“Yes,” said Kenny. “Of course.”
And she was gone. Kenny lay back in his chair and closed his eyes; the sound of her flying feet death in his ears.
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.