Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

Suddenly Kadir Buksh said, over his shoulder: “Here is Solon”; and Garm snored where he lay with his head on my knee. Solon is an unpleasant little cantonment, but it has the advantage of being cool and healthy. It is all bare and windy, and one generally stops at a rest-house nearby for something to eat. I got out and took both dogs with me, while Kadir Buksh made tea. A soldier told us we should find Stanley “out there,” nodding his head towards a bare, bleak hill.

When we climbed to the top we spied that very Stanley, who had given me all this trouble, sitting on a rock with his face in his hands, and his overcoat hanging loose about him. I never saw anything so lonely and dejected in my life as this one little man, crumpled up and thinking, on the great gray hillside.

Here Garm left me.

He departed without a word, and, so far as I could see, without moving his legs. He flew through the air bodily, and I heard the whack of him as he flung himself at Stanley, knocking the little man clean over. They rolled on the ground together, shouting, and yelping, and hugging. I could not see which was dog and which was man, till Stanley got up and whimpered.

He told me that he had been suffering from fever at intervals, and was very weak. He looked all he said, but even while I watched, both man and dog plumped out to their natural sizes, precisely as dried apples swell in water. Garm was on his shoulder, and his breast and feet all at the same time, so that Stanley spoke all through a cloud of Garm--gulping, sobbing, slavering Garm. He did not say anything that I could understand, except that he had fancied he was going to die, but that now he was quite well, and that he was not going to give up Garm any more to anybody under the rank of Beelzebub.

Then he said he felt hungry, and thirsty, and happy.

We went down to tea at the rest-house, where Stanley stuffed himself with sardines and raspberry jam, and beer, and cold mutton and pickles, when Garm wasn't climbing over him; and then Vixen and I went on.

Garm saw how it was at once. He said good-bye to me three times, giving me both paws one after another, and leaping on to my shoulder. He further escorted us, singing Hosannas at the top of his voice, a mile down the road. Then he raced back to his own master.

Vixen never opened her mouth, but when the cold twilight came, and we could see the lights of Simla across the hills, she snuffled with her nose at the breast of my ulster. I unbuttoned it, and tucked her inside. Then she gave a contented little sniff, and fell fast asleep, her head on my breast, till we bundled out at Simla, two of the four happiest people in all the world that night.

THE POWER OF THE DOG

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
But when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

Buy a pup and your money will buy
Love unflinching that cannot lie--
Perfect passion and worship fed
By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head.
Nevertheless it is hardly fair
To risk your heart for a dog to tear.

When the fourteen years which Nature permits
Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits,
And the vet's unspoken prescription runs
To lethal chambers or loaded guns,
Then you will find--it's your own affair
But... you've given your heart to a dog to tear.

When the body that lived at your single will
When the whimper of welcome is stilled (how still!)
When the spirit that answered your every mood
Is gone--wherever it goes--for good,
You will discover how much you care,
And will give your heart to a dog to tear!

We've sorrow enough in the natural way,
When it comes to burying Christian clay.
Our loves are not given, but only lent,
At compound interest of cent per cent.
Though it is not always the case, I believe,
That the longer we've kept 'em, the more do we grieve:
For, when debts are payable, right or wrong,
A short-time loan is as bad as a long
So why in Heaven (before we are there!)
Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?

THE MOTHER HIVE

If the stock had not been old and overcrowded, the Wax-moth would never have entered; but where bees are too thick on the comb there must be sickness or parasites. The heat of the hive had risen with the June honey-flow, and though the farmers worked, until their wings ached, to keep people cool, everybody suffered.

A young bee crawled up the greasy trampled alighting-board. “Excuse me,” she began, “but it's my first honey-flight. Could you kindly tell me if this is my--”

“--own hive?” the Guard snapped. “Yes! Buzz in, and be foul-brooded to you! Next!”

“Shame!” cried half a dozen old workers with worn wings and nerves, and there was a scuffle and a hum.

The little grey Wax-moth, pressed close in a crack in the alighting-board, had waited this chance all day. She scuttled in like a ghost, and, knowing the senior bees would turn her out at once, dodged into a brood-frame, where youngsters who had not yet seen the winds blow or the flowers nod discussed life. Here she was safe, for young bees will tolerate any sort of stranger. Behind her came the bee who had been slanged by the Guard.

“What is the world like, Melissa?” said a companion. “Cruel! I brought in a full load of first-class stuff, and the Guard told me to go and be foul-brooded!” She sat down in the cool draught across the combs.

“If you'd only heard,” said the Wax-moth silkily, “the insolence of the Guard's tone when she cursed our sister. It aroused the Entire Community.” She laid an egg. She had stolen in for that purpose.

“There was a bit of a fuss on the Gate,” Melissa chuckled. “You were there, Miss?” She did not know how to address the slim stranger.

“Don't call me 'Miss.' I'm a sister to all in affliction--just a working-sister. My heart bled for you beneath your burden.” The Wax-moth caressed Melissa with her soft feelers and laid another egg.

“You mustn't lay here,” cried Melissa. “You aren't a Queen.”

“My dear child, I give you my most solemn word of honour those aren't eggs. Those are my principles, and I am ready to die for them.” She raised her voice a little above the rustle and tramp round her. “If you'd like to kill me, pray do.”

“Don't be unkind, Melissa,” said a young bee, impressed by the chaste folds of the Wax-moth's wing, which hid her ceaseless egg-dropping.

“I haven't done anything,” Melissa answered. “She's doing it all.”

“Ah, don't let your conscience reproach you later, but when you've killed me, write me, at least, as one that loved her fellow-worker.”

Laying at every sob, the Wax-moth backed into a crowd of young bees, and left Melissa bewildered and annoyed. So she lifted up her little voice in the darkness and cried, “Stores!” till a gang of cell-fillers hailed her, and she left her load with them.

“I'm afraid I foul-brooded you just now,” said a voice over her shoulder. “I'd been on the Gate for three hours, and one would foul-brood the Queen herself after that. No offence meant.”

“None taken,” Melissa answered cheerily. “I shall be on Guard myself, some day. What's next to do?”

“There's a rumour of Death's Head Moths about. Send a gang of youngsters to the Gate, and tell them to narrow it in with a couple of stout scrap-wax pillars. It'll make the Hive hot, but we can't have Death's Headers in the middle of our honey-flow.”

“My Only Wings! I should think not!” Melissa had all a sound bee's hereditary hatred against the big, squeaking, feathery Thief of the Hives. “Tumble out!” she called across the youngsters' quarters. “All you who aren't feeding babies, show a leg. Scrap-wax pillars for the Ga-ate!” She chanted the order at length.

“That's nonsense,” a downy, day-old bee answered. “In the first place, I never heard of a Death's Header coming into a hive. People don't do such things. In the second, building pillars to keep 'em out is purely a Cypriote trick, unworthy of British bees. In the third, if you trust a Death's Head, he will trust you. Pillar-building shows lack of confidence. Our dear sister in grey says so.”

“Yes. Pillars are un-English and provocative, and a waste of wax that is needed for higher and more practical ends,” said the Wax-moth from an empty store-cell.

“The safety of the Hive is the highest thing I've ever heard of. You mustn't teach us to refuse work,” Melissa began.

“You misunderstand me, as usual, love. Work's the essence of life; but to expend precious unreturning vitality and real labour against imaginary danger, that is heartbreakingly absurd! If I can only teach a--a little toleration--a little ordinary kindness here toward that absurd old bogey you call the Death's Header, I shan't have lived in vain.”

“She hasn't lived in vain, the darling!” cried twenty bees together. “You should see her saintly life, Melissa! She just devotes herself to spreading her principles, and--and--she looks lovely!”

An old, baldish bee came up the comb.

“Pillar-workers for the Gate! Get out and chew scraps. Buzz off!” she said. The Wax-moth slipped aside.

The young bees trooped down the frame, whispering. “What's the matter with 'em?” said the oldster. “Why do they call each other 'ducky' and 'darling'? Must be the weather.” She sniffed suspiciously. “Horrid stuffy smell here. Like stale quilts. Not Wax-moth, I hope, Melissa?”

“Not to my knowledge,” said Melissa, who, of course, only knew the Wax-moth as a lady with principles, and had never thought to report her presence. She had always imagined Wax-moths to be like blood-red dragon-flies.

“You had better fan out this corner for a little,” said the old bee and passed on. Melissa dropped her head at once, took firm hold with her fore-feet, and fanned obediently at the regulation stroke three hundred beats to the second. Fanning tries a bee's temper, because she must always keep in the same place where she never seems to be doing any good, and, all the while, she is wearing out her only wings. When a bee cannot fly, a bee must not live; and a bee knows it. The Wax-moth crept forth, and caressed Melissa again.

“I see,” she murmured, “that at heart you are one of Us.”

“I work with the Hive,” Melissa answered briefly.

“It's the same thing. We and the Hive are one.”

“Then why are your feelers different from ours? Don't cuddle so.”

“Don't be provincial, Carissima. You can't have all the world alike--yet.”

“But why do you lay eggs?” Melissa insisted. “You lay 'em like a Queen--only you drop them in patches all over the place. I've watched you.”

“Ah, Brighteyes, so you've pierced my little subterfuge? Yes, they are eggs. By and by they'll spread our principles. Aren't you glad?”

“You gave me your most solemn word of honour that they were not eggs.”

“That was my little subterfuge, dearest--for the sake of the Cause. Now I must reach the young.” The Wax-moth tripped towards the fourth brood-frame where the young bees were busy feeding the babies.

It takes some time for a sound bee to realize a malignant and continuous lie. “She's very sweet and feathery,” was all that Melissa thought, “but her talk sounds like ivy honey tastes. I'd better get to my field-work again.”

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 waxmaker, 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 any one to-day.”

“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 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. Any one 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 to-morrow 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 to-morrow.” 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 albinoes 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. 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! 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 garmed 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--albinoes, mixed-leggers, single-eyed composites, faceless drones, halfqueens 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 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 disreputable 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.

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!” 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.”

Melissa clawed past him with all six legs. Sacharissa had run to what was left of the fertile brood-comb. “Down and out!” she called across the brown breadth of it. “Nurses, guards, fanners, sweepers--out!”

“Never mind the babies. They're better dead.--Out, before the Light and the Hot Smoke!”

The Princess's first clear fearless call (Melissa had found her) rose and drummed through all the frames. “La Reine le veult! Swarm! Swar-rm! Swar-r-rm!”

The Hive shook beneath the shattering thunder of a stuck-down quilt being torn back.

“Don't be alarmed, dears,” said the Wax-moths. “That's our work. Look up, and you'll see the dawn of the New Day.”

Light broke in the top of the hive as the Queen had, prophesied--naked light on the boiling, bewildered bees.

Sacharissa rounded up her rearguard, which dropped headlong off the frame, and joined the Princess's detachment thrusting toward the Gate. Now panic was in full blast, and each sound bee found herself embraced by at least three Oddities. The first instinct of a frightened bee is to break into the stores and gorge herself with honey; but there were no stores left, so the Oddities fought the sound bees.

“You must feed us, or we shall die!” they cried, holding and clutching and slipping, while the silent scared earwigs and little spiders twisted between their legs. “Think of the Hive, traitors! The Holy Hive!”

“You should have thought before!” cried the sound bees. “Stay and see the dawn of your New Day.”

They reached the Gate at last over the soft bodies of many to whom they had ministered.

“On! Out! Up!” roared Melissa in the Princess's ear. “For the Hive's sake! To the Old Oak!”

The Princess left the alighting-board, circled once, flung herself at the lowest branch of the Old Oak, and her little loyal swarm--you could have covered it with a pint mug--followed, hooked, and hung.

“Hold close!” Melissa gasped. “The old legends have come true! Look!”

The Hive was half hidden by smoke, and Figures moved through the smoke. They heard a frame crack stickily, saw it heaved high and twirled round between enormous hands--a blotched, bulged, and perished horror of grey wax, corrupt brood, and small drone-cells, all covered with crawling Oddities, strange to the sun.

“Why, this isn't a hive! This is a museum of curiosities,” said the Voice behind the Veil. It was only the Bee Master talking to his son.

“Can you blame 'em, father?” said a second voice. “It's rotten with Wax-moth. See here!”

Another frame came up. A finger poked through it, and it broke away in rustling flakes of ashy rottenness.

“Number Four Frame! That was your mother's pet comb once,” whispered Melissa to the Princess. “Many's the good egg I've watched her lay there.”

“Aren't you confusing post hoc with propter hoc?” said the Bee Master. “Wax-moth only succeed when weak bees let them in.” A third frame crackled and rose into the light. “All this is full of laying workers' brood. That never happens till the stock's weakened. Phew!”

He beat it on his knee like a tambourine, and it also crumbled to pieces.

The little swarm shivered as they watched the dwarf drone-grubs squirm feebly on the grass. Many sound bees had nursed on that frame, well knowing their work was useless; but the actual sight of even useless work destroyed disheartens a good worker.

“No, they have some recuperative power left,” said the second voice. “Here's a Queen cell!”

“But it's tucked away among---- What on earth has come to the little wretches? They seem to have lost the instinct of cell-building.” The father held up the frame where the bees had experimented in circular cell-work. It looked like the pitted head of a decaying toadstool.

“Not altogether,” the son corrected. “There's one line, at least, of perfectly good cells.”

“My work,” said Sacharissa to herself. “I'm glad Man does me justice before--”

That frame, too, was smashed out and thrown atop of the others and the foul earwiggy quilts.

As frame after frame followed it, the swarm beheld the upheaval, exposure, and destruction of all that had been well or ill done in every cranny of their Hive for generations past. There was black comb so old that they had forgotten where it hung; orange, buff, and ochre-varnished store-comb, built as bees were used to build before the days of artificial foundations; and there was a little, white, frail new work. There were sheets on sheets of level, even brood-comb that had held in its time unnumbered thousands of unnamed workers; patches of obsolete drone-comb, broad and high-shouldered, showing to what marks the male grub was expected to grow; and two-inch deep honey-magazines, empty, but still magnificent, the whole gummed and glued into twisted scrap-work, awry on the wires; half-cells, beginnings abandoned, or grandiose, weak-walled, composite cells pieced out with rubbish and capped with dirt.

Good or bad, every inch of it was so riddled by the tunnels of the Wax-moth that it broke in clouds of dust as it was flung on the heap.

“Oh, see!” cried Sacharissa. “The Great Burning that Our Queen foretold. Who can bear to look?”

A flame crawled up the pile of rubbish, and they smelt singeing wax.

The Figures stooped, lifted the Hive and shook it upside down over the pyre. A cascade of Oddities, chips of broken comb, scale, fluff, and grubs slid out, crackled, sizzled, popped a little, and then the flames roared up and consumed all that fuel.

“We must disinfect,” said a Voice. “Get me a sulphur-candle, please.”

The shell of the Hive was returned to its place, a light was set in its sticky emptiness, tier by tier the Figures built it up, closed the entrance, and went away. The swarm watched the light leaking through the cracks all the long night. At dawn one Wax-moth came by, fluttering impudently.

“There has been a miscalculation about the New Day, my dears,” she began; “one can't expect people to be perfect all at once. That was our mistake.”

“No, the mistake was entirely ours,” said the Princess.

“Pardon me,” said the Wax-moth. “When you think of the enormous upheaval--call it good or bad--which our influence brought about, you will admit that we, and we alone--”

“You?” said the Princess. “Our stock was not strong. So you came--as any other disease might have come. Hang close, all my people.”

When the sun rose, Veiled Figures came down, and saw their swarm at the bough's end waiting patiently within sight of the old Hive--a handful, but prepared to go on.

THE BEES AND THE FLIES

A farmer of the Augustan age
Perused in Virgil's golden page,
The story of the secret won
From Proteus by Cyrene's son
How the dank sea-god sowed the swain
Means to restore his hives again
More briefly, how a slaughtered bull
Breeds honey by the bellyful.

The egregious rustic put to death
A bull by stopping of its breath:
Disposed the carcass in a shed
With fragrant herbs and branches spread.
And, having thus performed the charm,
Sat down to wait the promised swarm.

Nor waited long... The God of Day
Impartial, quickening with his ray
Evil and good alike, beheld
The carcass--and the carcass swelled!
Big with new birth the belly heaves
Beneath its screen of scented leaves;
Past any doubt, the bull conceives!

The farmer bids men bring more hives
To house the profit that arrives;
Prepares on pan, and key and kettle,
Sweet music that shall make 'em settle;
But when to crown the work he goes,
Gods! What a stink salutes his nose!
Where are the honest toilers? Where
The gravid mistress of their care?
A busy scene, indeed, he sees,
But not a sign or sound of bees.
Worms of the riper grave unhid
By any kindly coffin lid,
Obscene and shameless to the light,
Seethe in insatiate appetite,
Through putrid offal; while above
The hissing blow-fly seeks his love,
Whose offspring, supping where they supt,
Consume corruption twice corrupt.

WITH THE NIGHT MAIL

A STORY OF 2000 A. D.

(_Together with extracts from the magazine in which it appeared_)

A nine o'clock of a gusty winter night I stood on the lower stages of one of the G.P.O. outward mail towers. My purpose was a run to Quebec in “Postal Packet 162 or such other as may be appointed”; and the Postmaster-General himself countersigned the order. This talisman opened all doors, even those in the despatching-caisson at the foot of the tower, where they were delivering the sorted Continental mail. The bags lay packed close as herrings in the long grey underbodies which our G.P.O. still calls “coaches.” Five such coaches were filled as I watched, and were shot up the guides to be locked on to their waiting packets three hundred feet nearer the stars.

From the despatching-caisson I was conducted by a courteous and wonderfully learned official Mr. L.L. Geary, Second Despatcher of the Western Route--to the Captains' Room (this wakes an echo of old romance), where the mail captains come on for their turn of duty. He introduces me to the captain of “162”--Captain Purnall, and his relief, Captain Hodgson. The one is small and dark; the other large and red; but each has the brooding sheathed glance characteristic of eagles and aeronauts. You can see it in the pictures of our racing professionals, from L.V. Rautsch to little Ada Warrleigh--that fathomless abstraction of eyes habitually turned through naked space.

On the notice-board in the Captains' Room, the pulsing arrows of some twenty indicators register, degree by geographical degree, the progress of as many homeward-bound packets. The word “Cape” rises across the face of a dial; a gong strikes: the South African mid-weekly mail is in at the Highgate Receiving Towers. That is all. It reminds one comically of the traitorous little bell which in pigeon-fanciers', lofts notifies the return of a homer.

“Time for us to be on the move,” says Captain Purnall, and we are shot up by the passenger-lift to the top of the despatch-towers. “Our coach will lock on when it is filled and the clerks are aboard.”

“No. 162” waits for us in Slip E of the topmost stage. The great curve of her back shines frostily under the lights, and some minute alteration of trim makes her rock a little in her holding-down slips.

Captain Purnall frowns and dives inside. Hissing softly, “162” comes to rest as level as a rule. From her North Atlantic Winter nose-cap (worn bright as diamond with boring through uncounted leagues of hail, snow, and ice) to the inset of her three built out propeller-shafts is some two hundred and forty feet. Her extreme diameter, carried well forward, is thirty-seven. Contrast this with the nine hundred by ninety-five of any crack liner, and you will realize the power that must drive a hull through all weathers at more than the emergency speed of the Cyclonic!

The eye detects no joint in her skin plating save the sweeping hair-crack of the bow-rudder--Magniac's rudder that assured us the dominion of the unstable air and left its inventor penniless and half-blind. It is calculated to Castelli's “gullwing” curve. Raise a few feet of that all but invisible plate three-eighths of an inch and she will yaw five miles to port or starboard ere she is under control again. Give her full helm and she returns on her track like a whip-lash. Cant the whole forward--a touch on the wheel will suffice--and she sweeps at your good direction up or down. Open the complete circle and she presents to the air a mushroom-head that will bring her up all standing within a half mile.

“Yes,” says Captain Hodgson, answering my thought, “Castelli thought he'd discovered the secret of controlling aeroplanes when he'd only found out how to steer dirigible balloons. Magniac invented his rudder to help war-boats ram each other; and war went out of fashion and Magniac he went out of his mind because he said he couldn't serve his country any more. I wonder if any of us ever know what we're really doing.”

“If you want to see the coach locked you'd better go aboard. It's due now,” says Mr. Geary. I enter through the door amidships. There is nothing here for display. The inner skin of the gas-tanks comes down to within a foot or two of my head and turns over just short of the turn of the bilges. Liners and yachts disguise their tanks with decoration, but the G.P.O. serves them raw under a lick of grey official paint. The inner skin shuts off fifty feet of the bow and as much of the stern, but the bow-bulkhead is recessed for the lift-shunting apparatus as the stern is pierced for the shaft-tunnels. The engine-room lies almost amidships. Forward of it, extending to the turn of the bow tanks, is an aperture--a bottomless hatch at present--into which our coach will be locked. One looks down over the coamings three hundred feet to the despatching-caisson whence voices boom upward. The light below is obscured to a sound of thunder, as our coach rises on its guides. It enlarges rapidly from a postage-stamp to a playing-card; to a punt and last a pontoon. The two clerks, its crew, do not even look up as it comes into place. The Quebec letters fly under their fingers and leap into the docketed racks, while both captains and Mr. Geary satisfy them selves that the coach is locked home. A clerk passes the way-bill over the hatch coaming. Captain Purnall thumb-marks and passes it to Mr. Geary. Receipt has been given and taken. “Pleasant run,” says Mr. Geary, and disappears through the door which a foot high pneumatic compressor locks after him.

“A-ah!” sighs the compressor released. Our holding-down clips part with a tang. We are clear.

Captain Hodgson opens the great colloid underbody porthole through which I watch over-lighted London slide eastward as the gale gets hold of us. The first of the low winter clouds cuts off the well-known view and darkens Middlesex. On the south edge of it I can see a postal packet's light ploughing through the white fleece. For an instant she gleams like a star ere she drops toward the Highgate Receiving Towers. “The Bombay Mail,” says Captain Hodgson, and looks at his watch. “She's forty minutes late.”

“What's our level?” I ask.

“Four thousand. Aren't you coming up on the bridge?”

The bridge (let us ever praise the G.P.O. as a repository of ancientest tradition!) is represented by a view of Captain Hodgson's legs where he stands on the Control Platform that runs thwart-ships overhead. The bow colloid is unshuttered and Captain Purnall, one hand on the wheel, is feeling for a fair slant. The dial shows 4300 feet. “It's steep to-night,” he mutters, as tier on tier of cloud drops under. “We generally pick up an easterly draught below three thousand at this time o' the year. I hate slathering through fluff.”

“So does Van Cutsem. Look at him huntin' for a slant!” says Captain Hodgson. A foglight breaks cloud a hundred fathoms below. The Antwerp Night Mail makes her signal and rises between two racing clouds far to port, her flanks blood-red in the glare of Sheerness Double Light. The gale will have us over the North Sea in half-an-hour, but Captain Purnall lets her go composedly--nosing to every point of the compass as she rises.

“Five thousand-six, six thousand eight hundred”--the dip-dial reads ere we find the easterly drift, heralded by a flurry of snow at the thousand fathom level. Captain Purnall rings up the engines and keys down the governor on the switch before him. There is no sense in urging machinery when Eolus himself gives you good knots for nothing. We are away in earnest now--our nose notched home on our chosen star. At this level the lower clouds are laid out, all neatly combed by the dry fingers of the East. Below that again is the strong westerly blow through which we rose. Overhead, a film of southerly drifting mist draws a theatrical gauze across the firmament. The moonlight turns the lower strata to silver without a stain except where our shadow underruns us. Bristol and Cardiff Double Lights (those statelily inclined beams over Severnmouth) are dead ahead of us; for we keep the Southern Winter Route. Coventry Central, the pivot of the English system, stabs upward once in ten seconds its spear of diamond light to the north; and a point or two off our starboard bow The Leek, the great cloud-breaker of Saint David's Head, swings its unmistakable green beam twenty-five degrees each way. There must be half a mile of fluff over it in this weather, but it does not affect The Leek.

“Our planet's over-lighted if anything,” says Captain Purnall at the wheel, as Cardiff-Bristol slides under. “I remember the old days of common white verticals that 'ud show two or three hundred feet up in a mist, if you knew where to look for 'em. In really fluffy weather they might as well have been under your hat. One could get lost coming home then, an' have some fun. Now, it's like driving down Piccadilly.”

He points to the pillars of light where the cloud-breakers bore through the cloud-floor. We see nothing of England's outlines: only a white pavement pierced in all directions by these manholes of variously coloured fire--Holy Island's white and red--St. Bee's interrupted white, and so on as far as the eye can reach. Blessed be Sargent, Ahrens, and the Dubois brothers, who invented the cloud-breakers of the world whereby we travel in security!

“Are you going to lift for The Shamrock?” asks Captain Hodgson. Cork Light (green, fixed) enlarges as we rush to it. Captain Purnall nods. There is heavy traffic hereabouts--the cloud-bank beneath us is streaked with running fissures of flame where the Atlantic boats are hurrying Londonward just clear of the fluff. Mail-packets are supposed, under the Conference rules, to have the five-thousand-foot lanes to themselves, but the foreigner in a hurry is apt to take liberties with English air. “No. 162” lifts to a long-drawn wail of the breeze in the fore-flange of the rudder and we make Valencia (white, green, white) at a safe 7000 feet, dipping our beam to an incoming Washington packet.

There is no cloud on the Atlantic, and faint streaks of cream round Dingle Bay show where the driven seas hammer the coast. A big S.A.T.A. liner (Société Anonyme des Transports Aëriens) is diving and lifting half a mile below us in search of some break in the solid west wind. Lower still lies a disabled Dane she is telling the liner all about it in International. Our General Communication dial has caught her talk and begins to eavesdrop. Captain Hodgson makes a motion to shut it off but checks himself. “Perhaps you'd like to listen,” he says.

“Argol of St. Thomas,” the Dane whimpers. “Report owners three starboard shaft collar-bearings fused. Can make Flores as we are, but impossible further. Shall we buy spares at Fayal?”

The liner acknowledges and recommends inverting the bearings. The Argol answers that she has already done so without effect, and begins to relieve her mind about cheap German enamels for collar-bearings. The Frenchman assents cordially, cries “Courage, mon ami,” and switches off.

Then lights sink under the curve of the ocean.

“That's one of Lundt & Bleamers' boats,” says Captain Hodgson. “Serves 'em right for putting German compos in their thrust-blocks. She won't be in Fayal to-night! By the way, wouldn't you like to look round the engine-room?”

I have been waiting eagerly for this invitation and I follow Captain Hodgson from the control-platform, stooping low to avoid the bulge of the tanks. We know that Fleury's gas can lift anything, as the world-famous trials of '89 showed, but its almost indefinite powers of expansion necessitate vast tank room. Even in this thin air the lift-shunts are busy taking out one-third of its normal lift, and still “162” must be checked by an occasional downdraw of the rudder or our flight would become a climb to the stars. Captain Purnall prefers an overlifted to an underlifted ship; but no two captains trim ship alike. “When I take the bridge,” says Captain Hodgson, “you'll see me shunt forty per cent of the lift out of the gas and run her on the upper rudder. With a swoop upward instead of a swoop downward, as you say. Either way will do. It's only habit. Watch our dip-dial! Tim fetches her down once every thirty knots as regularly as breathing.”

So is it shown on the dip-dial. For five or six minutes the arrow creeps from 6700 to 7300. There is the faint “szgee” of the rudder, and back slides the arrow to 6000 on a falling slant of ten or fifteen knots.

“In heavy weather you jockey her with the screws as well,” says Captain Hodgson, and, unclipping the jointed bar which divides the engine-room from the bare deck, he leads me on to the floor. Here we find Fleury's Paradox of the Bulk-headed Vacuum--which we accept now without thought--literally in full blast. The three engines are H.T.&T. assisted-vacuo Fleury turbines running from 3000 to the Limit--that is to say, up to the point when the blades make the air “bell”--cut out a vacuum for themselves precisely as over-driven marine propellers used to do. “162's” Limit is low on account of the small size of her nine screws, which, though handier than the old colloid Thelussons, “bell” sooner. The midships engine, generally used as a reinforce, is not running; so the port and starboard turbine vacuum-chambers draw direct into the return-mains.