Uneasy Money, P. G. Wodehouse [little bear else holmelund minarik txt] 📗

“But this fellow may have been smoking.”

“He has just finished a strong cigar.”

“For heaven’s sake!”

“Goodbye, Nutty, dear, I mustn’t keep him waiting.”

Lord Dawlish looked with interest at the various implements which she had collected when she rejoined him outside. He relieved her of the stool, the smoker, the cotton waste, the knife, the screwdriver and the queen clipping cage.

“Let me carry these for you,” he said, “unless you’ve hired a van.”

Elizabeth disapproved of this flippancy. It was out of place in one who should have been trembling at the prospect of doom. She threw her mind back to the first occasion on which she had opened a hive. Only a firm conviction that the bee-moth had been at work inside it had given her the courage to go through the ordeal. She could still recall the sensations attendant on taking out her first brood frame.

“Don’t you wear a veil for this sort of job?”

As a rule Elizabeth did. She had reached a stage of intimacy with her bees which rendered a veil a superfluous precaution, but until today she had never abandoned it. Her view of the matter was that, though the inhabitants of the hives were familiar and friendly with her by this time and recognized that she came among them without hostile intent, it might well happen that among so many thousands there might be one slow-witted enough and obtuse enough not to have grasped this fact. And in such an event a veil was better than any amount of explanations, for you cannot stick to pure reason when quarreling with bees. But today it had struck her that she could hardly protect herself in this way without offering a similar safeguard to her visitor and she had no wish to hedge him about with safeguards.

“Oh, no,” she said brightly; “I’m not afraid of a few bees. Are you?”

“Rather not!”

“You know what to do if one of them flies at you?”

“Well, it would anyway, what? What I mean to say is, I could leave most of the doing to the bee.”

Elizabeth was more disapproving than ever. This was mere bravado. She did not speak again until they reached the hives.

In the neighborhood of the hives a vast activity prevailed. What, heard from afar, had been a pleasant murmur became at close quarters a menacing tumult. The air was full of bees⁠—bees sallying forth for honey, bees returning with honey, bees trampling on each other’s heels, bees pausing in midair to pass the time of day with rivals on competing lines of traffic. Blunt-bodied drones whizzed to and fro with a noise like miniature high-powered automobiles, as if anxious to convey the idea of being tremendously busy without going to the length of doing any actual work. One of these blundered into Lord Dawlish’s face, and it pleased Elizabeth to observe that he gave a jump.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said, “it’s only a drone. Drones have no stings.”

“They have hard heads though. Here he comes again!”

“I suppose he smells your tobacco. A drone has thirty-seven thousand eight hundred nostrils, you know.”

“That gives him a sporting chance of smelling a fifteen-cent cigar, what? I mean to say, if he misses with eight hundred of his nostrils he’s apt to get it with the other thirty-seven thousand.”

Elizabeth was feeling annoyed with her bees. They resolutely declined to sting this young man. Bees flew past him, bees flew into him, bees settled upon his coat, bees paused questioningly in front of him, as who should say, “What have we here?” but not a single bee molested him. Yet when Nutty, poor darling, went within a dozen yards of the hives he never failed to suffer for it. In her heart Elizabeth knew perfectly well that this was because Nutty, when in the presence of the bees, lost his head completely and behaved like an exaggerated version of Lady Wetherby’s Dream of Psyche, whereas Bill maintained an easy calm; but at the moment she put the phenomenon down to that inexplicable cussedness which does so much to exasperate the human race, and it fed her annoyance with her unbidden guest.

Without commenting on his last remark she took the smoker from him and set to work. She inserted in the fire chamber a handful of the cotton waste and set fire to it; then with a preliminary puff or two of the bellows to make sure that the conflagration had not gone out, she aimed the nozzle at the front door of the hive.

The results were instantaneous. One or two bee policemen, who were doing fixed-post duty near the opening, scuttled hastily back into the hive; and from within came a muffled buzzing as other bees, all talking at once, worried the perplexed officials with foolish questions, a buzzing that became less muffled and more pronounced as Elizabeth lifted the edge of the cover and directed more smoke through the crack. This done, she removed the cover, set it down on the grass beside her, lifted the supercover and applied more smoke, and raised her eyes to where Bill stood watching. His face wore a smile of pleased interest.

Elizabeth’s irritation became painful. She resented his smile. Nutty, on the famous occasion when she had induced him to help her open a hive, had wabbled with pure terror. She hung the smoker on the side of the hive.

“The stool, please, and the screw driver.”

She seated herself beside the hive and began to loosen the outside section. Then taking the brood frame by the projecting ends she pulled it out and handed it to her companion. She did it as one who plays an ace of trumps.

“Would you mind holding this, Mr. Chalmers?”

This was the point in the ceremony at which the wretched Nutty had broken down absolutely, and not inexcusably, considering the severity of the test. The surface of the frame was black with what appeared at first sight to be a thick, bubbling fluid of some sort, pouring viscously to