The Adventures of Maya the Bee Part 15

Hannibal had evidently mistaken Maya's good nature for weakness.

For now something unusual happened to the little bee. Suddenly her depression pa.s.sed and gave way, not to alarm or timidity, but to a calm courage. She straightened up, lifted her lovely, transparent wings, uttered her high clear buzz, and said with a gleam in her eyes:

"I am a bee, Mr. Hannibal."

"I beg your pardon," said he, and without saying good-by turned and ran down the tree-trunk as fast as a person can run who has seven legs.

Maya had to laugh, w.i.l.l.y-nilly. From down below Hannibal began to scold.

"You're bad. You threaten helpless people, you threaten them with your sting when you know they're handicapped by a misfortune and can't get away fast. But your hour is coming, and when you're in a tight place you'll think of me and be sorry." Hannibal disappeared under the leaves of the coltsfoot on the ground.

His last words had not reached the little bee.

The wind had almost died away, and the day promised to be fine.

White clouds sailed aloft in a deep, deep blue, looking happy and serene like good thoughts of the Lord. Maya was cheered. She thought of the rich shaded meadows by the woods and of the sunny slopes beyond the lake. A blithe activity must have begun there by this time. In her mind she saw the slim gra.s.ses waving and the purple iris that grew in the rills at the edge of the woods.

From the flower of an iris you could look across to the mysterious night of the pine-forest and catch its cool breath of melancholy. You knew that its forbidding silence, which transformed the sunshine into a reddish half-light of sleep, was the home of the fairy tale.

Maya was already flying. She had started off instinctively, in answer to the call of the meadows and their gay carpeting of flowers. It was a joy to be alive.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER X

THE WONDERS OF THE NIGHT

Thus the days and weeks of her young life pa.s.sed for little Maya among the insects in a lovely summer world--a happy roving in garden and meadow, occasional risks and many joys. For all that, she often missed the companions of her early childhood and now and again suffered a pang of homesickness, an ache of longing for her people and the kingdom she had left. There were hours, too, when she yearned for regular, useful work and a.s.sociation with friends of her own kind.

However, at bottom she had a restless nature, little Maya had, and was scarcely ready to settle down for good and live in the community of the bees; she wouldn't have felt comfortable. Often among animals as well as human beings there are some who cannot conform to the ways of the others. Before we condemn them we must be careful and give them a chance to prove themselves. For it is not always laziness or stubbornness that makes them different. Far from it. At the back of their peculiar urge is a deep longing for something higher or better than what every-day life has to offer, and many a time young runaways have grown up into good, sensible, experienced men and women.

Little Maya was a pure, sensitive soul, and her att.i.tude to the big, beautiful world came of a genuine eagerness for knowledge and a great delight in the glories of creation.

Yet it is hard to be alone even when you are happy, and the more Maya went through, the greater became her yearning for companionship and love. She was no longer so very young; she had grown into a strong, superb creature with sound, bright wings, a sharp, dangerous sting, and a highly developed sense of both the pleasures and the hazards of her life. Through her own experience she had gathered information and stored up wisdom, which she now often wished she could apply to something of real value. There were days when she was ready to return to the hive and throw herself at the queen's feet and sue for pardon and honorable reinstatement. But a great, burning desire held her back--the desire to know human beings. She had heard so many contradictory things about them that she was confused rather than enlightened. Yet she had a feeling that in the whole of creation there were no beings more powerful or more intelligent or more sublime than they.

A few times in her wanderings she had seen people, but only from afar, from high up in the air--big and little people, black people, white people, red people, and such as dressed in many colors. She had never ventured close. Once she had caught the glimmer of red near a brook, and thinking it was a bed of flowers had flown down. She found a human being fast asleep among the brookside blossoms. It had golden hair and a pink face and wore a red dress. It was dreadfully large, of course, but still it looked so good and sweet that Maya thrilled, and tears came to her eyes. She lost all sense of her whereabouts; she could do nothing but gaze and gaze upon the slumbering presence.

All the horrid things she had ever heard against man seemed utterly impossible. Lies they must have been--mean lies that she had been told against creatures as charming as this one asleep in the shade of the whispering birch-trees.

After a while a mosquito came and buzzed greetings.

"Look!" cried Maya, hot with excitement and delight. "Look, just look at that human being there. How good, how beautiful! Doesn't it fill you with enthusiasm?"

The mosquito gave Maya a surprised stare, then turned slowly round to glance at the object of her admiration.

"Yes, it _is_ good. I just tasted it. I stung it. Look, my body is shining red with its blood."

Maya had to press her hand to her heart, so startled was she by the mosquito's daring.

"Will it die?" she cried. "Where did you wound it? How could you? How could you screw up your courage to sting it? And how vile! Why, you're a beast of prey!"

The mosquito t.i.ttered.

"Why, it's only a very little human being," it answered in its high, thin voice. "It's the size called girl--the size at which the legs are covered half way up with a separate colored casing.

My sting, of course, goes through the casing but usually doesn't reach the skin.-- Your ignorance is really stupendous. Do you actually think that human beings are good? I haven't come across one who willingly let me take the tiniest drop of his blood."

"I don't know very much about human beings, I admit," said Maya humbly.

"But of all the insects you bees have most to do with human beings. That's a well-known fact."

"I left our kingdom," Maya confessed timidly. "I didn't like it.

I wanted to learn about the outside world."

"Well, well, what do you think of that!" The mosquito drew a step nearer. "How do you like your free-lancing? I must say, I admire you for your independence. I for one would never consent to serve human beings."

"But they serve us too!" said Maya, who couldn't bear a slight to be put upon her people.

"Maybe.-- To what nation do you belong?"

"I come of the nation in the castle park. The ruling queen is Helen VIII."

"Indeed," said the mosquito, and bowed low. "An enviable lineage. My deepest respects.-- There was a revolution in your kingdom not so long ago, wasn't there? I heard it from the messengers of the rebel swarm. Am I right?"

"Yes," said Maya, proud and happy that her nation was so respected and renowned. Homesickness for her people awoke again, deep down in her heart, and she wished she could do something good and great for her queen and country. Carried away on the wings of this dream, she forgot to ask about human beings. Or, like as not, she refrained from questions, feeling that the mosquito would not tell her things she would be glad to hear.

The mite of a creature impressed her as a saucy Miss, and people of her kind usually had nothing good to say of others. Besides, she soon flew away.

"I'm going to take one more drink," she called back to Maya.

"Later I and my friends are going flying in the light of the westering sun. Then we'll be sure to have good weather to-morrow."

Maya made off quickly. She couldn't bear to stay and see the mosquito hurt the sleeping child. And how could she do this thing and not perish? Hadn't Ca.s.sandra said: "If you sting a human being, you will die?"

Maya still remembered every detail of this incident with the child and the mosquito, but her craving to know human beings well had not been stilled. She made up her mind to be bolder and never stop trying until she had reached her goal.

At last Maya's longing to know human beings was to be satisfied, and in a way far, far lovelier and more wonderful than she had dreamed.

Once, on a warm evening, having gone to sleep earlier than usual, she woke up suddenly in the middle of the night--something that had never happened to her before. When she opened her eyes, her astonishment was indescribable: her little bedroom was all steeped in a quiet bluish radiance. It came down through the entrance, and the entrance itself shone as if hung with a silver-blue curtain.

Maya did not dare to budge at first, though not because she was frightened. No. Somehow, along with the light came a rare, lovely peacefulness, and outside her room the air was filled with a sound finer, more harmonious than any music she had ever heard. After a time she rose timidly, awed by the glamour and the strangeness of it all, and looked out. The whole world seemed to lie under the spell of an enchantment. Everything was sparkling and glittering in pure silver. The trunks of the birch-trees, the slumbering leaves were overlaid with silver.

The gra.s.s, which from her height seemed to lie under delicate veils, was set with a thousand pale pearls. All things near and far, the silent distances, were shrouded in this soft, bluish sheen.

"This must be the night," Maya whispered and folded her hands.

High up in the heavens, partly veiled by the leaves of a beech-tree, hung a full clear disk of silver, from which the radiance poured down that beautified the world. And then Maya saw countless bright, sharp little lights surrounding the moon in the heavens--oh, so still and beautiful, unlike any shining things she had ever seen before. To think she beheld the night, the moon, and the stars--the wonders, the lovely wonders of the night! She had heard of them but never believed in them. It was almost too much.

Then the sound rose again, the strange night sound that must have awakened her. It came from nearby, filling the welkin, a soaring chirp with a silvery ring that matched the silver on the trees and leaves and gra.s.s and seemed to come rilling down from the moon on the beams of silver light.

Maya looked about for the source, in vain; in the mysterious drift of light and shadow it was difficult to make out objects in clear outline, everything was draped so mysteriously; and yet everything showed up true and in such heroic beauty.