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.