There is a prevalent notion that the country is a good place to work
in. The quiet of the country, so runs the theory, leaves the mind
undistracted, calm and able to concentrate on the task in hand. It
is a plausible theory, but it is untrue. In town the movement, noise
and ceaseless unrest form a welter of sound that has no more personal
significance than the lapping of the waves on the sea-shore. It does
not disturb--it rather composes the mind. It is the irrelevant
babble of the world, enormous but signifying nothing, in the midst of
which the mind is at ease and self-contained. But in the country
every sound has an individual meaning that breaks in upon the quiet
and demands attention. It is not general; it is particular. Take
to-day, for example. I had sat down after breakfast, determined to
traverse the Sahara on which I am engaged and to reach the oasis of a
chapter-ending by nightfall.
But I had hardly begun when a bumble bee flew in at the open door on
one side of the room and made for the closed window on the other
side. The buzz of a bumble bee in the open air makes a substantial
volume of sound. But inside the room this turbulent fellow sounded
like an aeroplane as he roared against the window-panes in his
frantic efforts to get through. Give him time, I thought. He will
discover that there is no thoroughfare by the window and will return
by the way he came in. Let me get on with my work. But the bumble
bee has as little sense in the matter of exits and entrances as the
wasp has, and my visitor kept up such a thunder against the
window-panes that I was compelled to surrender, got up, opened the
window, and with a judicious thrust with a newspaper piloted the
fellow out into the open air.
It was a bad beginning for the journey across the Sahara; but I sat
down, composed myself afresh, and started again, ignoring the thrush
who was calling his hardest to me just outside the window to come out
and see what a glorious sunshiny day we had got at last. But I was
hardly launched again on my journey when I became conscious of
unusual sounds in the garden. I looked out and saw the odd man, who
had been banking up the potatoes, shielding himself as if from a
storm and uttering strange cries. I left the desert again and rushed
out. Everybody else in the house I found was rushing out. There,
swirling like a cloud of dust across the garden, was a swarm of bees
which had swept down from the hills and across the meadow land behind
us and were evidently on the point of settling. They passed by the
house with the boom of ten thousand wings and came to rest in a
hawthorn bush on the road below. It was no business of mine. The
expert was out with veil and gloves on for the fray and could very
well manage without my help; but no amount of familiarity makes me
able to resist the call of a swarm of bees, and I forgot all about
Sahara until we returned triumphantly with a branch bearing a vast
coagulated mass of bees and succeeded in housing them in a spare hive.
Then I remembered Sahara and, like Mr. Snodgrass (the exercise having
warmed me unduly), I took off my coat and announced to myself that
"Now I am about to begin." A ring at the telephone bell! A swarm of
bees had settled on the roof of a house a mile or two away, and would
we be so kind as to take them away. Off went the expert as fast as
petrol could carry her, and I returned to my lonely plough and the
desert sands. But this day was doomed for me by the warm sun that
had set all the surplus population of the hives for miles round
trekking to new quarters. The cold Spring and the wet May and early
June had kept the bee world quiescent. Looking in the hives we could
see all the preparations for swarming in progress, but the weather
had been unpropitious and now with this sudden burst of summer all
the tide of repressed life was released, and it seemed that the whole
countryside was alive with bees in flight from their crowded homes to
new lodgings. Before the expert returned there was sensation once
more in the garden. No. 5 had swarmed, and down between the
spruce-trees and the hedge the air was thick with the migrants.
Usually our swarms settle in the hedge while the couriers fly far and
wide to reconnoitre for suitable quarters. And it is in this
interval of waiting that they are hived afresh. But this swarm
neither settled in the hedge nor flew away with that sudden
inspiration which sometimes seizes them. They swirled round and
round like a tornado that had lost its way. Then they were observed
to be returning to the hive they had left.
Here was a mystery indeed. Had the queen changed her mind and gone
back, or had she by some miracle eluded her enormous family? The
arrival of the expert, with her new capture, relieved us of
responsibility in the matter. She opened the hive and took out the
frames on which the bees were massed, but the queen, discoverable by
her larger size, was not to be seen. At last, outside on the path,
we saw a group of bees and in the midst of them the queen. The
adventure had been too much for her powers, or perhaps she had
defective wings. She was put back in the hive, and what the workers
thought about the flight that failed I shall never know. But a new
home to which the queen had no need to fly was soon at their disposal.
By this time the day was far advanced, but my journey across Sahara
had hardly begun, and even now the interruptions from the bees were
not at an end. For the third time there was commotion in the garden;
on this occasion the note was tragedy. One of the hens, which had
had some accident, was confined in a coop as a sort of convalescent
home. Its water-supply was outside and thither the bees had gone to
drink. One of them, objecting to the beak that came out of the coop,
stung the hen near the eye, and the smell of the acid infuriated its
fellows and soon the unhappy hen was enveloped in a cloud of bees
each stabbing it in its vulnerable spot. When its plight was
discovered the poor creature was insensible and apparently dying.
With difficulty the assailants were driven off and the victim was put
out of its misery.
When night came I was still ploughing my lonely furrow with no hope
of reaching the goal for which I had started out so hopefully in the
morning. No, the country is too exciting a place to work in. Give
me the solitude of London, where there are no bees to swarm and no
thrushes to keep telling one what a fine day it is in the garden.