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Page 55
Joan waved him down the farm lane, her soft eyes wistful. An adorable
will-of-the-wisp! Almost he could not bring himself to leave her. But
for Hughie's eyes, he would have vaulted from the farm buggy, crying
her name.
"The farm," she had said with frank tears in her eyes, "will be just
like a grave without you."
Kenny knew it would.
The studio he found could match it.
CHAPTER XVI
TANTRUMS
Things went badly from the start. Whitaker for one thing claimed to
have lost track of Brian and Kenny thought he lied. For another, he
could not bring himself to work. A sense in the studio of a presence
gone, he told Garry, haunted him, Brian's lazy authoritative
guardianship and the comparative order to which he could reduce
existence when he chose were indispensable to his daily comfort.
Ah! unbelievably care-free--those old devil-may-care days when Brian
had been content to work and laugh and quarrel! Kenny, looking back
with longing, likened his plight to that of Ossian returning after
three hundred years of fairy bliss from the fabled delights of
Tirnanoge. Touched earth he had, in spite of warning, and become on
the minute a wrinkled, old, old man. So with Kenny. He had touched
earth, he reflected tragically. Never again would his fairyland be
quite the same. Man talked of his flaws. His fallibility they said
was monumental. There was Adam who had morbidly incited him to a
notebook, a damnable, pervasive notebook which he tried in vain to
ignore. There was Whitaker, to whom, at a loose end, he wrote a great
many letters of rebuke, some stately, some less so. There was Brian,
whose absence had revolutionized his pleasant way of life; and Garry
and Jan and Sid, who at any cost merely wanted him to work. Grievance
enough for any man who resented the disturbance of unneeded change.
The truth of it was, he owned at times, he was homesick for Joan and
fed his loneliness with letters he felt himself obliged to write. That
was inevitable, for he had fled from an idyl and the memory of its
charm must lessen slowly. Often with an eye upon the clock he found
himself picturing the routine of the farm and longing for its freedom
from the petty need of work.
He blew the horn beneath the willow and watched Joan cross the river in
the punt. He climbed the garret stairway and helped her pick a gown.
He watched the Gray Man steal along the ridge, lingering in boxwood
paths and in the orchard. And then with night among the pines and the
plaintive voice of autumn wind, Joan was climbing down the vine and
hurrying through the wood to the cabin, and Adam with his eye upon the
brandy was counting wearily when the clock struck. How the wind would
rattle at his windows! How the log would flare! How Adam must be
longing for excitement! And how glad he was that he himself had found
a safe hiding place in a lonely tree-stump for the lantern Joan had
reluctantly agreed to carry since the fall closed in.
Um . . . Joan would be building a fire in the cabin now and drawing
the shades and Mr. Abbott would be picking his way through the pines
with a book beneath his arm. Kenny glowered some at Mr. Abbott. An
eye for nothing there but duty and even that he saw in a stark and
unromantic way. And he lacked a sense of humor. He'd proved it in the
river. Joan answered his letters with an adorable primness that filled
him with delight. It reflected Mr. Abbott. But her letters ended
always with the naivete of a child. They all missed him.
It was pleasant to be missed.
The pleasure was curiously reactive. Kenny's irritability grew too
marked to be ignored. Jan and Sid and Garry met and talked him over.
"What's wrong with him?" demanded Sid, amazed. "Garry, what is it?
He's as quarrelsome as a magpie and nothing suits him. He barks at the
club-boys and if you drift into the studio you're about as welcome as
the measles."
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