Kenny Part 44

"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 pa.s.sion for truth was literally a pa.s.sion, 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. d.a.m.n 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, h.e.l.l," 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!" bl.u.s.tered 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 Ca.s.sie'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 Ma.r.s.eillaise in a flag, and a Roosian hussy dancin' in boots. And Mr. O'Neill, G.o.d 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 succ.u.mbed 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 G.o.d'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 pa.s.sionate 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d!" 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.