Actions and Reactions
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Rudyard Kipling >> Actions and Reactions
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Then he said he felt hungry, and thirsty, and happy.
We went down to tea at the rest-house, where Stanley stuffed
himself with sardines and raspberry jam, and beer, and cold
mutton and pickles, when Garm wasn't climbing over him; and then
Vixen and I went on.
Garm saw how it was at once. He said good-bye to me three times,
giving me both paws one after another, and leaping on to my
shoulder. He further escorted us, singing Hosannas at the top of
his voice, a mile down the road. Then he raced back to his own
master.
Vixen never opened her mouth, but when the cold twilight came,
and we could see the lights of Simla across the hills, she
snuffled with her nose at the breast of my ulster. I unbuttoned
it, and tucked her inside. Then she gave a contented little
sniff, and fell fast asleep, her head on my breast, till we
bundled out at Simla, two of the four happiest people in all the
world that night.
THE POWER OF THE DOG
There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
But when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.
Buy a pup and your money will buy
Love unflinching that cannot lie--
Perfect passion and worship fed
By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head.
Nevertheless it is hardly fair
To risk your heart for a dog to tear.
When the fourteen years which Nature permits
Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits,
And the vet's unspoken prescription runs
To lethal chambers or loaded guns,
Then you will find--it's your own affair
But . . . you've given your heart to a dog to tear.
When the body that lived at your single will
When the whimper of welcome is stilled (how still!)
When the spirit that answered your every mood
Is gone wherever it goes--for good,
You will discover how much you care,
And will give your heart to a dog to tear!
We've sorrow enough in the natural way,
When it comes to burying Christian clay.
Our loves are not given, but only lent,
At compound interest of cent per cent.
Though it is not always the case, I believe,
That the longer we've kept 'em, the more do we grieve:
For, when debts are payable, right or wrong,
A short-time loan is as bad as a long
So why in Heaven (before we are there!)
Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?
THE MOTHER HIVE
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 farmers 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?" 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-worker."
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 toward 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. 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."
She found the Gate in a sulky uproar. The youngsters told off to
the pillars had refused to chew scrap-wax because it made their
jaws ache, and were clamouring for virgin stuff.
"Anything to finish the job!" said the badgered Guards. "Hang up,
some of you, and make wax for these slack-jawed sisters."
Before a bee can make wax she must fill herself with honey. Then
she climbs to safe foothold and hangs, while other gorged bees
hang on to her in a cluster. There they wait in silence till the
wax comes. The scales are either taken out of the maker's pockets
by the workers, or tinkle down on the workers while they wait.
The workers chew them (they are useless unchewed) into the
all-supporting, all-embracing Wax of the Hive.
But now, no sooner was the wax-cluster in position than the
workers below broke out again.
"Come down!" they cried. "Come down and work! Come on, you
Levantine parasites! Don't think to enjoy yourselves up there
while we're sweating down here!"
The cluster shivered, as from hooked fore-foot to hooked
hind-foot it telegraphed uneasiness. At last a worker sprang up,
grabbed the lowest waxmaker, and swung, kicking above her
companions.
"I can make wax too!" she bawled. "Give me a full gorge and I'll
make tons of it."
"Make it, then," said the bee she had grappled. The spoken word
snapped the current through the cluster. It shook and glistened
like a cat's fur in the dark. "Unhook!" it murmured. "No wax for
any one to-day."
"You lazy thieves! Hang up at once and produce our wax," said the
bees below.
"Impossible! The sweat's gone. To make your wax we must have
stillness, warmth, and food. Unhook! Unhook!"
They broke up as they murmured, and disappeared among the other
bees, from whom, of course, they were undistinguishable.
"Seems as if we'd have to chew scrap-wax for these pillars, after
all," said a worker.
"Not by a whole comb," cried the young bee who had broken the
cluster. "Listen here! I've studied the question more than twenty
minutes. It's as simple as falling off a daisy. You've heard of
Cheshire, Root and Langstroth?"
They had not, but they shouted "Good old Langstroth!" just the
same.
"Those three know all that there is to be known about making
hives. One or t'other of 'em must have made ours, and if they've
made it, they're bound to look after it. Ours is a 'Guaranteed
Patent Hive.' You can see it on the label behind."
"Good old guarantee! Hurrah for the label behind!" roared the
bees.
"Well, such being the case, I say that when we find they've
betrayed us, we can exact from them a terrible vengeance."
"Good old vengeance! Good old Root! 'Nuff said! Chuck it!" The
crowd cheered and broke away as Melissa dived through.
"D'you know where Langstroth, Root and Cheshire, live if you
happen to want em? she asked of the proud panting orator.
"Gum me if I know they ever lived at all! But aren't they
beautiful names to buzz about? Did you see how it worked up the
sisterhood?"
"Yes; but it didn't defend the Gate," she replied.
"Ah, perhaps that's true, but think how delicate my position is,
sister. I've a magnificent appetite, and I don't like working.
It's bad for the mind. My instinct tells me that I can act as a
restraining influence on others. They would have been worse, but
for me."
But Melissa had already risen clear, and was heading for a
breadth of virgin white clover, which to an overtired bee is as
soothing as plain knitting to a woman.
"I think I'll take this load to the nurseries," she said, when
she had finished. "It was always quiet there in my day," and she
topped off with two little pats of pollen for the babies.
She was met on the fourth brood-comb by a rush of excited sisters
all buzzing together.
"One at a time! Let me put down my load. Now, what is it
Sacharissa?" she said.
"Grey Sister--that fluffy one, I mean--she came and said we ought
to be out in the sunshine gathering honey, because life was
short. She said any old bee could attend to our babies, and some
day old bees would. That isn't true, Melissa, is it? No old bees
can take us away from our babies, can they?"
"Of course not. You feed the babies while your heads are soft.
When your heads harden, you go on to field-work. Any one knows
that."
"We told her so! We told her so; but she only waved her feelers,
and said we could all lay eggs like Queens if we chose. And I'm
afraid lots of the weaker sisters believe her, and are trying to
do it. So unsettling!"
Sacharissa sped to a sealed worker-cell whose lid pulsated, as
the bee within began to cut its way out.
"Come along, precious!" she murmured, and thinned the frail top
from the other side. A pale, damp, creased thing hoisted itself
feebly on to the comb. Sacharissa's note changed at once. "No
time to waste! Go up the frame and preen yourself!" she said.
"Report for nursing-duty in my ward to-morrow evening at six.
Stop a minute. What's the matter with your third right leg?"
The young bee held it out in silence--unmistakably a drone leg
incapable of packing pollen.
"Thank you. You needn't report till the day after to-morrow."
Sacharissa turned to her companion. "That's the fifth oddity
hatched in my ward since noon. I don't like it."
"There's always a certain number of 'em," said Melissa. "You
can't stop a few working sisters from laying, now and then, when
they overfeed themselves. They only raise dwarf drones."
But we're hatching out drones with workers' stomachs; workers
with drones' stomachs; and albinoes and mixed-leggers who can't
pack pollen--like that poor little beast yonder. I don't mind
dwarf drones any more than you do (they all die in July), but
this steady hatch of oddities frightens me, Melissa!"
"How narrow of you! They are all so delightfully clever and
unusual and interesting," piped the Wax-moth from a crack above
them. "Come here, you dear, downy duck, and tell us all about
your feelings."
"I wish she'd go!" Sacharissa lowered her voice. "She meets
these--er -oddities as they dry out, and cuddles 'em in corners."
"I suppose the truth is that we're over-stocked and too well fed
to swarm," said Melissa.
"That is the truth," said the Queen's voice behind them. They had
not heard the heavy royal footfall which sets empty cells
vibrating. Sacharissa offered her food at once. She ate and
dragged her weary body forward. "Can you suggest a remedy?" she
said.
"New principles!" cried the Wax-moth from her crevice. "We'll
apply them quietly later."
"Suppose we sent out a swarm?" Melissa suggested. "It's a little
late, but it might ease us off."
"It would save us, but--I know the Hive! You shall see for
yourself." The old Queen cried the Swarming Cry, which to a bee
of good blood should be what the trumpet was to Job's war-horse.
In spite of her immense age (three, years), it rang between the
canon-like frames as a pibroch rings in a mountain pass; the
fanners changed their note, and repeated it up in every gallery;
and the broad-winged drones, burly and eager, ended it on one
nerve-thrilling outbreak of bugles: "La Reine le veult! Swarm!
Swar-rm! Swar-r-rm!"
But the roar which should follow the Call was wanting. They heard
a broken grumble like the murmur of a falling tide.
"Swarm? What for? Catch me leaving a good bar-frame Hive, with
fixed foundations, for a rotten, old oak out in the open where it
may rain any minute! We're all right! It's a 'Patent Guaranteed
Hive.' Why do they want to turn us out? Swarming be gummed!
Swarming was invented to cheat a worker out of her proper
comforts. Come on off to bed!"
The noise died out as the bees settled in empty cells for the
night.
"You hear?" said the Queen. "I know the Hive!"
"Quite between ourselves, I taught them that," cried the
Wax-moth. "Wait till my principles develop, and you'll see the
light from a new quarter."
"You speak truth for once," the Queen said suddenly, for she
recognized the Wax-moth. "That Light will break into the top of
the Hive. A Hot Smoke will follow it, and your children will not
be able to hide in any crevice."
"Is it possible?" Melissa whispered. "I-we have sometimes heard a
legend like it."
"It is no legend," the old Queen answered. "I had it from my
mother, and she had it from hers. After the Wax-moth has grown
strong, a Shadow will fall across the gate; a Voice will speak
from behind a Veil; there will be Light, and Hot Smoke, and
earthquakes, and those who live will see everything that they
have done, all together in one place, burned up in one great
fire." The old Queen was trying to tell what she had been told of
the Bee Master's dealings with an infected hive in the apiary,
two or three seasons ago; and, of course, from her point of view
the affair was as important as the Day of Judgment.
"And then?" asked horrified Sacharissa.
"Then, I have heard that a little light will burn in a great
darkness, and perhaps the world will begin again. Myself, I think
not."
"Tut! Tut!" the Wax-moth cried. "You good, fat people always
prophesy ruin if things don't go exactly your way. But I grant
you there will be changes."
There were. When her eggs hatched, the wax was riddled with
little tunnels, coated with the dirty clothes of the
caterpillars. Flannelly lines ran through the honey-stores, the
pollen-larders, the foundations, and, worst of all, through the
babies in their cradles, till the Sweeper Guards spent half their
time tossing out useless little corpses. The lines ended in a
maze of sticky webbing on the face of the comb. The caterpillars
could not stop spinning as they walked, and as they walked
everywhere, they smarmed and garmed everything. Even where it did
not hamper the bees' feet, the stale, sour smell of the stuff put
them off their work; though some of the bees who had taken to egg
laying said it encouraged them to be mothers and maintain a vital
interest in life.
When the caterpillars became moths, they made friends with the
ever-increasing Oddities--albinoes, mixed-leggers, single-eyed
composites, faceless drones, halfqueens and laying sisters; and
the ever-dwindling band of the old stock worked themselves bald
and fray-winged to feed their queer charges. Most of the Oddities
would not, and many, on account of their malformations, could
not, go through a day's field-work; but the Wax-moths, who were
always busy on the brood-comb, found pleasant home occupations
for them. One albino, for instance, divided the number of pounds
of honey in stock by the number of bees in the Hive, and proved
that if every bee only gathered honey for seven and three quarter
minutes a day, she would have the rest of the time to herself,
and could accompany the drones on their mating flights. The
drones were not at all pleased.
Another, an eyeless drone with no feelers, said that all
brood-cells should be perfect circles, so as not to interfere
with the grub or the workers. He proved that the old six-sided
cell was solely due to the workers building against each other on
opposite sides of the wall, and that if there were no
interference, there would be no angles. Some bees tried the new
plan for a while, and found it cost eight times more wax than the
old six sided specification; and, as they never allowed a cluster
to hang up and make wax in peace, real wax was scarce. However,
they eked out their task with varnish stolen from new coffins at
funerals, and it made them rather sick. Then they took to cadging
round sugar-factories and breweries, because it was easiest to
get their material from those places, and the mixture of glucose
and beer naturally fermented in store and blew the store-cells
out of shape, besides smelling abominably. Some of the sound bees
warned them that ill-gotten gains never prosper, but the Oddities
at once surrounded them and balled them to death. That was a
punishment they were almost as fond of as they were of eating,
and they expected the sound bees to feed them. Curiously enough
the age-old instinct of loyalty and devotion towards the Hive
made the sound bees do this, though their reason told them they
ought to slip away and unite with some other healthy stock in the
apiary.
"What, about seven and three-quarter minutes' work now?" said
Melissa one day as she came in. "I've been at it for five hours,
and I've only half a load."
"Oh, the Hive subsists on the Hival Honey which the Hive
produces," said a blind Oddity squatting in a store-cell.
"But honey is gathered from flowers outside two miles away
sometimes," cried Melissa.
"Pardon me," said the blind thing, sucking hard. "But this is the
Hive, is it not?"
"It was. Worse luck, it is."
"And the Hival Honey is here, is it not?" It opened a fresh
store-cell to prove it.
"Ye-es, but it won't be long at this rate," said Melissa.
"The rates have nothing to do with it. This Hive produces the
Hival Honey. You people never seem to grasp the economic
simplicity that underlies all life."
"Oh, me!" said poor Melissa, "haven't you ever been beyond the
Gate?"
"Certainly not. A fool's eyes are in the ends of the earth. Mine
are in my head." It gorged till it bloated.
Melissa took refuge in her poorly paid field-work and told
Sacharissa the story.
"Hut!" said that wise bee, fretting with an old maid of a
thistle. "Tell us something new. The Hive's full of such as
him--it, I mean."
"What's the end to be? All the honey going out and none coming
in. Things can't last this way!" said Melissa.
"Who cares?" said Sacharissa. "I know now how drones feel the day
before they're killed. A short life and a merry one for me."
"If it only were merry! But think of those awful, solemn,
lop-sided Oddities waiting for us at home crawling and clambering
and preaching--and dirtying things in the dark."
"I don't mind that so much as their silly songs, after we've fed
'em, all about 'work among the merry, merry blossoms," said
Sacharissa from the deeps of a stale Canterbury bell.
"I do. How's our Queen?" said Melissa.
"Cheerfully hopeless, as usual. But she lays an egg now and
then."
"Does she so?" Melissa backed out of the next bell with a jerk.
"Suppose now, we sound workers tried to raise a Princess in some
clean corner?"
"You'd be put to it to find one. The Hive's all Wax-moth and
muckings. But--well?"
"A Princess might help us in the time of the Voice behind the
Veil that the Queen talks of. And anything is better than working
for Oddities that chirrup about work that they can't do, and
waste what we bring home."
"Who cares?" said Sacharissa. "I'm with you, for the fun of it.
The Oddities would ball us to death, if they knew. Come home, and
we'll begin."
There is no room to tell how the experienced Melissa found a
far-off frame so messed and mishandled by abandoned cell-building
experiments that, for very shame, the bees never went there. How
in that ruin she blocked out a Royal Cell of sound wax, but
disguised by rubbish till it looked like a kopje among deserted
kopjes. How she prevailed upon the hopeless Queen to make one
last effort and lay a worthy egg. How the Queen obeyed and died.
How her spent carcass was flung out on the rubbish heap, and how
a multitude of laying sisters went about dropping drone-eggs
where they listed, and said there was no more need of Queens.
How, covered by this confusion, Sacharissa educated certain young
bees to educate certain new-born bees in the almost lost art of
making Royal Jelly. How the nectar for it was won out of hours in
the teeth of chill winds. How the hidden egg hatched true--no
drone, but Blood Royal. How it was capped, and how desperately
they worked to feed and double-feed the now swarming Oddities,
lest any break in the food-supplies should set them to
instituting inquiries, which, with songs about work, was their
favourite amusement. How in an auspicious hour, on a moonless
night, the Princess came forth a Princess indeed, and how Melissa
smuggled her into a dark empty honey-magazine, to bide her time;
and how the drones, knowing she was there, went about singing the
deep disreputable love-songs of the old days--to the scandal of
the laying sisters, who do not think well of drones. These things
are, written in the Book of Queens, which is laid up in the
hollow of the Great Ash Ygdrasil.
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