SAMHAIN
To Kenny in poetic mood the seasons were druidic. There was May Eve
with its Bel fires when summer peeped over the hilltops at the cattle
driven through the sacred flames to protect them from disease. There
was Midsummer's Eve with more fires, and if St. Patrick in unpagan zeal
had chosen to kindle his fires in honor of St. John, he could. To
Kenny the festival was still druidic. There was Samhain or summer
ending, when the November wind speeded the waning season with a flurry
of dead leaves; and to Kenny, Samhain came and drove him forth in the
chill dusk to face another problem.
He had come to the farm in blossom time and he had stared ahead to
sanity--in September at the latest. Now with branches dark and bare
against the glorious sunsets that burned at night in the west long
after the valley was in shadow, even with talk in Hannah's kitchen of
early snow, his madness was if anything a trifle more acute. Even the
dreaded hours with Adam ceased to trouble him in the joy of his days.
There was peace here and, thanks to Mr. Adams, who had simplified his
relations with the bank, freedom from work and worry.
The November twilight, scintillant with stars, lay darkly ahead. He
forged through it in excitement. He who could forecast with the wisdom
of experience the duration of his own enslavement had gone over his
time. And, powers of wild-fire, he still kept going! Something
emotionally was wrong.
It pleased him in a moody moment to busy himself with mathematics, much
as he hated them, and deduce a singular fact. He had spent delicious
hours of many a day with many a maid. But days and days and days with
one? Not ever!
For one hour he had spent with some forgotten object of his adoration
in the past, he had spent five with Joan. The thought alarmed him. It
came to this. If by rational reduction you translated each flare into
hours, the vertigo of his summer with Joan became at once in contrast
equivalent to years. And by every law his infatuation should have
stopped the sooner. How much longer would it linger? What if
Christmas still found him turbulent and upset--and hating the thought
of the studio? This furlough of his from work and worry must come to
an end in time!
Paralyzed by an infinite variety of prospects he stopped dead and
stared at the fading red behind the hills. When had it altered--this
madness of his? Why was it stronger? Any man addicted to falling in
love knew well enough it shouldn't be.
It was his fate to remember as he stood there the talk of love around
the wood-fire. He had barely listened. Yet now his memory cast up
Kreiling's words and took his breath away.
"There is love and love 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."
To stay! . . . The thought was volcanic. . . . _To stay_!
And yet . . . how different that first dizzy sweep of delight at the
sight of Joan's loveliness, from this big, nameless something that
filled his heart with humility and longing! . . . How far away that
day beneath the willow when he had blown the horn! . . . An eternity
lay between.
This love of his--no, it was no longer merely a storm of unrest. It
was no longer merely a delirium of the senses in which he knew
suffering no less than ecstasy. It was a big, kind, selfless
tenderness that grew from day to day. A thing perhaps for eternity!
Kreiling was right.
Kenny's irreverent philosophy of the heart crumbled into ashes at his
feet. Love he had once believed was poetic like summer lightning. It
flashed, blinded in a glory of light and disappeared. If it lingered
it would lose its mystery, It was a quest in which the emotion was
paramount; the object that inspired it merely essential and
subordinate. Love was the only thing in the world worth while but
though a poet's love might fill his life with a perpetuity of delight
the object was bound to be a variant. Kenny had often mourned for
departed madness. He had never mourned the girl whom Chance had
appointed to inspire it. Why mourn a flower that has bloomed and faded
when the bush is full?
And marriage? That uncomfortable essential, legalists said, to
civilization and the transmission of property? To Kenny marriage had
always seemed a little like the Land of the Ever-Young. Mortals
imprisoned there soon tired of exile and longed for freedom and
distraction. His own marriage was but a memory he refused to face, dim
and distant, an inexplicable flurry of sentimentality that had ended
tragically with Brian in his arms. The brief year of it had been
poignant and at the end he had gone forth upon the hills, praying for
death. That girl of long ago with the black-lashed eyes of Irish blue
like Brian's, he had loved with all the passionate tumult of boyhood;
and in the end he had lived for Brian, coming to believe as life
carelessly unfolded for him its book of heart-things that in time he
must have tired. Lived for Brian! Had he? Or had he lived for
himself?
The memory he had crushed out of his heart in a panic long ago, now
left him with a terrified sense of obligation. Why in this dreadful
moment of crisis when he had to think must even his memories accuse
him? Brian! Brian! Always Brian!
The pang was spasmodic. The immensity of his love for Joan swept
everything before it and filled him with terror and amazement. To
stay! Any other thought was a profanation. And he must face another
problem. If Joan's madness was the kind that waned, if for her there
was no madness, if the summer had left her tranquil and
indifferent. . . . The uncertainty maddened him.
He struck a match and glanced at his watch. It was supper time. In an
hour now Joan likely would be coming to the cabin. So, alas! would Mr.
Abbott. Kenny struck off hurriedly toward the south.
The cabin was dark and silent. He waited near it, endlessly it seemed,
smoking and wondering if his heart would ever stop its nervous
thumping. If only she would come! His head had begun to ache. His
hand was shaking. Where the blood pounded in his wrists there was a
flurried sense of pain. And somehow the heavy odor of the pines and
the chill silence was depressing.
It was his fate to see Mr. Abbott come first. Unaware of the Irishman
who drew back at his approach, his hot heart sick with disappointment,
he opened the door of the cabin and went in, the inevitable book under
his arm. A second later the cabin window with its shade drawn, sprang
out of the shadow, a yellow checkerpane of light. Kenny stalked off,
chafing intolerantly at the anticlimacteric tenor of his summer.
He saw her coming a long way off, her lantern bobbing along like a
firefly, and walked faster. Impatience brought a cold sweat out upon
his forehead and then he needs must call her name before she could hear.
"Joan!" he called a little later. The tenderness in his heart hurt.
The light faltered and became a fixed point in the darkness ahead.
"It is I, Kenny!" he called again.
Once more the firefly glimmer glided toward him.
"Kenny," called Joan in the darkness, "is it really you? You
frightened me a little. And why in the world didn't you come home to
supper? Hannah's wondering where you are."
But his voice failed him and with shaking hand he took the lantern and
held it high above her head. If he could but read her eyes!
Joan glanced up at him in wonder and the hood of her cloak tumbling
back upon her shoulders, bared her hair. It shone, in the lantern
light, with an odd dark gold. She had never seemed so lovely--or so
much a part of the lonely wood.
"Why do you stare so, Kenny?" she asked. "And why are you so--quiet?"
"Mavourneen!" said Kenny. And his eyes implored.
It was not at all what he had meant to say. The word, tell-tale in its
tenderness, had seemed to speak itself.
Joan's face flamed. But her eyes were beautiful and kind.
Kenny dropped the lantern with a crash and caught her in his arms. She
cried and clung to him in the darkness.
"Joan! Joan!" he said and kissed her.
He did not remember how long he stood there under the bright November
stars with Joan in his arms and his face upon her hair. He knew his
eyes were wet. He knew there was peace in his heart and a vast
content. But something made him dumb and tongue-tied.
"Kenny!" exclaimed Joan. "The lantern!"
"I know, colleen," said Kenny, "but one lantern more or less in an
epoch doesn't matter."
"Mr. Abbott will be waiting. Suppose he came to look for me."
"God forbid! I can't--I won't let you go."
"You must!"
"Joan, you are sure, _sure_ you love me?"
"I know," said Joan steadily, "that I love you. I've known it since
that night upon the lake when you first spoke of--going. I knew it
when you went. And then when you came again. When I think of the farm
without you it turns my heart to stone. Every minute that I--I am away
from you, I am eager to be back."
"Bless your heart!"
She slipped out of his arms with a sigh. His hands clung to her.
"Truly, truly, Kenny, I must go!"
"I'll come back with another lantern after supper."
"No," said Joan. "Please don't. Mr. Abbott might scold. Besides,
every star is a lantern to-night. And Uncle sent Hughie for you long
ago."
Kenny groaned.