The Keeper of the Bees, page 38
At that moment, with anger flaming hot in his heart against her, Jamie whirled on his heel and looked behind him. He saw that he was standing before a crevice in the overhanging rock that led back to what looked as if it might be some kind of a subterranean passage. Before he realized what he was doing, he had gone plunging into the black depths until he brought up precipitately against walls which would afford him no further retreat. He turned in time to see the shadow of the Storm Girl’s figure as she splashed through the waves in passing the opening. Immediately he was back at the entrance. She was still racing down the beach in absorbed pursuit. Jamie darted into the water around the point and did some sprinting on his own behalf. By the time the Storm Girl could have retraced her steps, he was across the road and hidden by the live oak, the madrono, the manzanita, and the sage of the mountain-side. Hurriedly he made his way back to the corral.
He found Jean exactly where he had expected to find her, on the back of a horse, circling the riding course that surrounded the corral where the horses were being sold.
When she saw him, she rode up to the railing and asked: “How do you like this one?”
“This one” was, to Jamie’s way of thinking, the poorest horse of the three.
“What are his points?” asked Jamie, and laughed outright at the femininity of the first response.
“Well, he matches my suit, for one thing. You wouldn’t have to telephone. And for another, he’s got the wind and he rides easy, and he likes me. He seems as If he kind of needed to be loved and petted up a good deal. He seems like he could be better looking than he is if he was rubbed up a lot, and fed right, and ridden with some sense. Most of the kids that get on these horses think they’re on a piece of machinery, and they don’t care whether they break it or whether they don’t, so long as it doesn’t belong to them. This horse could stand quite a bit of being treated decent.”
Jean stood in one stirrup, drew the other leg across the horse and deftly dropped to the ground.
“I haven’t put any of ’em to the final test,” she said. “Let’s try it.”
She called to the attendant and said to him: “Bring my horses and stand them along in a row headed toward me. Right along there.”
“Right along there” was an imaginary line perhaps four feet in front of her. When the horses were so disposed, Jean stood in front of them. She looked them over carefully. She walked up to each horse and, one at a time, she laid the length of its head against her body. She cupped her hands around their ears, pressed in at the bases, and drew them through her hands two or three times, and then slid her hands down under each cheek and under the throat and hugged the head tight. Precisely what she did to the throat and muzzle, Jamie could not tell. This performance she repeated with each of them, with the horse she had been riding, last, and it seemed to Jamie that her touch was lingering, that she hugged it slightly closer. She certainly finished by laying her cheek against its nose. Then she backed away eight or ten feet and uttered a funny little whinnying call, and of the three horses, the one she had ridden last stepped forward and immediately went to her and again dropped its head to her touch.
Jean laid her hand on it and said to Jamie: “If this is the horse I think he is, if he is my horse, he will follow me.” She gave one more light stroke around the ears and across the nose and said to the horse: “Come on, Chief!” and started down the corral. The horse followed her as she might have been followed by a dog that she had trained for a considerable period.
That settled the horse question. All that remained for Jamie to do was to make the reservation, to set a date when Chief should be delivered and where, to stop on the way home and purchase the saddle and the crop upon which he insisted, and then to make as straight a journey as possible to the garden of the bees, because there was lumber to arrive for the stable and John Carey was coming the next day to help him and the carpenter he had engaged to build a shelter for Chief.
When they left the car line and started up the road toward the bee garden, Jamie, from an impulse whose origin he could not have guessed, faced Jean.
“Everything all satisfactory?” he asked.
Jean stood very still, and finally she raised her eyes and in them Jamie saw precisely what he had seen in the face of the Storm Girl when she had left him without a word and written a letter to say it afterward; so he understood.
He kissed her again and said: “You run along home now, and I’ll telephone you when I have the stable finished and the horse is here. Then you can come out in the car and bring your dad and mother and Nannette and let them see Chief and show them how you can ride him. I’ll tell them that the horse and fixtures are my gifts to you for saving me a lawsuit or any disagreeable complications in keeping my property. Will that be all right?”
And Jean the versatile, Jean the ever ready to talk, Jean of the school playground, of the diving raft, of the beaches and mountains, of the picture studio, of city and country alike, turned a small, quivering back, and silent, wordless, walked away.
Jamie went up to his door alone to find out what the premonition had been that had kept him from bringing the child with him.
22. The Magnificent Lie
As he unlatched the gate and went inside, Jamie noticed that the front door was standing open. That meant that Margaret Cameron, who had a key, was in the house putting things to rights. As he opened the screen and passed through the door he was fairly sure that he heard a low moaning. Swiftly he crossed the living room and stood in his bedroom door. The first thing he saw was the bed, and spread over it was a queer assortment of beads and pins and rings and bracelets and combs, the little vanities of a girl of the day, and lying open beside them was the marriage certificate he had not yet examined closely himself. A little bundle showing life lay very near to it, and on her knees beside the bed, her arms extended, her hands gripped full of the beads and bracelets crouched Margaret Cameron, so still that she seemed to be breathing only in faint moans.
The drawers of the highboy were open and in a heap on top of it lay Jamie’s rolled socks and his shirts and underclothing, so he knew that Margaret Cameron had been examining his wearing apparel, hunting out the pieces that needed to be mended. Under his shirts she had found the package that had been given to him at the hospital. The story of what had happened to her and to him lay spread before him, and it read like the plainest print. He could see it all, with that certificate before him reading “Alice Louise Cameron”—Lolly.
Before he moved, before Margaret became aware of his presence, there was one thing Jamie had to do. He must make up his mind whether he would tell her that he was legally married to the girl she had idolized with the double devotion of a widowed mother. He must tell her the truth, or he must live a lie. He must stick to it that the child was his and its name James Lewis MacFarlane. He resolved that this was what he would be forced to do. But if he made Margaret Cameron think that he had been married to Lolly, that he had cared for her in any slight degree, that the child was his, she would expect him to observe at least a period of mourning. And he had already told her that he could not pretend to be in mourning for the mother of the child, that he had scarcely known her. That constituted the first difficulty he thought of. Jamie had to be decent no matter at what price of mental suffering or physical endurance, or to his purse. So he made his decision. He took one step forward and reached out his arms.
“Mother,” he said, “Mother Cameron,” but he got no further.
Margaret Cameron, still gripping the beads and the bracelets, pressed her hands against the bed to brace her and arose. She turned toward him, but her face was no longer the set, hard face of a woman in danger of losing her reason. It was a face broken, lined, and creased with sorrow, but a face down which the blessed tears of relief had rolled until the sources of grief were nearly dried. Jamie was so surprised that he did not know what to say. It was Margaret Cameron who spoke.
“Jamie,” she said, “you needn’t fix up any magnificent lie. You needn’t try to make me believe that you are the father of this baby. You needn’t try to make me believe that you ever went through a marriage ceremony in person with my Alice Louise. You couldn’t have. You didn’t know her. I am sure you never saw her. I don’t know where you ran into Molly. Down on the sands taking your sun baths, most likely. And I don’t know what you two fixed up between you to try to save the situation, but I do know this: I know as well as I am standing before you that Don was the boy Lolly loved. If she ever was in trouble, it was Don. There wasn’t any one else she was accustomed to being with. There wasn’t any one else she loved with a self-effacing love. I can see now that all their lives together they had cared for each other, and as I think about it, I think there must have been some mistake in some way. I don’t just understand this clearly.”
Jamie’s arms closed around her.
“Margaret,” he said, “It is true that I never saw your girl until they sent for me to come to the hospital where that certificate made them expect me to take the baby.
I gave Molly the right to use my name. She used it for Alice Louise. I think that will help you to understand.
Margaret Cameron stood still, clutching the pitiful little strands of cheap beads and bracelets, the tears rolling down her cheeks, her eyes fast on Jamie.
“Since Don is the father of the boy, I’d be glad to think the best I can of him,” she said, “and I’m glad to have the sore feeling wiped out that I’ve carried in my heart against Molly for months. I knew that she was at the bottom of helping Alice Louise to go away, but, of course, I didn’t know that she was doing it to spare me, that she was trying frantically to fix some way that I might be kept from knowledge that would hurt me so. I didn’t know that, but I know it now. There is only one thing that you can do for me. There will be some legal complication maybe. Maybe Louise’s doctor can engineer it for you. Anyway, this baby isn’t going to bear your name. He shall not be James Lewis MacFarlane. He’s going to be Donald Cameron. I have surely got that much to say about it. He’s going on the records with his father’s name, and, of course, he is mine. Will you have his record changed for me?”
“Certainly I will, if it is legally possible,” said Jamie. “I’ll talk to the doctor and find out. I think very likely that he can arrange matters as you wish without any great difficulty’.”
He went to Margaret Cameron and took the pitiful little relics of her girl from her fingers and made them into a heap. The marriage certificate he laid back in the drawer.
“I might need this,” he explained, “in accomplishing what you want done. The certificate and these things, I give you my word of honor, I have not seen. I did not know, when I left the house this morning, that it would make any difference if you did run on to that package. I didn’t know that I gave my name to help your girl until I saw that certificate there on the bed when I came in.”
Jamie picked up the baby and the bundle and put his arm around Margaret Cameron and helped her back to her home. As they went, he tried to say to her everything he could think of that might be of comfort, that might be of consolation. When they reached her living room, she freed herself, took the little package he carried, laid it on the table, and gently tucked the baby in his basket.
“Jamie,” she said, “I’m thankful to you for your kindness of heart and for your good intentions. I know you are trying to comfort me, but at the present minute I happen to be a woman for whom there is no comfort. It may be that in years to come I can arrive at some sort of peace of mind concerning Lolly. It may be that in years to come I can love her baby, can take him to my heart and try to get some sort of comfort from him against old age, but I’ll tell you right now that it looks to me rather like a hopeless proposition. It seems to me as if in taking the bit between their teeth and running, the youngsters of the present day bad, at least in my case, met sickening disaster. Don was a fine chap and under the pressure of necessity to get out and earn money and earn it quickly that he might marry Lolly, he went to a job that dealt him his death, and she spent her maternity period in torture, how she was tortured is attested by the fact that her health was undermined until a function that should not have hurt her permanently, killed her. That’s two dead. Here’s a baby without a clear and legal right to a name, a brand of shame to hang over it for the rest of its life in the knowledge of several people. Here’s Molly been tortured almost beyond endurance for months. And here am I, who have lived my life and done the best I could, left to bow my head to a blow that by no interpretation can be made into anything except a shameful blow. All the rest of my days there is nothing left for me but to go softly, to know that there is something that I must hide, that I must keep secret, that never again can I lift my head with the pride of the Camerons or the pride of my own people. There’s no use, Jamie. Go home, and if it turns out that you and Molly learn to care for each other, don’t get the cart before the horse. Keep yourselves right before God and before the law. Stand by the ancient pride of your race and your clan. Stand by the laws of your country and the laws of your church and the laws of God. it may sound like preaching, but who has better right to preach than I, who have had two funerals on my hands, both children I have reared in my own home and by whom I can swear before the living God I did the very best I knew.
“And it was not enough. The youngsters thought they knew a better way, and they disregarded me and left me, and I wish that the good God would in some way make thousands of youngsters all over the land who are thinking about trying the same way, oh, I wish that the good God could show them the two dead faces that I have seen so lately, dead in their youth, dead in their beauty, gone out of life, gone out of love! Those children cannot face the Master and answer anything but “Guilty,” and all the rest of life for me I must bear the burden of their sin. I am right when I say that with bowed head for the rest of my days I must walk softly. Go home and leave me, Jamie. This is a thing I have to fight out alone.”
Jamie took the stricken woman in his arms and kissed her and left her. There was nothing else he could do. What she had said was true. There was no controverting it. There was no way to get around it. There were no consoling words that he could speak. But he made up his mind that with the young folks with whom he came in contact he would try to use all the influence he might have on the side of God’s laws, of man’s laws, of the natural laws of physical cleanliness and decency.
23. Still Adventuring
Through the rapidly falling darkness Jamie stumbled home. He stumbled because there was a vision that filled his eyes to the exclusion of everything else, even the walk upon which he trod. All he could see was the lean, slender form of a girl with rounded curves, with flushed cheeks, with windswept hair, with the fires of indignation streaming from the brown-gray eves as she rushed down the beach in search of him. He reflected that possibly it was well for him that she had not found him, that he might stand a better chance with her if she had more time to reflect before he tried to talk to her.
When he reached the bench under the jacqueranda, he dropped on it and sat there, a bewildered and a broken man. He reflected that he had fun true to the well-known characteristic of the Scots. He had bridled his anger and bided his time and waited long to strike. Then, when he struck, he had struck too cruelly, too hard. There was no use to try to imagine anything else, to think any other way. The whole situation was open before him now. There was no one his Storm Girl could be save Molly Cameron, the niece of his neighbor and friend.
There was no one she could be save the little Scout’s idolized teacher of Americanism, and he had witnessed what probably was a picnic following the close of school with a group of the young disciples. Vivid before him came the flock of little black faces, the brown faces, the chocolate faces, the copper faces, the red faces, of these children born in America to all the rights of the American citizen. Then there came the absorbed face of the girl who was accepting the situation as it was and making her contribution toward the betterment and the safety of our land by trying to mold and to utilize this strange material into forces that in time would be called on to do their part to help sustain and protect our government.
It seemed to Jamie in that hour that the men who had gone abroad had done nothing nobler, nothing braver, nothing more worth while than this girl was doing, this girl who was getting her fingers on the very pulse of the situation, who was preparing these children to carry to their homes the seeds that might flourish and grow into mighty trees.
There would be no difficulty in finding his Storm Girl now. He knew her name. All he had to do to locate her stopping place was to ask Margaret Cameron. He realized, too, as he sat there in the perfumed darkness with the glinting stars peeping through the lace of the jacqueranda, sheeted for months at a stretch with bloom as blue as the night sky, he realized for the first time precisely the depth of agony that had filled the heart of the Storm Girl the night she had come to him as he sat alone fighting his own battle on the throne beside the sea. He had thought that he was dealing with a wounded heart, broken over her own troubles. Now he realized that what a girl such as he knew Molly Cameron must be would feel for herself was as nothing compared with what she must have felt when she awakened to the galling realization that her twin brother, the only near relative she had in the world, was responsible for the anguish that was beating Alice Louise Cameron to the dust. The certainty that Lolly in trouble would cost the reason, if not the life, of the dear Aunt Margaret who had opened her home to them when they were homeless, friendless, penniless, must have weighed heavily on Molly’s soul. Jamie could see how, in a vision of the years, the Storm Girl would sense her obligation to a woman as fine as Margaret Cameron, and he could see why she was frantic to the point where she had resolved to throw herself into the undertow because she could plan no escape, she could figure no way in which to right the wrong that had been done, since a power that no law can sway or divert had reached out and struck Donald down before he had any chance to make the reparation that if he were ever so little of a man he certainly would have made. Margaret had said that he was not a bad boy, and it was her desire that his child should bear his name.
