Actions and Reactions
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Rudyard Kipling >> Actions and Reactions
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After a few days the weather changed again and became glorious.
Even the Oddities would now join the crowd that hung out on the
alighting-board, and would sing of work among the merry, merry
blossoms till an untrained ear might have received it for the hum
of a working hive. Yet, in truth, their store-honey had been
eaten long ago. They lived from day to day on the efforts of the
few sound bees, while the Wax-moth fretted and consumed again
their already ruined wax. But the sound bees never mentioned
these matters. They knew, if they did, the Oddities would hold a
meeting and ball them to death.
"Now you see what we have done," said the Wax-moths. "We have
created New Material, a New Convention, a New Type, as we said we
would."
"And new possibilities for us," said the laying sisters
gratefully. "You have given us a new life's work, vital and
paramount."
"More than that," chanted the Oddities in the sunshine; "you have
created a new heaven and a new earth. Heaven, cloudless and
accessible" (it was a perfect August evening) "and Earth teeming
with the merry, merry blossoms, waiting only our honest toil to
turn them all to good. The--er--Aster, and the Crocus, and
the--er--Ladies' Smock in her season, the Chrysanthemum after her
kind, and the Guelder Rose bringing forth abundantly withal."
"Oh, Holy Hymettus!" said Melissa, awestruck. "I knew they didn't
know how honey was made, but they've forgotten the Order of the
Flowers! What will become of them?"
A Shadow fell across the alighting-board as the Bee Master and
his son came by. The Oddities crawled in and a Voice behind a
Veil said: "I've neglected the old Hive too long. Give me the
smoker."
Melissa heard and darted through the gate. "Come, oh come!" she
cried. "It is the destruction the Old Queen foretold. Princess,
come!"
"Really, you are too archaic for words," said an Oddity in an
alley-way. "A cloud, I admit, may have crossed the sun; but why
hysterics? Above all, why Princesses so late in the day? Are you
aware it's the Hival Tea-time? Let's sing grace."
Melissa clawed past him with all six legs. Sacharissa had run to
what was left of the fertile brood-comb. "Down and out!" she
called across the brown breadth of it. "Nurses, guards, fanners,
sweepers--out!
Never mind the babies. They're better dead.--Out, before the
Light and the Hot Smoke!"
The Princess's first clear fearless call (Melissa had found her)
rose and drummed through all the frames. "La Reine le veult!
Swarm! Swar-rm! Swar-r-rm!"
The Hive shook beneath the shattering thunder of a stuck-down
quilt being torn back.
"Don't be alarmed, dears," said the Wax-moths. "That's our work.
Look up, and you'll see the dawn of the New Day."
Light broke in the top of the hive as the Queen had,
prophesied--naked light on the boiling, bewildered bees.
Sacharissa rounded up her rearguard, which dropped headlong off
the frame, and joined the Princess's detachment thrusting toward
the Gate. Now panic was in full blast, and each sound bee found
herself embraced by at least three Oddities. The first instinct
of a frightened bee is to break into the stores and gorge herself
with honey; but there were no stores left, so the Oddities fought
the sound bees.
"You must feed us, or we shall die!" they cried, holding and
clutching and slipping, while the silent scared earwigs and
little spiders twisted between their legs. "Think of the Hive,
traitors! The Holy Hive!"
"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.
On the notice-board in the Captains' Room, the pulsing arrows of
some twenty indicators register, degree by geographical degree,
the progress of as many homeward-bound packets. The word "Cape"
rises across the face of a dial; a gong strikes: the South
African mid-weekly mail is in at the Highgate Receiving Towers.
That is all. It reminds one comically of the traitorous little
bell which in pigeon-fanciers', lofts notifies the return of a
homer.
"Time for us to be on the move," says Captain Purnall, and we are
shot up by the passenger-lift to the top of the despatch-towers.
"Our coach will lock on when it is filled and the clerks are
aboard."
"No. 162" waits for us in Slip E of the topmost stage. The great
curve of her back shines frostily under the lights, and some
minute alteration of trim makes her rock a little in her
holding-down slips.
Captain Purnall frowns and dives inside. Hissing softly, "162"
comes to rest as level as a rule. From her North Atlantic Winter
nose-cap (worn bright as diamond with boring through uncounted
leagues of hail, snow, and ice) to the inset of her three built
out propeller-shafts is some two hundred and forty feet. Her
extreme diameter, carried well forward, is thirty-seven. Contrast
this with the nine hundred by ninety-five of any crack liner, and
you will realize the power that must drive a hull through all
weathers at more than the emergency speed of the Cyclonic!
The eye detects no joint in her skin plating save the sweeping
hair-crack of the bow-rudder--Magniac's rudder that assured us
the dominion of the unstable air and left its inventor penniless
and half-blind. It is calculated to Castelli's "gullwing" curve.
Raise a few feet of that all but invisible plate three-eighths of
an inch and she will yaw five miles to port or starboard ere she
is under control again. Give her full helm and she returns on her
track like a whip-lash. Cant the whole forward--a touch on the
wheel will suffice--and she sweeps at your good direction up or
down. Open the complete circle and she presents to the air a
mushroom-head that will bring her up all standing within a half
mile.
"Yes," says Captain Hodgson, answering my thought, "Castelli
thought he'd discovered the secret of controlling aeroplanes when
he'd only found out how to steer dirigible balloons. Magniac
invented his rudder to help war-boats ram each other; and war
went out of fashion and Magniac he went out of his mind because
he said he couldn't serve his country any more. I wonder if any
of us ever know what we're really doing."
"If you want to see the coach locked you'd better go aboard. It's
due now," says Mr. Geary. I enter through the door amidships.
There is nothing here for display. The inner skin of the
gas-tanks comes down to within a foot or two of my head and turns
over just short of the turn of the bilges. Liners and yachts
disguise their tanks with decoration, but the G.P.O. serves them
raw under a lick of grey official paint. The inner skin shuts off
fifty feet of the bow and as much of the stern, but the
bow-bulkhead is recessed for the lift-shunting apparatus as the
stern is pierced for the shaft-tunnels. The engine-room lies
almost amidships. Forward of it, extending to the turn of the bow
tanks, is an aperture--a bottomless hatch at present--into which
our coach will be locked. One looks down over the coamings three
hundred feet to the despatching-caisson whence voices boom
upward. The light below is obscured to a sound of thunder, as our
coach rises on its guides. It enlarges rapidly from a
postage-stamp to a playing-card; to a punt and last a pontoon.
The two clerks, its crew, do not even look up as it comes into
place. The Quebec letters fly under their fingers and leap into
the docketed racks, while both captains and Mr. Geary satisfy
them selves that the coach is locked home. A clerk passes the
way-bill over the hatch coaming. Captain Purnall thumb-marks and
passes it to Mr. Geary. Receipt has been given and taken.
"Pleasant run," says Mr. Geary, and disappears through the door
which a foot high pneumatic compressor locks after him.
"A-ah!" sighs the compressor released. Our holding-down clips
part with a tang. We are clear.
Captain Hodgson opens the great colloid underbody porthole
through which I watch over-lighted London slide eastward as the
gale gets hold of us. The first of the low winter clouds cuts off
the well-known view and darkens Middlesex. On the south edge of
it I can see a postal packet's light ploughing through the white
fleece. For an instant she gleams like a star ere she drops
toward the Highgate Receiving Towers. "The Bombay Mail," says
Captain Hodgson, and looks at his watch. "She's forty minutes
late."
"What's our level?" I ask.
"Four thousand. Aren't you coming up on the bridge?"
The bridge (let us ever praise the G.P.O. as a repository of
ancientest tradition!) is represented by a view of Captain
Hodgson's legs where he stands on the Control Platform that runs
thwart-ships overhead. The bow colloid is unshuttered and Captain
Purnall, one hand on the wheel, is feeling for a fair slant. The
dial shows 4300 feet. "It's steep to-night," he mutters, as tier
on tier of cloud drops under. "We generally pick up an easterly
draught below three thousand at this time o' the year. I hate
slathering through fluff."
"So does Van Cutsem. Look at him huntin' for a slant!" says
Captain Hodgson. A foglight breaks cloud a hundred fathoms below.
The Antwerp Night Mail makes her signal and rises between two
racing clouds far to port, her flanks blood-red in the glare of
Sheerness Double Light. The gale will have us over the North Sea
in half-an-hour, but Captain Purnall lets her go
composedly--nosing to every point of the compass as she rises.
"Five thousand-six, six thousand eight hundred"--the dip-dial
reads ere we find the easterly drift, heralded by a flurry of
snow at the thousand fathom level. Captain Purnall rings up the
engines and keys down the governor on the switch before him.
There is no sense in urging machinery when Eolus himself gives
you good knots for nothing. We are away in earnest now--our nose
notched home on our chosen star. At this level the lower clouds
are laid out, all neatly combed by the dry fingers of the East.
Below that again is the strong westerly blow through which we
rose. Overhead, a film of southerly drifting mist draws a
theatrical gauze across the firmament. The moonlight turns the
lower strata to silver without a stain except where our shadow
underruns us. Bristol and Cardiff Double Lights (those statelily
inclined beams over Severnmouth) are dead ahead of us; for we
keep the Southern Winter Route. Coventry Central, the pivot of
the English system, stabs upward once in ten seconds its spear of
diamond light to the north; and a point or two off our starboard
bow The Leek, the great cloud-breaker of Saint David's Head,
swings its unmistakable green beam twenty-five degrees each way.
There must be half a mile of fluff over it in this weather, but
it does not affect The Leek.
"Our planet's over-lighted if anything," says Captain Purnall at
the wheel, as Cardiff-Bristol slides under. "I remember the old
days of common white verticals that 'ud show two or three hundred
feet up in a mist, if you knew where to look for 'em. In really
fluffy weather they might as well have been under your hat. One
could get lost coming home then, an' have some fun. Now, it's
like driving down Piccadilly."
He points to the pillars of light where the cloud-breakers bore
through the cloud-floor. We see nothing of England's outlines:
only a white pavement pierced in all directions by these manholes
of variously coloured fire--Holy Island's white and red--St.
Bee's interrupted white, and so on as far as the eye can reach.
Blessed be Sargent, Ahrens, and the Dubois brothers, who invented
the cloud-breakers of the world whereby we travel in security!
"Are you going to lift for The Shamrock?" asks Captain Hodgson.
Cork Light (green, fixed) enlarges as we rush to it. Captain
Purnall nods. There is heavy traffic hereabouts--the cloud-bank
beneath us is streaked. with running fissures of flame where the
Atlantic boats are hurrying Londonward just clear of the fluff.
Mail-packets are supposed, under the Conference rules, to have
the five-thousand-foot lanes to themselves, but the foreigner in
a hurry is apt to take liberties with English air. "No. 162"
lifts to a long-drawn wail of the breeze in the fore-flange of
the rudder and we make Valencia (white, green, white) at a safe
7000 feet, dipping our beam to an incoming Washington packet.
There is no cloud on the Atlantic, and faint streaks of cream
round Dingle Bay show where the driven seas hammer the coast. A
big S.A.T.A. liner (Societe Anonyme des Transports Aeriens) is
diving and lifting half a mile below us in search of some break
in the solid west wind. Lower still lies a disabled Dane she is
telling the liner all about it in International. Our General
Communication dial has caught her talk and begins to eavesdrop.
Captain Hodgson makes a motion to shut it off but checks himself.
"Perhaps you'd like to listen," he says.
"Argol of St. Thomas," the Dane whimpers. "Report owners three
starboard shaft collar-bearings fused. Can make Flores as we are,
but impossible further. Shall we buy spares at Fayal?"
The liner acknowledges and recommends inverting the bearings. The
Argol answers that she has already done so without effect, and
begins to relieve her mind about cheap German enamels for
collar-bearings. The Frenchman assents cordially, cries "Courage,
mon ami," and switches off.
Then lights sink under the curve of the ocean.
"That's one of Lundt & Bleamers' boats," says Captain Hodgson.
"Serves 'em right for putting German compos in their
thrust-blocks. She won't be in Fayal to-night! By the way,
wouldn't you like to look round the engine-room?"
I have been waiting eagerly for this invitation and I follow
Captain Hodgson from the control-platform, stooping low to avoid
the bulge of the tanks. We know that Fleury's gas can lift
anything, as the world-famous trials of '89 showed, but its
almost indefinite powers of expansion necessitate vast tank room.
Even in this thin air the lift-shunts are busy taking out
one-third of its normal lift, and still "162" must be checked by
an occasional downdraw of the rudder or our flight would become a
climb to the stars. Captain Purnall prefers an overlifted to an
underlifted ship; but no two captains trim ship alike. "When I
take the bridge," says Captain Hodgson, "you'll see me shunt
forty per cent of the lift out of the gas and run her on the
upper rudder. With a swoop upward instead of a swoop downward, as
you say. Either way will do. It's only habit. Watch our dip-dial!
Tim fetches her down once every thirty knots as regularly as
breathing."
So is it shown on the dip-dial. For five or six minutes the arrow
creeps from 6700 to 7300. There is the faint "szgee" of the
rudder, and back slides the arrow to 6000 on a falling slant of
ten or fifteen knots.
"In heavy weather you jockey her with the screws as well," says
Captain Hodgson, and, unclipping the jointed bar which divides
the engine-room from the bare deck, he leads me on to the floor.
Here we find Fleury's Paradox of the Bulk-headed Vacuum--which we
accept now without thought--literally in full blast. The three
engines are H.T.&T. assisted-vacuo Fleury turbines running from
3000 to the Limit--that is to say, up to the point when the
blades make the air "bell"--cut out a vacuum for themselves
precisely as over-driven marine propellers used to do. "162's"
Limit is low on account of the small size of her nine screws,
which, though handier than the old colloid Thelussons, "bell"
sooner. The midships engine, generally used as a reinforce, is
not running; so the port and starboard turbine vacuum-chambers
draw direct into the return-mains.
The turbines whistle reflectively. From the low-arched
expansion-tanks on either side the valves descend pillarwise to
the turbine-chests, and thence the obedient gas whirls through
the spirals of blades with a force that would whip the teeth out
of a power saw. Behind, is its own pressure held in leash of
spurred on by the lift-shunts; before it, the vacuum where
Fleury's Ray dances in violet-green bands and whirled turbillons
of flame. The jointed U-tubes of the vacuum-chamber are
pressure-tempered colloid (no glass would endure the strain for
an instant) and a junior engineer with tinted spectacles watches
the Ray intently. It is the very heart of the machine--a mystery
to this day. Even Fleury who begat it and, unlike Magniac, died a
multi-millionaire, could not explain how the restless little imp
shuddering in the U-tube can, in the fractional fraction of a
second, strike the furious blast of gas into a chill
greyish-green liquid that drains (you can hear it trickle) from
the far end of the vacuum through the eduction-pipes and the
mains back to the bilges. Here it returns to its gaseous, one had
almost written sagacious, state and climbs to work afresh.
Bilge-tank, upper tank, dorsal-tank, expansion-chamber, vacuum,
main-return (as a liquid), and bilge-tank once more is the
ordained cycle. Fleury's Ray sees to that; and the engineer with
the tinted spectacles sees to Fleury's Ray. If a speck of oil, if
even the natural grease of the human finger touch the hooded
terminals, Fleury's Ray will wink and disappear and must be
laboriously built up again. This means half a day's work for all
hands and an expense of, one hundred and seventy-odd pounds to
the G.P.O. for radium-salts and such trifles.
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