Kenny | Page 2

conqueror. His stage play fell rather flat. Garry Rittenhouse,
in bathrobe and slippers, confronted the pair with a look of weary
inquiry. He sometimes regretted that as a peacemaker he had become
an institution. Nobody said anything. Garry hunted cigarettes, cleared a
chair and sat down.
"It may or may not interest you two to know that I was in bed," he
began irritably. "I wish to Heaven you'd fight in union hours."
Brian was sorry and said so. Kenny, however, took immediate
advantage of Garry's attitude to sidetrack what he considered the
preposterous irrelevance of the shotgun, the one unessential thing in the
studio, and point with rising temper to the statuette. It had, alas! been a
birthday present from Ann Marvin, whose statuettes, fashionable and
satiric, were famous.
It was like Kenny to have a grievance. He was hardly ever without one.
But justification was rare indeed and he made the best of it. He said all
that was on his mind without restraint as to duration or intensity,
thunderstruck at Brian's white-hot response. For twenty minutes of Irish
fire and fury, Garry listened in amazement, sensing an unaccustomed
stubbornness in Brian's anger.
"Just a minute," said Garry, dazed. "Let's get down to brass tacks. Who
and what began it?"
They both told him.
"One at a time, please!" he begged. "I gather that you, Kenny, in need
of petty funds, went out to pawn Brian's shotgun. And you, Brian,
losing your temper, flung a brush across the studio and smashed a
valued statuette--"
Kenny chose indignantly to tell it all again and overshot the mark,

bringing Garry down upon him with a bark.
"Now, see here, Kenny," he interposed curtly, "that's enough. Brian's
usually sane and regular. It's by no means a criminal offense for him to
pick a row with you about his shotgun. And he didn't mean to smash
the statuette."
He waited for the voice of thunder in which Kenny, at a disadvantage,
would be sure to disinherit his son and, waiting, glanced a trifle wryly
at the littered studio. What Brian lost by chronic disinheritance lay ever
before the eye, particularly now when Kenny, in one of his periods of
insolvency, was posted downstairs for club debt and Mrs. Haggerty's
insular notions about credit had driven him to certain frugal devices
with the few handkerchiefs he owned, one of which was spread upon
the nearest window pane to dry.
Garry's disgusted inventory missed nothing: a prayer rug for which
Kenny had toured into the south of Persia and led an Arabian Nights'
existence with pursuing bandits whom, by some extraordinary twist of
genius, he had conciliated and painted; an illuminated manuscript in
Gaelic which he claimed had been used by a warrior to ransom a king;
chain armor, weapons of all kinds, climes and periods; an Alpine horn,
reminiscent of the summer Kenny had saved a young painter's life at
the risk of his own; some old masters, a cittern, a Chinese cheng with
tubes and reeds, an ancient psaltery with wires you struck with a
crooked stick that was always lost (Kenny when the mood was upon
him evolved weird music from them all), an Italian dulcimer, a Welsh
crwth that was unpronounceably interesting (some of the strings you
twanged with your thumb and some you played with a bow); Chinese,
Japanese, Indian vases, some alas! sufficiently small for utilitarian
purposes, Salviati glass, feather embroidery, carved chairs and a chest.
A prodigal display--Kenny in his shifting periods of affluence was
always prodigal--but there had never been cups enough with handles in
the littered closet, Garry recalled, until Brian inspired had bought too
many bouillon cups, figuring that one handle always would be left;
Kenny could not remember to buy a teapot when he could and made tea
in a chafing dish; and he had been known to serve highballs in vases.

Garry glanced expectantly at his host and found him but a blur of
oriental color in a film of smoke. As usual, when he was in a temper or
excited, he was smoking furiously. But the threat of disinheritance was
not forthcoming. If anything, the disinheritor was sulking. And the eyes
of the disinheritee were intelligent and disconcerting.
"Well?" said Garry, amazed.
"I've already been disinherited," explained Brian dryly. "Twice. And
I'm leaving tonight--for good."
Garry sat up.
"You mean?" demanded Kenny coldly.
"I mean," flung out Brian, "that I'm tired of it all. I'm sick to death of
painting sunsets."
Garry's startled glance sought and found a mediocre sunset on an easel.
Brian went in for sunsets. He said so himself with an inexplicable air of
weariness and disgust. He knew how to make them.
Kenny's glance too had found the sunset. It stood beside a landscape,
brilliant and unforgettable, of his