by H. F. Heard
“It is really one of the simplest of the great soups,” said Mr. Mycroft in answer to some such remark of mine, “and, you are right, one of the best. The Russians are fine eaters. Primitive peoples often retain keenness in certain senses which we are too busy and hasty to have preserved. Taste and sound both are primitive. We have chosen sight, and so all our world is now hardly anything but a visual world, as far as we can make it. Our painting is better than Russian painting, in consequence. Their music and food are far richer. We have accuracy, neatness, tidiness. We treat smell as something disgusting, and it goes from us. ‘You smell’ is never praise in our mouths. Jacob’s praise of his son, ‘The smell of my son is even as the smell of the fruitful field,’ makes us smile with more than a flavor of disgust. Indeed, ‘you smell’ is most often a phrase of the deepest loathing.
“We have order, but lack copious creativeness. We are scentless and are becoming very restricted in our hearing. Accurate but without flair (notice that word, set, by the logical French, over against logical thought—smell in contradistinction from reason). Precise but lacking intuition. And the narrowing and starving of our apprehension goes on apace. Already color—the side of seeing which keeps us most in touch with the warmth of actual living, is being banished as not quite nice. ‘Loud,’ we call it when condemning it—again a revealing word. We borrow it from our hearing, and we are afraid, anaemically afraid, of any volume, any width and size in things. Nothing must be too robust; everything must be muted, lower. We pick our way, creep about. We must at all costs be refined, even to the extraction of every flavor and vitamin out of life’s raw juices. Plenty is vulgar. Well,” he laughed, “we can actually and at this moment do something to correct that shrinking error. What a good color, as well as taste, borsch has! Loud, of course, and of course you know, in topical illustration of our point, that the word ‘red’ in Russian is the word for color itself.”
So he prattled on. His obvious wish to distract and entertain me, and the excellent way his food was planned to match and support his talk, did give me quite remarkable relief. I think that was the first time that I realized that a wise, cool, calculating, and brave man can show (a fact which I had never imagined before) his coolness, courage, and considerateness by a gay and clattering amusingness and a wonderful and quite sincere interest in small and general things. I had never thought that a really powerful and strong and (I hate the word) good person could be gay and even foolish. I now began to suspect that only the biggest people, perhaps because they are at times as impersonal as life itself, can be merry and funny right at the moment of crisis, with their minds made up and their senses all alert as a marksman’s. They don’t even do it, I began to feel, even to cheer us, though perhaps that starts them. They do it because they are so free of everything but the actual moment. I don’t know how to put it, but I suppose they are as timeless as an animal; perhaps more so, as timeless as a plant or even a rock.
I don’t know, even less, why I have put all that down. I think it is to make clear how it was that my mood, which had been pretty bad, changed into a sense of security and gaiety almost like Mr. Mycroft’s. Surely that is remarkable enough to need some explaining?
“This luncheon,” rattled on the host, “is to be a salute to Russia: only red on the surface and at the dawn. Now we shall get down to the deeper Russia. Caviar, but not the cheap red. The sound black. This is also a pre-revolutionary way of serving it. I learned it when a Grand Duke of the ancien régime once wanted my company, hoping that together we might recover some rather indifferent pearls mislaid in a rather indiscreet way. That’s a long story for lunch. Anyhow, I brought back this way of enjoying the sturgeon’s black pearls. Cleopatra was right: most jewels would give us more real pleasure and do us in the end less harm if we could use them as crystallized cherries in a cocktail or a cordial, or as jujubes we could suck.
“Now for something more solid. These big Russian meat pies act as a pivot on which the meal turns, and they are wonderfully healthy if taken with their appropriate drink. This vodka was, I now recall, a present from that same Grand Duke who now, poor fellow, probably cleans boots in Paris or New York—so, I suppose, as I got the vodka, he must have got back the pearls. I hope they proved one of his liquid assets when the crash came. This is another sort of liquid which he certainly could not have got away with; so we need not mind using it ourselves. We will drink to his health, though, and to our success.”
I felt now we could not fail, and drank to a success of which I was already unquestionably sure, though even that surety grew stronger as the warming stuff went through my veins. There followed a wonderful sweet: all of cream and almonds and honey. To a man as fond of sugar as myself it closed a banquet perfectly.
Chapter VIII
WASP STRIKES SPIDER
As we sat over our coffee, I therefore experienced no shock when Mr. Mycroft; without any change of his bright and almost careless tone, remarked, as though we had been discussing it all through lunch, “We’ll pay that second visit to Heregrove this afternoon. The morning’s work went perfectly—even quicker and better than I had dared to hope. Just come into the laboratory, and I’ll be able to show you everything and how ready we are now to finish off this troublesome little matter.”
One side of me knew that he was talking about a desperate and even illegal adventure. But that side was simply timid, calculating, bloodless reason. He had put his own mood into my blood, and that was surging about in a state of merriment which actually made (I must record it) the word adventure, to me, Sydney Silchester, have almost a ring of attractiveness in it, instead of the very warning sound which I have always connected with such a noun.
Mr. Mycroft closed the laboratory door, drew out a chair, cleared it of books, offered it to me, and himself perched, like a powerful bird, on the edge of the bench. Swinging round, he picked up a corked phial, drew the cork carefully and handed it to me. It contained, I should say, a egg-spoonful of liquid—quite clear but oily.
“Smell that,” he requested.
I expected a shock to my nose and only sniffed as lightly as possible. I saw him smile, and so put it right under one nostril; then I drew a deep breath and finally almost touched the end of my nose on the test-tube’s rim. Still I could smell nothing.
“Perhaps it’s the vodka, or the garlic in the pie that has spoiled for the present my sense of smell,” I said, a little apologetically, for though, or perhaps because, I hate all stenches, I rather pride myself on having a keen appreciation of scent.
He smiled back.
“I had noticed that you have an uncommonly lively olfactory sense. When we first came in here on your pristine visit you didn’t like the laboratory smell, for you began to breathe through your mouth, though you made no effort to clear your nose, which you would have done had it been simply a little turbinal congestion which was temporarily troubling you. Then, when we went into the library, almost unconsciously, as we passed, in coming out, those Turgeniev novels bound in Russian leather—another reminder of my ducal devoirs—you could not resist just touching them and carrying your fingers immediately to your nose to relish the faint perfume.”
“Then why—” I said.
“Because,” he cut in, “there isn’t any! That is just the point of my test. This stuff, I tried out on you. You have an uncommonly keen nose and you—scent is very ‘suggestible’—expected to be able to detect, expected to be shocked by the strength of, a very rank odor. And you notice nothing. Try again, and don’t touch the rim.”
I snuffed until I must have vacuum-cleaned that glass, but not a ghost of a perfume rose to me.
“What does this mean?” I asked.
“It means,” he encouragingly, if rather cryptically, remarked, “that we are far safer than anyone would have imagined that we could be. We have something amounting to the cap of invisibility.”
“But what is it?” I asked again.
“Well,” he said, “as it happens, it is that brown, pungent, s
o-called disinfectant, with which both you and I have been in touch.”
“It isn’t,” I blurted out, “or, if it is, it has had taken out of it all the particular smell which made the original so dangerous.”
“To us, yes, and that’s half the battle: that’s the defense, the parry. Your keen nose catches nothing. Mine isn’t blunted. I have tried to keep my fivefold endowment sharp on every point of life’s sacred pentagram. And scent, like taste, often outstays the present approved senses such as sight and hearing—on which our unbalanced age puts nearly all its weight. I, too, can smell nothing.”
“But is there anything else to the stuff?” I prompted.
“We can’t judge,” he began.
“Then what’s the use?” I exclaimed.
Having made up my mind to adventure, having thrown caution to the winds and with my courage seeming now unshakable, I experienced a sudden sense of impatience at all this caution and dawdling. But he cut me short.
“I didn’t ask you in here simply to confirm my strong feeling that this essence is scentless. You must see that it is positive as well as negative.”
He corked it carefully again, put the phial in the rack, anointed cork and glass with what my nose told me was his triple off-scent-thrower, the valerian, citronella, aniseed mixture. Next he told me to wash my hands as he washed his at the sink and then dabbed our fingers with surgical alcohol, rubbed them hard, and gave them also their anointing. That done, he went over to the other side of the room where there were some small drawers, their fronts covered with fine wire mesh, pulled out one, picked up a forceps, slipped back a trap, and brought out the forceps with a bee held by the wings.
“I captured it yesterday, in the early morning, before your Alice called for me. A few pirates were reconnoitering and a small squadron swooped. They’ll never leave us alone, or any bees, as long as they are alive. I stunned them with sound, as you know, and picked up the few who actually fell on the lawn. They are now all dead except this one, though I gave them fine quarters and plenty of food. That, of course, is another mystery of the hive; it is what makes one of the greatest French apiarists say that the bee is not an individual, but only a loose, floating cell of that largely invisible organism or ‘field’ which we call the hive and of which we are able to perceive only its material core—the honeycomb and the queen.
“Certainly they will not live if kept from their swarm; and these are no exception. In fact, like most products of fancy breeding, they are evidently in this respect, as in others, more highly strung, more hysterical.”
While he spoke he carefully carried the pinioned bee across the room. It, too, was obviously on the verge of death. Its legs moved slowly as if tangled in some invisible web. The antennae drooped. The bright, many-faceted eye already looked dulled. Mr. Mycroft put it down on the bench. It nearly fell over on its side, and then recovered itself; it began to crawl laboriously, blindly ahead. But it had to stop, out of what was obviously sheer exhaustion.
“Yes, its minute, invisible pipe-line to its mysterious source of its general life is nearly severed,” he said, looking at it.
“It will be dead in a few minutes,” I concurred.
“Still,” he said, “we are taking no risks,” and, rather unnecessarily, I thought, he spent a moment in securing the wings, by slipping with a fine brush a drop of spirit-gum under each wing and so sticking the wing to the body.
So moribund was the insect that it did not even buzz nor seem to feel that its wings were now glued tightly to its back. Mr. Mycroft waited until the gum had set. The bee remained still. Indeed, the only sign of life was that it did not roll over. I was watching it with considerable curiosity and carefulness, so that I did not see what Mr. Mycroft was doing. What I did see was that suddenly, for no apparent reason, the dying bee literally sprang to life. It was as though an electric shock had struck it. Perhaps no electric current could so have galvanized it. The whole small body seemed to swell, the drooping antennae writhed like tiny snakes. A vibration of such intense energy went through it that the wings tore themselves free from their sealing, leaving the veined, transparent vans still stuck to the back. The stumps whirred wildly. Luckily for us, the possessed mite could not rise. The frantic tremor pulsed through it again. The body curled over on itself in a paroxysm of violence, and it was dead. The body still remained upright and humped as it had died.
I looked up. With rubber stalls on both index fingers and thumbs, Mr. Mycroft was corking the phial again.
“Why doesn’t it fall over?” was all I could find to say.
He answered me by picking up the forceps again and taking hold of the dead bee. It required quite a considerable pull, however, to raise the body from the bench. When it came away, there, quite clearly, was the long murderous sting torn from the body and left deeply buried in the hard-wood.
“The master passion strong in death,” he remarked, dropping the curled-up little husk into the ash-bin under the bench. With his free forceps picking out the sting from the wood, he dropped it into a small crucible glowing red-hot above a bunsen flame.
“One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning,” he continued, “and demonstration is always necessary. We both now know beyond any doubt that in that test-tube we have something which is precisely what we must have—a thing the essential nature of which is quite impossible to be perceived by us, while to the particular bee which we have to circumvent, it is as flagrant as a cup of vitriol.”
“And now?” I said.
I realized that the time had come when we must go ahead, apply our knowledge and free ourselves and the world of a deadly pest. I knew that by an hour or so of resolute and obedient action I should somehow be delivered from a living nightmare and be able once again to go back to my quiet, secure, happy life, into the steady sunshine from under this hideous cloud. I felt also a curious sense of assurance, which the demonstration had at least given me reason for—the feeling, I suppose, that a hunter, concealed in a tree and armed with the latest sporting rifle, must experience when, all unconscious that it is covered, a man-eater strolls into perfect range. I felt that our enemy was as powerful, as malignant, and as stupid in his vain ignorance of what he was up against, as a tiger. So it was not any longer timidity which made me hesitate.
I was hunting for words, though, when Mr. Mycroft, who had been with great care drawing the clear liquid out of the test-tube by means of a pipette-nosed flask, his task finished and test-tube and flask shut into a hermetically sealed drawer, looked up at me, remarking, “The chemical interest of this experiment (and, I own, that has been quite absorbing in its way) has not made me forget that this problem, though now solved materially, remains morally a very grave one.”
So saying, he went across the room, throwing wide the window as he passed, and opened one of the wire-covered drawers at the room’s end. A dozen or so bees flew out. I ducked, but they made straight for the window. Looking out, I saw them swoop toward and enter one of the hives on the lawn.
“They are glad to get home,” he said, looking after them. “I hate distressing them, blind and obsessed as all bees are, imprisoned in their fossilized dream of instinctive service to the hive. Perhaps I need hardly tell you that time and again while I was making this extract—eliminating the coarse essential oils, which alone our crude olfactory nerve-ends can pick up; finding the actual essence, partly by help of that odd article and its tables and partly by testing out my various refinings—by using that small caged party of my own placid bees as tasters, or smellers, by watching the way they first reacted and then, as the brew became specific they became almost unaware, when the stuff, then crystal clear, brought near the pirates’ detention drawer, made them nearly beat themselves to death against their wire-gauze bars—all that time the moral problem hung like a vast cloud on the horizon of my thought. Then, as the material problem was completely cleared out of the way, I turned on this other, and, to me, greater problem and found my mind as clear, as made up, an
d as convinced of its essential correctness as I am that the essence we hold is the stuff we need to fulfill our purpose.”
“What’s your solution?” I asked. I was myself so puzzled that I was really willing to take advice and act on it.
“I see,” he said, looking at me, “you are kind enough now to trust me, so I am going to ask you one more favor.”
I must have registered some dismay, for he quickly added, “It is a very small one and between ourselves.”
He’s going to seal me to secrecy, I thought. Well, we are certainly in the same boat. I had told him I should be silent. I would certainly promise again. Even if I were an inveterate gossip, this was the one subject for which my silence could be trusted.
I was, therefore, surprised when he said, “I am going to ask you to trust me enough not to ask as yet how I have solved the moral problem, but to adopt my solution. It will, I believe, help the difficult and still quite sufficiently dangerous parts we have both to play if the man whom we have to try cannot see any signs, however involuntary, of collusion between us. I have to convince him again, after having shaken him badly, that I am what he still on the whole believes me to be, so that he will dismiss me as only a possible and peculiarly defenseless victim.”
Well, it was a relief to follow, not to have to make up one’s mind, to know that here was an authority who would accept the responsibility both for the material arrangements and the moral consequences. Perhaps I was too sanguine, too suggestible. Certainly my mood of physical readiness and mental acquiescence was not normal. I learned that later. It is, I think, a point of considerable importance, for it makes me far less responsible should any trouble arise in the future.
All the while he was talking, Mr. Mycroft was making preparations with a definiteness and a precision which, I must say, kept my sense of assurance from waning; for he evidently foresaw his moves (whatever these might be) as clearly as a chess player of champion rank sees, as the end-game begins, the exact positions his pieces will take up to bring about the checkmate. There was nothing unexpected in the flasks being taken out of its drawer now that all the bees were gone and the window was up again. He wiped the nozzle of the pipette duct with spirits, fitted its small cap on it tightly, and then slipped it into his pocket. The next move, however, was puzzling. He went to his filing shelves and collected from a number of periodicals a couple or so of loose pages, placing these in a drawer near the window. Then he looked at his watch.
