A Taste for Honey

by H. F. Heard

  How could I fail to resent that? I had been treated like a child that has to be tricked to serve its elders’ ends, and now, when I was highly and rightly vexed, as if the wasted time were not bad enough, this old dominie was going to force his company still further on the and, in fact, make an attempt to order my life. Who was this old stranger, pushing his advice on me and directing what I should do and whom I should see and in whose care? It was, of course, I felt, quite clear, that he had angled all the time to put me in a position in which I should be unable out of common politeness to refuse his request. He was a clever old crank of a busybody. I hate being managed and maneuvered. Even more, I dislike being made to change my ways and to do precisely the very thing which I live in the country just to avoid doing, taking strangers to call on one’s acquaintance. I felt so vexed at this transparent stratagem, coming on the top of everything else—the silly old man with his senile sense of his own tactful finesse, thinking I shouldn’t see through it (I was tired too, being kept waiting about all day)—that I felt a positive revulsion against him, and, I suppose by contrast, something almost like clannish protectiveness toward Heregrove.

  What was this stranger, gossiper, romancer doing? Making all kinds of insinuations about one of our village—a man about whom I only knew, as a matter of fact, that his honey was always good and quite reasonably priced, and who, poor fellow, had just had his wife killed by his bees which kept me in honey. True, he might not have been very fond of her, but English law had decided, and rightly, that she was the victim of a horrible accident. Even someone you dislike, you can miss very much and be very sorry for, especially if he is suddenly killed in a horrible way. When I was a boy, we had a dog I never really liked. It used to bark and leap up on me—startling and dirtying. Yet when a car dashed over it and there it lay like a smashed bag, I felt not only quite sick, I was really sorry. These thoughts, of course, went in a flash through my mind. I was pretty certainly more tired than I realized.

  Mr. Mycroft was standing before me with a rather assured expression on his face.

  Before I had thought out the words, I found myself saying: “I’ll pay for the honey. I’m a complete recluse and never introduce anyone to anyone else. As to my movements, I have never needed anyone to advise me on them.”

  I stopped. I own I lacked the courage to meet Mr. Mycroft’s eye now that I was being deliberately rude, so I couldn’t judge how he took it. All I know is that he passed out of the room without a word. He was away for a few minutes, came back with a neatly made parcel with an ingenious handle made of the string, and named a ridiculously low figure. I fumbled a bit, and I am afraid was a little red as I paid.

  All he said was, “The string will hold quite securely. It saves the trouble of a basket being returned.”

  He held the door open and with a rather clumsy “Good day” I stepped out, hurried across the lawn, now in shadow, into the dusky path through the plantation and so down into the twilit sunken lane. My nerves must have been overstrung (perhaps I had been very discourteous). The whole place seemed unpleasantly still. Those silly, melodramatic lines from The Ancient Mariner kept running in my head:

  Like one that on a lonesome road

  Doth walk in fear and dread,

  And having once turned round walks on,

  And turns no more his head;

  Because he knows a frightful fiend

  Doth close behind him tread.

  I didn’t really feel at all comfortable until I was back in my own sitting room, with the lamp lit, the curtains drawn, and the door well bolted.

  Chapter IV

  FLY TO SPIDER

  The next morning, however, I was quite cheerful. Only one thing seemed clear in the gay morning light. By observing my rightful impulse I had—at the cost of a moment’s unpleasantness—escaped what might well have turned out to be a permanent invasion by a loquacious, opinionated, fantastic old bore—the very thing, I repeat, that one lives in the country to avoid, the special terror of town clubs and gardens. I was well stocked with honey. I put the whole question out of my head—even of what I would do when my supplies again ran out.

  It seemed only a few days, however, before they did. It must, of course, have been a month, perhaps a little more. I remember that I evidently didn’t want to notice that I was running low, for it was Alice who drew my attention to it and I was vexed with her. It was really her fault. She should have seen that it was quite clear I did not want to be troubled. But somehow the poorer people are and the stupider, the more they seem to expect you always to be reasonable and clear and sensible.

  “You ’ave only ’alf a pot an’ one comb now left, sir,” was her opening.

  “I know,” I said, as a silencer. It was as ineffective as my effort to stem the obituaries of the late Mrs. Heregrove.

  “An’ you ’aven’t, sir, rightly even that: the combs run so in this ’ot weather.”

  I grunted. Human speech of any sort, however astringent, seemed only to act as warm water to a hemorrhage. “An’ where you’ll be getting your new lot I can’t but be wondering. There’s never a hive now all round the neighborhood. ’Iveless Hashton, that’s what my young man he called it the other day, an’ he’s right. He’s a cure, ’Iveless Hashton.”

  This was too much, to have the cold and clotted wit of Alice’s walker-out served to me after breakfast.

  “Alice,” I said, with a firmness which I don’t remember showing for a very long time, unless it was when I broke away from the tentacles of Mr. Mycroft, “Alice, please get on with your work”—the breakfast table was half cleared, half the china was already marshaled on its transport tray for the kitchen, half still held its position on the table—“and I will get on with mine.”

  What that was, as I had been looking out the window when the attack had been launched, was not very clear, but I felt I must soften my rebuke by showing that we both had duties which forbade further waste of time. But Alice was wounded. I was being, I could see, not merely rude—that was an employer’s right, but “not sensible,” and that is something which the rustic mind finds far more upsetting than insult. The wound led to a further hemorrhage of words.

  “Well, sir, I was never one to hoffer advice hanywhere, not even in the right quarters” (advice again!), “but I did think it seemed positively silly-like to get yourself with no honey—you being that fond of it and suspicious-like of shop things, as indeed I’m myself; an’ all I meant, and no imperence intended and never was, that I’d ’eard that, maybe, you might again be able to be getting yer honey at Heregrove’s.”

  I couldn’t help starting a little. Alice was no doubt encouraged by this sign that her attack had made some impression.

  “M’young man works up in fields beyond Heregrove’s place and ’e’s sure ’e’s seen Heregrove tending bees as before.”

  I did want to know more but I was determined even more strongly to check Alice before after-breakfast conversations became established as a precedent.

  “Thank you, Alice,” I said. “I will look into the matter myself.”

  I was cold and stiff. I was rude. But I was being sensible. I was not being “simply whimsey.” The stiffness, therefore, did not matter. It might wound, but the cut was aseptic. Alice was quite content. She had, of course, not had her talk out, as no doubt she would have liked, but she had made me do something. That was even more important. The gentry had been made to mobilize. I had been compelled to take command. Off she sailed, contented in her way, and soon the drone-drawl of “Abide with me” mixed with crockery clackings came through the baize door—a sure sign that Alice was enjoying that sentimental sense of having sacrificed herself to make someone else uncomfortable, which I believe bitter-sweetens the whole lives of the industrious poor.

  But as I realized Alice’s victory I was not so pleased. I should have to do something. I couldn’t and wouldn’t go back to my old bore in Waller’s Lane. He, no doubt, would be glad enough to overlook my unavailing struggle to escape his hold.
Alice’s victory must not lead to a rout.

  Then there was nothing left to do but to go and see whether what Alice had said about Heregrove was true—to spy out the land. And, after all, if he was again tending bees, there was nothing wrong in that. Of course he had got rid of the mad hive which had attacked his poor wife. If no one else could keep bees in the district, why shouldn’t he? No doubt he was skillful—that was all, “bee-handy.” These epidemics—foul-brood, Isle of Wight disease, etc.—were always wiping out hives. I had long ago dismissed old Mycroft’s romances. All the demonstrations he gave me could easily, I concluded, have been staged by a clever eccentric. Probably he was the dangerous person to be in touch with—a borderline case. As to Heregrove, it was not my duty to boycott an unfortunate and skillful man. If other people chose to do so—well, it was an ill wind which blew no one any good and I should benefit by being his sole customer.

  I went over all these points—small ones, they may seem, and no doubt are. “Why all this fuss,” a reader might say, “over buying a few pounds of honey?” I have to own that my mind, far down, was far from easy. If I had not dreaded Mycroft’s becoming a bore, an intruder, would I have dismissed all he had told me as mere romance and tried to convince myself that he was cracky? I crushed back the thought, but it was there, and the only way to get rid of it seemed to go and see for myself whether Heregrove was actually again beekeeping, and, if he were, to replenish my stock. So to escape one unpleasant train of thought—old Mycroft’s speculations—I ran right onto the other horn of the dilemma—the very source of all these really rather unnerving suspicions.

  When one has made up one’s mind to hair-cutting or being fitted by the tailor, I’ve found it always better to get it over. So that very afternoon I deliberately took my afternoon walk up to Heregrove’s end of the village. Luck—no, I have decided to say Destiny—decided that the man should be coming down his garden path at the very moment that I reached his gate. I paused and we came face to face.

  “I hear you may again be selling honey” was, I thought, a safe enough opening.

  It was not very well received, though. He looked at me with a curiously expressionless face. He certainly was not what fashion papers call prepossessing. Dark, strong, resolute, and intelligent—yes, all these, and cold. Where had I seen a face as cold as that? Of course—old Mycroft’s; but there it seemed to me that coldness came from detachment, this from hardness. When I was first taken with Mycroft’s look I remembered thinking how quietly cool his face was.

  This man’s face was somehow not quiet in spite of its coldness. It went through my mind that he was deliberately making his features expressionless, not because he did not care what people thought of him but because he was determined to hide something. That thought led to a still more disquieting one. I felt now sure that he was watching me with much more interest than he intended me to recognize. After a pause, which was becoming quite embarrassing to me, suddenly, like an electric light being switched on behind drawn blinds, the face lit up. I felt a queer, baseless, but quite definite conviction that he had suddenly made up his mind about something.

  “I am sorry,” he said, in a surprisingly low and accentless voice, “to have hesitated in answering. Since my great sorrow and loss I have been much of a recluse and long silences make for slow responses. Yes, I am again keeping bees.” Then, after a pause, “My doctor, when I consulted him, said that after a severe shock the best cure is the hardest—to take up the actual thing most associated with the shock—men who have had a bad fall steeplechasing are told to jump fences as soon as they can again sit in the saddle. Of course, the actual hives have been destroyed, but I have a way with bees and am again thriving with them. I don’t quite like to put my notice up again but perhaps I can breed queens and make a little that way.” (A queer tremor of suspicion from the back of my mind shook me for a moment.) “But I would be glad to have you again as a customer as my poor wife had. I trust that while I have been out of business” (we were now walking up the path and I was aware his eyes had turned toward me though his head was not turned) “you have not suffered any inconvenience?”

  “No,” I said, evasively. “No.”

  I knew I ought to make up some story but, as I’ve said, living by oneself, one doesn’t have to lie and gets out of the habit, at least of doing it convincingly. His next remark showed that I had been right.

  “There are, I believe, very few other beekeepers in the district. As homemade honey is so different from the stuff most shops sell, I feared you must have gone without supplies.”

  I simply said nothing. I could hardly construe that remark as other than a searching question devised to discover where any other beekeepers might be lurking in the locality. However, he must take my silence as he wished. We reached the house and he showed me into the parlor, still as distressing a room as when I had seen it in his wife’s day, from my casual glimpses through the door.

  I heard his voice behind me continuing, “—Unless, of course, you went far afield hunting your honey?”

  The chuckle he gave at this minimal joke did nothing to cheer me. The house, the man, my suspicions, all grated together. I turned around.

  “I should like the same supply as I had before,” I said.

  He named the exact amount and then added, “Come with me. I store near the hives. It saves trouble when in the winter one has to feed them some of their own. Pure sugar is never enough.”

  Again I felt even more strongly the wish to be out of it all, felt a quite strong resentment toward Mycroft—why could he not have kept from boring me and just supplied me with honey?—and even a wave of irritation at Alice. Still, to refuse would be ridiculous. We left the house and went down the back garden path along which, I remembered, I had seen him, in his wife’s time, going toward the stable.

  Because that memory flashed through my mind and for the sake of saying something not to do with bees or honey and to break the silence on my part, I asked, “Do you still keep a horse?”

  I own I might have taken such a remark made to myself by a stranger as impertinent, interfering. But of course I didn’t mean it as that. It was one of those pointless, stopgap remarks we make when we fear a silence may become too awkward. The remark did have a bad effect—there was no doubt as to that—a surprisingly bad effect. Heregrove stopped and turned on me. I looked round and confronted an unpleasantly searching glance. Another of those horrid pauses, and then the very commonplaceness of the reply only disturbed me more.

  “No, I sold the horse some time ago. I couldn’t afford to keep it.”

  “That’s frank and obvious,” I said to myself, but something in me told me I must have put a finger almost on the bolt which fastened down some grave secret in the man’s mind. However, the thought that one is alone, talking to a dangerous fellow who suspects that you may know too much, is so disturbing that I chose, not unnaturally, the alternative, which had certainly still as good a case—that here was a poor creature who had had very bad luck (or an ill deal from Destiny) and whom I could help by helping myself to his honey. We seldom fear those whom we feel we can patronize. Fear is a beastly feeling, while patronizing always faintly warms one, though we don’t like saying so. I needed warming, for I felt more than a slight chill of foreboding, so I changed the subject. The overgrown and bedraggled flower beds caught my eye.

  “Even now that most of the best of the summer flowers are over,” I prattled, “yet there are enough to keep the bees busy. Queer little creatures.” I ran on, as my companion kept silent and I was determined that there should be talk, if only mine and only to reassure myself. “I suppose it’s not color but scent which really guides them?”

  Again I was aware I was being sidelongly looked over. But how could such babble do anything but reassure a suspicious character? Alas, I knew I was only fooling myself or trying to convince myself that my efforts had done anything of the sort. On the contrary, do what I would, everything I said and even my silences quite obviously heighte
ned his suspicion, and, what was even more disconcerting, made him quite clearly resolved to hold on to me—I supposed to find out whether I was as innocent as I looked or as suspicious as I apparently kept on sounding.

  We had reached the end of the garden and the beehives were now in view on the other side of a rather dilapidated railing. The hives themselves were in order. When we reached the fence, Here-grove seemed suddenly to change his mind.

  “If you will wait here,” he said, civilly enough, “I will fetch the honey. It is in that small shed alongside the hives. Most of the bees are already in but, you see, a few latecomers are still coming home. They might be a little irritable. Hard workers on returning home may get cross if they find strangers hanging about their doors.”

  He smiled as he said this; I was so glad of this sign of improving relations that I tittered rather foolishly in my effort to show my friendliness. He turned his back on me and in a few moments reappeared out of the shed with the load of honey.

  “Well, that’s done,” I thought. “Somehow I shall have to find some other supply, or cure myself of the taste. For I don’t think I can face another visit like this.” But I spoke to myself before I was out of the wood.

  As he came toward me he said coolly, “Before you go, we can just step across to the stable, as we are down at this end of the garden. I’d like to show you the place, as you expressed an interest in the horse I once kept.”

  The excuse for showing me the place was so palpably inadequate that I was filled with a queer panic. Yet when I thought of how I could reasonably get out of going the fifty yards he asked me to go and looking into the tumble-down shed, I could see no reason to refuse, as there was obviously no possible peril in going just there, beyond what I might be exposed to in getting straight back to the road. Granted that he had some reason other than he alleged for wanting to show me the place, it was equally clear that that reason could not be to do me any harm. He would hardly wish to injure the first customer of the trade he was trying to revive. I made some sort of assenting sound and turned to follow him as he had already started walking toward the stable. I did this a little more willingly as I was slightly reassured to have him walking in front of me, not I in front of him, and as his hands were full of the jars and combs it was clear he would be a little handicapped if he did intend to assault me.