Kenny Part 23

He could not, would not go! And where in the name of all lunatics was Brian? Life in the studio without him would be impossible. What did he intend to do? Could he, Kenny, settle down to work with the problem of his penitential quest for his son still unsettled?

And why in the name of the Sacred Question-mark, was his life a string of questions!

In the end he fled from Adam's tongue. So he told himself. In reality panic plunged him into action. His summer was ending. His madness was not. And for that alarming fact he blamed Brian.

"I was worried," he remembered irritably, "and just in the mood to make a colossal fool of myself. And I have!"

Otherwise this seizure must have run its course by now. It bothered him that he had pledged himself to linger at the farm until Joan was quite herself. Surely the G.o.ds of love and honor would understand that he had foreseen no such troublous dilemma as that which faced him now.

He must take himself in hand. He must find an undisturbing level of common sense and keep his roving feet upon it. The need was drastic.

"I'll be back in a month," he told Joan, his lips white with compa.s.sion for himself and her, and stared moodily at the blaze of autumn on the hills, knowing he would not return. "Often I've longed for a winter of sketching in such a wild and lonely spot."

"And then," said Joan, "when Donald writes you must be here."

"I must be here," said Kenny.

That he felt was the kindest way. Surely, surely it was the kindest.

It saved Joan the painful thought of permanent separation. In a month without him she would soon forget. A month, he knew of old, worked wonders. Absence, he had proved again and again, never made a heart grow fonder. Propinquity was at once a danger and a cure.

Joan waved him down the farm lane, her soft eyes wistful. An adorable will-of-the-wisp! Almost he could not bring himself to leave her. But for Hughie's eyes, he would have vaulted from the farm buggy, crying her name.

"The farm," she had said with frank tears in her eyes, "will be just like a grave without you."

Kenny knew it would.

The studio he found could match it.

CHAPTER XVI

TANTRUMS

Things went badly from the start. Whitaker for one thing claimed to have lost track of Brian and Kenny thought he lied. For another, he could not bring himself to work. A sense in the studio of a presence gone, he told Garry, haunted him, Brian's lazy authoritative guardians.h.i.+p and the comparative order to which he could reduce existence when he chose were indispensable to his daily comfort.

Ah! unbelievably care-free--those old devil-may-care days when Brian had been content to work and laugh and quarrel! Kenny, looking back with longing, likened his plight to that of Ossian returning after three hundred years of fairy bliss from the fabled delights of Tirnanoge. Touched earth he had, in spite of warning, and become on the minute a wrinkled, old, old man. So with Kenny. He had touched earth, he reflected tragically. Never again would his fairyland be quite the same. Man talked of his flaws. His fallibility they said was monumental. There was Adam who had morbidly incited him to a notebook, a d.a.m.nable, pervasive notebook which he tried in vain to ignore. There was Whitaker, to whom, at a loose end, he wrote a great many letters of rebuke, some stately, some less so. There was Brian, whose absence had revolutionized his pleasant way of life; and Garry and Jan and Sid, who at any cost merely wanted him to work. Grievance enough for any man who resented the disturbance of unneeded change.

The truth of it was, he owned at times, he was homesick for Joan and fed his loneliness with letters he felt himself obliged to write. That was inevitable, for he had fled from an idyl and the memory of its charm must lessen slowly. Often with an eye upon the clock he found himself picturing the routine of the farm and longing for its freedom from the petty need of work.

He blew the horn beneath the willow and watched Joan cross the river in the punt. He climbed the garret stairway and helped her pick a gown.

He watched the Gray Man steal along the ridge, lingering in boxwood paths and in the orchard. And then with night among the pines and the plaintive voice of autumn wind, Joan was climbing down the vine and hurrying through the wood to the cabin, and Adam with his eye upon the brandy was counting wearily when the clock struck. How the wind would rattle at his windows! How the log would flare! How Adam must be longing for excitement! And how glad he was that he himself had found a safe hiding place in a lonely tree-stump for the lantern Joan had reluctantly agreed to carry since the fall closed in.

Um . . . Joan would be building a fire in the cabin now and drawing the shades and Mr. Abbott would be picking his way through the pines with a book beneath his arm. Kenny glowered some at Mr. Abbott. An eye for nothing there but duty and even that he saw in a stark and unromantic way. And he lacked a sense of humor. He'd proved it in the river. Joan answered his letters with an adorable primness that filled him with delight. It reflected Mr. Abbott. But her letters ended always with the naivete of a child. They all missed him.

It was pleasant to be missed.

The pleasure was curiously reactive. Kenny's irritability grew too marked to be ignored. Jan and Sid and Garry met and talked him over.

"What's wrong with him?" demanded Sid, amazed. "Garry, what is it?

He's as quarrelsome as a magpie and nothing suits him. He barks at the club-boys and if you drift into the studio you're about as welcome as the measles."

"It's not because he's busy," said Garry grimly. "Nothing I've found is further from his mind than the thought of work."

"And it's plain Brian isn't coming back," put in Jan. "He might as well face that fact and have done with it. Personally I've lost patience with him. He acts like a sulky kid."

Later Jan improvised a "scarlet fever" placard which Kenny in the course of time found nailed upon his door. He read with amazed and offended eyes that he was temporarily in temper quarantine.

It soon became apparent that life without Brian was maintaining even more than its usual average of petty complication. The problem of small change Kenny found a torment. There Brian had been a jewel. It simply narrowed down to this, he told Garry: No matter how he started, he never had any. Even a bag of change he had procured from the bank in a moment of desperation was never to be found. It got under things.

His eventual solution of the difficulty plunged the club into scandal and uproar. He found the bag of change and sprinkled coins into everything in the studio that would hold them.

"Now," he informed Garry with moody satisfaction, "I'll always be able to put my hand on some when I want it. I wonder I didn't think of it before. I'm better with big sums. Dimes and nickels and even quarters make me nervous. You know how it is, Garry. I always have to come in to you or do one of a number of desperate things. And then if I can't find a small coin and tip with a big one, Jan gets wind of it somehow and talks by the hour about demoralizing the club-boys. He's a pest."

The device at first bade fair to be successful. Later there was frenzied recourse to Garry to help him remember where on earth the dimes were likely to be. Later still the pages helped. The sequel came quickly. The studio attained suspicious popularity with one or two new untried boys who mined the studio in Kenny's absence and tipped themselves. Kenny, as scandalized as only Kenny could be, turned sleuth and reported the thing in wrath. Everybody missed something and the club buzzed with scandal until the boys departed, likely, Kenny thought bitterly, to retire for life on the dimes and nickels they had dug out of his studio.

Why must he always be the central pivot of a whirlpool of excitement?

G.o.d knows he loved peace even if Fate never permitted him to sample it.

He laid the whole thing unconditionally at Brian's door. Let Brian, instead of s.h.i.+rking his usual numismatic responsibilities in some indefinite green world of peace and calm, come home as he should.

As for work, Kenny loved work, Brian and Garry to the contrary. If in Brian's absence everything conspired against his pa.s.sionate love of industry, it was no fault of his. Along with the torment of doubts that a.s.sailed him, thanks to that infernal notebook, the studio kept catapulting itself into a jungle of nerve-racking disorder in which it was impossible to work. And when Mrs. Haggerty fell upon it with the horrible energy of the Philistine and found places for everything, the studio became a place in which no self-respecting painter could be expected to keep his inspiration or his temper. Here again, Kenny felt aggrievedly, was a condition which Brian's presence could have altered.

The lad had a way of mitigating order and disorder with a curious result of comfort.

Garry lost his patience.

"You remind me," he said, "of the English squire who only drank ale on two occasions; when he had goose for dinner and when he didn't."

Kenny remarked that the squire by reason of his nativity was a fool.

And the thing couldn't be helped. The studio in order was impossible.

He added with an air of inspiration that it made him think of mathematics. Mathematics he considered a final argument against anything. Besides, he was unusually fallible. Garry must always keep that in mind. Let the infallibles work. If there was only something he liked well enough, he'd drink himself to death.

"I suppose you are aware," thundered Garry, thoroughly exasperated, "that even a painter must work to live? The whole club's buzzing over your tantrums. There's been some talk of chaining you to an easel with a brush in your hand for your own good."

Kenny as usual consigned the club to Gehenna. Nevertheless, as Garry saw, he winced. Very well, he would work, furiously, as only he knew how to work and when he had scored another brilliant success--

Fate intervened. To his intense excitement Kenny was summoned for jury duty. He managed after much difficulty to place the blame of this too at Brian's door. Brian, he remembered, had flirted with the daughter of an uptown judge. Likely he had boasted about his father's versatility.

Inevitably on the morning there was civic need of him at court, Kenny awoke with a fever for work, shocked at his record of indolence. Garry found him in a painter's smock, conspicuously busy with a yard-stick and crayon. Everything in the studio on rollers had been rearranged.

A chafing dish of coffee, sufficient to stimulate him through a day of fearful labor, stood upon a table beside a supply of cigarettes.

"Now, Kenny," said Garry, who was finding his responsibilities in Brian's absence more or less complex, "you know hanged well you have that jury thing on this morning. I'm going with you."

Kenny filled a battered tin-cup with something he had to sniff for purposes of ident.i.ty, unearthed a number of brushes and defiantly polished a palette with a wad of cheesecloth.

"I'll be d.a.m.ned if I go!" he bristled. "I'm too busy."

Garry looked directly at him and compelled a slight faltering of his gaze.

"It's the one day I've felt like work," bl.u.s.tered Kenny, squaring off his canvas. "You spoke of work, didn't you? And a fool of an English squire who ate goose? Let the idle rich sit around in squads and swear they don't read the newspapers. I do. Me on a jury! My dear Garry!

I can't even sit still in my own studio. You know that yourself."