His room occupied the front corner on the sea, Emmy's was beyond; the
door between was partly open and he could hear her moving about, but
with a cigarette and his hair-brushes he made no acknowledgment of her
presence.
The sun was now no more than a diffused gray glow, the sea like
unstirred molten silver. The sound of the muffled gong that announced
dinner floated up the stairs.
Below, the damask was lit both by rose silk-shaded candles and by the
radiance of a suspended alabaster bowl. August Turnbull sat at the
head of a table laden with silver and crystal and flowers. There were
individual pepper mills--he detested adulterated or stale spices--carved
goblets for water, cocktail glasses with enameled roosters, ruby goblets
like blown flowers and little gilt-speckled liqueur glasses; there were
knives with steel blades, knives all of silver, and gold fruit knives;
there were slim oyster forks, entrée forks of solid design, and forks of
filigree; a bank of spoons by a plate that would be presently removed,
unused, for other filled plates.
Opposite him Emmy's place was still empty, but his son, Morice, in the
olive drab and bar of a first lieutenant, together with his wife, was
already present. August was annoyed by any delay: one of the marks of
a properly controlled household, a house admirably conscious of the
importance of order--and obedience--was an utter promptness at the
table. Then, silent and unsubstantial as a shadow, Emmy Turnbull slipped
into her seat.
August gazed at her with the secret resentment more and more inspired
by her sickness. At first he had been merely dogmatic--she must recover
under the superlative advice and attention he was able to summon for
her. Then his impatience had swung about toward all doctors--they were
a pack of incompetent fools, medicine was nothing more than an
organized swindle. They had tried baths, cures, innumerable infallible
treatments--to no purpose. Finally he had given up all effort, all hope;
he had given her up. And since then it had been difficult to mask his
resentment.
The butler, a white jacket taking the place of the conventional somber
black, poured four cocktails from a silver mixer and placed four dishes
of shaved ice, lemon rosettes and minute pinkish clams before August
Turnbull, Morice and his wife, and Miss Beggs, occupying in solitude a
side of the table. Then he set at Mrs. Turnbull's hand a glass of milk
thinned with limewater and an elaborate platter holding three small
pieces of zwieback.
She could eat practically nothing.
It was the particular character of her state that specially upset August
Turnbull. He was continually affronted by the spectacle of Emmy seated
before him sipping her diluted milk, breaking her dry bread, in the
midst of the rich plenty he provided. Damn it, he admitted, it got on
his nerves!
The sting of the cocktail whipped up his eagerness for the iced tender
clams. His narrowed gaze rested on Emmy; she was actually seven years
older than he, but from her appearance she might be a hundred,
a million. There was nothing but her painfully slow movements to
distinguish her from a mummy.
The plates were again removed and soup brought on, a clear steaming
amber-green turtle, and with it crisp wheat rolls. Morice's wife gave a
sigh of satisfaction at the latter.
“My,” she said, “they're elegant! I'm sick and tired of war bread.”
She was a pinkish young woman with regular features and abundant coppery
hair. Marriage had brought her into the Turnbull family from the
chorus of a famous New York roof beauty show. August had been at first
displeased, then a certain complacency had possessed him--Morice, who
was practically thirty years old, had no source of income other than
that volunteered by his father, and it pleased the latter to keep them
depending uncertainly on what he was willing to do. It insured just the
attitude from Rosalie he most enjoyed, approved, in a youthful and not
unhandsome woman. He liked her soft scented weight hanging on his arm
and the perfumed kiss with which she greeted him in the morning.
Nevertheless, at times there was a gleam in her eyes and an expression
at odds with the perfection of her submission; on several occasions
Morice had approached him armed with a determination that he, August,
knew had been injected from without, undoubtedly by Rosalie. Whatever it
had been he quickly disposed of it, but there was a possibility that she
might some day undertake a rebellion; and there was added zest in the
thought of how he would totally subdue her.
“It's a wonder something isn't said to you,” she continued. “They're
awfully strict about wheat now.”
“That,” August Turnbull instructed her heavily, “is a subject we needn't
pursue.”
The truth was that he would permit no interference with what so closely
touched his comfort. He was not a horse to eat bran. His bakery--under
inspection--conformed rigidly with the Government requirements; but he
had no intention of spoiling his own dinners. Any necessary conservation
could be effected at the expense of the riffraff through which he had
driven coming from the station. Black bread was no new experience to
them.
He saw that Miss Beggs' small white teeth were crushing salted cashew
nuts. Noticing her in detail for the first time he realized that she
enormously appreciated good food. Why in thunder, since she ate so
heartily, didn't she get fat and rosy! She was one of the thin kind--yet
not thin, he corrected himself. Graceful. Why, she must weigh a hundred
and twenty-five pounds; and she wasn't tall.
The butler filled his ruby goblet from a narrow bottle of Rhine wine. It
was exactly right, not sweet but full; and the man held for his choice a
great platter of beef, beautifully carved into thick crimson slices; the
bloodlike gravy had collected in its depression and he poured it over
his meat.
“A piece of this,” he told Emmy discontentedly, “would set you right up;
put something in your veins besides limewater.”
She became painfully upset at once and fumbled in her lap, with her face
averted, as the attention of the table was momentarily directed at her.
There was an uncontrollable tremor of her loose colorless mouth.
What a wife for him, August Turnbull! The stimulants and rich flavors
and roast filled him with a humming vitality; he could feel his heart
beat--as strong, he thought, as a bell. In a way Emmy had deceived
him--she probably had always been fragile, but was careful to conceal
it from him at their marriage. It was unjust to him. He wished that she
would take her farcical meals in her room, and not sit here--a skeleton
at the feast. Positively it made him nervous to see her--spoiled his
pleasure.
It had become worse lately; he had difficulty in putting her from his
mind; he imagined Emmy in conjunction with the bakery, of her slowly
starving and the thousands of loaves he produced in a day. There was
something unnatural in such a situation; it was like a mockery at him.
A vision of her came to him at the most inopportune moments, lingering
until it drove him into a hot rage and a pounding set up at the back of
his neck.
The meat was brought back, and he had more of a sweet boiled huckleberry
pudding. A salad followed, with a heavy Russian dressing. August
Turnbull's breathing grew thicker, he was conscious of a familiar
oppression. He assaulted it with fresh wine.
“I saw Bernard on the beach,” he related; “Victorine is sick once more.
Chocolate sundaes, Bernard said. She is always stuffing herself at
soda-water counters or with candy. They oughtn't to allow it; the child
should be made to eat at the table. When she is here she touches nothing
but the dessert. When I was ten I ate everything or not at all.
But there is no longer any discipline, not only with children but
everywhere.”
“There is a little freedom, though,” Rosalie suggested.
His manner clearly showed displeasure, almost contempt, and he turned
to Miss Beggs. “What do you think?” he demanded. “I understand you have
been a school-teacher.”
“Oh, you are quite right,” she responded; “at least about children, and
it is clear from them that most parents are idiotically lax.” A blaze of
discontent, loathing, surprisingly invaded her pallid face.
“A rod of iron,” August recommended.
The contrast between his wife and Miss Beggs recurred, intensified--one
an absolute wreck and the other as solidly slender as a birch tree. Fate
had played a disgusting trick on him. In the prime of his life he was
tied to a hopeless invalid. It put an unfair tension on him. Women were
charming, gracious--or else they were nothing. If Emmy's money had been
an assistance at first he had speedily justified its absorption in the
business. She owed him, her husband, everything possible. He suddenly
pictured mountains of bread, bread towering up into the clouds, fragrant
and appetizing; and Emmy, a thing of bones, gazing wistfully at it.
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 glass
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 asserted: “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 asset. 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 café, where
the men left their hats and sticks. As they entered the brilliantly
lighted space 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 café 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 space. 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 glasses. His appetite 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 passed 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
glasses. Perversely it made August think of Emmy, his wife, and acute
dread touched him at the mockery of her wasting despair.