WHEN THE ISLE OF DELIGHT RECEDED
Often Kenny had appreciatively dramatized for himself possible minutes of
tragedy. They were always opportunities for Shakespearian soliloquy and
gesture.
Now he lay back in his chair much too tired for tragedy and gesture. And
the need of soliloquy would have found him dumb. Upper-most in his mind
was a dream in which Joan had peeped down at him from a balloon that went
ever and ever higher--like the Isle of Delight that was always--receding.
He had sensed in her to-night that aerial aloofness he had felt when he
blocked old Adam out from his dream of love. Liebestraum! The stabbing
pain in his heart grew hotter.
It was lonely here in the pines. He wondered why he had never caught
before that chill pervading sense of solitude--sad solitude. The pines
whispered. It was not merely poetry. They whispered plaintively. . . .
And he was very tired.
Rebellion came flaming into his apathy and Kenny caught his breath and
held it, fiercely striking his hands together again and again. Sacrifice
and suffering! Must it be like this? What had he written in his
notebook anyway? He seemed almost to have forgotten.
The book opened at a touch to the page he wanted.
"Sunsets and vanity," he read drearily and penciled the rebuke away with
a faint smile. Like his hairbrained, unquenchable youth, bright with
folly, the sunsets and vanity lay in the past. Vanity! Ah, dear God! he
could not feel humbler.
Nor was he irresponsible--or a failure as a parent. He had made good
to-night. Surely, surely, he had made good to-night. The one thing that
he might not mark out was his failure as a painter.
"Need to suffer and learn something of the psychology of sacrifice."
Well, he was--learning. . . . Nay, he had learned. Kenny fiercely drew
his pencil through the sentence and read the rest.
The truth, though he did not fully understand it, he would always try to
tell. He had no debts. The chairs in the studio were cleared of litter.
A plebeian regularity had made him uncomfortably provident.
So much for that part of his self-arraignment. One by one he marked the
items out and stared with a twisted smile at the next.
"I borrow Brian's girls, his money and his clothes!" Hum! Once Garry
had barked at him for sending orchids to a girl or two whom Brian liked.
The money, the clothes, the paraphernalia he had pawned, were returned.
As for the girls--well, Brian had retaliated in kind and perhaps the debt
in its concentration of payment, was abundantly squared.
"Indolence." That the record of his winter could disprove.
And finally, he read what, after Adam's telling of the truth, he had
scribbled at the end.
"Life is a battle. I do not fight. And life is not an individual
adventure."
It wasn't. It was a chain that clanked.
"I do not fight," he read again and crossed it out.
"Adam, old man," he said wryly, "I think to-night I've done some
fighting. And the fight has just begun."
He tore the page out, struck a match and burned it. Again he dropped
back in his chair and closed his eyes.
Into the blur came Garry.
"Kenny!" he called. "Kenny!"
Kenny opened his eyes with a start. Garry stood by the cabin door, his
hand upon the knob.
"Don asked me to come. Kenny, I was on the porch. Great God! the kid
must have gone crazy."
"You heard?"
"Yes."
"He wanted to--atone."
"And now that he's cooled down enough to remember your kindness, Kenny,
he's breaking his heart over you. A queer kid! I almost thrashed him.
He's tramping off his brain-storm."
"And Joan?"
"With Brian." Garry looked away. "They have forgotten the world," he
added bitterly.
"Kenny, how did you manage? That look in her face--"
"I lied."
"Gallant liar!" said Garry huskily. "I knew you would. It was the only
kind way."
"Almost," said Kenny, "I did not remember to lie in time. Truth is a
thing I cannot understand."
The sympathy in Garry's eyes unnerved him.
"Garry," he flamed, "why did I practice the telling of truth to end now
with a lie? Why did Joan plead for a year to learn to be my wife and
learn in it--not to be?"
"God knows!" said Garry gently. "Why did agony come to Brian at the
hands of a boy he'd befriended? And then--to you?"
"It is the Samhain of my life," said Kenny rising. "And I am no longer
John Whitaker's King of Youth. I think my youth died back there when Don
thrust it aside, not meaning, I take it, to be cruel. But I grew up all
at once." He frowned. "Drowning men, they say, have a kaleidoscopic
vision of the past. I think sitting here that came to me. Perhaps,
Garry, if Eileen had lived I would have been different--steadier. I
think I loved her. I think it would have lasted. A child is a beautiful
link. Perhaps that fever of vanity that grew to a burning in my veins
would never have started. Started, it was like a conflagration. It
drove Brian to sunsets. God knows what it didn't do. I thought only of
myself--always. That desire for adulation in a woman's eyes, that
curious persistent fever was, I'm sure, a sort of sex vanity. It has
nearly ruined many another man's life. It nearly ruined mine. Always
when I was drifting into new madness, I couldn't work. I dreamed. The
Isle of Delight, always receding! I sang and whistled. The King of
Youth! Only when I was drifting out again, could I bend myself to
concentration and sanity. And then another look in a girl's soft
eyes--and more vanity and self and delirium. But I'm tired. I want to
look ahead to--to quiet and steadiness and work."
Garry, with the husk still in his throat, wandered off to the window.
"Garry!"
Garry wheeled and found a wistful, boyish Kenny with his fingers in his
hair.
"I'm no longer a failure as a parent?"
"No!" said Garry with decision.
"And God knows I haven't been a failure as a lover. I'm prayin' I shan't
always be a failure as a painter. It's the one thing left. Somewhere in
Ireland, Garry, nine silent fairies blow beneath a caldron. They know
the secrets of the future. I'd like to be peepin'."
He was to know in time that the caldron held for him peace and big
achievement.
"I wish I could help!" said Garry.
"Garry, could you--would you drive me home to-night?"
"Anything!"
"You'll not be mindin'?"
"No. It's better."
"Come," said Kenny, his color high. "We'll be facin' it now."
They went in silence through the pines.