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."