Chapter 6
“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.