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.
ON SHAKING HANDS
If there is one custom that might be assumed to be beyond criticism it is the custom of shaking hands; but it seems that even this innocent and amiable practice is upon its trial. A heavy indictment has been directed against it in the Press on hygienic grounds, and we are urged to adopt some more healthy mode of expressing our mutual emotion when we meet or part. I think it would need a pretty stiff Act of Parliament and a heavy code of penalties to break us of so ingrained a habit. Of course, there are many people in the world who go through life without ever shaking hands. Probably most people in the world manage to do so. The Japanese bows, and the Indian salaams, and the Chinese makes a grave motion of the hand, and the Arab touches the breast of his friend at parting with the tips of his fingers.
By comparison with these modes of salutation it may be that our Western custom of shaking each other by the hand seems coarse and bucolic, just as our custom of promiscuous kissing seems an unintelligible indecency to the Japanese, to whom osculation has an exclusive sexual significance that we do not attach to it. In the matter of kissing, it is true, we have become much more restrained than our ancestors. Everyone has read the famous passage in Erasmus' letters in which he describes how people used to kiss in Tudor England, and how, by the way, that learned and holy man enjoyed it. He could not write so of us to-day. And there is one connection in which kissing has never been a common form of salutation with us. Masculine kissing is an entirely Continental habit, chiefly cultivated among the Russians. The greatest display of kissing I have ever witnessed was at Prince Kropotkin's house—he was then living at Brighton—on his seventieth birthday. A procession of aged and bearded Russian patriarchs came to bring greetings, and as each one entered the room he rushed at the sage, flung his arms about his neck, and gave him a resounding smack on each whiskered cheek, and Kropotkin gave resounding smacks in return.
This is carrying heartiness too far for our austerer tastes. I do not think that Englishmen could be bribed to kiss each other, but I cannot conceive that they will ever be argued out of shaking hands with each other. A greeting which we really feel without a grip of the hand to accompany it would seem like a repulse, or a sacrilege. It would be a bond without the seal—as cold as a stepmother's breath, as official as a typewritten letter with a typewritten signature. It would be like denying our hands their natural office. They would revolt. They would not remain in our pockets or behind our backs or toying with a button. We should have to chain them up, so instinctive and impetuous is their impulse to leap at a brother hand.
No doubt the custom has its disadvantages. We all know hands that we should prefer not to shake, warm, clammy hands, listless, flaccid hands, bony, energetic hands. The horror and loathing with which Uriah Heep filled our youthful mind was conveyed more through the touch of his hand than by any other circumstance. It was a cold, dank hand that left us haunted with the sense of obscene and creepy things. I know the touch of that hand as though it had lain in mine, and whenever I feel such a hand now the vision of a cringing, fawning figure damns the possessor of it in my mind beyond reprieve. It may be unjust, but the hand-clasp is no bad clue to moral as well as physical health. "There is death in that hand" was Coleridge's remark after parting from Keats, and there are times when we can say with no less confidence that there is pollution, or dishonesty, or candour, or courage "in that hand."