The Keeper of the Bees/Chapter 4
In the Garden of the Bees
IT WAS afternoon of the following day before James MacFarlane awoke, and he did not regain consciousness feeling either refreshed or invigorated. On trying to assume a sitting posture he discovered that he was sore through and through, that every bone in his body ached with an ache that was nearly intolerable, and when he set his feet on the floor and examined them carefully and then looked at his shoes, he realized that the shoes were not going to contain the feet for some time to come.
Remembering the Bee Master’s offer of clothing and his bed, he hobbled through the house until he found the bedroom, and he uttered a thankful exclamation when he stumbled into the bathroom adjoining. A thorough soaking in hot water with a cold shower afterward helped considerably with the ache and the soreness. He borrowed of underclothing he found in a chiffonier in the bedroom to make himself comfortable, and a pair of moccasins on a shelf were the thing for his feet.
Then the scent of cooked food assailed his nostrils, and as he came into the living room, he had at the door his first vision of Margaret Cameron.
Margaret Cameron did not in the least resemble Jamie’s mother, but she resembled a woman who might well have been typical of a universal mother, and exactly the right kind of a mother at that. Her face was beautiful with a severely cut beauty that always indicates an indomitable spirit. With one glance at Margaret Cameron one would have been safe in arriving at the conclusion that she would be drawn and quartered before she would renounce her religion, her country, her political opinions, or her family. She was tall; she carried no ounce of superfluous flesh. Her hair was white and her eyes were blue. There was colour in her lips and cheeks. She looked wonderful to Jamie when she smiled at him.
“I had a ring from Doctor Grayson this morning,” she said. “He thought you would be sleeping and he didn’t want to waken you. He told me you were to take care of things here until the Bee Master comes back to us. I never was sorrier about anything than I was over being away when he was stricken. A young relative of mine needed me sorely; there was death in her family and I was forced to go to her.”
“I think,” said Jamie, “that I found everything the Bee Master required and I believe there was no time lost.”
There was a hint of finality in the slight gesture in which Margaret Cameron threw out her hands.
“I haven’t a doubt,” she said, bluntly, “but the Bee Master had everything he needed. There is no one on earth who wouldn’t do anything Michael Worthington wanted. The point is that he was forced to call on a stranger for help that I, as his friend of long standing, would have loved to give.”
“I see,” said Jamie, quietly. “I am sorry you weren’t here. I think you are right about any one doing anything he asked, because here I am, and any one less suited for what he asked of me couldn’t have been found in the State. But because he asked it, I am here to try.”
A dry smile crossed Margaret Cameron’s face. Her eyes narrowed as they followed a line of vision that carried through the living room, through the combination kitchen and dining room, across the back porch and out to unmeasured leagues of the sea beyond—the Pacific Sea, the peaceful ocean that smiles and lures and invites and so very seldom shows the fangs and the jaws of the monster that lies lurking in its depths.
“I understand,” she said, quietly. “I know why you are here and I can see that you are not fit for work, Doctor Grayson mentioned that you looked mighty seedy. He thought you might have been one of ours, across.”
Jamie ran his fingers in his pocket and produced a Service Bar and two decorations for valour and held them toward her, and Margaret Cameron came forward and took his unsteady white hand in both of hers and said: “God love you, boy! I’ve got the Bee Master’s routine by heart myself, and while I don’t know as much about the bees as he has really been making a business of teaching the little Scout, I know enough to show you where the water pans are and how to keep them filled with the right combination of water—strange, but they like a sprinkle of salt in it—and I can go over the flowers with you and show you which need the most water and when. I think if you rest a few days, you can make it all right, and I will cook your meals as I always have cooked the Bee Master’s. Only you might as well tell me what you particularly like and how you want it. No two people have tastes alike.”
“That’s mighty good of you,” said Jamie. “I am ready to confess that I am ravenous this minute and whatever you have brought will be fine, I am sure.”
So he went into the kitchen and ate the food that Margaret Cameron had provided for him. He learned how to operate the gas stove in case he wanted a hot drink at any time. He was shown where a small ice chest stood on the back porch in which there was daily deposited a bottle of cream and a bottle of milk, and he noticed a basket of eggs and some fruit, and then together they went over the garden and he located the different hose attachments and was given exhaustive instructions about watering the flowers.
Noticing how very unsteady he was on his feet and how terribly those members were swollen, seeing his thin white hands with the blue veins standing in ridges, Margaret Cameron drew her own conclusions. As they came up the back walk she advanced very slowly to give Jamie time to keep up with her, and when they reached the back door, she asked of him: “Are you bee immune?”
Jamie looked at her in a speculative silence for a moment, pondering that question, and then he said: “I’m not at all sure that I know what you mean by ‘bee immune.’”
“Why, I mean,” said Margaret Cameron, “that there are people in this world whom bees won’t tolerate. There are people to whom it would mean certain and mighty unpleasant death to go down either side line of this garden. There are people whom a bee naturally hates, and there are others with whom they instantly make friends. One man may lift the roof of a hive and scoop up a handful of working bees. There’s a man who comes to help the Bee Master sometimes who carries bees around in the crown of his hat. But that doesn’t prove that they are a safe proposition for everyone.”
Jamie thought that over.
“How do I go about finding out whether I am ‘bee immune’?” he asked, as he leaned against the casing facing the woman before him and noting that she was almost his own height.
“Right there,” said Margaret Cameron, “is where the little Scout comes in. There isn’t anything the Bee Master knows about bees that he hasn’t carefully passed on to his side partner—his first assistant. I imagine you will have a visitor to-day or to-morrow. If you don’t, I will telephone. Take my advice and keep away from the hives until you get your instructions.”
Then Margaret Cameron gathered into a basket the dishes that Jamie had been using, crossed the side yard, and through a small gate entered her own premises.
Jamie stood and watched her going to a low white house that seemed cheerful and homelike, that appeared as if it might have required the same amount of labour and the same length of time to construct, and yet,in someway, lacked the luring charm of the home of the Bee Master.
Refreshed by the food, Jamie went out to the middle of the road and stood looking at the house and grounds. There was such a slight variation in the width of the eaves and the angle of the roof, one could scarcely have told where lay the difference between it and the other houses that stretched away down the street.
As he stood studying it, Jamie had difficulty in defining the difference to himself. Maybe it was the setting, the whitewashed paling fence, and the quaint sloping veranda. Maybe it was the particular colour of paint that preserved the wood . Maybe it was the rare vines, the odorous shrubs, the gay flowers clambering everywhere with absolutely no hint of order or precision. Anyway, there was something about the house shaded by tall eucalyptus trees and lacy jacqueranda, with its gaudy surrounding carpet of blue flower magic that gave to it, Jamie could think of no other term, a welcoming face. It seemed to be a human thing and it seemed to smile the warmest kind of welcome.
Then Jamie looked beyond it to the scintillating blue of the sea and the equal blue of the sky, and then he looked higher. He stood there thinking intently, and before he realized what he was doing, he had repeated a phrase in his father’s tongue that he had used a few days before: “You are unco gude to me, Lord!”
Then Jamie smiled through misty eyes at the house, and he went into it, carefully noting the side seats and the delicate vines trained over the veranda. He looked at the rugs on the floors and decided that they were Persians of antiquity and price. He was unschooled in rug lore. He knew that the furniture was antique and priceless. He ran his fingers appreciatively over pieces of rosewood and mahogany that were old and shining from use and that had been designed by master craftsmen long ago, across far seas.
The bookcases, ranging from floor to ceiling almost around the room, held his attention for a few moments, and then he stopped before a writing desk, open, the quill of the Master in the small horn holder of shot, the sheets of an unfinished letter lying on the pad. With that fineness inherent in the heart of a gentleman of Scotland, Jamie picked up the sheets, lifted the pad, laid them face down on the mahogany of the writing desk and returned the pad to its place. The letter would lie there untouched until the return of the Bee Master.
Then Jamie’s eyes wandered to the case above the writing desk. He had been reading names prominent in literature from the beginning, but each volume in that small case seemed to be either completely concerning or in some way related to bees. At one instant Jamie’s hand lifted to open one of the doors. Probably its weight roused him to the fact that he had better rest a few more days before he began on a task that might he over quickly or might be long. In detail he went through the adjoining sleeping room, noting its neatness, the precision of its arrangement, the delicate beauty of the etchings and engravings, the rareness of the books that lay here and there, the quiet grace of the furnishings.
He went back through the kitchen and the back porch and came out into the open shine of the afternoon sun. He was thin enough and cold enough to love its warmth.
As he stood there looking down the stretch of the garden to the sea, he thought it comprised the most beautiful picture that he had ever seen. It covered two acres of the Sierra Madres where they meet the Pacific. A crude walk, fashioned from stones collected from the mountain-side, ran in steps down to the beach below. There was a pergola loaded with grapes as they are allowed to run in the gardens of the East but lavishly among them grew wisteria and clematis, roses and vines and vines whose names, habits, or flowering, he did not know. On either hand, sometimes with abrupt juttings of big rocks, sometimes in tiny fertile plateaus, sometimes on gentle slopes, there grew every fruit tree that loves to flourish in the soil and sun of California—loquats and figs, oranges and lemons, plums and peaches, pears and nectarines, dates and grapefruit—only a tree or two of each, and between and beneath them tiny cultivated beds of vegetables.
Prominently bordering the walk halfway down the mountain-side, staked and rankly growing, Jamie’s eye was caught by a blare of purple-red where stalks of tomatoes lifted huge fruits, some of them bursting with ripeness, and on either hand everywhere, bushes, shrubs, vines and flowers, and flowers, and yet more flowers, and because Jamie recognized nearly each one of these, he knew mother and his grandmother had grown. There were they were the quaint, old-fashioned flowers that his Madonna lilies that, in the warm soil and the luring sunshine, had opened to bloom at two and three feet less height than in the cold gardens of the East. Carpeting around them were beds of cinnamon pinks, touching the fresh salt air with their spicy sweetness, mignonette and heliotrope, forget-me-nots and great blue blooms of myrtle the like of which Jamie never had seen—a whole world of flowers and fruit.
On either hand, steadily, slowly, came the low hum of millions of working bees—bees hived, not in the ugly flat houses used in numberless apiaries he had passed on his journey, but each stand in a separate spot raised above the earth on a low platform and having a round pointed roof that gave to the hives a beauty, a quaintness, an appropriateness to the location. On close examination Jamie found that each hive stood in a bed of myrtle blue as the sky. And then he saw that back of the hives the fences were a wall of the blue of plumbago, delicate sheets of it. And above, one after another, great lacy jacquerandas lifting clouds of blue to the heavens. And then he realized that, facing the hives, around and near them, there was a world of blue: blue violets, heliotrope, forget-me-nots, blue verbenas, blue lilies, larkspur, bluebells, phlox, blue vervain, blue and yet more blue. Past his head and face, lured by the reds and brilliant colours around the house, darted the jewel-throated and crowned humming birds, but the bees lived in a whole world of blue. It seemed as if the blue flowers dearly loved to creep up to these white hives, to vine around them, to cling to them, to bloom above them. Alone, close to the back walk, Jamie noticed several big hives that stood by themselves where he would have to pass within the distance of a few feet when he made his first journey the length of the garden, out of the gate and across the strip of sand to where the ocean, in a great bay, came lapping up the shore and then slid back again, gently, softly, with only a low murmur song that would be the finest thing in the world to lull a tired man to sleep.
Slowly, with wavering feet, Jamie made his way across the back end of the house. Under a jacqueranda tree on the east side, he saw the most attractive bench. So he went and sat upon it at just the precise spot where the branches of the tree threw a mottled shade over his head and left his lean body stretched in the sunshine. He sat and tried to think. Because the sky was so beautiful, and the sea was so beautiful, and the garden was so painfully beautiful, there came to him the old thought he had dragged around for the past two years: How much longer? How much time had he, anyway? How soon was the sky going to lose her eternal verity and the sea to cease smiling, and flower faces and bird song and the hum of the bee and the chirp of the cricket—how soon were they to be over for him?
Because he had tried himself so sorely, because he was so desperately strained and over-tired from his journey, he was not very hopeful. Everything concerning himself looked the blackest it ever had. The bandages that he had removed for his bath bore brilliant stains, telling anew the story of angry wounds that refused to heal. So that afternoon Jamie’s individual case seemed more hopeless to him than it had seemed when he had arisen in hot rebellion and walked out from the protection of his government. But the irony of the whole thing was that, when for himself matters could scarcely have been blacker, all inadvertently he had fallen into one of the most exquisite beauty spots that the face of the world had to boast.
There are only a few places where love and artisanship build a small house with a welcoming face. There are only a few places where love and good horse sense build a garden, half of wildings and half of quaint old-fashioned things that evolved without the help of crossing and fertilization and other makeshifts that produce growth so rampant and sizable that it is difficult to believe that the blooms are living things. There are only a few places where the side of a mountain walks down, and slides down, and jumps down, and meanders winding, flowering ways until it reaches the white sands of a brilliantly blue sea, and it is easy to believe that such a location would naturally be the home of tiny round white houses with round roofs where millions of bees make honey to sweeten the food of a world.
It is easy to see that the hum of the bees and the scent of the flowers would draw the birds to a place like this, and across any stretch of ocean shore line there is bound to be the wide sweep of great gray pelicans and the black winged anhingas, and the wild ducks, the snow -white of the gulls and the scimitar-winged sea swallows, like birds of carved ivory, arching and sailing for pure love of blue sky and blue water and to indulge the powers of flight. There are bound to be Mother Carey’s chickens and little stilt-legged sandpipers and killdeers tilting along the shore, and there are sure to be little children digging in the sand, and grown folk having an hour of pleasure stretched in the sunshine, asking earth to heal their bodies and the Sun God to heal their hearts.
As Jamie sat on the bench under the jacqueranda feeling so ill that the tears of self-pity were stinging the lids of his wide gray eyes, he vaguely wondered what it would do to him if he were to go down to the sea and soak his body in the cold salt water and let the sun drive home every medicinal property that sea water contains. He had tried a year of hot water from the boiling bowels of the earth. How would it do to try a year of cold water from the seas of the surface and the sun of the heavens?
Jamie’s lips twisted bitterly. He was probably as near Heaven as he ever would be until Heaven passed him by, and it might be that only a few days would end his tenure of the little white house and the mountain garden, and it would be his lot to move on until his case grew even more desperate than it was at that minute.