The Keeper of the Bees, page 28
“You mean,” he said, thickly, “that it’s strange I don’t recognize her? Maybe it’s the pain, and it’s been long months since we were married.”
“I’ve learned,” said the doctor, “that there are a good many curious and some inexplicable things in this world, but I can’t help expressing the opinion that you’ve been a poor sort of a husband If you’ve allowed your wife to go through anything so crucial as the nerve strain and the physical strain of approaching maternity and delivery and given no sympathy, extended no care. It scarcely seems human.”
Jamie licked his lips and took his medicine. He could not say anything in self-extenuation that would not cast a reflection on the girl before him, and in the few minutes that he had stood staring down at her he had realized that her every breath was coming shorter. The hand he was holding was a weight in his fingers. He gripped it and began to chafe it.
“For God’s sake!” he cried, “try to do something! Forget about lecturing me now! Do something! Don’t, don’t let her slip away like this!”
The doctor looked up at Jamie and said quietly: “There is nothing known to medical science that three of the best doctors in the city have not been trying all night, and some very excellent nurses have performed their duties carefully. You might as well understand that it is very near the end. I thought possibly she might rally. I thought possibly she might have something she would want to say to you. I thought you ought to be here in the event she needed you, and I told you the truth when I said your son is a fine little fellow. He is a beautiful specimen of physical babyhood. There’s the makings of a fine man in him, and we are needing men in this country. We seem at the present minute to have an overplus of hounds.”
Again Jamie took his medicine. The taste of it was bitter on his tongue, because he was not a “hound.” He never had been. He had not the smallest obligation to the woman before him, other than the obligation that any man owes all women to love them honestly, to care for them gently, to respect their bodies as the vessels through which the world must be populated. That was a thing that had been hammered into him from the hour that he was old enough even remotely to understand its meaning. He must always take care of the women. He must always be polite to the women. He must always be kind to them. They must be taken care of because they were to make homes; they were to mother little children. They must be respected. They were the vessels that contained the seeds of life. From their loins must come the presidents and the senators, the governors and the business men, the captains and sailors and soldiers and the tillers of the soil and the ministers who filled the pulpits and the teachers who molded the minds of youth in our schools.
Here lay a woman dying; dying in youth; dying in beauty; dying, in her own thought of herself, in shame, in scorching anguish, because some man, somewhere, had held her body lightly and violated it and consigned it to months of mental suffering, to hours of pain-racked anguish, to the loneliness of unloved death. Jamie reeled on his feet and the nurse thrust a chair under him.
She looked at him penetratingly and then she said deliberately: “Doctor, there’s something about this I don’t understand, but I will not join you in the belief that there is anything unmanly attaching to Mr. Macfarlane. In the few days she was here before the child was born, Mrs. MacFarlane seemed to adore him. She had no unkind word to say against him.”
“What’s that?” asked the doctor, sharply.
“I am telling you the truth,” said the nurse. “She said that he was the noblest man, the finest man, in all the world. She said that he had done one thing so big and shining that no other man would have done it. She said that she had a feeling that she would not survive the birth of the baby. When she showed me her marriage certificate, I supposed she intended me to send for him. I looked up his residence. She said that if her baby should live, provisions had been made for it, but she expressed a wish to me that so fine a man as he might have it. I don’t know how to explain the fact that they haven’t been together these months, but I do know that the fault did not lie with Mr. MacFarlane.”
“In that case,” said the doctor to Jamie, “very likely I owe you an apology. I am seeing so much these days that is exactly as things should not be in this world, that I am getting fairly raw. I do apologize if I have said something I shouldn’t. About your son and provisions having been made for him, that’s up to you. If you want the child, of course, in the face of this marriage certificate, the law will give him to you.”
Jamie turned to the nurse.
“What did she say?” he asked.
“She said once,” answered the nurse, “that it was impossible, but if it were possible, she would give her life gladly if she knew that you would take the baby and make of him the kind of a man that you are.”
“All right,” said Jamie, tersely. “I will take the baby. You may get him ready. I have a comfortable home. I can see a way in which he can be well cared for. I will do my best to make the kind of a man of the boy who bears my name that his mother wanted him to be.” Then Jamie and the doctor and the nurse were astonished and bewildered. A low laugh broke from the lips of the girl on the pillow, a low, exultant, caressing laugh, a laugh full of wonder and delight and unbelief, and with it ended the last remnant of breath from the tortured body and the bright head on the pillow rolled back and lay still.
Jamie covered his face and sat silent, and when he looked again he saw a sheeted straight line. He looked at the nurse with pitiful eyes.
“Have you instructions,” he asked, “for necessary arrangements?”
The nurse nodded.
“Everything has been provided for, and most unusual, all expenses were paid when Mrs. MacFarlane entered the institution. In such an event as this we were ordered to prepare her body and send it to her family.”
“All right,” said Jamie, arising and mustering his strength. “Where is the boy?”
The doctor looked dubious.
“You have someone competent to take charge of a new-born baby?” he asked.
“I have,” answered Jamie. “A fine, cleanly woman who has reared three children to maturity.”
“All right, then,” said the doctor. “Give him the baby.”
The nurse disappeared and presently returned. She put into Jamie’s arms a bundle odorous of castile and boracic, a thing that was warm and alive and moving. Convenient to his reach she set a suitcase, and Jamie put on his hat, crooked his arm around the live bundle, picked up the suitcase, and walked from the room.
The nurse looked at the doctor and the doctor looked at the nurse, and they said to each other: “Well, can you beat that?”
“What do you suppose came between them?” asked the doctor. “If she said things like that about him, why should he leave her, never to see her again, without a tear of remorse, without a touch of affection? I’ve had a good many peculiar experiences in thirty years’ practice of medicine, but this beats everything. I don’t understand it!”
“Neither do I,” said the nurse, “and what’s more, I don’t believe he does. I must go and put in the calls for the parties I was told to send for in the event she died.
I think she must have been very much under the weather all the time. I think she came with the feeling that she would not survive, and I think she had that feeling because she did not in the least care whether she did or not.”
The nurse picked up a towel and wiped her hands vigorously.
“I get so mad at this sort of thing sometimes,” she said, “that I want to go out and stand on the platforms and in the pulpits and I want to tell people some of the things I’ve seen and heard. I’d like to talk for one solid day to the girls of this country. I’d like to tell them of the heartache and the disappointment and the pain and the shame that they are fixing up for themselves in their future lives when they undertake to leave the straight and narrow path and allow themselves voluntarily to become the playthings of men; to let their honor be taken from them; to let their efficiency be wiped out; to let their years of training and the loving care that has been expended on them all go for nothing; to bring shame and disgrace on their parents, and to do to their own souls and to their own bodies what this poor dead girl has done to hers.” “Evidently,” said the doctor, “you are one of the people who still believe in hell fire and damnation.”
“Yes,” said the nurse, “I do. And I believe in hell at its hottest and damnation at its damnedest for the men who are responsible for such anguish as we have seen this girl suffer and for such a death as we have watched her die. I’d like to take the men who cannot wait for honest marriage and a time when they are able to support a woman and give her a home and fortify her body to serve the functions of wife hood, of motherhood and home-making, men who upset everything and ruin everything for their own personal immediate self-gratification—I’d like to take them all out and hang them as high as Haman. Sometimes I think I just hate men!”
And to his amazement the nurse broke into tears and used the towel on her eyes.
“But, look here!” said the doctor. “You spoke up for Mr. MacFarlane. You said he was not responsible for this.”
“And I’ll say it again,” said the nurse. “Can’t you see by what she told me, by the way he came in, by the way he left, that he’d never seen the girl before, that he didn’t know who she was? Because some arrangement had been made by which that child was to bear his name, he assumed responsibility for it, but, good Lord! you can’t convince me in ten years that he had ever seen that girl there on the bed before, or that the marriage certificate I packed among her belonging so the child could have it was a legal document. Don’t you think it!”
Then the nurse went her way and the doctor went his way, and the Keeper of the Bees climbed in the taxi and gave instructions to be driven back to the blue garden.
16. The Partnership Baby
When he dismissed the taxi and started up the front walk with the bundle and the suitcase, Jamie was surprised to find the little Scout sitting on the front steps beside a bottle of milk half consumed, with crumb decoration prominently on the face lifted inquiringly in his direction.
“Well, look who’s here!” said the little Scout. “My gracious! you look exactly like Dad when he brought Jimmy home from the hospital!”
“Well,” said Jamie, “that’s a very good way for me to look. Have you been sitting here ever since I left?” “No,” said the little Scout. “I went through the back window and lay on the foot of your bed and slept about three hours, and then I was hungry and I went over to Margaret Cameron’s to ask her for something to eat, and I run into her just as she was leaving. She said Molly had telephoned her to come in for a few days. I am waiting at the church to tell you you’ll have to get your food the best you can until she comes back. Didn’t strike me until after she was gone that I’d forgotten to ask her for something to eat myself, but I knew she wouldn’t care, so I climbed in the back porch window and got a chunk of bread out of the bread box. The milk’s yours all that ain’t used. Say, Be, honest, what you got there?”
Jamie sat down suddenly. His solution of what he was to do with James Lewis MacFarlane, Junior, had been to transfer him to the care of Margaret Cameron. He had planned to ask his neighbor to take the child and care for it until he could find the right kind of a woman to undertake the job. In the back of his head there had been a hope as he had driven out that Margaret would use on the baby the same cleanliness, deftness, and expert care with which Jamie had not a doubt, from her brand of housekeeping and cooking, she had reared her own family. Of all the bad luck that he had experienced in his unlucky days, nothing had been much worse than that Margaret Cameron should have chosen to go pleasuring, should have selected the day to start a vacation when he needed her the very worst. Jamie set down the suitcase and produced the front door key.
“Unlock the door,” he said to the little Scout, and together they went in.
Jamie laid the small bundle on the davenport and then he stepped back and drew his hands over his perplexed face and said to the Scout Master, “I wish you’d tell me what am I going to do.”
“What’s eating you?” inquired the small person, casually.
Jamie pointed to the bundle.
“That’s a baby,” he said, “a live baby that needs nursing and feeding and loving, and I thought Margaret Cameron would be the woman who’d do it. Are you sure she said she had gone visiting and she would be gone no telling how long?”
“She didn’t say ‘no telling how long,” said the Scout Master. “She said ‘a few days.’ I should think a few days would be a week, maybe.”
“And what,” demanded Jamie, “what am I going to do in ‘a week maybe’ with a live baby?”
“Aw, feed it to the birds and let’s get on with our work! We’re wasting’ a lot of time on the garden,” said the little Scout.
“You look here,” said Jamie, “you aren’t talking about a crust of bread. That’s a baby in that bundle, a tiny boy who wants his chance to live and to grow and to paddle a canoe and to ride a horse and to be a Scout Master just as bad as you do!”
“Aw,” said the disgruntled small person.
Then the Scout Master walked over and lifted a square of line white flannel with a border of forget-me-nots, and peered down at what was beneath it. Suddenly the Scout Master dropped to a kneeling position, leaned forward and looked intently. Then a softened face turned to Jamie over a lean shoulder.
“You’ll have to get a baby bottle,” was the verdict,” ’tis a nice baby. It’s an awful nice baby! It’s the cutest little thing. It’s as pretty as our Jimmy was the first time I ever saw him, and I thought there wouldn’t ever be another baby as nice as he was. But they is. Far as I can see, this baby has got just as nice clothes and just as pretty a face and just as cute little hands as our baby bad. Say, where did you get him?”
“He’s mine,” said Jamie. “His name is James Lewis MacFarlane, Junior.”
“Well, I’ll be darned!” said the little Scout. “Ain’t the world getting full of James and Jamies and Jimmies! I know about two dozen. Dad’s name begins with James and our baby’s Jimmy, and this baby will be Jamie and you’re Jamie. You wouldn’t think, with all the names in the back of the dictionary and names by the yard in the Bible and fool names that people invent, that so many folks would have to run to James. Say, what you going to do with him?”
“That’s exactly the question,” said Jamie. “What am I going to do with him?”
“Hm-m-m-m!” said the little Scout. “Lemme think.” Jamie had the impression that he came closer to seeing thought than he ever had before. The face of the youngster was drawn with thought. First the body sank back on the heels and then the heels curled under and the floor made the seat. One arm leaned against the davenport. One hand, from fingering the blanket, crept up and closed over the little red fingers of the newborn baby. The little Scout looked up.
“Pull down that window blind,” came the order. “You got to have a dim light. Their eyes are riley for the first few days. They can’t see. If they get too much light, they go cross-eyed.”
There was a return of a few minutes to thought. Then the little Scout began to think aloud. “My! ain’t we accumulating Talk about compound interest! I’ll say things are compounding for this partnership! Here all unbeknownst to ourselves we get a house and flowers and trees and bees and now, by gracious! we get a baby! And, of course, if we got it and it’s yours, we got to take care of it. Say, where is his mother?”
Jamie hesitated a second and decided that the truth was the quickest and the easiest.
“I hate to tell you, Buddy,” he said. “I hate to tell you, but the truth is this baby hasn’t any mother. The task of getting him into the world was too big for her. She paid for his life with hers. You will be glad to know that she was like your Aunt Beth. She went over to see what Heaven had in store for her laughing, laughing out loud, laughing the gayest laugh of contentment and exultation.”
From the floor the little Scout stared up at Jamie with wide eyes and slowly nodded a corroborative head. “I know, that was Aunt Beth’s smile come true. It’s the kind of a laugh that the smile she had would have been If it had broken through and come out loud. I told you being dead was beautiful, but I don’t see what’s going to become of this little new Jamie. You never saw the amount of oiling and bathing and bandaging and changing and dressing and weighing, you never saw anything to equal the things Mother does to our Jimmy.”
Then suddenly the little Scout came up to one knee and then the other, and then slowly assumed an erect position, then from the depths of preoccupation, stumbled to the telephone and took down the receiver and gave a number. Jamie stood breathlessly, fearfully, and listened to a one-sided conversation.
“I want Mom.
“Hello, Mom, is that you?
“Say, Mom, we got a problem out here this morning! We got a little splinter new boy baby just like Jimmy when he first came from the hospital, just as nice and sweet and everything. And, Mom, this is the dirty part of it. Getting him here was too much for his mother. She went dead on us and we ain’t got her, and we are got the baby, and his name’s Jamie after his dad—just like our baby! And, Mom, we thought Margaret Cameron would take him and take care of him for us, and that’s another dirty thing! She’s gone off on a visit and she won’t be home for three or four days, and we ain’t got a thing to feed him!”
The little Scout clapped a hand over the mouthpiece, turned to Jamie, and in a strained whisper inquired: “Have we got any clothes?”
“I think so,” said Jamie.
The small person turned back.
“We got oodles of clothes. Everything we need. What we need is somebody to do the oiling and the feeding and the changing-”
