IV
At least, August reflected with a degree of comfort at breakfast, Emmy didn't come down in the morning; she hadn't enough strength. He addressed himself to the demolishment of a ripe Cassaba melon. It melted in his mouth to the consistency of sugary water. His coffee cup had a large flattened bowl, and pouring in the ropy cream with his free hand he lifted the silver cover of a dish set before him. It held spitted chicken livers and bacon and gave out an irresistible odor. There were, too, potatoes chopped fine with peppers and browned; and hot delicately sweetened buns. He emptied two full spits, renewed his coffee and finished the potatoes.
With a butter ball at the center of a bun he casually glanced at the day's paper. The submarines, he saw, were operating farther south. A small passenger steamer, the Veronica had been torpedoed outside the Delaware Capes.
A step sounded in the hall, and Louise entered the dining room, clad all in white with the exception of a closely fitting yellow hat. After a moment Victorine, a girl small for her age, with a petulant satiated expression, followed.
“It's a shame,” Louise observed, “that with Morice and his wife in the cottage you have to breakfast alone. I suppose all those theatrical people get up at noon.”
“Not quite,” Rosalie told her from the doorway.
Louise made no reply other than elevating her brows. Victorine looked at the other with an exact mirroring of her mother's disdain.
“Good morning,” Morice said indistinctly, hooking the collar of his uniform. “It's a bloody nuisance,” he asserted. “Why can't they copy the English jacket?”
“It is much better looking,” Louise added.
“Well,” Rosalie proclaimed, “I'm glad to see Morice in any; even if it means nothing more than a desk in the Quartermaster's Department.”
“That is very necessary,” August Turnbull spoke decidedly.
“Perhaps,” she agreed.
“I think it is bad taste to raise such insinuations.” Louise was severe.
“An army,” August put in, “travels on its stomach. As Louise suggests—we must ask you not to discuss the question in your present tone.” Morice's wife half-audibly spoke into her melon, and his face reddened. “What did I understand you to say?” he demanded.
“Oh, 'Swat the fly!'” Rosalie answered hardily.
“Not at all!” he almost shouted. “What you said was 'Swat the Kaiser!'”
“Well, swat him!”
“It was evident, also, that you did not refer to the Emperor of Germany—but to me.”
“You said it,” she admitted vulgarly. “If any house ever had a Hohenzollern this has.”
“Shut up, Rosalie!” her husband commanded, perturbed; “you'll spoil everything.”
“It might be better if she continued,” Louise Foster corrected him. “Perhaps then we'd learn something of this—this beauty.”
“I got good money for my face anyhow,” Rosalie asserted. “And no cash premium went with it either. As for going on, I'll go.” She turned to August Turnbull: “I've been stalling round here for nearly a year with Morice scared to death trying to get a piece of change out of you. Now I'm through; I've worked hard for a season's pay, but this is slavery. What you want is an amalgamated lady bootblack and nautch dancer. You're a joke to a free white woman. I'm sorry for your wife. She ought to slip you a bichloride tablet. If it was worth while I'd turn you over to the authorities for breaking the food regulations.”
She rose, unceremoniously shoving back her chair. “For a fact, I'm tired of watching you eat. You down as much as a company of good boys on the march. Don't get black in the face; I'd be afraid to if I were you.”
August Turnbull's rage beat like a hammer at the base of his head. He, too, rose, leaning forward with his napkin crumpled in a pounding fist.
“Get out of my house!” he shouted.
“That's all right enough,” she replied; “the question is—is Morice coming with me? Is that khaki he has on or a Kate Greenaway suit?”
Morice looked from one to the other in obvious dismay. He had a pleasant dull face and a minute spiked mustache on an irresolute mouth.
“If you stay with me,” she warned him further, “I'll have you out of that grocery store and into a trench.”
“Pleasant for you, Morice,” Louise explained.
“Things were so comfortable, Rosalie,” he protested despairingly. “What in the name of sense made you stir this all up? The governor won't do a tap for us now.”
His wife stood by herself, facing the inimical Turnbull front, while Morice wavered between.
“If you'll get along,” the former told him, “I can make a living till you come back. We can do without any Trübner money. I'm not a lot at German, but I guess you can understand me,” she again addressed August. “Not that I blame you for the change, such as it is.”
“I'll have to go with her,” Morice unhappily declared.
August Turnbull's face was stiff with congestion. The figures before him wavered in a sort of fog. He put out a hand, supporting himself on the back of his chair.
“Get out of my house,” he repeated in a hoarse whisper.
Fortunately Morice's leave had come to an end, and Rosalie and he withdrew in at least the semblance of a normal departure. August's rage changed to an indignant surprise, and he established himself with a rigid dignity on the veranda. There, happening on a cigar that burned badly, he was reduced to a state of further self-commiseration. That is, he dwelt on the general deterioration of the world about him. There was no discipline; there was no respect; authority was laughed at. All this was the result of laxness, of the sentimentality he condemned; a firmer hand was needed everywhere.
He turned with relief to the contemplation of Meta Beggs; she was enormously satisfactory to consider. August watched her now with the greatest interest; he even sat in his wife's room while her companion moved silently and gracefully about. Miss Beggs couldn't have noticed this, for scarcely ever did her gaze meet his; she had a habit of standing lost in thought, her slimness a little drooping, as if she were weary or depressed. She was in his mind continually—Miss Beggs and Emmy, his wife.
The latter had a surprising power to disturb him; lately he had even dreamed of her starving to death in the presence of abundant food. He began to be superstitious about it, to think of her in a ridiculous nervous manner as an evil design on his peace and security. She seemed unnatural with her shrunken face bowed opposite him at the table. His feeling for her shifted subconsciously to hatred. It broke out publicly in sardonic or angry periods under which she would shrink away, incredibly timid, from his scorn. This quality of utter helplessness gave the menace he divined in her its illusive air of unreality. She seemed—she was—entirely helpless; a prematurely aged woman, of the mildest instincts, dying of malnutrition.
Miss Beggs now merged into all his daily life, his very fiber. He regarded her in an attitude of admirable frankness. “Still it is extraordinary you haven't married.”
The tide was out, it was late afternoon, and they were walking over the hard exposed sand. Whenever she came on a shell she crushed it with a sharp heel.
“There were some,” she replied indifferently.
He nodded gravely. “It would have to be a special kind of man,” he agreed. “An ordinary individual would be crushed by your personality. You'd need a firm hand.”
Her face was inscrutable. “I have always had the misfortune to be too late,” she told him.
“I wish I had known you sooner!” he exclaimed.
Her arms, in transparent sleeves, were like marble. His words crystallized an overwhelming realization of how exactly she was suited to him. The desire to shut her will in his hand increased a thousandfold.
“Yes,” she said, “I would have married you. But there's no good discussing it.” She breathed deeply with a sinking forward of her rounded shoulders. All her vigor seemed to have left her. “I have been worried about Mrs. Turnbull lately,” she went on. “Perhaps it's my imagination—does she look weaker to you?”
“I haven't noticed,” he answered brusquely.
Curiously he had never thought of Emmy as dying; she appeared eternal, without the possibility of offering him the relief of such freedom as yet remained. Freedom for—for Meta Beggs.
“The doctor was at the cottage again Thursday,” she informed him. “I didn't hear what he said.”
“Humbugs,” August Turnbull pronounced.
A sudden caution invaded him. It would be well not to implicate himself too far with his wife's companion. She was a far shrewder woman than was common; there was such a thing as blackmail. He studied her privately. Damn it, what a pen he had been caught in! Her manner, too, changed immediately, as though she had read his feeling.
“I shall have to go back.”
She spoke coldly. A moment before she had been close beside him, but now she might as well have been miles away.