She pointed into a heavily-timbered room. There were little low gate tables and children’s chairs. A doll’s house, its hooked front half open, faced a great dappled rocking-horse, from whose padded saddle it was but a child’s scramble to the broad window-seat overlooking the lawn. A toy gun lay in a corner beside a gilt wooden cannon.
‘Surely they’ve only just gone,’ I whispered. In the failing light a door creaked cautiously. I heard the rustle of a frock and the patter of feet – quick feet through a room beyond.
‘I heard that,’ she cried triumphantly. ‘Did you? Children, oh, children! Where are you?’
The voice filled the walls that held it lovingly to the last perfect note, but there came no answering shout such as I had heard in the garden. We hurried on from room to oak-floored room; up a step here, down three steps there; among a maze of passages; always mocked by our quarry. One might as well have tried to work an unstopped warren with a single ferret. There were bolt-holes innumerable – recesses in walls, embrasures of deep slitten windows now darkened, whence they could start up behind us; and abandoned fireplaces, six feet deep in the masonry, as well as the tangle of communicating doors. Above all, they had the twilight for their helper in our game. I had caught one or two joyous chuckles of evasion, and once or twice had seen the silhouette of a child’s frock against some darkening window at the end of a passage; but we returned empty-handed to the gallery, just as a middle-aged woman was setting a lamp in its niche.
‘No, I haven’t seen her either this evening, Miss Florence,’ I heard her say, ‘but that Turpin he says he wants to see you about his shed.’
‘Oh, Mr Turpin must want to see me very badly. Tell him to come to the hall, Mrs Madden.’
I looked down into the hall whose only light was the dulled fire, and deep in the shadow I saw them at last. They must have slipped down while we were in the passages, and now thought themselves perfectly hidden behind an old gilt leather screen. By child’s law, my fruitless chase was as good as an introduction, but since I had taken so much trouble I resolved to force them to come forward later by the simple trick, which children detest, of pretending not to notice them. They lay close, in a little huddle, no more than shadows except when a quick flame betrayed an outline.
‘And now we’ll have some tea,’ she said. ‘I believe I ought to have offered it you at first, but one doesn’t arrive at manners somehow when one lives alone and is considered – h’m – peculiar.’ Then with very pretty scorn, ‘Would you like a lamp to see to eat by?’
‘The firelight’s much pleasanter, I think.’ We descended into that delicious gloom and Madden brought tea.
I took my chair in the direction of the screen ready to surprise or be surprised as the game should go, and at her permission, since a hearth is always sacred, bent forward to play with the fire.
‘Where do you get these beautiful short faggots from?’ I asked idly. ‘Why, they are tallies!’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘As I can’t read or write I’m driven back on the early English tally for my accounts. Give me one and I’ll tell you what it meant.’
I passed her an unburned hazel-tally, about a foot long, and she ran her thumb down the nicks.
‘This is the milk-record for the home farm for the month of April last year, in gallons,’ said she. ‘I don’t know what I should have done without tallies. An old forester of mine taught me the system. It’s out of date now for everyone else; but my tenants respect it. One of them’s coming now to see me. Oh, it doesn’t matter. He has no business here out of office hours. He’s a greedy, ignorant man – very greedy or – he wouldn’t come here after dark.’
‘Have you much land then?’
‘Only a couple of hundred acres in hand, thank goodness. The other six hundred are nearly all let to folk who knew my folk before me, but this Turpin is quite a new man – and a highway robber.’
‘But are you sure I shan’t be –?’
‘Certainly not. You have the right. He hasn’t any children.’
‘Ah, the children!’ I said, and slid my low chair back till it nearly touched the screen that hid them. ‘I wonder whether they’ll come out for me.’
There was a murmur of voices – Madden’s and a deeper note – at the low, dark side door, and a ginger-headed, canvas-gaitered giant of the unmistakable tenant-farmer type stumbled or was pushed in.
‘Come to the fire, Mr Turpin,’ she said.
‘If – if you please, Miss, I’ll – I’ll be quite as well by the door.’ He clung to the latch as he spoke like a frightened child. Of a sudden I realized that he was in the grip of some almost overpowering fear.
‘Well?’
‘About that new shed for the young stock – that was all. These first autumn storms settin’ in… but I’ll come again, Miss.’ His teeth did not chatter much more than the door latch.
‘I think not,’ she answered levelly. ‘The new shed – m’m. What did my agent write you on the 15th?’
‘I – fancied p’raps that if I came to see you – ma – man to man like, Miss. But –’
His eyes rolled into every corner of the room wide with horror. He half opened the door through which he had entered, but I noticed it shut again – from without and firmly.
‘He wrote what I told him,’ she went on. ‘You are overstocked already. Dunnett’s Farm never carried more than fifty bullocks – even in Mr Wright’s time. And he used cake. You’ve sixty-seven and you don’t cake. You’ve broken the lease in that respect. You’re dragging the heart out of the farm.’
‘I’m – I’m getting some minerals – superphosphates – next week. I’ve as good as ordered a truck-load already. I’ll go down to the station tomorrow about ’em. Then I can come and see you man to man like, Miss, in the daylight… That gentleman’s not going away, is he?’ He almost shrieked.
I had only slid the chair a little farther back, reaching behind me to tap on the leather of the screen, but he jumped like a rat.
‘No. Please attend to me, Mr Turpin.’ She turned in her chair and faced him with his back to the door. It was an old and sordid little piece of scheming that she forced from him – his plea for the new cow-shed at his landlady’s expense, that he might with the covered manure pay his next year’s rent out of the valuation after, as she made clear, he had bled the enriched pastures to the bone. I could not but admire the intensity of his greed, when I saw him out-facing for its sake whatever terror it was that ran wet on his forehead.
I ceased to tap the leather – was, indeed, calculating the cost of the shed – when I felt my relaxed hands taken and turned softly between the soft hands of a child. So at last I had triumphed. In a moment I would turn and acquaint myself with those quick-footed wanderers…
The little brushing kiss fell in the centre of my palm – as a gift on which the fingers were, once, expected to close: as the all-faithful half-reproachful signal of a waiting child not used to neglect even when grown-ups were busiest – a fragment of the mute code devised very long ago.
Then I knew. And it was as though I had known from the first day when I looked across the lawn at the high window.
I heard the door shut. The woman turned to me in silence, and I felt that she knew.
What time passed after this I cannot say. I was roused by the fall of a log, and mechanically rose to put it back. Then I returned to my place in the chair very close to the screen.
‘Now you understand,’ she whispered, across the packed shadows.
‘Yes, I understand – now. Thank you.’
‘I – I only hear them.’ She bowed her head in her hands. ‘I have no right, you know – no other right. I have neither borne nor lost – neither borne nor lost!’
‘Be very glad then,’ said I, for my soul was torn open within me.
‘Forgive me!’
She was still, and I went back to my sorrow and my joy.
‘It was because I loved them so,’ she said at last, brokenly. ‘That was why it was, ev
en from the first – even before I knew that they – they were all I should ever have. And I loved them so!’
She stretched out her arms to the shadows and the shadows within the shadow.
‘They came because I loved them – because I needed them. I – I must have made them come. Was that wrong, think you?’
‘No – no.’
‘I – I grant you that the toys and – and all that sort of thing were nonsense, but – but I used to so hate empty rooms myself when I was little.’ She pointed to the gallery. ‘And the passages all empty… And how could I ever bear the garden door shut? Suppose – ‘
‘Don’t! For pity’s sake, don’t!’ I cried. The twilight had brought a cold rain with gusty squalls that plucked at the leaded windows.
‘And the same thing with keeping the fire in all night. I don’t think it so foolish – do you?’
I looked at the broad brick hearth, saw, through tears I believe, that there was no unpassable iron 8 on or near it, and bowed my head.
‘I did all that and lots of other things – just to make believe. Then they came. I heard them, but I didn’t know that they were not mine by right till Mrs Madden told me – ‘
‘The butler’s wife? What?’
‘One of them – I heard – she saw. And knew. Hers! Not for me. I didn’t know at first. Perhaps I was jealous. Afterwards, I began to understand that it was only because I loved them, not because –… Oh, you must bear or lose,’ she said piteously. ‘There is no other way – and yet they love me. They must! Don’t they?’
There was no sound in the room except the lapping voices of the fire, but we two listened intently, and she at least took comfort from what she heard. She recovered herself and half rose. I sat still in my chair by the screen.
‘Don’t think me a wretch to whine about myself like this, but – but I’m all in the dark, you know, and you can see.’
In truth I could see, and my vision confirmed me in my resolve, though that was like the very parting of spirit and flesh. Yet a little longer I would stay since it was the last time.
‘You think it is wrong, then?’ she cried sharply, though I had said nothing.
‘Not for you. A thousand times no. For you it is right… I am grateful to you beyond words. For me it would be wrong. For me only…’
‘Why?’ she said, but passed her hand before her face as she had done at our second meeting in the wood. ‘Oh, I see,’ she went on simply as a child. ‘For you it would be wrong.’ Then with a little indrawn laugh, ‘and, d’you remember, I called you lucky – once – at first. You who must never come here again!’
She left me to sit a little longer by the screen, and I heard the sound of her feet die out along the gallery above.
The Mother Hive1
If the stock had not been old and overcrowded, the Wax-moth would never have entered; but where bees are too thick on the comb there must be sickness or parasites. The heat of the hive had risen with the June honey-flow, and though the fanners worked, until their wings ached, to keep people cool, everybody suffered.
A young bee crawled up the greasy, trampled alighting-board. ‘Excuse me,’ she began, ‘but it’s my first honey-flight. Could you kindly tell me if this is my –’
‘– own hive?’ the Guard snapped. ‘Yes! Buzz in, and be foul-brooded to you! Next!’
‘Shame!’ cried half-a-dozen old workers with worn wings and nerves, and there was a scuffle and a hum.
The little grey Wax-moth, pressed close in a crack in the alighting-board, had waited this chance all day. She scuttled in like a ghost, and, knowing the senior bees would turn her out at once, dodged into a brood-frame, where youngsters who had not yet seen the winds blow or the flowers nod discussed life. Here she was safe, for young bees will tolerate any sort of stranger. Behind her came the bee who had been slanged by the Guard.
‘What is the world like, Melissa?’2 said a companion.
‘Cruel! I brought in a full load of first-class stuff, and the Guard told me to go and be foul-brooded!’ She sat down in the cool draught across the combs.
‘If you’d only heard,’ said the Wax-moth silkily, ‘the insolence of the Guard’s tone when she cursed our sister! It aroused the Entire Community.’ She laid an egg. She had stolen in for that purpose.
‘There was a bit of a fuss on the Gate,’ Melissa chuckled. ‘You were there, Miss –?’ She did not know how to address the slim stranger.
‘Don’t call me “Miss”. I’m a sister to all in affliction – just a working-sister. My heart bled for you beneath your burden.’ The Wax-moth caressed Melissa with her soft feelers and laid another egg.
‘You mustn’t lay here,’ cried Melissa. ‘You aren’t a Queen.’
‘My dear child, I give you my most solemn word of honour those aren’t eggs. Those are my principles, and I am ready to die for them.’ She raised her voice a little above the rustle and tramp round her. ‘If you’d like to kill me, pray do.’
‘Don’t be unkind, Melissa,’ said a young bee, impressed by the chaste folds of the Wax-moth’s wing, which hid her ceaseless egg-dropping.
‘I haven’t done anything,’ Melissa answered. ‘She’s doing it all.’
‘Ah, don’t let your conscience reproach you later, but when you’ve killed me, write me, at least, as one that loved her fellow-workers.’
Laying at every sob, the Wax-moth backed into a crowd of young bees, and left Melissa bewildered and annoyed. So she lifted up her little voice in the darkness and cried, ‘Stores!’ till a gang of cell-fillers hailed her, and she left her load with them.
‘I’m afraid I foul-brooded you just now,’ said a voice over her shoulder. ‘I’d been on the Gate for three hours, and one would foul-brood the Queen herself after that. No offence meant.’
‘None taken,’ Melissa answered cheerily. ‘I shall be on guard myself, some day. What’s next to do?’
‘There’s a rumour of Death’s Head Moths about. Send a gang of youngsters to the Gate, and tell them to narrow it in with a couple of stout scrap-wax pillars. It’ll make the Hive hot, but we can’t have Death’s Headers in the middle of our honey-flow.’
‘My Only Wings! I should think not!’ Melissa had all a sound bee’s hereditary hatred against the big, squeaking, feathery Thief of the Hives. ‘Tumble out!’ she called across the youngsters’ quarters. ‘All you who aren’t feeding babies, show a leg. Scrap-wax pillars for the Ga-ate!’ She chanted the order at length.
‘That’s nonsense,’ a downy, day-old bee answered. ‘In the first place, I never heard of a Death’s Header coming into a hive. People don’t do such things. In the second, building pillars to keep ’em out is purely a Cypriote trick, unworthy of British bees. In the third, if you trust a Death’s Head, he will trust you. Pillar-building shows lack of confidence. Our dear sister in grey says so.’
‘Yes. Pillars are un-English and provocative, and a waste of wax that is needed for higher and more practical ends,’ said the Wax-moth from an empty store-cell.
‘The safety of the Hive is the highest thing I’ve ever heard of. You mustn’t teach us to refuse work,’ Melissa began.
‘You misunderstand me as usual, love. Work’s the essence of life; but to expend precious unreturning vitality and real labour against imaginary danger, that is heartbreakingly absurd! If I can only teach a – a little toleration – a little ordinary kindness here towards that absurd old bogey you call the Death’s Header, I shan’t have lived in vain.’
‘She hasn’t lived in vain, the darling!’ cried twenty bees together. ‘You should see her saintly life, Melissa! She just devotes herself to spreading her principles, and – and – she looks lovely!’
An old, baldish bee came up the comb.
‘Pillar-workers for the Gate! Get out and chew scraps. Buzz off!’ she said. The Wax-moth slipped aside.
The young bees trooped down the frame, whispering.
‘What’s the matter with ’em?’ said the oldster. ‘Why do they call each
other “ducky” and “darling”. Must be the weather.’ She sniffed suspiciously. ‘Horrid stuffy smell here. Like stale quilts. Not Wax-moth, I hope, Melissa?’
‘Not to my knowledge,’ said Melissa, who, of course, only knew the Wax-moth as a lady with principles, and had never thought to report her presence. She had always imagined Wax-moths to be like blood-red dragon-flies.
‘You had better fan out this corner for a little,’ said the old bee and passed on. Melissa dropped her head at once, took firm hold with her fore-feet, and fanned obediently at the regulation stroke – three hundred beats to the second. Fanning tries a bee’s temper, because she must always keep in the same place where she never seems to be doing any good, and, all the while, she is wearing out her only wings. When a bee cannot fly, a bee must not live; and a bee knows it. The Wax-moth crept forth, and caressed Melissa again.
‘I see,’ she murmured, ‘that at heart you are one of Us.’
‘I work with the Hive,’ Melissa answered briefly.
‘It’s the same thing. We and the Hive are one.’
‘Then why are your feelers different from ours? Don’t cuddle so.’
‘Don’t be provincial, carissima.3 You can’t have all the world alike – yet.’
‘But why do you lay eggs?’ Melissa insisted. ‘You lay ’em like a Queen – only you drop them in patches all over the place. I’ve watched you.’
‘Ah, Brighteyes, so you’ve pierced my little subterfuge? Yes, they are eggs. By and by they’ll spread our principles. Aren’t you glad?’
‘You gave me your most solemn word of honour that they were not eggs.’
‘That was my little subterfuge, dearest – for the sake of the Cause. Now I must reach the young.’ The Wax-moth tripped towards the fourth brood-frame where the young bees were busy feeding the babies.
It takes some time for a sound bee to realize a malignant and continuous lie. ‘She’s very sweet and feathery,’ was all that Melissa thought, ‘but her talk sounds like ivy honey tastes. I’d better get to my field-work again.’