Kenny

CHAPTER XIII

KENNY'S TRUTH CRUSADE

Kenny began his truth crusade the next night.

"Adam," he said, halting on the threshold of the old man's sitting room with one hand carelessly behind him and his attitude expectant and determined, "I've often wondered why every book in the farmhouse is up here on your shelves."

Adam cupped his ear with his hand.

"Wh-a-a-a-t?" he asked blankly.

Kenny brought the hand behind his back forward. It held a megaphone.

"I said," he bellowed through it, "that I've often wondered why all the books in the farmhouse are here upon your shelves."

Adam sat up.

"For God's sake, Kenny," he said. "Close the door. Where did you get that thing?" he demanded with a scowl.

"It's Hughie's and the very sight of it was an inspiration."

"Give it to me!"

"On the contrary I intend to cure your deafness."

Adam stared.

"I mean just this: You can hear as well as I can. You pretend to be deaf when you don't want to hear."

"What?" snapped the old man with a glance like lightning.

"You told me to practice the truth," reminded Kenny, dropping into a chair. "I'm merely beginning. I've a lot to say. And the health of your hearing, Adam, is an indispensable adjunct to my practice hour and my peace of mind. I'm merely insuring myself against your refusing with a feint of deafness to hear what I have to say."

"For once," said Adam insolently, "you've scored. But if ever I get my hands on that damned megaphone, I'll burn it."

"You won't get your hands on it," retorted Kenny. "And if you do I'll buy a bigger one."

It was hard to begin but Kenny with his mouth set thought of Joan. He told Adam Craig he was a miser.

In the dreadful silence the tick of the old clock on the mantel seemed to Kenny's distracted ears a perpetuity of measured taps upon a death-drum. He thought of Poe and the pit and the pendulum. He thought of Joan and told himself fiercely that he did it all for her; for her he was winding around himself a chain foredoomed to clank. And he wondered why on earth the old man did not speak.

The suspense became intolerable. Intensely excited, Kenny swung to his feet.

"Well?" he said.

"Well!" said Adam and smiled a curious, inscrutable, twisted sort of smile. He had never looked so evil-eyed and subtle. "One of your greatest drawbacks, Kenny, is an Irish temper and a habit of excitement."

"A miser!" repeated Kenny with defiance. He must keep his feet upon the path. It was the prelude to all that he must say for Joan's emancipation.

"A miser!" said Adam, nodding. "Well, what of it?"

Kenny struck himself fiercely on the forehead, wondering if the word had pleased and not provoked him. The possibility shocked him into fresh courage. He said everything that was on his mind with deadly quietness and an air of fixed purpose. Then he picked up his megaphone and started for the door.

"Adam," he said, "I've told you the truth, so help me God, in an hour of practice. Now, you can practice facing facts."

And he was gone.

He was courageous and persistent, with the thought of Joan always spurring him to further effort. Night after night he played his game of truth and fought with desperation for the happiness of the girl whose eyes had committed him irrevocably to a vow of honesty and fact.

He could not see that he was making any headway.

Adam listened with baffling intentness while his strange guest practiced strangely the telling of truth. He refuted nothing. He accepted everything that Kenny said with a corroborative, birdlike nod of politeness. With the megaphone upon the floor by Kenny's chair, he made no further pretense of deafness. He said nothing at all and Kenny found his new inscrutable trick of silence unendurable. One singular fact loomed out above all others. Adam shamelessly accepted the word miser with a gloating chuckle. He seemed to like it. For Kenny, generous to a fault and prodigal with money, the word embodied all things hideous.

There were times when Kenny abandoned the hopeless battle and came at Adam's plea, reserved and sullen. Then with a solicitous air of virtue the old man urged him to renew it.

"Kenny," he demanded more than once, "have you got your practicing done? You lack application. If you're ever to learn truth at your stage of ignorance you'll have to have it."

The goad went home. He did lack application. And Joan must not suffer from that lack.

But in the end the old man tired him out; and the practice of truth became a boomerang.

Adam Craig smoothly demanded reciprocal privileges. Once more he told Kenny the truth about himself and drove the tormented Irishman again and again to his notebook. It had for him a morbid fascination. No matter how resolute the disdain with which he began to read it, he finished with his color high and his eyes incredulous and indignant. The barbs failed to lose their sting. They sank deeper and deeper. In a terror of defense Kenny returned to the fray with added vim. But Adam had a deftness with his barbs that his opponent lacked. Compassion drove the younger man to restraint. And Adam did not scruple to hide behind the bulwark of his own debility.

Night after night, mutinous at the glaring fact that in this singular battle of truth, Adam Craig was winning, Kenny rushed out into the peace and darkness of the night to seek Joan. It was inevitable that he should see in the wistaria ladder the means to starlit hours of delight. It was inevitable that Joan, to whom the vine was no more than an old, familiar stairway, would climb down to him with that shy oblivion of convention that was as much a part of her as her will-of-the-wisp charm.

They roamed in the dark silver of the star-light to the cabin in the pines and the hours that Joan had spent with Mr. Abbott or the books she loved, fell tinkling now with new melody into the lap of time. In the rude room, bright with lamplight and the trophies of childhood, the girl listened tirelessly to a musical Irish voice that read to her with brogue and tenderness enough to insure her interest in the reader no less than in his task. Kenny blessed the village congregation that had sent Mr. Abbott forth upon his needed month of recreation.

When the nights were cool enough, they built a fire of pine cones in the cabin stove and made tea and Kenny talked of Brian to ease his troubled heart. Joan listened wide-eyed to tales of the son Kenny said was all things in one.

"And you quarreled!" said Joan.

"Yes," said Kenny.

"So did Donald and I. How queer that is! Was it your fault, Kenny? Or was it Brian's?"

"It was my fault," said Kenny and lost his color. "But I know now that it wasn't the quarrel then that counted. It was the things that had gone before."

"How much you love him!" said Joan gently.

"Yes," said Kenny. "In this world of hideous complexities and uncertainty and—chains—of that at least I am sure."

"That," said Joan, "I like."

Mingled inextricably with this new fervor in his soul for truth, was the memory of the inspirational stage mother. The idle claim bothered him more and more. But there he was never brave enough to tell the truth.

Well, it was a queer world and he—Kennicott O'Neill—was thrall to a pitiful old fiend with the soul of a Caliban. He was unspeakably grateful for the relief of the hours when, with his conscience up in arms, he could talk to Joan of Brian and ease his misdeeds of the past by praise and appreciation.

A jewel of a lad! Everybody loved his humor, his compassion and his common sense.

CHAPTER XIV

IN SOMEBODY'S BOAT

The moon came silver in the valley and mingled with shadow among the trees. Owl's-light was nowhere, Kenny said, and the pines stood like shaggy druids in the silver dusk. The twilight of the moon he called it. Restless and poetic he begged Joan to help him find the lake down yonder in the valley. It was gleaming, to his fancy, with fairies' fire.

They found the lake and somebody's boat. Both were in a lonely glen. Kenny unwillingly conceded the existence of somebody with a claim upon the boat stronger than his own.

"But," he went on with an air of inspiration, "somebody is in the world or he wouldn't be somebody; and the world's my friend. Therefore by moon-mad deduction somebody's my friend and I may take his boat."

He released the painter, smiling up into Joan's face.

"Beside," he added, "he's either a young dub who doesn't know the moon is shining or an old cynic who doesn't care."

"Kenny!" said Joan, somewhat shocked by his inconsequent habits of acquirement. "I'm quite sure we shouldn't."

"Everything in the world you want to do," reminded Kenny, "you shouldn't. And everything in the world you shouldn't, you want to do!"

He flung his cigarette at a frog.

"The only thing to smoke on such a lake," he said, "is a fairy's pipe. Come, jewel machree, happiness is the aim of life. And my happiness for the moment, is to glide forth upon the bosom of that lake with you. Look, you can even see the gleam of silver shoes where the fairies dance upon the ripples."

He was indeed moon-mad in mood and irresistible. Joan smiled compassionately at the pleading of his eyes.

"But, Kenny," she said, holding back, "the aim of life isn't just happiness. That might be very dreadful. It's just happiness with the least unhappiness to others."

He stared at her a little startled. It was the sort of thing, he felt rebelliously, that he should write down in his notebook. Well, it was no night for notebooks. It was a night, a lake, a boat for lovers.

"Even granting that, girleen," he said, "it's not going to make somebody unhappy if we take his boat. For he won't know it. And therefore it will make us happy with the least possible unhappiness to anybody else. And, after all, it's more likely to be a fairy's boat, for it's made of quicksilver. Come, mavourneen, come!"

She climbed in unconvinced.

"Lordy! Lordy!" breathed Kenny in delight. "The lake is thatched with moonbeams!" And he thought of course of the legend of Killarney. "'Twas a valley like this, Joan," he said, "all rich with fields and pastures of green and there in the heart of it always was the fairy fountain covered with a stone to keep the water from rushin' out. And then came the knight."

His eyes pleaded. He was staging his legend and begging her to act.

"And then," said Joan smiling, "came the knight. I think his eyes were Irish."

"He saw a maid at the fountain," said Kenny, his eyes tender, "a maid with a pitcher and her skin was cream and her cheeks were rose and there were shadows of gold in her bronzy, nut-brown hair. I'm sure she wore a quaint old gown of blue and silver."

"Kenny!"

"And he liked her," said Kenny stubbornly. "You can't deny him that."

"No," said Joan gently. "And why should I deny it? For the blue and silver maid liked the knight."

Kenny's heart leaped to his eyes.

"They wandered on the hills and they wandered in the valley. And then the maid in blue and silver, who was all rose petals and sun shadows and the glory of autumn, ran back to the fountain. She had forgotten to cover it with the stone and the valley was flooded. There beautiful and calm stretched the lake of Killarney and I hope it was moonlight."

"And the knight and the maid?" Joan had forgotten their game of pretense. She was eager for the end of the story.

Kenny feathered his oars in silver spray and wondered impatiently why all love stories ended in an anticlimax. He had finished the story artistically and well. Luckily Joan had forgotten the stage and the actors.

"I suppose," he said gloomily, "that the knight married the maid and took her to dwell in a castle she must have hated. And they lived unhappily ever after."

Joan laughed. She saw in his words merely a perverse dislike for familiar endings and forgot it at once. The moonlit lake had aroused in her a yearning tenderness for the brother off somewhere in what, Kenny said, Brian called his Tavern of Stars.

"Oh, Kenny," she sighed, "I wish Donald would write!"

The wish jarred. Kenny frowned. How could he wish it too! And yet, not wishing was disloyal, disloyal to Brian. Upset, he turned, hurt and sulky. And presently as Joan, busy with thoughts of the truant brother, continued unaware of the melancholy in his mood that never failed to make its appeal to her tenderness, he began to hum.

Joan looked up.

"What a queer, wild tune!" she exclaimed. "What is it, Kenny? I've never heard you sing it before."

"I never felt the need," said Kenny. "It's called the 'Twisting of the Rope.' Long, long ago, girleen, a harper's gallantry to a pretty maid angered her mother and she asked him to help her twist a straw rope. And he did. And twisting he had to back away and over the threshold and the mother slammed the door in his face. Faith, 'twas all to get rid of him!"

It was impossible to miss the point. Joan's face went scarlet.

"Oh, Kenny!" she said. "You knew—surely you knew I couldn't mean that."

It was a new delight to hear her say it.

"When Donald writes," reminded Kenny, "then I must go." And watching the girl's troubled face, he wondered with a thrill of triumph if at last the madness of the summer was upon her. Well, thank Heaven, he was honest and honorable. He would stay until the madness waned. Always he was fated to climb down out of the clouds first.

Ah! But what if Joan slipped back into sense and sanity first? The possibility filled him with panic. What on earth would he do?

CHAPTER XV

IN WHICH CALIBAN SCORES

It was a prospect doomed to haunt him more and more as the summer which had bade fail to be so full of peace, took on an indescribable atmosphere of complication. Where could he go, he wondered despairingly, that life would not instantly pour around him a distracting whirlpool of commotion? Was he fated to rush through life with his fingers clenched in his hair and his teeth set? Was he doomed, as Garry had once said, to run forever in circles of excitement?

Stumbling and tired, Kenny tried to keep his feet unswervingly in the path of truth, colorless and uninviting as it seemed; but the strategy of his practice hour in Adam's room he was forced to abandon, heartsick for Joan and the future. His battle for her he knew had been in vain. Useless further to bombard with truth that silent, inscrutable Caliban upstairs, whose fiendish power to drive him to his notebook when he chose in turn to tell the truth, seemed uncanny. And it was practice enough to tell the truth to Joan! God grant, in all sincerity, that he might come to justify the faith in the dear eyes of her.

He made one last heroic effort to break his chain of thraldom. After an interval of bitter insubordination which ended each night in surrender, he set his teeth and vowed by every sacred thing he knew that to-morrow night, summons or no summons, he would not go to the sitting room of Adam Craig. He would secretly leave the farmhouse at dusk with Joan and when Hughie knocked on his bedroom door, ready to say that the old man was lonely and in pain, he would be safe and serene in the cabin in the pines. Was it fated to be his refuge too?

Torrential rain woke him in the morning. Kenny stared out at the wet valley in tragic unbelief. It simply could not be; for he wanted a dusk flecked with stars. But the rain gave no promise of abating and late that afternoon he altered the detail of his rebellion. Fortunately there were other ways. When the dusk closed in and the old man watched the clock and waited, he would go boldly downstairs to the old piano and register his rebellion in music that Adam Craig could hear. He would spend his evening openly with Joan; he would go through fire and water; he would ride the whirlwind and direct the storm but what this time he would assure his emancipation.

Instinct had warned him to abandon, in his hours with Adam Craig, certain picturesque forms of attire in which he delighted. To-night, whistling with a feeling of gayety and unrestraint, he rummaged his trunks, selecting his clothing with fastidious attention to minor detail and held the lamp high at the end to afford a better glimpse of the handsome Irishman smiling back at him from the mirror in the bureau. No doubt of it, give a fashionable tailor disposed to be experimental, his head and enough money on account and he could create a dash and piquancy worth while. Always remembering that such a creative artisan was fortunate to find a suitable contrast of shoulder and hip to wear his inspiration.

Kenny in the best of spirits went downstairs. The lamp in the parlor was already lighted; soft yellow shadows lay upon the faded walls; dust and cobwebs had long ago surrendered to the siege of Hannah's broom. Kenny drew the curtains to close out the splash of rain upon the window panes and went to the piano. Even the noise of wind and rain left him calm and cold and invincible. He played brilliantly snatches of everything he knew. When Joan came and curled up in a chair beside him with her chin upon her hand, he forgot Adam Craig entirely and went on playing. Not the music of rebellion; it was more the music of dreams, dusk-moths of melody that flitted through his memory, curiously iridescent.

He drifted dangerously after a while into the tenderness and passion of the Liebestraume, the one thing perhaps that, loving, he knew to the end; swept through the downward cadenza with exquisite accuracy and feeling, and forgot the rest. With the girl's soft pensive eyes upon him he could have forgotten anything; he even forgot that love is transient.

"Joan!" he gasped.

A loud voice rasped through the silence.

"Kenny!"

Joan shivered. Kenny stared at her in terror. It was the voice of Adam Craig.

"Kenny!" The voice, sharp with indignation, brought them both to their feet.

"Yes?" stammered Kenny, his face scarlet.

"Do you know all of anything?"

Lamp in hand Kenny went to the foot of the stairway.

"Adam," he demanded, staring up aghast at the wheel-chair and the wrinkled, saturnine face bending over the railing with a leer of triumph, "how in God's name did you get there?"

"Wheeled myself, you Irish fool!" snapped Adam.

Kenny went wearily up the stairway and set the lamp in a corner of the hallway.

"Well," bristled the old man. "Why don't you say something? What are you going to do about it?"

"It's the kind of night," said Kenny, "that you always have a fire. I'm going to wheel you back where it's safe and warm."

Adam chuckled.

"That's what I thought you'd do," he jeered.

"And then?"

"Then," thundered Kenny in a blaze of temper, "I'm going back!"

As usual his show of temper filled the invalid with delight.

"Humph!" said he. "So am I."

Kenny stopped the chair with a jerk.

"What do you mean by that?" he demanded.

"I mean," said Adam Craig, "that I'll wheel my chair back where I can listen to music instead of rain. And if you wheel me back I'll do it again. The hallway's dark and it's full of turns but I'll manage somehow, if I break my neck."

There was danger at every turn. A cold sweat came out on Kenny's forehead.

"Adam," he said quietly, "how did you manage to get there in the first place? How did you open the door of your room?"

"Wheeled myself close to the knob and unlatched it—"

"Yes?"

"Then I wheeled myself out of the way and poked at the door with a stick."

"Stick! What stick?"

"A stick out of a shade. Do you think I'm a fool?"

Kenny groaned.

"After that," purred the old man with a hint of pride, "until I got into the dark hallway and began to bump, it was easy."

The sitting room door was still open. Kenny wheeled his exasperating old man of the sea over the sill in a terror of foreboding.

Adam stared at him.

"Where in the name of Heaven," he said, "did you get that rig? You look like an actor."

Kenny turned a dark red and ignored the question.

"Don't like it!" jeered the old man.

"There's a Shakespeare quotation," reminded Kenny dangerously, "that begins—Hum! how does it begin? Yes. 'There was no thought of pleasing you' and so on. That's it."

"You impudent devil! Close the door."

"I'll close it when I go out. And I'll lock it."

They faced each other in a silence perilously akin to hate.

"Are you a Christian?" hissed Adam Craig between his teeth. "Or are you a heartless pagan?"

"I'm a pagan," said Kenny. "Orthodoxy, Adam," he added bitterly with thoughts of Joan, "I leave for such compassionate hearts as yours."

"I don't want it!" said Adam instantly. "It's churchiology, not Christianity. They are as different, thank God, as you and I."

A gust of wind and rain tore at the windows. The old man fixed his piercing eyes on Kenny's face. Kenny shuddered and looked away.

"Hear the rain!" said Adam.

"I hear it," said Kenny hopelessly.

"And you'll lock me in!"

"Yes!"

"I'll ring for Hughie and tell him to batter the door down. I would rather bump myself into eternity down that hallway," flung out Adam Craig passionately, banging his fist upon the arm of the wheel-chair, "than sit here, alone, to-night."

With his hands clenched Kenny choked back his anger and faced his fate. He could not lock the door. Either he must stay or go back with the haunting conviction that this hungry-eyed old fiend who could strum with diabolic skill upon the sensitive strings of his very soul, would propel himself in his wheel-chair to the stairway, there to sit like a ghoul at the top. Rain beat in Kenny's ears like a trumpet of doom. He felt sick and dizzy. No! with the memory of that last wonderful moment when the music had blended into the fire of his tenderness, he could not go back. Invisible, Adam Craig would still be pervasive. He would jar the idyl into a mockery, the indefinable malignity of him, alert and silent up there at the head of the stairs, floating down like an evil wind to mingle with the reminiscent sound of rain.

"Well?" said the old man softly.

"Oh, my God!" said Kenny, wiping his forehead. "I'll stay!"

"Good!" said Adam, moistening his lips. "Good! You know, Kenny," he whispered, shivering, "I—I hate the rain."

"Yes," said Kenny wretchedly, "so do I."

"Kenny," said the old man later when Kenny had carried the lamp back and made sure that Joan had gone to her room, "don't sulk. You're old enough to know better."

"I'm not sulking."

"You are."

"Very well, then, I am."

"You've had enough music for one night."

Kenny did not trouble to reply. Whatever he said would be combated.

"Music," insisted Adam, "makes you as noisy as a magpie. If you're not whistling, you're singing some damned rake of an Irish song and if you're not singing, you're at the piano battering out a scrap-heap of tunes."

"From the first day until the last when he goes to sleep with a daisy quilt over him," said Kenny stiffly, "an Irishman lives his life to music."

"Humph!" said the old man, ready for battle, "the music of his own voice, telling lies."

Reckless, Kenny used his one weapon of composure. It made the old man cough with fury and propel himself up and down the room in his wheel-chair until, with a feeling of whirling fire in his brain, Kenny wondered if a man could lose his sanity by watching an infuriated lunatic in a wheel-chair narrowly miss everything in his way.

But he made no further effort at rebellion. Instead he went each night, invincible in his determination not to be outdone. When by playing on his pity Adam trapped him he smiled and shrugged. When the old man assailed him with shafts of truth, no matter what the aftermath of communion with himself and his notebook, he accepted it with composure and an air of interest. When in a fury, Adam reviled him for his phlegm, he laughed and was cursed for his pains.

"You told me, Adam," he said, "that my greatest drawback is a habit of excitement and temper. Excitable I shall probably be all my life. It's temperamental. But I'm learning to control my temper."

In a week his coolness and composure were bearing horrible fruit.

Exhausted by blind fits of rage, racking spells of coughing and more brandy than usual, the invalid's weakness became pitifully apparent. He seemed now but a shaking shadow, gray and gaunt. Even the doctor, who accepted him with fatalistic calm, confessed alarm. And Kenny, with his teeth set and his fingers clenched in his hair, faced another problem. He was to blame and he alone! What in the literal name of mercy was he to do?

There was one alternative left and one only. Either he must meet the old man's hunger for battle with a show of temper, the blacker the better, or leave the farm for good. But even with his thraldom heavy on his soul the prospect of leaving Joan filled him with pain and panic. There remained then but the show of temper in which Adam would be sure to thrive.

So Kenny set himself to his freak of mercy. Thereafter, when the need arose, he walked the floor under the piercing battery of Adam's eyes, blazing forth a fury that, in the circumstances, with his sense of the ridiculous upper-most, could not be real. He raved and swore when he wanted to collapse in a chair and rock with nervous laughter.

Keen, alert, intensely delighted, Adam began to thrive. Chuckling he slipped back to his normal state of debility. Finding in the stress of his victim's tempestuous surrender that he forgot the megaphone, he perversely began again to have trouble with his ears.

Kenny and his megaphone returned to the fray.

Thus September came, warm and golden. Haze, soft and indistinct lay in the valley and on the hills. Summer lingered in the garden but on the ridge the nights were cool and in the swamplands, Hughie said, already the maples were coloring with a hint of colder weather. Here and there on birch and poplar fluttered a yellowing leaf.

And Donald had not written.

Kenny, as the days slipped by, faced a new and tragic problem. October was at hand. Work beckoned with urgent hand. If he did not go soon somebody would have to balance up his check book for him and tell him how long he could live without working. Brian, dear lad, had been a jewel at figures.

But how could he work with the thought of the winter wind and Joan tormenting him? And the snow-bound cabin in the pines? And the ferry and the ladder of icy vine? And Adam Craig?

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 gods 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 compassion 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 guardianship 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 damnable, 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? God 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 shirking 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 passionate love of industry, it was no fault of his. Along with the torment of doubts that assailed 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 identity, unearthed a number of brushes and defiantly polished a palette with a wad of cheesecloth.

"I'll be damned 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," blustered 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."

Nevertheless after a heated argument he went wearily with Garry in a taxi, particularly individualistic in his attire. And he told the judge in a richer brogue than usual that he was a painter subject to irresistible fits of dreaminess and must be excused. Garry, aghast, stared at the judge and the judge, with peculiar interest stared at the delinquent and excused him.

"Fortunately," Garry told him later, "your civic duties haven't spoiled your day."

Kenny merely glanced at him with a gentle air of patience. He would like to remind Garry that he had wanted to work and, thanks to Brian, the law had intervened. Now the coffee would be cold and he hated the sight of cold coffee. It depressed him.

Things thickened alarmingly. At three that afternoon, when he answered a violent thump upon the wall, Garry found the Louis XV table in a cloud of smoke; it was littered with vouchers and check books. Kenny, with his teeth set and one hand clenched in his hair, was figuring with the speed of an expert without, Garry felt sure, an expert's results. Brian, Kenny said aggrievedly, had always kept his check book straight.

"Look!" he flung out, indicating a problematical balance. "Look at that! And the fool says I'm overdrawn."

"What particular fool?"

"Some clod of a mathematician," explained Kenny with contempt, "whom the bank employs to insult its patrons. Look here, Garry! Look at that balance. Over a thousand dollars. Do you wonder I told him he had a sense of humor when he said I was overdrawn? The young popinjay! Arguing with me about my own balance!"

"How did it end?"

"I told him," said Kenny formally, "that the bank would most likely demand his resignation in a few days. And when he began to grow mathematical and persistent, I hung up."

Garry patiently sorted the vouchers and balanced the check book while Kenny in frenzied consideration of a new complication roved around the studio and smoked. He was a God-fearing Irishman. He wanted peace. But if ever a man's destiny knew unheard-of complication! Well, all of it could be traced to Brian's unscrupulous flight. He must come back. Kenny felt that his career was menaced. Life in the studio had become intolerable. He had been embroiled in two scandals, thanks to Brian's bouillon cups and Brian's unscrupulous shirking of numismatic responsibility. Everybody was talking about him; he had Garry's word for it. He couldn't work. When he could he was summoned for jury duty. His accounts, like the studio, were in a mess and he'd overdrawn. If something didn't happen soon—

"Shut up!" said Garry. "How on earth do you suppose that I can work with you talking all over the studio? Here are three pages of checks when you were evidently hitting the high spots, that you've failed to subtract. Three on a page. That makes your balance overdrawn."

Kenny struck an attitude of acute despair. "God of my fathers!" he groaned, changing color. "It can't be. Garry, it simply can not be!"

"It can and is," said Garry pushing away the book.

"Adams still owes me five thousand dollars for his wife's portrait," sputtered Kenny.

"And now he's out of town."

"What on earth did you do with Reynolds' last check? You had enough there to live a year."

Kenny looked dazed.

"I recognized the danger with Brian's commercial instinct gone," he stammered, "and—and conserved my funds."

"You must have. You bought a lot of clothes," reminded Garry. "And paid some bills."

"Some," admitted Kenny.

"Enough," commented Garry, "to establish, I suppose, one of your startling flurries of credit."

Kenny had meant to pay more. But the bank had put an end to that to-day by intruding into his private affairs. He'd even meant to redeem Brian's shotgun and anything else he'd pawned.

"Lucky for Brian," put in Garry, "that you've mesmerized Simon into holding things indefinitely even when you don't pay the interest. And of course you blew in a good part of the check on something foolish."

Kenny said with dignity that he'd bought a rug, nothing foolish. It hung over there. An exquisite thing, sensuous and soft! Color and form enough to drive a man mad with delight. He'd dreamt of the thing for days before he bought it. Indeed he'd meant not to buy it but something had snapped in his brain when he looked at it. Look at the design. Never once did it tire the eye, free-flowing and sure. Its intricate simplicity was amazing.

"And you paid a small fortune for it," said Garry. "Don't sputter. The voucher's here."

Kenny sulked. Finding that Garry still had a tendency to finger disconcerting checks and jot figures on a pad, he reached for his hat and went out.

"I'm going to do some illustrating for Graham," he telephoned a little later, "if I do it quick. I'm with him now. I presume it's etiquette to do something financial when you're overdrawn. Brian always watched the bank to see that they put nothing over on me."

He disappeared from human ken for several days. Garry, sniffing the odor of coffee and cigarettes in the corridor outside his door, pictured his horrible concentration.

"It's that hazy autumn sort of weather that gets me," he telephoned nervously one morning. "I don't want to work and I've got to finish this stuff for Graham to-day. He'll pay at once if I do. Garry, I'm going to lock the studio door and throw the key over the transom to you. Don't let me out, no matter what I say."

Obediently Garry at four ignored a violent thump upon the wall. Then the telephone rang and Kenny said with some annoyance that the work was done.

When on the following day he found that Mr. Adams had returned and wanted, purposefully perhaps, to come to tea, he lost his temper and began at once to hunt cups, demanding of Garry why on earth Fate hadn't smiled upon him before he wasted his vigor and inspiration in endless hours of torture, doing pot-boilers.

"If he's coming to tea with a red-blooded check like that," said Garry, "I'll lend you some decent cups. Those bouillon cups are the limit."

"Oh, hell!" said Kenny moodily. "I've talked with him. I've even answered his questions with politeness. A man who wants to know if you must have a north light to paint by will think it a rule of the guild to double-handle teacups."