The Keeper of the Bees, page 6
Past his head and face, lured by the reds and brilliant colors around the house, darted the jewel-throated and crowned humming birds, but the bees lived in a whole world of blue. It seemed as if the blue flowers dearly loved to creep up to these white hives, to vine around them, to cling to them, to bloom above them. Alone, close to the back walk, Jamie noticed several big hives that stood by themselves where he would have to pass within the distance of a few feet when he made his first journey the length of the garden, out of the gate and across the strip of sand to where the ocean, in a great bay, came lapping up the shore and then slid back again, gently, softly, with only a low murmur song that would be the finest thing in the world to lull a tired man to sleep.
Slowly, with wavering feet, Jamie made his way across the back end of the house. Under a jacqueranda tree on the east side, he saw the most attractive bench. So he went and sat upon it at just the precise spot where the branches of the tree threw a mottled shade over his head and left his lean body stretched in the sunshine. He sat and tried to think. Because the sky was so beautiful, and the sea was so beautiful, and the garden was so painfully beautiful, there came to him the old thought he had dragged around for the past two years: How much longer? How much time had he, anyway? How soon was the sky going to lose her eternal verity and the sea to cease smiling, and flower faces and bird song and the hum of the bee and the chirp of the cricket—how soon were they to be over for him?
Because he had tried himself so sorely, because he was so desperately strained and over-tired from his journey, he was not very hopeful. Everything concerning himself looked the blackest it ever had. The bandages that he had removed for his bath bore brilliant stains, telling anew the story of angry wounds that refused to heal. So that afternoon Jamie’s individual case seemed more hopeless to him than it had seemed when he had arisen in hot rebellion and walked out from the protection of his government. But the irony of the whole thing was that, when for himself matters could scarcely have been blacker, all inadvertently he had fallen into one of the most exquisite beauty spots that the face of the world had to boast.
There are only a few places where love and artisanship build a small house with a welcoming face. There are only a few places where love and good horse sense build a garden, half of wildings and half of quaint old-fashioned things that evolved without the help of crossing and fertilization and other makeshifts that produce growth so rampant and sizable that it is difficult to believe that the blooms are living things. There are only a few places where the side of a mountain walks down, and slides down, and jumps down, and meanders winding, flowering ways until it reaches the white sands of a brilliantly blue sea, and it is easy to believe that such a location would naturally be the home of tiny round white houses with round roofs where millions of bees make honey to sweeten the food of a world.
It is easy to see that the hum of the bees and the scent of the flowers would draw the birds to a place like this, and across any stretch of ocean shore line there is bound to be the wide sweep of great gray pelicans and the black winged anhingas, and the wild ducks, the snow-white of the gulls and the scimitar-winged sea swallows, like birds of carved ivory, arching and sailing for pure love of blue sky and blue water and to indulge the powers of flight. There are bound to be Mother Carey’s chickens and little stilt-legged sandpipers and killdeers tilting along the shore, and there are sure to be little children digging in the sand, and grown folk having an hour of pleasure stretched in the sunshine, asking earth to heal their bodies and the Sun God to heal their hearts.
As Jamie sat on the bench under the jacqueranda feeling so ill that the tears of self-pity were stinging the lids of his wide gray eyes, he vaguely wondered what it would do to him if he were to go down to the sea and soak his body in the cold salt water and let the sun drive home every medicinal property that sea water contains. He had tried a year of hot water from the boiling bowels of the earth. How would it do to try a year of cold water from the seas of the surface and the sun of the heavens?
Jamie’s lips twisted bitterly. He was probably as near Heaven as he ever would be until Heaven passed him by, and it might be that only a few days would end his tenure of the little white house and the mountain garden, and it would be his lot to move on until his case grew even more desperate than it was at that minute.
5. The Little Scout
The following day, as Jamie sat on the same bench, his mind occupied with the same subject, in a wide flare between earth and sky, a slender bit of a child sailed over the fence and landed expertly on the sanded walk of the garden. As the small figure righted itself one hand caught the band of a pair of particularly dirty breeches and the other stuffed more securely therein the tail of a not overly clean shirt. Standing on one foot, the youngster removed a canvas shoe from the other, shook the sand from it, and replaced the shoe on a bare foot. The child drew a deep breath and stood still an instant with a wandering gaze roving over the garden.
In that pause Jamie took mental account of the lean, flat figure. One trouser leg was fastened at the knee. The other had lost its fastening and hung halfway down the ankle with a loose strap and a flopping buckle. The sleeves of the green khaki shirt were cut off at the elbows and one of them was ripped lengthwise to the shoulder. Hands and arms and legs as well bore the traces of climbing and rough exercise. The little face was rather flat; the nose a faint pug; the mouth wide. The eyes seemed not overly large. At that distance Jamie could not decide what color they were. The hair might have been brown if it had not been bleached by California suns until the outer layer was a flaxen tan; where it fell apart darker streaks appeared. It was cut evenly in a circle from ear lobe to ear lobe and across the forehead in a bang. “Dutch” Jamie supposed, and as he sat watching, the child with a movement exquisitely deft and graceful, began to pirouette, to dance in the sunshine.
Sometimes with arms curved above the head until the tips of the fingers touched, sometimes with the right arm extended and lifted and the left trailing behind like a flying Mercury, up and down the walk went the small figure, whirling, reaching as if snatching butterflies from the air, dancing all alone there in the mid-afternoon under the California sun. Then, tiring, a sudden change from the dance to a walk started the youngster straight toward Jamie. Halfway between lay the Madonna lily bed. Opposite it the child paused, bent forward, and peered at the lily faces, and then Jamie’s eyes widened and a queer, incredulous grin crossed his face. What he was seeing was a very small person on bended knees, elbows akimbo, hands at the sides, in a half-crouching attitude, with eyes rolled heavenward, ecstatically sucking, one after another, the pistils of the Madonna lilies!
Jamie’s grin widened to a chuckle when once he noticed that a pistil overflowing honey had dripped a drop on a petal and the child supported the under side of the petal and licked away the drop with an appreciative tongue and then arose and came slouching down the walk until Jamie drew back his toes because they happened to be particularly sore and tender and he did not want them stepped on.
The youngster stopped and looked at Jamie, from the crown of his tired, sick head to the soles of his very badly swollen feet, and an expression of wonderment crossed the small face, but there was not the slightest sign of fear and there was no backward movement. Ground attained was firmly held.
“Oh, hello!” said the child.
“Hello!” said Jamie, as cordially as he could say it in a voice that had so recently been roughened with the emotion of self-pity.
“Where is the Bee Master?” asked the small person.
Jamie hesitated. He was near enough now to look to the depths of the eyes trained on him, and it struck him that they had more depth, more expression, more comprehension, than any pair of eyes that he had ever seen on a person of anywhere near that age. There were things lying away back in the depths of the brownish grey eyes meeting his that awoke Jamie to caution.
“He went away for a few days and left me in charge,” he answered.
“Oh! But we don’t know you,” objected the small person.
“But I’m here,” said Jamie.
“So you are,” said the small person, “and you probably wouldn’t be here if the Bee Master hadn’t said you might, and whatever he says, goes!”
With that “goes” both hands were spread out on a level with the belt line and given an emphatic downward and outward sweep that seemed to cover long distances with perfect accuracy.
“I am glad you think I’ll do,” said Jamie.
“I haven’t had time to think anything,” said the small person. “I am no acrobat in my head. I can’t think quick. If the Bee Master told you to come here and stay here, you’ve got to come and you’ve got to stay and you’ve got to do. That’s all there is to that. I’m the Bee Master’s side partner. Look me over, Kid! It ain’t expensive!”
Jamie smiled, and when Jamie smiled, which was not any too frequent an occurrence, there were tiny dancing flecks of light in his eyes and a stretching of the skin over his lean face and a twitching of his lips that made an appeal that had not as yet failed in its effect. The child advanced a step and laid a hand on Jamie’s arm while an impish grin overspread the small features. The inquiry was shot at him suddenly.
“Did you see me pirouette?”
Jamie nodded.
“Did I pull it off pretty well?”
“I thought you did famously,” said Jamie.
“We got to do that darn stuff in school,” said the small person. “It’s the bunk! But when I get off where I think I’m alone, I practise it. I think I can do it better to the bee music and to the waves than any other kind. It’s sure goofy! I wish you could see Fat Old Bill pirouette! But if your school makes you do it, you might just as well keep ever lastingly at it until you do it a Little bit better than the other fellow.”
“That’s sound logic,” said Jamie. “If you start out with that kind of an idea in your head and keep ‘ever lastingly at it, ’there isn’t any place you can land except at the top of the heap.”
“That’s the way I’ve got it figured,” said the small person, casually. “And I’ve learned while only just as wide and just as high as I am this minute, that I can’t be Scout Master and Chief of the Robbers’ Den and First Assistant to the Bee Master unless I hoe it down.”
Jamie decided that the little figure before him was surely a boy.
There was a slight drawing closer, a lowering of the voice, and the small person asked confidentially: “When did they take him to the hospital?”
Jamie drew back and looked inquiringly at the child.
“I didn’t say any one was taken to the hospital,” he protested.
“No. You didn’t,” conceded the small person. “But if you had known the Bee Master as well as I’ve known him, in all the time we’ve been partners, which is ever since I’ve been big enough to climb the fence, you’d know that there wasn’t any place they could take him away from this garden except to the hospital, and you’d know there wasn’t any way they could take him except flat on his back.”
“I suspect that’s about the truth,” said Jamie.
The youngster, in an instant gesture, threw out wide arms with spread fingers and nodded emphatically.
“That’s just exactly the truth, because he has needed to go for months and months and Doctor Grayson’s told him to go, and coaxed him to go, and tried to make him go, and none of them could make him. He thought he’d do anything in the world for me. He said he would. So when I saw that he wasn’t going to go and couldn’t be made to go”—there was a sudden straightening of the small figure and a squaring of the shoulders—“I didn’t tell him to go to the hospital. I told him to stay at home and do what he felt like,” and here the youngster chuckled, “’cause I knew darn well that was what he was going to do anyway, and I didn’t want to spoil my record! When you got a position to hold you might as well look a little to keeping up your fences.”
There was no reason that Jamie could see as to why he should not laugh, and anyway, he had done it before he knew it was coming. But it did not disconcert the small person; not a particle.
“When will they operate?”
The question upset Jamie. He slowly shook his head.
“I don’t even know what his trouble is,” he said.
“Neither do I,” said the child. “I guess it’s the only thing on earth that really hurt his heart that he didn’t tell me about. He told me about all the things that hurt him and drove him from his home in the East, and about the Little girl with gold hair that he had to give up in such a horrid way, and I’ve been all through the big carved mahogany chest and straightened all the papers and seen all the pictures in it. I know about how he loved Mary, and I know about the home he lost. I even know the secret that broke his heart, and I know all he can teach me about the bees.”
The small person paused and dropped into a voice of absolute business impartiality.
“About bees, now. There’s so much to learn that the men who write the books haven’t found it all out yet, so, of course, the Bee Master couldn’t teach it all to me. But I know all he could show me about the hives and about the bee bread and foul brood and about queens and nymphs and workers and drones and nurses. That about nurses is the sky-blue limit! You wouldn’t hardly believe that a hive of bees would have nurses, now would you?”
Thinking of recent experiences, Jamie said slowly: “Nurses are among the most wonderful things in the world, and I have heard that bees are very wonderful, so I think it’s probable that they do have nurses.”
“Right you are, Pat!” said the small person. “I can take you to any of these hives and open them up and show you maybe as many as forty thousand nurses taking care of the white nymphs.”
And then, for the second time, Jamie faced the question: “Are you bee immune?”
And again Jamie answered: “I don’t know. I’ve had no experience.”
The small person chuckled appreciatively.
“Neither had I—until I got it. After I had stuck around from the first time I ever saw his white head and away back into his eyes until he said I might be his partner and help him with the bees, I hadn’t had any experience, so I went back one morning, down along the east side over there, to see whether I was bee immune, and we always thought afterward that I made a mistake. My scent wasn’t right.”
Jamie bit his lip and swallowed hard because, as a matter of fact, the young person before him smelled more strongly of horse than of anything else, while dog ran a close second, and mingled with the odors of horse and dog there was a strong hint of Madonna lilies and onions. The combination played on Jamie’s delicate sense of smell in a peculiar way. It was not so long since his eyes had been smarting with self-pity, yet at that particular minute he wanted to whoop. And there was no good reason at all why he should not. Without in the least understanding his mental processes, the small person proceeded gravely.
“My scent wasn’t right. You know, a bee has got smell hollows instead of a nose. They are in two little tubes that stick out where a nose would be if it wasn’t on a bee, and each one of the worker bees (which are the ones that do the business around a hive) each one of the worker bees has got five thousand smell hollows. And a worker isn’t a patchen to a male. A male has got thirty-seven thousand eight hundred smell hollows, so he’ll be sure not to miss the scent of the Queen when he goes out to love her up. So, if a male came near me, a fat chance I had, all gummed up with horse and dog. That was the whole trouble—my scent wasn’t right. The Bee Master said it was too aggressive. I had been riding Queen and playing with Mom’s dog and when I get into a scuffle with Chum, half the time he’s on top and half the time I am, and I was all smeared up with dog and horse and things like that, things a bee doesn’t like.
The Bee Master always said if he had used any judgment himself, it wouldn’t have happened. He always felt bad about it, but I didn’t mind so much. It’s a pretty good thing to know just exactly what you are getting into and then, if you think you can stand it, why, most likely you can Anyway, I said I would go down before the hives in the east row the way the Bee Master went to fill the watering pans and to watch that there wasn’t any robbing going on and to see if the queens were all happy and laying a few million eggs or so, and I went meandering along, and first thing I knew, out came a big working bee zoomin’ right above my head, and behind it came two or three more, and they were between me and the Master, and I didn’t want to cut through his flowers—he’s just about as particular as anybody God ever made about flowers—and I didn’t know exactly how to get my chance to dust the home plate, ’cause I had only two eyes and each one of them had maybe six thousand on each side of its head.
“Then the Bee Master yells at me and he says: ‘Zigzag!’ And that was all right if he had a-said it in Spanish or French or something, but there wasn’t any use in talking English before his bees, because they understood him just as well as I did! I tried hard enough to do what he told me, but whenever I’d zig, the darn bee would zig, too; and whenever I’d leap to one side and try to zag, the bee had zagged just a little bit before I had, and just naturally, working’ it that way, we interfered. Say, did a Black German ever zip you?”
Jamie’s face went black for an instant, and then he looked at the eager little face in front of him and let the instant pass as he said, quietly, “Not with the stinger of a bee. No. But I’ve had a few experiences with wasps and hornets out in the fields and woods when I was a boy. I get the general idea.”
“I hardly think you do,” said the small person. “I hardly think there’s anything, in the stinging profession, wearing six legs, that’s got quite such a sharp, long, ready-to-use stinger as a Black German bee. By gravy! they can ping you to the liver, and when about three of ’em takes you on the back of your neck and around the ears and into your arm muscles, oh, boy!” Both hands clenched and then unclenched and were thrown outward in a wide-spreading sweep.
