Part 7

All along the valleys of the coast are hundreds of these amphitheatres which are as stages whereon, by moonlight or amid the peace of the mornings and afternoons, are acted the dumb fairy-plays of the world's contentment. They are all alike, and yet each of them reveals a different happiness. Each of them, as though they were the faces of a bevy of equally happy and equally beautiful sisters, wears its distinguishing smile. A cluster of cypresses, with its pure outline, a mimosa that resembles a bubbling spring of sulphur, a grove of orange-trees with dark and heavy tops symmetrically charged with golden fruits that suddenly proclaim the royal affluence of the soil that feeds them, a slope covered with lemon-trees, where the night seems to have heaped up on a mountain-side, to await a new twilight, the stars gathered by the dawn, a leafy portico which opens over the sea like a deep glance that suddenly discloses an infinite thought, a brook hidden like a tear of joy, a trellis awaiting the purple of the grapes, a great stone basin drinking in the water that trickles from the tip of a green reed: all and yet none modify the expression of the restfulness, the tranquillity, the azure silence, the blissfulness that is its own delight.

IV

But I am looking for Winter and the print of its footsteps. Where is it hiding? It should be here; and how dares this feast of roses and anemones, of soft air and dew, of bees and birds display itself with such assurance during the most pitiless month of Winter's reign? And what will Spring do, what will Spring say, since all seems done, since all seems said? Is it superfluous, then, and does nothing await it? No; search carefully: you shall find amid this life of unwearying youth the work of its hand, the perfume of its breath which is younger than life. Thus, there are foreign trees yonder, taciturn guests, like poor relations in ragged clothes. They come from very far, from the land of fog and frost and wind. They are aliens, sullen and distrustful. They have not yet learned the limpid speed, not adopted the delightful customs of the azure. They refused to believe in the promises of the sky and suspected the caresses of the sun which, from early dawn, covers them with a mantle of silkier and warmer rays than that with which July loaded their shoulders in the precarious summers of their native land. It made no difference: at the given hour, when snow was falling a thousand miles away, their trunks shivered, and, despite the bold averment of the grass and a hundred thousand flowers, despite the impertinence of the roses that climb up to them to bear witness to life, they stripped themselves for their winter sleep. Sombre and grim and bare as the dead, they await the Spring that bursts forth around them; and, by a strange and excessive reaction, they wait for it longer than under the harsh, gloomy sky of Paris, for it is said that in Paris the buds are already beginning to shoot. One catches glimpses of them here and there amid the holiday throng whose motionless dances enchant the hills. They are not many and they conceal themselves: they are gnarled oaks, beeches, planes; and even the vine, which one would have thought better-mannered, more docile and well-informed, remains incredulous. There they stand, black and gaunt, like sick people on an Easter Sunday in the church-porch made transparent by the splendour of the sun. They have been there for years and some of them, perhaps, for two or three centuries; but they have the terror of winter in their marrow. They will never lose the habit of death. They have too much experience, they are too old to forget and too old to learn. Their hardened reason refuses to admit the light when it does not come at the accustomed time. They are rugged old men, too wise to enjoy unforeseen pleasures. They are wrong. For here, around the old, around the grudging ancestors, is a whole world of plants that know nothing of the future, but give themselves to it. They live but for a season; they have no past and no traditions and they know nothing, except that the hour is fair and that they must enjoy it. While their elders, their masters and their gods, sulk and waste their time, they burst into flower; they love and they beget. They are the humble flowers of dear solitude: the Easter daisy that covers the sward with its frank and methodical neatness; the borage bluer than the bluest sky; the anemone, scarlet or dyed in aniline; the virgin primrose; the arborescent mallow; the bell-flower, shaking its bells that no one hears; the rosemary that looks like a little country maid; and the heavy thyme that thrusts its grey head between the broken stones.

But, above all, this is the incomparable hour, the diaphanous and liquid hour of the wood-violet. Its proverbial humility becomes usurping and almost intolerant. It no longer cowers timidly among the leaves: it hustles the grass, overtowers it, blots it out, forces its colours upon it, fills it with its breath. Its unnumbered smiles cover the terraces of olives and vines, the tracks of the ravines, the bend of the valleys with a net of sweet and innocent gaiety; its perfume, fresh and pure as the soul of the mountain spring, makes the air more translucent, the silence more limpid and is, in very deed, as a forgotten legend tells us, the breath of Earth, all bathed in dew, when, a virgin yet, she wakes in the sun and yields herself wholly in the first kiss of early dawn.

V

Again, in the little gardens that surround the cottages, the bright little houses with their Italian roofs, the good vegetables, unprejudiced and unpretentious, have known no fear. While the old peasant, who has come to resemble the trees he cultivates, digs the earth around the olives, the spinach assumes a lofty bearing, hastens to grow green nor takes the smallest precaution; the garden bean opens its eyes of jet in its pale leaves and sees the night fall unmoved; the fickle peas shoot and lengthen out, covered with motionless and tenacious butterflies, as though June had entered the farm-gate; the carrot blushes as it faces the light; the ingenuous strawberry-plants inhale the flavours which noontide lavishes upon them as it bends towards earth its sapphire urns; the lettuce exerts itself to achieve a heart of gold wherein to lock the dews of morning and night.

The fruit-trees alone have long reflected: the example of the vegetables among which they live urged them to join in the general rejoicing, but the rigid attitude of their elders from the North, of the grandparents born in the great dark forests, preached prudence to them. But now they awaken: they too can resist no longer and at last make up their minds to join the dance of perfumes and of love. The peach-trees are now no more than a rosy miracle, like the softness of a child's skin turned into azure vapour by the breath of dawn. The pear and plum and apple and almond-trees make dazzling efforts in drunken rivalry; and the pale hazel-trees, like Venetian chandeliers, resplendent with a cascade of gems, stand here and there to light the feast. As for the luxurious flowers that seem to possess no other object than themselves, they have long abandoned the endeavour to solve the mystery of this boundless summer. They no longer score the seasons, no longer count the days, and, knowing not what to do in the glowing disarray of hours that have no shadow, dreading lest they should be deceived and lose a single second that might be fair, they have resolved to bloom without respite from January to December. Nature approves them and, to reward their trust in happiness, their generous beauty and amorous excesses, grants them a force, a brilliancy and perfumes which she never gives to those which hang back and show a fear of life.

All this, among other truths, was proclaimed by the little house that I saw to-day on the side of a hill all deluged in roses, carnations, wall-flowers, heliotrope and mignonette, so as to suggest the source, choked and overflowing with flowers, whence Spring was preparing to pour down upon us; while, upon the stone threshold of the closed door, pumpkins, lemons, oranges, limes and Turkey figs slumbered in the majestic, deserted, monotonous silence of a perfect day.

THE WRATH OF THE BEE

I

Since the publication of "The Life of the Bee," I have often been asked to throw light upon one of the most dreaded mysteries of the hive, namely, the psychology of its inexplicable, sudden and sometimes mortal wrath. A crowd of cruel and unjust legends, in fact, hovers around the abode of the yellow fairies of the honey. The bravest among the guests who visit the garden slacken their pace and lapse into involuntary silence as they approach the enclosure, blooming with clover and mignonette, where buzz the daughters of the light. Doting mothers keep their children away from it, as they would keep them away from a smouldering fire or a nest of adders; nor does the bee-keeping novice, gloved in leather, veiled in gauze, surrounded by clouds of smoke, face the mystic citadel without that little unavowed shiver which men feel before a great battle.

How much reason is there at the bottom of these traditional fears? Is the bee really dangerous? Does she allow herself to be tamed? Is there a risk in approaching the hives? Ought we to flee or to face their wrath? Has the bee-keeper some secret or some talisman that preserves him from being stung? These are the questions that are anxiously put by all those who have started a timid hive and who are beginning their apprenticeship.

II

The bee, in general, is neither ill-disposed nor aggressive, but appears somewhat capricious. She has an unconquerable antipathy to certain people; she also has days of enervation--for instance, when a storm is at hand--on which she shows herself extremely irritable. She has a most subtle and susceptible sense of smell; she tolerates no perfume and detests, above all, the scent of human sweat and of alcohol. She is not to be tamed, in the proper sense of the word; but, whereas the hives which we seldom visit become crabbed and distrustful, those which we surround with our daily cares soon grow accustomed to the discreet and prudent presence of man. Lastly, to enable us to handle the bees almost without impunity, there exist a certain number of little expedients which vary according to circumstances and which can be learnt by practice alone. But it is time to reveal the great secret of their wrath.

III

The bee, essentially so pacific, so long-suffering, the bee, which never stings (unless you crush her) when looting among the flowers, once she has returned to her kingdom with the waxen monuments, retains her mild and tolerant character, or grows violent and deadly dangerous, according as her maternal city be opulent or poor. Here again, as often happens when we study the manners of this spirited and mysterious little people, the provisions of human logic are utterly at fault. It would be natural that the bees should defend desperately treasures so laboriously amassed, a city such as we find in good apiaries, where the nectar, overflowing the numberless cells that represent thousands of casks piled from cellar to garret, streams in golden stalactites along the rustling walls and sends far afield, in glad response to the ephemeral perfumes of calyces that are opening, the more lasting perfume of the honey that keeps alive the memory of calyces which time has closed. Now this is not the case. The richer their abode, the less eagerness they display to fight around it. Open or turn over a wealthy hive; if you take care to drive the sentries from the entrance with a puff of smoke, it will be extremely rare for the other bees to contend with you for the liquid booty conquered from the smiles, from all the charms of the beautiful azure months. Try the experiment; I promise you impunity, if you touch only the heavier hives. You can turn them over and empty them; those throbbing flagons are perfectly harmless. What does it mean? Have the fierce amazons lost courage? Has abundance unnerved them, and have they, after the manner of the too fortunate inhabitants of luxurious towns, delegated the dangerous duties to the unhappy mercenaries who keep watch at the gates? No, it has never been observed that the greatest good fortune relaxes the valour of the bee. On the contrary, the more the republic prospers, the more harshly and severely are its laws applied, and the worker in a hive where superfluity accumulates labours much more zealously than her sister in an indigent hive. There are other reasons which we cannot wholly fathom, but which are likely reasons, if only we take into account the wild interpretation which the poor bee must needs place upon our monstrous doings. Seeing suddenly her huge dwelling-place upheaved, overturned, half-opened, she probably imagines that an inevitable, a natural catastrophe is occurring against which it were madness to struggle. She no longer resists, but neither does she flee. Admitting the ruin, it looks as though already, in her instinct, she saw the future dwelling which she hopes to build with the materials taken from the gutted town. She leaves the present defenceless in order to save the hereafter. Or else, perhaps, does she, like the dog in the fable, "the dog that carried his master's dinner round his neck," knowing that all is irreparably lost, prefer to die taking her share of the pillage and to pass from life to death in one prodigious orgy? We do not know for certain. How should we penetrate the motives of the bee, when those of the simplest actions of our brothers are beyond our ken?

IV

Still, the fact is that, at each great proof to which the city is put, at each trouble that appears to the bees to possess an inevitable character, no sooner has the infatuation spread from one to the other among the densely quivering people than the bees fling themselves upon their combs, violently tear the sacred lids from the provisions for the winter, topple head foremost and plunge their whole bodies into the sweet-smelling vats, imbibe with long draughts the chaste wine of the flowers, gorge themselves with it, intoxicate themselves with it, till their bronze-ringed forms lengthen and distend like compressed leather bottles. Now the bee, when swollen with honey, can no longer curve her abdomen at the angle required to draw her sting. She becomes, so to speak, mechanically harmless from that moment. It is generally imagined that the beekeeper employs the fumigator to stun, to half-asphyxiate the warriors that gather their treasure in the blue and thus to effect an entrance by favour of a defenceless slumber into the palace of the innumerous sleeping amazons. This is a mistake: the smoke serves first to drive back the guardians of the threshold, who are ever on the alert and extremely quarrelsome; then, two or three puffs come to spread panic among the workers: the panic provokes the mysterious orgy, and the orgy helplessness. Thus is the fact explained that, with bare arms and unprotected face, one can open the most populous hives, examine their combs, shake off the bees, spread them at one's feet, heap them up, pour them out like grains of corn and quietly gather the honey, in the midst of the deafening cloud of ousted workers, without having to suffer a single sting.

V

But woe to whoso touches the poor hives! Keep away from the abodes of want! Here, smoke has lost its spell, and you shall scarce have emitted the first puffs before twenty thousand acrid and enraged demons will dart from within the walls, overwhelm your hands, blind your eyes and blacken your face. No living being, except, they say, the bear and the Sphinx Atropos, can resist the rage of the mailed legions. Above all, do not struggle: the fury would overtake the neighbouring colonies; and the smell of the spilt venom would enrage all the republics around. There is no means of safety other than instant flight through the bushes. The bee is less rancorous, less implacable than the wasp and rarely pursues her enemy. If flight be impossible, absolute immobility alone might calm her or put her off the scent. She fears and attacks any too sudden movement, but at once forgives that which no longer stirs.

The poor hives live, or rather die from day to day, and it is because they have no honey in their cellars that smoke makes no impression on them. They cannot gorge themselves like their sisters that belong to happier tribes; the possibilities of a future city are not there to divert their ardour. Their only thought is to perish on the outraged threshold, and, lean, shrunk, nimble, unrestrained, they defend it with unheard-of heroism and desperation. Therefore, the cautious beekeeper never displaces the indigent hives without making a preliminary sacrifice to the hungry Furies. His offering is a honey-comb. They come hastening up and then, the smoke assisting, they distend and intoxicate themselves: behold them reduced to helplessness like the rich burgesses of the plentiful cells.

VI

One could find much more to tell of the wrath of the bees and their singular antipathies. These antipathies are often so strange that they were for long attributed, that they are still attributed, by the peasants, to moral causes, to profound and mystic intuitions. There is the conviction, for instance, that the vestal vintagers cannot endure the approach of the unchaste, above all of the adulterous. It would be surprising if the most rational beings that live with us on this incomprehensible globe were to attach so much importance to a trespass that is often very harmless. In reality, they give it no thought; but they, whose whole life sways to the nuptial and sumptuous breath of the flowers, abhor the perfumes which we steal from them. Are we to believe that chastity exhales fewer odours than love? Is this the origin of the rancour of the jealous bees and of the legend that avenges virtues as jealous as they? Be this as it may, the legend must be classed with the many others that pretend to do great honour to the phenomena of nature by ascribing human feelings to them. It would be better, on the contrary, to mix our petty human psychology as little as possible with all that we do not easily understand, to seek our explanations only without, on this side of man or on that side; for it is probably there that lie the positive revelations which we are still awaiting.

FIELD FLOWERS

I

They welcome our steps without the city gates, on a gay and eager carpet of many colours, which they wave madly in the sunlight. It is evident that they were expecting us. When the first bright rays of March appeared, the Snowdrop, or Amaryllis, the heroic daughter of the hoar-frost, sounded the reveille. Next sprang from the earth efforts, as yet shapeless, of a slumbering memory: vague ghosts of flowers; pale flowers that are scarcely flowers at all: the three-fingered Saxifrage, or Samphire; the almost invisible Shepherd's Pouch; the two-leaved Squill; the Stinking Hellebore, or Christmas Rose; the Colt's Foot; the gloomy and poisonous Spurge Laurel: all plants of frail and doubtful health, pale-blue, pale-pink, undecided attempts, the first fever of life in which nature expels her ill humours, anæmic captives set free by winter, convalescent patients from the underground prisons, timid and unskilful endeavours of the still buried light.

But soon this light ventures forth into space; the nuptial thoughts of the earth become clearer and purer; the rough attempts disappear; the half-dreams of the night lift like a fog dispelled by the dawn; and the good rustic flowers begin their unseen revels under the blue, all around the cities where man knows them not. No matter, they are there, making honey, while their proud and barren sisters, who alone receive our care, are still trembling in the depths of the hot-houses. They will still be there, in the flooded fields, in the broken paths, and adorning the roads with their simplicity, when the first snows shall have covered the country-side. No one sows them and no one gathers them. They survive their glory, and man treads them under foot. Formerly, however, and not so long ago, they alone represented Nature's gladness. Formerly, however, a few hundred years ago, before their dazzling and chilly kinswomen had come from the Antilles, from India, from Japan, or before their own daughters, ungrateful and unrecognizable, had usurped their place, they alone enlivened the stricken gaze, they alone brightened the cottage porch, the castle precincts, and followed the lovers' footsteps in the woods. But those times are no more; and they are dethroned. They have retained of their past happiness only the names which they received when they were loved.

And these names show all that they were to man: all his gratitude, his studious fondness, all that he owed them, all that they gave him are there contained, like a secular aroma in hollow pearls. And so they bear names of queens, shepherdesses, virgins, princesses, sylphs and fairies, which flow from the lips like a caress, a lightning-flash, a kiss, a murmur of love. Our language, I think, contains nothing that is better, more daintily, more affectionately named than these homely flowers. Here the word clothes the idea almost always with care, with light precision, with admirable happiness. It is like an ornate and transparent stuff that moulds the form which it embraces and has the proper shade, perfume and sound. Call to mind the Easter Daisy, the Violet, the Bluebell, the Poppy, or, rather, Coquelicot: the name is the flower itself. How wonderful, for instance, that sort of cry and crest of light and joy: "Coquelicot!" to designate the scarlet flower which the scientists crush under this barbarous title: _Papaver rhoeas!_ See the Primrose, or, rather, the Cowslip, the Periwinkle, the Anemone, the Wild Hyacinth, the blue Speedwell, the Forget-me-not, the Wild Bindweed, the Iris, the Harebell: their name depicts them by equivalents and analogies which the greatest poets but rarely light upon. It represents all their ingenuous and visible soul. It hides itself, it bends over, it rises to the ear even as those who bear it lie concealed, stoop forward, or stand erect in the corn and in the grass.

These are the few names that are known to all of us; we do not know the others, though their music describes with the same gentleness, the same happy genius, flowers which we see by every wayside and upon all the paths. Thus, at this moment, that is to say, at the end of the month in which the ripe corn falls beneath the reaper's sickle, the banks of the roads are a pale violet: it is the Sweet Scabious, who has blossomed at last, discreet, aristocratically poor and modestly beautiful, as her title, that of a mist-veiled precious stone, proclaims. Around her, a treasure lies scattered: it is the Ranunculus, or Buttercup, who has two names, even as he has two lives; for he is at once the innocent virgin that covers the grass with sun-drops, and the redoubtable and venomous wizard that deals out death to heedless animals. Again we have the Milfoil and the St. John's Wort, little flowers, once useful, that march along the roads, like silent school-girls, clad in a dull uniform; the vulgar and innumerous Bird's Groundsel; her big brother, the Hare's Lettuce of the fields; then the dangerous black Nightshade; the Bitter-sweet, who hides herself; the creeping Knotweed, with the patient leaves: all the families without show, with the resigned smile, wearing the practical grey livery of autumn, which already is felt to be at hand.

II