The Happy End Part 23

August Turnbull, with a feeling like panic, brushed the picture from his mind.

The dessert was apparently a bomb of frozen coffee, but the center revealed a delicious creamy substance flaked with pistache. The cold sweet was exactly what he craved, and he ate it rapidly in a curious mounting excitement. With the coffee he fingered the diminutive gla.s.s of golden brandy and a long dark roll of oily tobacco. He lighted this carefully and flooded his head with the coiling bluish smoke. Rosalie was smoking a cigarette--a habit in women which he noisily denounced.

She extinguished it in an ash tray, but his anger lingered, an unreasoning exasperation that constricted his throat. Sharply aware of the sultriness of the evening he went hastily out to the veranda.

Morice following him with the evening paper volunteered, "I see German submarines are operating on the Atlantic coast."

His father a.s.serted: "This country is due for a lesson. It was anxious enough to get into trouble, and now we'll find how it likes some severe instruction. All the news here is bluff--the national a.s.set. What I hope is that business won't be entirely ruined later."

"The Germans will get the lesson," Rosalie unexpectedly declared at his shoulder.

"You don't know what you're talking about," he replied decidedly. "The German system is a marvel, one of the wonders of civilization."

She turned away, lightly singing a line from one of her late numbers: "I've a Yankee boy bound for Berlin."

Morice stirred uneasily. "They got a Danish tanker somewhere off Nantucket," he continued impotently.

August Turnbull refused to be drawn into further speech; he inhaled his cigar with a replete bodily contentment. The oppression of dinner was subsiding. His private opinion of the war was that it would end without a military decision--he regarded the German system as unsmashable--and then, with France deleted and England swamped in internal politics, he saw an alliance of common sense between Germany and the United States.

The present hysteria, the sentimentality he condemned, could not continue to stand before the pressure of mercantile necessity. After all, the entire country was not made up of fools.

Morice and his wife wandered off to the boardwalk, and he, August, must have fallen asleep, for he suddenly sat up with a sensation of strangeness and dizzy vision.

He rose and shook it off. It was still light, and he could see Bernard at his automobile, parked before the latter's cottage.

The younger man caught sight of August at the same moment and called: "We are going to a cafe with the Rathes; will you come?"

He was still slightly confused, his head full, and the ride, the gayety of the crowd, he thought, would do him good.

"Be over for you," the other added; and later he was crowded into a rear seat between Louise, his daughter, and Caroline Rathe.

Louise was wearing the necklace of platinum and diamonds Bernard Foster had given her last Christmas. It was, August admitted to himself, a splendid present, and must have cost eighteen or twenty thousand dollars. The Government had made platinum almost prohibitive. In things of this kind--the adornment of his wife, of, really, himself, the extension of his pride--Bernard was extremely generous. It was in the small affairs such as gasoline that he was prudent.

Both Caroline Rathe and Louise were handsome women handsomely dressed; he was seated in a nest of soft tulle and ruffled embroidery, of pliant swaying bodies. Their satin-shod feet had high sharp insteps in films of black lace and their fingers glittered with prismatic stones. Bernard was in front with the chauffeur, and Frederick Rathe occupied a small seat at the knees of the three others. He had not made his money, as had August and Bernard, but inherited it with a huge brewery. Frederick was younger than the other men too; but his manner was, if anything, curter.

He said things about the present war that made even August Turnbull uneasy.

He was an unusual youth, not devoted to sports and convivial pleasures--as any one might infer, viewing his heavy frame and wealth--but something of a reader. He quoted fragments from philosophical books about the will-to-power and the _Uebermensch_ that stuck like burrs in August Turnbull's memory, furnishing him with labels, backing, for many of his personally evolved convictions and experience.

They were soon descending the steps to the anteroom of the cafe, where the men left their hats and sticks. As they entered the brilliantly lighted s.p.a.ce beyond a captain hurried forward. "Good evening, gentlemen," he said servilely; "Mr. Turnbull----"

He ushered them to a table by the rope of an open floor for dancing and removed a reserved card. There he stood attentively with a waiter at his shoulder.

"What will you have?" Frederick Rathe asked generally. "For me nothing but beer. Not the filthy American stuff." He turned to the servants. "If you still have some of the other. You understand?"

"No beer for me!" Louise exclaimed.

"Champagne," the captain suggested.

She agreed, but Caroline had a fancy for something else. August Turnbull preferred a Scotch whisky and soda. The cafe was crowded; everywhere drinking multiplied in an illuminated haze of cigarettes. A slight girl in an airy slip and bare legs was executing a furious dance with a powdered youth on the open s.p.a.ce. The girl whirled about her partner's head, a rigid shape in a flutter of white.

They stood limply answering the rattle of applause that followed. A woman in an extravagantly low-cut gown took their place, singing. There was no possibility of mistaking her allusions; August smiled broadly, but Louise and Caroline Rathe watched her with an unmoved sharp curiosity. In the same manner they studied other women in the cafe; more than once August Turnbull hastily averted his gaze at the discovery that his daughter and he were intent upon the same individual.

"The U-boats are at it again," Bernard commented in a lowered voice.

"And, though it is war," Frederick added, "every one here is squealing like a mouse. 'Ye are not great enough to know of hatred and envy,'" he quoted. "'It is the good war which halloweth every cause.'"

"I wish you wouldn't say those things here," his wife murmured.

"'Thou goest to women?'" he lectured her with mock solemnity. "'Do not forget thy whip!'"

The whisky ran in a burning tide through August Turnbull's senses. His surroundings became a little blurred, out of focus; his voice sounded unfamiliar, as though it came from somewhere behind him. Fresh buckets of wine were brought, fresh, polished gla.s.ses. His appet.i.te revived, and he ordered caviar. Beyond, a girl in a snake-like dress was breaking a scarlet boiled lobster with a nut cracker; her cigarette smoked on the table edge. Waiters pa.s.sed bearing trays of steaming food, pitchers of foaming beer, colorless drinks with bobbing sliced limes, purplish sloe gin and sirupy cordials. Bernard's face was dark and there was a splash of champagne on his dinner shirt. Louise was uncertainly humming a fragment of popular song. The table was littered with empty plates and gla.s.ses. Perversely it made August think of Emmy, his wife, and acute dread touched him at the mockery of her wasting despair.

III

The following morning, Thursday, August Turnbull was forced to go into the city. He drove to the Turnbull Bakery in a taxi and dispatched his responsibilities in time for luncheon uptown and an early afternoon train to the sh.o.r.e. The bakery was a consequential rectangle of brick, with the office across the front and a court resounding with the shattering din of ponderous delivery trucks. All the vehicles, August saw, bore a new temporary label advertising still another war bread; there was, too, a subsidiary patriotic declaration: "Win the War With Wheat."

He was, as always, fascinated by the mammoth trays of bread, the enormous flood of sustenance produced as the result of his energy and ability. Each loaf was shut in a sanitary paper envelope; the popular superst.i.tion, sanitation, had contributed as much as anything to his marked success. He liked to picture himself as a great force, a granary on which the city depended for life; it pleased him to think of thousands of people, men, women and children, waiting for his loaves or perhaps suffering through the inability to buy them.

August left a direction for a barrel of superlative flower to be sent to his cottage, and then with a curious feeling of expectancy he departed.

He was unable to grasp the cause of his sudden impatience to be again at the sea. On the train, in the Pullman smoking compartment, his coat swinging on a hook beside him, the vague haste centered surprisingly about the person of Miss Beggs. At first he was annoyed by the reality and persistence of her image; then he slipped into an unquestioning consideration of her.

Never had he seen a more healthy being, and that alone, he told himself, was sufficient to account for his interest. He liked marked physical well-being; particularly, he added, in women. A sick wife, for example, was the most futile thing imaginable; a wife should exist for the comfort and pleasure of her husband. What little Miss Beggs--her name, he now remembered from the checks made out for her, was Meta Beggs--had said was as vigorous as herself. He realized that she had a strong, even rebellious personality. That, in her, however, should not be encouraged--an engaging submission was the becoming att.i.tude for her s.e.x.

He proceeded immediately into the ocean, puffing strenuously and gazing about. No women could be seen. They never had any regularity of habit, he complained silently. After dinner--a surfeit of tenderloin Bordelaise--he walked up the short incline to the boardwalk, where on one of the benches overlooking the sparkling water he saw a slight familiar figure. It was Miss Beggs. Her eyes dwelt on him momentarily and then returned to the horizon.

"You are a great deal alone," he commented on the far end of the bench.

"It's because I choose to be," she answered sharply.

An expression of displeasure was audible in his reply, "You should have no trouble."

"I ought to explain," she continued, her slim hands clasped on shapely knees; "I mean that I can't get what I want."

"So you prefer nothing?"

She nodded.

"That's different," August Turnbull declared. "Anybody could see you're particular. Still, it's strange you haven't met--well, one that suited you."

"What good would it do me--a school-teacher, and now a companion!"

"You might be admired for those very things."

"Yes, by old ladies, male and female. Not men. There's just one attraction for them."

"Well----"

She turned now and faced him with a suppressed bitter energy. "Clothes,"

she said.

"That's nonsense!" he replied emphatically. "Dress is only incidental."