“'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.
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 shore. 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 superstition, 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 attitude for her sex.
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.