Читать книгу Empty Hands - Stringer Arthur - Страница 6

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Endicott waited until the last voices had died away and the last noisy car had circled insolently about the lower drive. He waited, watching the crawling twin-lights as this car mounted the opposing valley-slope, oppressed by the silence hanging over the home that seemed no longer home to him. He stared down at the pool where the mocking globes of radiance still swung, pondering the dark problem as to why man's happiness is so often destroyed by the very things with which he seeks to perpetuate it. He had fashioned this pool for innocent pleasure, yet he found himself, for the second time, nursing nothing but hate for it. He would be glad, he told himself as he stood waiting for his daughter, when she and he had seen the last of it. It would be better for them both.

Endicott's daughter, however, showed no signs of returning to the house. So he pocketed his repugnance and made his way down into that region of revelry left doubly obnoxious by the mockery of its over-colored lanterns and the memory of its over-hectic hours. He moved slowly, mysteriously touched with age, down through the darkness toward the gaily-lighted oblong of refracted colors framed in drooping shrubbery, feeling utterly and incommunicably alone in a world which had in some way outlived him.

He realized the gulf of time between them as he caught sight of his daughter in her wet bathing-suit, on one end of the Roman bench, staring down into the water. She sat quite motionless. She seemed as remote from him, staring with odd grotesquery from her lonely perch, as a gargoyle of stone staring down from its medieval tower. Yet some humanizing touch of wistfulness in her face prompted Endicott to wonder if she too could be shadowed by a trace of that same isolation which clouded his own heart. He asked himself why he should suddenly think of her as a child, as a lonely child surrounded by an aura of pathos. For she looked ridiculously small and ridiculously youthful in her trivial wisp of a suit. And she gave him an impression of careless fastidiousness, with her sinewy young body, slender as a dryad's, leaning listlessly forward with the narrowing brown chin cupped in the palm of her hand.

Surely, he felt as he moved so wearily toward where she sat, she was worth saving, worth saving in some way or another?

"Hello!" was all she said, without any trace of emotion, as he came and stood beside her.

"Hello, Clannie!" was his reply to her, equally casual, equally barricading.

"When'd you get back?" she asked as she stooped to wring the water from her trunk-leg.

"To-night," he told her. He sat heavily down on the other end of the Roman bench. "Hot, isn't it?"

"Like hell!" she said in a small voice flat with weariness.

He resented that, yet it gave him a point about which to centralize still earlier resentments.

"It doesn't seem to have interfered with your fun," he retorted.

She looked languidly up, at the barb of bitterness in his voice.

"Oh, that!" she scoffed with a small hand-movement of indifference. "You heard us, of course?"

"Most all the countryside did, I imagine!" Then he added, gathering momentum as he went: "Yes, I've been both hearing and seeing you. And it's been giving me a great deal to think over."

She gazed directly up at him, for the first time, with her limpid and fearless eyes fixed on his face. She had courage, the man looking so intently down at her was forced to admit; she had courage and a something beyond courage. He would have found it hard to define that added something, but he tended to the belief that it was a stubborn quality akin to sportsmanship, a sort of skeletonized code of ethics evolved out of the one normalizing phase of her existence, her athletics. Whatever she did, she would at least sullenly prefer to have it known as the sporting thing to do. But life, Endicott was remembering, was a trifle more complicated than a squash-court.

"And what did you think about us?" his daughter was asking him, almost insolently.

Some instinct, kenneled deep in his indignation, warned him to be calm. Tragically little, he remembered, was to be gained by passion, with a girl like that. So he waited a moment or two, determined to have his voice a steady one.

"They impressed me as a pretty rotten lot," he finally asserted. But the casualness of his tone was discredited by the granitic grimness of his jaw.

"Yes, I know," said the girl, with quite unlooked-for quietness. "But it seems the only way out."

"Out of what?"

She emitted a ghost of a sigh, before speaking.

"Oh, I don't know. Out of being bored, I suppose."

A second tide of indignation rose and ebbed through Endicott, rose and ebbed without her knowledge, before he spoke again.

"Have you any idea what you're heading for?" he suddenly demanded of her.

She laughed, quietly and indifferently. But there was bitterness about the youthful lips bent over the pool.

"That's the trouble," she complained. "I'm not heading for anything." She felt about on the wet bench until she found a gold cigarette-case. "I'm just drifting."

"Then I imagine it's about time somebody interfered with your movements," said the man at her side.

"Who?" she asked, audaciously abstracted.

"Your father," he announced, refusing to countenance the tide of frustration that was creeping through him.

"How?" she inquired in her indifferent small voice. And with that one word, in some way, she had been able to reaffirm the fact of their remoteness, their astral remoteness, from each other.

"To begin with, this pool swimming is going to be stopped, and stopped right now," he heard his own irate voice proclaiming.

"Isn't that rather ridiculous?" demanded the girl in the wet bathing-suit.

"No, it's more like getting back to sanity."

"You mean," she challenged amiably enough, "you're telling me I'm not to swim in this pool?"

"Precisely!"

"But Montie and Gypsy Bowers and Milt are coming back a little after midnight, when the moon's up. And it would be rather humiliating, to have to leave word that I'd been scolded and sent up to bed, wouldn't it?"

He stared at her, wondering what would have happened to her if she had lived in an earlier and more rudimentary generation. He stared at the two brown hands buckled over a bare brown knee, realizing how small and helpless she would be in the face of physical violence. But physical violence, he remembered, would never tame her, would never altogether break down her spirit.

"You are not going to swim in this pool to-night," he announced with a fierceness which brought her narrow face slowly around to his.

"Nor any other night?" she studiously interrogated.

"Nor any other night," he just as studiously asserted, with the thought of history so ironically repeating itself making his face more haggard than he imagined. "Is that clearly understood?"

"I heard you the first time," she said with her barricading flippancy.

"There are a number of other things you're going to hear!"

"What?"

"Things we've got to talk over."

"Isn't it horribly hot," she complained, "for that sort of thing?"

"There are worse misfortunes than mere heat," he reminded her. And he was reminding himself, at the same moment, that she would not be easily driven, that she was not even bridle-wise. She had never bowed to authority. She was his daughter, his one and only child. Yet they had no points of contact, apparently, except that of brute force. And he suspected that she would break, under force, before she would yield.

She surprised him by getting languidly up from the stone bench.

"Then I'd better phone Milt and the others," she casually announced.

"And what are you going to do after that?" he demanded.

"I don't know," was her listless retort. "It seems so hot in the house."

His scrutinizing eyes followed her as she moved moodily away. Then he went to the valve that emptied the pool. Still again, as he turned the brass wheel and heard the rash of the escaping water, he was oppressed by the sense of history repeating itself. His heart was heavy as he moved slowly on to the grotto and switched out the lights.

"I've emptied the pool," he announced as he passed the slim figure of his daughter groping through the half-lighted sun-room.

"I know," she said in a neutral voice.

"Then where are you going?" he demanded.

"I want to sit outside for a while," she answered in her insouciant cool way.

"We understand each other, don't we?" he challenged.

"I wonder if we do?" she countered in her careless soprano.

"We'd better!" he called out with a harshness which arrested her, for a minute or two, in the outer doorway.

Endicott watched her as she passed down the balustraded terrace into the garden. Then he went up to his room.