Old Gao’s experience, the less he bothered his bees, the better they did. And if they stung the barbarian, what then?
The stranger’s hair was silver-white, and sparse; his nose, the first barbarian nose that Old Gao had seen, was huge and curved and put Old Gao in mind of the beak of an eagle; his skin was tanned the same colour as Old Gao’s own, and was lined deeply. Old Gao was not certain that he could read a barbarian’s face as he could read the face of a person, but he thought the man seemed most serious and, perhaps, unhappy.
“Why?”
“I study bees. Your brother tells me you have big black bees here. Unusual bees.”
Old Gao shrugged. He did not correct the man on the relationship with his cousin.
The stranger asked Old Gao if he had eaten, and when Gao said that he had not the stranger asked the Widow Zhang to bring them soup and rice and whatever was good that she had in her kitchen, which turned out to be a stew of black tree-fungus and vegetables and tiny transparent river fish, little bigger than tadpoles. The two men ate in silence. When they had finished eating, the stranger said, “I would be honoured if you would show me your bees.”
Old Gao said nothing, but the stranger paid the Widow Zhang well and he put his bag on his back. Then he waited, and, when Old Gao began to walk, the stranger followed him. He carried his bag as if it weighed nothing to him. He was strong for an old man, thought Old Gao, and wondered whether all such barbarians were so strong.
“Where are you from?”
“England,” said the stranger.
Old Gao remembered his father telling him about a war with the English, over trade and over opium, but that was long ago.
They walked up the hillside, that was, perhaps, a mountainside. It was steep, and the hillside was too rocky to be cut into fields. Old Gao tested the stranger’s pace, walking faster than usual, and the stranger kept up with him, with his pack on his back.
The stranger stopped several times, however. He stopped to examine flowers—the small white flowers that bloomed in early spring elsewhere in the valley, but in late spring here on the side of the hill. There was a bee on one of the flowers, and the stranger knelt and observed it. Then he reached into his pocket, produced a large magnifying glass and examined the bee through it, and made notes in a small pocket notebook, in an incomprehensible writing.
Old Gao had never seen a magnifying glass before, and he leaned in to look at the bee, so black and so strong and so very different from the bees elsewhere in that valley.
“One of your bees?”
“Yes,” said Old Gao. “Or one like it.”
“Then we shall let her find her own way home,” said the stranger, and he did not disturb the bee, and he put away the magnifying glass.
The Croft
East Dene, Sussex
August 11th, 1922
My dear Watson,
I have taken our discussion of this afternoon to heart, considered it carefully, and am prepared to modify my previous opinions.
I am amenable to your publishing your account of the incidents of 1903, specifically of the final case before my retirement, under the following conditions.
In addition to the usual changes that you would make to disguise actual people and places, I would suggest that you replace the entire scenario we encountered (I speak of Professor Presbury’s garden. I shall not write of it further here) with monkey glands, or a similar extract from the testes of an ape or lemur, sent by some foreign mystery-man. Perhaps the monkey-extract could have the effect of making Professor Presbury move like an ape—he could be some kind of “creeping man,” perhaps?—or possibly make him able to clamber up the sides of buildings and up trees. I would suggest that he could grow a tail, but this might be too fanciful even for you, Watson, although no more fanciful than many of the rococo additions you have made in your histories to otherwise humdrum events in my life and work.
In addition, I have written the following speech, to be delivered by myself, at the end of your narrative. Please make certain that something much like this is there, in which I inveigh against living too long, and the foolish urges that push foolish people to do foolish things to prolong their foolish lives:
Something along those lines, I fancy, would set my mind at rest.
Let me see the finished article, please, before you submit it to be published.
I remain, old friend, your most obedient servant,
Sherlock Holmes
They reached Old Gao’s bees late in the afternoon. The beehives were grey wooden boxes piled behind a structure so simple it could barely be called a shack. Four posts, a roof, and hangings of oiled cloth that served to keep out the worst of the spring rains and the summer storms. A small charcoal brazier served for warmth, if you placed a blanket over it and yourself, and to cook upon; a wooden pallet in the center of the structure, with an ancient ceramic pillow, served as a bed on the occasions that Old Gao slept up on the mountainside with the bees, particularly in the autumn, when he harvested most of the honey. There was little enough of it compared to the output of his cousin’s hives, but it was enough that he would sometimes spend two or three days waiting for the comb that he had crushed and stirred into a slurry to drain through the cloth into the buckets and pots that he had carried up the mountainside. Finally he would melt the remainder, the sticky wax and bits of pollen and dirt and bee slurry, in a pot, to extract the beeswax, and he would give the sweet water back to the bees. Then he would carry the honey and the wax blocks down the hill to the village to sell.
He showed the barbarian stranger the eleven hives, watched impassively as the stranger put on a veil and opened a hive, examining first the bees, then the contents of a brood box, and finally the queen, through his magnifying glass. He showed no fear, no discomfort: in everything he did the stranger’s movements were gentle and slow, and he was not stung, nor did he crush or hurt a single bee. This impressed Old Gao. He had assumed that barbarians were inscrutable, unreadable, mysterious creatures, but this man seemed overjoyed to have encountered Gao’s bees. His eyes were shining.
Old Gao fired up the brazier, to boil some water. Long before the charcoal was hot, however, the stranger had removed from his bag a contraption of glass and metal. He had filled the upper half of it with water from the stream, lit a flame, and soon a kettleful of water was steaming and bubbling. Then the stranger took two tin mugs from his bag, and some green tea leaves wrapped in paper, and dropped the leaves into the mug, and poured on the water.
It was the finest tea that Old Gao had ever drunk: better by far than his cousin’s tea. They drank it cross- legged on the floor.
“I would like to stay here for the summer, in this house,” said the stranger.
“Here? This is not even a house,” said Old Gao. “Stay down in the village. Widow Zhang has a room.”
“I will stay here,” said the stranger. “Also I would like to rent one of your beehives.”
Old Gao had not laughed in years. There were those in the village who would have thought such a thing impossible. But still, he laughed then, a guffaw of surprise and amusement that seemed to have been jerked out of him.
“I am serious,” said the stranger. He placed four silver coins on the ground between them. Old Gao had not seen where he got them from: three silver Mexican pesos, a coin that had become popular in China years before, and a large silver yuan. It was as much money as Old Gao might see in a year of selling honey. “For this money,” said the stranger, “I would like someone to bring me food: every three days should suffice.”
