Читать книгу Kenny - Leona Dalrymple - Страница 6

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"You needn't repeat it," said Brian with a flash of his quiet eyes. "This time, Kenny, I mean to stay disinherited." Kennicott O'Neill stared at his son and gasped. The note of permanency in the chronic rite of disinheritance was startling. So was something in the set of Brian's chin and the flush of anger burning steadily beneath the dark of his skin. Moreover, his eyes, warmly Irish like his father's, and ordinarily humorous and kind, remained unflinchingly aggressive.

With the air of an outraged emperor, the older man strode across the studio and rapped upon his neighbor's wall for arbitration.

"Garry may be in bed," said Brian,

"And he may not." It was much the same to Kenny.

He was a splendid figure—that Irishman. His gorgeous Persian slippers curled at the toes and ended in a pair of scarlet heels. The extraordinary mandarin combination of oriental magnificence and the rags he affected for a bathrobe, hung from a pair of shoulders noticeably broad and graceful. If he wore his frayed splendor with a certain picturesque distinction, it was the way he did all things, even his delightful brogue which was if anything a shade too mellifluous to be wholly unaffected. What Kenny liked he kept if he could, even his irresponsible youth and gayety.

Time had helped him there. His auburn hair was still bright and thick. And his eyes were as blue and merry now as when with pagan reverence he had tramped and sketched as a lad among the ruined altars of the druids.

He had meant to wither his son with continued dignity and calm. The vagaries of Irish temper ordained otherwise. Kenny glanced at the fragments of a statuette conspicuously rearranged on a Louis XV table almost submerged in the chaotic disorder of the studio, and lost his head.

"Look at that!" he flung out furiously.

Brian had already looked—with guilt—and regretted.

"I broke it—accidentally," he admitted.

"Accidentally! You flung a brush at it."

"I flung a brush across the studio," corrected Brian, "just after you went out to pawn my shotgun."

"Damn the shotgun!"

"I can extend that same courtesy," reminded Brian, "to the statuette."

Things were going badly when the expected arbitrator rapped upon the door, and losing ground, Kenny felt that he must needs dramatize his parental right to authority for the benefit of Garry's ears and his own pride.

"Silence!" he thundered, striding toward the door. He flung it back with the air of a conqueror. His stage play fell rather flat. Garry Rittenhouse, in bathrobe and slippers, confronted the pair with a look of weary inquiry. He sometimes regretted that as a peacemaker he had become an institution. Nobody said anything. Garry hunted cigarettes, cleared a chair and sat down.

"It may or may not interest you two to know that I was in bed," he began irritably. "I wish to Heaven you'd fight in union hours."

Brian was sorry and said so. Kenny, however, took immediate advantage of Garry's attitude to sidetrack what he considered the preposterous irrelevance of the shotgun, the one unessential thing in the studio, and point with rising temper to the statuette. It had, alas! been a birthday present from Ann Marvin, whose statuettes, fashionable and satiric, were famous.

It was like Kenny to have a grievance. He was hardly ever without one. But justification was rare indeed and he made the best of it. He said all that was on his mind without restraint as to duration or intensity, thunderstruck at Brian's white-hot response. For twenty minutes of Irish fire and fury, Garry listened in amazement, sensing an unaccustomed stubbornness in Brian's anger.

"Just a minute," said Garry, dazed. "Let's get down to brass tacks. Who and what began it?"

They both told him.

"One at a time, please!" he begged. "I gather that you, Kenny, in need of petty funds, went out to pawn Brian's shotgun. And you, Brian, losing your temper, flung a brush across the studio and smashed a valued statuette—"

Kenny chose indignantly to tell it all again and overshot the mark, bringing Garry down upon him with a bark.

"Now, see here, Kenny," he interposed curtly, "that's enough. Brian's usually sane and regular. It's by no means a criminal offense for him to pick a row with you about his shotgun. And he didn't mean to smash the statuette."

He waited for the voice of thunder in which Kenny, at a disadvantage, would be sure to disinherit his son and, waiting, glanced a trifle wryly at the littered studio. What Brian lost by chronic disinheritance lay ever before the eye, particularly now when Kenny, in one of his periods of insolvency, was posted downstairs for club debt and Mrs. Haggerty's insular notions about credit had driven him to certain frugal devices with the few handkerchiefs he owned, one of which was spread upon the nearest window pane to dry.

Garry's disgusted inventory missed nothing: a prayer rug for which Kenny had toured into the south of Persia and led an Arabian Nights' existence with pursuing bandits whom, by some extraordinary twist of genius, he had conciliated and painted; an illuminated manuscript in Gaelic which he claimed had been used by a warrior to ransom a king; chain armor, weapons of all kinds, climes and periods; an Alpine horn, reminiscent of the summer Kenny had saved a young painter's life at the risk of his own; some old masters, a cittern, a Chinese cheng with tubes and reeds, an ancient psaltery with wires you struck with a crooked stick that was always lost (Kenny when the mood was upon him evolved weird music from them all), an Italian dulcimer, a Welsh crwth that was unpronounceably interesting (some of the strings you twanged with your thumb and some you played with a bow); Chinese, Japanese, Indian vases, some alas! sufficiently small for utilitarian purposes, Salviati glass, feather embroidery, carved chairs and a chest.

A prodigal display—Kenny in his shifting periods of affluence was always prodigal—but there had never been cups enough with handles in the littered closet, Garry recalled, until Brian inspired had bought too many bouillon cups, figuring that one handle always would be left; Kenny could not remember to buy a teapot when he could and made tea in a chafing dish; and he had been known to serve highballs in vases.

Garry glanced expectantly at his host and found him but a blur of oriental color in a film of smoke. As usual, when he was in a temper or excited, he was smoking furiously. But the threat of disinheritance was not forthcoming. If anything, the disinheritor was sulking. And the eyes of the disinheritee were intelligent and disconcerting.

"Well?" said Garry, amazed.

"I've already been disinherited," explained Brian dryly. "Twice. And I'm leaving tonight—for good."

Garry sat up.

"You mean?" demanded Kenny coldly.

"I mean," flung out Brian, "that I'm tired of it all. I'm sick to death of painting sunsets."

Garry's startled glance sought and found a mediocre sunset on an easel. Brian went in for sunsets. He said so himself with an inexplicable air of weariness and disgust. He knew how to make them.

Kenny's glance too had found the sunset. It stood beside a landscape, brilliant and unforgettable, of his own. Both men looked away. Brian smiled.

"You see?" he said quietly.

"Sunsets!" stammered Kenny, perversely taking up the keynote of his son's rebellion literally. "Sunsets! I warned you, Brian—"

"Sunsets," said Brian, "and everything else you put on canvas with paint and brush. I can't paint. You know it. Garry knows it. I know it. I've painted, Kenny, merely to please you. I've nothing more than a commonplace skill whipped into shape by an art school. Aerial battlefields—my sunsets—in more ways than one. I paint 'em because they happen to be the thing in Nature that thrills me most. And when I fire to a thing, most always I can manage somehow. You yourself have engineered for me every profitable commission I've ever had. What's more, Kenny, if ever once you'd put into real art the dreadful energy I've put into my mediocrity—"

"You mean I'm lazy?" interrupted Kenny, bristling.

"Certainly not," said Brian with acid politeness. "You're merely subject to periodic fits of indolence. You've said as much yourself."

It was irrefutable. Kenny, offended, brought his fist down upon the table with a bang.

"I know precisely what you're going to say," cut in Brian. "I'm ungrateful. I'm not. But it's misdirected generosity on your part, Kenny. And I'm through. I'm tired," he added simply. "I want to live my own life away from the things I can't do well. I'm tired of drifting."

"And to-night?"

Brian flung out his hands.

"The last straw!" he said bitterly.

"You're meaning the shotgun, Brian?" demanded Kenny.

"I'm meaning the shotgun."

"What will you do?" interposed the peacemaker in the nick of time.

"I've done some free-lance reporting for John Whitaker," said Brian. "I think he'll give me a big chance. He's interested." His voice—it had in it at times a hint of Kenny's soft and captivating brogue—was splendidly boyish and eager now. "Foreign perhaps or war. Maybe Mexico. Anything so I can write the truth, Garry, the big truth that's down so far you have to dig for it, the passion of humanness—the humanness of unrest. I can't say it to-night. I can only feel it."

Alarmed by this time, Kenny came turbulently into the conversation and abused John Whitaker for his son's defection. Brian, it was plain, had been decoyed by bromidic tales of cub reporters and "record-smashing beats." He contrasted art and journalism and found Brian indifferent to his scorn.

"It isn't just Whitaker and the sunsets and the desire to exchange the sham of my 'art' for the truth of something real," said Brian. "It's everything. It's the studio here and things like—like the shotgun. I hate the brilliant, disorderly hand-to-mouth sort of Bohemia, Kenny, in which you seem to thrive. Either we have a lot of money or a lot of debts—"

Garry nodded.

"I suppose," went on Brian wearily, "that my nature must demand an orderly security in essentials. Plebeian, of course, but comfortable. I mean, money in sufficient regularity, chairs you can sit down on without looking first—" he shrugged.

Further detail and he would be drifting into deep water. Life with Kenny, who borrowed as freely as he gave, entailed petty harassments that could not be named.

"Things," finished Brian. "that are mine without a lock and key."

He had meant not to say it. Kenny struck his hand fiercely against the table.

"You hear that, Garry?" he demanded with an indignant bid for support. "You hear that? By the Lord Harry, Brian, it's damnable and indecent to harp so upon the shotgun after smashing the statuette."

The circle was complete. They were back to Kenny's grievance. Brian sighed.

"I wasn't thinking of the shotgun," he said. "There have been times, Kenny, when I hadn't a collar left—"

"He's right," put in Garry with quick sympathy. "It's not just the shotgun—"

"Garry, you shut up!" snapped Kenny, sweeping the fragments of Ann's statuette into the table drawer and closing it with a bang.

"Please remember," reminded Garry, coldly, "that an established privilege of mine, since I undertook this Hague stuff, is absolute frankness."

"Br-r-r-r—"

"Who rapped for me?"

"Kenny did," said Brian.

"Any man," retorted Kenny bitterly, "may have a—a moment of lunacy. I thought you were impartial."

"You mean," said Garry keenly, "that when you rapped you'd been hypnotized by the justice of your own case and felt a little reckless."

Kenny drew himself up splendidly and glared at Garry through a cloud of smoke.

"Piffle!" said Garry. "No stately stuff for me, Kenny, please. It's late and I'm tired. I'll referee this thing in my own way. I repeat—it's not just the shotgun. It's everything he owns."

"What for instance?" inquired Kenny, dangerously polite.

"His money, his clothes and his girls!" enumerated Garry brutally. "You even pawned his fishing rods and golf clubs."

"I sent him a fern," said Kenny, affronted. "Did he even water it? No!"

"I think I paid for it," said Brian.

"Has he ever given me the proper degree of respect. No! He calls me—Kenny!"

Garry laughed aloud at the wrathful search for grievance. It was not always easy to remember that Kenny had eloped at twenty with the young wife who had died when his son was born; and that his son was twenty-three.

"Go on," said Kenny. "Laugh your fool head off. I'm merely stating facts."

"As for his tennis racquet," reminded Garry, and Kenny flushed.

It developed that of studio things the racquet and the shotgun had seemed the least essential. And the need had been imperative.

"Nevertheless," interposed Garry, "they and a number of other things you pawned were Brian's."

Moreover, reverting to the fishing rods and golf clubs, Kenny would like to have them both remember that it had been winter and one can redeem most anything by summer. He'd meant to. He honestly had.

"But you didn't," said Garry.

"Great God," thundered Kenny, "you're like a parrot." Fuming he searched afield for cigarettes and found them at his elbow. A noise at the open window behind him brought him to his feet with a nervous start.

"What's that? What's over there?" he demanded petulantly.

"Oh, it's only H-B," said Garry. "He's come down the fire-escape. Mac's likely forgotten to chain him."

The honey-bear, kept secretly in a studio upstairs and christened "H-B" to cloak his identity—for the club rules denied him hospitality—came in with a jaunty air of confidence. At the sight of the three men he turned tail and fled. Kenny speeded his departure with a bouillon cup and felt better.

As for clothes, Kenny began with new dignity, he must remind them both that he had more than Brian, if now and again he did forget a minor essential and have to forage for it. He added with an air of rebuke that Brian was welcome to anything he had, anything—to borrow, to wear and to lose if he chose.

Brian received the offer with a glance of blank dismay and Garry with difficulty repressed a smile. Kenny's fashionable wardrobe, portentous in all truth, had an unmistakable air of originality about it at once foreign and striking. There were times when he looked irresistibly theatric and ducal.

Kenny repeated his willingness to lend his wardrobe.

"Of course you would," said Garry. "Though it's hardly the point and difficult to remember when Brian is in a hurry and has to send out a boy to buy him a collar."

In the matter of money, to take up another point, Kenny felt that his son had a peculiar genius for always having money somewhere. Brian had of necessity been saved considerable inconvenience by a tendency to economy and resource. As usual, if anybody suffered it was Kenny.

"For 'tis myself, dear lad," he finished, "that runs the scale a bit. Faith, I'm that impecunious at times I'm beside myself with fret and worry."

Brian steeled himself against the disarming gentleness of the change of mood. It was inevitably strategic. Wily and magnetic Kenny always had his way. It was plain he thought to have it now with every instinct up in arms at the thought of Brian's going.

"I've less genius, less debt and less money," conceded Brian, "but I've a lot more capacity for worry and I'm tired of always being on my guard. I'm tired of bookkeeping—"

"Bookkeeping!"

"Bookkeeping lies!" said Brian bluntly. "I've lied myself sometimes, Kenny, to keep from denying a lie of yours." The nature of the thrust was unexpected. Kenny changed color and resented the hyper-critical word. To his mind it was neither filial nor aesthetic.

"Lies!" he repeated indignantly, regarding his son with a look of paralyzed inquiry. "Lies!"

"Lies!" insisted Brian. "You know precisely what I mean."

"I suppose, Kenny," said Garry fairly, "that a certain amount of romancing is for you the wine of existence. Your wit's insistent and if a thing presents itself, tempting and warmly colored, you can't refuse it expression simply because it isn't true. You must make a good story. I've sometimes thought you'd have a qualm or two of conscience if you didn't, as if it's an artistic obligation you've ignored—to delight somebody's ears, even for a moment. Perhaps you don't realize how far afield you travel. But it's pretty hard on Brian."

It was the thing, as Garry knew, that taxed Brian's patience to the utmost, plunged him into grotesque dilemmas and kept him keyed to an abnormal alertness of memory. Always his sense of loyalty revolted at the notion of denying any tale that Kenny told.

Now Kenny's hurt stare left Brian unrepentant. He lost his temper utterly. Thereafter he blazed out a hot-headed summary of book-keeping that made his father gasp.

Kenny's air of conscious rectitude vanished. In an instant he was defensive and excited, resenting the unexpected need of the one and the distraction of the other. The sum of his episodic rambling on Brian's tongue was appalling. He was willing to concede that his imagination was wayward and romantic. But why in the name of Heaven must a man—and an Irishman—justify the indiscretions of his wit? Well, the lad had always had an unnatural trend for fact. Kenny remembered with resentment the Irish fairies that even in his childhood Brian had been unable to accept, excellent fairies with feet so big that in time of storm they stood on their heads and used them for umbrellas!

Staggered by Brian's inflexible air of resolution, Kenny, his fingers clenched in his hair, began another circle. He reverted to his grievance. The quarrel this time was sharp and brief. Brian hated repetitions. Hotly impenitent he flung out of the studio and slammed his bedroom door, leaving Kenny dazed and defensive and utterly unable to comprehend the twist of fate by which the dignity of his grievance had been turned to disadvantage.

Garry glanced at the gray haze in the court beyond the window and rose.

"It's nearly daybreak," he said. "And I've a model coming at ten. She's busy and I can't stall."

He left Kenny amazed and aggrieved at his desertion. Certainly in the grip of untoward events, a man is entitled to someone with whom he can talk it over.

Wakeful and nervous, Kenny smoked, raked his hair with his fingers and brooded. Brian had been disinherited much too often to resent it all at once to-night. As for the shotgun, that dispute or its equivalent was certainly as normal a one as regularity could make it. And he had related many a tale unhampered by fact that Brian had simply ignored.

"What on earth has got into the lad?" he wondered impatiently.

Ah, well, he was a good lad, clean-cut and fine, with Irish eyes and an Irish temper like his father. Kenny forgot and forgave. Both were a spontaneity of temperament. Brian and he would begin again. That was always pleasant.

He strode remorsefully to Brian's door and knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again. Ordinarily he would have flung back the door with a show of temper. Penitential, he opened it with an air of gentle forbearance. The room, which gave evidence of anger and hurried packing, was empty, the door that opened into the corridor, ajar.

Brian was gone.

White and startled, Kenny unearthed the chafing dish and made himself some coffee.

Brian, of course, would return in the morning, whistling and sane. He would call something back in his big, pleasant voice to the elevator man who worshipped him, and bang the studio door. The lad was not given to such definite revolt. Besides, Brian, he must remember, was an O'Neill, an Irishman and a son of his, an indisputable trio of good fortune; as such he could be depended upon not to make an ass of himself.