When Erica had finally come running downstairs he could see that she had been crying; he knew that she wouldn’t want to stop in the hall among a lot of people, so he had cut across to the front door, getting there just ahead of her, and had opened it for her.
"Have you had any dinner, Eric?"
"No".
"Are you going to get some somewhere?"
She said nothing but simply stood with her hands at her sides and her eyes on some point near the floor at his feet, waiting for him to let her pass.
"You’d better let me pay for your dinner and then I’ll be sure you won’t forget and go without it".
He took a bill from his pocket and held it out to her but she did not take it, and he asked, "What time do you think you’ll be back?"
"I don’t know".
"Is something the matter?"
Her eyes moved up to his face, then down again, and she said, "Let me go please, Charles. I’m late enough already".
It was the first time that he could remember Erica ever having gone off without saying what was on her mind and for a while he had been thoroughly upset. He was sensitive to the moods of everyone with whom he lived or worked, particularly where his wife and Erica were concerned, and he had watched his daughter disappear down the long flight of steps which led from their street to the one below, still holding the two-dollar bill in his hand and wondering if he had been right to act on his hunch about the fellow, after all.
Since then, however, he had had four hours in which to think it over, four hours during which he had, in fact, found it impossible to think about anything else. He had intended to spend the evening rearranging and listing fifty or sixty miscellaneous records which were at present scattered through half a dozen big albums so that he could never find anything without searching for it. He had got out all the records and grouped them, according to the composer, on the big, flat-topped desk which he had had brought up from his office for just this sort of thing, and had then lost interest. The listing would have to wait. Having returned the records to their albums in even worse disorder than they had been in to start with, he had then tried to read for a while, and had finally ended up by simply sitting, waiting to hear the front door open and the sound of Erica’s footsteps in the hall below.
In the meantime, he had come to certain conclusions. The fact that Erica could be so worried by his behavior toward a complete stranger that she would first go up to her room and cry, and then refuse even to tell him where she was going to have her dinner or so much as thank him for having offered to pay for it, was clear proof that his hunch had been right. Besides that, even if it had been entirely groundless, what he did in his own house was his own business, and it was not up to Erica either to regard his unwillingness to meet René’s singularly ill-chosen friend as an injury to herself, or to take it out on him by refusing to be even civil.
He said, "Whatever you want to talk about can wait till the morning. You’d better go to bed".
Instead of going to bed, she left the door and went over to the windows, asking with her back to him, "Why did you do it, Charles?"
She heard him knocking his pipe against the brass ash-tray standing beside his chair and finally his voice saying, "If you’ll think back to what I said when you first told me that René had turned up with some Jewish lawyer…"
"His name is Marc Reiser". The apple tree in the garden next door had turned to mist and silver; it looked like a ghost in the moonlight. "Anyhow, that isn’t enough to explain it".
"I don’t think I’m called upon to give explanations".
Erica swung around, so that she was facing him. She was still inwardly raging; like her father, she had had four hours in which to think over his behavior at the foot of the stairs, but she had come to somewhat different conclusions. Still managing to keep her voice fairly level, however, she said, "It’s no use talking like that to me, Charles. It isn’t going to work. I’ve been going around in circles all evening trying to find some way of straightening this thing out. So far as Marc’s concerned, there doesn’t seem to be any-nothing you or I can say will make the slightest difference, it’s done and we can’t change it. Every time he remembers what happened to him in our house, it will happen to him all over again…".
"I daresay it’s happened to him before", said her father dryly.
"Probably", said Erica. "After all, we Canadians don’t really disagree fundamentally with the Nazis about the Jews-we just think they go a bit too far".
There was a quick flash of anger in his dark eyes and a momentary tightening of the muscles around his mouth, but he said nothing, and the next minute his face was as impassive as ever. He went on looking at her steadily, almost speculatively, with no indication of what he was thinking showing in his face. It was so unlike him that Erica felt vaguely uneasy, but she added in the same tone, "Anyhow, the fact that other people have kicked him around doesn’t mean that Marc has worked up an immunity which more or less lets you out-or that I feel any better because all you did was gang up with the others".
She said, "Apart from your manners, which are usually a good deal better than that, what on earth has become of your sense of justice…" and suddenly pulled herself up short. She was on the wrong track. None of them had ever got anywhere with Charles by a discussion of abstract principles-though after thirty-two years of marriage, Margaret Drake was still trying! — the only way to reach him was through his emotions. Her father had never cared what his family thought on any subject, since in most arguments, he did not think himself; he only cared how they felt. Any stand he took with them was likely to be largely emotional, and to counter emotion with logic was useless; the only effective way to deal with him was to take advantage of his intuitive understanding of people and to substitute either your own or someone else’s feelings for his own. Once her father started to be sympathetic, he usually defeated himself.
She said, "I don’t know when I’ve met anyone I’ve liked as much as I liked Marc, or anyone as intelligent and civilized and as easy to talk to. He’s the complete opposite of everything you seem to think. He hasn’t much self-confidence and he didn’t know anybody but René; I think he had an awful time until I came along and rescued him. If you’d even bothered to look at him, you’d have known what kind of person he is because it’s all in his face…".
Unimpressed and still nowhere near losing his temper, her father broke in at last, "You don’t seem to realize that fortunately or unfortunately, the kind of person he is has almost nothing to do with it…".
"What matters is the label, is that it?"
"I didn’t invent the label, Eric. And I’ve already told you that I don’t intend to sit here and be lectured by one of my children…".
"I’m not trying to lecture you", said Erica desperately. "I’m trying to get you to tell me why you did it. Along with what you did to Marc, you gave me the worst shock I’ve ever had-you, of all people! I thought I could count on you to back me up-you always have until now-and instead of that, you let me down. You couldn’t have let me down any harder if you’d tried. And having put me in the most humiliating position-believe it or not, Charles, I’d just finished telling him that you’d like to meet him because both of you are so keen on music; I’d even invited him to come and listen to your records! — you tell me that I’m not even entitled to an explanation".