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.