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Page 57
Fate intervened. To his intense excitement Kenny was summoned for jury
duty. He managed after much difficulty to place the blame of this too
at Brian's door. Brian, he remembered, had flirted with the daughter
of an uptown judge. Likely he had boasted about his father's
versatility.
Inevitably on the morning there was civic need of him at court, Kenny
awoke with a fever for work, shocked at his record of indolence. Garry
found him in a painter's smock, conspicuously busy with a yard-stick
and crayon. Everything in the studio on rollers had been rearranged.
A chafing dish of coffee, sufficient to stimulate him through a day of
fearful labor, stood upon a table beside a supply of cigarettes.
"Now, Kenny," said Garry, who was finding his responsibilities in
Brian's absence more or less complex, "you know hanged well you have
that jury thing on this morning. I'm going with you."
Kenny filled a battered tin-cup with something he had to sniff for
purposes of identity, unearthed a number of brushes and defiantly
polished a palette with a wad of cheesecloth.
"I'll be damned if I go!" he bristled. "I'm too busy."
Garry looked directly at him and compelled a slight faltering of his
gaze.
"It's the one day I've felt like work," blustered Kenny, squaring off
his canvas. "You spoke of work, didn't you? And a fool of an English
squire who ate goose? Let the idle rich sit around in squads and swear
they don't read the newspapers. I do. Me on a jury! My dear Garry!
I can't even sit still in my own studio. You know that yourself."
Nevertheless after a heated argument he went wearily with Garry in a
taxi, particularly individualistic in his attire. And he told the
judge in a richer brogue than usual that he was a painter subject to
irresistible fits of dreaminess and must be excused. Garry, aghast,
stared at the judge and the judge, with peculiar interest stared at the
delinquent and excused him.
"Fortunately," Garry told him later, "your civic duties haven't spoiled
your day."
Kenny merely glanced at him with a gentle air of patience. He would
like to remind Garry that he had wanted to work and, thanks to Brian,
the law had intervened. Now the coffee would be cold and he hated the
sight of cold coffee. It depressed him.
Things thickened alarmingly. At three that afternoon, when he answered
a violent thump upon the wall, Garry found the Louis XV table in a
cloud of smoke; it was littered with vouchers and check books. Kenny,
with his teeth set and one hand clenched in his hair, was figuring with
the speed of an expert without, Garry felt sure, an expert's results.
Brian, Kenny said aggrievedly, had always kept his check book straight.
"Look!" he flung out, indicating a problematical balance. "Look at
that! And the fool says I'm overdrawn."
"What particular fool?"
"Some clod of a mathematician," explained Kenny with contempt, "whom
the bank employs to insult its patrons. Look here, Garry! Look at
that balance. Over a thousand dollars. Do you wonder I told him he
had a sense of humor when he said I was overdrawn? The young popinjay!
Arguing with me about my own balance!"
"How did it end?"
"I told him," said Kenny formally, "that the bank would most likely
demand his resignation in a few days. And when he began to grow
mathematical and persistent, I hung up."
Garry patiently sorted the vouchers and balanced the check book while
Kenny in frenzied consideration of a new complication roved around the
studio and smoked. He was a God-fearing Irishman. He wanted peace.
But if ever a man's destiny knew unheard-of complication! Well, all of
it could be traced to Brian's unscrupulous flight. He must come back.
Kenny felt that his career was menaced. Life in the studio had become
intolerable. He had been embroiled in two scandals, thanks to Brian's
bouillon cups and Brian's unscrupulous shirking of numismatic
responsibility. Everybody was talking about him; he had Garry's word
for it. He couldn't work. When he could he was summoned for jury
duty. His accounts, like the studio, were in a mess and he'd
overdrawn. If something didn't happen soon--
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