FATE STABS
March came to Kenny and found his studio with its haunting odor of
coffee and cigarettes, his brushes, his head and his heart, furiously
at work. He was giving himself up to love and labor with a Celtic
intensity that Garry found appalling. He planned endlessly to one
purpose: Joan's happiness, Joan's pleasure, Joan's future with him.
The memory of the ragged money laid aside for Don he dismissed with a
wry smile, gritting his teeth. What mattered in the face of the
splendid fact that he was so joyously, so recklessly, so absurdly happy?
His life, with its deadly singleness of purpose, should have been
simple. It attained a complexity at times at which he marveled. An
inclination to blurt out the truth with panicky abruptness when he
wanted to lie, plunged him into more than one predicament.
"I'm always explaining to somebody," he complained bitterly to Garry,
"why I tell the truth--"
"You told Kenneth his dancing urchin was rotten--"
"It was," insisted Kenny. "Garry, why is truth always unpleasant? Why
can't it be as romantic and agreeable as the things you want to say?"
"Why," countered Garry, "isn't peace as romantic as war? Ask somebody
who knows. I don't."
He stared curiously at Kenny and shook his head. A heavy hand with the
truth, that Irishman; and about as understandable in these splendid,
tender days of his idiocy and bliss, as March wind, comets or
star-dust. His passion for truth was literally a passion, relentless
and exact. He worked harder. His steadiness, as Jan said, was grim
and conscious and a thing of terror to anything in his path. He
wrestled with his check book and managed somehow to keep his studio in
order. And he was kinder. Fahr, in particular, remarked it; and Fahr,
worshipping Kenny, had sputtered and endured the brunt of many tempests.
"But, Garry," he confided, round-eyed and apprehensive, "honest Injun,
I don't think he ought to bottle up his temper that way. Sometimes I
can almost see him swelling up and then when he speaks and I'm waiting
for an Irish roar, his voice is so quiet and pleasant that I feel
queer. I--I swear I do. Damn it all, I'm liking him more every day."
"So am I," said Garry honestly. "But--"
"But what?"
"I wish he'd be less turbulently happy."
"Let him," said Sid sagely, "Darn few can."
"A pendulum," reminded Garry, "swings both ways. And he's an
extremist. If he'd just plant his two feet solidly on the ground and
get his head out of the clouds. He's got to do it sometime."
"Oh, hell," said Sid. "Give him time. If that girl was going to marry
me I'd climb up a few air-steps myself and stick my head into any old
cloud."
"Good old Sid!" said Garry affectionately. "You'd be sure to hit your
head on a star and then you'd be amazed and--"
"Oh, you go to thunder!" blustered Sid.
By now Kenny's Bohemia was rushing through its yearly cycle of costume
dances. Motley groups emerged at times from Ann's castle and departed
in taxis.
"And Gawd knows where," said Mrs. Ryan from the third floor front of
the tenement that faced the street. "They're a wild bunch and my
Cassie'll never travel wid 'em. Last week the architeks rigged up
somethin' fierce and danced in 'the streets of Paris,' wid bullyvard
cafes, they called 'em, built into the dance hall, an actress singin'
the Marseillaise in a flag, and a Roosian hussy dancin' in boots. And
Mr. O'Neill, God save him for a pleasant gentleman though a bit wild in
the eye, took my Dinny up to be a gamin. Gay-min. I thought myself he
said a 'gay mon' and Dinny's a bit young; but I found he meant him to
peddle cigarettes about among the tables."
In the quaint old gowns that were delighting the older painters, Joan
glided through the shifting blare and color unaware of the eyes that
watched and liked her. Not so Kenny.
He knew who stared and smiled and he knew who stared too long. He was
inordinately proud of her.
"Kenny, please!" begged Garry. "Let me paint her. I'm going to
California in April and I won't have another chance. I won't be back
until fall."
"My son--" began Kenny wearily. Then he smiled. "Oh, go ahead,
Garry, darlin'. I'll not be mindin' a bit."
And Garry curiously enough caught the tantalizing charm of her
sweetness that had baffled many an older and wiser man.
Shadows had no part in the wonder of Kenny's winter, but an inclination
to forget his quarrel with Brian and his flare of penance, violent and
incomplete--for he had never reached the longed-for grail of his son's
forgiveness--troubled him vaguely. In spasmodic moments of remorse he
read his notebook, tremendously buoyed up by an augmenting
consciousness of evolution. Faint inner voices warned him at times not
to misinterpret his exultant happiness in terms of infallibility and
when they called to him he had his moments of humility and panic.
In one of them he tried to coax the fern back to life; once with an
alarming air of energy and importance, he departed in a taxi and bought
a great many things for Brian's room; once when miraculously the bank
and he agreed for a brief period upon his balance, he succumbed to a
mathematical fit of uplift and conscience, dashed off a bewildering
number of checks and left the overladen slate of his credit unmarked by
even an I.O.U. His brilliant air of calm and satisfaction thereafter
was distinctly noticeable.
On the whole he was much too happy to be lonely or introspective.
Brian's absence and his splendid, sacrificial freak of service, had
been the price of Joan's content and the welfare of her brother.
Whitaker, journalism and God's green world of spring he had chosen
jealously to resent. The thought of Donald West and a dim conviction
of quarry hardships filled him with a new sense of solidarity in Brian
and a passionate respect. The current of his affection for his son was
subtly altering. It was no longer careless and frenzied and
sentimental. Nor was it selfish. Something big and abiding had sprung
up out of the ashes of his penance.
By the end of March, with a record-breaking period of work behind him
and a furore of notoriety over his striking portrait of a famous beauty
compelling him to a radiant admission of success, Kenny found himself
lulled into the self-respecting quietude he craved.
Days back self-confidence had come to him in Hannah's kitchen and Adam
Craig, in the course of time, had crushed it out with a keen and
understanding leer. Later it had returned with Adam's death, and the
weary voice of Doctor Cole had shattered it.
So now on a March night of wind and hail--and this time by telephone
after much tedious trouble with the wire, Doctor Cole's voice, tired,
sorrowful and kind, came stabbing intrusively into his full-blown
equanimity with a message of terror.
"Mr. O'Neill--"
"Yes."
"This is Doctor Cole of Briston, Pennsylvania."
Kenny stiffened. He had never quite forgiven the doctor for that
bleak, anticlimacteric morning when he had driven dazedly away with
Nellie. Adjectives, like a man's laughter, were to him an irrefutable
test. With one you could definitely prefigure a man's degree of
refinement; with the other the aesthetic color of his soul. And gray
was no color for any mortal's soul.
"Yes?"
"Mr. O'Neill," came the kind, tired voice, "I'm sorry, sorrier than I
can tell. I've bad news for you. There has been an accident, a quarry
explosion, and your son is badly injured."
A hot quiver swept through Kenny's body, ended at his face in a
stinging rush of blood and left him icy cold.
"Brian!"
"Yes. . . . Are you there, Mr. O'Neill?"
"Yes. . . . Yes, I am here. Doctor. . . . How--badly?"
"He is--well, conscious. I can hardly say more," owned the doctor.
"Thank God he's young and strong. There are no developed symptoms of
fracture yet but his skull--"
"Fracture! Skull!"
"There's a chance. Contusion now merely and a swollen condition. The
soft parts are unbroken and that makes an accurate diagnosis difficult,
but I must warn you that there is an immediate risk to his life from
shock and perhaps compression--"
"Oh, my God!" said Kenny, his eyes wet.
"You see, Mr. O'Neill," said the doctor sadly, "there may be depressed
fragments of bone or effused blood. We are watching closely. But I
think you had better come to him at once. There is a possibility--"
But there were some things that even the little doctor could not say.
"Still there, Mr. O'Neill?" he asked a little later.
"Yes. Where is Brian now?"
"In a quarry shack on what we call up here the Finlake mountain."
"Finlake mountain!"
"Yes, barely eighteen miles across the valley from the farm. They
couldn't find a doctor. Carson is nearer but he was out. Has a widely
scattered farm practice like my own and Don, frantic with terror,
telephoned to me. We've done everything possible for him, Mr. O'Neill,
but his pulse is pretty feeble and it's difficult to rouse him.
Sensibility of course is blunted. Bound to be--"
"I will be there," said Kenny, "as soon--as soon as it is possible.
There are but three north-bound trains at Briston?"
"Morning--eight-ten. Noon, one-twenty-nine and night, seven-fifteen.
But don't get off at Briston, Mr. O'Neill. Finlake, fifteen miles on,
is nearer--"
"I can not possibly make the morning train. The changes make the trip
long. Twelve hours. . . . God!"
"I myself will meet you at Finlake. It's three miles farther to the
quarry. If you are not on the noon train I will meet the night--"
"I--I cannot thank you, Doctor Cole." Kenny hung up, unaware that the
doctor was adding further detail.
Almost at once he unhooked the receiver and summoned the club central.
Afterward Pietro, who took his turn at the switchboard when the day
operator departed, spoke of the quiet curtness of his voice.
"Pietro? Mr. O'Neill speaking. I want you, at once, to look up the
earliest connecting train with Finlake, Pennsylvania, any road."
"Yes, sir," began Pietro. "What--" but the receiver had clicked into
place.
Kenny stared with a shudder at the withered fern, his face as white as
chalk.
A tearing hand seemed clinging to his brain.
In the face of this grief-stricken terror that quaked and burned in his
soul, etching unforgettable scars, the recollection of his unsteady
spurts of penance rose to mock him with their artificiality. His
remorse had been but a pale, theatric spree! And now in this forgetful
winter of his love, Fate had decoyed him into optimistic quietude only
to thrust savagely and deep. Remorse in the raw! Was it
punishment--punishment for the farcical penitent on the highway who had
smiled into a woman's soft eyes, forgetting--
He answered Pietro's ring with a throbbing sense of confusion in his
forehead.
The best connecting train and the earliest left the Pennsylvania
Terminal at eleven. It was now but five. How could he wait?
"Pietro," he said, "give me now Doctor Barrington's office. And tell
the operator to put me through to his private wire. It's urgent. I do
not want the nurse in the anteroom. When you ring for me I want Dr.
Barrington ready at the other end and I want you yourself, Pietro, to
be sure he's there."
Pietro, obeyed, amazed and loyal.
"Frank?" Hot relief surged in Kenny's heart at the chance ease of
connection. "Kenny speaking."
"Hello, Kenny. Nothing doing for me tonight, old man. I've got to
sleep."
"I need you, Frank. Brian has been injured--badly--in a quarry
explosion."
"Kenny!"
"A chance of skull fracture," said Kenny steadily. "That means?"
"A possible operation."
"Can you leave with me at eleven o'clock to-night, Pennsylvania
Terminal? It will mean at least two days. He's at Finlake,
Pennsylvania, barely conscious--in the hands of a country doctor."
The brilliant industrious young surgeon on the other end gasped and
whistled. He worked and played at heavy pressure.
"Kenny, old man," he said, "nothing is impossible. Almost this is.
But it's you and Brian and that's enough, I'll meet you at quarter of
eleven. I'll go--thoroughly prepared. Do you feel like telling me
more?"
"No."
Two receivers clicked and Kenny, remembering that he could not
definitely locate Joan until six, felt the tautness of his control slip
dangerously.
Eleven o'clock. . . . How could he wait? He paced the floor, his mind
in its chaotic desperation, numb and inelastic. With his glance upon
the psaltery stick, a dim notion of accounting filtered curiously into
his mind and became obsessional. He went shaking to Brian's room and
put the key of the chiffonier in his pocket. Thank God the studio was
in order, save a chair or two. Brian . . . would . . . be . . .
pleased. Kenny stared at the withered fern and blinked. An augury?
God forbid! Then he flung the bill-file with its heterogeneous
collection of receipted I.O.U.'s into his bulging suit case and called
up Simon Meyer.
"Simon," he said, "whatever I happen to have there--there's a shotgun,
I know, and a tennis racket and some fishing rods. . . . The rest for
the moment I can't recall. . . . I want you to put all of it in a
bundle and send it here at once by special messenger. I have the
tickets here. . . . I'll have them ready. . . . Yes, I'll give him a
check. . . . No, Simon, it won't be certified and he'll take it as it
is."
He rang off and searched impatiently for pawn tickets. Simon's
messenger arrived and, strained and hostile, Kenny looked over the
contents of the bundle and wrote a check.
Alone in the studio again, he flung up a window, his mind pushing ahead
to eleven o'clock. It seemed to him then that he could not possibly
wait and go on fighting for his self-control. A gust of sleet and hail
swept in with a pattering sound upon the floor. Its cold, stinging
contact with his face refreshed him. Kenny's brain cleared. He gulped
and gasped. Garry's car! He would not wait.
"Frank," he telephoned after an unavailing interval of search for
Garry, "if you're willing we'll motor to Finlake in Garry's car. He'll
not be mindin'. I borrow it often. It's a bad night of course--but we
could start now. And we can make time on the road. It's barely two
hundred and fifty miles but the branch roads and changes make
unendurable delay. Shall I come for you in half an hour?"
Again Barrington gasped. Again he whistled. "Make it three quarters,"
he said, "and I think I can swing it."
"You're a jewel for sense," Kenny told him, a passionate note of
gratitude in his voice. "I love you for it."
He called Ann's studio at six. Joan had not returned. Ann took the
message, startled and sympathetic.
"I'll wire her in the morning," he said and, hanging up, found that
Sidney Fahr had come in. He stood with his back against the door, his
round face blank with terror.
"Kenny," he stammered, "I--I couldn't help hearing." The hot sympathy
he could not bring himself to utter, flamed desperately in his
face--almost to the ruin of Kenny's iron control. "I--I--I can do
something, can't I, Kenny?"
"Yes, Sid, darlin', you can," said Kenny gently. "I'm taking Garry's
car. You can square me with him."
"I--I'd even thrash him," mumbled Sid.
"Then if you will I'd like you to get in touch with Westcott's wife and
tell her. I'm painting her portrait. She comes to-morrow at ten.
Sid, could you--could you clean off those two chairs?"
Sid fell upon the nearest chair with fearful energy. At the table
Kenny hurriedly wrote a check.
"And to-morrow I want you to deposit this to Brian's account. I'm
paying back--what I owe him." His mouth worked.
"Oh, Sid!" he said, his face scarlet.
"Now, now, now, Kenny," choked the little painter, winking and making
horrible faces at the littered chair, "don't you go to taking on.
Don't you do it. I'll call up Westcott. The old gladiator!" Somehow
he turned his sniffle to a snort. "What in thunder does she want to be
painted for anyway? She's got a nose like a triangle and the
composition of her face is all wrong."
He blinked away the wetness on his lashes and wondered why, with every
other chair in the studio clear, Kenny should make a point of the
littered two. But he did not ask. Instead he entered upon a period of
fruitless and agitated trotting that lasted until Kenny came hack from
the garage with Garry's car. Then Sid packed him in, made one last
terrible face and bolted across the sidewalk for the door.
Beyond the threshold he bolted for a telephone.
"Jan," he said in shocked tones, "I want you to come down to the bar
and watch me. I--I've made up my mind to get drunk. I've got to." He
gulped. "I'll tell you why when you come down."
"Oh, fiddlesticks!" said Jan in a bored voice. "Go down to the grill
and eat something. And order me an English mutton chop and some
macaroni. I'll be down to dinner in five minutes."
Sid aggrievedly obeyed.