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Page 3
"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--"
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