A Taste for Honey (14 page)

“My metaphor was clumsy,” Mr. Mycroft apologized. “Of course, I only mean that we can and must counter Heregrove with nothing more than those instruments which he is attempting to use on us and which the law does not recognize as methods of murder—which, in fact, it dismisses as accidental ‘acts of God' and not of malicious man.”

That was, certainly, put as reassuringly as possible. I could, and must own did, dismiss from my mind the Wild-West sheriff simile. It certainly did not appeal to me, the recluse, to ride about avenging murders which the law chose to overlook. I am not a Red-Cross Knight. But I am an easily scared individual, and the one fact which remained, boring down into my consciousness and pushing me to lengths which otherwise I should have thought absurdly desperate, was my actual desperate situation. I made a final twist, however.

“All right,” I said, with an air of having thought everything out to the end and seeing exactly how much would be expected of me. “All right, go ahead. I promise you I will never divulge anything of this. Obviously I shall want, quite as much as you, to keep my mouth shut.”

“Thank you,” he said, a bit dryly, I thought. My heart began sinking to new low levels. “That means, of course, that you will collaborate with me, for, while I can manage the technical part of this problem quite well by myself, I shall have to require your assistance at the end, in the practical application. We shall, may I repeat, have to call on Heregrove again.”

Those last words, which I had dreaded most, were like a knell.

“Now, Mr. Silchester,” he continued, in the same level tone, as though we had been planning a picnic, “I must go back into my laboratory. When you arrived I had started a couple of experiments and I must go and see how they are cooking. You, too, will want to think over our conversation, no doubt. Perhaps you would like to rest or read in my library. The singing of my pet birds in there will not, as you have tested for yourself, disturb you. I venture to invite and advise you to stay here; not only because we shall have several more things to talk over, which we can best do as soon as my experiments are finished, but also because I honestly believe that today you are safer here than in your own house.”

“All right,” I said none too graciously but he seemed quite content. He knew that my resistance was broken. I was his pawn; a hateful position, even if you are to be used to checkmate a man who wants to murder you.

The morning passed slowly. I could hear Mr. Mycroft cluttering about, across the hall, in his laboratory. I couldn't read. I sat there dully, my mind slowly, like a mud-locked eddy in a stream, turning pointlessly round and round the events which had me snarled. At last my attention was caught by those silly birds as they hopped round their cage, stupidly safe, too stupid to know they were safe. As I looked, there they were, at it again, he singing silently and she listening enthralled. That soundless singing seemed to me all part of Nature's senseless arranging of things. Then, somehow, I had evidently gone too far in my disgust with everything. I realized how self-centered I was being, expecting the world to be made for me and to care for my fate; and how perverse I must be, for, after all, if I could have heard these birds squeaking away to each other I should only have been exasperated at the noise. I began to smile at myself. I got up, went over to the cage, and was agreeably surprised when the birds, instead of stupidly fluttering in dismay, both came at once to the bars, heads on one side, evidently expecting me to give them something or to play with them. I am not good with animals—they either bore or frighten me—but I must say, I felt a sudden reassurance that if I had to be wholly in the hands and power of a stranger, that stranger should have been able to make birds not only trust him but trust strangers also. I was musing on that; it was sinking into my mind, for it was a thought I was ready to reflect on, the only pleasant one I had had for some time, when the door opened.

Mr. Mycroft said, “Lunch is ready. I have washed. You know the way to the bathroom from your last visit.”

Certainly, too, the house was very neat and efficiently run. That gave me almost as much confidence as the birds' confidence in me. And lunch was even better than last time.

“Last time,” said my host as we sat down, “it was, I fear, a very scratch meal. Today, as I hoped I might persuade you to stay, there can be a little more design in living. Like everything else, a menu depends on foresight, in taking time in time.” We started with borsch—a soup I love but could never get Alice to make.

“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, so-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.