"You should have thought before!" cried the sound bees., "Stay and see the dawn of your New Day."
They reached the Gate at last over the soft bodies of many to whom they had ministered.
"On! Out! Up!" roared Melissa in the Princess's ear. "For the Hive's sake! To the Old Oak!"
The Princess left the alighting-board, circled once, flung herself at the lowest branch of the Old Oak, and her little loyal swarm--you could have covered it with a pint mug--followed, hooked, and hung.
"Hold close!" Melissa gasped. "The old legends have come true! Look!"
The Hive was half hidden by smoke, and Figures moved through the smoke. They heard a frame crack stickily, saw it heaved high and twirled round between enormous hands--a blotched, bulged, and perished horror of grey wax, corrupt brood, and small drone-cells, all covered with crawling Oddities, strange to the sun.
"Why, this isn't a hive! This is a museum of curiosities," said the Voice behind the Veil. It was only the Bee Master talking to his son.
"Can you blame 'em, father?" said a second voice. "It's rotten with Wax-moth. See here!"
Another frame came up. A finger poked through it, and it broke away in rustling flakes of ashy rottenness.
"Number Four Frame! That was your mother's pet comb once," whispered Melissa to the Princess. "Many's the good egg I've watched her lay there."
"Aren't you confusing pod hoc with propter hoc?" said the Bee Master. "Wax-moth only succeed when weak bees let them in." A third frame crackled and rose into the light. "All this is full of laying workers' brood. That never happens till the stock's weakened. Phew!"
He beat it on his knee like a tambourine, and it also crumbled to pieces.
The little swarm shivered as they watched the dwarf drone-grubs squirm feebly on the grass. Many sound bees had nursed on that frame, well knowing their work was useless; but the actual sight of even useless work destroyed disheartens a good worker.
"No, they have some recuperative power left," said the second voice. "Here's a Queen cell!"
"But it's tucked away among--What on earth has come to the little wretches? They seem to have lost the instinct of cell-building." The father held up the frame where the bees had experimented in circular cell-work. It looked like the pitted head, of a decaying toadstool.
"Not altogether," the son corrected. "There's one line, at least, of perfectly good cells."
"My work," said Sacharissa to herself. "I'm glad Man does me justice before--"
That frame, too, was smashed out and thrown atop of the others and the foul earwiggy quilts.
As frame after frame followed it, the swarm beheld the upheaval, exposure, and destruction of all that had been well or ill done in every cranny of their Hive for generations past. There was black comb so old that they had forgotten where it hung; orange, buff, and ochre-varnished store-comb, built as bees were used to build before the days of artificial foundations; and there was a little, white, frail new work. There were sheets on sheets of level, even brood-comb that had held in its time unnumbered thousands of unnamed workers; patches of obsolete drone-comb, broad and high-shouldered, showing to what marks the male grub was expected to grow; and two-inch deep honey-magazines, empty, but still magnificent, the whole gummed and glued into twisted scrap-work, awry on the wires; half-cells, beginnings abandoned, or grandiose, weak-walled, composite cells pieced out with rubbish and capped with dirt.
Good or bad, every inch of it was so riddled by the tunnels of the Wax-moth that it broke in clouds of dust as it was flung on the heap.
"Oh, see!" cried Sacharissa. "The Great Burning that Our Queen foretold. Who can bear to look?"
A flame crawled up the pile of rubbish, and they smelt singeing wax.
The Figures stooped, lifted the Hive and shook it upside down over the pyre. A cascade of Oddities, chips of broken comb, scale, fluff, and grubs slid out, crackled, sizzled, popped a little, and then the flames roared up and consumed all that fuel.
"We must disinfect," said a Voice. "Get me a sulphur-candle, please."
The shell of the Hive was returned to its place, a light was set in its sticky emptiness, tier by tier the Figures built it up, closed the entrance, and went away. The swarm watched the light leaking through the cracks all the long night. At dawn one Wax-moth came by, fluttering impudently.
"There has been a miscalculation about the New Day, my dears," she began; "one can't expect people to be perfect all at once. That was our mistake."
"No, the mistake was entirely ours," said the Princess.
"Pardon me," said the Wax-moth. "When you think of the enormous upheaval--call it good or bad--which our influence brought about, you will admit that we, and we alone--"
"You?" said the Princess. "Our stock was not strong. So you came--as any other disease might have come. Hang close, all my people."
When the sun rose, Veiled Figures came down, and saw their swarm at the bough's end waiting patiently within sight of the old Hive--a handful, but prepared to go on.
THE BEES AND THE FLIES A FARMER of the Augustan age Perused in Virgil's golden page, The story of the secret won From Proteus by Cyrene's son How the dank sea-god sowed the swain Means to restore his hives again More briefly, how a slaughtered bull Breeds honey by the bellyful. The egregious rustic put to death A bull by stopping of its breath: Disposed the carcass in a shed With fragrant herbs and branches spread. And, having thus performed the charm, Sat down to wait the promised swarm. Nor waited long . . . The God of Day Impartial, quickening with his ray Evil and good alike, beheld The carcass--and the carcass swelled! Big with new birth the belly heaves Beneath its screen of scented leaves; Past any doubt, the bull conceives! The farmer bids men bring more hives To house the profit that arrives; Prepares on pan, and key and kettle, Sweet music that shall make 'em settle; But when to crown the work he goes, Gods! What a stink salutes his nose! Where are the honest toilers? Where The gravid mistress of their care? A busy scene, indeed, he sees, But not a sign or sound of bees. Worms of the riper grave unhid By any kindly coffin lid, Obscene and shameless to the light, Seethe in insatiate appetite, Through putrid offal; while above The hissing blow-fly seeks his love, Whose offspring, supping where they supt, Consume corruption twice corrupt.
WITH THE NIGHT MAIL
A STORY OF 2000 A. D.
(Together with extracts from the magazine in which it appeared)
A nine o'clock of a gusty winter night I stood on the lower stages of one of the G.P.O. outward mail towers. My purpose was a run to Quebec in "Postal Packet 162 or such other as may be appointed"; and the Postmaster-General himself countersigned the order. This talisman opened all doors, even those in the despatching-caisson at the foot of the tower, where they were delivering the sorted Continental mail. The bags lay packed close as herrings in the long grey underbodies which our G.P.O. still calls "coaches." Five such coaches were filled as I watched, and were shot up the guides to be locked on to their waiting packets three hundred feet nearer the stars.
From the despatching-caisson I was conducted by a courteous and wonderfully learned official Mr. L.L. Geary, Second Despatcher of the Western Route--to the Captains' Room (this wakes an echo of old romance), where the mail captains come on for their turn of duty. He introduces me to the captain of "162"--Captain Purnall, and his relief, Captain Hodgson. The one is small and dark; the other large and red; but each has the brooding sheathed glance characteristic of eagles and aeronauts. You can see it in the pictures of our racing professionals, from L.V. Rautsch to little Ada Warrleigh--that fathomless abstraction of eyes habitually turned through naked space.