The Player on the Other Side Read Free

difference,’ said Tom Archer, ‘is that now I know it. B.A. — Before the Army — I didn’t.’
    â€˜But if now you know it,’ murmured Ann Drew, ‘— I shouldn’t ask this, but you brought it up — why don’t you go out and function in the world?’
    â€˜I probably will, and sooner than I think. I could teach — I don’t want to, but I could. There’s a school out West where you learn to run power shovels — I might do that. I don’t know. The right thing will come along. This has been fascinating,’ the young man said suddenly. ‘I talk too much. Now let’s talk about you.’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜No?’
    â€˜It … wouldn’t be fascinating,’ Ann Drew said.
    â€˜Let’s try. You’ve been here about five months taking care of poor old Myra York —’
    â€˜Who’s pretty happy in spite of your adjectives.’
    He tilted his head. ‘I thought we’d agreed it’s best to live in the real world?’
    â€˜Not for Myra York it isn’t,’ said Ann Drew.
    â€˜Clever,’ said Tom Archer. ‘Oh, clever. I want to talk about you and you deftly switch the conversation to someone else. All right, I’ll talk about you all by myself. You’re stacked. You’re intelligent. You’re very pretty. You were discovered somewhere, somehow, by our social-conscious, welfare-type York, Miss Emily. Which makes you some sort of waif.’
    â€˜I don’t like this,’ the girl said with an uncertain smile.
    â€˜Some of my best friends are waifs. Waives.’
    â€˜I don’t know that I like you , either.’
    â€˜Oh, look,’ Archer said, swiftly and warmly. ‘Please don’t not like me. Please don’t even try to not like me —’ He stopped, cocking his head in his quick, odd way. ‘You don’t understand me at all, do you?’
    She looked at him. ‘I do,’ she said reluctantly. ‘I had a father very like you once.’
    â€˜That bodes well,’ he grinned. ‘Dr. Freud says —’ But he was able to see, even in the dim light, that this was no time for a witticism. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘What happened?’
    â€˜He died,’ said the girl.
    There was a long pause, as if she had an invisible book to leaf through. Finally she murmured, ‘Daddy was brilliant and … unworldly and impractical and … well, he just couldn’t cope. I did everything to — I mean, I took care of him as best I could. After he died and there wasn’t anyone but myself to take care of’ — her pause this time seemed full of silent syllables, because it ended just as if she had not stopped speaking at all — ‘Miss Emily found me and brought me here.’
    â€˜You like it here,’ Archer said.
    She looked over at Percival York’s house, then quickly around at the identical others. ‘I like the money I’m near. I mean, handed-down money. I like the feeling that nothing here ever has to change, nothing that starts from any … under-the-skin need.’ She shook herself, or shuddered. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say any of that. It sounds envious.’
    â€˜I’m glad,’ he said seriously, so seriously that she could know for the first time that he really was serious. ‘These people — poor Miss Myra, do-gooding Miss Emily — and she does do good, I’m not denying it — Sir Robert and his little bits of expensive paper, and that Percival ’ — he said the name as its own cuss-word, without adjectives — ‘they’re all laboratory specimens of the genus “have.” The tendency of the like of us have-nots is to envy them, and why shouldn’t we? It’s hard to feel that they deserve what they’ve got, when you know and I know that they don’t and we do.’
    She