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Page 40
But the careless sobriquet of Kenny's rankled in the old man's mind and
bore a startling aftermath of fruit.
Kenny was Irish and conversational. He had as usual talked too much,
unaware that Adam, with fiendish insight, was reading steadily between
the lines, ready to pounce.
"Paul Pry!" repeated the old man at intervals. "Paul Pry! You are a
selfish, hair-brained Irishman," he blazed suddenly, leaning forward,
baleful and intense. "Some men feel and some men act. But you act
only when you have to. Life's a battle. Do you fight? No! You glide
along and watch the others. That's the way you've kept your youth.
You never linger on the things that prove unpleasant. You think life
an individual adventure to be lived the way you choose. It isn't.
It's a link in a chain that clanks. You can't escape. You won't
escape. You're a play-actor with a gift for staging yourself and
you're as hungry for the limelight as a circus girl in spangles. What
you need is the hurt of sacrifice. You need to suffer and forget
yourself. Damn you and your brogue and your folk lore. You're the
most amazing liar I've ever met."
But Kenny heard no more. He stumbled out of the sitting room and
slammed the door.
There was a lamp burning in his bedroom. Kenny walked the floor in
anger and humiliation, his fingers clenched as usual in his hair. Back
there in the studio with Whitaker's arraignment ringing in his ears, he
had been conscious of a terror he refused to face, a curious inner
crash of something vital to his peace of mind. And he had fought it
back for days, plunging into the relief of penance with a gasp of hot
content.
Now Adam, sitting in separate judgment, had reached out into the void
and linked himself to Whitaker--to Brian, to Garry--and his barbs
stung. That terror of misgiving, lulled into quietude here in the
peace and charm of his life with Joan, stirred within him hydra-headed
and drove the color from his face. Then he blazed into rebellion.
Failure! Vanity! Self! And Adam to-night had fused the verdict of
the other three.
Whether or not these things were true was at first of little moment.
The sting lay in the fact that someone had troubled to think them. The
careless illusion, that what he thought of himself the world thought,
lay at his feet pricked into utter collapse. It seemed to him as he
walked the floor in a tumult of hurt pride, that the world must accept
the man he knew himself to be, the man whose light-hearted existence he
loved to dramatize, a brilliant painter with piquant imperfections,
intensely human and delightful. He passionately demanded that it
accept him so without question. Good God! No one had seemed to
question until Brian in a burst of temper had brought the world about
his ears.
Well, let the world misjudge him if it chose. He was big enough, he
knew, to hold his head above it.
In a mood of lively irony he whipped forth a notebook and wrote a
sarcastic summary of his shortcomings, his lips curled in hostile
interest.
"Sunsets and vanity," he wrote with a flourish and lost his temper.
Well, that phase in Brian's life was closed forever, thanks to
Whitaker's meddling tongue. Never again would Kenny lay himself open
to misinterpretation by seeking commissions for his son. Brian could
write truth for Whitaker with a blue pencil and be damned!
"Hairbrained, unquenchable youth," he wrote next and added airily after
this: "This is likely hair and teeth."
"Irresponsible."
"Failure as a parent." This he underlined.
"Need to suffer and learn something of the psychology of sacrifice."
"Romantic attitude toward the truth."
"Improvidence. Need for plebeian regularity in money affairs and petty
debt."
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