"Robert F. Young - On the River" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

downstream. Maybe this wasn't the last day after all.
 It wasn't. Farrell knew it the minute he saw the inn. It was on the left bank, and it appeared a little
while before the sun was about to set. The current was swift now, and very strong, and it required the
combined efforts of both him and the girl to pole the raft in to the small pier. Breathing hard, and soaked
to the skin, they clung to each other till they caught their breaths. Then they went inside.
Warmth rose up to meet them, and they rejoiced in it. They chose rooms on the second floor, dried
their clothes, made themselves presentable, and joined each other in the dining room for the evening
meal. Jill had a roast-beef dinner and Farrell had scalloped potatoes and pork chops. He had never
tasted anything so delicious in all his life, and he savored every mouthful. Lord, but it was good to be
alive!
Astonished at the thought, he stared at his empty plate. Good to be alive? Then why was he sitting in
his car with the motor running and the garage doors closed, waiting to die? What was he doing on the
River? He raised his eyes to Jill's, saw from the bewilderment in them that the face of all the world had
changed for her, too, and knew that as surely as she was responsible for his new outlook, he was
responsible for hers.
"Why did you do it, Jill?" he asked. "Why?"
She looked away. "As I told you, I used to dance in night clubs. Not nice dances, but I wasn't a
stripper either—not in the strict sense of the word. But even though my act could have been far worse, it
was still bad enough to awaken something in me that I didn't know existed. Anyway, one night I ran
away, and not long after that I joined a convent."
She was silent for a while, and so was he. Then she said, looking at him now, "It's funny about a
person's hair—what it can come to stand for, I mean. I wore my hair very long, and it was the most
essential part of my act. The only decent part, because it covered my nakedness. Without my knowing
what was happening, it came to symbolize for me the only really decent quality I possessed. But I didn't
tumble to the truth until it was too late. With my hair, I had been able to live with myself. Without it, I felt
unfit to live. I—I ran away again—to Rapids City this time—and I got a job in a department store and
rented a small apartment. But a decent job wasn't enough—I needed something more. Winter arrived,
and I came down with the flu. You know how it weakens you sometimes, how depressed you can feel
afterwards. I—I—"
She looked down at her hands. They lay on the table before her, and they were slender and very
white. The sad susurrus of the River filled the room, muting the throb of the juke box. Backgrounding
both sounds was the roar of the falls.
Farrell looked down at his own hands. "I guess I was sick, too," he said. "I must have been. I felt
empty. Bored. Do you know what true boredom is? It's a vast, gnawing nothingness that settles around
you and accompanies you wherever you go. It comes over you in great gray waves and inundates you. It
suffocates you. I said that my giving up the kind of work I wanted to do wasn't responsible for my being
on the River, and it wasn't—not directly. But my boredom was a reaction, just the same. Everything lost
meaning for me. It was like waiting all your life for Christmas to come, and then getting up Christmas
morning and finding an empty stocking. If I could have found something in the stocking—anything at all
—I might have been all right. But I found nothing in it, absolutely nothing. I know now that it was my
fault. That the only way anyone can expect to find something in his Christmas stocking is by placing
something in it the night before, and that the nothingness I saw around me was merely a reflection of
myself. But I didn't know these things then." He raised his head and met her eyes across the table. "Why
did we have to die in order to meet each other and want to live? Why couldn't we have met like other
people — in a summer park or on a quiet street? Why did we have to meet on the River, Jill? Why?"
She stood up, crying. "Let's dance," she said. "Let's dance all night."
They drifted onto the empty dance floor and the music rose around them and took them in its
arms—the sad and the gay and the poignant songs that first one of them and then the other remembered
from the lifetimes they had cast aside. "That one's from the Senior Prom," she said once. "The one we're
dancing to now," he said a short while afterward, "dates from the days when I was still a kid and thought