A Taste for Honey (10 page)

And then I saw, into the hard, white, prison-like room, through the hygienically wide-open window, right toward us, swoop one of those diabolical bees. I saw myself involuntarily duck and call out to them to take cover. I saw them (as in a nightmare but, oh, so inevitably) pay no attention to my actual words or to the bee. Even if one of the damned fools
were
stung, the rest of them would be so delighted at this beautiful little demonstration of my specific madness that they would have no attention for anything but my “seizure.” I could hear them, in that clipped, conclusive, colloquial, group-assuring jargon, confirming one another's idiocy, “Typical case.” “Trigger action.” “Frenzy brought on by associative symbol.”—Symbol! I could only hope that the stung medico was stung in some quite unsymbolic part—not that his pain would disturb their stupid equanimity and blind assurance. “Perfect example of hymenophobia.” “Must study this for a clinical paper; a valuable demonstration. Old Singleton will be fascinated with such a complete case.” And all the while they would be scurrying me along those long, high-lit passages; I, held in one of those oh-so-gentle-but-move-a-finger-and-your-wrist-will-break jiu-jitsu grips, and they talking of the bundle in their hands, of me, as though I were a corpse being lugged along to its autopsy!

I had just reached that pleasant climax of my all too convincing extrapolation of the remainder of my days; I was just imagining, with complete realization, night and day succeeding one another without feature or finitude, until I really fell in with their idea of me, until I was so persuaded by my unchanging situation that they must be right and I wrong that I would actually demonstrate for them. I would be brought into the lecture theater of the mental hospital and sit there amiably huddled in the demonstration chair, while students and their friends looked at the interesting specimen, the queer animal, and the lecturer told its history and indicated its peculiar points of interest, finally letting fly a bumblebee in my face. I would then obligingly go off into my seizure and be carted out by the attendants. But, just as they pounced on me, I saw, sitting high up in the visitors' part of the theater, looking down on me with a delight in this torture worse than death by poison, the face of Heregrove!

I had just arrived at such a pretty peep into the hell that seemed now all too likely to lie ahead, when I heard not one set but two sets of footsteps on the garden path. Though I was well screened, for I always curtain my windows heavily—in my opinion, houses were not meant to be glass hives, as some modern architects seem to think—and though the path from gate to front door went round to the other side of the house (I always have my bedroom in the quietest place), I was so nervous now that I drew back and positively cowered in my chair. The front door opened and I heard muttered voices. I knew it was highly improbable, but somehow reason was no help and emotion only said with every pound of my heart: “They've
come
for you! They've come for
you
!”

Then there was a step on the stairs. I picked up a piece of cold, brittle toast. I must appear to be eating unconcernedly; I must make a last fight for my sanity and for being thought normal. I was hardly given time to answer the knock, and my throat was so dry I probably couldn't have said clearly “Come in.”

“Why, and you've not even finished your breakfast now, and me gone ever so!”

It was very impertinent of Alice to make such a personal remark, but I was shattered by all that I had been through and foreseen. I felt so strongly that her very “imperence” was a sort of semiconscious suggestion that she thought I was already half-certifiable and an intuitive test to see whether I would break out, that I answered in a positively demure, sub-acid voice, steady and quiet, though it shook a little to my feeling if not to her ear.

“Who has accompanied you into the house?” I felt that, though such a question to Dr. Jones would sound rank with agoraphobia and blatant with schizophrenia, to Alice it would be the best approach. She was still mainly my servant and I, at least for a few days more and as long as I was let be at large, her employer. Thank God, she reacted according to her type.

“Oh, please, sir, I was only sorry to see you'd not fancied your breakfast. No imperence was meant, sir. I 'ope I'd never forget m'place. And as for bringing in someone—well, sir, I couldn't 'elp myself. He's so quick and direct, is—” (I could not but feel my heart pounding even harder) “is Mr. Mycroft.”

Somehow, at the mention of that name, my heart suddenly was free. It positively leapt. Bore or no bore, would not I have the old fellow every day, all my life, if only I need not be shut up. And now I felt certain he was the one man who would understand and could save me from one or the other of two frightful fates which I felt closing in on me.

“Please, Alice,” I said, reprovingly, “don't keep Mr. Mycroft waiting downstairs. Go at once. Give him the paper. Offer him some tea. I suppose he has breakfasted. Say how pleased I am that he has called round. Tell him I will be down in a moment.”

She went. I hurried with my dressing. I don't have to shave every day, unless I am peculiarly particular. It is more of a massage than a mow. So I was following Alice down the stairs in a very few minutes. Mr. Mycroft was standing by the fireplace as I entered. I must say he put me beautifully at my ease, and I needed it, I need hardly say.

“I have been away, Mr. Silchester,” he began, quite easily and naturally keeping the talk away from me; “I have been over to Hungerford—still a nice, small town, with beautiful open country round it. I went for a few walks when I was there. You don't know it? And perhaps you do not care much for walking? I find I enjoy it very much, but, perhaps because I've always been rather a collector-hunter type of man, I find, to enjoy myself really, I have to make some little objective for myself, some small sight to see.”

There he was talking about himself, but somehow today it was positively a relief. All too soon we should have to come to my case and, as long as he was here, I felt safe. I felt that I ought to make some slight comment.

“Didn't that amusing writer Lytton Strachey live down there?”

“Yes; in fact, I passed his house, in taking my longest walk. But I wasn't on a literary pilgrimage. His house lies in the vale just before you reach the finest walking in England, the North Downs escarpment. I was bound for that. Right opposite that house's windows stands Inkpen Beacon. I walked there; really after I had done my little piece of hunting, just out of romantic interest.” Looking away from me, Mr. Mycroft added, “There used to be a gallows on that crest. The last man hanged on it was a remarkable murderer. Indeed, I should have thought, at that date, more than a century ago, he would have got off. But they brought the charge fully home to him. I was reading up the crime at Hungerford. He was a small Hungerford farmer, living not far from Lytton Strachey's house.” Then, turning to me, Mr. Mycroft said, quietly, “He murdered his wife with a simple ingenuity which I have myself not met with elsewhere in the records of homicidal crime: by upsetting her into a hive of angry bees.”

I felt myself pale.

“But,” he went on, “even at that date, he was caught. And, though time adds to all skill, even in devilry, it also adds to our defenses.”

He paused. Then I summoned up my courage.

“Mr. Mycroft, it was extremely kind of you to come round so promptly. I don't expect to be able to conceal from you the condition I am in, a condition to which—”

“Yes,” he said, with comforting confirmation. “I have seen plenty of men, who felt they were brave and tough, begin to go to pieces under the strain you have been enduring.”

That kindness—what I would call the right professional or medical attitude (I felt now pretty sure the old fellow had been a doctor)—that steady understanding, certainly hit me pretty hard. He took the hand—rather trembling, I fear it was—which I put out and held it in a remarkably reassuring grip.

“You have been doing a useful and dangerous piece of work,” he said—a curiously clever way of comforting someone who felt he had been only a bungling, impertinent fool, who had insisted, even when warned, on sticking his silly head all too literally into a hornets' nest, and now was frightened almost out of his wits.

“You have drawn Heregrove,” he continued. “As we agreed” (that again was kind; it had, of course, been solely his diagnosis), “Heregrove is the typical murderer-with-a-bright-idea.”

I shuddered at the word, but it was true enough.

“That type generally reads a great many detective stories and, as you are no doubt aware, detective stories, like many other of our modes and manners—if you will forgive what may sound like an old man's ‘grouse'—have degenerated. They began with common sense and trained observation and perhaps a patient devotion to and belief in tidying things up, these three allied together—not necessarily to exact the law's penalty but to show the criminal he could not win; that the balance of intelligence and insight are, in the end, always on the side of order and right.”

The old man was started, but again I felt only relief. I thought of a long, plodding relief column, pertinaciously winding its way through narrow passes to raise the siege of a sorely beleaguered garrison.

“But now,” he went on, “it is the gentleman cracksman who is the public's real fancy. Oh, I know the films have to show the G-man getting his gunman, but that is only a ‘command performance.' The public has to see such pictures because it supposes they protect it from young, growing criminals. But the public really likes fancying itself in immaculate evening dress carelessly holding up the bank at Monte Carlo. Well, a few act on their daydreams. They get a new idea, as they think. I have shown you that this one is not as new as our friend believes. They suffer from an old irritation—as old as the world, the returning to ‘a dark house and a detested wife'—reverse the roles and the story is certainly as old as cyclopean Mykenae and the Trojan War, Klytemnestra killing her Agamemnon in his bath—older, if we only knew. They kill, and then, like most animals with the instinct to kill in their blood, having tasted blood, they must go on killing. Nothing else gives them such a sense of power—and this feeling they must have. All the members of the human race—proud, successful, hateful creatures—are in the murderer's hand. To them he may seem a failure. They had better beware! At his slightest whim, there they are—so much carrion.”

It was all too obviously exemplified by my situation—the casual, nearest-to-hand neighbor following the hated wife into the oubliette.

“What are we to do?” I ventured to interpose.

“Mr. Silchester,” he said, looking straight at me, “I am going to repeat a request.”

“You needn't have any fear,” I interrupted: “I shall never go near the place again.”

“The request I made,” he went on quietly, “had two clauses. The first, that you should not go alone, has proved to have been wise. The second—” He saw I had gone white. I now remembered it all too well. But he went on serenely, “Was that you would introduce me to your acquaintance, Mr. Heregrove.”

“But I can't! It would be suicide for us both. The very sight of the man would make me tremble and he would be bound to make his brutes attack us, even if they did not do so of themselves. Can't you put all you know before the police? Can't you have him arrested?”

“British law is a noble pile,” he replied ruminatively, “but, like most stately causeways, erected block by block, year after year for centuries, it has plenty of crannies in it. The liberty of the subject requires that the law should not look too closely. For life and law are never very easy with each other and we must pay for our freedom to be eccentric by letting an occasional criminal get through and away.” Then, with a sudden sharpness, “There's not a shred of evidence to go to a court upon. He's proved innocent of his wife's death. A court has said it was an accident. As for your situation: you were attacked in your house and no one even saw it happen. Your servant is hardly a mute. She does not ask to be questioned before she gives you both news and views. She sympathizes sincerely with you for having had some sort of shock. In her family, I gather, similar things have befallen. But she is certainly skeptical about the cause being other than, as she put it, ‘in the family.' Indeed, Heregrove might turn the tables on you—he is certainly bold enough to do it—and say you were maligning him; trying to ruin him; either a blackmailer or a border-line neurotic. Remember, Mr. Silchester, an eccentric has few friends.”

That so chimed with my own gloomy thoughts at which his visit had found me that I collapsed into a wholly apprehensive silence.

“But remember also,” he went on, deliberately cheering, “Heregrove is also curiously helpless, curiously localized in his malignancy. He is like one of those slow-moving, stiff, poisonous lizards which, if you pounce and pick them up in a certain way, can't get their venom-spine into you.”

He saw that I remained dolefully unconvinced. So he added, “Believe me, there is no safer place for you than in Heregrove's house. He's playing a game. He's perfecting his lovely, power-giving murder tool. He's not going to spoil all by striking at you when the corpse would fall on his hands.”

I didn't like the phrase at all, but it did make the situation clear, if painfully so.

“No, no; in his house you will be under his guard. Some spiders don't recognize a fly if it is not in their web. Heregrove simply can't kill you unless you are outside his.”

Still, I quite naturally hesitated. Mr. Mycroft looked keenly at me again.

“And unless we do get into that house we shall never get him off your track. I beg you to make no mistake over that. I have more knowledge of this particular psychology than, if I may say so, you are likely to have. At the proper range, with his perfect shot, he is as determined yet to get you, as a golfer who won't go on to the third green until he has holed out on the second. You are No. 2 on his score.”