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.