not be imbued with mental processes even by a far stretch of the 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 popped 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 smashing 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
