A new kind of Wedding
WHEN the faintest sound of a footfall had died away, Jamie settled back in his niche in the rock, drew his wrappings around him, and turned his face in the direction of the sea, the face that had been held between a pair of strong, impetuous woman’s hands, the face that had been showered with wholly impersonal caresses merely as an expression of release from a thraldom of shame. He had been paid in the coin of the realm of womanhood most desired by men, therefore most frequently offered by women in extremity.
Jamie sought among his clothing and found a handkerchief. He pulled it out and carefully wiped his face. There was nothing about the clammy, salty kisses he had received that he wished to perpetuate, not even the memory of them, because the girl who gave them had not meant them for him personally. She had bestowed real kisses elsewhere. These were the first available expression of thankfulness for freedom, freedom to lift up her head, freedom to face the world, freedom to go on with her life in such a manner that the ever-ready “finger of scorn” need not be pointed at her.
Jamie grinned dourly as he scoured his face.“I hope she doesn’t think,” he said to the boiling surf below, “that she fooled me any with those kisses. It’s all right. She’s welcome to my name. She’s welcome to her ring—if she buys it herself—and her certificate. I didn’t see her very well, but what I did see didn’t look like a fast woman.
“I’ll say that for her. And she didn’t act as if she were used to calling on other people to shoulder many of her burdens. God knows she wasn’t afraid for her body, or she wouldn’t have been on this rock close to midnight in this storm; not afraid with physical fear; but I suppose it’s the mental strain that gets people the worst. I suppose it’s mental fear or nerve strain, or whatever you might call it, that’s been eating me for the past two years. It’s not that I’m afraid of death physically. God knows I’ve seen enough of it so that I can take my medicine as I saw thousands of boys take theirs! It’s just that since I am alive, since I am breathing, since there is the ghost of a possibility that I might have a slim fighting chance, I hate standing still and watching myself going out by the inch. And the reason I hate the going is because I’ve never lived; I’ve never had the things that, to a man, constitute real life, and I want a taste of life! I know just enough about the sky and the sea and the earth to want to get on the tree job and run it down as I’ve always intended.”
Then, for a time, long past the stipulated time, Jamie sat and watched the gradual clearing of the sky, the calming of the sea. It was not long before he could see the stars again, and some way a star always was connected in Jamie’s mind with a suggestion of hope. Ever since he had read an oration by the greatest agnostic of his day in which he had said at the grave of a beloved brother, when put to the ultimate test himself: “In the night time of despair, hope sees a star and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing,” Jamie had thought that perhaps the lips of man never had uttered more beautiful words. This night had been a “night time of despair” for a young thing that he had held in his arms for a few brief minutes. Every night for a long time had been a night of despair for him. He was sorry, sorry to the depths of his heart for the grief that wracked and tore and drove frantic such a fine, strong young thing, with an odour of the woods, with the sage of the mountains and the lavender and gold flowers of the beach distilling like incense around her. That was the pity of it. How had shame happened to a woods girl? Jamie knew that while he lived there would remain in his nostrils the scent that had first assailed them, carried by the winds of the storm, and as if it had not been removed he could feel the clinging of the silky strands of hair. She must have a perfect mane. Then he wondered how it came to be unbound. Then he remembered something else—the one revealing flash that had shown him the girl most clearly. He had not thought of it at the time, but he remembered it now. That flash had disclosed bare feet and a streak of white above them.
“By Jove!” said Jamie, softly, to the Spirit of the Sea that was drawing up very close to him in that hour. “By Jove! She wore a nightdress and one of those eiderdown kimonos over it! I remember by the feel of her and by her bare feet. She asked a few minutes’ grace before I should start. That means that she had gone to bed and was so driven she had decided that she’d bed in the sea, and she’d put on the kimono and come as she was to this point she knew how to find. She couldn’t have come up these rocks as still as thought, and she couldn’t have gone down them with the swiftness and ease she used if she had not known them perfectly, and a few minutes wouldn’t carry her far across the sands of this soaked beach. That means that she came from somewhere very near here.”
And then, as an outsider might speak to him, Jamie added: “And if you will recall what you said to her, old man, you gave her your word of honour that you wouldn’t try to find her.”
Then Jamie answered back and said: “But how am I going to keep that promise? How am I going to marry a girl with such a noble face, with hair of silk, and hands of such assurance; how am I going to stand up and swear that I’ll love her and take care of her so long as we both shall live, and then not work for her, not wonder where she is, and what is happening to her, and whether I could not do more for her than to give her my name at a pinch?”
Then Jamie, for the second time that night, thought of his Great Adventure, and he said to the sea and to the near-by personality who had commenced the conversation with him: “I’m not so sure that what I called a Great Adventure in jesting merely to hearten myself may not possibly prove to be more of an adventure than I’ve reckoned on.”
Then the outside voice talked back to Jamie again, and it was a jeering voice that laughed at him and sneered at him. It said: “Well, Mr. Married Man, you’d better be getting home and fortify yourself with rest and sleep. You’d better press your trousers and see if the Master has got a decent scarf you can borrow. If you’re going to be a bridegroom, you’d better think about starting your preparations.”
Jamie, detecting the sneer in the voice, defended himself. He said: “Well what would you have done? If you hadn’t a relative on earth, if you knew you wouldn’t live to see the consequences, if a woman creature, young and attractive, was ready to throw herself into the sea before you, wouldn’t you save her by any means you could? Wouldn’t you give her a name that couldn’t hurt her and that might possibly help her all the rest of her life?”
He did not hear any answer to that, and so he turned his attention to the sea again. “I’d like to know,” he said, dourly, “what a lot of the mothers in this world mean. If they’ve known enough about the awful power of sex attraction themselves to marry a man and bear a child, why, in God’s world, don’t they know what they are letting the young folks up against when they turn them loose in utter and untrammelled freedom on the mountains and through the canyons and on the beaches and in the parks and the dance halls and the streets? Can’t they see that however times and customs change, the desires of the heart and the urge of the body do not change? They only grow stronger with the freedom and license and physical contact allowed in these astounding days.”
Then Jamie arose unsteadily and drew on the raincoat, and shuffling his feet before him, made his way down the steep pathway with which he had become sufficiently familiar during the few times he had climbed it to negotiate it safely. He followed his way down the beach by gyrating between the slopping of the waves and the entangling primroses. When he found he was among mats of primrose that threatened to trip him, he veered toward the water. When he splashed in the water, he veered toward the primroses, and by so going he came at last to where the lights of the Bee Master’s home threw a welcoming beam down the mountain-side. Then he felt along the back fence until he found the gate, and after that it was easy to reach the back door, and he was entirely ready for the back door by the time he opened it. He dropped on the first chair he encountered to rest awhile.
“I’m none too sure,” said Jamie, “that my contract for to-morrow, or is it to-day?”—he glanced up at the clock and saw to his surprise that it was to-day—“won’t be about all I can accomplish in one day.” But that one word that had been jeeringly thrust at him out there on the rock, “bridegroom,” persisted in his ears. It meant something to a man to be a bridegroom under any circumstances. It should mean the most wonderful thing in all the world. There should not be anything, unless it might be the love of God, that would be bigger and higher and holier in the heart of a man than to be the groom of his chosen bride, in ordinary circumstances. But there was nothing ordinary about the circumstances under which he had contracted to be a bridegroom. No, there was not. The storm of the elements, the storm in his own heart, the storm in the heart of the girl——
“Holy Moses!” said Jamie. “What a storm! Regular typhoon! Anyway for the clearing up to-morrow I'll go to bed and I'll see whether I can sleep or not. And if I can, then I wonder how much time I am going to need, and how I am going to find the place where I've promised to be?”
Then he thought of Margaret Cameron. She could tell him what car lines he must take, and once he reached the heart of the city it would not be difficult to find the proper office where the business of the county was transacted.
So Jamie lay down and shut his eyes; the velvet blackness of the night closed round him and the steady sweep of the sea breaking on the shore so very near came with rhythmic cadence. There was enough wind to sing a little. He was very tired but he had made good his boast so far. He had told the girl that if she would tell her trouble, he could help her, without a notion in his head as to how he was going to help her. By the depth of her grief he could measure the depth of her relief, relief that set her lips on his face, her hands frantically clutching him. He had saved her position before the world probably. He had offered what was of not much use to him, in the stead of the man who had been too much of a hound to make good his obligations. After all, he would have something beautiful to think about when the last hour came. Maybe the little Scout had been right about the different kinds of death. Maybe when Jamie’s time came he could think of the passion of relief, of deliverance, of utter panicky joy, that had obliterated the passion of fear and humiliation in the girl he was going to try to help. Maybe he could fold his hands and go softly in his sleep, and maybe at least his face could carry the smiling secret that the little Scout had talked about, if he got a chance to enter the gates and face his mother.
The next thing Jamie knew, the clock that he had set for seven was burring and he awoke from deep sleep and went to his breakfast and the watering. He merely told Margaret Cameron that he had some business in town. No, he was not going to the hospital, because he saw the desire to go with him in her eyes. He was not going to the hospital until Doctor Grayson sent for him. He would be back in the evening in time for dinner, maybe sooner. She need not mind about his lunch.
Jamie did the most important of the things he had been doing daily outdoors, postponing as many of them as he possibly could to the coming day. Then he went in and rested awhile. Later he brushed his clothing and searched through the drawers and the closets—the Bee Master had told to help himself to his clothing if needed changes, in view of the manifest fact that he had taken him from the road with only the clothing on his back. Jamie thought it over and then he selected an extremely good-looking gray silk shirt and a dull-blue tie. He looked at his own trousers critically. He had slept in them and given them rough usage, and he had worked in them some. They were not suitable trousers for a bridegroom. He was so near the Bee Master’s height and build that a pair of gray ones he found stretched in the long drawer of a highboy were exactly right. He went on searching, and by and by he had the bed almost covered with clothing that appealed to Jamie as eminently suitable for an honest-to-goodness bridegroom.
Then he went to his bath, and when he managed the fresh dressings on his left breast, he hesitated over the antiseptics—and omitted them. He would not go to his bride even with a taint of medicinal odour about him. Since she smelled of flowers herself, he would emulate the example of the greatest beau the world has ever known by having the odour that emanated from him merely that of fresh linen, of utter cleanliness.
At heart Jamie was a gentleman. When he locked the front door and started down the walk for the short trip to the trolley line which ended a few rods away, he was as white of face and hands as his condition warranted. Otherwise, he was an attractive gentleman. He carried his head at a high angle. He squared his shoulders, as much military training had required. He stepped out in the Master’s best shoes and gray trousers and black coat, in his gray silken shirt and his dull-blue tie and a soft broad-brimmed black hat; he stepped out habited as it was proper that any gentleman might habit himself when he was going to be a bridegroom. He stepped very carefully that he might not accumulate dust on his shoes before he reached the trolley, and in taking this care it occurred to him to wonder where the girl he was going to marry was at that minute and what she was doing; whether she really would be at the appointed place to meet him and what she would look like, and what she would say to him, and with what words she would leave him when she had secured from him the things that she had admitted she needed so badly—a name, a wedding certificate, and a ring.
When he reached the ring in thought, a dull red flamed up in Jamie’s cheek. He was not sure that he had not gone too far. Before the Bee Master had been carried from his home he had pointed to a little drawer in his secretary in which Jamie would find money for an emergency, for milk, or ice, or whatever he needed until the Master’s return. From that drawer, as a fortification for his self-respect that morning, Jamie had taken ten dollars. He was not sure that ten dollars would pay for a marriage license. A marriage license was a commodity he had not previously considered. He had no idea what the article cost, but he felt certain it would not be more than ten dollars. Small change for car fare and for a sandwich for his lunch and the money for the license. Perhaps the girl would expect to pay for it, but Jamie could not quite endure the thought of a woman paying for his marriage license. After all, if he stood up and married the girl, it was his wedding, the only wedding he would ever have probably, and he meant to have it in appropriate and decent clothing, even if he borrowed the clothing, and he meant to pay for his wedding even if he borrowed the money. If he had not stayed there and taken care of the bees, someone would have been asked to do it who would have been paid, and when his first earnings were handed to him he could return the ten dollars. He had borrowed that amount.
But about a little thin engraved circlet of gold that looked as if it might fit a woman’s finger, about that little ring that he had run across among the Bee Master’s collar buttons and small belongings—— He had it. He had it in his vest pocket. It might be a souvenir; it might be something precious; it might be that there was nothing among the effects of the Bee Master more dear to him. He had not at all made up his mind as to whether he might use it or not, but, at any rate, he had it in his pocket. He was fortified with the clothing and the price and the ring, if he should bring himself to use it.
Then a thought appealed to him. There was a bare possibility that he could materialize his thought, and so he consulted the motorman, and after making several changes, landed before the old Court House with some minutes to spare. Hurriedly he made his way to the Marriage License Bureau on the main floor. He told the Clerk he was expecting to be there shortly with a young lady to secure a marriage license and he asked about the expense, and found to his relief that he had more than enough money. Then with all the haste compatible with the state of his knees, he left the Court House and regained the street. He looked around him, up and down and across, and in that survey he located a jewellery store.
It appealed to him as modest in appearance, so he walked in and faced a clerk across a case filled with rings. He laid the money he could spare on the counter and said: “Could you furnish me with a very plain, simple ring for that amount?”
The clerk had not been accustomed to furnishing rings for that amount of money, but he was of Hebraic origin; he was shrewd; he realized that the money on the counter was all the money the man before him intended to spend. If he did not take it he would not have it. So, after some hunting, he found a ring that Jamie thought would be the right size. It looked fairly satisfactory, so the Hebraic gentleman had the money and Jamie had the ring. He took the shining band of gold that he had borrowed from the Master and transferred it to a left-hand pocket of the vest he was wearing, and in the right-hand pocket, convenient to his fingers, he slipped the circlet, that at least had the merit of shining.
Then he headed back for the Court House, and as he stepped into the office, he taced a woman whom he knew instantly. He knew her height; he knew her eyes; he knew without knowing exactly how or why he knew. He was a bridegroom, but the woman he was facing was not a bride. She was a widow, if any story wer to be told by her clothing. From head to foot the Storm Girl was in deep mourning. A tight, small hat fitted her head and was pulled so low that he could only see a gleam of the eyes that he had been positive in the lightning’s flare were either black or brown. The office lights revealed them brown—gray-brown. The baffling thing about the costume the girl wore was a veil. He would have called it a widow’s veil. It was thick; it was black; a broad satin band finished the edges. The band covered the mouth and chin; the hat shaded the eyes and a mask-like gleam of eye and a line across the cheek and nose were all Jamie was permitted to see of his prospective bride.
For a minute he experienced a sense of shock, and then he realized that in some manner death figured in the adventure he was embarking on that day. The girl was in mourning. Possibly, after all, the man whose place he was taking was a dead man who might have fulfilled his obligations if he had been granted the opportunity; but, at any rate, the girl had distinctly said that she must be rescued from shame. So if a dead man figured in the case, he hadn’t been very much of a man, and it was shameful that he had left the marriage ceremony to any chance of disaster.
These things were tearing through Jamie’s brain swift as light flashes, while Jamie himself lifted the Bee Master’s hat and brought his own heels together and presented a figure that would at least have been worthy of consideration by any woman. His hasty rush after the ring that was to save his self-respect, that was to put a crowning touch of pride on his only wedding, had set his heart pumping unduly, and so his cheeks were not so white as they had been, his lips were not so blue. A flush of red had surged to his face and he looked very much as any lean, self-respecting, well-dressed man of Scottish origin and American birth and training might be expected to appear. From force of habit, as he straightened from his bow, Jamie extended his hand and recognized the touch of the hand that met his, and then he lined up shoulder to shoulder and said casually: “We figured time from the same watch, didn’t we?”
The girl beside him merely assented. Jamie took charge of proceedings with all the self-assurance of a man who was accustomed to captaining his own affairs. Whatever the woman beside him was getting out of this, Jamie had made up his mind that he was going to get a wedding, and it was going to be his own. He took the arm of the girl beside him and piloted her to the Clerk’s desk. Whether she had the correct impression now or not, Jamie did not know, but he proposed that when she got through with that wedding and went her way with the ring and the certificate that were to save her self-respect, she should, at least, go in the belief that she had married a man. He had forgotten all about telling her that very shortly he would not be a man; he intended for the few minutes that were to come to be all man.
So he impelled her to the Clerk and announced that they wanted to fill the forms necessary to procure a marriage license. While Jamie wrote down the names of his father and mother and the date of his birth and his residence and his occupation and all the things required, beside him stood a tall, self-reliant girl, who was filling in the blank that had been given her. When these documents were filled out as the law required, to keep the Storm Girl firm in the impression that he was a man of his word, Jamie picked them up and signed first, then handed them to her for her signature. When the Clerk finished his share of the proceeding and offered the long envelope to Jamie, he waved toward the girl he was marrying and the Clerk gave her the document. They were directed to the office of the Probate Judge and it was not any time at all until the necessary papers were signed, sealed, and delivered to Jamie, who, without one glance of examination, handed them to the Storm Girl. Jamie paid the fee and walked beside her to the street without knowing even the surname of the woman he had married. She might be either Smith, Jones, or Brown. It was ridiculous, but it was true that the touch of a hand, a strip of white face decorated with dark eyes, and “I, Alice Louise, take thee, James Lewis, to be my lawful and wedded husband,” were all the information he had.
So he had married “Alice Louise.” He was not particularly well satisfied with the name. She did not look like Alice, and she did not the least in the world resemble Louise. He had known Louises by the dozen all his life, and they always had light hair; always they had blue eyes, and they were always clinging, dependent little things. Never since he could remember had known of a woman who could touch shoulders with a six-foot man and carry her head like an empress, who extended a hand mighty near as big as, evidently firmer than, his own, and in a voice of mellow contralto from away down in a deep chest answer to the name of Louise!
Jamie cupped his hand around the elbow of Alice Louise merely to show her that he considered himself enough of a man to take care of her in case she needed him, and he piloted her to the street, and there, standing on the sidewalk, for the first time they looked at each other. Jamie deliberately waited to see what the lady had to say; and as he waited, with concentrated vision, he strove to pierce that crow-black costume and fix in his memory the form and all he could see of the face of the woman before him.
He had given his word that he would not seek her, and he was not any too sure that he was going to keep that word. He was not any too sure that he was not going to know who she was, and where she lived, and why she had used him to ease her heart and her conscience, to save her body from the ocean. As he awaited, looking straight into the face of the girl opposite him, he saw that the muscles of the cheeks and the lips were all in a quiver and that the steady stare of the eyes looking into his was going to dissolve any minute in an uncontrollable gush of tears. Tears did the same thing to Jamie that they do to any man when an attractive woman admits she is facing something that is too much for her, that she needs his help. He had intended to force her to speak, and the first thing he knew he was no longer facing her. He had stepped beside her and he was saying to her in low tones: “Steady yourself! You’ll be all right in a few minutes. Are you taking the car at this corner?”
She had merely nodded in assent, and still with her elbow in his palm, Jamie piloted her through the crowds and helped her on a street car, and the people surged between them. As he saw her enter the car and make her way to a seat, he realized that “Alice Louise” and “I do” were all that he had heard her say. He had not kept his determination to force her to speak. He had felt so sorry for her when he realized she was near a breakdown he had spared her. Anyway, he had shown her that he was a man who could run his own affairs. He had helped her to a street car and away from him. He could not honourably board the same car. So he stepped back, raised his hat, lifted his chin and looked at the car, on a bare chance that she might glance his way before the car started and carried her from sight.
Then Jamie put on his hat and regained the sidewalk and said to himself in not very pleasant tones: “Well, can you beat that?”
He had not expected much, but he had expected a word or two, and not only had the words not been spoken, but the lady herself had not even turned her head to see whether he was going to take the same car or not. She had walked down the aisle, taken her seat with her back toward him, and sat immovable until she was carried from sight. It did not avail much that he might see what car she had taken or in which direction she went. She might take any car and she might leave it in a bluck or two in order to use the speediest opportunity to escape him. She had gone away Mrs. James Lewis MacFarlane with the necessary credentials and the ring he had produced at the proper moment for a finger that had hesitated to receive it; now he was left standing on the sidewalk and the best thing for him to do was to see how soon he could reach home and restore the Bee Master’s wardrobe to its accustomed place. He had been a bridegroom and there was nothing to it, not even “Thank you.” If he wanted to extract any romance whatever, he would have to get it from the salty kisses that had swept his face the previous night. And, being honest, he had to admit that if the rock upon which they had sat had been the means of the girl’s salvation, she probably would have kissed it with as much, or possibly more, enthusiasm.
Jamie stood on the sidewalk and waited for his knees to stiffen slightly before he began searching for the car he required to carry him back to the garden of the bees. When he found it and boarded it and sank into a seat, he said to all and sundry: “Well, of all the darned weddings!” He knew that he said it because he heard the words, but nobody else seemed to have heard them because everybody was interested in their papers and their friends and where they were going.
So Jamie went back to the house and returned the borrowed raiment and assumed his own. Then he went out in the sunshine and sat down to think things over. He had half a mind to tell Margaret Cameron that this was his wedding day and she might prepare him any kind of a feast she saw fit to offer for such an occasion. A wry grin crossed his cheeks when he thought of the look that would come on her face if he told her that, and then she would speak and she would ask where his bride was; and where his bride was happened to be a secret and the business of the bride herself. He reflected that if she was where she had been at midnight the previous night, she would not be so very far from him at the present minute. He was assailed by an impulse to go down and walk up and down the beach, to scan each house accessible from the shore line to see whether in any of them there was visible a glimpse of a girl clad in the deepest kind of mourning.
How much that mourning meant, Jamie could not decide. He remembered that the girl had offered to begin at the beginning and tell him the story. It had been he who had told her to use a few words, merely to state what she wanted. If she had been as full of Scottish blood as he, she could not have taken him at his word more quickly or more completely. She had stated the bald facts and he, Jamie reflected, with another twisted grin, had materialized the facts. The lady had said that she needed a ring, a marriage certificate and a name, and she had stood beside him, she had allowed the ring to be put on her finger, she had taken possession of the certificate. One thing he did recall. She had laid the document on her breast and folded both hands over it and held it there as if nothing in all the world could be more precious to her. Ar his name. At least she had accepted it in marriage whether she meant to use it or not.
Jamie felt something of a fool that he had not at least stretched out his hand and picked up the record the girl had written and read it. He had not been much of a man and he had not managed his own wedding in his own way quite as he had thought that he would. It all harked back to the fact that he had given a promise, that he had said that he would not intrude himself, he would make no effort to find her. He had said that he would be content merely to offer what assistance he could and the amount and kind of assistance that the girl required had been very clearly specified to him. He had accepted the bargain. He had gone through with it. The thing to do now was to go out on the back porch, put on the Bee Master’s old bee coat, raid the lily and the cinnamon pink beds, and while his body was free from the taint of surgical dressing, go down and face the Black Germans and find out for himself whether he was bee immune for sure. It was a piece of knowledge that he wanted to have before the little Scout put in another appearance.
So Jamie donned the coat and applied the lily and wiped his head through the pinks and slowly, deliberately, with as much assurance of step as he could assume, he made the long march down the east line, pausing before hive after hive of bees, looking at the tiny things that were coming and going so busily on humming wings, realizing that he did not know a drone from a worker, a nurse from a queen.
He resolved, as he stood before one of the hives, that when Doctor Grayson called him that evening for his daily report, he would ask how soon now it would be possible for him to see the Bee Master for a very few minutes, and he would ask how long it was probable that he was going to remain in the hospital. Then he reflected that if he had not been called yet to see the Bee Master there was every chance that he was so weak and so ill that he might be away a matter of weeks, possibly of months. Besides, bees were very closely related to trees and what the little Scout had pointed out to him of bee lore was so alluring that he might as well go deeper; he might as well read some of the technical books and see what they contained. It was going to be some time yet before his fate was decided, and in that time possibly there was nothing more interesting, nothing more useful that would come within his possibilities to which he could turn his attention than just bees.
So Jamie, doing his best on “Highland Mary,” went slowly the round of the hives and as he turned up the back walk and sighted the big hive of the Black Germans, he remembered something else. He hunted for the water tap around which grew the mint. He pulled a handful of it and rubbed it over his trousers and over his sleeves and crushed it in his hands, and then, doing his best on the tune prescribed, he slowly approached the Black Germans. He planted himself in front of their first hive. He stood there as long as he pleased. He knelt down and peered into the opening. He studied them so intently that he realized that they lacked the gold of the Italians. They were of different shape. When he slowly walked away, he felt that the next person who asked him if he were bee immune might safely be given an affirmative answer. He believed that the next time a bee alighted on a flower before him he would at least be able to say whether it was an Italian or a Black German.
He so disliked the name that he told himself as he climbed the back walk that if those bees belonged to him, he truly would pick up the hives of the Black Germans and carry them down and pitch them into the Pacific Ocean. He would not have anything called a Black German, not even a bee, where it was a daily reminder of what true Black Germans had done to men of his father’s race and country, to men who carried his same blood in their veins. Of course, it was silly to carry the loathing contempt he felt for a race of men into his feeling for a hive of bees. It was not very sensible, but Jamie reflected as he slowly climbed the walk, eating a big red tomato that he had picked from a vine he passed, that there was not much reason to most of our likes and dislikes in this world. What we liked was so a matter of individual preference, and preference was so controlled by the manner in which one had been reared, by environment, by individual taste, that necessarily there had to be a wide range given to personal preference.
Jamie wiped his fingers and threw the core of the tomato as far as he could fling it down the mountain-side and went into the house. On the back porch he changed his own coat, and entered the living room to select the particular book he intended to read, with two thoughts foremost in his mind. His tenure of the Bee Master’s garden had resulted in three things: He was a bridegroom; he knew a Black German bee from an Italian; and he had found out that there was something particularly and peculiarly satisfying about a big, dead-ripe tomato. He would try that tomato stunt between meals every day. The fruit slid down his throat and landed in his stomach with a sort of cooling, refreshing effect that was better than any glass of wine he had ever taken. There was no heat about it, no forced stimulation. It did the work and felt wonderful where it was and left an urgent invitation for more.
So the bridegroom stood before the small writing desk and, opening the case above it, ran an investigating finger over the titles of many books. Then he selected one and dropped into the chair that he had decided to use as his own and tried to concentrate all the mentality he had upon the subject of what is necessary for the beginner who would keep bees. He found himself reading paragraph after paragraph about proper hives and comb cases and smokers and all sorts of paraphernalia that he could find in a big case on the back porch if he opened it and knew what to look for. His eyes were reading the words and his brain was fixing with unbelievable stubbornness—which, after all, was not so unbelievable in a man of Scottish ancestry—his brain would persist in dwelling on a surprised hand that had drawn back and then advanced to be decorated with a wedding ring, on a marriage certificate that had been held tight against a breast that looked capable and immensely attractive. Then his brain would focus on a pair of keen brown eyes bespeaking nerve strain to the limit. His brain would keep making his eyes see quivering lips and twitching cheek muscles.
The thing he had done was going to stay with him for a while. He was not going to be able to put it aside and concentrate his thought on anything, not even a thing as interesting as the little Scout had said bees were. He truly did want to get on with a real bee book. That about bee nurses. Who would train a bee to become a nurse? Were bees sick? Did they need nurses? Did they sting each other and have wounds that would not heal on their small anatomies? He must find out about that speedily, but he could not find out about it at that minute because he had a number of things that were forcing him to think about them. And these things were, after all, important. You could not alter the fact that events had put him legally in a position where he was a married man, and you could not alter the fact that an immensely attractive woman had stood beside him and put herself in a position where she was legally a married woman; and there was not any reason why he should try to get away from the fact that she would be of much more use to the world, to her family, to a nebulous little person, as she stood, even in her black dress, in enforced composure, than she would have been as a formless thing wasted by an undertow leagues away and worried to the bone by the lean hounds the sea. To have saved the life of a woman like that was worth thinking of. He had thought last night that it might be the one worth-while thing that he could do before the end. Since he had nothing else to do, and since it would intrude, he could not very well be blamed for thinking about it. Evidently no one else was going to think about it. He had coveted a word. He had not received even a “Thank you.” But that was all right. He did not ask or expect anything.
Right there Jamie closed the book with his finger in the place and went to open his front door. A messenger boy handed him a parcel and a letter and disappeared with such miraculous swiftness that there was no conclusion left for Jamie except that he had been told to make his delivery and also to see how speedily he could vanish.
Jamie laid down the book without looking to see what page he had been reading on, and slipped the letter from the band that held the small oblong box in his fingers. With the letter in one hand and the box in the other he contemplated them. He studied them. He turned them over and around, and he caught an odour emanating from the box that he knew.
Before he opened it, he recognized what he would see. He was sufficiently sensitive to odours that his brain told him, even as his fingers worked to confirm the message, that when he slipped the paper and lifted the lid of the size of box that florists used for violets, he would find a big bunch of the pinkish lavender flower that grew on the sand bordering the Pacific Ocean. Now he would get the flower book. And when he got it, as he did later, he learned to know sand verbena by its real name, and he learned that the six-o’clock odour of this flower is perhaps as sweet a scent as can delight the nostrils of any lover of evanescent perfume. He lifted the delicate blooms and hunted through the Master’s belongings until he found a little bowl of antique copper, and this he filled with water, and into the water he carefully put the flowers.
Then he took the letter and sat down in the chair and slowly and deliberately broke the seal. Again Jamie felt that he knew exactly what he was going to see. The thing that the eyes and lips had been unable to say because the effort of speech would unlock a floodgate of tears, that thing had been written. So he was not in the least surprised, but to the depths of his heart he was pleased, when he raised the flap of the heavy oblong envelope and extracted an equally heavy sheet of paper that he unfolded to read:
My dear Mr. MacFarlane:
The reason I left you without saying one word, without one backward look, was from the physical necessity of keeping my lips tight shut and my eyes wide open in order that I might not attract the attention of passers-by and humiliate you by making a scene before people.
I want you to know that what you did for me has given me life, the chance to go on with my work with the same prideful assurance I always have taken in it. You have eased the heart of a woman who was slowly dying from fear and anxiety.
All my life I shall thank you for your kindness of last night, for your unparalleled act of to-day. If you are correct in your statement that you have not much time, believe this, that every night before I go to bed I shall ask God to extend to you His utmost clemency, the deepest depth and the highest height of His mercy.
It is quite impossible that I should voice adequate thanks for what you did for me, and now I find that it is equally impossible to write anything on this paper that will come any nearer expressing my sincere thanks for the obligation to you under which I find myself. With all my heart I do thank you, and I hope that God will bless you and keep you. I hope that you may be mistaken and that there may be a long and happy life in store for you.
Half-a-dozen lines ahead of it, Jamie got it, and it hit him in the face like a blow. It was written there in a firm, beautifully legible hand, just such writing as Jamie had imagined the hand that he had held last night and had seen in operation that afternoon, would write:
With undying obligations,
“Well, I’ll be darned!” said Jamie. “Can you beat it? Is she really going to take my name? Is she really going to use it in some kind of business? Is she really going to bring a child into the world and call it ‘MacFarlane’?”
Then Jamie began the process of reading the letter again, and it was not long until he could have repeated it a word at a time backward. Just why he kept getting it out and holding it in his fingers and turning it over and examining the paper and studying the script, he did not know. It was wonderful, it was right, it was all his heart could have asked. It sounded exactly like the girl who was just the height, who had the strength of body, who had the mane of silken hair, who had the keen brown eyes, who had the firm breasts, the capable hands, the mellow, luring voice, that Jamie always had imagined would be exactly what he would want when he met the woman who would be the one woman of all the world to him.