by H. F. Heard
Mr. Mycroft was, as it happens, asking about honey. He had introduced himself and he had spoken with disarming frankness about his failure to keep bees himself. He supposed he hadn’t the knack and was too old now to learn. His only wish had been to keep himself in honey. He had no knowledge of the strange insects and confessed that he found it hard to understand their normal ways, let alone their crotchets, their likes and dislikes and their complaints, of which there seemed to be no end and each one more mysterious than the last. Then his young friend here had told him that he had an acquaintance up at this end of the village who had kept him supplied for a long while now with excellent honey.
“Perhaps it’s a breach of village etiquette for me to call. Each community has its rules, which the outsider must learn. So I persuaded Mr. Silchester to come along with me this afternoon.”
There was nothing very cunning in the opening, but it was delivered with an indefinable air, with that quiet, cheerful assurance which creates an atmosphere in which the other side simply has to accept your initiative and to believe at its face value what you say.
“Oh, come in, come in,” said Heregrove.
He was obviously having to give ground, as a man with a weaker wrist, poorer eye, and less skill has to yield ground to a more powerful fencer. I was surprised to find myself feeling that we were the attacking party, and Heregrove in danger of us, not we of him. We entered that dreary living room, and he made an effort, having landed us there, to get away.
“I’ll just go down and get you the honey. It’s at the bottom of the garden, as Mr. Silchester knows.”
That appeal to me, somehow, gave another fillip to my still rising courage. I certainly now should not smell of fear as long as I realized that our enemy, however consciously still unaware, was subconsciously so uneasy that he had to call me in to confirm his right to get unsuspected away from an old, effusive man and a dolt of a young one.
Mr. Mycroft, however, was as quick as a fencer taking an opening of his enemy’s guard.
“I spied your garden as we talked outside. I think, too, I noticed that you have some uncommon stripings on your tulips. I wish I knew as much of bees as I do about tulips. I will take a modest wager you have a very interesting mutation there. Perhaps chance aiding skill? The chromosome study of tulips, I confess, fascinates me.”
With his rapid conjuror’s patter, Mr. Mycroft gently, firmly irresistibly, forced his company on the retreating Heregrove. I followed, and so we three went down the garden path, up which I had last come so short a time before, little better than a fugitive and, as it happened, branded with the mark of death. When we reached the egregious bunch of late, mid-summer tulips—which, of course, I had never before noticed—Heregrove muttered something about knowing nothing about flowers, and indeed the flower beds fully confirmed him. But Mr. Mycroft would have none of this “false modesty,” as he rallyingly called it.
“Obviously, my dear sir, you are not one of those wearisome, prettysome cottage gardeners, but, whether by luck or no, here is a plant well worth an expert botanist’s interest. I can’t claim to be that, but I can claim to be able to recognize a remarkable sport when I see one.”
He bent, examined the plant, looked into the rather closely folded petals, at the anthers or stamens or whatever botanists call that sort of tonsil things which flowers have in their throats.
Then, suddenly, “But we are forgetting our honey,” he said, straightening himself up.
Heregrove had stopped, standing closely beside him. He was quite clearly taken in by his apparently bona fide enthusiasm and quite as clearly at a loss how to manage this lively old bore and keep him at the proper distance from places where his long nose might scent things less sweet and harmless than the faint, clean perfume of the tulip.
“The bees are apt to be a bit cross now; frayed nerves at the end of the season.” Heregrove tried to make a little joke of it. “You had better not come too near.”
I thought he glanced at me in a questioning way. The next moment he strode off to the little shed. Bees were coming and going in the air, just over our heads, as they went to and from the hives. But none paid any attention to us. The moment Heregrove had turned from us, however, my lively old companion was seized with another idea.
“Bless my soul,” he remarked, making off quickly across the garden, “if that isn’t purple Pileus growing by that stable door. Of course it’s not rare, but in this locality, any mycologist would be surprised. I must have a glance at it; perhaps a local variant.”
Heregrove had turned round with his hand on the latch of the honey shed, one foot already over the door sill. When he saw dear, old Mr. Mycroft skimming across the paddock something far more like terror than rage swept his face. I stood in between looking from one to the other.
“Mr. Mycroft,” he shouted, “come here!”
“Just a moment … Purple Pileus … Odd locality,” floated back over Mr. Mycroft’s shoulder.
Suddenly Heregrove, leaving the door of the shed open, bounded across the garden strip, passed me without a look, and started running toward Mr. Mycroft. I thought all was up—that he would kill both of us on the spot. I stood, of course, stock still. Action, it will now be clear, is not my role. I am quite a good observer, though, in spite of what Mr. Mycroft may think. I can see the whole of that scene as though I had a photograph of it lying before me now. Heregrove, as suddenly as he had begun to run, stopped and fell into a walk. That, I realized, must mean that he saw he would be too late. When he reached the stable door, Mr. Mycroft was coming out.
I heard his clear, vividly interested voice saying, “The spores have spread inside. The fungi are indeed the most interesting of all plant life. Of course, though, your tulip is the thing here. A high spot in my day. Thank you, indeed. Oh, you haven’t yet the honey. You shouldn’t have troubled to run over when I called, I’m always so excited by any plant discovery I make. Experts are too often like that, on their own subjects. It makes them bores, I fear. Ordinary, sane men can’t understand all their enthusiasm—seems affected, indeed, almost insincere.”
I could see Heregrove struggling with himself, but he had no chance of doing anything. Mr. Mycroft’s ascendancy, the interpretation of our visit which Mr. Mycroft had forced on Heregrove’s mind as the obvious truth, indicated precisely the same behavior which his own caution urged. He could not afford, I now saw, an outburst in front of two witnesses. I thought he would burst, though. As we parted, he was scarcely master of his voice, when, with the honey parceled up, we turned to go. He muttered the conventional courtesies and I could see the vein on the side of his forehead pulsing with its heightened pressure.
Out of earshot, Mr. Mycroft’s first remark was not at all cheering, however.
“We shall have to call again.”
“Couldn’t you go alone, now you know him?” was my rather mean but really quite natural reply.
I was ashamed when I had said it and so quite a little relieved when, instead of taking me to task as he might, Mr. Mycroft’s answer was merely, “The benzedrine hydrate is wearing off. You’ll feel a bit let down now. As soon as we have buried this very dubious purchase in your garden, you had better turn in.”
I felt even more ashamed when we went into the brick-walled part of my garden at the back of the house and Mr. Mycroft, with an energy I really could not command, proceeded to dig wide and deep the cursed honey’s grave. When I wanted to stop, thinking we really had dug enough, for digging always makes my back ache, all he said was, “I have owed my life too often to not skimping jobs, to start doing so now.”
At last, like bewitched gold, it was safe underground, and we were back in the sitting room, after washing in the kitchen.
“He’s puzzled, and a bit frightened,” Mr. Mycroft began. “But I’m puzzled, also, and if I depended only on the law to protect you and me, I’d be frightened too. There isn’t a case against him, though of course he’s as guilty as Judas and as dangerous as a cornered lynx.”
> “Didn’t you get a clue in the stable?” I asked, almost irritably.
“A clue, yes,” he answered. “But a clue is not a conviction, and the sharper you are at getting clues, the surer you may be that a jury will not see the strength of the evidential chain.”
“But where are we, then?” I asked, with a growing sense of frustration.
“I’ll tell you all I know. It may be more than you noticed.”
“Of course it is,” I said wearily. He bowed.
“Well, I hope you’ll soon be comfortably asleep; but I must first clear your mind as to our present actual situation and our future action. First, I was determined to get into that house. Neither you nor perhaps Heregrove himself knew that that entry was forced. We walked in while talking and distracting him. If you keep on talking to a person who does not wish to talk, and meanwhile walk straight at him, as long as he thinks you are absorbed in what you are saying and aren’t aware that you are walking him down, he moves back, thinking only how to stop you talking and so bring you to a standstill. So Heregrove, in spite of himself, had actually to say ‘Come in.’ Once we were in, Heregrove’s next move, a fairly blind and unthought-out reaction, was to keep us from getting into the back premises, the outhouses, etc.
“The room itself was just worth the visit. In one corner I saw a familiar puce-colored piece, of paper. It is the cover (unmistakable to those who know it) of a queer foundation in the United States, which has much money, some brains, little judgment, and less method. It lives on the bequest of a millionaire who was abducted and held for ransom by some kidnapers, left nearly to die (and certainly to get fairly unhinged) by the official police, and finally was saved by a private detective whom I once knew. The detective’s reward was a small fee, the foundation of this institute (the founding of which he, as far as his own interests were concerned, unwisely opposed, for millionaires even when sane must found institutes, as medieval barons had to found chantries and as hens must lay eggs), and the right to receive, all his life, copies of all the Foundation’s publications.
“As I have said, I know that detective, and through him, I receive the periodical. The trust publishes research work for amateur detectives—a queer hobby, but more popular than you would suppose. And they have done some useful work—among a mountain of rubbish. As it happens, they were the first people to issue a description of the magnetized-dust test for fingerprints too faint to be picked up in any other way. They also published a very useful biochemical study of the animal ammonias. As we left the room I managed to see the number of the issue which he had. I will look it up when I get home, but I would take another wager that it is the issue which has that biochemical study in it.
“The next point, the tulip, was, of course, a bluff. His garden shows that he doesn’t know enough even to know that I am fooling him. Naturally, I know sufficient genetics to counter him if he should try to expose me. He knows something about animal genetics and neglects plant genetics—the typical specialist; only in this case he has one confining aim—to perfect a new way of killing. No doubt he now does think he has got a freak tulip, and, as it happens, all these striped tulips are due to an interesting derangement of the chromosomes, as Hall has shown. But I turned to the tulip because it allowed me to examine not it but Mr. Heregrove at close and unsuspected range. A man changes his coat when he works in a laboratory but not his trousers. If he works long enough—and if he has no one to take his clothes to the cleaners, and it is obvious Mr. Heregrove has not—his trousers will get marked. Heregrove’s trousers were within six inches of my eyes while I extolled that convenient but commonplace tulip, and I could see quite clearly a number of small stains and etches on the cloth which could be made by nothing but acids. So he makes his stuff himself. Next, I had to find out where.”
“That’s why you trotted off to the stable when he was almost in the shed?”
“Of course.”
“But why should not his hellish laboratory be in the house? Isn’t that more likely?”
“It is difficult to keep a horse in the house.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It was plain to me directly you told me about the stable. Don’t you know—we raised the matter before our visit to Heregrove, when we were discussing the smell of fear—that even amiable bees will often go mad if a sweating horse comes near them? You must never approach hives on horseback after a stiff gallop, unless you are looking for trouble. Heregrove’s little research was naturally on the biochemical ammonias of horses. In other words, he has been looking for an essence which, when in full strength, will have just that quality which most rouses bees. He has (to put it in harsh Anglo-Saxon) been distilling and quintessencing sweats, like a medieval warlock, with all the witch-doctor’s malignancy and far greater efficaciousness. His first simple experiment worked well enough to kill his wife walking in the garden. And now, like the first radio researchers, he is becoming ambitious to strengthen his transmission and to be able to make his messages travel over long distances. Your house is more than a mile away. It was just bad luck (or Destiny) that he didn’t—well, shall we say, get perfect transmission.”
“But you didn’t find anything in the stable?”
I wanted to get down to facts. Mr. Mycroft could not be kept sufficiently interested in the real issue, that I was in danger and must somehow be got out of it. The problem, I could see, was to him one of general interest and my fate was only one feature in it. That was a point of view which perhaps I must understand but with which even he could not expect me to sympathize. He looked up, for he had been following his own line of thought, with his eyes fixed on the ground, and I expect he had really quite forgotten about me as a human being.
“No,” he said, meditatively; “no, he has dismantled his laboratory. Not an uncareful man. I have known murderers as ingenious and far less careful—the two types do not necessarily go together. I could see where the bench and racks must have been. He was not lying to you when he said water was laid on in that stall. And after this visit of ours I am sure that a man who is as careful as that will take the precaution of clearing up again and even more thoroughly. And not only in the stable. The puce-covered periodical will go—would have gone already, but he was needing it right up to date and he did not expect we should get into the house, or if we did, that one of us would have such an out-of-the-way piece of knowledge as to be able to recognize that cover. All that remains, secreted somewhere, are a few small phials of a rather rank-smelling liquid marked ‘Disinfectant’; certainly not healthy for microbes and certainly not very lethal, even if very nauseating to man. What good could a prosecution make of those, even should they be found?”
“Why,” I shot in at this somewhat rhetorical question, for here I had direct experience he had not, “why, if the stuff was put on a piece of cloth and bees released near it, then you would see them go mad and bury their stings in it. Put a wretched rabbit in court with a smear of that stuff on its fur and it would be stung to death before the eyes of judge and jury! I can’t think of a more conclusive demonstration and a more damning proof.”
“You mistake our man,” he replied without showing any interest in my contribution. “He’s not so simple as that. In fact, I want you to realize that he is uncommonly clever, in his way—careful and cunning. No doubt he saw that was a way in which the noose might be slipped over his neck. I told you, at the beginning, that he bred special bees. True, he didn’t know about their hearing and their curious limitation and ability to be controlled thereby. But that is just like nearly every specialist. Because he knows so much about their smelling reaction, he overlooks their hearing. He bred a curiously fierce and poisonous bee. You might expect that psycho-physical linkage—after all, rage is a kind of poison, and, no doubt, venom was evolved gradually by animals which, both weak and vindictive, were literally and bodily embittered by their sense of wrong and age-long yearning for revenge. There is, you know, a bee in Australia which, because it has no serious enemies, has
yet to evolve a sting. The sting in all the bees and insects that we know is evolved from the ovipositor, the instrument first evolved just to insert their eggs into safe places. Venom is a late thing. There are, I gather, no poisonous snakes before the Miocene. It takes some considerable time and effort and brooding to be able to be as malignant as you wish. Nemo repente fuit turpissimus.”
“Yes, yes,” I had to break in. “But we are discussing how this man got his diabolical knowledge and skill which today is making at least one of us go hourly in peril of his life!”
Mr. Mycroft did not seem vexed by my interruption, which, after all, considering his ranging interests, was necessary.
“Yes,” he said,” I was just coming to that. For though you might expect him to be able to blend fierceness with actual venom and to increase them together, I must own that his next breeding effort was remarkable and one which I might even have been inclined, offhand, to say was practically impossible. He refines animal ammonia, especially horse ammonia, until he gets a peculiar essence which wildly maddens a bee, but only a particular breed and strain of bees—in fact, his own monsters. No doubt his brooding mind caught that clue from what is known about those rare, but now well-noted and observed, peculiar specific affinities between the olfactory sense of one particular species of insect and the scent of one single species of plant—the best-known of which cross-alliances of insect and plant is, of course, the Yucca flower and the Yucca moth. But I mustn’t say more tonight. You are dead tired.”
