Читать книгу Empty Hands - Stringer Arthur - Страница 5

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Endicott, oppressed by the silence of the house, dropped his bags on the Sarouk rug at the foot of the cascading wide stairway and went on to the twilit living-room. Finding that empty, he wandered out to the sun-room, where he hesitated a moment, then stepped through the double screen-doors to the garden terrace. There he turned abruptly south. He followed the leaf-filtered gloom of a pergola until he came to the Etruscan seat that overlooked the swimming-pool. And there he sat down.

It was a hot night. It was more than hot; it was stifling. Not a breath of air stirred the syringa leaves that hung on either side of him. Somewhere back of the faded tamarisks a pair of katydids had already begun their nocturnal antiphony. A cricket shrilled from time to time, in the parched grass-parterres behind the grape-arbors. There was no moon, as yet, and even the stars were shut out by the tepid haze that seemed to blanket a burned-out world. It was so close and sultry that Endicott, as he stared down at the pool, found something consolatory in the mere thought of water.

There was a time when he had been inordinately proud of that pool. He had planned it himself, on the hillside where a spring had bubbled out below the twisted root of an umbrella-elm. He had tamed and harnessed that spring, and had built his basin of cement, eighty feet long and thirty feet wide, lining it with Tennessee marble and fashioning seven marble steps to lead into its shallower end. Along its full length, on either side, ran a marble colonnade shaded with wistaria, with Tuscan urns at the four corners. At its upper end stood the arched grotto which he had built of field-stone, after landscaping the higher garden-slopes. He had thought of it as an arena of sane and healthful pleasure. But life had taken the savor out of it, as life took the savor out of so many things. For all its trellises and vines and tubbed greenery, for all its double beauty of jade-green water reflecting unwavering flowers and foliage framed in their milky oblong of marble, it was now a pool of bitterness to him.

As he stared down at it, through the lifeless hot darkness, Endicott remembered how Erica, his wife, had once loved it. He could almost picture her sitting on the Roman bench at the far end of the pool. The wistaria vines were thinner, in those days, and the sun would strike slantingly down on her drying hair. It was wonderful hair, like spun gold, and she had an incredible amount of it. She had always claimed that the water from his spring was not like other water, nursing the purely personal belief that it was slightly radiumized, since it had the trick of leaving one's skin so satin-like in its smoothness. But the blight had fallen with the Osborne affair, when Erica and Bertie Osborne had drifted into the habit of swimming alone there, after dark. Endicott had objected to that, had finally taken his stand and forbidden it. When his wife had laughingly defied him, and proclaimed that she and Bertie were going to swim at midnight, he had as grimly proclaimed otherwise. To establish his authority, he returned to the pool and opened the valve that let out the water. Then he went to bed.

At midnight his wife and Osborne slipped down to the pool, without switching on the lights. Osborne dived, laughing and light-hearted, from the carpet-covered spring-board. It was one of his swan-dives, of which he was so proud. His skull crushed in, like an egg-shell, against the floor of the empty cement basin.

Endicott, as he sat there, fancied he could still hear Erica's scream through the midnight quietness of their garden. He even fancied that he could see her, sitting crouched on the Roman bench at the pool-end, staring down into the depths of the jade-green water. Yet she had been dead for five long years. And that second tragedy had always seemed to Endicott as gratuitous and as ironic as the first. For as they were motoring through northern Georgia she had drunk from an abandoned farm well, after he had warned her not to. Three weeks later she had died of typhoid. She had been a beautiful woman. But some women, he told himself, were not to be controlled. They remained untamed and intractable, always seeming one page late in reading the lesson of life. And they not only suffered themselves, but they brought suffering to those about them. He had built up his fortune, as he had built his pool, for her good. And the one now stood as futile as the other. He wondered, as he stared down at the vaguely opalescent oblong of water, if she ever came back there, in the stillness of the night, and brooded over that one place that had once seemed alluring and beautiful to her.

Endicott, the next moment, caught his breath sharply. For as he stared down through the gloom he saw by the sudden flare of a match that a woman was sitting alone and silent on the Roman bench, on the bench where Erica used to sit and dry her hair. He started up from his seat. Then he sat down again, being able to breathe once more. For he saw that it was merely his daughter Claire, striking a match and lighting a cigarette; Claire in a bathing suit, obviously trying to keep cool.

He could see the slender oval of her thin face, the heavily-lashed eyes under the thoughtful brow touched with petulance, the dusky tone of the sun-tanned skin as the momentary light-flare played on her bare shoulders, forward-thrust and boy-like in their slenderness. He could make out the mass of her bobbed hair, framing the intent, narrow face, darker and more girlish-looking than her mother's. He could see the curved and short-lipped mouth holding the cigarette as she drew the flame in against its end. Then the light went out, with an impatient shake of her hand, and the glowing match-end circled through the darkness and fell into the pool at her feet. All that remained was the tiny glow of the cigarette, growing intermittently brighter as the air was sucked in through its shredded leaf corseted in rice-paper.

What impressed Endicott was the passiveness, the isolation, of the figure on the Roman bench. It amazed him to think how little he understood the girl, if she could still be called a girl, for he remembered that she must be well past nineteen. Perhaps she was more; there was a great deal he could not remember about his Clannie. But he wondered if she too sat oppressed by the loneliness of life, if she too found Hillcrest, this huge house on the hillside, an empty place. She had been left a great deal to herself this last year or two, he recalled, for a man can't run copper-mines next door to Alaska and northern Quebec and at the same time hug his own fireside. Then he wondered why his heart could remain so unmoved at the thought of her. She was his only child; she was all he had. Yet they lived in worlds of their own, with interstellar æons of space between them, with so few discernible ways of signaling across that gulf.

He was startled, the next moment, by her clear soprano voice calling through the darkness.

"You'd better switch on the lights, Baker."

Endicott could see that she was speaking to one of the servants who carried a flash-light as he wheeled a loaded tea-wagon to the arched outer end of the grotto. He could hear the servant's respectful reply and could see the pencil of light waver about the stone wall in search of the switch. A moment later a sudden garden of color flowered out of the gloom. The dusky oblong of water flashed into incandescence as the current ran through the strings of bulbs enclosed in their huge globes of many-colored Japanese lanterns, globes of beryl and orange and rose and yellow. They fused and merged in a misty crown of light above the mirroring pool where the water, now green and lustrous as malachite, reflected the motionless globes, line for line and color for color, making the tubbed arbor-vitæ and the cerise phlox in the long flower-boxes as fantastically unreal as the paper foliage of a stage-setting.

And at the edge of the pool, with her bare feet trailing in the limpid water, sat the motionless girl in her attenuating dark bathing-suit, alone in her little world of light and silence. She seemed to be waiting for something.

Endicott realized what this was when he looked up and saw the wide-wheeling twin-ray of motor head-lights as a car circled into the lower drive. Down the valley-side opposing him he could see a second pair of head-lights groping their way. A horn sounded, abrupt and insolent and sonorous, as the first car drew up below the pool, bathed for a moment in the clear light of the car that followed it. To Endicott, in that momentary illumination, it seemed like a car full of white legs. It was filled to overflowing with men and girls in bathing-suits, and from it rose a careless babel of voices, singing voices, shot through with laughter and the sustained chant of a musical-comedy song from the motor behind them.

"Hello, Clannie!" cried a bare-armed youth almost as dark as a Nubian. He leaped the flower-boxes to the pool-edge as he spoke.

"Oh, boy, to get cool!" cried a pale girl in black satin with angel-fish painted on her skirt.

"And Blinkie's bringing some bubble-water," announced a large girl with butternut-brown shoulders and arms.

They crowded and clamored along the pergola until they surrounded the impassive Claire. A girl's voice cried: "Here goes—a jack-knife, everybody!" And that challenge was followed by the repeated splash-splash of straightening bodies striking the dark water, the shouts and gasps of swimmers, the careless screams and laughter of contending couples.

Endicott could see them, when they emerged, sitting side by side along the marble lip of the pool, flesh against flesh, brown against white, while they smoked and chatted and a fat youth, prematurely bald, passed among them with glasses and a glistening cocktail-shaker. Endicott noticed that Claire drained her glass, drained it silently and impersonally, and still without speaking held it out to be refilled. She tossed away a half-smoked cigarette and stood poised, for a moment of abstraction, as a chorus of laughter followed the sound of a sudden splash. The fat youth with the shaker had slipped and fallen into the pool.

"Go after him, Jappie, and save the hooch!" cried a round-armed girl in a one-piece suit.

"What's the use, Nicky, when we all know fat must float," was Jappie's indifferent retort as chocolates from a brocaded carton that passed from wet hand to wet hand were thrown at the youth swimming with one hand and clutching the shaker with the other. There was a second chorus of laughter as some one tossed him a wine-glass, which, after turning on his back, he poised on his protuberant stomach and solemnly filled from his shaker. Then a car honked from the outer darkness and somebody called: "Here's Blinkie with the champagne!"

But Claire, Endicott noticed, was not thinking of Blinkie. She moved moodily on to the diving-board, where she stood for a moment, to speak to a youth whom she addressed as "Milt." Then she turned and faced the pool. She balanced, for a moment, on the end of the spring-board, with her bare heels together and her hands above her head, as brown and slender as a dryad, assured, indifferent, insolently impersonal. Then she rose in the air, incredibly, with her knees drawn up against her body, straightening miraculously at the precise moment of her descent, so that she struck the water taut as an arrow, and disappeared below its surface with scarcely a sound. She stayed under for what seemed an alarming length of time to the watching man. He was on his feet, in fact, before her head slowly emerged within a foot of the marble steps, where she shook her bobbed hair with a casual dog-like movement and swam lazily back to the deeper end of the pool. She seemed as much at home in the water as a young seal might have been. She reminded Endicott of a seal, in fact, as she lowered her head and doubled her thin body and disappeared below the surface again. She came up and went down again, giving the watcher an impression of wallowing, making him think of a porpoise at play. He could see where her lazy movements broke the water's surface into eddies, many-colored under the magnifying light, indescribably lovely in their transmuting tones that merged off into opal and amethyst and broke away again into beryl and still again brightened under one of the swinging globes into orange. Lovely, too, seemed the languid figure floating on that tissue of intermingling colors, so competent and close-muscled, so slender and assured, so passive and yet so poignantly alone in the midst of its noisier companions.

"Can't she," gasped Endicott, "O God, can't she be saved from all this?"

For he could see that glasses were being once more passed from hand to hand. He could see the cool and deliberate stare of men, neither young nor old, scanning the half-clad bodies of women. He could see a brown arm about a stooping white shoulder and above that shoulder the laughing face, reckless with alcohol, that stared into the solemnly hungry face beside it. And it came home to Endicott, as he gazed down at them, how they were so pallidly and yet so persistently steeping themselves in sensation. That, as he saw it, seemed the one end of this younger generation. All their lives, apparently, were a quest for sensation. They were being catered to, as they idled there in the enervating sultriness, by an appeal to every sense, to taste and touch, to smell and sight. Color was about them and the soft flow of water from the bronze dolphin's mouth was beside them and the body-cooling depths of the pool was below them. They had the scent of flowers floating above the heavier scent of their own perfumed cigarettes. They had sweets for their caprices of appetite, waiting food for their hunger, fantastically flavored drinks for their thirst, and for those darker wants of the spirit the casual contact of velvet skin with velvet skin.

It sickened Endicott, at the same moment that it confronted him with a sense of his own helplessness. It filled him with a passion to snatch the blood of his blood from their midst, to stride down amongst them, scattering them from side to side, and carry his child out of their reach. But where, he asked himself, could he carry her? Where could he take her beyond their influence? She announced herself as one of them by having them about her. And even in carrying her to the end of the world he could not carry her away from herself.

He groaned, without quite knowing it, as his unhappy eyes once more sought out his daughter. She was floating at the far end of the pool now, idly watching the man called Milt as he dove with a lighted cigarette between his lips. This cigarette he adroitly kept alight by reversing it between his teeth and holding it there until he was above water again. Thereupon he floated triumphantly about on his back, side by side with Claire Endicott, puffing smoke up toward the many-colored globes. The father, watching from his seat above them, moved restlessly when a careless wet hand passed the cigarette over to his daughter, who inhaled a lungful or two of the smoke, luxuriously, and lay floating on the pool-surface, as motionless as a drifting cadaver facing the sky.

There even the man named Milt deserted her, when he found the pool abandoned for Blinkie and his bubble-water. The ensuing laughter grew louder, in the remoter shadows, and the voices dreamier. Back in the grotto a music-box was started up and the wet-clad figures fell to dancing, two by two, about the splashed marble floor.

"Say, Clannie, when do we eat?" an impatiently casual voice called out. And Endicott, a minute or two later, could see the impassive Baker behind the laden tea-wagon. Then couples emerged from the shadows, fantastically like wolves from a forest, and the noise became general again. They shouted and laughed as they ate. And when the music-box was once more started up thin-clad couples with capon-wings in their hands started to dance again.

"These crumpets are cold, Baker—get hot ones," the daughter of the house commanded in her clear and reedy voice. "And some fresh coffee."

Then the scene was blotted out, at a breath, for some one had switched off the lights. A soft pedal fell on the noise about the pool.

Endicott, starting up from his seat, heard a stifled scream that ended in a bubble of laughter. As he stood there, breathing hard, he could see the significant twin-glow of cigarettes from smokers side by side in the darkness. A girlish voice called out in mock terror. "Make this cave-man stop biting me!" From the pergola-end came a deeper male voice, careless and mocking: "No necking, you two!" Then some one dove into the pool and an indifferent-voiced girl called out: "There goes poor Baker!" Then Claire's voice again, reedy and quiet but strangely penetrating: "Milt, I want the lights on!" Scattered groans of protest arose at this command. But the girl disregarded them. "I said I wanted the lights on."

"Why so solemn, Clannie?" demanded a drawling contralto voice.

There was an echo of the drawl in the girl's voice as she retorted: "King Langford says my dad got home to-night!"