The Happy End Part 9

The following noon he shut the door of his house with a sharp impact and made his way over the single street of Nantbrook toward the city. His fear of it had vanished; and when he reached the steel-bound towering masonry, the pouring crowds, he moved directly to a theater from which an audience composed entirely of men was pa.s.sing out by the posters of a hectic burlesque.

"Clegett?" he asked at the grille of the box office.

A small man with a tilted black derby came from the darkened auditorium.

"Where have you been?" he demanded as he caught sight of Lemuel Doret.

"I asked two or three but you might have been dead for all of them."

"That's just about what I have," Doret answered. "Mr. Clegett, I'd like a little money."

"How little?"

"A hundred would be plenty."

The other without hesitation produced a fold of currency, from which he transferred an amount to Lemuel Doret. It went into his pocket without a glance. He hesitated a moment, then added: "This will be all."

Clegett nodded. "It might, and it might not," he a.s.serted; "but you can't jam me. You're welcome to that, anyhow. It was coming to you. I wondered when you'd be round."

It was not far from the theater to a glittering hardware store, a place that specialized in sporting goods. There were cases of fis.h.i.+ng reels, brilliant tied flies and varnished, gayly wrapped cane rods, gaffs and coiled wire leaders, and an impressive a.s.sortment of modern pistols, rifles and shotguns.

"Something small and neat," Doret told the man in charge of the weapons.

He examined a compact automatic pistol, a blunted shape no larger than his palm. It was a beautiful mechanism, and as with his silken razors, merely to hold it, to test the smooth action, gave him a sense of pleasure.

Later, seated in a quiet cafe, an adjunct of the saloon below, he could not resist the temptation of taking the pistol in its rubber holster from his pocket, merely to finger the delicate trigger. There was no hurry. He knew his world thoroughly: it was a small land in which the inhabitants had constant knowledge of each other. A question in the right place would bring all the information he needed. Lemuel was absolutely composed, actually he was a little sleepy; longing and inner strife, dreams, were at an end; only an old familiar state, a thoroughly comprehensible purpose remained.

A girl--she could have been no more than fourteen--was hurriedly slipping a paper of white crystalline powder into a gla.s.s of sarsaparilla. She smiled at him as she saw his indifferent interrogation.

"It's better rolled with a pencil first," he said, and then returned to the contemplation of his own affair.

The result of this was that, soon after, he was seated in the smoking car of an electric train that, hurtling across a sedgy green expanse of salt meadow, deposited him in a colorful thronging city built on sand and the rim of the sea. It was best to avoid if possible even a casual inquiry, and Bowman had spoken of Atlantic City. The afternoon was hot and bright, the beach was still dotted with groups of bathers; and Lemuel Doret found an inconspicuous place in a row of swing chairs protected by an awning ... where he waited for evening. Below him a young woman lay contentedly with her head in a youth's lap; a child in a red sc.r.a.p of bathing suit dug st.u.r.dily with an ineffectual tin spade.

The day declined, the water darkened and the groups vanished from the beach. An attendant was stacking the swing chairs, and Lemuel Doret left his place. The boardwalk, elevated above him, was filled with a gay mult.i.tude, subdued by the early twilight and the brightening lemon-yellow radiance of the strung globes. Drifting, with only his gaze alert, in the scented mob, he stopped at an unremarkable lunch room for coffee, and afterward turned down a side avenue to where some automobiles waited at the curb. A driver moved from his seat as Lemuel approached, but after a closer inspection the former's interest died.

Doret lighted a cigarette. "How are they hitting you?" he asked negligently.

"Bad; but the season ain't opened up right yet. It'll have to soon, though, if they want me; gas has gone to where it's like shoving champagne into your car."

"The cafes doing anything?"

"None except the Torquay; but the cabaret they got takes all the profits. That's on the front. Then there's the World, back of the town.

It's colored, but white go. Quite a place--I saw a sailor come out last night hashed with a knife."

He found the Torquay, a place of brilliant illumination and color, packed with tables about a dancing floor, and small insistent orchestra.

He sat against the wall by the entrance, apparently sunk in apathy, but his vision searched the crowd like the cutting bar of light thrown on the intermittent singers. He renewed his order. Toward midnight a fresh influx of people swept in; his search was unsatisfied.

The cigarette girl, pinkly pretty with an exaggerated figure, carrying a wooden tray with her wares, stopped at his gesture.

"Why don't you hang that about your neck with something?" he inquired.

"And get round shouldered!" she demanded. Her manner became confidential. "I do get fierce tired," she admitted; "nine till two-thirty."

He asked for a particular brand of cigarette.

"We haven't got them." She studied him with a memorizing frown. "They are hardly ever asked for; and now--yes, there was a man, last night, I think----"

"He must have made an impression."

"Another move and I'd slapped him if I lost my job. They got to be some fresh when they disturb me, too."

"Alone, then?"

"That's right. Wanted me to meet him, and showed me a roll of money.

Me!" her contempt sharpened.

"He was young?"

"Young nothing, with gray in his s...o...b..ush mustache."

By such small things, Lemuel Doret reflected, the freshness that had fixed June Bowman in the girl's memory, men were marked and followed.

"I told him," she volunteered further, "he didn't belong on the boardwalk but in the rough joints past the avenue."

Paying for his drink Doret left the Torquay; and following the slight pressure of two suggestions and a faint possibility he found himself in a sodden dark district where a red-gla.s.s electric sign proclaimed the entrance to the World. An automobile stopped and a chattering group of young colored girls in sheer white with vivid ribbons, accompanied by sultry silent negroes, preceded him into the cafe. He was met by a bra.s.sy racket and a curiously musty heavy air.

The room was long and narrow, and on one wall a narrow long platform was built above the floor for the cabaret. There was a ledge about the other walls the width of one table, and below that the s.p.a.ce was crowded by a singular a.s.sembly. There were women faintly bisque in shade, with beautiful regular features, and absolute blacks with flattened noses and glistening eyes in burning red and green muslins. Among them were white girls with untidy bright-gold hair, veiled gaze and sullen painted lips; white men sat scattered through the darker throng, men like Lemuel Doret, quiet and watchful, others laughing carelessly, belligerent, and still more sunk in a stupor of drink.

Perhaps ten performers occupied the stage, and at one end was the hysterical sc.r.a.ping on strings, the m.u.f.fled hammered drums, that furnished the rhythm for a slow intense waltz.

Yet in no detail was the place so marked as by an indefinable oppressive atmosphere. The strong musk and edged perfumes, the races, distinct and subtly antagonistic or mingled and spoiled, the rasping instruments, combined in an unnatural irritating pressure; they produced an actual sensation of cold and staleness like that from the air of a vault.

Doret ordered beer in a bottle, and watched the negro waitress snap off the cap. He had never seen a cafe such as this before, and he was engaged, slightly; its character he expressed comprehensively in the word "bad."

A wonderfully agile dancer caught the attention of the room.

The musicians added their voices to the jangle, and the minor half-inarticulate wail, the dull regular thudding of the ba.s.s drum were savage. The song fluctuated and died; the dancer dropped exhausted into her chair.

Then Lemuel saw June Bowman. He was only a short distance away, and--without Bella--seated alone but talking to the occupants of the next table. Lemuel Doret was composed. In his pocket he removed the automatic pistol from its rubber case. Still there was no hurry--Bowman was half turned from him, absolutely at his command. The other twisted about, his glance swept the room, and he recognized Doret. He half rose from his chair, made a gesture of acknowledgment that died before Lemuel's stony face, and sank back into his place. Lemuel saw Bowman's hand slip under his coat, but it came out immediately; the fingers drummed on the table.

The careless fool--he was unarmed.

There was no hurry; he could make one, two steps at Bowman's slightest movement.... Lemuel thought of Flavilla deserted, dying alone with a parched mouth, of all that had gone to wreck in the evil that had overtaken him--the past that could not, it appeared, be killed. Yet where Bowman was the past, it was nearly over. He'd finish the beer before him, that would leave some in the bottle, and then end it.

With the gla.s.s poised in his hand he heard an absurd unexpected sound.

Looking up he saw that it came from the platform, from a black woman in pale-blue silk, a short ruffled skirt and silver-paper ornaments in her tightly crinkled hair. She was singing, barely audibly:

_"Oh, children ... lost in Egypt See that chariot....

... good tidings!"_

Even from his table across the room he realized that she was sunk in an abstraction; her eyes were shut and her body rocking in beat to the line.