it out in silence – unmistakably a drone leg incapable of packing pollen.

  ‘Thank you. You needn’t report till the day after tomorrow.’ Sacharissa turned to her companion. ‘That’s the fifth oddity hatched in my ward since noon. I don’t like it.’

  ‘There’s always a certain number of ’em,’ said Melissa. ‘You can’t stop a few working sisters from laying, now and then, when they overfeed themselves. They only raise dwarf drones.’

  ‘But we’re hatching out drones with workers’ stomachs; workers with drones’ stomachs; and albinos and mixed-leggers who can’t pack pollen – like that poor little beast yonder. I don’t mind dwarf drones any more than you do (they all die in July), but this steady hatch of oddities frightens me, Melissa!’

  ‘How narrow of you! They are all so delightfully clever and unusual and interesting,’ piped the Wax-moth from a crack above them. ‘Come here, you dear, downy duck, and tell us all about your feelings.’

  ‘I wish she’d go!’ Sacharissa lowered her voice. ‘She meets these – er – oddities as they dry out, and cuddles ’em in corners.’

  ‘I suppose the truth is that we’re over-stocked and too well fed to swarm,’ said Melissa.

  ‘That is the truth,’ said the Queen’s voice behind them. They had not heard the heavy royal footfall which sets empty cells vibrating. Sacharissa offered her food at once. She ate and dragged her weary body forward. ‘Can you suggest a remedy?’ she said.

  ‘New principles!’ cried the Wax-moth from her crevice. ‘We’ll apply them quietly – later.’

  ‘Suppose we sent out a swarm?’ Melissa suggested. ‘It’s a little late, but it might ease us off.’

  ‘It would save us, but – I know the Hive! You shall see for yourself.’ The old Queen cried the Swarming Cry, which to a bee of good blood should be what the trumpet was to Job’s war-horse.4 In spite of her immense age (three years), it rang between the cañon-like frames as a pibroch rings in a mountain pass; the fanners changed their note, and repeated it up in every gallery; and the broad-winged drones, burly and eager, ended it on one nerve-thrilling outbreak of bugles: ‘La Reine le veult!5 Swarm! Swar-rm! Swar-r-rm!

  But the roar which should follow the Call was wanting. They heard a broken grumble like the murmur of a falling tide.

  ‘Swarm? What for? Catch me leaving a good bar-frame Hive, with fixed foundations, for a rotten old oak out in the open where it may rain any minute! We’re all right! It’s a “Patent Guaranteed Hive”. Why do they want to turn us out? Swarming be gummed! Swarming was invented to cheat a worker out of her proper comforts. Come on off to bed!’

  The noise died out as the bees settled in empty cells for the night.

  ‘You hear?’ said the Queen. ‘I know the Hive!’

  ‘Quite between ourselves, I taught them that,’ cried the Wax-moth. ‘Wait till my principles develop, and you’ll see the light from a
new quarter.’

  ‘You speak truth for once,’ the Queen said suddenly, for she recognized the Wax-moth. ‘That Light will break into the top of the Hive. A Hot Smoke will follow it, and your children will not be able to hide in any crevice.’

  ‘Is it possible?’ Melissa whispered. ‘I – we have sometimes heard a legend like it.’

  ‘It is no legend,’ the old Queen answered. ‘I had it from my mother, and she had it from hers. After the Wax-moth has grown strong, a Shadow will fall across the gate; a Voice will speak from behind a Veil; there will be Light, and Hot Smoke, and earthquakes, and those who live will see everything that they have done, all together in one place, burned up in one great Fire.’ The old Queen was trying to tell what she had been told of the Bee Master’s dealings with an infected hive in the apiary, two or three seasons ago; and, of course, from her point of view the affair was as important as the Day of Judgment.

  ‘And then?’ asked horrified Sacharissa.

  ‘Then, I have heard that a little light will burn in a great darkness, and perhaps the world will begin again. Myself, I think not.’

  ‘Tut! Tut!’ the Wax-moth cried. ‘You good, fat people always prophesy ruin if things don’t go exactly your way. But I grant you there will be changes.’

  There were. When her eggs hatched, the wax was riddled with little tunnels, coated with the dirty clothes of the caterpillars. Flannelly lines ran through the honey-stores, the pollen-larders, the foundations, and, worst of all, through the babies in their cradles, till the Sweeper Guards spent half their time tossing out useless little corpses. The lines ended in a maze of sticky webbing on the face of the comb. The caterpillars could not stop spinning as they walked, and as they walked everywhere, they smarmed and garmed6 everything. Even where it did not hamper the bees’ feet, the stale, sour smell of the stuff put them off their work; though some of the bees who had taken to egg-laying said it encouraged them to be mothers and maintain a vital interest in life.

  When the caterpillars became moths, they made friends with the ever-increasing Oddities – albinos, mixed-leggers, single-eyed composites, faceless drones, half-queens and laying sisters; and the ever-dwindling band of the old stock worked themselves bald and fray-winged to feed their queer charges. Most of the Oddities would not, and many, on account of their malformations, could not, go through a day’s field-work; but the Wax-moths, who were always busy on the brood-comb, found pleasant home occupations for them. One albino, for instance, divided the number of pounds of honey in stock by the number of bees in the Hive, and proved that if every bee only gathered honey for seven and three-quarter minutes a day, she would have the rest of the time to herself, and could accompany the drones on their mating flights. The drones were not at all pleased.

  Another, an eyeless drone with no feelers, said that all brood-cells should be perfect circles, so as not to interfere with the grub or the workers. He proved that the old six-sided cell was solely due to the workers building against each other on opposite sides of the wall, and that if there were no interference, there would be no angles. Some bees tried the new plan for a while, and found it cost eight times more wax than the old six-sided specification; and, as they never allowed a cluster to hang up and make wax in peace, real wax was scarce. However, they eked out their task with varnish stolen from new coffins at funerals, and it made them rather sick. Then they took to cadging round sugar-factories and breweries, because it was easiest to get their material from those places, and the mixture of glucose and beer naturally fermented in store and blew the store-cells out of shape, besides smelling abominably. Some of the sound bees warned them that ill-gotten gains never prosper, but the Oddities at once surrounded them and balled them to death. That was a punishment they were almost as fond of as they were of eating, and they expected the sound bees to feed them. Curiously enough the age-old instinct of loyalty and devotion towards the Hive made the sound bees do this, though their reason told them they ought to slip away and unite with some other healthy stock in the apiary.

  ‘What about seven and three-quarter minutes’ work now?’ said Melissa one day as she came in. ‘I’ve been at it for five hours, and I’ve only half a load.’

  ‘Oh, the Hive subsists on the Hival Honey which the Hive produces,’ said a blind Oddity squatting in a store-cell.

  ‘But honey is gathered from flowers outside – two miles away sometimes,’ cried Melissa.

  ‘Pardon me,’ said the blind thing, sucking hard. ‘But this is the Hive, is it not?’

  ‘It was. Worse luck, it is.’

  ‘And the Hival Honey is here, is it not?’ It opened a fresh store-cell to prove it.

  ‘Ye-es, but it won’t be long at this rate,’ said Melissa.

  ‘The rates have nothing to do with it. This Hive produces the Hival Honey. You people never seem to grasp the economic simplicity that underlies all life.’

  ‘Oh, me!’ said poor Melissa, ‘haven’t you ever been beyond the Gate?’

  ‘Certainly not. A fool’s eyes are in the ends of the earth. Mine are in my head.’ It gorged till it bloated.

  Melissa took refuge in her poorly-paid field-work and told Sacharissa the story.

  ‘Hut!’ said that wise bee, fretting with an old maid of a thistle. ‘Tell us something new. The Hive’s full of such as him – it, I mean.’

  ‘What’s the end to be? All the honey going out and none coming in. Things can’t last this way!’ said Melissa.

  ‘Who cares?’ said Sacharissa. ‘I know now how drones feel the day before they’re killed. A short life and a merry one for me!’

  ‘If it only were merry! But think of those awful, solemn, lop-sided Oddities waiting for us at home – crawling and clambering and preaching – and dirtying things in the dark.’

  ‘I don’t mind that so much as their silly songs, after we’ve fed ’em, all about “work among the merry, merry blossoms”,’ said Sacharissa from the deeps of a stale Canterbury bell.

  ‘I do. How’s our Queen?’ said Melissa.

  ‘Cheerfully hopeless, as usual. But she lays an egg now and then.’

  ‘Does she so?’ Melissa backed out of the next bell with a jerk. ‘Suppose, now, we sound workers tried to raise a Princess in some clean corner?’

  ‘You’d be put to it to find one. The Hive’s all wax-moth and muckings. But – Well?’

  ‘A Princess might help us in the time of the Voice behind the Veil that the Queen talks of. And anything is better than working for Oddities that chirrup about work that they can’t do, and waste what we bring home.’

  ‘Who cares?’ said Sacharissa. ‘I’m with you, for the fun of it. The Oddities would ball us to death, if they knew. Come home, and we’ll begin.’

  There is no room to tell how the experienced Melissa found a far-off frame so messed and mishandled by abandoned cell-building experiments that, for very shame, the bees never went there. How in that ruin she blocked out a Royal Cell of sound wax, but disguised by rubbish till it looked like a kopje 7 among deserted kopjes. How she prevailed upon the hopeless Queen to make one last effort and lay a worthy egg. How the Queen obeyed and died. How her spent carcass was flung out on the rubbish heap, and how a multitude of laying sisters went about dropping drone-eggs where they listed, and said there was no more need of Queens. How, covered by this confusion, Sacharissa educated certain young bees to educate certain new-born bees in the almost lost art of making Royal Jelly. How the nectar for it was won out of hours in the teeth of chill winds. How the hidden egg hatched true – no drone, but Blood Royal. How it was capped, and how desperately they worked to feed and double-feed the now swarming Oddities, lest any break in the food-supplies should set them to instituting inquiries, which, with songs about work, was their favourite amusement. How in an auspicious hour, on a moonless night, the Princess came forth – a Princess indeed – and how Melissa smuggled her into a dark empty honey-magazine, to bide her time; and how the drones, knowing she was there, went about singing the deep disreputa
ble love-songs of the old days – to the scandal of the laying-sisters, who do not think well of drones. These things are written in the Book of Queens, which is laid up in the hollow of the Great Ash Ygdrasil.8

  After a few days the weather changed again and became glorious. Even the Oddities would now join the crowd that hung out on the alighting-board, and would sing of work among the merry, merry blossoms till an untrained ear might have received it for the hum of a working hive. Yet, in truth, their store-honey had been eaten long ago. They lived from day to day on the efforts of the few sound bees, while the Wax-moth fretted and consumed again their already ruined wax. But the sound bees never mentioned these matters. They knew, if they did, the Oddities would hold a meeting and ball them to death.

  ‘Now you see what we have done,’ said the Wax-moths. ‘We have created New Material, a New Convention, a New Type, as we said we would.’

  ‘And new possibilities for us,’ said the laying-sisters gratefully. ‘You have given us a new life’s work, vital and paramount.’

  ‘More than that,’ chanted the Oddities in the sunshine; ‘you have created a new heaven and a new earth. Heaven, cloudless and accessible’ (it was a perfect August evening) ‘and Earth teeming with the merry, merry blossoms, waiting only our honest toil to turn them all to good. The – er – Aster, and the Crocus, and the – er – Ladies’ Smock in her season, the Chrysanthemum after her kind, and the Guelder Rose bringing forth abundantly withal.’

  ‘Oh, Holy Hymettus!’9 said Melissa, awestruck. ‘I knew they didn’t know how honey was made, but they’ve forgotten the Order of the Flowers! What will become of them?’

  A Shadow fell across the alighting-board as the Bee Master and his son came by. The Oddities crawled in and a Voice behind a Veil said: ‘I’ve neglected the old Hive too long. Give me the smoker.’

  Melissa heard and darted through the gate. ‘Come, oh come!’ she cried. ‘It is the destruction the Old Queen foretold. Princess, come!’

  ‘Really, you are too archaic for words,’ said an Oddity in an alley-way. ‘A cloud, I admit, may have crossed the sun; but why hysterics? Above all, why Princesses so late in the day? Are you aware it’s the Hival Tea-time? Let’s sing grace.’