# The Keeper of the Bees/Chapter 15

Reap the Whirlwind
THE days began to slip by rapidly. As Jamie be came more familiar with the work he was supposed to do he found that constantly he could see things of his own volition that no one had told him about, yet they were things that increased the activity of the bees, things that added to the beauty of the garden, things that resulted in producing a larger amount of different kinds of vegetables. He found, too, that a number of fruit and vegetable stands not far from his location were willing to pay him worth-while prices for anything he had in those lines that he and Margaret Cameron could not use. Then he began filling baskets for the little Scout to carry home that there might be no question of unequal division.
​Jamie found himself mighty thankful to have the little Scout around the garden. It was not only that he received much efficient help with the bees, with the pruning and watering; it was that he had fallen deeply in love with the youngster. As he became more firmly fixed in his regard for the child, he worried, grew obsessed with the feeling that things were not as they should be; that of the Scouts it was the Master who was not attaining the height and developing the physical strength that the exercise all of them took should have resulted in producing. Several times Jamie had seriously considered calling the Scout Master’s mother and asking her if she did not think Jean was exercising too strenuously, taxing brain power to the breaking point, making of each day a round of never-ending activity. From a word dropped here and there, Jamie realized that the child was not sleeping any too well of nights. Sometimes the little Scout slipped into the living room and stretched on a davenport, or into Jamie’s room and, across the foot of the bed, slept for hours as the dead are supposed to sleep.
As Jamie’s own strength grew, as the tissue coating of skin across his breast strengthened in thickness and faded in colour, as the continued careful diet, the salt baths, the sun treatment, and the tomato and orange juice worked their will, so Jamie’s mind cleared in proportion as his body strengthened. A feeling of power, of executive ability, began to develop in him. He ceased almost entirely to think of himself. All the thought he had he ​needed to concentrate on his work, on the little Scout on Margaret Cameron, and he found that there was no hour of the day in which his mind was not battling back and forth, pro and con, concerning the girl he had married.
He wondered if he should start a systematic search for her; if he found her, whether she would be pleased or turn from him in anger. He wondered if there might not be assistance he could render her. He wondered if there might not be mitigating circumstances. Jamie could not force himself to think of the Storm Girl as a girl who had broken the laws, the laws of God and the laws of man.
In those days he had an ever-present worry concerning Margaret Cameron. He had learned to respect his neighbour highly. He had learned to appreciate deeply the many kind and thoughtful things she did for his comfort. He felt that if the whole world were filled with mothers who were willing to remain at home, to shoulder the duties of caring for a home, to stick to sound common sense and reasonable judgments as Margaret Cameron had done, there would be more boys and girls willing to remain at home, willing to find entertainment there instead of on the beaches and in the canyons and in cheap public dance halls. Then he reflected that Margaret Cameron’s trouble at that present minute, as nearly as he could figure it, was because her only child had left home and was deliberately remaining away from home. Margaret had told him only that morning that Lolly had definitely decided to go with a party of young people who planned to hike ​through Yosemite and Muir Woods. She had written that she would try if possible to get back for a few days before school began in the fall, so a long, lonely summer was stretching before Margaret, and she frankly admitted to Jamie that there was an unrest, an apprehension hanging over her that it was quite impossible for her to dispel.
So when Jamie thought of Margaret, he thought sympathetically, wonderingly, and much of the time with a fair amount of indignation. He could but feel that something was due to parents who kept the home fires burning, who weathered the years, who had doctored their children and worked over them and prayed over them, who had used the utmost of their strength and bestowed the deepest of their love, who had unselfishly given and given all they had to give, and still had earned, seemingly, nothing whatever, not even gratitude. Jamie could not believe that the attention Margaret was paying to him was touched with the depth of devotion and tinged with the quality of consideration and love that she had given to any of the three youngsters she had loved and devoted herself to until they reached the point where they were able to fend for themselves. Now it was vacation. It was the time that other children were coming home, and neither of Margaret Cameron’s were coming, not the girl to whom she had given birth, nor the girl to whom she had given shelter. Why did not both of them come for a few weeks? Why did they not plan and come one at a time so that Margaret might have her vacation when other people were having theirs? Why did they not make some plans for ​her? Why did they not do something to break the monotony, the sacrifice, and the hard work of her life?
He resolved that he would work very hard. Then he would take a few days off and he would ask Margaret Cameron to go pleasuring with him. They would go where people were resting on the beaches. They might go somewhere on a boat. They could go into the city and hear some wonderful concerts or see some worth-while pictures, or to an interesting play. For his share of what she was making life mean to him, he would try to make some material return. That he settled on definitely.
One day Jamie mentioned Margaret’s children to the little Scout and found that the child was as indignant as he was.
“There isn’t any tellin’,” said the little Scout, “as to when Lolly will get here. She doesn’t think about much except herself and she does mostly what she pleases, but Molly will come. Her job’s a hard one and she may have to rest up a few days. She may have to close her rooms and get somebody else in them, but if Molly doesn’t come she’s got a mighty good reason, and when she comes, the camp fires and the picnics will begin, and there’ll be something worth while doin’ around these parts. When Molly comes she has greased her bearings and she’s hittin’ on six cylinders, and we go!”
The little Scout used both hands to illustrate how they went when Molly came home.
“There’s a lot of fun in Molly to the square inch! She wears a big kid grin on her face and she ain’t afraid of dirt. ​and she ain’t afraid of water, and she ain’t afraid of work, and she ain’t afraid of spending a penny. Talk about persimmons! Molly’s them!”
“I’m waiting anxiously,” said Jamie, “to know Molly.”
“Well, go on waitin’,” said the small person. “Stick on the job, and when she does come, if you care about girls, why, there’s a girl that’s got some juice in her!”
“I believe you,” said Jamie. “I think you should know and I’ve every confidence in your judgment.”
The little Scout was crumbling bread along the edge of the back walk for a hen mocking bird that had nested in a date palm beside the pergola. A large chunk of apple from one that was being consumed in scarcely masticated chunks was laid beside the bread. In three more bites the apple disappeared, core and all. Juicy fingers were wiped on the seat of unusually soiled breeches, and the little Scout took a hold above the hands Jamie had gripped around the stems of some iris he was transplanting. The added strength that was brought to bear loosened the roots from the ground and the Scout Master and the Bee Keeper rolled promiscuously over each other and down the side of the mountain until they came to forceful impact with a grapefruit tree. They got up laughing, and Jamie gathered up the iris. The Scout Master stood daintily poised. A deep inhalation of breath, an indrawn upper lip, an outshot lower one, blew the dust from the deep gray eyes. A shake like a dog coming from the water was supposed to be sufficient to dislodge accumulated dirt. An ecstatic expression toned to idiotic sweetness settled on the ​small face. With the thumb and second finger of the right hand a very real piece of dirt was flipped with exquisite execution from the left shoulder. Then in pantomime Jamie’s condition was inspected through skilfully manipulated eyeglasses, that Jamie saw perfectly, even when they were not there.
“Aw, weally,” said the little Scout, “I hope you didn’t dawmadge yourself permanently.”
“No, I didn’t,” said Jamie, “and I entertain the same lively hope concerning you.”
“Aw, thanks awfully!” said the little Scout, and with a continuation of the same breath, “I betcha——” A hand dived into a pocket, brought up some small coin and inspected it carefully. The price of a hot dog and a strawberry pop were laid aside and the remainder estimated. “I betcha seven cents I can hang by one foot from the beam of the pergola right there!”
Jamie looked the situation over.
“I’m not taking your bet,” he said. “If your foot slipped and you came down there you’d knock your brains out.”
“I wouldn’t if I hit on the ground,” said the Scout Master.
“You would if you struck the stones within six inches of the ground.”
“Yes, and that’s the kick to it,” said the small person, “just to find out what I would hit on!” and immediately started scaling the pergola.
“Look here,” said Jamie, “cut that out! You aren’t ​going to hang from one foot from that cross section. I don’t know how long that pergola’s been built, and there’s been a lot of water thrown on it to wash the vines. It may be as rotten as sin.”
Steadily the Scout Master climbed upward and presently sat on the second bar bouncing up and down on it to ascertain its stability.
Jamie looked belligerent.
“I told you not to do that!” he said, provokedly.
“I ain’t goin’ to do it,” answered the Scout Master, serenely. “I heard you. There’s nothing the matter with my ears. I can pull another one just as good, and if I come a smasher ’twon’t break any more than my leg. I’m going to hang by my little finger!”
Before Jamie had time either to say or to do anything, the body of the Scout Master was dangling and it was supported by one little finger of the right hand and nothing more.
“All in!” shouted the swaying youngster. “Look out! I’m comin’ down! I’m aimin’ for the dirt, Call Grayson if I hit the stone!”
Down came the Scout Master, landing deftly and with perfect precision on the freshly watered soil of the garden, perhaps four inches from the stones that might very easily have broken a leg.
“Now, look here,” said Jamie, “I told you I wasn’t feeling as good as I might one time, didn’t I?”
“Yes, and you didn’t need to tell me!” said the Scout Master. “I could see it for myself, but I can see now ​that you’re about as husky as they make ’em. You could drive a steam plough or run a stone crusher or swat a bandit, if you wanted to. I won’t do it again.”
Then the Scout Master planted a small pair of feet squarely in front of Jamie and looked at him with the very Devil dancing in the depths of the deep eyes.
“Got your goat, didn’t I?” taunted the little Scout. “Thought you’d have to go to the telephone and ring up Mother to come with the ambulance. By gracious! there goes your telephone!”
Jamie had gotten past the place where the ringing of the telephone was an event, it rang so frequently in those days. It might be Carey calling for help. It might be Grayson to explain some new legal technicality that he had encountered. It might be the bank calling. It might be the Scout Master’s mother wanting her offspring at home. Jamie wiped his hands on his trousers and walked to the telephone and picked down the receiver. The Scout Master sat on the stone that had failed to serve the purpose of breaking any bones, and with loving pride inspected the west half of the garden in which they were working and which constituted a beloved personal possession.
Looking over the length and the width of the acre that stretched down to the sea, said the little Scout: “When I get through High School, I’m comin’ here to live. They may take their darn colleges and gamble ’em and smoke ’em and drink ’em and Bolshevik ’em straight to the Devil! I’m goin’ to get my education out of the books ​that the Bee Master put in his library. What was good enough for him, is good enough for me, and while I read his books I’ll be thinking about him. One of the reasons I’m going to keep clean and walk straight and be decent like he was is because I’m going where he went, and we’re going to see what we can get out of Heaven together like we got a good deal of fun out of earth. And, oh, boy! I wish he knew how I miss him!”
In the house, before the telephone with a face sheet white, hanging to the instrument for support, shaking in every part of his being, shorn of his new-found strength, torn to the depths of his soul, stood Jamie. He had picked down the receiver and said, “Hello!” as casually as any man ever had said it, and then answered in the affirmative to the inquiry: “Is this James Lewis MacFarlane of the Sierra Madre Apiary?” Then the voice had continued: “You are wanted immediately and most imperatively at the Maternity Hospital, corner of Irolo and Seventeenth Streets.”
“Yes,” panted Jamie.
The voice went on: “Your wife last night gave birth to a fine son, but she is not reacting from the anæsthetic as she should, and we are growing alarmed. We found your address among her effects. Kindly see how quickly you can reach her. The probabilities are that she will be asking for you very shortly.”
Jamie hung up the receiver, picked up a pencil and wrote, “Irolo and Seventeenth Streets,” so that he would not forget. Then he reeled to the bedroom and began see​ing how quickly he could put on suitable clothing to make his appearance on the street. As he worked he called for the little Scout and when the youngster appeared, he said: “Lock up quickly. Have the front door key ready for me. I have an urgent business call to the city and I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“Aw!” said the little Scout, in disgusted tones, “I came to stay all day! There was a lot I wanted to get done on my property.”
“Yes, I know,” said Jamie. “Maybe to-morrow. You better call the gang and play the rest of the day on the beach or run along home.”
He was out of the door, locking it behind him. Then he made a headlong plunge down the walk and down the street toward the car line.
The little Scout stood looking after him.
“‘Important business!’ Well, I’ll tell the world it’s important! The house is on fire, the dog’s bit the baby, Ma’s lost her vanity case, the Government ain’t survivin’, God’s dropped out of Heaven, and there ain’t a darned thing right in the whole world! Leap to it, Jamie! Fix it all up fine! Oh, boy!”
The little Scout walked around the house, climbed in the back window, punched up Jamie’s pillow, and lay down on the foot of his bed.
Jamie sprinted to the nearest street car and rode to the city, getting instructions on the way as to where Irolo and Seventeenth Streets might be, and when he landed some distance away, he took a taxi. Once seated within ​it, he felt for the check book he had stuffed in his pocket and all the emergency change that lay in the little box on the top left-hand shelf of the working library of the bees. His thoughts were whirling in chaos. The Storm Girl. She had come to her hour of agony, bravely, without doubt, as she would. She had asked no help from him, She had brought a child into the world, a son. “A fine baby,” the voice had said, but it did not sound as if she were all right. The report had sounded ominous to Jamie. He had not known that anæsthetics were a part of the birth of a child. A great many things had happened in the past six years that Jamie did not know about. He had not known anything worth while in the beginning as to how human beings entered the world, but he had been told, he had deciphered for himself, the fact that it was not an easy journey either for the mother or the child, and at this hospital that he was going to there was a little living boy, and the ceremony Jamie had gone through had been for the purpose of covering the child with an honourable name. That “fine little fellow” he had been told about was James Lewis MacFarlane, Junior, and the fine girl, the Storm Girl, the girl of the deep eyes and the broad chest, the girl of the cold wet face and the clutching hands, the girl of the quivering lips and the staring eyes—what was it? She had not rallied from the anæsthetic? She was not regaining consciousness as she should, and among her effects they had found his address, and he was on his way to her. A minute more and he would be in the room where she was. He would see her forehead, and ​the wealth of hair streaming over the pillow, and her white throat.
Jamie knew what he was going to do. That was definitely settled in his mind. He was going to take her hands and hold them tight. He was going to draw her face to his as she had voluntarily yielded it to him once. He was going to cover it with a passion of suffering kisses. He was going to tell her that he did not give a darn what had happened or how it had happened. He never could and he never would believe that dishonour had touched her or ever could touch her. He was going to make her well, and he was going to take her home, and he was going to take care of her. They were going to live together and love together, and they were going to make something very wonderful of life. The new blood, the fresh blood, the clean blood, surged up in Jamie until the hair was almost standing on his head. He was wringing his hands without knowing what he was doing.
“They aren’t efficient! They aren’t doing what they should! I’ll kill the doctor and wring the neck of every nurse in that hospital if they don’t get a move on them!” threatened Jamie. “Birth’s a natural function. You can’t tell me that a big, strong girl like that wouldn’t live through it if she had the proper care.”
​“I have made a mistake,” he said. “They’ve given me the wrong number. This isn’t my wife.”
The nurse stepped over and from the contents of a drawer picked up a marriage certificate that he had seen before.
“James Lewis MacFarlane,” she read from it and replaced it in the drawer.
Jamie took a grip on the foot of the bed and leaned over. The girl lying on it was not a girl he ever had seen, not a girl who, by the wildest stretch of possibility, could have been the Storm Girl. Jamie gripped the insensate wood harder and bent lower and stared wide-eyed. What did it mean? How could this have happened? Why should this girl have in her possession the certificate which symbolized the marriage that he had entered into with the Storm Girl?
He made his way to the side of the bed and looked intently at the left hand lying nerveless on the coverlet. There was the ring that he had bought, on the third finger, the cheap little wedding ring. He picked up the hand and examined the ring until he made sure. He knew that both the doctor and the nurse were watching him.
The doctor spoke. “How long has it been since you’ve seen your wife?”
Jamie opened his lips to say that never in all his life had he seen the woman before him and stopped with the words unsaid.
If he said what he was thinking, if he repudiated her ​if he left her to life or the greater mercy of death with the avowal that he did not know her, that he never had seen her, then where was the beauty of the deed that he had tried to do in covering a woman who needed a name with his? After all, it had not made any difference to him, the night of the storm, what woman bore his name if with it she recovered self-respect and a decent heritage for an unborn child—“a fine little fellow,” the doctor had said. If he opened his lips, the fine little fellow would no longer be fine. He would be a shame baby, a thing to be pitied, to be scoffed at, to be shifted around from one charity organization to another. He would be thrown on the world defeated in the right to a home, to love, to the proper kind of rearing. It would be no marvel if any wave of crime or of shame that any one could imagine should engulf him. And the girl. Jamie stared hard. He realized that if there were blood in the china-white face, if there were colour in the lips, if there were lustre in the hair, if those transparent eyelids would reveal painfilled, beseeching eyes, she would be lovely. Possibly there was a man in the world who could have repudiated her. Jamie could not. Not Jamie MacFarlane. The words died without utterance.
“You mean,” he said, thickly, “that it’s strange I don’t recognize her? Maybe it’s the pain, and it’s been long months since we were married.”
"I’ve learned," said the doctor, "that there are a good many curious and some inexplicable things in this world, but I can’t help expressing the opinion that you’ve been ​a poor sort of a husband if you’ve allowed your wife to go through anything so crucial as the nerve strain and the physical strain of approaching maternity and delivery and given no sympathy, extended no care. It scarcely seems human.”
Jamie licked his lips and took his medicine. He could not say anything in self-extenuation that would not cast a reflection on the girl before him, and in the few minutes that he had stood staring down at her he had realized that her every breath was coming shorter. The hand he was holding was a weight in his fingers. He gripped it and began to chafe it.
“For God’s sake!” he cried, “try to do something! Forget about lecturing me now! Do something! Don’t, don’t let her slip away like this!”
​Again Jamie took his medicine. The taste of it was bitter on his tongue, because he was not a “hound.” He never had been. He had not the smallest obligation to the woman before him, other than the obligation that any man owes all women to love them honestly, to care for them gently, to respect their bodies as the vessels through which the world must be populated. That was a thing that had been hammered into him from the hour that he was old enough even remotely to understand its meaning. He must always take care of the women. He must always be polite to the women. He must always be kind to them. They must be taken care of because they were to make homes; they were to mother little children. They must be respected. They were the vessels that contained the seeds of life. From their loins must come the presidents and the senators, the governors and the businessmen, the captains and sailors and soldiers and the tillers of the soil and the ministers who filled the pulpits and the teachers who moulded the minds of youth in our schools.
Here lay a woman dying; dying in youth; dying in beauty; dying, in her own thought of herself, in shame, in scorching anguish, because some man, somewhere, had held her body lightly and violated it and consigned it to months of mental suffering, to hours of pain-racked anguish, to the loneliness of unloved death. Jamie reeled on his feet and the nurse thrust a chair under him.
She looked at him penetratingly and then she said deliberately: “Doctor, there’s something about this I don’t ​understand, but I will not join you in the belief that there is anything unmanly attaching to Mr. MacFarlane. In the few days she was here before the child was born, Mrs. MacFarlane seemed to adore him. She had no unkind word to say against him.”
“What’s that?” asked the doctor, sharply.
“I am telling you the truth,” said the nurse. “She said that he was the noblest man, the finest man, in all the world. She said that he had done one thing so big and shining that no other man would have done it. She said that she had a feeling that she would not survive the birth of the baby. When she showed me her marriage certificate, I supposed she intended me to send for him. I looked up his residence. She said that if her baby should live, provisions had been made for it, but she expressed a wish to me that so fine a man as he might have it. I don’t know how to explain the fact that they haven’t been together these months, but I do know that the fault did not lie with Mr. MacFarlane.”
“In that case,” said the doctor to Jamie, “very likely I owe you an apology. I am seeing so much these days that is exactly as things should not be in this world, that I am getting fairly raw. I do apologize if I have said something I shouldn’t. About your son and provisions having been made for him, that’s up to you. If you want the child, of course, in the face of this marriage certificate, the law will give him to you.”
Jamie turned to the nurse.
​“She said once,” answered the nurse, “that it was impossible, but if it were possible, she would give her life gladly if she knew that you would take the baby and make of him the kind of a man that you are.”
“All right,” said Jamie, tersely. “I will take the baby. You may get him ready. I have a comfortable home. I can see a way in which he can be well cared for. I will do my best to make the kind of a man of the boy who bears my name that his mother wanted him to be.”
Then Jamie and the doctor and the nurse were astonished and bewildered. A low laugh broke from the lips of the girl on the pillow, a low, exultant, caressing laugh, a laugh full of wonder and delight and unbelief, and with it ended the last remnant of breath from the tortured body and the bright head on the pillow rolled back and lay still.
Jamie covered his face and sat silent, and when he looked again he saw a sheeted straight line. He looked at the nurse with pitiful eyes.
“Have you instructions,” he asked, “for necessary arrangements?”
The nurse nodded.
“Everything has been provided for, and most unusual, all expenses were paid when Mrs. MacFarlane entered the institution. In such an event as this we were ordered to prepare her body and send it to her family.”
“All right,” said Jamie, rising and mustering his strength. “Where is the boy?”
​“You have someone competent to take charge of a new-born baby?” he asked.
“I have,” answered Jamie. “A fine, cleanly woman who has reared three children to maturity.”
“All right, then,” said the doctor. “Give him the baby.”
The nurse disappeared and presently returned. She put into Jamie’s arms a bundle odorous of castile and boracic, a thing that was warm and alive and moving. Convenient to his reach she set a suitcase, and Jamie put on his hat, crooked his arm around the live bundle, picked up the suitcase, and walked from the room.
The nurse looked at the doctor and the doctor looked at the nurse, and they said to each other: “Well, can you beat that?” . “What do you suppose came between them?” asked the doctor. “If she said things like that about him, why should he leave her, never to see her again, without a tear of remorse, without a touch of affection? I’ve had a good many peculiar experiences in thirty years’ practice of medicine, but this beats everything. I don’t understand it!”
​The nurse picked up a towel and wiped her hands vigorously.
“I get so mad at this sort of thing sometimes,” she said, “that I want to go out and stand on the platforms and in the pulpits and I want to tell people some of the things I’ve seen and heard. I’d like to talk for one solid day to the girls of this country. I’d like to tell them of the heartache and the disappointment and the pain and the shame that they are fixing up for themselves in their future lives when they undertake to leave the straight and narrow path and allow themselves voluntarily to become the playthings of men; to let their honour be taken from them; to let their efficiency be wiped out; to let their years of training and the loving care that has been expended on them all go for nothing; to bring shame and disgrace on their parents, and to do to their own souls and to their own bodies what this poor dead girl has done to hers.”
“Evidently,” said the doctor, “you are one of the people who still believe in hell fire and damnation.”
“Yes,” said the nurse, “I do. And I believe in hell at its hottest and damnation at its damnedest for the men who are responsible for such anguish as we have seen this girl suffer and for such a death as we have watched her die. I’d like to take the men who cannot wait for honest marriage and a time when they are able to support a woman and give her a home and fortify her body to serve the functions of wifehood, of motherhood and home-making, men who upset everything and ruin everything for their own personal immediate self-gratification—I’d like to take ​them all out and hang them as high as Haman. Some times I think I just hate men!”
And to his amazement the nurse broke into tears and used the towel on her eyes.
“But, look here!” said the doctor. “You spoke up for Mr. MacFarlane. You said he was not responsible for this.”
“And I’ll say it again,” said the nurse. “Can’t you see by what she told me, by the way he came in , by the way he left, that he’d never seen the girl before, that he didn’t know who she was? Because some arrangement had been made by which that child was to bear his name, he assumed responsibility for it, but, good Lord! you can’t convince me in ten years that he had ever seen that girl there on the bed before, or that the marriage certificate I packed among her belonging so the child could have it was a legal document. Don’t you think it!”
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