A NOTEBOOK
It seemed that Adam too could add his two and two. In his quieter
hours of pain, when every warmer instinct of his guest was uppermost,
he was as curious as a woman. His questions, put with the sad,
querulous courtesy of an invalid claiming privileges by reason of his
pain, were sometimes difficult to answer.
"Paul Pry!" murmured Kenny to himself one night.
Adam's sharp eyes snapped.
"Paul Pry, eh?" he quivered. "You impudent devil!"
"A minute ago," reminded Kenny coldly, "when I told you you were
drinking too much brandy, you said you were deaf to-night."
"It's an intermittent affliction," purred Adam with a chuckle. "You
struck me in a minute of vacation."
But the careless sobriquet of Kenny's rankled in the old man's mind and
bore a startling aftermath of fruit.
Kenny was Irish and conversational. He had as usual talked too much,
unaware that Adam, with fiendish insight, was reading steadily between
the lines, ready to pounce.
"Paul Pry!" repeated the old man at intervals. "Paul Pry! You are a
selfish, hair-brained Irishman," he blazed suddenly, leaning forward,
baleful and intense. "Some men feel and some men act. But you act
only when you have to. Life's a battle. Do you fight? No! You glide
along and watch the others. That's the way you've kept your youth.
You never linger on the things that prove unpleasant. You think life
an individual adventure to be lived the way you choose. It isn't.
It's a link in a chain that clanks. You can't escape. You won't
escape. You're a play-actor with a gift for staging yourself and
you're as hungry for the limelight as a circus girl in spangles. What
you need is the hurt of sacrifice. You need to suffer and forget
yourself. Damn you and your brogue and your folk lore. You're the
most amazing liar I've ever met."
But Kenny heard no more. He stumbled out of the sitting room and
slammed the door.
There was a lamp burning in his bedroom. Kenny walked the floor in
anger and humiliation, his fingers clenched as usual in his hair. Back
there in the studio with Whitaker's arraignment ringing in his ears, he
had been conscious of a terror he refused to face, a curious inner
crash of something vital to his peace of mind. And he had fought it
back for days, plunging into the relief of penance with a gasp of hot
content.
Now Adam, sitting in separate judgment, had reached out into the void
and linked himself to Whitaker--to Brian, to Garry--and his barbs
stung. That terror of misgiving, lulled into quietude here in the
peace and charm of his life with Joan, stirred within him hydra-headed
and drove the color from his face. Then he blazed into rebellion.
Failure! Vanity! Self! And Adam to-night had fused the verdict of
the other three.
Whether or not these things were true was at first of little moment.
The sting lay in the fact that someone had troubled to think them. The
careless illusion, that what he thought of himself the world thought,
lay at his feet pricked into utter collapse. It seemed to him as he
walked the floor in a tumult of hurt pride, that the world must accept
the man he knew himself to be, the man whose light-hearted existence he
loved to dramatize, a brilliant painter with piquant imperfections,
intensely human and delightful. He passionately demanded that it
accept him so without question. Good God! No one had seemed to
question until Brian in a burst of temper had brought the world about
his ears.
Well, let the world misjudge him if it chose. He was big enough, he
knew, to hold his head above it.
In a mood of lively irony he whipped forth a notebook and wrote a
sarcastic summary of his shortcomings, his lips curled in hostile
interest.
"Sunsets and vanity," he wrote with a flourish and lost his temper.
Well, that phase in Brian's life was closed forever, thanks to
Whitaker's meddling tongue. Never again would Kenny lay himself open
to misinterpretation by seeking commissions for his son. Brian could
write truth for Whitaker with a blue pencil and be damned!
"Hairbrained, unquenchable youth," he wrote next and added airily after
this: "This is likely hair and teeth."
"Irresponsible."
"Failure as a parent." This he underlined.
"Need to suffer and learn something of the psychology of sacrifice."
"Romantic attitude toward the truth."
"Improvidence. Need for plebeian regularity in money affairs and petty
debt."
"Disorder--chairs to sit down on without looking first."
"I borrow Brian's money and his clothes."
"Pawned shotgun, tennis racket, some fishing tackle and golf clubs."
"Note: Look over tickets."
"A tendency to indolence."
He had begun with an air of bored amusement; he finished grimly, read
and reread. In the light of the Craig-and-Whitaker analysis, which
dovetailed in the similarity of their venom, the details might, he
fancied with a lifting of his brows, be classified under three general
headings: youth, irresponsibility and a romantic attitude toward the
truth.
The envious charge of youth he attributed instantly to the thinning of
John Whitaker's grayish hair, and felt better. In irresponsibility he
read, agreeably, needful temperament. And his romantic attitude toward
the truth was merely a brilliant overplus of imagination without which
life would be insufferably dull.
He read the list again with colors flying and drum beating victory.
Though singly he could refute each item, an unguarded perusal when he
felt complacent, brought the hot blood back to his face in a rush of
mortification and dismay.
With a curse he flung the book across the room. Then unreasonably he
went after it and wrote at the end: "Life is a battle. I do not fight.
And life is not an individual adventure."
The final sentence startled him most of all.
Again he read it all and the memory of Brian, white, aggressive,
desperately intent upon escape, came between him and his quest of
self-content. It always bothered him. It had driven him to hunt the
psaltery stick, repent his lie to Garry and water the fern. It had
driven him out upon the road. Mocking voices rose now from the depths.
Was it--could it all be true? The shock of the thought was cataclysmic
and he longed for the self-respect and confidence in which he had
basked that night in Hannah's kitchen. Must the world side with Brian?
He was sorry about the shotgun. He was sorry about the sunsets. By
the Blessed Bell of Clare, he was willing to be sorry about anything,
little as he felt himself to blame. Was he to blame? Had he not paid
for it all in his days of stormy penance?
Out of his white-hot revolt clear vision came to him, as it sometimes
did, with incomprehensible, dart-like swiftness, and leveled him to the
dust. Some of it he would not face but he saw his days upon the road
with truth and shame. He had failed in his penance. Garry was right.
He did everything by fits and starts. And he could justify whatever
was most conducive to his comfort and his inclination. His pilgrimage
had been farcical. He had fled from discomfort, magnifying pettiness
into tragedy. And he had been disloyal to the son he loved. For there
under the willow when his startled eyes had found Joan, he had
passionately made up his mind to linger. Nay more, even then in the
dim recesses of his mind, he had hoped there would be no clue to send
him forth again in quest of Brian. And if there had been, Kenny faced
the fact that he would not have gone. . . . No, he would not have
gone. . . . And Adam Craig was a vulture preying upon the unrest in
his heart that he had hoped to stifle.
He went downstairs with a shudder, craving stars and darkness, unbolted
the front door and went out upon the porch.
The valley was black. Its lonely points of light vanished early. Up
here on the ridge there was wind and quiet. He peopled the gulf of
blackness ahead with things sinister and evil in spirit like Adam Craig
and turned his back upon it with a shiver. There would be peace in the
voice of the river.
The starlight, dim and soft, had a sense of silver in its
indistinctness. To Kenny, walking through the orchard, ghosts of
blossoms blew fragrantly above his head. The blossoms were gone like
his peace of mind. He hungered for Joan.
In the velvet dimness the wistaria vine beneath her window loomed forth
like a shower of shadow; a grotesque ladder of bloom warm to his mind
with invisible color and yet darker to his eye than the night with its
silver sheen of stars.
A ladder? Kenny caught his breath and stood still, quite still. It
was a ladder. Some one was climbing down. Branch after branch the
climber touched with unerring instinct and ran off noiselessly through
the orchard to the south.
Kenny's heart throbbed with a ghastly fear.
It was Joan.
He knew what lay to the south beyond the orchard: woodlands and
wildness, nothing else. The fields Hughie cultivated stretched to the
north from the kitchen windows. There in the forest to the south where
the river curved off at a tangent and flowed directly east, Brian had
had his camp. On farther Joan had never cared to go. Where did she go
now in the starlit darkness, climbing down the wistaria ladder with a
cloak around her shoulders? To what did she venture through the
solitude of whispering trees and the gloom of the pine forest?
A lover's tryst? Kenny sickened and choked. He could not follow her.
He would not.
He turned back instead and went to bed to lie wakeful until dawn with
something new and horrible gnawing at his heartstrings. Then he fell
asleep and dreamed of monsters.