The Keeper of the Bees, page 34
This from John Carey.
“Wager it would have been worth more,” from Jamie.
“Chances are you’ve been saved a lawsuit that might have dragged for months and cost a lot of money and made a lot of rotten publicity.”
“When we get these bees up, I’ll go over to Margaret Cameron’s and straighten everything up and bring home my stuff. I was going to camp there until Margaret got back.”
“You were a fool ever to have allowed that creature inside the house, to have walked out and turned things over to her!”
Jamie smiled, a slow Scot smile.
“You know,” he said, “we are no so verra well acquainted with ourselves in this world. I thought I had not earned this property; I thought I had no right to it; I thought it belonged to someone of blood kin; I thought I had not set my heart on it, and when I had walked out and started trying to give it up, I found it was almost going to kill me to do it. You can trust me, there will not be any more walking out for anybody, and that’s that!”
So they hived the bees that had swarmed, and went over the other hives to clip old queens and destroy queen cells and to search for moth webs on the comb, and when everything was in proper shape John Carey went home, and Jamie took a shovel and commenced repairing the damage to the marigold bed. After that, he went over and cleaned up Margaret Cameron’s house and brought home his belongings with a heart so full of thankfulness that he remembered to go on his knees and thank God.
When the little Scout awoke in mid-afternoon, Jamie was waiting to return his possessions to the chiffonier and closet. They went into the kitchen and gathered up the Bee Master’s effects which the crisp, dry air had done its work upon, carefully returned them to the chest, pushed the splintered wood into place, and took stock of the damages. Jamie thought he could find a man who could make the repairs skillfully so that no one ever would know that the beautiful thing had been broken. Then he went to his room to hang up his clothing and replace his things in the chiffonier.
No one had ever known the little Scout Master to waste very much time. There were no lazy bones in the small body. Jamie had assistance in folding the papers and putting them in the chest. He was now being assisted in returning his shirts, underclothing, and socks to their proper places. When they came to a small package, carefully pinned, the Scout Master ran a pair of small hands under it and lifted it, then looked at Jamie with speculative eyes.
“Feels like woman’s stuff.”
Jamie smiled at that comment.
“It is ‘woman’s stuff.’ It’s things that belonged to wee Jamie’s mother.”
The little Scout stood very still holding the package toward Jamie, and Jamie saw the lips open and he knew that the question was going to be: “May I see?” And someway, he did not feel that he could stand to touch those things. So he reached his hand and said quickly: “Some day I’ll let you see what’s in that package.” It did not occur to the little Scout that Jamie did not know what was in it himself. So they put the package back in the drawer and covered it with clothing, and then they went down to the corner grocery and bought what the little Scout called a “party.”
After they had finished the “party,” and Jamie had been told every detail of what had occurred in the morning, the little Scout arose from the table and helped to put away the food and wiped the dishes.
“Now, what shall we do?” inquired Jamie.
“Well, I don’t know what you’re going to do,” said the small person, “but I know what I’m going to do. I’m going home to Mom and Jamie. I been taking care of him so much the last few days that he knows me better than he does anybody else, and he likes me better. I know how to fix his bottle now and get his milk just right with the thermometer and everything. The rest of the way I could take care of him myself if I had to. I’m pretty near doing it anyway.”
“But that’s girl’s work,” suggested Jamie.
“Yes, I know,” said the little Scout, “and if it’s what a girl really ought to do, it’s kind of funny that I’d want to do it, but I do want to take care of Jamie. I want to take care of him so bad I can’t hardly bear to see Mother touch him. It’s the funniest thing. I thought I liked a horse better than anything else in the world, but I don’t. I like our Jimmy better than any horse, and I like your Jamie about as well as I do ours. I don’t know but just as well, and I don’t care a bit who sees me taking care of him. And that’s strange, too. Girls don’t interest me. I have nothing in common with them. I never can think of anything to say to them. I don’t know how to play with them, and I don’t like the things they do, anyway. They’re so sissy. They got no pep to ’em. They got no kick and bang. They won’t play Indians or robbers or policeman or Scouts.”
“Now, back up there,” said Jamie. “You’re mistaken. Girls do play Scouts. They not only play Scouts, but they are Scouts, and being is better than pretending any day. There are Girl Scout camps and there are girls that can ride hard and shoot straight and fish and do everything that a boy does, and do some things even better than a boy does and are all the prouder because they are girls.” The little Scout did not seem deeply impressed.
“Aw, girls! I ain’t got any use for girls! But I’m going home and take a girl’s job ’cause I’m going to see for myself that Jamie’s all right. He’s so little and sweet. My! you’re going to love him! My! you’re going to be glad you got him!”
“Am I?” asked Jamie.
“Sure you are! You ought to see my dad with our Jimmy. He’s just crazy about him. He says that our Jimmy has got all the rest of the babies on the map lashed to the mast.”
“And you think my Jamie stands a chance of being as fine a baby as that?” asked Jamie.
“I don’t think anything about it,” said the little Scout. “I’m well acquainted with both of ’em and there ain’t a thing the matter with your Jamie. He don’t cry and he’s no fusser. He just takes his food and goes to sleep and lies there so little and so still it most breaks your heart ’cause he can’t help himself any, and no mother to cuddle him. He’s got some service due him and I’m going to see that he gets it.”
“Yes, I thought about that, too,” said Jamie. “He’s certainly a helpless little duffer.”
“Yes, he is,” agreed the Scout Master, heartily, “He’s a helpless little duffer. And that’s where we come in, and so we got to get on the job and take care of him.”
“All right,” said Jamie, “we’ll get on the job and take care of him. Do the best you can for a few days more until Margaret Cameron comes.”
At the mention of Margaret Cameron they both looked her way, and at the same time they both saw her going in her back door and moving through the back part of the house.
“Why, there she is now!” cried the little Scout. “Shall I go over and tell her about Jamie and ask her If she will take him?”
“No,” said Jamie, “let’s give her rime to take her hat off and set her house in order, and maybe what I consider straight, she wouldn’t think was straight. Some rime this evening I’ll talk with her, and then I’ll telephone you what she says.”
“All right,” said the little Scout.
Possibly in those two words lay the secret of the thing that made the little Scout so many friends; such an adorable little Scout. In the small person’s cosmos there was no rime to argue. In training the Scouts the same teaching had been applied to personal experience. The Scout Master had learned how to obey. So Jamie watched the receding figure on the way to the car line, willing in one instance to take a girl’s job, because the “little duffer was so helpless.” Jamie smiled whimsically and started to interview Margaret Cameron.
19. The Province of a Friend
Jamie stood in Margaret Cameron’s back door and called cheerfully: “Oh, neighbor, where have you been for the past fifty years?”
Margaret Cameron stepped to the living-room door and braced herself with a hand on each side of the casing, and Jamie was shocked to the depths. He found himself crossing the room in a sweep and catching her in his arms. “Oh, Margaret!” he cried. “Margaret!”
He held her from him and looked at her, and her face was the face of a stricken woman. She was there. She seemed all right herself. There was only one thing to think.
“Lolly?” he questioned. “What happened to your girl?”
Margaret Cameron opened her mouth but no words came. Jamie helped her to a chair and rushed to the kitchen for a glass of water. Then he knelt on one knee beside her and took both her hands and stared at her with questioning eyes.
“Tell me, friend of mine,” he urged. “Tell me what I can do for you. Where can I go? Whom can I get?” Slowly the woman shook her head, and at last her voice came, a hoarse, rasping voice with which he was not familiar.
“She went on that hiking trip up in the northern part of the state. She fell over a bluff and hurt herself terribly. Nobody knew how bad it was. They were where they couldn’t get anything. It must have been appendicitis or peritonitis. Her body was all bandaged. Anyway, Lolly is beside her father out in Pinehurst Cemetery.”
“Oh!” cried Jamie. “Oh!”
He dropped back on his heels and possessed himself of both Margaret Cameron’s hands and sat staring at her.
“I had a ’phone call,” she said presently, “from my niece, Molly, to come to her place in town quick, that she was worried about Lolly. She just said that to make it easier for me to get there. They must have sent her word from the start that Lolly was gone. Molly had written her a letter and they got the address off it and sent Lolly to her. They were always, not like sisters, more than sisters. If they had been sisters, they’d not have gotten along half so well as they did. I’ve been kind of sore at Molly for a good while. I thought she had a good deal to do with Lolly going away, but maybe she didn’t. Maybe I was so hurt at her going that I just imagined it. You know, a mother has got a lot of time to think and her children arc so bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh that to save her she can’t help worrying over them. But I needn’t worry over Lolly any more. There’s nothing more I am ever going to do for her.”
She sat still in dry-eyed resignation.
Jamie gripped her hands.
“Go on and cry! Cry your heart out about it!” he said. “Put your head over here on my shoulder and let me hold you tight. If it tears you to pieces, you had better cry than to sit dry eyed like that.”
Margaret Cameron shook her head.
“I think I am cut too deep for tears,” she said. “I am just about killed. I wish to God I had something to do besides the routine of the house, something different, somebody who needed me! I wanted Molly to come home with me, but she seemed to have things keeping her in town, and she wanted me to come with her, and awful as it seems here now that Lolly is never going to come again, I don’t seem to be able even to think about leaving. I am hit pretty hard, losing my neighbor and all the light of love and laughter that there was in my life and in my home. I don’t mind telling you, Jamie, that the Bee Master did not care anything about me. His heart had been broken on the question of women.
“I don’t know all the details, but I know this much. He had had a first wife that he idolized, and after her death he had let another woman fool him into the idea that she would take care of his child and make a home for him and comfort him. But she wasn’t the right kind of a woman and she had a child of her own, and there was a tragedy about the Bee Master’s little girl. I don’t think he could prove it, but I think he knew in his heart that the other child had pushed her, and when they got to her, her spine was injured and she never could walk again. Her agony was fearful and she couldn’t stand it long. When she died, he turned everything over to the woman but enough to buy this place, and asked the courts for his freedom and came here. He was free and he could have married me, but he did not want me. He did not want any woman in that way. He had had his punishment. He was worn out with sorrow and disappointment. He didn’t love me, but, oh! Jamie! I did love him! I couldn’t help loving him. Whenever I look at his chair beside the fireplace, I see his white, silken hair, his noble forehead, his lean slender face fine as parchment, always gentle, always panent—I would have given my life to have comforted him! And just when I knew this couldn’t ever be, Lolly went, so suddenly and so needlessly.
“Jamie, I cant understand it! There was no reason why she should have left home. Her grades were always good. Her school work was fine. She was offered positions here at the close of the war, when teachers were so scarce, when so many girls preferred the freedom of the shops and offices to the confinement of teaching. I can’t get away from the fact that she went because she didn’t want to stay at home. She didn’t want to be around me, and I can’t see why. I spent my days and I lay awake at night trying to think of things that would please her, but I couldn’t keep up with the procession. I can’t think that a lot of things the youngsters are doing are right. I can’t think that they won’t end in humiliation and pain and maybe death, and now death’s come to her just from a little foolish accident. She must have slipped on the mountains, and I can’t understand that. She was sure-footed as a goat. She’d been in the mountains all her life. Oh, Jamie, it’s all so useless. What am I going to do?”
Jamie hesitated.
“Margaret,” he said, “I came over here to tell you a tale of woe, but what I have to say seems feeble compared to what you are enduring.”
Margaret Cameron straightened in her chair. She drew her hands from Jamie’s and laid one of them on his head.
“Oh, my boy, my poor boy!” she cried. “Has that awful thing gone and broken open again? Have we got it all to do over?”
“No! No!” Jamie hastened to assure her. “No, it isn’t that. My side’s fine. I’m fairly sure I won’t have to wear either the pads or bandages more than two or three months more. I haven’t been able to stick to diet so well since you’ve been gone because I’m not much of a cook and I haven’t been places where I could get what I needed.”
Margaret Cameron went on smoothing his hair.
“I guess you’re about all that’s left to me, Jamie,” she said. “I guess you are my job. It’s fair hell to stay at home, and it’s blacker hell to try to leave it. I doubt if I can go to Molly. If she wants to be with me, I guess she will have to come here. And as for you, lad, if it isn’t your side, what is it that’s hurting you?”
With Scot brevity Jamie told her.
“About the time I came here I married a girl, A few days ago her baby was born at the Star of Mercy Hospital and she was not strong enough to make it. All I have to show for her is the baby.”
Margaret Cameron pushed him back and looked at him quietly.
“Why, Jamie,” she said, “Jamie, I can’t understand that. Why didn’t you bring her here to the garden? Why didn’t you let me take care of her, too? Maybe If her diet had been right and she had been cared for as a woman can care for a girl, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. “
“‘Maybes’ don’t do any good now,” said Jamie. “The circumstances were such that I couldn’t bring her here. The point is that she is gone and there is a splendid boy baby and his name is James Lewis MacFarlane, Junior.” “At the hospital? He’s at the hospital?”
“No,” said Jamie. “She’d told them before I got there that she wanted me to have him, that she wanted him named for me. They had him all ready and they put him in my arms and without knowing what I was going to do, I walked out with him. I am the same kind of a dog that you are, Margaret. I came home, to the only place I’ve got, to the only place on earth that knows me or wants me. It hasn’t been long, but as long as I live, this spot right here is home to me. So I came home with a little raw, new-born baby.”
Margaret Cameron arose.
“You have him over at the house?” she asked. “You’re trying to take care of him yourself?”
Jamie shook his head.
“No, I couldn’t do that,” he said. “I’m too big and clumsy. I don’t know enough. The little Scout was there and went to the telephone and had a conversation and half an hour later Mrs. Meredith came. She has a small person of her own and it seems that one more didn’t bother her.”
Margaret Cameron made a curious sound, a dry intake of breath which might have been a short laugh if she had not been too unhappy to laugh.
“No,” she said, tersely, “one more doesn’t bother that woman! I’ve heard about her. At the birth of her first child, there was a charity baby and a little millionaire baby at the same hospital and both of them were starving, and for the length of time she was there, along with her own baby she nursed the others and she saved both of them. She got them past a critical period where they could take proper nourishment and retain it, and then they could go on feeding them. And when her next baby came, there were a couple more starving babies and she took them under her wing and shared the nourishment for her own baby with them. And when her third one came there had been a Caesarean operation a few days before and the baby lived and there was no milk for it, and she nursed it as well as her own. Mrs. Meredith doesn’t stick at doing anything for any baby, that you can depend on. It isn’t hard to see where the little Scout gets a large bunch of lovable qualities, but if she’s got a little person of her own she doesn’t need yours. Maybe that’s the job that I was looking for. Maybe something alive that will put in a demand will be the thing that will tide me over. Go and get your baby, Jamie, and bring him to me.
Jamie arose and went to the telephone. He called Mrs. Meredith and asked to have the baby brought home. Margaret Cameron had returned and was willing to undertake his care. In only a short time a small brown car appeared down the street. Jamie stood at the gate and watched it coming. The car was the color of the hair of the woman who drove it. Her eyes, wide and bright, shone out smilingly. On the front seat beside her sat the little Scout, carefully holding the bundle. Jamie looked at it curiously and wondered what he would think and what he would feel if that child were truly his.
