Kenny

Leona Dalrymple

• Publisher: Start Classics
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781633553149
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Altertumswissenschaften

"Lightning struck with a sinister flare of fire at Kenny's feet, with hot blinding pieces of the floor flying all about him " Kennicott O'Neill had the magic touch of luck... and a predilection to run into disaster, too, to go right along with it—especially in matters involving his rebellious son, Brian. Kenny knew he was getting on in years, although his auburn hair was still bright and thick, and his eyes were as blue and merry now as when he tramped and sketched as a lad among the ruined altars of the druids. And his temper was as ready to flare up as ever—along with the sparking fires of his romantic heart Such a colorful figure, this old Irish artist, O'Neill—and still a troublemaker, too—winning heartfelt gazes from the same woman his son loved

Chapter I

BRIAN REBELS

"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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Chapter I
• Chapter II
• Chapter III
• Chapter IV
• Chapter V
• Chapter VI
• Chapter VII
• Chapter VIII
• Chapter IX
• Chapter X
• Chapter XI
• Chapter XII
• Chapter XIII
• Chapter XIV
• Chapter XV
• Chapter XVI
• Chapter XVII
• Chapter XVIII
• Chapter XIX
• Chapter XX
• Chapter XXI
• Chapter XXII
• Chapter XXIII
• Chapter XXIV
• Chapter XXV
• Chapter XXVI
• Chapter XXVII
• Chapter XXVIII
• Chapter XXIX
• Chapter XXX
• Chapter XXXI
• Chapter XXXII
• Chapter XXXIII
• Chapter XXXIV
• Chapter XXXV
• Chapter XXXVI
• Chapter XXXVII
• Chapter XXXVIII
• Chapter XXXIX
• Chapter XL
• Chapter XLI
• Chapter XLII