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Page 41
"Disorder--chairs to sit down on without looking first."
"I borrow Brian's money and his clothes."
"Pawned shotgun, tennis racket, some fishing tackle and golf clubs."
"Note: Look over tickets."
"A tendency to indolence."
He had begun with an air of bored amusement; he finished grimly, read
and reread. In the light of the Craig-and-Whitaker analysis, which
dovetailed in the similarity of their venom, the details might, he
fancied with a lifting of his brows, be classified under three general
headings: youth, irresponsibility and a romantic attitude toward the
truth.
The envious charge of youth he attributed instantly to the thinning of
John Whitaker's grayish hair, and felt better. In irresponsibility he
read, agreeably, needful temperament. And his romantic attitude toward
the truth was merely a brilliant overplus of imagination without which
life would be insufferably dull.
He read the list again with colors flying and drum beating victory.
Though singly he could refute each item, an unguarded perusal when he
felt complacent, brought the hot blood back to his face in a rush of
mortification and dismay.
With a curse he flung the book across the room. Then unreasonably he
went after it and wrote at the end: "Life is a battle. I do not fight.
And life is not an individual adventure."
The final sentence startled him most of all.
Again he read it all and the memory of Brian, white, aggressive,
desperately intent upon escape, came between him and his quest of
self-content. It always bothered him. It had driven him to hunt the
psaltery stick, repent his lie to Garry and water the fern. It had
driven him out upon the road. Mocking voices rose now from the depths.
Was it--could it all be true? The shock of the thought was cataclysmic
and he longed for the self-respect and confidence in which he had
basked that night in Hannah's kitchen. Must the world side with Brian?
He was sorry about the shotgun. He was sorry about the sunsets. By
the Blessed Bell of Clare, he was willing to be sorry about anything,
little as he felt himself to blame. Was he to blame? Had he not paid
for it all in his days of stormy penance?
Out of his white-hot revolt clear vision came to him, as it sometimes
did, with incomprehensible, dart-like swiftness, and leveled him to the
dust. Some of it he would not face but he saw his days upon the road
with truth and shame. He had failed in his penance. Garry was right.
He did everything by fits and starts. And he could justify whatever
was most conducive to his comfort and his inclination. His pilgrimage
had been farcical. He had fled from discomfort, magnifying pettiness
into tragedy. And he had been disloyal to the son he loved. For there
under the willow when his startled eyes had found Joan, he had
passionately made up his mind to linger. Nay more, even then in the
dim recesses of his mind, he had hoped there would be no clue to send
him forth again in quest of Brian. And if there had been, Kenny faced
the fact that he would not have gone. . . . No, he would not have
gone. . . . And Adam Craig was a vulture preying upon the unrest in
his heart that he had hoped to stifle.
He went downstairs with a shudder, craving stars and darkness, unbolted
the front door and went out upon the porch.
The valley was black. Its lonely points of light vanished early. Up
here on the ridge there was wind and quiet. He peopled the gulf of
blackness ahead with things sinister and evil in spirit like Adam Craig
and turned his back upon it with a shiver. There would be peace in the
voice of the river.
The starlight, dim and soft, had a sense of silver in its
indistinctness. To Kenny, walking through the orchard, ghosts of
blossoms blew fragrantly above his head. The blossoms were gone like
his peace of mind. He hungered for Joan.
In the velvet dimness the wistaria vine beneath her window loomed forth
like a shower of shadow; a grotesque ladder of bloom warm to his mind
with invisible color and yet darker to his eye than the night with its
silver sheen of stars.
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