Читать книгу Kenny - Leona Dalrymple - Страница 10

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Spring came early and with the first marsh hawk Brian was on the road, his eager youth crying out to the spring's hope and laughter. Everywhere he caught the thrill of it. Brooks released from an armor of ice went singing by him. Hill and meadow deepened verdantly into smiles. A little while now and the whole green earth in its tenderness would dimple exquisitely, with every dimple a flower. Mother Earth, moistening the bare brown fields for the plough with a capricious tear or so for the banished winter, was beginning again. And so was he. Hope swelled wistfully within him like song in the throat of the bluebird and sap in the trees. With the sun warm upon his face and the gladness of spring in his veins, he sang with Pippa that "God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world!"

Well, New York, thank God, lay to the back of him, veiling her realities and truth in glitter, defying nearness. Every human thing that made for life lay there as surely as it lay here in God's quieter world, but you never came close to it.

So he tramped away to green fields and hills and winding quiet roads, spring riding into his heart, invincible and bold.

An arbutus filled him with the wonder of things, a sense of eternity, a swift, inexplicable compassion, a longing for service to the needs of men. His ears thrilled to the song of the earth and the whistle of the ploughman turning up the fresh brown earth. He filled his lungs with the wind of the open country, drank in the enchantment of the morning and the dusk, his nostrils joyously alive to the smell of the furrowed ground and a hint of burgeoning wild flowers.

But the first robin brought misgivings and remorse. Brian remembered Kenny's legend of the thorn ("worst of them all it was," said Kenny gently, "and prickin' deepest!") and the robin who plucked it from the bleeding brow of Christ. So by the blood of the Son of Man had the robin come by his red breast.

The legend filled Brian with yearning. He softened dangerously to the memory of a sketching tramp with Kenny fuming at his heels, his excitement chronic. Adventure had endlessly stalked Kenny for its own, waylaid him at intervals when he passionately proclaimed his desire for peace, and saddled Brian with the responsibilities of constant guardianship.

Brian stubbornly put it all behind him. Kenny, frantic with tenderness and resolution, could sweep him credulously back into bondage if he kept to the siege. His promises were fluent always and alluring. Only by the courage of utter separation could Brian make his longed for emancipation a thing assured.

So he tramped the highway, lingering by fence and rail to talk with men, living and learning. For the highway meant to him the passion of life. Hope and sorrow traveled it day and night in homely hearts.

And often his thoughts harked wistfully back to the words of a modern poet which Kenny with his usual skill had set to music:

"And often, often I'm longing still,

This gay and golden weather,

For my father's face by an Irish hill,

And he and I together."

In the gay and golden weather things were going badly with the unsuccessful parent. For weeks now his life had been in ferment, his moods as freakish as the wind. What little regularity his life had known departed to that limbo that had claimed his peace of mind. That he felt himself abnormally methodic lay entirely in the fact that he watered the fern each day. It had for him a morbid fascination. Incomprehensible forces were sapping his faith in himself and the future; and viciously at war with them, he nursed his grievance against Brian only to find that it was less robust than any grievance should be. At any cost he wanted Brian back.

"He's taken care of me," remembered Kenny sadly, "since he was a bit of a lad."

As ever, the thing withheld, Kenny ardently desired. That thing was Brian's presence. Any Irishman, he decided fiercely, would understand his terrified clinging to the things of the heart that belonged to him by birth. It was part of his race and creed. He hated to be alone. And Brian was all he had. How lightly he had prized that one possession until it became a thing denied, Kenny, sentimentalizing his need, forgot.

Studio gossip, having concerned itself with Brian's going, almost to the disruption of the Holbein Club, took up in perturbed detail the glaring problem of Kenny's tantrums. He was keeping everyone excited.

"Of course," mused Garry, "you could earn your living as a moving picture actor—"

"Adams owes me five thousand dollars for his wife's portrait," sputtered Kenny. "But I can't get it. He's been sick for weeks. Typhoid."

"And in the meantime?"

The shaft went home. Kenny sent for a model—and sent her home.

"She was too ornamental and decidedly sympathetic," he explained gloomily to Garry. "I'm just in the mood to make a colossal fool of myself. She was the sort of girl you'd invite to tea to meet your brother's wife."

"Kenny!"

"She was!" insisted Kenny.

"Any number of models are and you know it. And that girl is Jan's cousin."

"I make a point of never losing my head over a model," declared Kenny with an air. "It's a hindrance to work. You concentrate on a type and every picture you do advertises your devotion. Suppose I married her!"

"Heaven help her!" snapped Garry, and went out, slamming the door.

Kenny offended, followed him home. He felt aggrieved and talkative.

If Kenny had succeeded in propelling himself into one of his nervous ecstasies of inspiration, thereby normalizing his existence to some extent, if Reynolds had not appeared and simplified the painter's credit to a point where he made no further search for unsympathetic models. Fate, weaving the destiny of two O'Neills, would have changed her loom. As it was, sick with brooding and pity for himself, Kenny abandoned all pretense of labor and rushed on blindly to his fate. The spring was in his blood. What form of midsummer madness lay ahead of him depended now upon the hairtrigger of impulse. A wind, a sketch, the perfume of a flower, and he would be off wherever the reminiscence called him. He whistled constantly. That, as Jan pointed out, was always a bad sign with Kenny. It meant that he felt perilously transient and would rocket up in the air when a spark came that pleased him. He had been much the same, Fahr remembered, the summer he embarked for Syria upon a tramp steamer—to the captain's frantic regret.

In the end, feeling absurdly sorry for him, Garry unwittingly sent the spark in by Pietro.

It was a letter from Brian.

"Tavern of Stars

Open Country

God's Green World of Spring

"Dear Garry:

"The purpose of this letter is primarily a favor. Therefore without pretense I'll have done with it at once. You'll find in the studio a scrapbook of clippings which represent my ebullitions in print. Whitaker wants them, I believe, for purposes of conference. It will save him running through his files.

"I've been on the road for weeks, tramping myself into blessed weariness at night. More often than not I sleep in the open. I'm writing this with the aid of a pocket searchlight. Mine host, old Gaffer Moon, smiles down upon the ashes of my camp fire, full-faced and silver. An excellent host! Never once has he grumbled about light or pay and he grants me a roof without question. Ah! it's a blessed old Tavern of Stars, Garry! Ramshackle enough in all faith, for there are gaps in the tree-walls and Dame Wind's a-sweeping night and day, but luckily I've a blanket I carry by day and need by night.

"I've a road-mate. I think in time he'll be my friend, though he isn't yet. And thereby hangs a tale.

"I camped to-night in a wood by a river and turned in early, feeling tired. Voices drifted hazily into my slumber after a while and I awoke to find the moon riding high above the wood. My fire was out, my room in the Tavern of Stars still carpeted in shadow. Beyond in the moonlight two people had halted, a boy who was denouncing someone in a hard and bitter voice and, clinging to his arm, a girl in a cloak, whom I judged to be his sister. Her eyes were like pools of ink and tragic with imploring, Laughter would have made her lovely. As it was, with her lashes wet I could only think of Niobe and a passion of tears. I have rarely seen in a woman's face so much of the right kind of sweetness. It was an exquisite vigor of sweetness, not in the least the kind that cloys.

"They were much alike, save that the boy's face was angry and rebellious. He was the younger of the two, seventeen or so, and would have been in rags but for an unbelievable amount of mending.

"When I awoke, he had, I think, been urging his sister to go with him and she had refused. Before I could even so much as make them aware of my nearness, things came to a climax. The boy with a curse pushed her away. The hurt in his heart perhaps had made him rough. But the girl shrank away from him with a sob and ran back up the hill. He watched her climb to a hill-farm near the river, with shame and agony in his eyes, and I thought he would follow. Instead he plunged most unexpectedly in my direction and finished his tragedy in comedy by stumbling over me. We both scrambled to our feet a shade resentful.

"He realized instantly that I had overheard and blazed out at me in a passion of temper. Running away had plainly given him an arrogant conviction of manhood. Garry, old dear, I had to thrash him for the good of his soul and my Irish temper—he was so offensively independent and unjust.

"It was a pretty job of thrashing but it did him good. He threw himself on the ground and sobbed like the kid he is. While he was pulling himself together, I built up the fire and made him some coffee.

"The blaze of the fire worried him—he was afraid his sister would see it and come back. But he drank the coffee and when I had damped the fire to ease his mind, I explained to him just why I'd felt the need of thrashing him. For one thing I hadn't cared for the way he spoke to his sister. And for another I hadn't cared at all for his insults to me. He listened sullenly to the facts of my eavesdropping and apologized. When he found that I was disposed to be friendly he blurted out his justification for running away: an eccentric old invalid uncle who in all probability is not so evil as the boy claims.

"I had an odd feeling as we talked that he stands at the parting of the ways. Chance will make or mar him. And therefore I told him that if he insisted upon running away, he might as well tramp with me and think it over.

"I don't quite know yet why I said it.

"He reminds me of Kenny somehow, save that Kenny's more of a kid. Both of them have an overdose of temperament and need a guardian with an iron hand. And both have a way about them.

"Likely, after the wind was so pitifully out of his sails I could have dragged him up the hill home but if he has the notion of escape in his head, he'd go again.

"After a good deal of talk, friendly and otherwise, we took turns at the searchlight and wrote, each of us, a letter to his sister, I in a sense seeking to guarantee a respectability I do not look or feel since I am a truant myself with an indifferent amount of worldly goods. However, I couldn't help thinking how she'd worry and I promised to see him through.