The Keeper of the Bees/Chapter 12
Seeing through Veiled Places
THE remainder of that week, outside of the time consumed in carrying out the régime Jamie had laid down for himself, he spent in the garden and with the books. With the trees and flowers he had a sure hand. He had learned how to make flowers thrifty and healthful in the meagre climate of New England. With water to lavish, with almost uninterrupted sunshine, with warm days and cool nights very frequently foggy, Jamie found himself facing a reversion of all he knew about gardening. He very speedily learned that in a land so lavish with sunshine and water, his task was going to be, not to stimulate flowers to growth, but to cutback the growth in order to draw the strength of the plant more directly toward the production of flowers. Much garden lore he accumulated from Margaret Cameron—practical things that she had learned through experience: how to loosen soil; how to fertilize; how to water discreetly and to the purpose. Jamie already knew how to cut back effectively. What to do to secure flowers instead of leaves he soon learned.
All that week he was looking forward to Saturday, planning for the day on which he and the little Scout should go to visit the Bee Master. He had set the hour for their starting at two o’clock. It was fifteen minutes past two when the little fellow swung over the high board fence and came racing down the walk. Jamie was rather surprised. He had expected, from the casual and business like manner with which the little Scout had conducted the fight with the Indians, that equal promptness and executive ability would be displayed in keeping a date.
He was waiting on the bench under the jacqueranda when the small figure sailed over the fence. Scanning the little Scout closely, Jamie thought he detected traces of recent tears. The eyes were suspiciously red of rim; the cheeks smeared with the indisputable evidence of childish grief. Instantly Jamie’s heart went out in protest. Who had any business to hurt the little Scout? What was it, beside the sting of a bee, that could bring tears to so valiant a small soul? Without taking time for thought, Jamie stretched out both hands. Without an instant’s hesitation, the little Scout walked straight into his arms and laid a confiding head on his breast, and Jamie’s arms closed up tight.
“You didn’t have a fall and hurt yourself, did you?”
Jamie could feel the shake of negation on his shoulder and the gulp in the throat.
“I’m sorry,” said Jamie, “but if we’re not to keep the Bee Master waiting, we must clean up your face and be on our way.”
The little Scout instantly stood erect.
“Clean up! Clean up! Can’t you tell by one look at me that I’ve been parboiled and scoured and curry combed?”
“You do give evidence of having had a bath,” said Jamie. “It’s only the region of your eyes that needs slight attention.”
“Oh, well, then,” said the little Scout, “if you say I need it, I reckon I do. I had so everlastingly much trouble with Mother and the Princess that I thought I never should get started. Women make me dead tired!”
“What’s the matter with the ladies?” inquired Jamie as he led the way to the bathroom, moistened a wash cloth and began operations in order to make sure that they were properly conducted. To his surprise, the youngster stood still and lifted a submissive face, and as Jamie operated, the child continued.
“Oh, Mother is always nagging about cleaning your nails and spooning out your ears and wild hairs in your eyelashes and ingrowing toenails! You’d get to be a burden to yourself if you’d try to pay any attention to all the things that woman wants done. When it comes to the Princess, I’d give my best jack-knife if Dad would fire her.”
“Fire a princess?” said Jamie. “You’re suggesting an unseemly proceeding. A princess is supposed to be treated with a very high degree of consideration.”
The youngster shrugged lean shoulders and sniffed.
“Well, this princess we’ve got in our kitchen hails from some little crossroad in Europe, and she’s used to being waited on herself, and so she knows too darned well how to wait on other people. All of us got to go through too much pollyfoxing. It’s too familiar to call us by our first names and say anything in plain English. You’ve got to beat around the bush like a scoutin’ Indian to put it across that you’d like a little more butter on your toast, or the strawberry jam just ain’t. What’s the use of all the fuss? When it comes to clothes, both all two of ’em make me sick! That’s what this row was about. I wanted to wear my clothes, so when I got back I could meet the fellows and go down on the beach for a sham battle. Mother would have it that I couldn’t go with you and I couldn’t go to the hospital without being all rigged up until I looked like—” the little Scout stopped and dug an enraged toe in the rug before the wash bowl and then concluded—“until I looked like such a sissy that the Bee Master wouldn’t ‘a’ owned me! And to tell it like a want ad, I was just forced to dress the way they wanted me to and at the same time I had to steal out the things I meant to wear and hide ’em in a hedge down the street a house or two, and then I had to duck the hedge and get the bundle and find a place where I could change, and I’m none too sure my things will be where I left ’em when I go back. Always making a lot of time killing and a lot of worry!”
“I see,” said Jamie, slowly, “but didn’t you want to be dressed in the best you had when you went to visit a very fine gentleman, whom you love as you told me you love the Bee Master?”
The little Scout drew up and heaved a deep breath. Into play came the gesture that had now come to be inseparable from the Scout Master’s personality.
“About loving the Bee Master—that’s a thing that it ain’t very good to talk about. That gets down among your feelin’s where you want ’em covered up, where things ain’t much of anybody’s business. If it was anything that would do the Bee Master any good, I’d stand fire and water to do it; but when it’s just nonsense, what’s the use? The Bee Master likes me or he wouldn’t have sent for me, and he never in his life saw me as dolled up as I am right now!”
The Scout Master squirmed, thrust forth a stocking clad leg and a patent leather shoe.
“Look at that now! Wouldn’t it make you sick? What’s legs for if you can’t use just leg? Who invented stockings anyway? Scratchy, itchy things and in a country where you don’t need ’em! I’ll tell the world, I’d ‘a’ shed the socks, too, but I knew I was late. Come on, let’s go!”
Jamie hung up the wash cloth, used the towel, and started to apply the comb. The Scout Master backed away with out-thrown hands.
“No, you don’t!” cried the little Scout. “I’m not allowed to use other people’s combs. They might have tarantulas or Gila monsters or octopuses on ’em!”
Jamie laid back the comb and reached his hand. The Scout Master laid a hard, scarred, wiry hand in his and walked sedately beside him until they passed through the front gate.
Then the child looked up and remarked: “Now I guess we better release the clutch. If any of the fellows would see us, there’s just a possibility that I’d get toppled off my throne. My Scouts are about all I can handle some of these days, anyway.”
When they reached the street car and took their places, Jamie looked down at the figure beside him and decided that it was too lean, that the physical condition was not what it should be.
“Do you mind,” he asked, “telling me how old you are?”
“No,” said the Scout Master, “I don’t. I’m ten years old, and lemme tell you, I’ve lived ’em! I’ve lived ’em all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, and I’ve lived in cities where you had to be for ever dodging the police, and the bandits, and the kidnappers, in Mother’s imagination. You couldn’t get a kidnapper to touch me with a lightnin’ rod. They’d take me for a regular roughneck!”
Jamie decided that the best way to get information was to keep quiet, so he said nothing.
“I’ve ridden on ships and boats and launches and paddled canoes and travelled on trains from the New York Limited to the Missionary, and believe me, I’ve had my eyes open and my ears open all the way! Last time we came out we missed the Limited we had reservations on and we had to take the Missionary or stay five days in Chicago and none of us could stick that, we took the Missionary. The rest of ’em like to died, but I had heaps of fun, and lemme tell you, I swelled my roll something pretty. I’d just go through the cars and nice and polite I’d say to the hot, dirty folks, ‘For five cents I’ll get you a nice, cool drink of water. If they looked like a Rolls-Rich, I’d make it ten, ’cause more of ’em got caught than us. You ought to ‘a’ seen ’em fall for it! I got so much I had to bank in my suitcase in our drawing room, and Nannette saw me and baa-hed like a sheep, and I thought ‘all was lost’——”
“Well, was it?” inquired Jamie.
“Not total. You see, Dad and Mother wasn’t in that load. First our Personal Conductor looked a mixshure, but finally she got to laughing ’cause I told her the funds was the result of the idle rich grindin’ the masses, and she’s a dead sport. She said if I’d go fifty-fifty with the Orthopedic Home, I could keep it. I was lief as not on that.” The little Scout paused. “Ever thank God for good legs?”
Jamie said, “I have!” fervently and the little Scout grinned and continued, “I’ve gone a good deal scoutin’ round with the Scouts, and, of course, some of it at school would stick to me by accident. My mother’s not so slow, and let me tell you there’s things you can learn from my dad! Maybe you think he hasn’t been a giddy ranger! Boy! He’s been city editor of a big newspaper, and he’s been two years in a scoutin’ plane over Germany, and he knows about making pictures. My dad’s a reg’lar leapin’ tuna!”
“I am going to meet him some of these days,” said Jamie.
The little Scout looked up quickly.
“Where?”
The inquiry was terse and forceful.
“When I called your telephone number to tell you about to-day, your mother invited me to dinner.”
The little Scout’s face fell.
“Aw!” The ejaculation was too laden with disapproval to escape notice.
“Of course, if you I don’t want me to come——”
“Now, that’s another one of them unpleasant issues,” said the small person. “Sure I want you to have grub! You can live on casabas and lobster and home brew for all of me. But what’s the use of draggin’ Mother and Dad and Nannette and Jimmy and the Royal Family of Denmark into our affairs? Why ain’t it good enough for us to go on being friends just the way we are?”
“All right,” said Jamie. “I wouldn’t think of coming if you don’t want me.”
“There you go again!” said the small person. “Did I ever say I didn’t want you? Did I ever say I didn’t fall for you hard? Did I ever say I wasn’t hittin’ on six cylinders every time I see you? No, I never did! But just because I say there’s places I want to see you and places I don’t, you go and make it look like I didn’t want you any old time and any old place! I thought from your mug you’d be a guy that’d play the game square!”
“Well, I try to play the game square,” said Jamie.
“Well, you’re out of luck, you’re all wet!” said the small person, “if you think you’re playin’ the game square when you tell me I don’t want you just because there’s certain places I don’t want you! Couldn’t a fellow have reasons? Couldn’t there be some things a body wouldn’t want to bleat all over the pasture?”
Jamie reached down and put his arm around the small person and drew the little figure up against him and found that the frame he was holding was quivering from head to foot.
“The days are fairly long for you, aren’t they?” asked Jamie.
“Oh, I reckon the days are all right,” answered the little Scout. “They’re the same days other kids have, and a lot of ’em get fat on ’em. Cast your optics on Fat Ole Bill, if you don’t believe it. It’s just that there’s times when I pretty near know that my job’s about all I can handle.”
“What’s the trouble?” asked Jamie.
“Well, I reckon you know how you get to be a Scout Master, don’t you?”
Because he wanted information, Jamie said he was not sure.
The little Scout shrugged exasperated shoulders.
“Well, I’m sure! I’m darned sure! You get to be a Scout Master by mastering the Scouts, that’s how! If they are jumping, you jump the farthest. If they are swinging, you swing the highest. If they are running, you spread your white wings and beat ’em to it. If it’s bicycles, you just lie down over the handle bars and paw the air for dear life and let the rest eat your dust. If it’s canoeing, your canoe makes the waves the rest of them upset in. If it comes to a slugging match, you got to have your jewjits so thoroughly in practice that you can sling any of the bunch in any direction you want ’em to circulate. Being a Scout Master means mastering the bunch; and Fat Ole Bill is getting to the place where I’m goin’ some if I handle him! The Nice Child is easier, but let me tell you, Angel Face is putting on muscle these days! He didn’t used to be so well. He was fussing around with appendicitis. Anywhere in the region of his right side even a little crack would knock him out and make him sweat blood. But now he’s kicking out of it in fine shape. He’s going to make a great big, strong man. In just about a year more he’s going to find out what I know already, that if he knew as much as I do, he’d know it’s only luck if I handle him now. And whenever they find that out they’s mutiny, and the fellow that can handle the bunch is due to usurp the throne. I got that out of a history book, and it’s good stuff. It sounds unpleasant, but it’s a plain statement of facts. Scout Master and The Limit is the same thing.”
“In other words, you are working too hard,” said Jamie. “You are trained down so fine that you are on the edge, and while the rest of them are gaining, you are losing. Is that the point?”
The Scout Master meditated.
“I guess the real needle-fine point of it is that there’s one of me and there’s three of them, and sometimes they beg so hard that we let in two or three more that I can’t eat ’em raw; I got to roast ’em or quit. And on those days I finish up just about out of ammunition. Nannette says that I keep on fightin’ and rollin’ and kickin’ until I horn in on her territory sometimes, but she ain’t got anything comin’ on me. I never had the hysterics and bellowed out in the night until I waked the family just ’cause the turtles didn’t eat all of anything!”
Jamie tightened his arm around the Scout Master and slumped his body into an inviting curve, and in three minutes he held against him a youngster tired to exhaustion at the middle of the day and fast asleep.
When they reached the hospital, Jamie gently shook the Scout Master, and instantly the youngster was up with blinking eyes and an ingratiating smile, ready to prove that unconsciousness of what was going on was for someone else; that particular fellow always was and always had been wide awake. The instant they were inside the hospital, the Scout Master reached for Jamie’s hand, crowded up beside him, and walked to the elevator and down the long halls cat stepping.
Evidently they were expected. The Bee Master’s door was open; a screen shielded the bed from the view of the passersby. The Scout Master sent one look across the room and to the open window and nudged Jamie with a sharp elbow.
“Have you noticed how Margaret Cameron’s roses have fallen off in bloomin’ lately?”
The whisper was sibilant; but Jamie caught it and smiled as he noted the flowers, and then he heard a further whisper.
“She’s always cottoning up to him. She’s got the idea that he’s her personal property. There’s been more than one day when she’d about given her eyes if I’d ‘a’ gone home, but as long as the Bee Master says, ‘Stay,’ I’m staying!”
Jamie rounded the screen and the Scout Master followed and stood back until Jamie shook hands with the Bee Master and stepped aside. Then the small Scout walked up before the Master’s bed, wide-eyed, and took one good look and changed colour, changed slowly from red lips and tinted cheeks to a spreading white. But the heels came together with a click. The figure stood very straight. The salute was according to rule and snappy to the superlative degree. The grin that overspread the small features was ingratiating. The Bee Master held out shaking hands and suddenly—Jamie thought he never had seen a movement quite so sudden; he wasn’t sure how the intervening space was cleared—the little figure simply arose in a leap and dived into the bed. The Bee Master made a good catch, although he caught his breath at the same time, because he was shaken by the suddenness of the plunge. But he had the little Scout tight in his arms, and the child was thoroughly draped over the chest of the Bee Master. A small hand was gripping the old white head on either side, and from forehead to chin a shower of short hot kisses was raining over the Bee Master’s face. The little Scout sat straight up on the bed and suddenly big tears shot one after another across the childish face and a little sharp wail that cut deeper than a knife piped out, “Oh, God ! I wish you didn’t have to suffer so!”
The Bee Master’s chin pointed toward the ceiling. He lifted his right hand and gathered his lower lip into folds and gave it outside pressure to reinforce it.
“Yes, Buddy, I’ve thought about that myself,” he said, “and I’ve sort of wished it, but it seems to be in the divine plan, or through some negligence of mine in taking proper care of the machinery as I’ve come along, and so I have to take the consequences. But don’t you mind.”
“Well, I do mind!” said the little Scout. A hand was jerked backward in the direction of Jamie. “He’s all right. He’s a good scout. He had sense enough to get behind the tree and use what he could find when the Red-skins attacked us. He’s good stuff, a sure fire thing, but he don’t think himself, that he’s you.”
The Bee Master glanced at Jamie and their eyes met and held.
“Take a chair,” he said to Jamie. “Draw up close here. I want to tell you something, but first I want to ask you something.” He looked straight at the Scout Master. “You’re fairly sure,” he said, “that the man I left to keep the bees is the right kind of a man?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” said the Scout Master, promptly. “You couldn’t get him to do a low-down, mean trick to save you!”
“That’s all right then,” said the Bee Master. Then he turned to Jamie. “And you,” he said, “have you become rather well acquainted with my little partner here?”
“Oh, we’ve made a start,” said Jamie. “We haven’t had so much of a chance. The little Scout is in school, you know.”
“Well, what I’m interested in knowing,” said the Bee Master, “is whether you’ve got a feeling that my little partner plays the game square, doesn’t do any mean tricks, is willing to help the other fellow, knows how to salute and to revere the flag of our country, and has a proper reverence for the Great Giver of all good and perfect gifts.”
Jamie thought an instant and then he nodded assent.
“Yes,” he said, “yes, I think we’ve come pretty close to at least touching on all that ground. I think if you had searched the whole world over, you couldn’t have found a more genuine little human being to make your partner in the keeping of the bees.”
“All right, then,” said the Bee Master, “that’s all I wanted to know. Merely if you liked each other. If you are getting along well together. In case I should have to stay here for quite a time, or in case I should get better and have to make quite a long journey, I just wanted to know if you would keep the garden growing and keep the bees happy. You know it’s something of a trick, if you have been studying the books carefully; you know it isn’t a thing that every one can do, just keeping two acres of bees happy, two acres of life thriving.”
Then he addressed Jamie directly.“There will be times when you must have help,” he said. “I told you about the right man the last time you were here. If you will call Mr. Carey and tell him the circumstances when you find in your examination that the last cell of any hive has been filled, and the bees are growing restless, he will come and help you harvest the honey. He will show you how. Then you can render him the same service and that way you will neither one be put to the expense of hiring a party who may not be compatible to the bees. He will teach you what the first signs of foul brood are and how to go to work on it, and as far as the rest is concerned, my little side partner here can tell you anything you need to know in taking care of the bees. Can’t you, Buddy?” asked the Bee Master, tightening his arm.
“I sure can!” answered the youngster. “I have put him wise to every single thing you ever told me about a bee. I haven’t forgot the first word of anything you told me and I can pretty near hit the bull’s-eye on anything you ever read me from a book. I might not have just all of the big, high-soundin’ words, but I passed on the proper meaning.”
“Yes, I think you could,” said the Bee Master. “I will bear you out in that. I never read anything to you that you failed in getting the proper meaning.”
“And, too, you know,” said the little Scout, “that you read somepin’ wonderful! You go very slow, and you pronounce your words so that almost anything you read is like poetry, and you put in little explanations where the language gets extensive. Most anybody could understand what you read.”
Then with a sudden rush the Scout slid from the bed and, turning around, smoothed the coverlet and dipped deep in a trouser pocket and brought forth a grimy, round-cornered pair of dice. With a flourish of triumph these were laid before the Bee Master.
“I won’t get you all het up throwin’ against you to-day,” said the Scout Master. “This is the luckiest set I got. I’m goin’ to leave ’em with you so as if times come when you can have a pillow propped up, you’ll have ’em to play with. Would a nurse be too puddin’-headed to throw with you? Could you teach her just how to roll the bones right? Could you teach her?” The Scout Master stopped suddenly. “If a woman’s got sense enough to take care of sick people and give ’em their medicine right and bathe ’em and rub ’em and take away the pain, I reckon she can throw dice. So, of course, you’ll have somebody to play with you. I just kind of got the feeling that there can’t anybody do anything just exactly the way we do it.”
The Scout Master looked at the Bee Master and the Bee Master looked at the Scout Master and each smiled a smile so rarely beautiful that his whole face was trans-figured.
“Well, as a secret, between us, and not letting that tall, lean Scotsman there hear what we are saying, of course, such old friends as we are, people that have been so many years with each other, we do have ways that nobody else can quite understand. We do satisfy each other a little bit better than any one else could. I have a very nice nurse. She will play with me, and I can't tell you how fine I think it is of you to leave your best set with me. I’ll take great care of them, and if it just happens that the nurse is so puddin’-headed that she can’t roll the bones right, I’ll ask Jamie to bring them back to you some of these days.”
The Scout Master nodded. Then from a hip pocket was brought out a small roll done in tissue paper. This was spread on the bed and opened up, and before the amazed eyes of Jamie and the Bee Master there billowed over the bed yards and yards of gaudy silk and satin flowered, plaided, and striped ribbons. The Scout Master ran appreciative fingers through the gaudy mass and shook it out.
“You wouldn’t guess in a frog’s croak how I got these. A few years ago, before all the girls took to painting their mouths and their faces like the Indians, and all of them got the shingles, they was addicted to ribbons. Ribbons just raged. You couldn’t get ’em bright enough and you couldn’t get ’em broad enough, and you couldn’t get ’em stiff enough. Nannette used to look like the ribbon counter at Wanamaker’s or Marshall Field’s or Robinson’s when she’d come down to breakfast. And then, just like that,” the Scout Master snapped a thumb and second finger with a spang to show how instantaneous “that” was, “just like that, ribbons were out, and Nannette had spent all her pin money on ribbons until she had a lean and hungry look every time she passed a hot-dog stand or an Eskimo-pie wagon. Ain’t they the prettiest things! I liked to see Nannette wear ’em. She couldn’t get ’em too bright to suit me, nor too broad, nor too flowery. She had a whole drawer full of ’em. But when she shingled, I asked her if I could have ’em. She’s got a business head on her all right! She soaked me two bits, but I paid it because I knew what they were worth. Then I took ’em down to the Princess in the kitchen and I told her she could have two that she liked the best to make her cases for her embroidery silks if she’d wash the rest of ’em and iron out the creases and make ’em pretty for me. Į wasn’t too lazy to do it myself, but I wasn’t right sure how much soap to put on ’em, or what kind, and swingin’ an electric iron is a profession you got to learn. You can’t flip the dust off your shoulder into anybody’s eye unless you’ve had a good deal of dust there to flip, and that’s the way it is with swinging an electric iron. You’ve got to know how to do it before you get results.”
The Scout Master shook out the ribbons.
“Now, one thing you can do is to take ’em one at a time and just slip ’em through your fingers and look how silky they are and how lovely the flowers are and what beautiful colours there are in the stripes and how they run into each other.”
Before the eyes of the Bee Master there was held up one ribbon of delicate hues.
“You know,” said the small person, “the man who invented that—if it wasn’t a woman—whoever did it—had rainbows on the brain. See the violet and the orange and the purple? See how the colours mix and blend? That’s about as good a rainbow as God ever set in the sky to make a sign to His people that He would keep His covenants with man. S. S. That means Sunday School.”
With fingers busy with the ribbons, the Scout Master glanced over toward Jamie.
“Do you know the Bible pretty good?”
“My father was a minister,” said Jamie. “I know the Bible from cover to cover.”
“Then you know that about rainbows?” asked the Scout Master.
“Yes,” said Jamie. “I know.”
“Do you know anything prettier?” asked the Scout Master.
“No,” said Jamie. “In any literature of any language I ever learned to read, I know nothing more beautiful than the promise that is symbolized by the rainbow.”
The Scout Master stood still. Lean brown hands dropped among the ribbons. A pair of deep, expressive, tender eyes lifted to the eyes of the Bee Master.
“Do you reckon,” said the Scout Master, “that that covenant between God and man is a little like our covenant about the bees and about our sekerts?”
The fine old eyes of the Bee Master were tender and solemn and his voice was loving as he said to the little person: “Well, you know a covenant is an understanding; it’s an agreement, usually only between two people, an agreement about something important and something worth while.”
“Well, then,” said the little Scout, “that’s what ours was, and I’m keeping it, and I am going to go on keeping it. And this one, now this one is a regular flower bed with the bouquets all made up, and this one is Roman stripes like Ben Hur had for his sash when he drove Atair and Aldebaran and Antares and Riegel. Oh, joy! Oh, boy! Wouldn’t it be great stuff if we really had an honest and true amphitheater and horses like that and races like that now? These dinky little races around here where the riders come and sell out the race before they run it, and they draw cuts in the morning to decide who gets to win that day, oh, bah! don’t it make you sick? The world’s getting so rotten they don’t even run the ponies fair any more!”
“I am sorry to say,” said the Bee Master, “that you are about right in your statements. If we don’t call a stern halt, if we don’t make a right about, if we don’t come to our senses pretty soon, we won’t have very much of the ancient honour that obtained among men left anywhere in this world concerning sport or business, either one.”
Then noticing the arresting hand and the grave face of the little Scout, he added: “Are you holding the Scouts level these days?”
There was an instant of hesitation on the part of the Scout Master.“The Nice Child is all right, but Fat Ole Bill and Angel Face are eatin’ too much raw meat. If they mutiny one at a time, I can handle ’em. If the day comes very often when two or three of them go bad in a heap—” the Scout Master straightened up and lifted a face contorted by a wry grimace—“woe is me!”
Jamie and the Bee Master could not keep from laughing, much as they respected the mentality of their small partner.
“Now, as I was telling you,” continued the little person, “you can look how beautiful they are and, too, you can braid ’em. Just by getting a nurse to give you a pin and starting with two and then workin’ up and down and across like this, you can make a coverlet big enough for your shoulders to keep the cold air out, and you can make them run in waves, an you can make ’em go in loops. I don’t know anything you can play at easier or get more combinations out of when you are sick and have to lie in bed than just a bunch of beautiful ribbons. It keeps your mind on what you are doing, but it isn’t like solitaire or some of the things you can play alone that still make you think hard enough to send you to the mat if you wasn’t already there. Now, I guess we’d better go. The Bee Master will be tired. Mother said I wasn’t to stay long enough to make a sick man tired, and I wasn’t to talk enough to make him worse, and what else did she say? Oh, I know. I wasn’t to look like I wanted anything to eat, ’cause there wasn’t anything to eat at a hospital.”
The Scout Master, with a lingering stroke, pushed back the gaudy ribbons, eyed them an instant covetously, and then bent above the Bee Master and dropped a feathery kiss on his forehead, ran a hand over his hair, and said:
“You be a good boy and take your medicine and sleep when you’re told and come home quick, just as quick as you possibly can!”
With that the Scout Master whirled and marched brusquely from the room.
Jamie waited for a few words and then followed. Once outside of the hospital and on the street again, the Scout Master lifted an enigmatical face.
“You’ve seen a good deal of hospitals yourself, haven’t you?”
Jamie assented.
“Yes,” said the Scout Master, “you seem to kind of fit a hospital right now, but not so much as you did the first time I saw you. The first time I saw you, you looked like you were a hospital all by yourself. But now you don’t look much more than half a hospital. You seem as if you might belong to the garden just about as well as to the hospital. I suppose they are necessary, but oh, boy! ain’t they fierce? Everything so slippery and so quiet and so clean, and everybody on tiptoe and whisperin’. If I had a mint of money, if I had gobs and stacks of money, I’d build a hospital where all the windows opened on to a race track and you could see a horse race and an automobile race twice a day, and I’d have bands and radios and moving pictures. Gee! the hospitals they have these days make me sick when there’s nothing the matter with me!”Then suddenly the Scout Master took Jamie’s hand and looked up at him.
“Say, what’s the matter with Mrs. Cameron? What makes her cry so much, and what’s the use of her lookin’ like a funeral without anybody dead, and why don't Lolly come home?”
“Now, look here,” said Jamie, “you’re asking me questions I can’t answer. In the first place, I didn’t know that Margaret Cameron was crying. I didn’t suppose anything could happen that would wring tears from a woman so self-contained as she is. And in the next place, what could I know about Lolly?”
“Well,” said the Scout Master, “she is crying a lot these days ’cause she’s right at the end of the car line where I get off with the Scouts to play brigand in the canyon, and robbers’ cave in the mountains, and sand fights on the beach, and to go bathing. She’s right where I see her every time I come past, and nearly every time I see her lately she’s wiping her eyes. It might be about the Bee Master, but there ain’t any use for her to spill the brine when he might get well and he might come home. If she knew he wouldn’t ever, I could understand it. I reckon it’s about Lolly because she don’t seem to come home and, of course, when she isn’t at home, Mrs. Cameron doesn’t know whether she’s sick or well, and she ain’t goin’ to feel comfortable as long as she doesn’t know.”
The Scout Master paused in intent thought a minute and then continued: “I reckon that’s kind of a silly thing to say. Lolly’s teaching school and, of course, when she’s teaching school she can’t come home, at least not until it’s time for vacation. If it was vacation and she could come and didn’t come, why, that’d be a horse of a different colour, and there’d be some reason for getting droopy.”
Merely to carry on the conversation, Jamie inquired: “Is Lolly a pretty girl?”
The Scout Master scuffled along the sidewalk, glancing from right to left, dodging pedestrians, watching passing cars for their numbers and direction, and replied en route: “Oh, joy! Maybe you’d call her pretty. If you like taffy molasses hair and big blue eyes and pink cheeks and a baby smile and about as much notion of whether you’re going to do it or whether you ain’t as a wave coming in, why, Lolly’s a pretty girl. But if you ask me, I’d tell you that if you want to see a pretty girl, if you want to see a right royal, high steppin’, cat’s whiskers kind of a girl, just turn your optics loose on Molly!”
“This sounds interesting,” said Jamie. “Can you give me any instructions as to where I’d have to be in order to ‘turn my optics loose on Molly’?”
“No,” said the Scout Master, “not during the school season, I couldn’t. Vacations it’s easy, unless the coming vacation is going to be different from all the vacations that have gone before. All that have gone before Molly comes home, at least part of the time, and then we have picnics and she tramps with us and scouts with us, and we sure do have a real time when Molly’s on the job.”
“Her home is near here?” inquired Jamie, beginning to take interest.“Well, how goofy!” exclaimed the Scout Master. “Have you lived over a month beside Mrs. Cameron and she hasn’t told you a word about Molly and Lolly and about Don?”
“It just happens,” said Jamie, “that when we’ve talked together we’ve talked about bees and flowers and food. She hasn’t told me so very much about her children.”
“Well, they aren’t her children,” said the Scout Master. “At least, Molly and Donald aren’t. Molly and Donald are twins and their father and Mr. Cameron were brothers, and when both of them went down in the boat the night of the big storm, why, Mrs. Cameron brought the kids home to her house and she helped both of ’em to get their schooling, so Molly could teach and so Don could work. He’s electricity. He knows a world about radio and he puts in wires in different places. I think you call it ‘installations,’ ‘Installations’ would be the right word, wouldn’t it?”
“It sounds right,” said Jamie. “And who’s Lolly?”
“Well, Lolly belonged to Margaret Cameron before she was married. Sometime, somewhere, she must have been married to some other man, and I dunno whether he went by the graveyard route or got eliminated by a divorce judge. Sometimes I think I’d like to be a divorce judge. It’d be fun to hear all the folks telling what’s their troubles and why they can’t pull even and who’s to blame, and sometimes I see women that I’d just naturally separate from any man. I see a lot of ’em that don’t look like they were keeping house or tending to their babies or could come within a mile telling whether their kids’ toenails were cut or their ears spooned, and things like that, that my mother’s always fussin’ about. And, of course, journeying along I do at times see men that need suppression.”
The hands went down and out. The men who needed it were suppressed at that instant.
“There’s some men, you know, just so trifling and just so full of home brew, or some other kind of brew, that no woman could live with ’em and think anything of herself. Maybe I wouldn’t like it. Maybe it would be kind of a painful job. I don’t know that I’d want it. But I’ll tell you this about things I do want: I’ll go to my grave disappointed if I don’t ever get to drive across this country from ocean to ocean in an automobile! One of the kind that’s got front seats that let back and make a bed, and a little cup-board and an ice box and a pantry on the running board, and sleeping rolls and everything. Maybe I’d have a trailer. Maybe I’d pick up some things along the way to bring home for Mother’s garden. I don’t know just what I’d do, but you mark my word, I’m goin’ to twist it around some way so I get to go before long! Of course, the best thing about it is camping by the wayside and sleeping on the ground and meeting different people and seeing the country when you got time to look at it. You can’t get much being whizzed through on a railroad train, and all the places you think might be a little bit interesting or have a bear or a deer, there’d be an Indian or bandit or something, those are the places you are whizzed by the fastest.”“That’s the truth,” said Jamie. “That’s quite the truth.”
Their car came down the line and the Scout Master was on the platform before Jamie had really convinced himself that the number and destination were right and could follow suit. Again on the way home, the Scout Master frankly leaned over against Jamie and waited for his circling arm and went sound asleep until the point came that brought the inevitable awakening.
On the way near the hot-dog stand at a comer toward which Jamie felt a slight propulsion on landing from the car, he said to the Scout Master: “Do you know, youngster, you are doing what the big folks call ‘burning the candle at both ends’?”
To his amazement, the Scout Master tuned in:
“‘But ah, my foes! and oh, my friends!
It makes a lovely light!’”
“That may be all right,” said Jamie, “and it may be a brand of philosophy that will do for grown folks, but that’s rotten for the kiddies. There isn’t anything you are doing that’s worth stunting your growth for.”
“Stunting my what?” said the Scout Master.
“I mean,” said Jamie, “that you are exercising too hard and sleeping too little, you are going such a pace that you are not as big and strong as you should be. You are on such a strain mastering those three big boys you play with that you are not getting the strength in your own arms and legs that they have in theirs. If you don’t go a little slower and eat more properly cooked food at home and eat less hot dogs while you are scouting, just what you prophesied will happen to you. If you take such pride in being the Scout Master, you’d better remember that you can’t hold that office unless you are physically fit. You’d better cut out some of the hiking and some of the fights and a whole lot of irregular eating.”
“Sky Pilot!” scoffed the Scout Master. “You sound like I had the hoof and mouth disease.”
And thereupon Jamie was treated to a countenance of such solemnity, to folded hands and uprolled eyes—for one instant he caught an expression with which he had been familiar in his boyhood—that he could not help laughing.
“You know,” said Jamie, very soberly, “that I’ve been thinking lately that being a preacher wouldn’t be such a bad profession. You might do a whole lot worse things than try to teach other men to come clean, to shoot straight, to ride hard, to be real men spiritually as well as physically.”
The Scout Master shuffled ahead and beat Jamie to the hot-dog stand. Also, the price for two was forth-coming.
“My treat to-day! And that looks kind of rotten to let you treat the last time when there was five of us and take it myself when there are only two. It’ll be my treat the next time and a half.”
Jamie stood staring.
“You figure your finances to the penny?”“I do,” said the Scout Master. “About the worst mess you can get into in this world is the one you get into when you don’t keep your millions straight. Dad says he guesses all the trouble in the world that is not about women is about money, and mostly if it’s about one of them, it’s about the other one, too.”
Having settled the financial end of the transaction, the Scout Master gave undivided attention to the hot dog. The combination struck Jamie as about what he wanted, also. It appealed to him further that he had no business, at that critical period, to partake of the combination that was entailed by the Scout Master’s idea of a perfect treat. He hesitated over it a second, then came off triumphant, although slightly humiliated to fail in being a good fellow.
“You know,” he said to the Scout Master, “I’ve been very sick and I’m not long out of the hospital and the doctor’s care. I think I won’t put my stomach up against that combination of yours. I’ll just go home and take a glass of orange juice instead.”
It touched his heart with particular appeal that the Scout Master said instantly: “Well, I’d go and take the orange juice with you, but I’ve got this started and I can’t waste it, so I have to pay for it and eat it, but the next time we’ll take the orange juice together, if orange juice is your limit until you get well.”
And then, trotting along the street beside Jamie, past a mouthful of the tantalizing combination, the Scout Master said: “Oh, gee! ain’t it goofy to be sick? I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t have a hot dog when I wanted it. Of all the things there is to eat in the whole world, I don’t know of anything I like better. Mother likes them, too. Dad doesn’t come in so strong on them ’cause he’s got a stomach himself every once and a while. City Editor and war did it. But as yet, glory be! they haven’t either of them put the grand kibosh on me. The day they do, I’ll leap from the pinnacle (I got ‘pinnacle’ in geography) of the highest rock in the bay and go out with the undertow.”
“That would be pathetic,” said Jamie. “Why do you want to cause your friends such grief and deprive the Bee Master of his partner and me of about the only friend I have on earth, unless the Bee Master has decided to be my friend.”
“Of course the Bee Master is your friend,” said the little Scout. “I knew the Bee Master was your friend the minute I faced up to the jacqueranda and saw you sittin’ on his particular bench. Didn’t you notice me keep straight on coming?”
“I certainly did,” said Jamie. “I registered that fact in my mentality with great pride and pleasure. I shall always remember that when you caught your first view of me, you kept straight on coming.”
“It was the same way with Molly,” said the Scout Master. “First peep I ever got at her I kept right on coming. I walked right up to her and into her just as far as I could get at the first séance. Do you know what a ‘séance’ is?”
Jamie said he did.“All right, then. A séance is so goofy that I didn’t know but I’d have to tell you about it like bees and other things you need educating up on. But getting back to Molly—there’s something about her that’s got a pull. Every one of the boys just took to her like you take to buckwheat cakes and maple syrup or waffles that you get from the waffle man on the beach, or anything like that that you want all you can hold of when you think about it and want to go back in a few days for more. Molly’s like that. Something that you want awful bad when you see her and every few days you want her just as bad.”
“Tell me about Molly. She sounds interesting,” said Jamie.
By this time they had reached the gate. Jamie opened it and the Scout Master led the way to the seat under the jacqueranda.
“Well, telling about Molly is a pretty long story. Molly had hard luck. She didn’t have any mother to begin with and then she lost her father. Then there was a good while that she had the Devil’s own time with Don. He just seemed bound and determined to do everything in the world except the thing she wanted him to. She thought she was never goin’ to make anything out of him. She thought just dead sure he’d go some way that wouldn’t get him anywhere and I don’t know whether she ever would have got him pulled through or net, if it hadn’t always been Lolly in the background. There never was a time since I’ve known ’em that he didn’t think she was just old peaches and persimmons, alligator pears, and everything squashy like that. When he wouldn’t do anything “cause it was honest and square and straight and ‘cause it was what he should do ’cause Molly wanted him to, why that very same thing he’d do for Lolly if she’d give him a kiss or pat him a little or laugh at him or coax him along with a petting party. I like Molly ’cause she ain’t any all-day sucker. She just comes to the point and she knows what the point she’s coming to is before she starts for it. There ain’t any meandering about Molly!”
The Scout Master showed in deft hand work the straight way that Molly went.
“And I reckon, if I was grown up and wanting a job to earn money at, that I’d rather have the job Molly’s got than any job in the world.”
“You surprise me,” said Jamie. “You astonish me! I’d have thought teaching school was the last profession in the world that you’d choose.”
“Yes, but in these days there’s different kinds of teaching school,” said the Scout Master. “The kind that Molly does isn’t the kind you’re thinking about. It isn’t shut up in a room and staying in one place and doing the same thing over and over. The kind Molly does is called ‘teaching Americanism.’ Did you ever know how good-looking and how interesting a lot of little round-the-world children can be—a lot of little Italians and Greeks and Spaniards and Indians and Hawaiians and Japanese and Chinese, cutest little brown things with big round eyes? You ought to hear ’em sing ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee!’ You ought to see ‘em salute the flag! You ought to hear ‘em learn the words that mean that there isn’t any country in all the world so big and fine and nice to live in as the United States. You ought to see ’em learn that their heads are made to think with, and their hands are made to work with; their feet are made to march with; their eyes are made to see with, to see straight, to see all there is. Oh, Gee! I like Molly’s job! I like to help her when she is having a picnic on the beach with ’em"?
“I think that school sounds mighty fine myself,” said Jamie. “Would you take me some day when Molly’s teaching Americanism on the beach?”
“Sure I would!” said the Scout Master. “Molly would be glad to see you. Molly’s always glad to see everybody that believes in America and believes in God. She’s strong on both of them. Anybody that shoots straight and rides hard and plays square, like I told you. You ought to see her shoot and ride. If I was a millionaire and had money to burn, the first thing I’d get, after I got the kind of a horse that I’d like to have for myself, would be the kind of a horse Molly would really like to have.”
The Scout Master arose:
“Just about now I speed for home with barely time left to shift to my other wardrobe, provided it ain’t been bandited, and left a dark cloud hanging over me.”
“Anything I can do to avert trouble?” inquired Jamie.
“Not a thing, old dear,” said the Scout Master. “Not a thing. But I thank you, I thank you heaps for your good intentions.”
The Scout Master cracked heels, laid a palm over the region of the pit of the stomach, and bowed low. Then, with a whirl, the youngster started down the walk. Only a few steps had been covered when the small figure turned and the Scout Master called back: “I didn’t have time to-day, but remind me the next time I come and I’ll do the Lame Duck and the Wet Hen for you. I made ’em up myself. I have to have a bathing suit and a dock to do ’em right, but I could pretend I had on a bathing suit and the walk was a dock and off of it was water, and show you how it goes. I’m nifty about the Wet Hen. I think I do her spiffy.”
“I’ll remember,” said Jamie. “I’ll surely remember.”
He waited before turning to the house because he liked to see the agility, the free sweep, the unfailing grace with which the little Scout skinned the line fence between the grounds of the Bee Master and Margaret Cameron.
The next morning before Jamie took up the line of march for the beach, he called his neighbour. Since she said nothing herself he ignored the fact that her eyes were red and her hands tremulous, but he did wonder. He wondered exceedingly whether it was the Lolly he had not liked so particularly well from the Scout Master’s description, or whether it was the illness of the Bee Mastet that worried so fine a woman as Margaret Cameron.
Jamie stretched himself on his bed and laid his hands on the dressings that covered his side. Then he looked up at his neighbour.
“Margaret Cameron, you are on oath,” he said. “Your right hand’s in the air and you are solemnly swearing that you are going to tell me whether or not one month of the best régime we could devise has taken the colour and the fever out of this wound any. I haven’t had the nerve to look myself, for I cannot face it very well except in a mirror, which is not altogether satisfactory. Let’s go!”
Jamie did not know as he shut his eyes, he did not know that the skin of his face was tightly drawn across its bonework. He did not realize that his hands were trembling as he raised them to uncover his left breast. Margaret Cameron came to the side of the bed and leaned over him and looked intently.
“Turn slightly toward me,” she ordered, sharply.
Jamie’s eyes popped open and at what he saw on her face his heart began to leap and to bound and before he knew what he was doing he was upright and he had both her hands.
“Ch, Margaret!” he cried, “are you sure? Are you sure it’s that much better?”
Margaret was gripping his hands as tight as ever she could.
“Ch, Jamie boy,” she said, “it’s well nigh a miracle the way the colour’s fading out, and as sure as you are six feet high, it is drawing together at the bottom! It is coming clean, and there is more flesh over your ribs and across your chest! You’re not so lean! I’ve been thinking I could see it on your hands and in your face, and at that we haven’t been trying so much for flesh building as we have for blood purification. If we can get the blood stream clean, ’most any time we can begin flesh-building. Jamie boy, I’d say you are going to make it. I’d say, if you hold steady and keep it up six months, you can close that ugly spot. It’s going to leave a nasty scar, but scars are the aftermath of any war. If your blood will purify, if you can get in working order, there is nothing to stop you from being the man God meant you to be when you were born.”
Then Jamie took Margaret Cameron tight in his arms and kissed her over and over again on the top of her head. Then he released her and looked after her wonderingly, because she was going from the back door, her shoulders shaken with sobs deeper and longer than the most motherly of women need shed over the joy of a step in the right direction for even a highly considered neighbour.
Slowly Jamie turned from the back door. Slowly he went back to the bed upon which he had lain. Slowly he got down on his knees and clasped his shaking hands and laid his forehead on them, and then, reverently, deeply, from the bottom of his heart, he thanked the Lord.
Then he headed straight for the ice box and drank a pint of tomato juice.