The Keeper of the Bees, page 21
With that the Scout Master whirled and marched brusquely from the room.
Jamie waited for a few words and then followed. Once outside of the hospital and on the street again, the Scout Master lifted an enigmatical face.
“You’ve seen a good deal of hospitals yourself, haven’t you?”
Jamie assented.
“Yes,” said the Scout Master, “you seem to kind of fit a hospital right now, but not so much as you did the first time I saw you. The first time I saw you, you looked like you were a hospital all by yourself. But now you don’t look much more than half a hospital. You seem as if you might belong to the garden just about as well as to the hospital. I suppose they are necessary, but oh, boy! ain’t they fierce? Everything so slippery and so quiet and so clean, and everybody on tiptoe and whispering. if I had a mint of money, If I had gobs and stacks of money, I’d build a hospital where all the windows opened on to a race track and you could see a horse race and an automobile race twice a day, and I’d have bands and radios and moving pictures. Gee! the hospitals they have these days make me sick when there’s nothing the matter with me!”
Then suddenly the Scout Master took Jamie’s hand and looked up at him.
“Say, what’s the matter with Mrs. Cameron? What makes her cry so much, and what’s the use of her lookin’ like a funeral without anybody dead, and why don’t Lolly come home?”
“Now, look here,” said Jamie, “you’re asking me questions I can’t answer. In the first place, I didn’t know that Margaret Cameron was crying. I didn’t suppose anything could happen that would wring tears from a woman so self-contained as she is. And in the next place, what could I know about Lolly?”
“Well,” said the Scout Master, “she is crying a lot these days ’cause she’s right at the end of the car line where I get off with the Scouts to play brigand in the canyon, and robbers’ cave in the mountains, and sand fights on the beach, and to go bathing. She’s right where I see her every time I come past, and nearly every time I see her lately she’s wiping her eyes. It might be about the Bee Master, but there ain’t any use for her to spill the brine when he might get well and he might come home. if she knew he wouldn’t ever, I could understand it. I reckon it’s about Lolly because she don’t seem to come home and, of course, when she isn’t at home, Mrs. Cameron doesn’t know whether she’s sick or well, and she ain’t going to feel comfortable as long as she doesn’t know.”
The Scout Master paused in intent thought a minute and then continued: “I reckon that’s kind of a silly thing to say. Lolly’s teaching school and, of course, when she’s
teaching school she can’t come home, at least not until it’s time for vacation. if it was vacation and she could come and didn’t come, why, that would be a horse of a different color, and there would be some reason for getting droopy.” Merely to carry on the conversation, Jamie inquired: “Is Lolly a pretty girl?”
The Scout Master scuffled along the sidewalk, glancing from right to left, dodging pedestrians, watching passing cars for their numbers and direction, and replied en route: “Oh, joy! Maybe you’d call her pretty. If you like taffy molasses hair and big blue eyes and pink cheeks and a baby smile and about as much notion of whether you’re going to do it or whether you ain’t as a wave coming in, why, Lolly’s a pretty girl. But if you ask me, I’d tell you that if you want to see a pretty girl, If you want to see a right royal, high stepping, cat’s whiskers kind of a girl, just turn your optics loose on Molly!”
“This sounds interesting,” said Jamie. “Can you give me any instructions as to where I’d have to be in order to ‘turn my optics loose on Molly’?”
“No,” said the Scout Master, “not during the school season, I couldn’t. Vacations it’s easy, unless the coming vacation is going to be different from all the vacations that have gone before. All that have gone before Molly comes home, at least part of the time, and then we have picnics and she tramps with us and scouts with us, and we sure do have a real time when Molly’s on the job.”
“Her home is near here?” inquired Jamie, beginning to take interest.
“Well, how goofy!” exclaimed the Scout Master. “Have you lived over a month beside Mrs. Cameron and she hasn’t told you a word about Molly and Lolly and about Don?”
“It just happens,” said Jamie, “that when we’ve talked together we’ve talked about bees and flowers and food. She hasn’t told me so very much about her children.” “Well, they aren’t her children,” said the Scout Master. “At least, Molly and Donald aren’t. Molly and Donald are twins and their father and Mr. Cameron were brothers, and when both of them went down in the boat the night of the big storm, why, Mrs. Cameron brought the kids home to her house and she helped both of ’em to get their schooling, so Molly could teach and so Don could work. He’s electricity. He knows a world about radio and he puts in wires in different places. I think you call it ‘installations,’ ‘Installations’ would be the right word, wouldn’t it?”
“It sounds right,” said Jamie. “And who’s Lolly?” “Well, Lolly belonged to Margaret Cameron before she was married. Sometime, somewhere, she must have been married to some other man, and I dunno whether he went by the graveyard route or got eliminated by a divorce judge. Sometimes I think I’d like to be a divorce judge. It’d be fun to hear all the folks telling what’s their troubles and why they can’t pull even and who’s to blame, and sometimes I see women that I’d just naturally separate from any man. I see a lot of ’em that don’t look like they were keeping house or tending to their babies or could come within a mile telling whether their kids’ toenails were cut or their ears spooned, and things like that, that my mother’s always fussing about. And, of course, journeying along I do at times see men that need suppression.”
The hands went down and out. The men who needed it were suppressed at that instant.
“There’s some men, you know, just so trifling and just so full of home brew, or some other kind of brew, that no woman could live with ’em and think anything of herself. Maybe I wouldn’t like it. Maybe it would be kind of a painful job. I don’t know that I’d want it. But I’ll tell you this about things I do want: I’ll go to my grave disappointed if I don’t ever get to drive across this country from ocean to ocean in an automobile! One of the kind that’s got front seats that let back and make a bed, and a little cupboard and an ice box and a pantry on the running board, and sleeping rolls and everything. Maybe I’d have a trailer. Maybe I’d pick up some things along the way to bring home for Mother’s garden. I don’t know just what I’d do, but you mark my word, I’m going to twist it around some way so I get to go before long! Of course, the best thing about it is camping by the wayside and sleeping on the ground and meeting different people and seeing the country when you got time to look at it. You can’t get much being whizzed through on a railroad train, and all the places you think might be a little bit interesting or have a bear or a deer, or there would be an bandit or something, those are the places you are whizzed by the fastest.”
“That’s the truth,” said Jamie. “That’s quite the truth.”
Their car came down the line and the Scout Master was on the platform before Jamie had really convinced himself that the number and destination were right and could follow suit. Again on the way home, the Scout Master frankly leaned over against Jamie and waited for his circling arm and went sound asleep until the point came that brought the inevitable awakening.
On the way near the hot dog stand at a corner toward which Jamie felt a slight propulsion on landing from the car, he said to the Scout Master: “Do you know, youngster, you are doing what the big folks call ‘burning the candle at both ends’?”
To his amazement, the Scout Master tuned in:
“‘But ah, my foes! and oh, my friends!
It makes a lovely light!’”
“That may be all right,” said Jamie, “and it may be a brand of philosophy that will do for grown folks, but that’s rotten for the kiddies. There isn’t anything you are doing that’s worth stunting your growth for.”
“Stunting my what?” said the Scout Master.
“I mean,” said Jamie, “that you are exercising too hard and sleeping too little, you are going such a pace that you are not as big and strong as you should be. You are on such a strain mastering those three big boys you play with that you are not getting the strength in your own arms and legs that they have in theirs. If you don’t go a little slower and eat more properly cooked food at home and eat less hot dogs while you are scouting, just what you prophesied will happen to you. If you take such pride in being the Scout Master, you’d better remember that you can’t hold that office unless you are physically fit. You’d better cut out some of the hiking and some of the fights and a whole lot of irregular eating.”
“Sky Pilot!” scoffed the Scout Master. “You sound like I had the hoof and mouth disease.”
And thereupon Jamie was treated to a countenance of such solemnity, to folded hands and uprolled eyes—for one instant he caught an expression with which he had been familiar in his boyhood—that he could not help laughing.
“You know,” said Jamie, very soberly, “that I’ve been thinking lately that being a preacher wouldn’t be such a bad profession. You might do a whole lot worse things than try to teach other men to come clean, to shoot straight, to ride hard, to be real men spiritually as well as physically.”
The Scout Master shuffled ahead and beat Jamie to the hot dog stand. Also, the price for two was forthcoming.
“My treat to-day! And that looks kind of rotten to let you treat the last time when there was five of us and take it myself when there are only two. It’ll be my treat the next time and a half.”
Jamie stood staring.
“You figure your finances to the penny?”
“I do,” said the Scout Master. “About the worst mess you can get into in this world is the one you get into when you don’t keep your millions straight. Dad says he guesses all the trouble in the world that is not about women is about money, and mostly if it’s about one of them, it’s about the other one, too.”
Having settled the financial end of the transaction, the Scout Master gave undivided attention to the hot dog. The combination struck Jamie as about what he wanted, also. It appealed to him further that he had no business, at that critical period, to partake of the combination that was entailed by the Scout Master’s idea of a perfect treat. He hesitated over it a second, then came off triumphant, although slightly humiliated to fail in being a good fellow.
“You know,” he said to the Scout Master, “I’ve been very sick and I’m not long out of the hospital and the doctor’s care. I think I won’t put my stomach up against that combination of yours. I’ll just go home and take a glass of orange juice instead.”
It touched his heart with particular appeal that the Scout Master said instantly: “Well, I’d go and take the orange juice with you, but I’ve got this started and I can’t waste it, so I have to pay for it and eat it, but the next time we’ll take the orange juice together, if orange juice is your limit until you get well.”
And then, trotting along the street beside Jamie, past a mouthful of the tantalizing combination, the Scout Master said: “Oh, gee! ain’t it goofy to be sick? I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t have a hot dog when I wanted it. Of all the things there is to eat in the whole world, I don’t know of anything I like better. Mother likes them, too. Dad doesn’t come in so strong on them ’cause he’s got a stomach himself every once and a while. City Editor and war did it. But as yet, glory be! they haven’t either of them put the grand kibosh on me. The day they do, I’ll leap from the pinnacle (I got ‘pinnacle’ in geography) of the highest rock in the bay and go out with the undertow.”
“That would be pathetic,” said Jamie. “Why do you want to cause your friends such grief and deprive the Bee Master of his partner and me of about the only friend I have on earth, unless the Bee Master has decided to be my friend.”
“Of course the Bee Master is your friend,” said the little Scout. “I knew the Bee Master was your friend the minute I faced up to the jacqueranda and saw you sitting on his particular bench. Didn’t you notice me keep straight on coming?”
“I certainly did,” said Jamie. “I registered that fact in my mentality with great pride and pleasure. I shall always remember that when you caught your first view of me, you kept straight on coming.”
“It was the same way with Molly,” said the Scout Master. “First peep I ever got at her I kept right on coming. I walked right up to her and into her just as far as I could get at the first seance. Do you know what a ‘seance’ is?”
Jamie said he did.
“All right then. A seance is so goofy that I didn’t know but I’d have to tell you about it like bees and other things you need educating up on. But getting back to Molly there’s something about her that’s got a pull. Every one of the boys just took to her like you take to buckwheat cakes and maple syrup or waffles that you get From the waffle man on the beach, or anything like that that you want all you can hold of when you think about it and want to go back in a few days for more. Molly’s like that. Something that you want awful bad when you see her and every few days you want her just as bad.”
“Tell me about Molly. She sounds interesting,” said Jamie.
By this time they had reached the gate. Jamie opened it and the Scout Master led the way to the seat under the jacqueranda.
“Well, telling about Molly is a pretty long story. Molly had hard luck. She didn’t have any mother to begin with and then she lost her father. Then there was a good while that she had the Devil’s own time with Don. He just seemed bound and determined to do everything in the world except the thing she wanted him to. She thought she was never going to make anything out of him. She thought just dead sure he’d go some way that wouldn’t get him anywhere and I don’t know whether she ever would have got him pulled through or not, if it hadn’t always been Lolly in the background. There never was a time since I’ve known ’em that he didn’t think she was just old peaches and persimmons, alligator pears, and everything squashy like that. When he wouldn’t do anything ’cause it was honest and square and straight and ’cause it was what he should do ’cause Molly wanted him to, why that very same thing he’d do for Lolly if she’d give him a kiss or pat him a little or laugh at him or coax him along with a petting party. I like Molly ’cause she ain’t any all-day sucker. She just comes to the point and she knows what the point she’s coming to is before she starts for it. There ain’t any meandering about Molly!” The Scout Master showed in deft hand work the straight way that Molly went.
“And I reckon, if I was grown up and wanting a job to earn money at, that I’d rather have the job Molly’s got than any job in the world.”
“You surprise me,” said Jamie. ‘You astonish me! I’d have thought teaching school was the last profession in the world that you’d choose.”
“Wes, but in these days there’s different kinds of teaching school,” said the Scout Master. “The kind that Molly does isn’t the kind you’re thinking about. It isn’t shut up in a room and staying in one place and doing the same thing over and over. The kind Molly does is called ‘teaching Americanism.’ Did you ever know how good-looking and how interesting a lot of little round-the-world children can be—a lot of little Italians and Greeks and Spaniards and and Hawaiians and Japanese and Chinese, cutest little brown things with big round eyes? You ought to hear ’em sing ‘My Country Tis of Thee!’ You ought to see ’em salute the flag! You ought to hear ’em learn the words that mean that there isn’t any country in all the world so big and fine and nice to live in as the United States. You ought to see ’em learn that their heads are made to think with, and their hands are made to work with; their feet are made to march with; their eyes are made to see with, to see straight, to see all there is. Oh, Gee! I like Molly’s job! I like to help her when she is having a picnic on the beach with ’em.”
“I think that school sounds mighty fine myself,” said Jamie. “Would you take me some day when Molly’s teaching Americanism on the beach?”
“Sure I would!” said the Scout Master. “Molly would be glad to see you. Molly’s always glad to see everybody that believes in America and believes in God. She’s strong on both of them. Anybody that shoots straight and rides hard and plays square, like I told you. You ought to see her shoot and ride. If I was a millionaire and had money to burn, the first thing I’d get, after l got the kind of a horse that I’d like to have for myself, would be the kind of a horse Molly would really like to have.” The Scout Master arose:
“Just about now I speed for home with barely time left to shift to my other wardrobe, provided it ain’t been bandited, and left a dark cloud hanging over me.” “Anything I can do to avert trouble?” inquired Jamie. “Not a thing, old dear,” said the Scout Master. “Not a thing. But I thank you, I thank you heaps for your good intendons.”
The Scout Master cracked heels, laid a palm over the region of the pit of the stomach, and bowed low. Then, with a whirl, the youngster started down the walk. Only a few steps had been covered when the small figure turned and the Scout Master called back: “I didn’t have time to-day, but remind me the next time I come and I’ll do the Lame Duck and the Wet Hen for you. I made ’em up myself. I have to have a bathing suit and a dock to do ’em right, but I could pretend I had on a bathing suit and the walk was a and off of it was water, and show you how it goes. I’m nifty about the Wet Hen. I think I do her spiffy.”
“I’ll remember,” said Jamie. “I’ll surely remember.” He waited before turning to the house because he liked to see the agility, the free sweep, the unfailing grace with which the little Scout skinned the line fence between the grounds of the Bee Master and Margaret Cameron.
