The Keeper of the Bees, page 13
Right there Jamie closed the book with his finger in the place and went to open his front door. A messenger boy handed him a parcel and a letter and disappeared with such miraculous swiftness that there was no conclusion left for Jamie except that he had been told to make his delivery and also to see how speedily he could vanish.
Jamie laid down the book without looking to see what page he had been reading on, and slipped the letter from the band that held the small oblong box in his fingers. With the letter in one hand and the box in the other he contemplated them. He studied them. He turned them over and around, and he caught an odor emanating from the box that he knew.
Before he opened it, he recognized what he would see. He was sufficiently sensitive to odors that his brain told him, even as his fingers worked to confirm the message, that when he slipped the paper and lifted the lid of the size of box that florists used for violets, he would find a big bunch of the pinkish lavender flower that grew on the sand bordering the Pacific Ocean. Now he would get the flower book. And when he got it, as he did later, he learned to know sand verbena by its real name, and he learned that the six-o’clock odor of this flower is perhaps as sweet a scent as can delight the nostrils of any lover of evanescent perfume. He lifted the delicate blooms and hunted through the Master’s belongings until he found a little bowl of antique copper, and this he filled with water, and into the water he carefully put the flowers.
Then he took the letter and sat down in the chair and slowly and deliberately broke the seal. Again Jamie felt that he knew exactly what he was going to see. The thing that the eyes and lips had been unable to say because the effort of speech would unlock a floodgate of tears, that thing had been written. So he was not in the least surprised, but to the depths of his heart he was pleased, when he raised the flap of the heavy oblong envelope and extracted an equally heavy sheet of paper that he unfolded to read:
My Dear Mr. MacFarlane:
The reason I left you without saying one word, without one backward look, was from the physical necessity of keeping my lips tight shut and my eyes wide open in order that I might not attract the attention of passers-by and humiliate you by making a scene before people.
I want you to know that what you did for me has given me life, the chance to go on with my work with the same prideful assurance I always have taken in it. You have eased the heart of a woman who was slowly dying from fear and anxiety.
All my life I shall thank you for your kindness of last night, for your unparalleled act of today. If you are correct in your statement that you have not much time, believe this, that every night before I go to bed I shall ask God to extend to you His utmost clemency, the deepest depth and the highest height of His mercy.
It is quite impossible that I should voice adequate thanks for what you did for me, and now I find that it is equally impossible to write anything on this paper that will come any nearer expressing my sincere thanks for the obligation to you under which I find myself. With all my heart I do thank you, and I hope that God will bless you and keep you. I hope that you may be mistaken and that there may be a long and happy life in store for you.
Half-a-dozen lines ahead of it, Jamie got it, and it hit him in the face like a blow. It was written there in a firm, beautifully legible hand, just such writing as Jamie had imagined the hand that he had held last night and had seen in operation that afternoon, would write:
With undying obligations,
Alice Louise MacFarlane.
“Well, I’ll be darned!” said Jamie. “Can you beat it? Is she really going to take my name? Is she really going to use it in some kind of business? Is she really going to bring a child into the world and call it ‘MacFarlane’?”
Then Jamie began the process of reading the letter again, and it was not long until he could have repeated it a word at a time backward. Just why he kept getting it out and holding it in his fingers and turning it over and examining the paper and studying the script, he did not know. It was wonderful, it was right, it was all his heart could have asked. It sounded exactly like the girl who was just the height, who had the strength of body, who had the mane of silken hair, who had the keen brown eyes, who had the firm breasts, the capable hands, the mellow, luring voice, that Jamie always had imagined would be exactly what he would want when he met the woman who would be the one woman of all the world to him.
9. Vitamins and Scouts
The last thing at night Jamie again read his letter, He opened the envelope and unfolded the sheet, very carefully scrutinizing each written word. It was not in the least necessary that he should do this in order to know the contents of the letter. Some way he liked the feel of the paper in his fingers. If he had been buying stationery for the Storm Woman, who had stood shoulder to shoulder with him during an official marriage ceremony, he would have bought that kind of paper. He thought very likely that he would have been willing to stake a small wager on the fact that this particular woman would use green ink. A woman who carried about her a distinct odor of sage and of sand verbena and primroses would use green ink. He thought that a hand such as he had held would fashion the letters of the alphabet as they were fashioned in his letter. He thought that she would express herself clearly, tersely, and in excellent English such as had been used.
As he read it and re-read it and repeated it from memory when he was busy with the watering or occupying his hands with something that prevented him from taking it from his pocket lest he soil it, a doubt began to spring in his mind. The doubt had not the slightest reference to the girl who had written the letter. What he was vaguely beginning to distrust was his own judgment. He could not quite couple the feel of the woman he had held in his arms, the tones of her voice, the silken length of her hair, the agony of her cold, salt-encrusted face laid against his; he could not quite couple the brow and the eyes, the wide mouth and the firm chin that the meager lightning flashes had revealed; he could not couple the quivering lips and the twitching cheeks and the tear-suppressing eyes with dishonor. He could not quite keep on, day after day, hour after hour, thinking over and over each least detail of his latest adventure and feel that this nameless, troubled girl was wanton. The real truth was that he did not want her to have been soiled. He did not want unbridled emotion ever to have swayed her. He did not want to feel that there was anywhere in all the world a man who could sully her honor. Sometimes he tried to figure on what manner of man it was that could have brought such trouble into the life of a girl who so filled his conception of exactly what a girl should be. He kept thinking about what a wonderful companion she would make; what a journey along the trail through the canyon of hurrying water would mean with her for a comrade.
Without the slightest knowledge of what had happened to him, Jamie’s thoughts had taken a new turn. When he awoke in the night and shifted his position to rest his wounded side, he answered the demands of pain and immediately fell to thinking of the Storm Girl.
It probably would not be a debatable question with doctors as to whether Jamie’s journey and his subsequent experiences were the best thing for a sick man. From their books, from their teachings, from their practice, they would simply know that such an experience would kill a man in Jamie’s condition, and Jamie, in the little ones and twos of the night, stretched his long frame on the Bee Master’s bed, moved either leg and either arm and twisted his spine and felt that the soreness had thoroughly gone out of him. The pain of the long march had left his feet and legs; his hands and arms seemed to have sufficient strength for one day more. Then his attention was attracted by the rhythmical sweep of the waves as they came washing up the sands below his window and rolled back to the mother of big waters again.
Jamie turned his head and listened to the song of the Pacific Ocean. He decided that there was a reason why it had been called the Pacific Ocean, the peaceful ocean. From the window beside which he lay, his vision carried for miles across the moon-silvered water, water so calm that it was scarcely ruffled by the waves that kept it in undulation almost as regular as breathing. Just when Jamie had decided that the Pacific Ocean had been well named he remembered the Storm Girl. That recalled to his mind the storm and he reflected further that perhaps the ocean was like a woman, that it was the still waters that ran deep; that after many days of peace, when the storm finally came, it really was a storm to make even the God of Storms look down and take notice.
The thing that a doctor never could or would have figured on about the entire circumstance was the thing that happened. Breathing in unison with the sweep of the waves, Jamie very shortly went to sleep again. His last conscious thought was not about himself. It was a commingling of lazy, sunlit waves, a feeling of being drawn somewhere by a rope of hair across his face. He went over the top into dreamland in imagination clutching a letter in one hand, and in the final drop into unconsciousness, the last thought that he sensed in his brain had something to do with a bathing suit and a gorgeous big red tomato.
When Margaret Cameron finished dusting and entered the kitchen to gather up the dishes from which Jamie had eaten his breakfast, she found that long, lean individual sitting at the table and looking at her speculatively. There was a question in his eyes, a humorous quirk around his mouth. His fingers were drumming the table. Then he spoke.
“Margaret Cameron,” he asked, “are you a lady?”
Margaret Cameron took hold of a wooden chair back, and leaning forward, studied Jamie intently, but she answered him quietly and readily enough:
“I try to be.”
“Oh, I don’t mean,” said Jamie, “have you got a long line of highly bred ancestors; are you skilled in the fine arts of society; do you wear exquisite clothing and live a life of elegant leisure. What I want to know, to put it briefly and bluntly, is, would you faint at the sight of a drop of blood, if it happened to be human blood?”
Margaret swung a chair around and sat down on it.
“Can’t you manage your dressings?” she asked, quietly.
It was Jamie’s turn to be disconcerted.
“You know,” said Margaret, “when you bend over to reach the hose and going through the garden, the bandages across your back and the straps over your shoulders show, and they look to me to be cumbersome things. I’ve wanted to speak to you for a week. I believe I could take some unbleached muslin and make a kind of jacket and fold some supports across your shoulders that would hold it up exactly as well and not be half so uncomfortable.”
Jamie sat silently staring at her.
At last he said: “I think what I had in my mind was this: I was going to ask you, if you could stomach it, if you would take one good look at a decoradon I wear on my left breast, and then I thought I’d go to work and put a kind of schedule that I’ve thought out for myself into practice for, say one month; and then I’d ask you if you would look again and see if I’d done any good. I’ve got a shrapnel wound and it must have been particularly filthy shrapnel. It carried with it some sort of damnable poison that defied the best doctors at the base hospitals and passed me on to London and then to this country and clear across the continent. I’ve had a year of boiling in hot water and fussing with nurses and doctors and I’m worse than I was when I began their treatment. Just as a little secret between you and me, I’ll tell you this. They were going to put me in a tuberculosis place when they knew and admitted I didn’t have tuberculosis yet, and I wouldn’t stand for it. I got up and walked out, and I’ve come this far. From the minute I started, and for long before, when that hot, chemically saturated boiling spring water soaked into me, I couldn’t help feeling that it was fostering germs and breeding more. For six months I’ve wakened in the night thinking about the sea, and I’d gotten to the place where, when I decided to walk out, I headed for a cooler spot and for the ocean. Now I’ve gotten here and I’ve made up my mind that I’m going to try it. I want to go over a list of food with you; I want you to cook me plain, simple, nourishing stuff, something that’s got iron in it, something that will have a tendency to purify and to clean up blood saturated with poison.
“When I finish my morning rounds with the bees, I am going to put on that bathing suit at the back door; I am going down the back walk and I’m going to squeeze a tumbler level full of the juice of a couple of those big red tomatoes and drink it, and then I’m going on down to the sea and I am going in mighty close to the edge of those bandages. I’m not so sure that I am not going heels over. Then I’m coming out and I’m going to lie on the hottest sand in the hottest stretch of sun I can find and cover the bare parts until I get toughened enough that I won’t blister. I’m going to let the sun dry that salt water into my anatomy, I’m not going to rinse it off. Then I’m coming up and eat whatever you prepare for me in the kind of combinations we agree on that will go toward the making of a man. Then I’m going to take a nap. Then I’m going to get up and drink a glass of orange juice. Then I’m going to go out in the garden and see what I can do for the flowers. There are some dead leaves on the lilies that need to come off and there are some that need propping. I could clip the seed pods from the roses that have bloomed to help keep up the succession. I can find a world of things to do. Then we will arrange a dinner that will have at least a tendency to be what you might call a gesture in the direction of making a real man out of particularly big bones and peculiarly flabby muscle. I’m going to walk down to a place on the beach that I call the throne and I am going to sit there, and thoroughly wrapped in the Master’s eiderdown dressing robe and his old working overcoat on top of it so that I cannot possibly chill, I am going to breathe fog and mist and salt water until my tongue tastes salty in my mouth. I am going to lie down there and go to sleep, if I take the notion.”
Margaret Cameron stretched out her hand.
“Now, look here, Jamie,” she said, “you’re all right up to that point, but you had better cut that right out. You had better not try sleeping outdoors in fog and mist. Maybe it’s all right to go and breathe it for an hour, but don’t go to sleep and let your circulation run down and the fog settle over you and wet you and chill you to the bone. That’s a wrong idea. Change that part of your program, and as for the rest, I’ll think hard all day, and you think hard, and this evening we’ll talk it over and see if we cannot make out the menu you want to follow. You try with all your might and I’ll try with all my might and we’ll see what we can do, with the help of the good God and all outdoors, to put you on your feet. Now, come on, let’s have a look at that sick side of yours.”
So Jamie stretched himself on the bed and uncovered his breast. Margaret Cameron, bending over him, could feel the blood slowly receding from her face.
“My, but that’s an angry wound!” she said, at last. “The flesh looks as If it had been burned. It’s almost angry enough for what we used to call ‘proud’ flesh. And it is deep and it’s wide.”
She stood staring an instant. Then she shifted her eyes to Jamie’s.
“Are you good for a strenuous diet and a stiff pull?” she asked.
“If you mean have I got the courage, yes,” said Jamie. “If you mean have I got the strength or have I got a chance—I don’t know. All I know is that I am going in the ocean. All I know is that I am going to soak in sunshine. All I know is that I am going to be a calamity to the tomato patch. Why I want these things, I don’t know. But I am ravenous for all of them, and since they are here, why shouldn’t I have them?”
“Where did you get that tomato idea?” asked Margaret Cameron.
“I ate one yesterday and it seemed to fill a long-felt want. It seemed to hit the exact spot. I had a feeling that it was cleansing and cooling. I got the idea that If I’d squeeze the juice from a couple of them and drink it at a time when my stomach is empty, it might do something for me from the interior out, that medicines and boiling springs have not accomplished.”
“It’s a queer thing,” said Margaret Cameron, “but there may be something in it. There’s a housekeeping magazine I take that has a health department in it that I have been reading for several years, and in the last year or two they have been stressing nothing in all the world but just the thing you have hit on. Just tomatoes. I didn’t think I’d ever pay much attention to what the little Scout would call ‘bunk’ about vitamins and calories and the like, but the other day something funny happened to me. I went down to the city to do some shopping and to have a visit with a niece of mine who teaches in the schools there and she took me to lunch in a lovely big room in one of those enormous department stores. At a table right adjoining us there sat a woman whose name Molly whispered to me across the table, and I remembered that wherever English is spoken all over the world her songs are sung. She had a noble face, a kindly face, an intelligent face. I couldn’t keep my eyes from the efficiency of her hands, and the beauty and individuality of her clothes. With her there was a little dumpling of a girl. You couldn’t imagine anything healthier; you couldn’t imagine anything prettier or more appealing. At one time when I was feasting my eyes on the child, because she reminded me so of my own girl when she was a little roly-poly thing like that, just when I was looking straight at her, with her spoon poised halfway to her mouth and her eyes very serious, she asked, Grandma, how many calorith ith there in thith jello?’
