CHAPTER XVII
KENNY DISAPPEARS
That night Whitaker brought him news of Brian. He was healthy and happy and wrote no word of coming in. There, Whitaker felt himself, Brian was over-reticent.
"And the postmark?" Kenny staring in disgust at a hole in his sock transferred his glance to Whitaker.
"That," said Whitaker, "I'm not at liberty to give. I've told you so before."
Kenny drew himself up to his full height.
"John—" he thundered.
The door opened and Mac Brett, the young sculptor on the floor above who harbored H. B., came in, somewhat mystified at the warmth of Whitaker's greeting.
"Come on down to the grill to dinner," he suggested. "Garry's down there and Jan. It's drizzling and a lot of men are staying in."
Kenny, moodily painting the skin beneath the hole in his sock black, flung down the brush and found his coat.
"Once," said Mac in a panic of laughter, "he painted hairs on the bald parts of Frieda Fuller's pony-skin coat. Thick, plutocraticky sort of hairs. I shan't forget 'em. And they melted and smudged her neck. Remember, Kenny? You ridged 'em beautifully—"
Kenny did not answer. He strode toward the door. Mac and Whitaker exchanged comprehending glances of dismay and followed him down to the grill.
It was a pleasant refuge from the autumn storm—that grill. The dark old wood framed light and color, sketches and a line of paintings. Mac's sculptured ragamuffin looked wistfully down from his niche near the open rafters upon a Round Table institutionally fraternal. He seemed always seeking warmth and food. Kenny's old peasant in wrinkled apple-faced cheer smiled broadly from the wall, listening to the click of billiard balls with his painted eyes upon the doorway.
The hum and clatter at the Round Table stopped as Kenny entered. It was followed by an immediate scraping of chairs, pushed back, and a hearty chorus of greeting but Kenny knew, intuitively, that the talk had been of him.
He ate but little and went back to the studio to play dummy bridge with Mac and Whitaker. A loud thump on the studio door and a Morse dot and dash announcement of identity on the bell just as he had pieced a pack of cards together, filled him with intense resentment.
"Max Kreiling!" he said with a sniff. And a little later: "Caesare!" He thought perhaps, feeling as he did in a mood for murder, he wouldn't let them in, abuse the door panel and the bell as they would. Whitaker did it for him.
"They'll come in and play music on my piano," he insisted sulkily, "and sing notes into my air and I repeat I'm in no mood for music."
But Kreiling, big, blond and Teutonic, was already striding in with Caesare at his heels. They filled the air with joyous greetings, thumped upon the intervening wall for Garry and unloaded their pockets and an institutional leather bag.
"Cheese," rumbled Kreiling, "jam, coffee and mince pies."
Caesare unsheathed his fiddle and played a preposterous rag-time interpretation of the Valkyrie's battle-cry. It evoked an instant response from the telephone.
"It's Mac," said Whitaker. "He says he'll be down in a jiffy and bring Jan with him."
"Tell him," grumbled Kenny, "to bring beer instead. No fault of mine, Max," he added, "if Jan comes down here and eats your cheese. He's a cheese lunatic. Blame Tony. He comes into my studio, does a Pied Piper stunt on his fiddle and the whole building appears."
To Whitaker's amusement nobody heeded Kenny's petulance. Caesare was already building a wood-fire in the fireplace, complaining of the chill. Max Kreiling was furiously hunting missing sheets from a ragged stack of music on the piano and grumbling in German about his host's habits. The fire flared. Caesare's dark face, always tense, relaxed into smiles. When Garry appeared the wood-fire was blazing and Caesare was plucking in nervous pizzicato at the strings of his fiddle. Later Mac arrived with beer, a loaf of rye bread and Jan, who gravitated at once by permanent instinct to the cheese.
Kenny morosely hunted cigarettes and reflected with raised eyebrows that the studio was never entirely his, not even when he wanted vehemently to quarrel with Whitaker. And last came Sidney Fahr, round and merry, who looked casually in, nibbled at a gumdrop and professed amazement to find so many there. Kenny unreasonably chose to take affront at his chronic amazement and withdrew to a corner in a state of gloom and disgust, whence Kreiling, sensitively alive to atmospheric dissonances, routed him forth with the heated accusation that he was not gemütlich.
Whitaker looked on through a film of smoke. Ordinarily he knew it was the sort of evening that fired Kenny to his maddest mood of fun and sparkle. It was the romance of his Bohemia, the thing upon which he fed his sense of the picturesque, ignoring the lesser things that bothered Brian. Men loved him. In the glow of their camaraderie he was always at his best, excited, joyous, irresponsibly gay and hearty. But to-night the fun and sparkle passed him by. Garry was right. He was surely not himself. Could it be—just Brian?
"'Pagliacci!'" demanded someone.
Kreiling laughed indulgently and beckoned Jan to the piano. His big voice, powerful and tender, swept into the hush like a splendid bird.
Kenny snapped off the lights, plunged into tragic sadness by the passion of his voice. Somehow its poignant sweetness hurt. The droplight over the music and the flare of the fire leaped out of the darkness like medallions. Faintly from a corner came the whisper of Caesare's violin, offering obligato.
Then he closed his eyes to block but the sight of rain splashing on the window. Enchanted rain surely! For it transformed the single pane into many, like a checkerboard of glass, and through it he was staring queerly into the farm.
Kreiling mopped his forehead at the end and switched on the lights. The silence he understood and liked but his keen eyes lingered in surprise on Kenny's face. His color was gone, his eyes curiously tired and wistful.
"So!" said Kreiling gently and passed on to the cheese with deliberate tact, pushing Jan away. A minute later his hand came down with heartiness on Kenny's shoulder.
"Spitzbube!" he rumbled affectionately.
Kenny laughed but Whitaker saw that his cigarette was shaking.
"Music," he reflected, feeling sympathetic, "always makes him wild and sentimental. And Max sang like an archangel."
"Now, Kenny," commanded Kreiling, nibbling cheese and rye bread, "play."
Kenny sullenly obeyed. After the first effort, something rebellious touched his sullen mood to fire and he played fragments of the Second Rhapsodic with madness in his touch.
Sid, aware of it, stared in round-eyed apprehension at his back.
"He's just in the mood again for rocketing," he decided.
From then on Kenny's reckless gayety kept them in an uproar.
When someone clamored for a wood-fire tale he told them of Finn's love for Deirdre. But the discussion it provoked bored him and he dropped back, smoking, in his chair,
"There is love and love," said Max Kreiling, "and to be in love is torture and a thing of self, but when the big splendid tenderness comes after the storm of self and craving, the tenderness that knows more of giving than of demanding, it comes to stay. But it's not the love of barbarity like Finn's. It's an evolution."
"Ask Kenny," said Mac mischievously. "He's an expert."
"Love, my son," said Kenny wearily, "is poetic like summer lightning. It flashes, blinds in a glory of light—and then disappears—in time."
He tired early and sent them home. Whitaker longed to linger but the moody cordiality of Kenny's good night was only too significant. He departed with regret.
"Garry!" called Kenny at the door.
Garry turned back.
"I meant you to wait," said Kenny irritably, "but you got out before I could tell you." He closed the door. "Garry, what were the men in the grill saying to-night when I came in?"
Caught unawares Garry flushed and stammered.
"Why," he evaded uncomfortably, "it began about the peasant picture in the grillroom. Everybody likes it."
"And then?"
"We talked some of the last thing you did—the winter landscape of snow and pines."
Garry looked away.
"Out with it!" said Kenny suspiciously. "For God's sake grant me the privilege at least of lumping it all in one supreme period of upheaval. They didn't like the pine picture?"
"On the contrary," Garry hastened to assure him, "Hazleton said you are brilliantly skillful."
"Brilliantly skillful! But?" prompted Kenny and looked a question. "Brilliant skill," he added moodily, "doesn't always make a big painter."
"Hazleton said as much," admitted Garry.
"I suppose it's best to tell you, Kenny," he added honestly, hoping to spur the culprit on to more and better work. "It may help. They said downstairs that you interpret everything, even trees and snow, in terms of unreality. You over-idealize. I suppose it's your eternal need of illusion. We've spoken of that before."
"I'm not a photographer!" blazed Kenny. "Any camera will give you realistic detail. Artistic too. What else? Go on, Garry. I'm calloused to the hearing of anything. I merely thank God you've had no newspaper training."
"Most of the older painters," Garry said with reluctance, "seem to feel that—well, there's too colorful a dominance of self in your work. Your personality always overshadows. You've an extraordinary fluency with color, a deft assurance, a brilliancy that leaves one rather breathless and incredulous, but what you do is autocratically, unforgettably—almost unforgivably—you!"
"Art," explained Kenny loftily, "is reality plus personality. And personalities are variously vivid and anaemic. Unreal, over-idealized, too colorful a dominance of self and personality overshadows," he summarized after an interval of silence. "And in the face of that—success. I am successful?"
"Undeniably."
"Even Hazleton, with his sordid gangs of Eastsiders nudging each other on a dirty bench, can't deny it," bristled Kenny.
He had divided the honors of more than one exhibition with Hazleton and admired and resented him impartially.
"It has been said," said Garry, ruffled by his air of triumph, "that you paint down subtly to the popular fancy where you might paint up to your own ideals."
The barb went home. Kenny flushed.
"Your work," added Garry, "lacks the force and depth of sincerity. Even in Brian's dreadful East River sunset over there, there's a quality you lack, an eagerness for reality and truth and life as it is. Brian has painted poorly what he saw but he painted boats for ragged sailors. Real boats. You've painted brilliantly, in the pine picture for instance, what you wanted to see, a dark forest for mystic folk to dance in when the moonlight lies upon the snow."
"And what," inquired Kenny with a shade of sarcasm, "was the final verdict of the grill jury when all the evidence was in?"
"Remember old Dirk, Kenny? He said that the fullness of life came through—sacrifice. That all things, good and permanent and true, come only out of suffering; that men pay for their dreams with pain." He let the full import of that drive home. "The verdict was, that if you'd forget your public and look for truth, paint with restraint and less brilliant illusory abandon, you'd be a big painter."
"And that," said Kenny with icy politeness, "unalterably defines my status as a painter. In this club at least."
"You asked me—"
Kenny looked tired but he held out his hand. "Dear lad," he said, "'twas fine brave friendship to tell me—when I asked you."
Failure! He, Kennicott O'Neill who had been decorated by the French government! The men in the grill then talked openly of his flaws and the verdict, officious or otherwise, was failure. Flaws! He was not a big painter. He was merely a self-centered, impecunious, improvident Irishman, indifferently skillful, whose vanity and self-indulgence had driven his son off into a vague green world, God alone knew where. He was a big painter! Posterity would fling that back in the teeth of men!
"Kenny!"
It was Garry's voice.
"I'm going."
"Oh," said Kenny vaguely. "Yes, of course."
He was grateful when the door closed, though he stood for full a minute afterward tapping on the table with his fingers. Then indignantly he looked up the word failure in Brian's dictionary and underscored it heavily.
Ah! this world of his was amazingly awry and he himself was hurt and unhappy. After all, was there any romance, any camaraderie in the Bohemia he once had loved. By Heaven, no! One had but to stare at the studio with Brian's vision to see the thing aright. Disorder and carping tongues and loneliness! God help him, how he longed to escape somewhere, anywhere where there was peace—and faith and friendliness in human eyes.
Afterward, a painter on the floor below, swore that Kenny had tramped the floor all night and there had been occasional thuds. At daylight he had gone out hurriedly and banged the door.
Sid, entering the studio by the door Kenny had forgotten to lock, found abundant evidence of frenzied packing and carried the news to the grill.
"I knew it," he said. "I knew it last night. By the Lord Harry, it was in his eye. Where on earth d'you suppose he's gone?"
"God knows," said Garry and heartily wished he'd kept the grillroom verdict to himself.
At sunset Kenny blew the horn beneath the willow.
Twilight here among the vivid leaves was softly orange. Where was the invisible lamp, Kenny wondered with his blood singing, that filled the world with golden dusk? It lay reflected in the water and in the dim and yellowed forest paths behind him. And there behind the gables of the farm, an autumn sunset focussed its softness into a brilliant blaze of color.
Later when life was kind and peace was in his heart, Kenny was to paint that picture with exquisite truth and restraint and call it "Afterglow."
At the flutter of a cloak on the cliff-path he slipped behind the willow.
For an eternity it seemed he traced the forward sweep of the punt until it grated on the shore. And the surprise perversely came to him.
"Kenny!" called Joan.
There was mischief and laughter in her voice—and welcome. And Kenny, oblivious of the detail of his going, knew only that he stood beside her in the golden dusk and that her eyes were curiously like shining, leaf-brown stars.
"Ah!" he reproached, catching both her hands. "You are a witch. You're burning an invisible lamp of incense off somewhere in that yellow wood and out of it comes the twilight and the secrets of the world. How did you know?"
"The horn was so excited!"
"The horn!"
Joan nodded.
"I know them all," she said. "Mr. Abbott blows an apology for disturbing me. Mrs. Lawler is stout and when she's delivering butter and eggs, her wind doesn't last and she gets no further than a toot, and the blacksmith's wind is amazing—"
"Enough!" said Kenny sternly. "You've too much wisdom. But—"
"Of course," said Joan, "I didn't know you would ride to the village yonder but I thought you might. Uncle said you wouldn't come."
Kenny laughed. Joan never knew that he had not meant to come again.
He found home in the farm kitchen and joyously pumping homely hands, stepped at once on the tail of Hannah's cat. Toby, after a vocal minute of terror, fixed a hard eye upon his heel and withdrew at once to a sheltered spot behind the stove. He had learned before that Mr. O'Neill with his head in the clouds was frequently unaware of feet things.
Kenny went of his own accord to Adam's sitting room.
Almost he surprised a glint of welcome in the old man's piercing eye.
"Well, Adam," he said happily, "I'm back!"
"Humph!" said Adam ungraciously. "I knew you would be."
By the end of the week Kenny forgot that he had been away.
CHAPTER XVIII
BRIAN SOLVES A PROBLEM
To Brian had come a problem of his own. His vagabond days were nearly over. Now with the wind cool at twilight and the dawns sharp, the two wayfarers, lean and brown as gypsies, were tramping back over the trail of the summer, finding old fires and the delight of reminiscence.
"Don," said Brian one twilight as they swung along in the dust of a country road, "if I'm not mistaken back yonder is the field where you barked for a summer show. Man alive," he added with a laugh, "how you did bark! Now with a summerful of health in your system and your voice full of fresh air, I could understand it, but then! Honestly, old top, I didn't know it was in you!"
The boy looked up and laughed.
"It wasn't," he said with utter truth. "You told me I could do it and I—I just did."
"I knew you could do it!" said Brian with the vigor of confidence that had made the boy his slave. "Still, when you unleashed that first roar and the crowd began to collect, I confess I thought you'd busted something vital and were yelling for help."
Don glanced at this clothes. The summer show had freed him from the mended rags he hated. Shirt and trousers, hat and shoes were as near like Brian's as they could be. So was the coat upon his arm and the knapsack on his back.
"Whenever you tell me I can do a thing," he said, "and hang around to see me do it, I can always somehow seem to make myself do it. Look!" he broke off with a boyish grin, pointing at a farmhouse on a distant hill. "There's the farm where you threw the can of whitewash at the farmer when he swore at his wife for dropping the eggs and threatened to lick her. Wasn't he a sight!"
"He was!" admitted Brian. "And wasn't he mad? If he hadn't been a coward he would have licked me instead. As it was, I never fully understood why his wife shied an egg at me. However, that's all rather a shady part of my past. I'm not reminding you of the self-winding blunderbuss you got in part payment for chopping wood, am I? Or that it went off by itself and shot a cabbage?"
Laughing they struck off into a twilight stretch of woods, found a familiar clearing near a spring and made a fire.
"Well," said Brian when the fire was down to embers, "what's the schedule? You're road manager this week. What do we eat?"
"Sausages," said Donald, unloading his pockets. "A can of macaroni and an apple pie."
"You disgraceful kid!" exclaimed Brian. "Whenever you get into a country store without a guard you kick over the traces and appear with something in your pocket that busts a road rule and obligates me to a sermon when I hate 'em. Pie, my son, is effete and civilized. It's like feeding cream puffs to a wandering Arab. You're apt to make him stop his Arabing and hang around the spot where the cream puff grows. However, now that you've brought the thing into camp, it would be improvident not to eat it. What am I, Don, wood-scout or cook?"
"Cook," said Donald. "All day," he added, "you've been limping."
Brian made a fence of forked twigs, hung the sausages up to toast, opened the can of macaroni and set it in the embers. That Don had noticed the limp gratified him immensely, even though it had been a mere and prosaic matter of a blistered heel.
Whistling softly, he watched the boy gather wood. Well, thank God! he was as unlike that white-faced moody lad who had stumbled into his Tavern of Stars as a boy could be. He whistled a good deal. He was as slim as a sapling, the slimness of muscle and health. His eyes were clear and boyish. And there was color in his face. Best of all, to Brian's mind, after the first sullen period of readjustment he had worked his own salvation and reverted by wholesome instinct to boyhood with its inexhaustible animal vigor, its gaucheries and its boisterous minutes of frolic heretofore denied. Now save for the hours by the camp fire when he passionately blurted out again and again the tale of his rebellion until Brian knew his life as he knew the weather-lore of the open road, he seemed ever on the verge of laughter.
Brian smiled. Attuned to the mood he summed up the achievement of his own summer. The brawn of splendid health and a clear head! For the one he could thank his gypsying; for the other, in a measure, he could thank the boy.
In the lonely hours before he came with his problems there had been solitude less soothing than Brian had expected. There has been an inclination to smoke and brood and nurse certain sentimental misgivings about Kenny when the fire was low and the owls hooting in the forest. After, mercifully—for they might have driven him back to sunsets—there had been no time. The life of another had made its demand and sympathy with Brian was never passive. Impossible somehow not to romp with the young savage yonder rejoicing in his freedom, with even work a lark! Impossible not to laugh with him, fight out his battles with him and surrender with a sigh of content to the weariness and hunger of a caveman!
If now with autumn at hand the fortunes of the road had in them a grain more of hardship and less of romance, it was to be expected. Brian had tramped to his goal. The staleness was gone. It was time to be up and off, seeking Whitaker.
A sausage burst its casing with an appetizing sizzle and leaped, it seemed of its own accord, into suicidal embers. Brian rescued it with a stick and looked up. Don had come back with the wood.
"It's fall," said Brian. "The wind's full of it to-night. Last night I was cold."
"So was I," said Don. Brian thought he looked a little out-of-sorts.
"It narrows down to two things," said Brian, fishing in his pocket for some forks and spoons. "Either we must acquire another blanket or two or get a job and sleep under cover until—"
The boy's imploring eyes upset him. Brian turned a charred sausage and sighed. There was his problem, he knew: Don and his future. And they were barely twenty miles away from his uncle's farm.
"Remember the mountain quarry somewhere over there to the west?" he asked. "Suppose we hike over there in the morning and see if they need some brawny arms to help 'em crush stone. Seems to me there were a lot of shacks up back of it on the mountain. We could live in one of them."
"Yes."
"What's the matter?"
"Oh," said Don with an effort, "I'm a little blue. I suppose it's the fall."
They tramped west in the morning and climbed a winding road. The quarry lay ahead in the rocky wall of a mountain.
"Lord, what an out-of-the world spot!" exclaimed Brian in dismay. "Don, you thought we were getting too close to your uncle's farm but nobody'd find us here. I suspect they have to build shacks to keep the men contented. That basin of stone looks as if it had been gouged out of the mountainside by the hand of a giant."
A drill-runner was shouting to a man with a red flag as Brian climbed into the pit. The flagman waved him back. A second later a dull blast shook the quarry, earth and stone crumbled out of a fissure in the cliff ahead, and the suspended labor of men awaiting the Titan aid of inanimate force, turned to noise and bustle.
"Hum!" said Brian, glinting, "mostly dago labor. Well, that doesn't need to worry us, does it? You stay here, Don, while I find the boss."
Don obeyed. Derricks hung above the cars upon the spur track. Farther back a screen revolved and sorted stone. Men were feeding the crusher and men were busy at the drills but the boy's eyes, with an instinct for adventure, followed a man who drove a mule-cart along an overhanging ledge above the pit. The task held for him a fearful fascination.
"Needs men to load cars," announced Brian coming back, "and feed the crusher. In quarry caste I imagine that's about at the bottom. The shacks are furnished and four of them are empty. We can take our pick. What do you say?"
"Whatever you say," said Don.
"Well," said Brian, "to tell you the truth, I have the keys."
The quarry, he fancied as he climbed the path to the cluster of shacks, would solve his problem for him and when the time was ripe he would have his say.
The time ripened with frost in the morning and a harvest moon at night; and Brian had failed to have his say. A letter came from John Whitaker definite in detail and a shade impatient. Why was he loitering when God's green world of spring had turned to autumn? Was he still stale and thinking wrong?
Brian set his lips to his task and spoke.
"Don," he said one night when the dishes were washed, the shack swept and the lamp lighted, "I've been thinking a lot about you and what you're going to do this winter."
The boy, who had been sparring with a kitten that had strayed into the shack the day before, rose abruptly.
"You say you won't write to your sister until you've made good?"
"It isn't just that," stammered Donald, changing color. "I—I don't dare. She'd beg me to come back—"
Brian nodded.
"Yes," he said. "I know the feeling."
"And I won't go back!" flung out Donald passionately. "I won't go back. I simply can't."
"It's better," said Brian sensibly, "if you don't. For a number of reasons. But you must do something. I mean something with the future in view."
"Yes."
"As far as I can make out," went on Brian, puffing at his pipe, "you're wildly unhappy and discontented at the farm and that worries your sister. Of course your absence worries her too but the two letters we wrote that night you tumbled into my camp fire must have made her feel a lot better, particularly since we both expressed our intention of making the best of ourselves. You say she won't leave your uncle because he's an invalid. That leaves you without any string to your bow but your own inclination. In a sense you've followed that too long. I mean, Don, shirking the course of study the old minister mapped out for you when your sister kept on plugging. You need it."
"Nothing mattered," said the boy bitterly. "I knew I wouldn't stay. I didn't dare. Once," he added in a low voice, "when Uncle cursed my sister and threw a bottle of brandy at her, I made up my mind to kill him."
"Good Lord!" said Brian, shocked.
"That's one of the reasons I don't dare go back. I'm afraid. You can't guess what it is," he choked. "He taunts and jeers and curses in a breath and he gets drunk every night. I wish to God he would die!"
The wish was horrible in its sincerity. Brian ignored it.
"If you were older," said Brian, "and your chief need wasn't school, I'd take you abroad with me, free lancing. But in the circumstances, with your welfare somewhere else, that's impossible."
Donald hung his head.
"I—I wish it wasn't," he blurted. "I want to go wherever you go."
"That first night when I asked you to tramp along with me," said Brian gently, "I said, in my letter to your sister, that I'd see you through. That I'm going to do. But you've got to help me. I want you, after I'm gone, to stay up here at the quarry, study nights, and next year work your way through college."
The boy stared, blank terror in his eyes.
"A year's work will put you on your feet—your kind of work when the mood is on you—and you can enter in the fall. I know a chap who's working his way through Yale. He'd show you the ropes."
"Here!" said Donald. "Alone!"
"Here," said Brian quietly, "alone. I know you can do it."
Don brushed his hair back heavily from his forehead. It was but little browner than his face. The gesture reminded Brian irresistibly of Kenny, Kenny in rebellion.
"It isn't the college part," Don said hopelessly. "There I think I'd get through. And I'd like to be an engineer. It's the year here. An entrance examination would be stiff, wouldn't it, Brian?"
"Yes."
"I know chunks of a lot of things I don't need, almost nothing of things I ought to know a lot about. When I liked a thing, I studied. And when I didn't I let it slide. It worried my sister. And I work by fits and starts when there's nobody around to keep me at it. Up here alone, working all day and studying half the night, I'd never swing it. It would mean the hardest kind of work."
"Once," said Brian, "I saw you chop wood for thirteen hours."
"You were there."
"And down there in the quarry Grogan says you can load more stone to the hour than two wops."
"You're there feeding the crusher. And you work as hard as I do."
Brian rose. His pipe was out. He knew as he knocked the ashes into a saucer and filled again from a bowl of tobacco upon the mantel, that Donald's eyes were upon him, abject with misery and remorse. But neither spoke.
Irritable and upset, Brian went out upon the porch.
The straggling cluster of shacks around the rude store were dark. Grogan's weary men found bed early. The moonlight was calm and cold and weirdly bright. A wind mournful with the rustle of dead leaves came sharply from the trees behind the shack where by day the autumn sun touched russet into gold and scarlet. A bleak spot up here! The solitude of stone and struggle. Could he expect Don to linger here and fight his battle? Brian, with the weight of his years heavy on his shoulders, said honestly no. And the problem still was with him.
He went down the steps and walked aimlessly along the ridge above the quarry. The bright emptiness below was grotesque with shadow, shadows of ghost-like derricks, screens and drills. On the spur track lay a car half full of stone. Standing there with the trainload of Donald's labor at his feet, it came sharply to Brian that the boy stood again at the parting of the ways. And the year would tell.
To the right from the dank water of a quarry pool abandoned long since to catfish and willows, a milk-white mist was rising eerily into the moonlight. Brian saw it but he saw it indistinctly. He was thinking of the boy's sister, her sweet face tragic with imploring. It lay in the mist and yet not in the mist, and it was binding him to obligation. He had written a promise. That promise he must keep. The face his memory etched upon the mist made its appeal to every finer instinct of his courage.
Brian did not face his problem with excitement. He faced it with ruthless concentration. All summer he had been groping through fog and disillusion to the meaning of service, service to his fellowmen, and he had groped through to something vague and lofty. Service lay across the water where men raved in the red fever of destruction, service and inclination. Could not one be mercifully the religion of the other? Must service spring from the bitter dregs of self-denial? Brian stared wretchedly into the dank white mist curling in the moonlight like a fallen cloud. And again with his conscience up in arms he remembered the face of Donald's sister. In a sense he could thank the boy for the peace of his summer. And he had written his promise. He was like Kenny, that boy, inflammable of purpose, erratic in his vigor, and likable. And he needed a friend, inflexible and kindly.
"Always," said Brian, "I am slated to be somebody's keeper."
Could he shirk? Had he shirked when he left the studio in anger? Had he a right to live his life his own way? Had anybody? His common sense endorsed his earlier rebellion. This was different.
"Whenever you tell me I can do a thing and hang around to see me do it, I can seem to make myself do it somehow!"
The words echoed harshly in his ears; and at first Brian refused to hear them. Then inexorably he faced his fact. He and he alone was the spur to the boy's amazing energy. A year? Well, after all what was a year?
He went back through the autumn moonlight with a sigh.
"Don," he said, "you're right. You couldn't swing it up here alone. I'll stick and see you through it."
Don looked up, his face scarlet with emotion. Brian's hand was on his shoulder. And Brian's eyes were half humorous, half quizzical and wholly tender.
"No, no, Brian, no!" he choked. "I—I didn't mean that—"
"Of course you didn't," said Brian. "I thought that much of it out for myself."
Don's head went down upon his hands with a sob.
That night Brian wrote to Whitaker.
CHAPTER XIX
SAMHAIN
To Kenny in poetic mood the seasons were druidic. There was May Eve with its Bel fires when summer peeped over the hilltops at the cattle driven through the sacred flames to protect them from disease. There was Midsummer's Eve with more fires, and if St. Patrick in unpagan zeal had chosen to kindle his fires in honor of St. John, he could. To Kenny the festival was still druidic. There was Samhain or summer ending, when the November wind speeded the waning season with a flurry of dead leaves; and to Kenny, Samhain came and drove him forth in the chill dusk to face another problem.
He had come to the farm in blossom time and he had stared ahead to sanity—in September at the latest. Now with branches dark and bare against the glorious sunsets that burned at night in the west long after the valley was in shadow, even with talk in Hannah's kitchen of early snow, his madness was if anything a trifle more acute. Even the dreaded hours with Adam ceased to trouble him in the joy of his days. There was peace here and, thanks to Mr. Adams, who had simplified his relations with the bank, freedom from work and worry.
The November twilight, scintillant with stars, lay darkly ahead. He forged through it in excitement. He who could forecast with the wisdom of experience the duration of his own enslavement had gone over his time. And, powers of wild-fire, he still kept going! Something emotionally was wrong.
It pleased him in a moody moment to busy himself with mathematics, much as he hated them, and deduce a singular fact. He had spent delicious hours of many a day with many a maid. But days and days and days with one? Not ever!
For one hour he had spent with some forgotten object of his adoration in the past, he had spent five with Joan. The thought alarmed him. It came to this. If by rational reduction you translated each flare into hours, the vertigo of his summer with Joan became at once in contrast equivalent to years. And by every law his infatuation should have stopped the sooner. How much longer would it linger? What if Christmas still found him turbulent and upset—and hating the thought of the studio? This furlough of his from work and worry must come to an end in time!
Paralyzed by an infinite variety of prospects he stopped dead and stared at the fading red behind the hills. When had it altered—this madness of his? Why was it stronger? Any man addicted to falling in love knew well enough it shouldn't be.
It was his fate to remember as he stood there the talk of love around the wood-fire. He had barely listened. Yet now his memory cast up Kreiling's words and took his breath away.
"There is love and love and to be in love is torture and a thing of self but when the big splendid tenderness comes after the storm of self and craving, the tenderness that knows more of giving than of demanding, it comes to stay. But it's not the love of barbarity like Finn's. It's an evolution."
To stay! … The thought was volcanic. … To stay!
And yet … how different that first dizzy sweep of delight at the sight of Joan's loveliness, from this big, nameless something that filled his heart with humility and longing! … How far away that day beneath the willow when he had blown the horn! … An eternity lay between.
This love of his—no, it was no longer merely a storm of unrest. It was no longer merely a delirium of the senses in which he knew suffering no less than ecstasy. It was a big, kind, selfless tenderness that grew from day to day. A thing perhaps for eternity!
Kreiling was right.
Kenny's irreverent philosophy of the heart crumbled into ashes at his feet. Love he had once believed was poetic like summer lightning. It flashed, blinded in a glory of light and disappeared. If it lingered it would lose its mystery, It was a quest in which the emotion was paramount; the object that inspired it merely essential and subordinate. Love was the only thing in the world worth while but though a poet's love might fill his life with a perpetuity of delight the object was bound to be a variant. Kenny had often mourned for departed madness. He had never mourned the girl whom Chance had appointed to inspire it. Why mourn a flower that has bloomed and faded when the bush is full?
And marriage? That uncomfortable essential, legalists said, to civilization and the transmission of property? To Kenny marriage had always seemed a little like the Land of the Ever-Young. Mortals imprisoned there soon tired of exile and longed for freedom and distraction. His own marriage was but a memory he refused to face, dim and distant, an inexplicable flurry of sentimentality that had ended tragically with Brian in his arms. The brief year of it had been poignant and at the end he had gone forth upon the hills, praying for death. That girl of long ago with the black-lashed eyes of Irish blue like Brian's, he had loved with all the passionate tumult of boyhood; and in the end he had lived for Brian, coming to believe as life carelessly unfolded for him its book of heart-things that in time he must have tired. Lived for Brian! Had he? Or had he lived for himself?
The memory he had crushed out of his heart in a panic long ago, now left him with a terrified sense of obligation. Why in this dreadful moment of crisis when he had to think must even his memories accuse him? Brian! Brian! Always Brian!
The pang was spasmodic. The immensity of his love for Joan swept everything before it and filled him with terror and amazement. To stay! Any other thought was a profanation. And he must face another problem. If Joan's madness was the kind that waned, if for her there was no madness, if the summer had left her tranquil and indifferent. … The uncertainty maddened him.
He struck a match and glanced at his watch. It was supper time. In an hour now Joan likely would be coming to the cabin. So, alas! would Mr. Abbott. Kenny struck off hurriedly toward the south.
The cabin was dark and silent. He waited near it, endlessly it seemed, smoking and wondering if his heart would ever stop its nervous thumping. If only she would come! His head had begun to ache. His hand was shaking. Where the blood pounded in his wrists there was a flurried sense of pain. And somehow the heavy odor of the pines and the chill silence was depressing.
It was his fate to see Mr. Abbott come first. Unaware of the Irishman who drew back at his approach, his hot heart sick with disappointment, he opened the door of the cabin and went in, the inevitable book under his arm. A second later the cabin window with its shade drawn, sprang out of the shadow, a yellow checkerpane of light. Kenny stalked off, chafing intolerantly at the anticlimacteric tenor of his summer.
He saw her coming a long way off, her lantern bobbing along like a firefly, and walked faster. Impatience brought a cold sweat out upon his forehead and then he needs must call her name before she could hear.
"Joan!" he called a little later. The tenderness in his heart hurt.
The light faltered and became a fixed point in the darkness ahead.
"It is I, Kenny!" he called again.
Once more the firefly glimmer glided toward him.
"Kenny," called Joan in the darkness, "is it really you? You frightened me a little. And why in the world didn't you come home to supper? Hannah's wondering where you are."
But his voice failed him and with shaking hand he took the lantern and held it high above her head. If he could but read her eyes!
Joan glanced up at him in wonder and the hood of her cloak tumbling back upon her shoulders, bared her hair. It shone, in the lantern light, with an odd dark gold. She had never seemed so lovely—or so much a part of the lonely wood.
"Why do you stare so, Kenny?" she asked. "And why are you so—quiet?"
"Mavourneen!" said Kenny. And his eyes implored.
It was not at all what he had meant to say. The word, tell-tale in its tenderness, had seemed to speak itself.
Joan's face flamed. But her eyes were beautiful and kind.
Kenny dropped the lantern with a crash and caught her in his arms. She cried and clung to him in the darkness.
"Joan! Joan!" he said and kissed her.
He did not remember how long he stood there under the bright November stars with Joan in his arms and his face upon her hair. He knew his eyes were wet. He knew there was peace in his heart and a vast content. But something made him dumb and tongue-tied.
"Kenny!" exclaimed Joan. "The lantern!"
"I know, colleen," said Kenny, "but one lantern more or less in an epoch doesn't matter."
"Mr. Abbott will be waiting. Suppose he came to look for me."
"God forbid! I can't—I won't let you go."
"You must!"
"Joan, you are sure, sure you love me?"
"I know," said Joan steadily, "that I love you. I've known it since that night upon the lake when you first spoke of—going. I knew it when you went. And then when you came again. When I think of the farm without you it turns my heart to stone. Every minute that I—I am away from you, I am eager to be back."
"Bless your heart!"
She slipped out of his arms with a sigh. His hands clung to her.
"Truly, truly, Kenny, I must go!"
"I'll come back with another lantern after supper."
"No," said Joan. "Please don't. Mr. Abbott might scold. Besides, every star is a lantern to-night. And Uncle sent Hughie for you long ago."
Kenny groaned.