The Keeper of the Bees, page 8
“Look here!” he said. “Are you a girl or a boy?”
The small person, with a deft twist, slipped through his fingers like shifting sand and took a step or two backward.
“If you can’t tell, it doesn’t make a darn bit of difference, does it?”
And Jamie was constrained to admit that it did not.
“I guess I’d better be going,” said the little Scout. “I wish you’d get on the job with that hot dog impressive. The Master likes ’em with the bun toasted and the boiled wiener split and fried and striped with a line of mustard and a thick slather of fried onions on and a slice of dill pickle. Can you remember that? Is that the way you like ’em?”
“Love o’ Mike!” said Jamie, licking his lips, “I haven’t had one in ages! Sure I can remember!”
“Then that’s that!” said the small person. “Do you feel like you’re sure going to get on the job and you’re sure going to take care of things here?”
“The level best I can,” said Jamie. “But I’ll have to tell you as I told your partner, I don’t know the first thing about bees.”
“And you don’t look chipper enough,” said the small person, “to coast down the east side and climb up the west side of two acres of bees. You sit still and I’ll go see If they are all right myself.”
So Jamie sat under the jacqueranda and waited while the little Scout went down the east side, carefully inspecting every hive of bees, and returned with the report that the water pans were all right, the queens were all laying eggs, the workers were all busy, the drones were droning, like the disagreeable, mussy things they were. There was not any foul brood, and there were no robbers at work.
“Just common, honest bees,” said the small person, “working hard to gather up all the honey they can find in the flower gardens where the Sierra Madres smash through the Santa Monicas right into the sea.”
The small party insisted on leading Jamie into the house and showing him the library of bee books. All the volumes that could be read with profit to find out how to take care of the bees were pointed out, and then a light finger ran over volumes on a shelf by themselves with the comment: “Now these are the funny ones.”
A small blue volume which opened of itself was selected and from it an amused voice read, “‘There are several kinds of bees, the best are small, round and va-ri-e-gated.’ Can you beat it?” asked the youngster.
Jamie, glancing over the little Scout’s shoulder, caught “Aristotle” on the title page and had perhaps his hundredth shock for the afternoon. After the volume was closed and set back on the shelf, the child turned toward him: “And Pliny says that when bees cross the Mediterranean in migration they each one get a little pebble and carry it with their feet to make them heavy enough that the wind won’t blow them away!” And a laugh that was clear and silvery broke on Jamie’s ears. “Ain’t that the bunk? You ought to hear the Bee Master laugh when he reads Pliny on bees! And there are a lot more of them that are just as funny, but these are not funny at all. These are mostly what you need to know to get really interested.”
The small finger ran across Lubbock and Swammerdam with the remark in passing: “He has got wonderful pictures of how bees are inside,” and paused on Huber. “You’ll want to read Huber,” the little Scout said. “He was blind, but he thought out all the experiments and made all the investigations, and a man with eyes kept the records. He’s wonderful, too. His book is named ‘New Observations on Bees.’ Pretty good for a blind man, I’ll say. You know, being a bee master is a lot of other things besides just bees.”
The explanation was offered off-hand, gratuitously.
“It’s being outdoors most of the time. It’s flowers and what flowers bees like best. It’s a case of quick eyes and a steady hand, and I’d say you’d got to be decent. You’d better be certain you’re hitting on all your cylinders before you go around bees. The Bee Master says that bees know, and if anybody is a liar and a cheat and got the odors of sin and selfishness hanging around ’em—tell it to Papa! The bees know it like a shot, if you’re mean; and they haven’t got a bit of mercy. The minute they get a whiff of what you are, they puncture your tire. If you know, away down deep inside you, that you ain’t right, and that God wouldn’t let you into Heaven if you went to sleep in the night, you better throw up this job and let me hunt somebody else to look after the bees.” Jamie stood very straight. He emptied his pocket of his distinguished service decorations and lowered them to the eyes of the small person.
“In so far as I know,” he said, quite seriously, “there is no reason why the bees should dislike any odors that might emanate from my exterior or even from the most secret places of my soul.”
“Well, then, that’s all to the good,” said the small person. “You just look to me sometimes as if you wasn’t sure whether you was going to stay or whether you was going on.”
“I’ll admit,” said Jamie, “that it has been difficult for me to decide whether I’d stay or whether I’d go on, but if you will help me, I think it would be better for me at least to try what I can do.”
Jamie stood still and watched the small person go down the walk toward the fence which had afforded the means of entrance. Poised on the top of it and in the act of swinging over, there came clear to his ears the admonition, “Better stick around, Bo! You’ll like it!”
6. “Good Master, What Shall I Do?”
For an hour after the departure of the Bee Master’s partner, to whom the Master had so tenderly referred as the “little Scout,” James MacFarlane sat and stared at the whitewashed panel of fence over which the child had disappeared. First a whimsical smile played over his features as he recalled the straightforward humor, the businesslike attitude, the flashes of tenderness, and the ruthless acceptance of facts following each other so rapidly in the mentality of the youngster. Then he seriously pondered, for a few minutes, on whether this peculiar small person really was a boy or really was a girl. The only definite conclusion he arrived at was that sometimes he was a boy and sometimes she was a girl.
His mind traveled on to the thing that was always foremost. What was it the youngster had said about Death? That there were several ways? What he had been facing for the past two years was Death, and the pitiful thing about it for him was that he had never faced it so imminently nor so surely as at that minute. His aching bones reminded him of his weakness every time he moved. His swollen feet cried out whenever he bore his weight on them, and as for the burning in his left side, he had carried it around with him for so long that it was almost like an incurable heart-ache or a mental strain from which one never found surcease. Jamie felt reasonably sure that he could eliminate the death by water, fire, and explosion.
He did not feel that any of these things were likely to happen to him. So there were the two remaining kinds of death; he must face one or the other.
That carried his mind back to the time when as a little boy he had said his prayers indiscriminately at the knees of either his mother or his father, for his father had been woman tender with his only child. There had been a period of years when he had knelt beside his bed and repeated what he had been taught with some additions of his own. There had been still later years when he had gotten into bed and muttered a makeshift prayer. And then there had been another stretch of years when, in the pride of his strength and the diverse interests of the full day, he had been so sufficient in his own body and his own mentality to any need that assailed him that he not only had not prayed a prayer of asking—because he was getting along very well without asking for anything—but he had not offered a prayer of thanksgiving. And as he sat there that afternoon, looking over the blue garden that was merely a small mountain running down to the sea, studying the beauty of the flowers, the foliage and the fruit, and then looking on to the white reaches of sand and the blue of the ocean and the sky stretching away halfway round the world, he was assailed by a distinct sorrow, a feeling of regret that he had ever ceased his nightly prayer.
If his arms had been strong and his brain had been sufficient, if he had not needed to ask physical help, he might have asked that his mind would be kept from the very thing that had happened, and there was always the prayer of thanksgiving. Since the mists had cleared in the beginning and the sun had shone through and coaxed the earth to foliage and fruit and animals and man had evolved after the ordained scheme of things, there always had existed in some degree the same exquisite beauty that lay before him now. There always had been in the breast of every man born to enjoy it a heart which should have rejoiced and should have given thanks for such a heritage. There always had been lips that should have spoken up and told the Creator how wonderful was the mystery of the earth and the majesty of the sea and the beneficence of the sunshine and the healing hours of moonlit darkness. There always had been the duty his father bravely had assumed, to acknowledge his obligations, to point the way to other men less sensitive to the call of God and Nature.
Jamie fell to wondering about how he was going to make the kind of death that the little Scout had played with and kissed and rejoiced in, had thought lovely, become a reality for himself. As he remembered what the child had said, Jamie was devoutly thankful that whatever his mistakes might have been, whatever his errors, whatever sins he had committed, he had not wronged his fellow man, he had not soiled and disgraced any innocent woman, he had not lied and cheated and smirched his soul in trickery and unfair business dealings. He had intended when he left college to study forestry. He had meant to be a tree man. Always he had loved the woods, the fields, the flowers; but to him a tree had been a living thing, a thing with feelings, a thing with feet in the earth and a head in the sky and widely reaching arms of beneficence that gave either shade or fruit or the pleasure of flowers for he benefit of the world. He had meant to go to the greatest doctor of trees, and under his guidance and instruction, take a thorough course in tree surgery; then he had meant to begin the great work of saving every possible tree in existence.
He reflected that working as a bee master was not too bad. Always he could do what he might for the trees and at the same time a world of flowers were necessary to furnish a sweet that from the dawn of history had lighted man, had been medicinal, healing. A noticeable factor in the wealth of the world was the work that the humming gauze wings swarming up and down the garden before him were carrying on. If a man were going to Live; if he had the chance to remain for any length of time in a place like that; if he could learn the profession without expensive tuition, without lengthy apprenticeship, it might be a quicker way to a livelihood, and it might be more pleasant and interesting. There was a possibility that the volumes on the shelves above the Bee Masters writing desk might contain information that would make a living bee, capable of what seemed remarkably near to thought and preconcerted action, quite as interesting as an immovable tree, which certainly could not be imbued with mental processes even by a far stretch of tie imagination.
Just when Jamie had decided that, in the event the Bee Master came home from the hospital weakened and incapacitated and approved of the manner in which he had cared for his home and watered the garden and the trees and taken care of the bees, merely in case he should make himself useful and interesting and should be asked to stay—just when he had resolved that he would find out for himself whether the prophecy that by “sticking around” he would like it in the garden of the Bee Master—up tiptoed the old black thought: How much time are you going to have in which to like it? How long will you, trying to do something for the Bee Master, resemble the case of the blind leading the blind? If he were not going to be sufficiently well, if he were not going to be sufficiently strong, if in a few months humming bees and chirping crickets, singing birds and running water, the blue of the garden and the sea and sky were to be over for him, what was the use?
Down below he could see where towers and mountains of rocks had been gnawed and eaten by high tides and slashing waves. Why should not he, when the Master came home and the trust he had assumed was over, why should not he just accidentally step off of one of those frowning crags and go down in an undertow that might carry him to China for all he knew?
And then, in a flash vivid before him came the mental picture that the little Scout had conjured up when he had told so casually about the drowned man and the turtles—sharks it would probably be that would worry his lean carcass. The smile was rather gruesome that twisted Jamie’s face when he reflected that his sharks would not find much nourishment in bone and muscle. Then he carried the thought a trifle further and reflected that the muscle would likely be fairly tender. He might make a mouthful for something.
Then up, big and bright, before his eyes popped that childish enumeration of the kinds of death, and the description of the little old lady who had lain on the spread of lavender satin covered with delicate lace, the beloved lady who softly and gently had gone to sleep in the night without even lifting her folded hands and who carried to her grave a look on her face that the little Scout had described as “a smiling secret.” There was in this child the paganism, the frankness, the cruelty of childhood. (What was it La Fontaine had said about children? That all of them were brutally frank, brutally cruel?) Large streaks of cruelty had been discernible in the little Scout, but not so large as the streaks of generosity, of tenderness, of the love of fair dealing. Jamie could see the grimy palm in which buttons and strings and sinkers and corks and buckles were pushed around to find the coins that went to pay for a treat for the Master.
Then, too, there had been in the back of the head of the little Scout the penetration to fathom the look on the face of the sleeping woman. Jamie reflected that if he purposely went down to the crags of the Pacific and threw himself to the sharks, when he came before God and his father and mother, he could carry no smiling secret on his face. He would not have kept the faith. He would have broken the laws of God and man. He would have allowed frail women to surpass him in courage, in endurance. He shut his eyes to close out even the imagined look on his mother’s face. So right there
Jamie crossed off the Pacific from his scheme of release, and he registered a solemn oath in his breast that no matter what happened, no matter if he again came to the fortunes of the road, to the callous indifference that so many wayfarers encountered, no matter what, anything at all that the most imaginative could think of, he would not take the chance of facing the Creator with a craven soul. He swore by all that he ever had loved and reverenced that he would try, try with all his might in the short time that might remain to him to master the secret that had given birth to the smile, and that whatever of good he might be able to do for the Bee Master or for any one he encountered in the time he had left, as far as he possibly could, he would forget himself, he would put his own pain and chagrin and disappointment, his own feeling of defeat and uselessness, his own craving for love and intellectual companionship in the background, and he would see if the more than six feet of bone and muscle that contained his being could do any small service that might come his way for God and his fellow-man before he went. Maybe if he could accomplish some little thing, something that would ease the ache of even one heart that ached as his was aching at that minute, just maybe that knowledge would be the secret that he might carry in his breast that would set the stamp of an indelible smile on his face, so that even a child could discern the majesty of the impulse and he would not be ashamed when the end came.
Then he arose and resolutely, though painfully, hobbled down the long stretch of the curving and irregular mountain stairway until he reached the gate. There he sat down and looked the length of the remaining steps and up and down the coast. On his left hand, not so far down, he discovered the most attractive young mountain of stone. It stood boldly, proudly, with defying arrogance, in the edge of the Pacific Ocean, and there seemed to be a way by which one might climb it at the back.
Jamie imagined that somewhere on the top of it there might be a grooved space where one could sit and look to the north and the west and the south, across the measureless miles of sea face, into illimitable space of sky county, into the starry orchards of Heaven. He wondered if any king had ever ruled from a throne like that, and he decided that none ever had. He decided that he would set that spot as his goal. To-day he would go no farther, because he had learned that going down a mountain is far easier than climbing it. But to-morrow he would open the gate and he would go to the exact spot where the trumpets of the toloache and the exquisite lavender beds of a dainty creeping flower that was sand verbena—Jamie had never heard of sand verbena, but he had very sensitive nostrils, and at that hour of the evening he could pick up an exquisite perfume and he watched a few late bees journeying back and forth to the delicate beds of color—just at the line where the pinkish lavender of the verbena and the gold of the beach primroses opened to the sun; he would go that far the coming day. And the following he would march right straight ahead until he attained the crest of the dauntless rock.
To reach it he must pass a long stretch of breaking waves, each of which seemed to say to him: “I dare you! I dare you to come on!” Jamie sat there and contemplated his feet and thought of their swollen and aching condition, and a great longing assailed him to thrust them into the cold salt water of the ocean. Once he half started to rise, and then the thought came to him that if he became chilled, if he took a heavy cold, if he developed a cough. Jamie laid his hand on his left breast and sat still. That would mean the end very speedily, and if it were a possible thing he intended to fight until the Bee Master came home and relieved him of the trust that he had assumed when he had agreed to remain with the bees. But the longing, the desire to step into the cold salt water had been awakened.
When he heard his call to supper, he started slowly, painfully, up the winding stairway. Every few steps he paused and turned to look at the lazy waves creeping up the sand and rolling back again, and he said to himself that as sure as there was light in the sky, one of these days he would go down there and he would put at least his feet in the ocean; he would climb that mountain of rock and he would sit on a high peak as far into the night as he chose. He would watch the Pacific Ocean when the moon was threading it with a million silver pathways. Some time there might possibly be a storm. There might be waves that would lash almost to the top of that towering mountain of stone; thunders might crash and lightning might dart in forked tongues and the waves might ‘go mad and do their worst in unchecked frenzy. Then he would make a point of being on the top of that rock, and he would watch that storm of the elements and see how nearly it resembled a storm that for a long time had been raging in his heart and in his mind. It would be something to think about, something to work for, a definite objective in view merely to reach that lofty rock crest.
