Chapter 3 IN THE GAY AND GOLDEN WEATHER

Spring came early and with the first marsh hawk Brian was on the road, his eager youth crying out to the spring's hope and laughter. Everywhere he caught the thrill of it. Brooks released from an armor of ice went singing by him. Hill and meadow deepened verdantly into smiles. A little while now and the whole green earth in its tenderness would dimple exquisitely, with every dimple a flower. Mother Earth, moistening the bare brown fields for the plough with a capricious tear or so for the banished winter, was beginning again. And so was he.

Hope swelled wistfully within him like song in the throat of the bluebird and sap in the trees. With the sun warm upon his face and the gladness of spring in his veins, he sang with Pippa that "God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world!"

Well, New York, thank God, lay to the back of him, veiling her realities and truth in glitter, defying nearness. Every human thing that made for life lay there as surely as it lay here in God's quieter world, but you never came close to it.

So he tramped away to green fields and hills and winding quiet roads, spring riding into his heart, invincible and bold.

An arbutus filled him with the wonder of things, a sense of eternity, a swift, inexplicable compassion, a longing for service to the needs of men. His ears thrilled to the song of the earth and the whistle of the ploughman turning up the fresh brown earth. He filled his lungs with the wind of the open country, drank in the enchantment of the morning and the dusk, his nostrils joyously alive to the smell of the furrowed ground and a hint of burgeoning wild flowers.

But the first robin brought misgivings and remorse. Brian remembered Kenny's legend of the thorn ("worst of them all it was," said Kenny gently, "and prickin' deepest!") and the robin who plucked it from the bleeding brow of Christ. So by the blood of the Son of Man had the robin come by his red breast.

The legend filled Brian with yearning. He softened dangerously to the memory of a sketching tramp with Kenny fuming at his heels, his excitement chronic. Adventure had endlessly stalked Kenny for its own, waylaid him at intervals when he passionately proclaimed his desire for peace, and saddled Brian with the responsibilities of constant guardianship.

Brian stubbornly put it all behind him. Kenny, frantic with tenderness and resolution, could sweep him credulously back into bondage if he kept to the siege. His promises were fluent always and alluring. Only by the courage of utter separation could Brian make his longed for emancipation a thing assured.

So he tramped the highway, lingering by fence and rail to talk with men, living and learning. For the highway meant to him the passion of life. Hope and sorrow traveled it day and night in homely hearts.

And often his thoughts harked wistfully back to the words of a modern poet which Kenny with his usual skill had set to music:

"And often, often I'm longing still,

This gay and golden weather,

For my father's face by an Irish hill,

And he and I together."

In the gay and golden weather things were going badly with the unsuccessful parent. For weeks now his life had been in ferment, his moods as freakish as the wind. What little regularity his life had known departed to that limbo that had claimed his peace of mind. That he felt himself abnormally methodic lay entirely in the fact that he watered the fern each day. It had for him a morbid fascination. Incomprehensible forces were sapping his faith in himself and the future; and viciously at war with them, he nursed his grievance against Brian only to find that it was less robust than any grievance should be. At any cost he wanted Brian back.

"He's taken care of me," remembered Kenny sadly, "since he was a bit of a lad."

As ever, the thing withheld, Kenny ardently desired. That thing was Brian's presence. Any Irishman, he decided fiercely, would understand his terrified clinging to the things of the heart that belonged to him by birth. It was part of his race and creed. He hated to be alone. And Brian was all he had. How lightly he had prized that one possession until it became a thing denied, Kenny, sentimentalizing his need, forgot.

Studio gossip, having concerned itself with Brian's going, almost to the disruption of the Holbein Club, took up in perturbed detail the glaring problem of Kenny's tantrums. He was keeping everyone excited.

"Of course," mused Garry, "you could earn your living as a moving picture actor-"

"Adams owes me five thousand dollars for his wife's portrait," sputtered Kenny. "But I can't get it. He's been sick for weeks. Typhoid."

"And in the meantime?"

The shaft went home. Kenny sent for a model-and sent her home.

"She was too ornamental and decidedly sympathetic," he explained gloomily to Garry. "I'm just in the mood to make a colossal fool of myself. She was the sort of girl you'd invite to tea to meet your brother's wife."

"Kenny!"

"She was!" insisted Kenny.

"Any number of models are and you know it. And that girl is Jan's cousin."

"I make a point of never losing my head over a model," declared Kenny with an air. "It's a hindrance to work. You concentrate on a type and every picture you do advertises your devotion. Suppose I married her!"

"Heaven help her!" snapped Garry, and went out, slamming the door.

Kenny offended, followed him home. He felt aggrieved and talkative.

If Kenny had succeeded in propelling himself into one of his nervous ecstasies of inspiration, thereby normalizing his existence to some extent, if Reynolds had not appeared and simplified the painter's credit to a point where he made no further search for unsympathetic models. Fate, weaving the destiny of two O'Neills, would have changed her loom. As it was, sick with brooding and pity for himself, Kenny abandoned all pretense of labor and rushed on blindly to his fate. The spring was in his blood. What form of midsummer madness lay ahead of him depended now upon the hairtrigger of impulse. A wind, a sketch, the perfume of a flower, and he would be off wherever the reminiscence called him. He whistled constantly. That, as Jan pointed out, was always a bad sign with Kenny. It meant that he felt perilously transient and would rocket up in the air when a spark came that pleased him. He had been much the same, Fahr remembered, the summer he embarked for Syria upon a tramp steamer-to the captain's frantic regret.

In the end, feeling absurdly sorry for him, Garry unwittingly sent the spark in by Pietro.

It was a letter from Brian.

"Tavern of Stars

Open Country

God's Green World of Spring

"Dear Garry:

"The purpose of this letter is primarily a favor. Therefore without pretense I'll have done with it at once. You'll find in the studio a scrapbook of clippings which represent my ebullitions in print. Whitaker wants them, I believe, for purposes of conference. It will save him running through his files.

"I've been on the road for weeks, tramping myself into blessed weariness at night. More often than not I sleep in the open. I'm writing this with the aid of a pocket searchlight. Mine host, old Gaffer Moon, smiles down upon the ashes of my camp fire, full-faced and silver. An excellent host! Never once has he grumbled about light or pay and he grants me a roof without question. Ah! it's a blessed old Tavern of Stars, Garry! Ramshackle enough in all faith, for there are gaps in the tree-walls and Dame Wind's a-sweeping night and day, but luckily I've a blanket I carry by day and need by night.

"I've a road-mate. I think in time he'll be my friend, though he isn't yet. And thereby hangs a tale.

"I camped to-night in a wood by a river and turned in early, feeling tired. Voices drifted hazily into my slumber after a while and I awoke to find the moon riding high above the wood. My fire was out, my room in the Tavern of Stars still carpeted in shadow. Beyond in the moonlight two people had halted, a boy who was denouncing someone in a hard and bitter voice and, clinging to his arm, a girl in a cloak, whom I judged to be his sister. Her eyes were like pools of ink and tragic with imploring, Laughter would have made her lovely. As it was, with her lashes wet I could only think of Niobe and a passion of tears. I have rarely seen in a woman's face so much of the right kind of sweetness. It was an exquisite vigor of sweetness, not in the least the kind that cloys.

"They were much alike, save that the boy's face was angry and rebellious. He was the younger of the two, seventeen or so, and would have been in rags but for an unbelievable amount of mending.

"When I awoke, he had, I think, been urging his sister to go with him and she had refused. Before I could even so much as make them aware of my nearness, things came to a climax. The boy with a curse pushed her away. The hurt in his heart perhaps had made him rough. But the girl shrank away from him with a sob and ran back up the hill. He watched her climb to a hill-farm near the river, with shame and agony in his eyes, and I thought he would follow. Instead he plunged most unexpectedly in my direction and finished his tragedy in comedy by stumbling over me. We both scrambled to our feet a shade resentful.

"He realized instantly that I had overheard and blazed out at me in a passion of temper. Running away had plainly given him an arrogant conviction of manhood. Garry, old dear, I had to thrash him for the good of his soul and my Irish temper-he was so offensively independent and unjust.

"It was a pretty job of thrashing but it did him good. He threw himself on the ground and sobbed like the kid he is. While he was pulling himself together, I built up the fire and made him some coffee.

"The blaze of the fire worried him-he was afraid his sister would see it and come back. But he drank the coffee and when I had damped the fire to ease his mind, I explained to him just why I'd felt the need of thrashing him. For one thing I hadn't cared for the way he spoke to his sister. And for another I hadn't cared at all for his insults to me. He listened sullenly to the facts of my eavesdropping and apologized. When he found that I was disposed to be friendly he blurted out his justification for running away: an eccentric old invalid uncle who in all probability is not so evil as the boy claims.

"I had an odd feeling as we talked that he stands at the parting of the ways. Chance will make or mar him. And therefore I told him that if he insisted upon running away, he might as well tramp with me and think it over.

"I don't quite know yet why I said it.

"He reminds me of Kenny somehow, save that Kenny's more of a kid. Both of them have an overdose of temperament and need a guardian with an iron hand. And both have a way about them.

"Likely, after the wind was so pitifully out of his sails I could have dragged him up the hill home but if he has the notion of escape in his head, he'd go again.

"After a good deal of talk, friendly and otherwise, we took turns at the searchlight and wrote, each of us, a letter to his sister, I in a sense seeking to guarantee a respectability I do not look or feel since I am a truant myself with an indifferent amount of worldly goods. However, I couldn't help thinking how she'd worry and I promised to see him through.

"He's asleep now under my blanket, catching his breath at intervals like a youngster who's carried heartbreak into his sleep. Poor kid! I suppose he has. I've promised him to be on the road before daybreak.

"He'll have to work his way, but that, of course, will be good for him. What pennies I have I'm obliged to count with a provident eye. I've added to 'em from time to time along the road. So far I've been intermittently a rotten ploughman, a fair fence-mender and a skillful whitewasher. My amazing facility there I attribute to an apprenticeship in sunsets. Once, during a period of rain, I lived in a corncrib for three days at an average of seven cents a day. I've reduced my need of kitchen equipment to a can-opener. A can of anything, I've discovered, provides food as well as a combination saucepan and coffee pot.

"I miss Kenny but I dare not write to him. Garry, you know how it is. Unless I brace myself with a lot of temper, he can twist me around his finger. Even his letters are dangerous. I can't-I won't go back to sunsets.

"I often think these days of Kenny's wood-fire tales of the shrine of Black Gartan where St. Columba was born. Colomcille, old Kenny called him around the wood-fire, didn't he? Colomcille, Kenny said, having been in exile, knew the homesick pangs himself and therefore could give the good Irishmen who journeyed to his shrine strength to bear them. I'm not in exile but there are times when I should be journeyin' off, as Kenny says when the brogue is on him, to Black Gartan. The curse of the Celt! Kenny swears there's no homesickness in the world like an Irishman's passionate longing for home and kin. Not that I long for the studio. God forbid! Kenny's the symbol for it all.

"I've had some black minutes of remorse. After all I had no earthly right to blaze out so about the shotgun. And you can't imagine how the statuette upset me.

"Say hello to Kenny for me, won't you? Tell him I'm brown and lean already, and that I like the fortunes of the road."

It hurt of course that the letter was Garry's. Nettled at first, Kenny had half a mind not to read it. Later, why it was Garry's, gave him a sense of power. Brian was homesick and repentant. And with the fire of his temper spent he was always manageable. Kenny cursed the miles between them.

He read the letter again and the poetry of the open road filled his veins with the fire of inspiration. Tavern of Stars! Old Gaffer Moon, full-faced and silver! Tree-walls and Dame Wind a-sweeping! Why, the lad was a poet-a poet like his father. And the big-hearted kindness of him, thrashing the runaway into sense. Irish temper there! Kenny felt a passionate thrill of pride in his offspring. Yes, Brian was like his father, thank God, even to the Celtic curse of homesickness.

"But to think of him," he marveled in a wave of tenderness, "living in a corncrib on seven cents a day!"

Again and again he read between the lines, finding sanity and sense, compassion and humor. The inherited charm of Brian's personality filled him with intense delight.

"Always," Kenny remembered, "he must be taking care of someone."

It gave him a sharp pang of jealousy that that someone was a stranger.

But the thrill of penance was in his blood. If Brian was big enough to see himself in the wrong, no less was Kennicott O'Neill, his unsuccessful father. And he had driven Brian forth upon the road. For that he must atone.

That the solution of everything now lay at hand, Kenny never doubted. Already he had rocketed sentimentally into inspiration. If a certain vagueness of detail sent him roving abstractedly around the studio with the letter in his hand, the inspiration in itself was amazingly clear. Yes, he would fare forth and find Brian. He would tramp every mile of the road as Brian had done. He would find the farmhouse, the wood and the river! There happily would be some clue or other that he needed. And Kenny, in rags and penitential, his feet blistered by the hardships of the road, would overtake his son and apologize for everything. Nay, more, he would promise anything. After that the rest would be easy. Brian had written it there in a letter. Kenny could wind his son around his finger. Yes, it was all quite clear. And Brian helpfully would be shocked and thrilled at the sacrificial tribute of penance. Kenny pursed his lips and nodded. He would even concede the sunsets. That, after John Whitaker's cold-blooded misinterpretation, was necessary to his own self-respect-and Brian's happiness.

Ah, love was the only thing in the world that counted, love and art. Not the love of woman, which was after all but an intermittent intoxicant, but the love of one's own.

Kenny pitied in foretaste the ragged parent who would come upon the camp fire of his son, picturesque and repentant, and dramatized the meeting, a lump in his throat. Emotionally it was complex to be actor and audience both. Thank God, he reflected, as he opened a closet door, dragged forth a battered multitude of bags and suit cases and began an impatient upheaval of bureau drawers, he was a man of action. When Garry entered a half hour later he found the studio floor littered with preparation.

"I'm off, this morning," he explained. "In an hour now. Garry, how can I possibly reduce this mass to packing possibility?"

"Stop running around in circles!" commanded Garry, thunderstruck. "What's it all about? Where are you going?"

"I'm going," said Kenny with his chin out and his eyes defiant, "to hunt Brian."

Garry stared blankly at the packing litter and the tall Irishman in the center of it wearily mopping his forehead. It was impossible to locate the crags he must have leaped to reach his spectacular decision. They were shrouded in mystery.

"You mean," said Garry after a while, "that you will tour vaguely off, seeking a farm on a hill, a wood, a river, a youngster in patches and Brian's trail of camp fires?"

"Precisely," said Kenny with detestable confidence. "See, even you mark the clues with perfect logic."

"A farm on a hill," exclaimed Garry, "is of course a clue with absolute individuality. So is a wood and a river."

"So," supplemented Kenny with the calm, unhurried air of one who scores an unexpected point, "is a postmark on a letter."

Startled, Garry reached for the envelope. Kenny put it in his pocket.

"An obscure village in Pennsylvania," he explained with dignity, "where your wood and your river will likely have definite individuality. I shall go there."

Garry scented danger and considered the outcome in horrified dismay, regretting his rash flurry of sympathy. It had become a boomerang. What if Brian's protégé in a fit of remorse saw fit to keep his sister posted? Kenny would indeed find clues. The possibility filled him with foreboding.

"Kenny," he said with some heat, "I consider that you have absolutely no right to take advantage of my letter to hunt Brian down. I'm sorry I sent it in. If he wanted you to know where he is, he'd write you. I wish to Heaven I'd thought of that postmark!"

"I shall tramp every inch on foot!" swore Kenny proudly. "Brian will appreciate the spirit of the thing if you do not."

There was relief at least in that. Garry drew a long breath. If Kenny tramped his way, another inexplicable factor in his lunacy, by the time he reached the farmhouse Brian would be well on ahead. And Garry was bitterly familiar with Kenny's incapacity for steadiness of any kind. Kenny, it developed, was thinking in similar vein.

"I take it there will be an interval of waiting before remorse will lead the kid to write to his sister," he said. "Otherwise I'd proceed to the farmhouse at once in a flying machine."

The romance of this seemed to strike him strongly for an interval. Then, mercifully, he repeated his intention of tramping.

"And then?" said Garry.

"Then," said Kenny with the utmost optimism, "I'll pick up his trail at the farmhouse and from there I'll travel night and day until I overtake him."

"And then?"

"The lad will come home with me."

"And then?"

"Good God, Garry," thundered Kenny, "I never knew anybody with such an 'And then?' sort of mind as you seem to have. There's an 'And then?' doubt after every glorious climax. He'll be home. That's sufficient."

"What about the scrapbook?"

"I've already sent it."

Garry glanced hopelessly at the melee on the floor.

"I suppose," he said coldly, "that you plan to go sagging along the highway with a suit case in each hand and a bag or two on your back?"

"I plan," retorted Kenny, "to depart from here with one suit case which will eventually become a knapsack. The problem now is entirely one of elimination. Have you anything to do, Garry?"

"I have," said Garry distinctly.

Kenny looked hurt.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Because you're a jewel at eliminatin'. I mind me of the sketching trip we took together. You did all of the packing then in a marvelous way."

Hopelessly uncertain what he ought to do, Garry lingered. If by a word he could restrain this madcap penitent from roving off in a fit of sentimentality it must be spoken forcibly and at once.

"Brian," he said, "will never forgive me."

"Brian," said Kenny, "is a jewel for sense. He'll love you for it."

Garry flung himself into a chair with a muttered imprecation.

"Now, Kenny," he said, "I want you to tell me precisely what you plan to do."

Nothing loathe, Kenny obeyed. He liked to talk. Garry found his plans indefinite and highly romantic. It was plain the notion of footsore penance had taken vigorous hold of his imagination and his love of adventure. Characteristically, since the actor on the highway was himself, he saw no chance of failure. To Garry's curt "ifs" he turned a deaf ear and sulked.

In the end they quarreled badly. Garry, raging inwardly, went home in despair; and Kenny, after a tumultuous period of indecision, eliminated a floorful of luggage. In the rebound he took less than he should. He was ready to go when the door opened and the head of Sidney Fahr appeared. Instantly his round eyes bulged with inquiry.

"Lord Almighty, Kenny," he said. "You-you're not off for anywhere, are you?"

"I am," said Kenny.

Sid came in and closed the door.

"I-I can't believe it!" he sputtered.

"Don't!" said Kenny. He was out of sorts. Garry, talking of honor and letters, had given him a bad interval of indecision and guilt.

"It-it's amazing!" went on Sid. "You were all right at breakfast-"

Kenny wheeled furiously.

"Sid," he snorted, "you're amazed when it rains. You're amazed when it snows. You're amazed when the sun's out and amazed when it isn't. Thunder-and-turf! you're always amazed!" Whereupon he stalked out with his suit case and slammed the door.

Sid pursed his lips and shook his head, his gaze riveted upon the door panels in round-eyed incredulity. To him Kenny was an incomprehensible source of turbulence.

"The spark!" said Sid. "Wonder what it's been?"

Then sharing the club-feeling of guardianship where Kenny was concerned, the good-natured little painter embarked upon a tour of inspection, locked the studio windows and trotted upstairs, still amazed, to tell Jan all about it.

Thus Kenny departed from the Holbein Club, forgetting Fahr almost at once. He had recalled the tale of the Irish piper who added a phrase to some fairy music he heard below him in a hill; and the fairies, bursting forth in delight, had struck the hump from his back in reward.

Kenny himself had the same feeling of relief that the piper must have had thereafter. He too had lost his hump of worry.