The Keeper of the Bees, page 4
Jamie stood still and looked to the right and to the left and at his feet. On the right he saw walls opening up that began at ordinary range and climbed higher and higher until hundreds and then thousands of feet had been attained. These walls had stood through so many ages that the crevices and irregularities were filled with live oak and holly and sage, with yucca and frosty, blue-green cotyledon. Ferns were hanging down near places where the high walls seeped water. On the left the same panorama of exquisite beauty spread before him, and at his feet lay a well-defined smoothly worn path, a path that he could see had been beaten by the feet of countless foot passengers, and here and there his eyes, even though over tired, could detect the hoof print of a horse: a range rider, he thought probable.
The water at his feet seemed clean. It had to be cool. It was falling over rocks. It was leaping small precipices. It was dropping down before grottoes, fern-lined, of delicate beauty, and trim little ouzels were darting through the spray, very likely to nesting places that lay protected by falling water.
Jamie promptly sat down in the sunniest place on the warmest rock he could find and studied the situation, and after he had rested awhile he got down and drank from his cupped hands. Then he dusted off his new clothing, which was getting rather rough usage, and took up his stick and followed the footpath. It was not so difficult to follow, because it was downhill all the way, and before he had gone any great distance he began hearing voices. Then he realized that a place of such exquisite beauty would attract people, that probably campers or picnickers might be enjoying themselves beside the water that ran so impetuously that never before had he seen water travel in such haste. Jamie reflected that there was a possibility that he had done the wrong thing in discarding his uniform. From the frequency with which he had been offered rides when he wore it, from the utter indifference with which cars had whizzed past him hundreds of times that day even when he had stood very close and raised his hand to ask for passage, he figured out that a man in uniform would be given assistance. A man in civilian clothes might be loaded with revolvers and have a mind full of evil intentions. The day seemed to be past when any traveler having a vacant seat would have despised himself if he had failed to offer any one journeying on foot the privilege of riding.
There was no question of riding now. Right foot forward, then the left, and then the right again, and oh, but they were swollen stiff, and oh, but they ached! Just when Jamie decided that he would take off his shoes and stockings and bathe his feet in the cold water and see if he could not reduce the aching and the swelling, he came face to face with a freshly painted big notice which stated that the water before him supplied Clifton, no doubt a town near by, that a ranger rode the canyon to protect it, and that any one who in any way polluted the water would be promptly arrested. So Jamie smiled dourly and looked down at his aching feet and realized that he had better leave his shoes where they were, since if he ever removed them there was a large possibility that he could not induce his feet to return to their capacity.
At any rate, his direction was right. Each step he forced himself to take was carrying him west and south. At first, tired though he was, he had not been able to ignore the beauty of the canyon through which he traveled. Within reach of his hand Hunter’s rock leek was blooming. There were ferns and mosses; there were red larkspur and lavender, blue, and yellow lupine and the red of pentstemon and many yellows, and one Little pool filled with the pearl-white of blooming lizard’s-tail with its rank foliage, its attractive flowers. None of these Jamie knew, for none had been included in his study of botany in the East.
On and on Jamie went down the canyon. How slowly he went he did not realize himself, but by and by he began to see people. Then he knew that he had been right when he thought he heard voices. There were places where smoke ascended and suddenly and joyfully Jamie felt his problem for the remainder of that day solved. All he had to do was to wait until the picnickers left the canyon and then he would search where they had been and gather up the dry wood of dead branches and twigs that they had collected or that had fallen, and in one of the places where they had been cooking he would make a fire so big and warm that he could spend the night in comfort.
So he sat down and waited until the sounds of the canyon had been reduced to bird notes and falling water, running water, laughing water, singing water. Then he began picking up everything big enough to burn and in the crook of his left arm he stacked it as he went along, until he had as big a load as he could carry. Presently he found a cavern of stone in a side wall of the stream where people had been cooking, and far back in the ashes, over which water had been poured, he found a few living coals. So he scraped the wet ashes away and drew the coals to the front and petted them with tiny twigs and dried grasses, and by and by, he coaxed a feeble flame, and this he fed until, as the sun went down and the air grew chill, he had heat with which to comfort his aching body.
Then, on one of his excursions after wood, he crossed the stream and made his way down the right-hand bank close at the foot of the mighty wall leaning over and frowning above him. There he came to a small open plateau of stone and what he saw made him laugh aloud. The picnickers who had spent a happy day there had left the remains of their lunch. They had set it out on the rocks for the birds and the squirrels; and the squirrels had not yet found it, and the birds had long since gone to rest. There were several slices of bread and butter. There was a cold tongue sandwich; there was a hard-boiled egg and the half of a dill pickle, not to mention crumbled pieces of cheese.
So the soldier of the Government, now a soldier of adventure indeed, sat down on the big rock, still warm from the heat of the day, and ate all the supper he wanted of very excellent food. When he arose to go the father in him said: “Leave what remains for the wee folks as you found it.” And the mother in him said: “Take with you every crumb that remains against the morrow. The wild things know how to fend for themselves. You are sick and you are almost at the limit of endurance, and you will need, oh, so badly! the slice of bread for your breakfast in the morning.”
Jamie thought that over. He had not cared particularly if he took the bandit’s breeches. He had not cared enough to keep him from using the contents of the bill book. He had filled his stomach to repletion with what had been left for the wild folks, and none of the wild folks had preyed upon him or refused him anything. It might be that in all the greenery climbing and trailing from, and festooning the walls that shut him in there was food better to the liking of the wild than what had been left for them. But there was a streak of something in Jamie, the same streak that had carried him to the woods and the forests, that had sent him uncounted miles along the banks of the trout brooks of his boyhood, a streak of decency and cleanliness in his soul, and that streak now said to him: “Take your chances as the wee folk take theirs.”
So Jamie got back on his knees and crumbled the bread and broke the crusts. Whimsically he laid one last piece of crust on his tongue and then he went on hunting wood. When he felt that he had enough accumulated, he built his fire and, warm and as comfortable as need be, he curled up before it and with his arm for a pillow and a stone for its support, he fell sound asleep in a very few minutes. He never felt the tiny lizards that ran over his feet; he never saw the trade rat that sat on its haunches and surveyed him with questioning eves to see whether there was anything about him that it would like to exchange for the half of a pearl button that it carried in its left cheek. The hardness of his bed awoke him in the night before the fire was gone, and so he piled on the remainder of the wood and turned his cold side toward the flame and the warm one down and went back to sleep again.
When morning came he washed his face and hands by wetting his handkerchief in the stream, and after that he wet his handkerchief several times and wrung the water over the coals he had left, scattering them widely and obliterating every trace of fire that could possibly spread. Then, with feet still aching in the shoes he had not dared to remove, he started on down the canyon.
About ten o’clock that morning he met the Ranger. The Ranger of this particular canyon was not so lonely as were the range riders of the mountains, but for all that he was friendly. He stopped to talk a minute and as he casually glanced at Jamie he saw the attenuation of his figure, he saw the whiteness of his hands, he saw how the skin of his face settled on the lean bones, and being young and full of life and having in his veins quite a bit of the milk of human kindness, he said to Jamie: “My mother tells me that if I keep in the saddle too much I will develop gout in my feet. What do you say to taking the horse for the next few miles and letting me exercise?”
Jamie said if that would be any accommodation to the Ranger he would be glad to ride for him, but he had not figured on what the gait of a horse would do to his left breast. Fit himself to the saddle as easily as he could, riding was torture he could not endure for long, and so, after a mile or two, he was forced to walk again. But he was thankful for the offer and dimly he was beginning to formulate in his mind the feeling that the world is made up of good people and bad people, of selfish people and thoughtful people, of cruel people and kind people, and it was merely a case of luck as to which kind you met when you went on a great adventure.
From the Ranger on, Jamie’s adventure stretched lagging miles of torture, still west by south, until nearly three o’clock that afternoon. Nobody had left a lunch box and there had been no place where the few pennies he carried would buy food. He had left the canyon and followed a road that had widened until it would accommodate horses and vehicles, here and there a car—not a greatly traveled road; not a busy, well-kept road; a road that became increasingly more difficult for Jamie to follow because his feet had endured almost all that human feet can endure when they are attached to a sick man who is gamely driving himself to the ultimate limit.
Near four o’clock the hunger that had been in abeyance since the night before began again to torment him. He was exhausted to the point at which he found himself taking two or three sidewise steps to keep from lifting his feet even a slight degree higher to step over a small irregularity in the road. He was beginning to realize that there was slight chance of shelter for the night. There was equally small chance of food. So far his adventure had yielded its bright spots, its thrills, its pains. At that minute, between the scorching in his breast and the burning in his shoes and the general ache all over his tortured body, he could not see much in it. He began to wonder if he could make his way back to the hospital and whether they would take him in, and then he thought of the White Plague which they said had not as yet attacked him, and so he shut his lips very tight and stood swaying on his feet as he peered like a half-drunken man down the road before him, trying to decide whether the wheel track on the right seemed the least bit smoother than the wheel track on the left. When he had decided that the one on the right was the one for him to travel, he reeled widely and started forward, and furtively his eyes began to search the road on either side for the spot where ultimately collapse would come. He wondered if he stumbled and fell and could not arise, if he lay unconscious in the middle of the road, whether any one would find him and what they would do with him if they did.
It was from searching the sides of the road that Jamie missed the point where there was a turn until he found his feet following it, and then he looked ahead and his eyes widened and his breath came in a light gasp. Down the road, only a few rods on the right, he could see a small house, and of all the houses that he had ever dreamed about and thought that he would like particularly to own and to live in, that house appealed to him as the most inviting.
It stood close to the road. A white picket fence ran along the front of it. A neat white gate shut it from the highway. Its painted face was soft and attractive.
New England was obvious all over it. Flowering vines were climbing up its corners and over the tiny front veranda. Outside the gate he could see a circle of crushed shells and he thought the walk that led to the front door might be made of shells. It seemed to lie very close to the road and there was not much ground on either side of it. All that there was seemed to be filled with the very flowers that Jamie had helped take care of in his mother’s New England garden. He could see hollyhocks as high as the eaves of the house, and in many colors to the left and to the right he could sense the gay hues of nasturtiums and zinnias and marigolds, and his sensitive nostrils could pick up the tang of heliotrope and mignonette and forget-me-not and violets; but above everything else he had the impression of a cloud of blue, sweet, restful blue.
Jamie rocked on his feet and stared at the house yearningly. His vision carried beyond it, and he saw that on the other side of the line fence there was another door yard and another house, and then houses began gathering in a friendly way on either side of the road and leading away as far as he could see here and there were other houses, other signs of life. At that instant there came softly to his ears the slow, steady wash of what might possibly have been a low tide of the sea.
In his exhaustion, his senses numbed with pain, he had traveled most of the afternoon, a plodding, half-conscious thing, but now, touched by the nearness of humanity, touched by the beauty of some bodies home, excited with the prospect that by some possibility he might find shelter and food, his sluggish blood surged up, his head lifted, his dull eyes brightened slightly, and his keen nostrils turned to the west and sniffed inquiringly. Then said Jamie, right out loud, right from the depths of nowhere: ‘“If my old nose don’t tell no lies ‘Pears like I smell’—what ought to be the Percific Ocean!”
He had not the faintest notion either why he called it the Per-cific Ocean. He probably did it because he was so desperately tired that if he did not manage a chuckle about something, there was every probability that he was going to tumble down in the road and lie still without giving his new clothes the slightest consideration, or any other thing in all the world.
At that minute the screen door that led from the veranda into the secret of the beautiful house whose whole exterior was one delicate luring invitation, opened and there came through a man, a tall man, a slender man, an aristocrat from head to toe, lean, and with long silken white hair flowing back from his forehead and a soft, short beard of silver-white wavy silk coming down on his breast, a man with long, slender nose, big, deep-set eyes, and white lips. He reeled as he came across the veranda, and both his hands clutched his left side and he kept on wavering to the right and the left until he reached the gate. Then he took his hands from his side and clung to the gate. He leaned over it and hung on to it and he looked up and down the road, and there he spied Jamie. He lifted one of his hands and beckoned.
Jamie stood there staring at him, and then slowly and deliberately, slapping one swollen foot and then the other on the hard road, he took a few steps in the man’s direction. He stopped again to stare at him, to note the fine lines of the anguished old face, the immaculate apparel, the stricken attitude of the frame hanging across the gate. So, with all the strength that he could muster Jamie took a few more steps and came within speaking distance, and on his dazed and incredulous ears there fell the strangled cry, “Help! For God’s sake, lad, help me!”
One minute before Jamie would not have believed that he could help anybody or anything. He had been figuring that he had reached the end of his endurance, that if he did not have help himself in a very few minutes he would be past the place where he would ever need it. There was something about the whiteness of the fine old head, something about the breadth of the shoulders and the leanness of the frame that reminded Jamie of his father, and possibly because he was reminded of his father, Jamie lifted his eyes above the wonderful white house, above the lace of the trees surrounding it, above its sheltering vines, away up to the blue, and far down in his heart he gave an imperative order. “Now you’ve got to help me, Lord! You must help me now!”
Then he clenched his fists very tightly at his sides and covered the three steps more to the gate. He found the combination by which it opened and he put his arm around the old figure leaning on it and in a dry, breathless voice he heard himself saying: “Why, of course I’ll help you!” and he had not the faintest notion whether he could manage three steps farther himself or not.
But he did accomplish the three steps farther, he pulled the screen door open, he headed the stricken man he was trying to support toward a big davenport and let him down on it, easing him back against the pillows that he punched up hastily. Then on his knees, grasping the side of the couch, he spoke again in his voice of dry breathlessness: “What must I do?”
Instinctively both hands of the stricken man had sought the region of his heart. Jamie’s thought, as his mind cleared at another man’s extremity, was: “He’s got it mighty near where I have.” And so he repeated again: “What must I do?”
The answer came: “The telephone. You must call my doctor. He must get me to a hospital.”
Pushing against the couch, Jamie rose to his feet and looked around him. Then he saw a telephone on the wall and a small table before it and an open telephone book, so he sat down on the chair and drew a deep breath or two. Then he asked over his shoulder: “Can you give me the number?”
After a paroxysm of pain that brought sweat to the white dome above the white brows sheltering the big eyes that were pools of darkness, there came the answer: “You will find the number and the name on the list beside the phone. Doctor Grayson.”
Jamie hunted down the line and found the name and number, and then he put in the call, and while he waited for it he again asked over his shoulder: “Whom shall I say?”
The gasping reply was: “The Bee Master.”
So presently Jamie found himself insisting that Doctor Grayson come to the telephone personally, and when he had the assurance that Doctor Grayson was speaking, he found himself mustering strength to say: “The Bee Master has been stricken with a very hard attack. He wants you to come and to bring an ambulance. He wants to be taken to the hospital immediately.”
