The Keeper of the Bees, page 26
“If she could convince me that she really had a right to the place, naturally, however much I loved it, I’d clear out,” said Jamie. “But clearing out isn’t what I came over here to talk about. Margaret, you’ve made my living room wonderful with a world of flowers. Now, tell me truly, did you put the flowers in my bedroom?” Margaret Cameron turned toward him a face of frank astonishment.
“No,” she said, “I didn’t. I never want a bedroom cluttered up with flowers. I don’t like to sleep with stronger flower perfume than comes through the windows. I don’t think it’s healthy to lie all night in a surcharged atmosphere. I didn’t put any flowers in your bedroom.” “All right, then,” said Jamie, “if you didn’t put them there, you are the only one who has keys and access to the room. You can tell me who did.”
“That’s exactly what I cannot,” said Margaret Cameron, “because I haven’t the least notion.”
“Has the little Scout been here?” asked Jamie.
“Not that I know of,” said Margaret Cameron. “Of course, I don’t pretend to keep tally on the comings and goings of that youngster, and I wouldn’t take oath that a window wouldn’t form a more suitable mode of entrance than a door. You know, there’s a gate between us, and you know that you never saw the little Scout do anything but jump the fence.”
Jamie grinned.
“I know. That’s part of a code of exercise. By this time I know the little Scout fairly well. In the first place, the youngster is not addicted to gathering flowers. In the second place, these flowers have been very carefully clipped with scissors or a knife, and in the third place, they are arranged with a grace and a beauty to which the little fellow has not as yet attained. Some of the stems are long and some of the stems are short, and some of the heads are upstanding and some, having a few leaves, spill over the edge of the bowl and creep out on the stand cover, and altogether they are sufficiently artistic to please the senses of the most discriminating artist of Japan. If the little Scout had gathered them, they would have been wadded into a tight bunch and chucked into the bowl in the most effective way to get them there. Don’t you believe it?”
“I think very likely,” answered Margaret Cameron.
Jamie smiled his most ingratiating smile.
“Margaret,” he said, “you would tell me if you knew, wouldn’t you?”
“Why, I think I would,” answered Margaret, catching his mood and smiling back at him. “I can imagine no reason as to why I shouldn’t. I think I’d tell you If I knew; but honestly and truly, Jamie, I haven’t the faintest notion who would compose the very artistic combination you’ve been describing so enthusiastically. Have you made friends with any of the neighbors?”
“You know I haven’t!” said Jamie. “There aren’t any neighbors on the west, neighbors are something to acquire in the future, and you are my neighbor on the east, and beyond you I haven’t penetrated. Straight down, of course, there are hundreds of people daily on the beach, but aside from more blue, this garden probably looks like every other garden running down to the sea. It’s had no visitors so far as I know. The truth is, Margaret, that there’s something about the house to-day that puzzles me. The bouquet in my bedroom was one thing. The Bee Master’s chair pulled to the hearth-side with the slippers I’ve been wearing before it- While we are on the subject, did you do that?”
“No,” said Margaret Cameron, “I didn’t. I’ve felt that the Bee Master’s chair was something sacred and devoted to him and I’ve respected the fineness of your nature that kept you from appropriating it. I’ve got to bring myself to the place where I don’t mind seeing some other man using it. Frankly, I’d rather see you use it than any other man I know, but I couldn’t see you sitting in it just at this minute without resenting it.”
“I thought you’d have that feeling,” said Jamie. “I had, and a desire to be more worthy, to attain more years and more knowledge, to make of myself the level best it was in me to become; not until I have climbed to near my limit dare I aspire to occupy that chair. You told me that you had a daughter away teaching school and that you had a niece who came to see you frequently, and I wondered if either of them might have been with you and might have arranged things differently from the way you would.”
Margaret Cameron shook her head.
“Lolly went far up state with the school she accepted, clear to Sacramento. She can’t afford to come back and forth until the term’s out. I don’t mind admitting that the house is like a grave without her and I’ve had some tears to shed because in one or two of her recent letters she has insinuated that she might not come home for her summer vacation, that she might go with a camp of girls up into the Yosemite. To tell the truth, I felt sort of peeved at Molly. Right down in my heart, I know that she was instrumental in getting my girl the school away from home, and I can’t see why she did it. The plea that she would get more salary doesn’t take into consideration the fact that she’d have to spend such a big share of her salary for food and a room, when, if she taught in the city, she could use the car line and be at home over nights and over Saturdays and Sundays. I haven’t dared say anything to Molly because, a few months ago—it was at the time I was away when you first came—I went in to the city to her. She had had an awful shock. She hadn’t but one near relative on earth, her twin brother Donald, and from the time their father and my husband were drowned at sea at the same time, I’ve had them in my home until they were far enough along with their education to get work and go out for themselves. They’d all been friends. Don and Lolly had been better friends than I’d wanted them to be. Don didn’t have Molly’s backbone; he didn’t have her view of life. I thought he was kind of shiftless and weak, and for a few years we all had a fight to keep him from getting into a lot of things that he shouldn’t have gotten into. It was always Lolly that could hold him and manage him, if anybody could. I was kind of glad of it when he got work and went away, but having Molly at her school work in the city left this house so emptied out and lonesome that my girl just picked up and went, too, and in my heart I knew that Molly planned it, and I didn’t like it.
“Then, like a clap out of a clear sky, Molly called for me to come quick, that she was in trouble, and when I got to her I found her worse broken up than I’d ever thought she could be. Word had come that Don was dead. They had got him work, a fine place, in the big power plant at San Joaquin, and he seemed to like it and was doing fine. I don’t know enough about electricity to know how the thing that happened could happen, but he did something wrong, and as quick as electricity can do it, he was gone. We sent for Lolly but she didn’t come. She sent word she felt so bad she was sick in bed and she couldn’t, and I could see how she would feel bad enough to make her sick in bed. You know, Lolly’s my girl. I had her by my first marriage. She wasn’t really related to the children. Mr. Cameron was her stepfather and she might have thought a lot more of Donald than I knew she did. Anyway, Molly and I had to lay him away alone. Molly felt so bad I most forgave her. Besides, I didn’t actually know that she had planned to get Lolly away from home. I just felt she had. The whole thing has upset me a good deal of late and Molly hasn’t been here as often as she used to come. I don’t know why, because the truth is, I thought a lot of the boy myself and I could have been honest and sincere in mourning him with her.
“Now come these letters from Lolly hinting about going farther north in the state for a summer vacation and only being home a few days at the very last, and going away again to teach the coming year. The whole thing is just the way it shouldn’t be. I wonder sometimes If I’ve been too clean and too particular about where the girls went and what they did. The way things seem to be going among the youngsters these days, it doesn’t look as if a mother could be too particular, but if she is so particular that she drives her young folks away from home, I don’t know that that gets her anything except a good big heartache. No, there wasn’t either of my girls with me. If there’s a feminine touch in your house to-day that you don’t understand, I’m telling you truly I don’t know who the female is or where she came from.”
Jamie thought deeply.
“All right,” he said, at last, “if you don’t know, why you don’t, and that’s all there is to it. I’ll have to do my own Sherlocking.”
He said it jestingly, but the idea persisted. He went home and down the back walk. He lifted the latch of the beach gate with exploring fingers. He followed the hard clay and gravel path down to where it met the sands of the sea, and he stood and looked very intently? very carefully over the sand. By and by, he thought he began to distinguish the impress of a foot and a few yards farther he found what he was looking for—an imprint that he had seen before, the same shape shoe, the same width, the same broad common-sense heel. Then he knew without any doubt whatever that the Storm Girl had been in his home.
He went farther along the beach toward the south following the footprints, and finally he found the sand mound on which the verbenas had grown. He found the severed stems from which his flowers had been cut. Then a thought struck Jamie and he whirled and almost ran in the direction of the throne. With palpitant heart he climbed the ascent leading to the crest, clambered over the rocks, and came about facing the place where he and the Storm Girl had endured the storm together.
That evening the sun was dropping into the Pacific in a circle of red glory. The clouds above were almost blood red in its light; the water, a deep indigo blue out on the way to China, an exquisite light emerald near the shore, and wavering over the surface and coming in slowly with the light waves were exquisitely shifting colors of lavender and old rose. The foam of the beach and the very sands were delicately colored with it. Somewhere very close a mocking bird was singing and white gulls were passing in homeward flight, and a few little sandpipers were quarrelling down on the shore line. There was a whole world of things for Jamie to see and to love and to thank God for, but what he did see was the fact that the Storm Woman had sat in her place and arranged the flowers that she had brought him. Tiny withered leaves of sand verbena lay on the rocks at his feet, discarded blooms that were too old had been dropped there. Jamie took one step farther and looked, and in his place there lay on the rocks three exquisite heads of bloom, a long trailing stem and a medium and a shorter stem twined together deftly, braided past the leaves and laid in the place upon which he had sat as one would lay an exquisite tribute on the grave of the dead. That very thought came to Jamie.
“Good Lord!” he said, “I wonder what she’d think if she knew I am about ten times the man that I was the day I married her! I wonder if she’d think I haven’t played fair if she knew that I was working with all my might to be a whole man. And I wonder what she’d think If she knew that I’m not keeping my promise not to try to find her. I wonder what she’d think if she knew I broke it when I went to Margaret Cameron to see if she could tell me anything, and I broke it again when I went along the beach trailing a footstep that I know. I wonder what she’d think if she knew that right down in the depths of my heart I just about adore her. I wonder what she’d think if she knew that there haven’t been very many minutes since the night that I held her in my arms that I haven’t held her in memory and haven’t wanted her and haven’t ached for her and haven’t worked for her and haven’t thought about her until I’ve got to the place where I don’t much care as to why she needed my name. And I wonder what she’d think if she knew how often I’ve read her letter and how I’ve appreciated it, and I wonder what she thinks when she gathers sand verbena and puts it into my fingers and carries it within a few feet of my pillow. By Jove! I wonder if I married her with sufficient assurance to stamp a little bit of my individuality on her! I wonder If she feels that I really am at least half a man. I wonder if days of trouble are coming near and If she needs a man who could take care of her and comfort her and do what he could to fortify her. I wonder if those flowers beside my pillow are her way of asking me to break my word, to search for her, to find her, to help her? I wonder if they are her way of saying that she needs more from me than my name?”
Jamie sat until dusk, then slowly arose and made his way home to his supper. As he crossed the back porch a thought occurred to him. He went down the walk and around to his bedroom window, and as he examined closely a head of sand verbena lying on the ground came to his notice. Margaret Cameron had told true. She did not know who the Storm Girl was. She had not furnished a key to give entrance to his house. The Storm Woman had done what she was so perfectly capable of doing. In the seclusion of the shrubs, screened from the streets and the neighboring houses, she had slipped up the back walk and stepped into his window. So that was that, and it did not help Jamie any on his way toward dying. As a matter of fact, it gave him more food for thought and more reasons for living than ever before had possessed him.
After that Jamie lived in hourly expectation. Some day surely she would come again. Some day he would be in the garden when she came through, or he would find her on the throne. He was almost tempted to write a note and leave it there, but the knowledge that many people climbed the uncertain path leading to the top of the jagged rock deterred him. He could not take the risk of any one else finding the message that he intended for the Storm Girl. He could not help in his heart thinking of her as he had seen her, strained and unhappy in the glare of the lightning, or with quivering lips and staring eyes as she had left him. He could not help trying to picture how her face would appear if it were afire and alight with happiness; how her eyes might shine if she were pleased and interested; what a wonderful companion she would be breasting the waves or climbing a mountain, or working in a garden, or sitting opposite a hearth stone. Whatever he might have thought of her in the nebulous character of a woman he had seen, a woman whose race and blood were manifest in her face and bearing and the tones of her voice, a woman to whom his blood had a right to cry out because they were of common nationality, each only one generation removed, the fact remained that she never could be nebulous to him. She was stamped on his memory, in his consciousness in a different way from any other woman.
“Because before the Lord and by the law, she is my wife,” said Jamie, “and I cannot get away from that fact, and she cannot get away from it. She cannot marry any other man without making herself known and divorcing me.
Then Jamie got another blow that knocked him speechless and almost senseless for a moment.
“What’s more,” he said to himself and to all and sundry when he gained sufficient breath with which to speak, “what’s more, James Lewis MacFarlane, you can’t marry any woman, you can’t have a real home, you can’t have a hearth stone so long as you are legally married to a girl who wants only your name, or to one who doesn’t want you in person at all!”
Jamie sat down suddenly and admitted that he was possessed of a single-track mind. He had been on the track that led to death and elimination when he had done this fool marrying stunt. Now he was on the track that led to a home, to work in the world, to the things that all men desire when they are sane and healthful, and he was bound as tight as the law could bind him by records in the office of the Marriage License Bureau of the county in which he lived. That was something more to think about. So Jamie went about being the Keeper of the Bees, the master of the house, the partner of the little Scout with several problems very persistently in the forefront of his mind.
15. Reaping the Whirlwind
The days began to slip by rapidly. As Jamie became more familiar with the work he was supposed to do he found that constantly he could see things of his own volition that no one had told him about, yet they were things that increased the activity of the bees, things that added to the beauty of the garden, things that resulted in producing a larger amount of different kinds of vegetables. He found, too, that a number of fruit and vegetable stands not far from his location were willing to pay him worth-while prices for anything he had in those lines that he and Margaret Cameron could not use. Then he began filling baskets for the little Scout to carry home that there might be no question of unequal division. There had been ten days when he had scarcely seen the little Scout, and then there came a joyous day when the child came whooping into the garden followed by Old Fat Bill and the Nice Child and Angel Face. They had made merry, and Jamie’s ears rang and his sides ached with laughter. They were celebrating the close of school. They were planning for a long summer that was to comprise more mischief than probably ever before had been crowded into the same length of time.
Jamie found himself mighty thankful to have the little Scout around the garden. It was not only that he received much efficient help with the bees, with the pruning and watering; it was that he had fallen deeply in love with the youngster. As he became more firmly fixed in his regard for the child, he worried, grew obsessed with the feeling that things were not as they should be; that of the Scouts it was the Master who was not attaining the height and developing the physical strength that the exercise all of them took should have resulted in producing. Several times Jamie had seriously considered calling the Scout Master’s mother and asking her if she did not think Jean was exercising too strenuously, taxing brain power to the breaking point, making of each day a round of never-ending activity. From a word dropped here and there, Jamie realized that the child was not sleeping any too well of nights. Sometimes the little Scout slipped into the living room and stretched on a davenport, or into Jamie’s room and, across the foot of the bed, slept for hours as the dead are supposed to sleep.
As Jamie’s own strength grew, as the tissue coating of skin across his breast strengthened in thickness and faded in color, as the continued careful diet, the salt baths, the sun treatment, and the tomato and orange juice worked their will, so Jamie’s mind cleared in proportion as his body strengthened. A feeling of power, of executive ability, began to develop in him. He ceased almost entirely to think of himself. All the thought he had he needed to concentrate on his work, on the little Scout, on Margaret Cameron, and he found that there was no hour of the day in which his mind was not battling back and forth, pro and con, concerning the girl he had married.
