The Keeper of the Bees, page 12
It appealed to him as modest in appearance, so he walked in and faced a clerk across a case filled with rings. He laid the money he could spare on the counter and said: “Could you furnish me with a very plain, simple ring for that amount?”
The clerk had not been accustomed to furnishing rings for that amount of money, but he was shrewd; he realized that the money on the counter was all the money the man before him intended to spend. If he did not take it he would not have it. So, after some hunting, he found a ring that Jamie thought would be the right size. It looked fairly satisfactory, so the gentleman had the money and Jamie had the ring. He took the shining band of gold that he had borrowed from the Master and transferred it to a left-hand pocket of the vest he was wearing, and in the right-hand pocket, convenient to his fingers, he slipped the circlet, that at least had the merit of shining.
Then he headed back for the Court House, and as he stepped into the office, he faced a woman whom he knew instantly. He knew her height; he knew her eyes; he knew without knowing exactly how or why he knew. He was a bridegroom, but the woman he was facing was not a bride. She was a widow, If any story were to be told by her clothing. From head to foot the Storm Girl was in deep mourning. A tight, small hat fitted her head and was pulled so low that he could only see a gleam of the eyes that he had been positive in the lightning’s flare were either black or brown. The office lights revealed them brown—gray-brown. The baffling thing about the costume the girl wore was a veil. He would have called it a widow’s veil. It was thick; it was black; a broad satin band finished the edges. The band covered the mouth and chin; the hat shaded the eyes and a mask-like gleam of eye and a line across the cheek and nose were all Jamie was permitted to see of his prospective bride.
For a minute he experienced a sense of shock, and then he realized that in some manner death figured in the adventure he was embarking on that day. The girl was in mourning. Possibly, after all, the man whose place he was taking was a dead man who might have fulfilled his obligations if he had been granted the opportunity; but, at any rate, the girl had distinctly said that she must be rescued from shame. So if a dead man figured in the case, he hadn’t been very much of a man, and it was shameful that he had left the marriage ceremony to any chance of disaster.
These things were tearing through Jamie’s brain swift as light flashes, while Jamie himself lifted the Bee Master’s hat and brought his own heels together and presented a figure that would at least have been worthy of consideration by any woman. His hasty rush after the ring that was to save his self-respect, that was to put a crowning touch of pride on his only wedding, had set his heart pumping unduly, and so his cheeks were not so white as they had been, his lips were not so blue. A flush of red had surged to his face and he looked very much as any lean, self-respecting, well-dressed man of Scottish origin and American birth and training might be expected to appear. From force of habit, as he straightened from his bow, Jamie extended his hand and recognized the touch of the hand that met his, and then he lined up shoulder to shoulder and said casually: “We figured time from the same watch, didn’t we?”
The girl beside him merely assented. Jamie took charge of proceedings with all the self-assurance of a man who was accustomed to captaining his own affairs. Whatever the woman beside him was getting out of this, Jamie had made up his mind that he was going to get a wedding, and it was going to be his own. He took the arm of the girl beside him and piloted her to the Clerk’s desk. Whether she had the correct impression now or not, Jamie did not know, but he proposed that when she got through with that wedding and went her way with the ring and the certificate that were to save her self-respect, she should, at least, go in the belief that she had married a man. He had forgotten all about telling her that very shortly he would not be a man; he intended for the few minutes that were to come to be all man.
So he impelled her to the Clerk and announced that they wanted to fill the forms necessary to procure a marriage license. While Jamie wrote down the names of his father and mother and the date of his birth and his residence and his occupation and all the things required, beside him stood a tall, self-reliant girl, who was filling in the blank that had been given her. When these documents were filled out as the law required, to keep the Storm Girl firm in the impression that he was a man of his word, Jamie picked them up and signed first, then handed them to her for her signature. When the Clerk finished his share of the proceeding and offered the long envelope to Jamie, he waved toward the girl he was marrying and the Clerk gave her the document. They were directed to the office of the Probate Judge and it was not any time at all until the necessary papers were signed, sealed, and delivered to Jamie, who, without one glance of examination, handed them to the Storm Girl. Jamie paid the fee and walked beside her to the street without knowing even the surname of the woman he had married. She might be either Smith, Jones, or Brown. It was ridiculous, but it was true that the touch of a hand, a strip of white face decorated with dark eyes, and “I, Alice Louise, take thee, James Lewis, to be my lawful and wedded husband,” were all the information he had.
So he had married “Alice Louise.” He was not particularly well satisfied with the name. She did not look like Alice, and she did not the least in the world resemble Louise. He had known Louises by the dozen all his life, and they always had light hair; always they had blue eyes, and they were always clinging, dependent little things. Never since he could remember had he known of a woman who could touch shoulders with a six-foot man and carry her head like an empress, who extended a hand mighty near as big as, evidently firmer than, his own, and in a voice of mellow contralto from away down in a deep chest answer to the name of Louise!
Jamie cupped his hand around the elbow of Alice Louise merely to show her that he considered himself enough of a man to take care of her in case she needed him, and he piloted her to the street, and there, standing on the sidewalk, for the first time they looked at each other. Jamie deliberately waited to see what the lady had to say; and as he waited, with concentrated vision, he strove to pierce that crow-black costume and fix in his memory the form and all he could see of the face of the woman before him.
He had given his word that he would not seek her, and he was not any too sure that he was going to keep that word. He was not any too sure that he was not going to know who she was, and where she lived, and why she had used him to ease her heart and her conscience, to save her body from the ocean. As he awaited, looking straight into the face of the girl opposite him, he saw that the muscles of the cheeks and the lips were all in a quiver and that the steady stare of the eyes looking into his was going to dissolve any minute in an uncontrollable gush of tears. Tears did the same thing to Jamie that they do to any man when an attractive woman admits she is facing something that is too much for her, that she needs his help. He had intended to force her to speak, and the first thing he knew he was no longer facing her. He had stepped beside her and he was saying to her in low tones: “Steady yourself! You’ll be all right in a few minutes. Are you taking the car at this corner?”
She had merely nodded in assent, and still with her elbow in his palm, Jamie piloted her through the crowds and helped her on a street car, and the people surged between them. As he saw her enter the car and make her way to a seat, he realized that “Alice Louise” and “I do” were all that he had heard her say. He had not kept his determination to force her to speak. He had felt so sorry for her when he realized she was near a breakdown he had spared her. Anyway, he had shown her that he was a man who could run his own affairs. He had helped her to a street car and away from him. He could not honorably board the same car. So he stepped back, raised his hat, lifted his chin and looked at the car, on a bare chance that she might glance his way before the car started and carried her from sight.
Then Jamie put on his hat and regained the sidewalk and said to himself in not very pleasant tones: “Well, can you beat that?”
He had not expected much, but he had expected a word or two, and not only had the words not been spoken, but the lady herself had not even turned her head to see whether he was going to take the same car or not. She had walked down the aisle, taken her seat with her back toward him, and sat immovable until she was carried from sight. It did not avail much that he might see what car she had taken or in which direction she went. She might take any car and she might leave it in a block or two in order to use the speediest opportunity to escape him. She had gone away Mrs. James Lewis MacFarlane with the necessary credentials and the ring he had produced at the proper moment for a finger that had hesitated to receive it; now he was left standing on the sidewalk and the best thing for him to do was to see how soon he could reach home and restore the Bee Master’s wardrobe to its accustomed place. He had been a bridegroom and there was nothing to it, not even “Thank you,” If he wanted to extract any romance whatever, he would have to get it from the salty kisses that had swept his face the previous night. And, being honest, he had to admit that if the rock upon which they had sat had been the means of the girl’s salvation, she probably would have kissed it with as much, or possibly more, enthusiasm.
Jamie stood on the sidewalk and waited for his knees to stiffen slightly before he began searching for the car he required to carry him back to the garden of the bees. When he found it and boarded it and sank into a seat, he said to all and sundry: “Well, of all the darned weddings!” He knew that he said it because he heard the words, but nobody else seemed to have heard them because everybody was interested in their papers and their friends and where they were going.
So Jamie went back to the house and returned the borrowed raiment and assumed his own. Then he went out in the sunshine and sat down to think things over. He had half a mind to tell Margaret Cameron that this was his wedding day and she might prepare him any kind of a feast she saw fit to offer for such an occasion. A wry grin crossed his cheeks when he thought of the look that would come on her face If he told her that, and then she would speak and she would ask where his bride was; and where his bride was happened to be a secret and the business of the bride herself. He reflected that if she was where she had been at midnight the previous night, she would not be so very far from him at the present minute. He was assailed by an impulse to go down and walk up and down the beach, to scan each house accessible from the shore line to see whether in any of them there was visible a glimpse of a girl clad in the deepest kind of mourning.
How much that mourning meant, Jamie could not decide. He remembered that the girl had offered to begin at the beginning and tell him the story. It had been he who had told her to use a few words, merely to state what she wanted. If she had been as full of Scottish blood as he, she could not have taken him at his word more quickly or more completely. She had stated the bald facts and he, Jamie reflected, with another twisted grin, had materialized the facts. The lady had said that she needed a ring a marriage certificate and a name, and she had stood beside him, she had allowed the ring to be put on her finger, she had taken possession of the certificate. One thing he did recall. She had laid the document on her breast and folded both hands over it and held it there as if nothing in all the world could be more precious to her. And his name. At least she had accepted it in marriage whether she meant to use it or not.
Jamie felt something of a fool that he had not at least stretched out his hand and picked up the record the girl had written and read it. He had not been much of a man and he had not managed his own wedding in his own way quite as he had thought that he would. It all harked back to the fact that he had given a promise, that he had said that he would not intrude himself, he would make no effort to find her. He had said that he would be content merely to offer what assistance he could and the amount and kind of assistance that the girl required had been very clearly specified to him. He had accepted the bargain. He had gone through with it. The thing to do now was to go out on the back porch, put on the Bee Master’s old bee coat, raid the lily and the cinnamon pink beds, and while his body was free from the taint of surgical dressing, go down and face the Black Germans and find out for himself whether he was bee immune for sure. It was a piece of knowledge that he wanted to have before the little Scout put in another appearance.
So Jamie donned the coat and applied the lily and wiped his head through the pinks and slowly, deliberately, with as much assurance of step as he could assume, he made the long march down the east line, pausing before hive after hive of bees, looking at the tiny things that were coming and going so busily on humming wings, realizing that he did not know a drone from a worker, a nurse from a queen.
He resolved, as he stood before one of the hives, that when Doctor Grayson called him that evening for his daily report, he would ask how soon now it would be possible for him to see the Bee Master for a very few minutes, and he would ask how long it was probable that he was going to remain in the hospital. Then he reflected that if he had not been called yet to see the Bee Master there was every chance that he was so weak and so ill that he might be away a matter of weeks, possibly of months. Besides, bees were very closely related to trees and what the little Scout had pointed out to him of bee lore was so alluring that he might as well go deeper; he might as well read some of the technical books and see what they contained. It was going to be some time yet before his fate was decided, and in that time possibly there was nothing more interesting, nothing more useful that would come within his possibilities to which he could turn his attention than just bees.
So Jamie, doing his best on “Highland Mary,” went slowly the round of the hives and as he turned up the back walk and sighted the big hive of the Black Germans, he remembered something else. He hunted for the water tap around which grew the mint. He pulled a handful of it and rubbed it over his trousers and over his sleeves and crushed it in his hands, and then, doing his best on the tune prescribed, he slowly approached the Black Germans. He planted himself in front of their first hive. He stood there as long as he pleased. He knelt down and peered into the opening. He studied them so intently that he realized that they lacked the gold of the Italians. They were of different shape. When he slowly walked away, he felt that the next person who asked him if he were bee immune might safely be given an affirmative answer. He believed that the next time a bee alighted on a flower before him he would at least be able to say whether it was an Italian or a Black German.
He so disliked the name that he told himself as he climbed the back walk that if those bees belonged to him, he truly would pick up the hives of the Black Germans and carry them down and pitch them into the Pacific Ocean. He would not have anything called a Black German, not even a bee, where it was a daily reminder of what true Black Germans had done to men of his father’s race and country, to men who carried his same blood in their veins. Of course, it was silly to carry the loathing contempt he felt for a race of men into his feeling for a hive of bees. It was not very sensible, but Jamie reflected as he slowly climbed the walk, eating a big red tomato that he had picked from a vine he passed, that there was not much reason to most of our likes and dislikes in this world. What we liked was so a matter of individual preference, and preference was so controlled by the manner in which one had been reared, by environment, by individual taste, that necessarily there had to be a wide range given to personal preference.
Jamie wiped his fingers and threw the core of the tomato as far as he could fling it down the mountain-side and went into the house. On the back porch he changed to his own coat, and entered the living room to select the particular book he intended to read, with two thoughts foremost in his mind. His tenure of the Bee Master’s garden had resulted in three things: He was a bridegroom; he knew a Black German bee from an Italian; and he had found out that there was something particularly and peculiarly satisfying about a big, dead-ripe tomato. He would try that tomato stunt between meals every day. The fruit slid down his throat and landed in his stomach with a sort of cooling, refreshing effect that was better than any glass of wine he had ever taken. There was no heat about it, no forced stimulation. It did the work and felt wonderful! where it was and left an urgent invitation for more.
So the bridegroom stood before the small writing desk and, opening the case above it, ran an investigating finger over the titles of many books. Then he selected one and dropped into the chair that he had decided to use as his own and tried to concentrate all the mentality he had upon the subject of what is necessary for the beginner who would keep bees. He found himself reading paragraph after paragraph about proper hives and comb cases and smokers and all sorts of paraphernalia that he could find in a big case on the back porch if he opened it and knew what to look for. His eyes were reading the words and his brain was fixing with unbelievable stubbornness—which, after all, was not so unbelievable in a man of Scottish ancestry—his brain would persist in dwelling on a surprised hand that had drawn back and then advanced to be decorated with a wedding ring, on a marriage certificate that had been held tight against a breast that looked capable and immensely attractive. Then his brain would focus on a pair of keen brown eyes bespeaking nerve strain to the limit. His brain would keep making his eyes see quivering lips and twitching cheek muscles.
The thing he had done was going to stay with him for a while. He was not going to be able to put it aside and concentrate his thought on anything, not even a thing as interesting as the little Scout had said bees were. He truly did want to get on with a real bee book. That about bee nurses. Who would train a bee to become a nurse? Were bees sick? Did they need nurses? Did they sting each other and have wounds that would not heal on their small anatomies? He must find out about that speedily, but he could not find out about it at that minute because he had a number of things that were forcing him to think about them. And these things were, after all, important. You could not alter the fact that events had put him legally in a position where he was a married man, and you could not alter the fact that an immensely attractive woman had stood beside him and put herself in a position where she was legally a married woman; and there was not any reason why he should try to get away from the fact that she would be of much more use to the world, to her family, to a nebulous little person, as she stood, even in her black dress, in enforced composure, than she would have been as a formless thing wasted by an undertow leagues away and worried to the bone by the lean hounds of the sea. To have saved the life of a woman like that was worth thinking of. He had thought last night that it might be the one worth-while thing that he could do before the end. Since he had nothing else to do, and since it would intrude, he could not very well be blamed for thinking about it. Evidently no one else was going to think about it. He had coveted a word. He had not received even a “Thank you.” But that was all right. He did not ask or expect anything.
