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Page 61
When someone clamored for a wood-fire tale he told them of Finn's love
for Deirdre. But the discussion it provoked bored him and he dropped
back, smoking, in his chair,
"There is love and love," said Max Kreiling, "and to be in love is
torture and a thing of self, but when the big splendid tenderness comes
after the storm of self and craving, the tenderness that knows more of
giving than of demanding, it comes to stay. But it's not the love of
barbarity like Finn's. It's an evolution."
"Ask Kenny," said Mac mischievously. "He's an expert."
"Love, my son," said Kenny wearily, "is poetic like summer lightning.
It flashes, blinds in a glory of light--and then disappears--in time."
He tired early and sent them home. Whitaker longed to linger but the
moody cordiality of Kenny's good night was only too significant. He
departed with regret.
"Garry!" called Kenny at the door.
Garry turned back.
"I meant you to wait," said Kenny irritably, "but you got out before I
could tell you." He closed the door. "Garry, what were the men in the
grill saying to-night when I came in?"
Caught unawares Garry flushed and stammered.
"Why," he evaded uncomfortably, "it began about the peasant picture in
the grillroom. Everybody likes it."
"And then?"
"We talked some of the last thing you did--the winter landscape of snow
and pines."
Garry looked away.
"Out with it!" said Kenny suspiciously. "For God's sake grant me the
privilege at least of lumping it all in one supreme period of upheaval.
They didn't like the pine picture?"
"On the contrary," Garry hastened to assure him, "Hazleton said you are
brilliantly skillful."
"Brilliantly skillful! But?" prompted Kenny and looked a question.
"Brilliant skill," he added moodily, "doesn't always make a big
painter."
"Hazleton said as much," admitted Garry.
"I suppose it's best to tell you, Kenny," he added honestly, hoping to
spur the culprit on to more and better work. "It may help. They said
downstairs that you interpret everything, even trees and snow, in terms
of unreality. You over-idealize. I suppose it's your eternal need of
illusion. We've spoken of that before."
"I'm not a photographer!" blazed Kenny. "Any camera will give you
realistic detail. Artistic too. What else? Go on, Garry. I'm
calloused to the hearing of anything. I merely thank God you've had no
newspaper training."
"Most of the older painters," Garry said with reluctance, "seem to feel
that--well, there's too colorful a dominance of self in your work.
Your personality always overshadows. You've an extraordinary fluency
with color, a deft assurance, a brilliancy that leaves one rather
breathless and incredulous, but what you do is autocratically,
unforgettably--almost unforgivably--you!"
"Art," explained Kenny loftily, "is reality plus personality. And
personalities are variously vivid and anaemic. Unreal, over-idealized,
too colorful a dominance of self and personality overshadows," he
summarized after an interval of silence. "And in the face of
that--success. I am successful?"
"Undeniably."
"Even Hazleton, with his sordid gangs of Eastsiders nudging each other
on a dirty bench, can't deny it," bristled Kenny.
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