The Turtles of Tasman | Page 7

daughter of a wastrel, herself but a flighty, fly-away, foreign creature.
Conflict between them was inevitable. He had disliked her from the
first moment of meeting. She did not have to speak. Her mere presence

made him uncomfortable. He felt her unspoken disapproval, though
there were times when she did not stop at that. Nor did she mince
language. She spoke forthright, like a man, and as no man had ever
dared to speak to him.
"I wonder if you ever miss what you've missed," she told him. "Did you
ever, once in your life, turn yourself loose and rip things up by the roots?
Did you ever once get drunk? Or smoke yourself black in the face? Or
dance a hoe-down on the ten commandments? Or stand up on your hind
legs and wink like a good fellow at God?"
"Isn't she a rare one!" Tom gurgled. "Her mother over again."
Outwardly smiling and calm, there was a chill of horror at Frederick's
heart. It was incredible.
"I think it is the English," she continued, "who have a saying that a man
has not lived until he has kissed his woman and struck his man. I
wonder--confess up, now--if you ever struck a man."
"Have you?" he countered.
She nodded, an angry reminiscent flash in her eyes, and waited.
"No, I have never had that pleasure," he answered slowly. "I early
learned control."
Later, irritated by his self-satisfied complacence and after listening to a
recital of how he had cornered the Klamath salmon-packing, planted
the first oysters on the bay and established that lucrative monopoly, and
of how, after exhausting litigation and a campaign of years he had
captured the water front of Williamsport and thereby won to control of
the Lumber Combine, she returned to the charge.
"You seem to value life in terms of profit and loss," she said. "I wonder
if you have ever known love."
The shaft went home. He had not kissed his woman. His marriage had

been one of policy. It had saved the estate in the days when he had been
almost beaten in the struggle to disencumber the vast holdings Isaac
Travers' wide hands had grasped. The girl was a witch. She had probed
an old wound and made it hurt again. He had never had time to love.
He had worked hard. He had been president of the chamber of
commerce, mayor of the city, state senator, but he had missed love. At
chance moments he had come upon Polly, openly and shamelessly in
her father's arms, and he had noted the warmth and tenderness in their
eyes. Again he knew that he had missed love. Wanton as was the
display, not even in private did he and Mary so behave. Normal, formal,
and colourless, she was what was to be expected of a loveless marriage.
He even puzzled to decide whether the feeling he felt for her was love.
Was he himself loveless as well?
In the moment following Polly's remark, he was aware of a great
emptiness. It seemed that his hands had grasped ashes, until, glancing
into the other room, he saw Tom asleep in the big chair, very grey and
aged and tired. He remembered all that he had done, all that he
possessed. Well, what did Tom possess? What had Tom done?--save
play ducks and drakes with life and wear it out until all that remained
was that dimly flickering spark in a dying body.
What bothered Frederick in Polly was that she attracted him as well as
repelled him. His own daughter had never interested him in that way.
Mary moved along frictionless grooves, and to forecast her actions was
so effortless that it was automatic. But Polly! many-hued,
protean-natured, he never knew what she was going to do next.
"Keeps you guessing, eh?" Tom chuckled.
She was irresistible. She had her way with Frederick in ways that in
Mary would have been impossible. She took liberties with him,
cosened him or hurt him, and compelled always in him a sharp
awareness of her existence.
Once, after one of their clashes, she devilled him at the piano, playing a
mad damned thing that stirred and irritated him and set his pulse
pounding wild and undisciplined fancies in the ordered chamber of his

brain. The worst of it was she saw and knew just what she was doing.
She was aware before he was, and she made him aware, her face turned
to look at him, on her lips a mocking, contemplative smile that was
almost a superior sneer. It was this that shocked him into consciousness
of the orgy his imagination had been playing him. From the wall above
her, the stiff portraits of Isaac and Eliza Travers looked down like
reproachful spectres. Infuriated, he left the