They encored him. One of the guests was the fattish young man, Mr. Mullett, but the spotlight had shifted from him and he sat eating morosely and regarding Hervey Deyo with bilious, jealous eye. During the dessert Mr. Mullett essayed to bark like a seal, but Mrs. Murgatroyd looked at him disapprovingly and he never reached the roared climax; he buried his chagrin in the peche Melba. Hervey Deyo, observing, smiled quietly to himself.
After dinner he had a tête-à-tête with Mina Low. For her own special and private diversion he twice repeated his imitation; on the second occasion he ventured to take her hand and she pretended to be so absorbed in the imitation that she did not notice.
Three nights later he called on her at her home. It was with difficulty that her young brothers were finally dragged off to bed; the imitation fascinated them and Hervey Deyo was forced to do it no less than seven times. He was getting to be a virtuoso. He could keep it up for five minutes at a time, now pretending that the bee was in the lampshade, now under a glass, now behind the piano, and even up the pant leg of the youngest Low boy. When he and Mina were at last alone together, he pretended that the bee was buzzing very near her blonde, bobbed hair; in capturing it, he kissed her. Their engagement was announced the following Friday.
The notice in the local newspaper pleased and yet vaguely disturbed Hervey Deyo. It described him thus: “Mr. Hervey Deyo is well known in local society; he is a gifted scientist and has gained a reputation for his ability to imitate a bee.”
As he reread this he could not but feel that some reference should have been made to the fact that he was the author of an authoritative work on the cuckoo (Cuculus Canorus), that he was a Doctor of Philosophy, and that in the fall he was to become Chief Curator of Birds in the Museum. Still, he reflected, newspapers haven’t room to print everything; they strive to print what to them are the salient facts.
He and his fiancée went about a great deal and the party at which Hervey Deyo did not give his imitation of a bee was adjudged a sterile affair. Frequently he congratulated himself in those days that it took a man of science to know when to be serious and when not to be. They were married in August, and no less than seventeen friends sent the happy pair various representations of bees as wedding gifts; they received bronze bees, porcelain bees, silver bees, gold bees, and a pewter bee; his colleagues at the Museum gave him a handsome bronze inkstand made to resemble a bee-hive.
On his return from his honeymoon, Hervey Deyo threw himself into his bird labors at the Museum with energy; he was a bird man, even a first-class bird man, and so far his ambition was gratified; but it still burned with a hot unappeased flame. He wanted to be the biggest bird man in the world. However, after his marriage he permitted himself certain digressions from the relentless pursuit of this aim. There was a constant demand for him socially and, as Mina was fond of teas and parties and bridge and balls, he found himself giving rather less time to his birds than formerly. He was by no means averse to a measure of social life.
“A great scientist can afford to have his human side,” he assured himself.
Wherever he went with Mina, be it tea, party, bridge, or ball, he was invariably pressed to give his imitation of a bee. He would bow; he would let them insist a bit; invariably he gave it.
“Bzzzzzzzzzzzz, bzzzzzzzzzzzzz, bzzzzzrf!”