The Partnership Baby
WHEN he dismissed the taxi and started up the front walk with the bundle and the suitcase, Jamie was surprised to find the little Scout sitting on the front steps beside a bottle of milk half consumed, with crumb decorations prominently on the face lifted inquiringly in his direction.
“Well, look who’s here!” said the little Scout. “My gracious! you look exactly like Dad when he brought Jimmy home from the hospital!”.
“Well,” said Jamie, “that’s a very good way for me to look. Have you been sitting here ever since I left?”
“No,” said the little Scout. “I went through the back window and lay on the foot of your bed and slept about three hours, and then I was hungry and I went over to Margaret Cameron’s to ask her for something to eat, and I run into her just as she was leaving. She said Molly had telephoned her to come in for a few days. I am waiting at the choich to tell you you’ll have to get your food the best you can until she comes back. Didn’t strike me until after she was gone that I’d forgotten to ask her for something to eat myself, but I knew she wouldn’t care, so I climbed in the back porch window and got a chunk of bread out of the bread box. The milk’s yours—all that ain’t used. Say, Bo, honest, what you got there?”
Jamie sat down suddenly. His solution of what he was to do with James Lewis MacFarlane, Junior, had been to transfer him to the care of Margaret Cameron. He had planned to ask his neighbour to take the child and care for it until he could find the right kind of a woman to undertake the job. In the back of his head there had been a hope as he had driven out that Margaret would use on the baby the same cleanliness, deftness, and expert care with which Jamie had not a doubt, from her brand of housekeeping and cooking, she had reared her own family. Of all the bad luck that he had experienced in his unlucky days, nothing had been much worse than that Margaret Cameron should have chosen to go pleasuring, should have selected the day to start a vacation when he needed her the very worst. Jamie set down the suitcase and produced the front door key.
“Unlock the door,” he said to the little Scout, and together they went in.
Jamie laid the small bundle on the davenport and then he stepped back and drew his hands over his perplexed face and said to the Scout Master, “I wish you’d tell me what am I going to do.”
“What’s eatin’ you?” inquired the small person, casually.
Jamie pointed to the bundle.
“That’s a baby,” he said, “a live baby that needs nursing and feeding and loving, and I thought Margaret Cameron would be the woman who’d do it. Are you sure she said she had gone visiting and she would be gone no telling how long?”
“She didn’t say ‘no telling how long,’” said the Scout Master. “She said ‘a few days.’ I should think a few days would be a week, maybe.”
“And what,” demanded Jamie, “what am I going to do in ‘a week maybe’ with a live baby?”
“Aw, feed it to the birds and let’s get on with our work! We’re wastin’ a lot of time on the garden,” said the little Scout.
“You look here,” said Jamie, “you aren’t talking about a crust of bread. That’s a baby in that bundle, a tiny boy who wants his chance to live and to grow and to paddle a canoe and to ride a horse and to be a Scout Master just as bad as you do!”
“Aw,” said the disgruntled small person.
Then the Scout Master walked over and lifted a square of fine white flannel with a border of forget-me-nots, and peered down at what was beneath it. Suddenly the Scout Master dropped to a kneeling position, leaned forward and looked intently. Then a softened face turned to Jamie over a lean shoulder.
“You’ll have to get a baby bottle,” was the verdict. “’Tis a nice baby. It’s an awful nice baby! It’s the cutest little thing. It’s as pretty as our Jimmy was the first time I ever saw him, and I thought there wouldn’t ever be another baby as nice as he was. But they is. Far as I can see, this baby has got just as nice clothes and just as pretty a face and just as cute little hands as our baby had. Say, where’d you get him?”
“He’s mine,” said Jamie. “His name is James Lewis MacFarlane, Junior.”
“Well, I’ll be darned!” said the little Scout. “Ain’t the world gettin’ full of James and Jamies and Jimmies! I know about two dozen. Dad’s name begins with James and our baby’s Jimmy, and this baby will be Jamie and you’re Jamie. You wouldn’t think, with all the names in the back of the dictionary and names by the yard in the Bible and fool names that people invent, that so many folks would have to run to James. Say, what you going to do with him?”
“That’s exactly the question,” said Jamie. “What am I going to do with him?”
“Hm-m-m-m!” said the little Scout. “Lemme think.” Jamie had the impression that he came closer to seeing thought than he ever had before. The face of the youngster was drawn with thought. First the body sank back on the heels and then the heels curled under and the floor made the seat. One arm leaned against the davenport. One hand, from fingering the blanket, crept up and closed over the little red fingers of the newborn baby. The little Scout looked up.
“Pull down that window blind,” came the order. “You got to have a dim light. Their eyes are riley for the first few days. They can’t see. If they get too much light, they go cross-eyed.”
There was a return of a few minutes to thought. Then the little Scout began to think aloud. “My! ain’t we accumulatin’! Talk about compound interest! I’ll say things are compoundin’ for this partnership! Here all unbeknownst to ourselves we get a house and flowers and trees and bees and now, by gracious! we get a baby! And, of course, if we got it and it’s yours, we got to take care of it. Say, where’s his mother?”
Jamie hesitated a second and decided that the truth was the quickest and the easiest.
“I hate to tell you, Buddy,” he said. “I hate to tell you, but the truth is this baby hasn’t any mother. The task of getting him into the world was too big for her. She paid for his life with hers. You will be glad to know that she was like your Aunt Beth. She went over to see what Heaven had in store for her laughing, laughing out loud, laughing the gayest laugh of contentment and exultation.”
From the floor the little Scout stared up at Jamie with wide eyes and slowly nodded a corroborative head. “I know, that was Aunt Beth’s smile come true. It’s the kind of a laugh that the smile she had would have been if it had broken through and come out loud. I told you being dead was beautiful, but I don’t see what’s going to become of this little new Jamie. You never saw the amount of oiling and bathing and bandaging and changing and dressing and weighing, you never saw anything to equal the things Mother does to our Jimmy.”
Then suddenly the little Scout came up to one knee and then the other, and then slowly assumed an erect position, then from the depths of preoccupation, stumbled to the telephone and took down the receiver and gave a number. Jamie stood breathlessly, fearfully, and listened to a one-sided conversation.
“I want Mom.
“Hello, Mom, is that you?
“Say, Mom, we got the dirtiest gyp out here this morning! We got a little splinter new boy baby just like Jimmy when he first came from the hospital, just as nice and sweet and everything. And, Mom, this is the dirty part of it. Getting him here was too much for his mother. She went dead on us and we ain’t got her, and we are got the baby, and his name’s Jamie after his dad—just like our baby! And, Mom, we thought Margaret Cameron would take him and take care of him for us, and that’s another dirty thing! She’s gone off on a visit and she won’t be home for three or four days, and we ain’t got a thing to feed him!”
The little Scout clapped a hand over the mouthpiece, turned to Jamie, and in a strained whisper inquired: “Have we got any clothes?”
“I think so,” said Jamie.
The small person turned back.
“We got oodles of clothes. Everything we need. What we need is somebody to do the oiling and the feeding and the changing——”
Then the little Scout sprang straight in the air and gave a shout.
“Bully for you, Mom! I knew you’d come across! Do you see why I didn’t ask? I was givin’ you your chance! I knew all the time you would! Least, I was dead sure you would. And say, Mom, take your roadster and step on the gas! Any minute he may begin to yell, and we don’t know what todo. He just came in the night. Jamie’s too big, and I’m afraid. Take the shortest cut, and if a speed cop mixes with you, bunt him and come on!”
The Scout Master hung up the receiver and turned to Jamie. The shoulders drew up, the chin tilted, a gloating look passed over the features, an indrawn breath was shot out suddenly.
“Um-hum-m!” said the Scout Master, “ain’t she the Lallapasooza! Did you get that? I didn’t even have to ask her! Right off the bat, just crack! Babe Ruth couldn’t of hit it cleaner! She says, says she, ‘I’ll take care of him for you’—just like that!” Both hands waved outward and onward in a curve of exquisite grace. “Just like that! Whenever you go to bet on the right royal high-steppers, I’ve got two bits I’ll chalk up on my mother!”
In the interim Jamie replaced the blanket over the face of the sleeping baby and looked dubiously at the suitcase. What was it the nurse had said about having put in personal belongings for the baby? He had better get those things out and take them into his own keeping. So he picked up the suitcase and carried it to the bedroom, opened it on his bed, and pulled out a drawer in the dresser, pushed aside the clothing it contained, and began emptying the case. He removed little nighties and dresses and all sorts of queer soft garments and square-folded stacks, and when in the bottom of the suitcase he came across a package wrapped in a cloth, he pulled it open enough to see that it contained strings of beads and bracelets and trifling feminine adornments.
He had not had time as yet to think of the Storm Girl. When he did think of her, he realized that the time had come to find her, and the time had come to settle a fairly long score with her. This was not playing the game. She had not been fair.
“And of all the women in the world, I wouldn’t have selected her for a liar!” said Jamie, and that minute his sense of outrage was so strong that he forgot the relief he should have felt over the knowledge that the woman he had rushed to the hospital to help was not the Storm Girl. Scot materialism, Scot integrity, Scot bulldog stubbornness, not alleviated by enough American environment to tone them down perceptibly, surged up in Jamie.
“She’d much better have a clean heart and be where the baby’s mother is than to be going around in the world high handed and strong, with a lie on her tongue,” said Jamie, and he slammed the package down and pushed it back and dropped some of his clothing on top of it and shut the drawer with a bang.
Then he went back to the bed and carefully repacked the baby clothes. There was lace on some of them and the fabrics were so fine that they stuck to his workroughened fingers and clung to them so that he had to shake some of them off. At any rate, they seemed to be warm things, there seemed to be enough for two or three babies, and even to Jamie’s unpractised eyes they seemed to be fine things, carefully made things, lovingly fashioned things, with tiny buds of pink and forget-me-nots of blue and wee yellow daisies showing here and there. As Jamie slammed shut the suitcase, he stood erect and addressed the back window. Possibly he was speaking to the ocean that glinted blue and gold beyond.
“Right this minute,” said the preacher in Jamie, said the judge in Jamie, said the stern critic in Jamie, “right this minute, between the two of you, I’m thinking most of the dead woman!”
He carried the suitcase out and dropped it on the floor beside the sleeping baby. Then he sat down and turned back the face blanket and worked back the clothing and pushed away the hood strings tied under the chin, and looked long and intently at the baby. He did not remind him of any one. He was very small. He had eyes and a nose and a mouth. He was extremely red. The girl on the pillow was not reproduced in him in so far as Jamie could see. Then, as the Scout Master had done, he examined the hands. He got more from them than he did from the face. They were perfect hands, fashioned exquisitely, long, slender fingers, beautifully tapering fingers, with little nails finished and extended beyond the finger ends, perfect workmanship, and they were such fingers as paint pictures and play violins and lovingly handle the kind of books that the Bee Master had bequeathed to the little Scout.Jamie turned, saying as he did so: “Did you notice how beautiful his hands are?”
He got no answer and turned farther. The little Scout had crossed the porch and gone the length of the walk and opened the gate and was hopping from one foot to the other in the nearest wheel track, looking with undivided attention toward the city.
In an unbelievably short time a nifty sport model, a beautiful car suitable for the show piece of an automobile exhibit, swung to a deft stop, and almost before it stopped the little Scout was on the running board. Jamie could see that the dirty arms were thrust inside and the face lifted to the face of a woman moving toward the door. He could not hear the conversation that ensued. Something was asked on the part of the Scout Master, and that something met a laugh that sounded mellow and sweet on Jamie’s ears. But the door was barred, the Scout was insistent, the hand that reached out to open the door was covered by a grimy hand, and then Jamie distinctly caught the phrase: “Aw, please, Mom, don’t!”
And he heard the answer: “All right, then.”
The little Scout hopped off the running board and opened the door, and there stepped down a woman who seemed to Jamie to appear the way any woman ought to look to be just about exactly right, a radiant picture of wholesome health. A head of gold-brown silken curls, bobbed short for comfort, sensible clothing, dainty and pretty, of extreme style in cut. Briskly across the stretch of sward, through the gate and up the walk toward Jamie, she came, the little Scout scuffing ahead. The screen door was pulled open as Jamie stepped back and the little Scout darted through.
“Mom, this is Jamie!”
Jamie made his best bow and stood for inspection. He got it. Careful, incisive, but not offensively long. A firm hand was held out to him.
“I’ve been intending to come for some time,” said the mellow voice that Jamie recognized as one he had frequently heard over the telephone. “I’ve had my hands reasonably full with our little Jimmy and a Danish Princess presiding in our kitchen, and keeping the children in school. I think I took it for granted that any one the Bee Master would leave in charge here would be all right, and so I haven’t gotten around to make friends as I should have done. But, of course, our little Scout has been all right with you.”
It happened that Jamie’s eyes were on the face of the little Scout when the expression was used and he saw the deep breath of satisfaction that swept from the lips of the child. Then past him hurried the woman that the little Scout had called “Mom.” She dropped on her knees before the davenport. She turned back the blanket and laughed softly. The face she lifted to Jamie was beautiful, a Madonna-like face, the face of a woman fashioned for motherhood.
“I am sorry,” she said, “if your baby has cost his mother her life. Iam sorry. But I must congratulate you on the baby himself. You’ll have your compensations. He is a beautiful child, really a beautiful child!”
The pair of deft hands, glittering with sparkling rings, slipped under the baby and lifted it, and the mother who had it in her heart to be a mother to any baby, to all babies that needed her, sat down in the Bee Master’s chair, its first occupant since his going, and lifted the baby and held it against her breast and to her face and laughed to it and said sweet little words of utter nonsense and praised it and curved around it and cuddled it up and then paused and looked at Jamie.
“I didn’t know,” said the soft voice, “that you were married.”
“I hardly knew it myself,” said Jamie. “It was such a very hurried marriage on account of circumstances I may explain to you some day. I’d been overseas and I brought back a wound and there were reasons as to why we had not been much together. I am shocked beyond expression that the baby’s mother lost her life. I had not even once thought that such a thing might occur, and I had depended on Margaret Cameron. I didn’t know that the child had been born until they telephoned me from the hospital. I decided I’d stay with the baby and let his mother’s family care for her. I could not leave the garden and I was sure of Margaret and got back to find that she had been telephoned for to go on some kind of a jaunt and she’d started suddenly. Before I knew what the little Scout was doing, you had your call. I’m afraid it’s too big an imposition for words.”The face that met Jamie’s was a laughing face.
“Don’t bother about that,” Mrs. Meredith said. “I’m willing to give a few days’ time for a lovely baby named Jamie. It will be like having my baby over again. You needn’t worry in the least. Have you clothes for him?”
Jamie pointed to the suitcase.
“Enough for two or three babies, I’d judge.”
To prove his statement, Jamie opened the case. Across the baby a pair of interested eyes explored its contents.
“Why, those are lovely things, exquisitely made! I almost hate to use them. I could use some of Jimmy’s things just at first when there is so much oiling, and a tiny baby is rather a mussy proposition.”
“I imagine those things will be more carefully handled in your hands than at the hospital or even by Margaret Cameron,” said Jamie. “Go ahead and use them. When they are gone little Jamie shall have some more.”
“That’s fine!” said Mrs. Meredith. “That’s fine! You will have something of your very own to work for now.”
Jamie felt something of a hypocrite as he assented to this proposition, but in the presence of the little Scout that was not the time for dissent, so he let the statement go and closed the suitcase, and when the lady arose he escorted her to the car. There they met a difficulty.
“I can’t drive and hold the baby, too,” said Mrs. Meredith.
The little Scout made a clean leap to the front seat and held eager arms.
“I can hold him! I can hold him edzactly like you do and keep the face cloth down. I want to hold him!”
Jamie smiled quizzically.
“And if Fat Ole Bill and the Nice Child and Angel Face come trooping down the street and see you holding a baby——”
“Now, you look here,” broke in the little Scout. “Fat Ole Bill and the Angel and the whole bunch can just fry in their own fat! All of ’em’s gettin’ too fat, anyway. Great big softies! Anybody that’s got any objections to anybody else holdin’ a little bit of a new baby that ain’t got any mother and that wants his dinner can have the best lickin’ I’ve got in my system, and they can have it quick! Step on the gas, Mom, and let’s get him home before he cries!”
The Scout Master tightened careful arms around the little bundle and called back: “I’ll telephone twice a day. I’m goin’ to stay at home and do all the care-taking myself except the feeding and changing and bathing. You call me when Margaret comes and you get your arrangements made.”
Jamie went back inside the house and sat down suddenly on the first chair he saw. He tried to think constructively, reasonably, humanely. Such an unexpected experience, such a startling experience, such a pitiful experience, he had not bargained for in his Adventure. It had come, and Jamie could not figure exactly why.
“I suppose,” he said at last, “that when God made trees and fruit and grain, He knew how He was going to use them. He didn’t intend that they should stand around and fill no purpose, and when God made men, very likely it was His intention to use them. That is a wonderful hand little Jamie brought into the world with him. It may be a useful hand as well as a beautiful hand. It may be that, if it’s carefully trained, there is work in the world that such a hand can do better than any other hand that ever has been fashioned. Once in a while there does come into the world one hand that can do work slightly better, a trifle finer, than any other hand ever has done it. There is one thing about this experience that is dead sure. So long as there is blood in my veins and marrow in my bones, there is not going to be any taint of shame attached to this baby. He is going to have his chance, no matter who was his mother. And as for that little mother herself, with that unexpected and wonderful laughter on her lips stepping across the boundary to meet her Maker——” Before he knew what he was doing, Jamie had slid to the floor and he was on his knees. His hands were clasped, his face was lifted and he was praying: “Oh God! Great God, Creator of the Universe and of men and of women and of all that this world contains, Oh God! have mercy, have mercy on the girl who is coming before you this morning! Whatever her frailty was, whatever her fault was, remember the suffering and the price she paid and have mercy! Take her to your heart, take her to your everlasting home where there is safety, and cleanliness of body, and purity of mind, take her with my father and my mother and all the holy angels and teach her that there is a better way than the way she chose. Have mercy, Oh Lord!”
Stumblingly, Jamie arose and went to the bedroom. He sat down on the side of the bed and put his hands over his face and cried until his lean frame shook, cried his heart out. After a long time, when the storm had passed, he wiped his eyes and discovered, as he reached the back porch, that he was hungry. So he went across to Margaret Cameron’s kitchen and burgled his way through a back window. Into the basket she used he packed everything he could find that would spoil in her absence and carried it home with him. Then, for the first time, he really went about the business of trying to cook food for himself. He knew where he could take the street car and find a small café not so far away, but somehow he was in no mood te meet men. He was in no mood to face women. He wanted to be alone. He wanted to think. He wondered where what remained of Alice Louise was going to be laid. He wondered if a small stone was going to be erected above her and if his name would be carved on that stone. He wondered if it would read “The beloved wife cf James Lewis MacFarlane.”
Then he wondered what the name of the baby’s mother might have been and it occurred to him that he had a way of finding out. The first time he was in the city he could go to the Marriage License Bureau and ask to see the records on some excuse that he could think up by that time. He could find out what name the Storm Girl had written in to fit with Alice Louise. Jamie never in his life had examined a marriage certificate. The one in which he had been interested had been compiled by the clerk, a line shown Jamie to sign on, and then the Storm Girl had signed her name and taken prompt possession of the document.
When his thoughts reached the Storm Girl they immediately grew chaotic. Exactly why, he had not as yet time sanely to figure out. He had the feeling that he had been made a dupe of, that he had been a good deal of a fool, and yet he knew that feeling was not fair. The girl had not asked him for anything. He had put up as strong a case of special pleading as he knew how to build before she had told him in a few brief words exactly what it was that she needed. Wherein Jamie felt aggrieved was that she had not been square. She had not told the truth. She had said what she needed; she had left him to feel that the offer he had made and which she had accepted was on her own behalf.
This morning had proven that she had used him not to serve her own needs, but those of another woman. Jamie realized that he would have done what she wanted. In that storm, facing his own reckoning so shortly, as he had felt at that time that he was facing it, he would have given any gitl who had happened to appeal to him in distress the benefit of his name and what protection he could offer her. It would not have made any difference who the girl was when her needs were so very gteat. It was just that he had gone to the hospital and had raced to the room expecting to kneel beside the bed and take the hand of the Storm Girl in his and fight for her life in a fight that some way he felt certain he could win. When he had seen a strange face the shock had been so great that he had sat down tamely and submitted to what the doctors and the nurse had said was inevitable without even making the beginning of the fight he had meant to wage for the woman he had thought he was going to see.
He had been defeated. She had slipped away from him again, and this time he was angry, genuinely provoked. He had only had a short time in which to think, and in that time he had told himself repeatedly: “She didn’t play the game square!” In Jamie’s eyes that was almost the worst sin that any one could possibly commit. His feelings on the subject had only grown stronger during his months of contact with the little Scout. The little Scout thought as keenly about playing the game square as he did, and was absolutely scrupulous in every practice indulged in. Jamie remembered with some amusement and a throb of pride that when he had asked the question of sex directly, the answer had been neither a lie nor an evasion, but straight from the shoulder: “If you can’t tell, does it make a darn bit of difference?” That was fair dealing. That was leaving the field open. That was the kind of thing that Jamie liked.
Before he went to bed he called Mrs. Meredith. The baby was fine. It was no trouble. It had been oiled and fed and rolled up warmly, and the little Scout was on the job, said the voice that Jamie thought was the sweetest voice he had ever heard over the telephone. “None of us are getting much of a chance at the little new Jamie. Our little Scout has taken possession of him and is on the job. I think you will need help with the bees seriously before you get it for the coming few days. There seems to be a feeling of responsibility that none of us understand.
I think perhaps it’s all of a piece with the pride of possession, with the ownership of an acre of ground and a line of beehives and a fine showing of orchard and garden. I notice that the little Scout says proudly: “Our baby!’”
When he had gone back to his bedroom, Jamie was still thinking.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “our baby’ isn’t a shame baby. He has a perfectly good name standing for him on the records, and he’s going to have a perfectly good chance, and as for the Storm Girl, she can go hang! I’m through with her!”
Then Jamie turned out the lights and lay down on his pillow and decided that he would go to sleep very speedily. Out of the darkness a voice said to him in the vernacular of the little Scout: “What’s eatin’ you? Did you want her to be dead? Did you want her to go to the horrors that are facing the beautiful body of Alice Louise?”
Jamie turned over and buried his face in the pillow and cried: “Oh, my God, no! I didn’t think of that! I don’t want her heart broken! I don’t want her dead! What I want is to know who she is, where she is, to have her depend on me, to be able to do something for her, to be released from my promise not to seek her. No! No! For her I want life, I want happiness!”