IN THE ABBOT’S BEE-GARDEN
STANDING in the lane without, and looking up at the grey forbidding walls
of the old abbey, you wondered how anything human could exist on the
other side; but, once past the heavy iron-studded gate, your thoughts
doubled like hares in the opposite direction.
It seemed good to be a monk, if life could be all sunshine, and quietude,
and beauty like that. As you waited in the shadow of the great
stone-flagged portico, while your coming was announced, this feeling grew
deeper with every moment. The garden sloped down to the river’s edge,
winding footway, and green lawn, and kitchen-plot all alike girdled and
barricaded with rich-hued autumn flowers. Through the mass of crimson
fuchsia and many-coloured dahlia and hollyhock, bowers of pink and white
geranium with stems as thick as your wrist, ancient apple-trees drooping
under their burden of scarlet fruit, crowding jungles of roses, you could
see the bright waters sweeping by, and hear their busy sound as they won
a way amidst the rocky boulders strewing the bed of the tortuous Devon
stream.
Here and there in the sunny field-of-view visible through the arched
doorway, black-robed figures were quietly at work: some digging; others
gathering apples in the orchard; one sturdy brother was mowing the
Abbot’s lawn, the bright blade coming perilously near his fluttering
skirts at every stroke; another went by trundling a wheelbarrow full of
green vegetables for the refectory table. There was a distant cackle of
poultry, blending oddly with the solemn chant that came from the chapel
hard by. Robins sang everywhere, and starlings clucked and whistled in
the valerian that topped the great encircling wall. But wherever you
looked, whatever drew away your attention for the moment, you were sure
to come back to the consideration of one preponderant yet inexplicable
thing. A steady, deep note was upon the air. Rich and resonant, it
seemed to come from all directions at once. The dim, grey-vaulted
entrance-porch was full of it. Looking up into the dusk of oaken beams
overhead, there it seemed at its strangest and loudest. Queerest fact of
all, it appeared to have some mysterious affinity with the sunshine, for
when a stray white argosy of cloud came drifting over the azure and
obscured for a minute the glad light, this full, sonorous note died
suddenly away, rising as swiftly again to its old power and volume when
the sunbeams glowed back once more over the spacious garden, and over the
riverside willows that shed their gold of dying leafage with every breath
of the soft south wind.
It was not until you stepped outside, and looked upward over the face of
the old building, that you realised what it all meant. From its
foundation to the highest stone of the ancient bell-turret, the whole
front of the place was thickly mantled with ivy in full flower, and every
yellow tuft of blossom was besieged with bees. There seemed tens of
thousands of them, hovering and humming everywhere; and thousands more
arriving with every moment out of the blue air, or darting off again
fully laden, and away to some invisible bourne over the ruddy roof of
orchard trees.
Intent on this vociferous wonder, you do not catch the footfall on the
gravel-path in your rear, or see the sombre figure of the Abbot as he
comes towards you, the sweep of his black frock setting all the marigolds
nodding behind him, as though from a sudden flaw of wind. And now you
have another pleasurable disillusionment as to monkish conditions of
being. Trudging along the deep-cut Devonshire lanes on your way to the
Abbey, through the rain of falling autumn leaves, you pictured the place
to yourself as a kind of sacred sink of desolation, inhabited by a crew
of sour-visaged anchorites, who found only godlessness in sunshine, and
in cakes-and-ale nothing but assured perdition. But here, coming towards
you, smiling, and with outstretched hand, is the last kind of human being
you expected to see. Clad from head to foot in sober black, with, for
ornament, but the one plain silver cross swinging at his breast, the
Abbot shows, unmistakably, for a gentleman of cultured and enlightened
mien. A fine, swarthy face, kind, calm eyes behind gold spectacles, a
voice like an old violin, and a grip of the hand that makes you wince
with its abounding welcome, all combine to set you there and then at your
ease; and talk begins at once on the old, familiar plane among
bee-keepers—the quick, enthusiastic interchange, each participant as
ready a listener as learner, common all the world over, wherever flowers
grow and men love bees.
The brothers of the old Benedictine monastery—so the Abbot tells you, as
he leads the way towards the hives, through the sun-riddled
labyrinth—have kept bees, probably, for more than a thousand years.
There is no doubt that the original abbey building stood there, in the
wooded cleft of Devon valley, so long ago as the sixth century, nor
little question that its founder was a bee-man, for he was contemporary
and friend of the great St Modonnoc who himself first taught Irishmen to
keep bees.
“Monks, in the very earliest times, were almost invariably
apiculturists,” argues the Abbot. He stops in the orchard, the more
impressively to quote Latin, the glib leaf-shadows playing the while over
his tonsured head. “Lac et mel; panis, vena rudis. Milk and honey, and
coarse oaten bread. At least we know, from our chronicles, that these
were the common daily fare of our Order more than eight hundred years
ago; and honey remains a part of our food to this day.”
Thus overawed with the centuries, you begin to form a mental picture of
the bee-garden you are about to visit, voyaging so pleasantly through
winding path and shady thicket, with the bell-like sound of the water
growing clearer and clearer at every step. With all that hoary tradition
of the ages behind them, you promise yourself, these monks will have
clung to their bee-keeping mediævalism as to some sacred, inviolable
thing. There will be no movable comb-frames, nor American sections, nor
weird, foreign races of bees. They will never have heard even of
foul-brood, or napthol-beta, or the host of things that bless or curse
modern apiculture at every turn of the way. But, instead, there will be
a tangled wilderness of late blossom, such as only Devonshire can show in
November; dome-shaped hives of straw, each with its singing company about
it; perhaps a superannuated brother or two quietly making straw hackles
to shield the hives against coming winter weather; even, perchance, the
smell of burning brimstone on the air, as the last remnant of the
honey-harvest is gathered in the ancient way, by “taking up” the
strongest and the weakest colonies of bees.
And then a wicket-gate in the old wall determines the path and your
ruminations together. A sudden burst of sunshine; the rich medley of
sound from fourscore hives lifting high above the song of the purling
stream; and you are out on the broad, green river-bank, looking on at a
scene very different from the one you have expected.
There are no old-fashioned hives; they are all of the latest, most
scientific pattern, ranged under the shelter of the wall in two wide
terraces of close-shaven turf, looking southward over the stream. There
are outhouses of the most approved design, where all the business of a
modern apiary is going on. Here and there you see black-frocked figures
at work, dexterously examining the colonies. There is the deep, whirring
note of honey-extractors; the clamour of carpenters’ tools; the faint,
sickly smell from the wax-boilers; all the familiar evidences of
bee-farming carried on in the most modern, twentieth-century way.
As you look down the long, trim avenue of gaily-painted hives your
companion has a quiet side-glance upon you, obviously noting your
disappointment.
“What would you?” says he, and his deep voice rings like a passing-bell
for all your dreams. “Everything must move with the times, or must
inevitably perish. Modernism, rightly understood, is God’s fairest, most
priceless gift to the universe. It is a crucible through which all
things of true metal must pass to lose the accumulated dross of the ages,
keeping their original pure substance, but taking the new shape required
of them by latter-day needs. It is so with the old, dim windows of man’s
faith; daily the glass is being taken out, smelted down, purified,
replaced; we can see abroad into distances now never before visible. And
so it must prove even with bee-keeping, which is one of the oldest human
occupations in the world.”
He waves his hand towards the sunny prospect before you. Beyond the
river the burning apple-woods soar steadily upward; and high above these,
stretching away to meet the blue sky, lie the Devon moorlands, once all
rose-red with blossoming heather, but now, parched and brown, except
where a grey crag or rock puts forth its jagged head.
“It is a fine thing, perhaps,” says the Abbot, thoughtfully swinging his
silver cross in the sunbeams, “to love old, ignorant customs, old,
benighted, useless errors, for their picturesqueness and beauty alone.
But don’t you think it is a still finer thing to teach poor people how
they may win from the common hillside plenty of rich, nourishing food at
almost no cost at all? And that is what we are doing here. Modern
bee-science, it is true, gives us only an ugly utilitarian hive. It
sweeps away all the bright, iridescent cobwebs in they path of
bee-keeping, and substitutes hard fact for pretty fairy-tale. But the
sum of it all is that the poor cottager gains, not twenty or thirty
pounds at most of coarse, unsaleable sweet food from his hives, but
perhaps hundredweights of pure, choice, section-honey, which, sold in the
proper market, will clothe his children comfortably, and make it possible
for them to lead decent human lives.”