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Page 11
"Whitaker," said Kenny, his eyes imploring, "you don't--you can't mean
that Brian isn't coming back?"
Whitaker sighed. After all, Kenny never heard all of anything, just as
he never read all of a letter unless it was asterisked and under-lined
and riveted to his attention by a multitude of pen devices.
"Kenny, have you been listening?"
"No!" lied Kenny.
"Brian," flung out Whitaker wrathfully, "isn't coming back. I thank
God for his sake."
His loss of temper brought a hornet's nest about his ears. Kenny swung
to his feet in smoldering fury. He expressed his opinion of Whitaker,
editors, Brian and sons. The sum of them merged into an unchristian
melee of officiousness and black ingratitude. He recounted the events
of the night before with stinging sarcasm in proof of Brian's
regularity. He ended magnificently by blaming Brian for the disorder
of the studio. There were handles everywhere. And Brian in an
exuberance of amiability had broken a statuette. Likely Whitaker would
see even in that some form of paternal oppression.
"Whitaker," flung out Kenny indignantly, "Brian plays but one
instrument in this studio and we have a dozen. Wasn't it precisely
like him to pick out that damned psaltery there with the crooked stick?
I mean--wasn't it like him to pick out something with a fiendish
appendage that could be lost, and keep the studio in an uproar when he
wanted to play it?"
Whitaker laughed in spite of himself. The psaltery stick was famous.
Moreover, Brian--Brian, mind you, who talked of truth with
hair-splitting piety--Brian had that very day at noon forced his father
to the telling of a lie.
"But he wasn't here," said Whitaker, mystified. "He lunched with me."
"The fact remains," insisted Kenny with dignity. "I myself told Garry
Rittenhouse he'd gone up to Reynolds to collect some money. And Garry,
thinking he had come back, believed it."
"Kenny," said Whitaker, his patience quite gone, "are you mad? How on
earth did Brian force you into that lie?"
"By not coming home," said Kenny sulkily. "If he'd come home as a lad
should, I needn't have told it. You can see that for yourself."
Whitaker dazedly threw up his hands.
Having successfully baffled his opponent with the brilliancy of his
unreason, Kenny enlarged upon the humiliation he must experience when
Garry learned the truth. At a familiar climax of self-glorification,
in which Kenny claimed he had saved Brian from no end of club-gossip by
his timely evasion of the truth, Whitaker lost his temper and went home.
He left his host in a dangerous mood of quiet.
It was a quiet unlike Kenny, who hated to think, and presently he flung
his pipe across the studio, fuming at what seemed to him unprecedented
disorder. It was getting on his nerves. No man could work in such a
hodge-podge. Even inspiration was likely to be chaotic and futuristic.
Small blame to Brian if he resented it all. To-morrow, if Reynolds
deigned to appear with his check, he would summon Mrs. Haggerty, and
the studio should have a cleaning that the mercenary old beldame would
remember. Kenny vaguely coupled Mrs. Haggerty with the present
disorder and resented both, his defiant eyes lingering with new
interest upon a jumble of musical instruments in a corner.
With a muffled objurgation he fell upon the jumble and began to
overhaul it. The object sought defied his fevered efforts to unearth
it and with teeth set, he ransacked the studio, resentfully flinging a
melee of hindrances right and left.
The telephone rang.
"Kenny," said Garry's patient voice, "what in Heaven's name are you
doing? What hit the wall?"
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