Gene Stratton-Porter

“ If you came and weathered the storm and resolved that you could go on with what you call an open wound in your breast, I’ll promise you that I’ll not go over the rock. I’ll promise you that I’ll find my way back to the friends I left; that I’ll go home; that I’ll take up my work; that I’ll do the best I can.”
“That’s fine,” said Jamie, “as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough to do you any more good than the good of saving your soul alive, because we don’t get life at our own volition in this world, and we have no right to give it up until the God who gave it says we have lived it. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was several days yet until the time for Margaret Cameron to make her second inspection. The pad Jamie had removed that morning looked as fresh and clean as when it had been applied. The morning tomato juice, the afternoon orange juice, the soaking in the sea, the baking on the sands, the clean, dustless, salt-laden air, absorbing occupation, all day out-of-doors, a mind with something to dwell on that was holy, that was beautiful—what doctor need hope to compete with such a combination, such an exhibition of Nature’s powers for healing? ”

“ 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. ”

“ If there is anything I am afraid of it’s a bee. If there’s anything I hate it’s a mountain. If there’s anything I hate worse than a mountain it’s the sea. If there is anything I can’t abide for a few hours at a stretch it is such stillness as this, such deadening, sickening silence. Does anything ever happen here?”
“Yes,” said Jamie, “you came, and the bees are beginning to swarm every few days. There’s fruit to be picked. There’s sprinkling to be done. There’s hoeing and cleaning and work a-plenty, more work than any one man can do as well as it should be done.” ”

“ Precisely why all his being had begun clamouring for the sea the minute he had gotten to his feet and made his start, Jamie did not know. He had not taken time to analyze himself or to try to find out why he wanted water, worlds of water, clean, jade- green and sky-blue and indigo-blue water, salty water, and foam, great swaths of snowy foam. He wanted to see waves, big waves, piling up high on a beach, and then he was obsessed with the ridiculous feeling, probably because he missed his morning bath, that he wanted to get in that water. ”

“ At last, above the rumbling of the subsiding storm, above the crashing of the waves below them, Jamie heard again the voice for which he was waiting.
“I can’t tell you,” said the woman, whose breast was still heaving, whose shoulders were still quivering. “I can’t tell a stranger in the darkness, in the storm, what it is that is hurting me!”
“Oh, yes, you can,” said Jamie, casually. “Better now than at any other time. If it is anything you aren’t proud of, the darkness will cover you. If it’s anything you are afraid of, you may depend on the strength there is in my right arm. ”

“ There was an hour of exceeding blackness in which the little Scout Master swung over my side fence and walked into my heart and into my life so securely that when this bitter hour came, almost before I knew what I had done, I had laid the whole of my burden on the shoulders of a child, only to learn that however keenly a child may think, however deeply a child may feel, there does not seem to be a large capacity for shouldering burdens. ”

“ It was a commingling of lazy, sunlit waves, a feeling of being drawn somewhere by a rope of hair across his face. He went over the top into dreamland in imagination clutching a letter in one hand, and in the final drop into unconsciousness, the last thought that he sensed in his brain had something to do with a bathing suit and a gorgeous big red tomato. When Margaret Cameron finished dusting and entered the kitchen to gather up the dishes from which Jamie had eaten his breakfast, she found that long, lean individual sitting at the table and looking at her speculatively. ”

“ Peering through the vines of the pergola, the Scout Master could see that the girl was not yet coming and again the soft buzzing called attention to the neighbourhood of the incinerator. The little Scout leaned low and peered from side to side and stepping lightly, remaining screened to get a clear view, watched for the girl’s approach. Then in an ominous roar almost at one and the same time from two hives of Italians there came streaming swarms of bees that were leaving their hives, honeycombs filled and bee crowded, to seek new homes, at the behest of the old queen. ”

“ It was a throne, a place for a man to captain his own soul. A man would be a monarch of all he could survey even for a short time on that crest, and it was better to be a monarch even for an hour than never to have had a kingly aspiration.
So Jamie went to the supper that Margaret Cameron had prepared for him and because that climb had wearied him so, because his feet were throbbing almost unendurably from the long, unaccustomed march to which he had forced them, he decided that he was not so well as he had been when he left the hospital. ”

“ Jamie turned his head and listened to the song of the Pacific Ocean. He decided that there was a reason why it had been called the Pacific Ocean, the peaceful ocean. From the window beside which he lay, his vision carried for miles across the moon-silvered water, water so calm that it was scarcely ruffled by the waves that kept it in undulation almost as regular as breathing. Just when Jamie had decided that the Pacific Ocean had been well named he remembered the Storm Girl. ”

“ Just how that would have worked out, Jamie never knew because at the instant that his hand crept higher to work the blinding hair from his eyes, a long, low flash of lightning struck the breast of the ocean and for one instant lighted the rock like day. In that instant Jamie saw the white face and the big, wide eyes of a woman, eyes that he would remember while remembrance remained with him, a face that by no possibility could he ever forget. ”

“ The little Scout shot the phrase at Jamie forcefully.
“Why, I haven’t done anything to earn it,” said Jamie. “All I’ve done here is not a drop in the bucket compared with the value of an acre of land down that slope, planted as it is, peopled with the bees. It’s simply stepping into a home and a comfortable living and a profession that I feel sure I have brains enough to master with a few years of loving and painstaking work, and there are all the books I need and all the material I need, and the name of a man who will help me. It’s too easy! ”

“ Perhaps it was the clean pad he had removed, the evidence that there was a skin coating over his breast, firm enough to hold through the work of the day, the feeling of coolness and satisfaction in the pit of his stomach, the absence of heat and burning in his blood, probably it was a combination of all these things that had made Jamie, standing facing the glass that morning, voice the joyful conviction: “I’m going to make it! As sure as there is a good God in the Heavens, I’m going to be a well man again!” ”

“ 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! ”

“ There would be no chill about that during the heat of the day, and then he might walk where the little waves were breaking enough to wet his feet, merely to feel the joy that he imagined he would experience in having those cold, salty waves creep up and run over them. He could go back to the warm sand and dry them rapidly and why might not a process like that stimulate circulation? Why would not the hot sand draw the sluggish poisoned blood in his veins to his feet? Why would not the cold salt water drive it back? ”

“ Margaret Cameron took hold of a wooden chair back, and leaning forward, studied Jamie intently, but she answered him quietly and readily enough:
“I try to be.”
“Oh, I don’t mean,” said Jamie, “have you got a long line of highly bred ancestors; are you skilled in the fine arts of society; do you wear exquisite clothing and live a life elegant leisure. What want to know, to put it briefly and bluntly, is, would you faint at the sight of a drop of blood, if it happened to be human blood?” ”

“ And I believe in hell at its hottest and damnation at its damnedest for the men who are responsible for such anguish as we have seen this girl suffer and for such a death as we have watched her die. I’d like to take the men who cannot wait for honest marriage and a time when they are able to support a woman and give her a home and fortify her body to serve the functions of wifehood, of motherhood and home-making, men who upset everything and ruin everything for their own personal immediate self-gratification—I’d like to take them all out and hang them as high as Haman. ”

“ It is in the blood of humanity to fight for life. Anything but death. Jamie sat on the side of the bed and meditated. upon how strange it was that human beings should complain of pain, of poverty, of disappointment, of defeat of every kind, and yet the instant death, death that the little Scout said was beautiful, became imminent, humanity armed against it and fought to the last ditch, as he was fighting. He admitted that he might be mistaken, that he might be over hopeful, that Margaret Cameron’s vision might even be coloured by her hopes for him. ”

“ One acre of valuable soil crowded to the limit with wonderful planting, a row of white hives running the length of it, something in the bank, plenty of comfortable clothing that fitted him, a bed whereon to sleep, and they were his if he cared to stretch forth his hand and take them? Jamie suddenly discovered that he was not so strong as he had thought he was because he was shaking until his teeth chattered and the tears were rolling down his cheeks until he was exhausted. ”

“ WHEN Jamie reached the road, he crossed it and started down a steep embankment leading to the hot sands of the sea and the breaking waves. As he was going down, to his right he noticed a stone projecting in such a manner as to make a particularly attractive seat. From the feel of the package he thought he knew what he had. So Jamie went over and sat on the stone screened on one side by an unusually large toluache, its lilied white trumpets blaring widely from blue edgings. ”

“ Jamie smiled with pleasure as he glanced around the living room. He thought how few men there were in the world who could take insensate objects and make a room so livable as the Bee Master had made the room upon which he had indelibly stamped his tastes, his mentality, his artistic tendencies. ”