The Keeper of the Bees, page 37
She pointed to one and said: “That one has the best temper, but it is easy and slow. That one has a good disposition. It will go steady and it will go all day. I believe it has good wind.”
Then she looked at the last one.
“And this one has got a fine large dose of the devil in him. You won’t know when he’s going to kick and when he’s going to rear, but he won’t know when you’re going to want to turn a quick curve or slide down a mountainside instead of walking. So maybe that will be even. He’ll go the farthest and he’ll keep it up the longest, but it would be a good long while before anybody that owned him could really trust him.”
“All right,” said Jamie, “so far as I know that’s probably the way it is. Now, put the saddle on and I’ll give you two hours to test them. I’m going to go down to the sand and stretch out in the sun for an hour. I’ve gotten so accustomed to it at this time of day that I miss it if I don’t get my sun bath. The salt water I’ll pass up for the day.”
“Wait a minute,” said Jean. “Stay here for a minute.” Her nimble feet went flying over in the direction of a corner stand. On her return she came up to Jamie and handed him a paper bag.
“Thank you very much,” said Jamie, gravely, as he accepted the bag.
Then he turned to the attendant.
“Let this young lady,” he said, “ride each one of these three horses around the track as often as she wants to. By the time she has her selection made, I’ll be back to escort her home. Anything she wants, will you kindly see to it for her?”
The attendant said that he would and went to bring a saddle. Jean dug the toe of her shoe in the dust of the corral and then looked obliquely at Jamie.
“What’s the use to rub it in?” she asked.
And Jamie did not resort to the subterfuge of asking, “Rub what in?” He happened to know, and he was too much of a Scot to pretend that he didn’t know when he did.
“You die hard, don’t you?” said Jamie. “But if you have been at this subterfuge all your life, I suppose you can’t get over it all in a minute. At any rate, I’ll explain to you exactly why I rub in the fact that you are a girl good and hard. I am conceding that you look enough like a boy so that any one might mistake you for a boy when you are doing your utmost to prove that you are one. The reason I seem to hammer in the fact that you are a girl is because men among themselves sometimes grow pretty coarse and they say things and they do things that they would neither say nor do if they understood that a child of your size among them was a girl. What I am trying to do, Jean, is to give you the same kind of loving care and protection that I’d give you if you were my little sister.”
Jean looked at Jamie and studied him intently. Then she almost bowled him over.
“I wouldn’t ever be old enough or big enough to be your sweetheart, would I?” she asked, as casually as she would have asked for a drink of water.
Only for a minute there rushed in a tumult through Jamie’s brain a picture of the kind of a sweetheart that the child before him might make ten or twelve years hence, and his head went a little wild; but Scotsmen are noted for saneness and sobriety and integrity, and he held himself and answered steadily: “I cannot imagine any sweetheart in the whole world I’d rather have than you, Jean, but it wouldn’t be fair to you. I am too much older than you are. Youth demands youth. Nothing else is fair. I have noticed in my experience that things always go wrong when a man is much older than a woman. It isn’t fair to a girl to tie her up to a man very nearly old enough to be her father. If I ever marry again, I’m going to marry a woman very near my own age.”
“Was Jamie’s mother very near your own age?” inquired Jean, calmly.
“Well, considerably nearer than you are,” said Jamie. “Now you go and ride your horses and I’ll go and take my sun bath and when you have your horse selected I’ll match it up with the saddle and I’m not right sure that we didn’t make a mistake in ordering the clothes first. Perhaps they should match the horse, too.”
Jean thought that over.
“Well, I don’t guess that suit is going to be cut out and made right this minute. Maybe we could change the colors of the things this afternoon by telephone. There was the same cloth in tans and browns as well as blues and grays.”
“So there was,” said Jamie. “Maybe we’ll want to change it. Now, think about your horse, and be sure you get the right one. We don’t want to find out later that you have a biting brute of a thing that is going to tax your strength every time you go out. You want a horse that will be your friend; that will be some comfort to you; that will love you.”
“Yes,” said Jean, “that’s exactly the kind of a horse I do want. I want a horse that will love me like Dad’s dog loves him.”
“Well, I doubt,” said Jamie, “if you will find a horse with the capacity for love that a dog has. A dog has been around man so many centuries and has had so much
attention that he has come to be almost human. There are times when I’ve seen a dog think; there are times when I’ve almost heard a dog talk; there are times when they have managed sounds that told what they wanted.”
“I’ll tell the world!” said Jean. “Dad’s dog can every time, and so could Mother’s dog, Chum.”
Then she turned to the horses and Jamie turned toward the beach.
21. Then Comes a Vision
When Jamie reached the road, he crossed it and started down a steep embankment leading to the hot sands of the sea and the breaking waves. As he was going down, to his right he noticed a stone projecting in such a manner as to make a particularly attractive seat. From the feel of the package he thought he knew what he had. So Jamie went over and sat on the stone screened on one side by an unusually large toluache, its lilied white trumpets blaring widely from blue edgings. Next to it a rose mallow towered, ten feet tall, a flaunting cloud of rosy pink accentuated by maplelike leaves of silvery green. He reached in his pocket, drew out his knife, and opening it, opened the bag, also, and found what he had expected: two very large, very red tomatoes. It was the time for his morning tomato juice. Jean had been thoughtful of him; she had decided that if he could not have the juice, he could eat the tomatoes and get his vitamin’s in slightly different form. So Jamie laid one tomato on the paper beside him and with his knife cut the stem end and the core from the other and began peeling back the thin skin in small pieces and cutting out the tomato in chunks. He found that he was enjoying it thoroughly. He had formed the tomato habit. He had gotten to the place where, if he did not have tomato juice at ten-thirty, his stomach arose and shouted for it.
While he was sitting there enjoying his fruit and watching the hundreds flocking back and forth on the beach, family parties here and there sheltered by beach umbrellas, people in bathing suits lying on the sands, children playing in the breakers, swimmers floating far out—the everyday life of a beach in summertime—there broke on his ears from behind him a clamor that to say the least was startling, and then there came pouring down the embankment at his left the most surprising aggregation of humanity he ever had seen collected in one crowd. Little Mexico with straight black hair and black eyes, with rosy cheeks and red lips and shining teeth. Sober little Yaqui with blue-black hair, with square, narrow face, with wide mouth and shining eyes and red lips. Little Italy, the prettiest sight, with tumbling curls and olive cheeks and always the lips of red and the white teeth. Little Spain was there wide-eyed and lovely; and China and Japan and Greece, and shiny little copper-colored Indian faces with the straight hair, deep-set, watchful eyes, the high cheek bones and sober faces, with lean, flat bodies and the prideful lift of head of the proudest race that ever walked the earth.
As this amazing combination poured over the embankment around him, Jamie noticed that each youngster either carried a small basket or clasped a small package. Some were boys, some were girls. All of them were shining eyed, all of them were young, all of them were beautiful, each in its own way, beautiful with the beauty of a perfect thing in the flower of youth.
Those who reached the sand first paused and looked back and beside Jamie, so near that he could have reached out and laid a hand upon it, there came down the embankment a narrow, arched foot and a slender leg clad in hiking boots. Then came khaki breeches, and in an instant more there stood out, back toward him, a tall, slender girl. The figure never could have been a boy. There were decided calves to the booted legs. There were rounded hips and arms and the profile of a shapely breast. There was a gracefully lifted neck, and it was topped with a shorn head of hair so thick that it stood out at the sides and on the top and turned over in big, soft curls and sloped down to the neck at the back like the hair of a boy.
When the foot lifted and took one step forward, Jamie looked down into the track that remained in the sand and drew in a deep breath in which he recognized sage and beach primrose and sand verbena, albeit heavily laden with garlic and mangoes and tamales. Jamie’s heart stopped right where it was and stood still so long that he did not know whether it ever was going to begin beating again or not. He shut his eyes tight and a strand of wet hair whipped across his face and drew him. Then he opened his eyes to make sure and saw the shorn head, and in his heart he cried: “Oh, what a pity! What a terrible pity! How could she sacrifice her crowning glory, a mane of silk like that?”
He watched the graceful movements of the slender girl as she went down the beach and seated herself a few rods in front of him. The little flock gathered around her. He heard a voice that he had heard before, that he knew perfectly, saying: “Now, children, before we have our lunch and before we begin to play, we must have our lesson just to see if you are going to remember when school is not in session. What is this before you?”
In concert the children shouted: “Pa-ceef-ik O-shun!” “And what is back of you?”
“Sierra Madre Mountains!”
“And what is above you?”
“Sky!”
“And what is it you are sitting on?”
“Sand!”
“And whose country is this?”
Each little individual shouted for him or herself: “My country!”
“And who of you can recite ‘My Country’?”
The air was waving with little hands. The teacher pointed in the direction of a little Yaqui Indian boy. “I sadore, you try!”
The little fellow stood up, brought his heels together, removed the little straw hat he was wearing, and because he knew what the child was going to say before he began, Jamie could distinguish:
‘“My count-ree tiss of ’ee,
Sweet Lan’ of li-ber-tee-
The teacher of Americanism smiled on the little fellow and said: “Right, Isadore! That’s fine. Now, who can tell us what ‘liberty’ is?”
Again the air was full of hands.
The teacher indicated a little girl of Mexico.
“Maria, you try.”
Maria answered promptly, waving her arms like a wind-mill over the sands and toward the mountains and the sky and the sea: “All this—with no fights.”
The teacher applauded. Then she asked: “And who was the Father of your Country?”
Little Japan knew: “George Washington.”
“And who is our President?”
Little Greece and Spain and China shouted in unison, “Calvin Coolidge!” and the teacher laughed and applauded again.
By this time quite a crowd had collected. Children with fairer faces had gathered and were listening and looking on. Grown people were passing before and behind the group of twenty-one, according to Jamie’s count. They went on with their affairs without paying the slightest attention. The teacher opened a book the size of a school atlas, and taking a pencil, began to draw.
Mechanically, Jamie finished the tomatoes, wiped his knife through the sand and then on his trouser leg, snapped it shut and restored it to his pocket. Then he arose and walked down the beach until he stood within three feet of the back of the girl he knew and looked over her shoulder in company with several other people.
The girl had drawn up one knee and the big book rested on it. The other leg stretched out along the sand in lithe comfort. The head was bent and with the right hand, in quick, precise movements, Jamie saw there was being crudely sketched the figure of a man. When the work was sufficiently completed that the component parts stood out plainly, the pencil rested on the round head, and instantly most of the youngsters touched their own craniums and shouted, “Head!” Then they proceeded down the anatomy, naming neck, shoulders, arms, hands, body, knees, feet. Then the pencil went back to the cranium and began making upstanding strokes on it and each youngster lifted his or her hands to his or her head and shouted, “Hair!” Then came forehead, and brow, and eyes, and eyelids, and eyelashes, and by this time, as each part of the face was named, the teacher ran a line out to the margin of the paper and whirled it into a circle and inside that circle printed very plainly, “Nose.” “Eye.” “Ear.” Every feature of the face was being reproduced and named.
Jamie noticed as this proceeding advanced from the ears downward that the space that had been left for the mouth was large. He stood almost breathlessly watching while gums were placed in the mouth, and then teeth and a tooth. The mellow voice of the teacher was talking almost constantly. She opened her mouth and exposed firm, milk-white teeth. She ran the eraser of the pencil across them to indicate that all of them were teeth. And all the children showed their teeth and ran a finger across them and shouted, “Teeth!”
Then she touched one of her front teeth and said: “Tooth,” and held up one finger and indicated one tooth. Then all the little brown children found “a” tooth. She stuck her tongue out, laughing all the while, a very pink tongue glowing with health, not a sign of a bilious coat on the extent of it, and all the little brown people stuck out their tongues and shouted with laughter and immediately fell to making faces at each other. Isadore made such an ugly face at little Mexico that Mexico threw a handful of sand and a scuffle began on the outskirts. The teacher sat laughingly watching. Then her voice was raised to call them to order. Very distinctly she pronounced the word “tongue,” and all the little folks kept showing their tongues and telling each other that they were tongues. Then she drew the tongue in the mouth of the figure she was working with, and from the tip of it she swept the pencil over to the margin and rounded the circle in which she meant to write the word.
At that instant, there was the slightest movement behind her. Someone knelt at her back. A big brown hand flashed over her shoulder and firmly imprisoned her hand and the pencil it was holding, held it in a grip from which there was no release, and with extreme plainness in the circle she had made, one little ugly word comprised of four letters was printed. She was forced to print it three different times, and under the first writing there was one underscoring; under the second, two; under the third, there were three, very broad and black. The words that were written were:
“Lies! Lies! Lies!”
Then her hand was released. She was free to go on with her lesson in Americanism.
As Jamie arose from his knees, he kept his eyes on the back of the girl, and what he saw was, that aside from the slight tensing of her figure that he had felt as he leaned against her back, there was not the least indication that she recognized the presence of any one behind her. There had been no resistance in the hand he had held. It had yielded to his use, and he had used it to write the ugly word as forcefully as he could write it. After he had released the hand, he saw the surge of red that flamed up in the cheek next him; he saw the pencil whipped over and the erasure of the words he had written begun.
He was on his feet heading down the beach. He was dying to look back, and he would not. The question that was hammering in his heart and brain was whether she would follow him, whether she would speak to him. If there only were a rock. If he could only stub his toe; if he could only pretend that he had fallen, that he might look back and see whether she were coming. But there was no rock. There was no slightest excuse for looking back unless he did it deliberately, and he was too Scot stubborn to let the girl see, if she happened to be looking his way, that he would turn his head for her.
The whole thing had been so unexpected and so bewildering that his brain was only functioning as far as proceedings had gone. He had not reached the place where he could think progressively, consecutively, conjecturally. He was simply putting distance between himself and a girl who had lied to him, lied outrageously. He had experienced the satisfaction of letting her know that he knew her and that he had called her a liar about as definitely and emphatically as a man well could, but he had not gone farther in thought than he had in action.
Right there he reached a rocky projection that ran down until the waves were breaking at its base, each wave creeping higher. Jamie was in no mood to stop for water. He went through, and as he rounded the rocks it seemed to him that here was an opportunity for a backward glance without being discovered. So he took the backward glance and what he saw stopped his heart again.
Away back on the beach in a sedate circle, mute and wide-eyed, with their lunches gripped tight, waiting the command from their beloved teacher, were the little brown and red and chocolate and copper-colored children, born in the United States, products of our soil, entitled by our laws and our Government to be educated with our children, to live with them, to love with them, to fight with them, to die with them, all free, all equal before the law. They were huddled there waiting, while their teacher was coming down the beach in flying strides.
Jamie thought in all his life he never had seen anything quite so beautiful. The Storm Girl was running as an Indian runs, perhaps her body a bit straighter, her chin thrown a trifle higher. The ocean breeze was catching her thick red-brown hair and blowing it back. He could see the broad white forehead. He could see the flash of the brown-gray eyes. He could see the surge of red staining the cheeks and the lips and even the throat. He could see the heavy sprinkling of freckles that the sun had drawn out not only crossing the bridge of the nose, but scattered over the entire face. In a minute, with the sweep at which she was coming, she would reach him. All Jamie could think of was that he must not be caught peering around a rock. To preserve his dignity he should be striding down the beach with his head up, with his shoulders square, his back toward her. Let the little liar run after him! Let her catch him if she thought she had anything to say to him!
