Kenny | Page 9

Whitaker laughed in spite of himself. The psaltery stick was famous.
Moreover, Brian--Brian, mind you, who talked of truth with
hair-splitting piety--Brian had that very day at noon forced his father to
the telling of a lie.
"But he wasn't here," said Whitaker, mystified. "He lunched with me."
"The fact remains," insisted Kenny with dignity. "I myself told Garry
Rittenhouse he'd gone up to Reynolds to collect some money. And

Garry, thinking he had come back, believed it."
"Kenny," said Whitaker, his patience quite gone, "are you mad? How
on earth did Brian force you into that lie?"
"By not coming home," said Kenny sulkily. "If he'd come home as a
lad should, I needn't have told it. You can see that for yourself."
Whitaker dazedly threw up his hands.
Having successfully baffled his opponent with the brilliancy of his
unreason, Kenny enlarged upon the humiliation he must experience
when Garry learned the truth. At a familiar climax of self-glorification,
in which Kenny claimed he had saved Brian from no end of club-gossip
by his timely evasion of the truth, Whitaker lost his temper and went
home.
He left his host in a dangerous mood of quiet.
It was a quiet unlike Kenny, who hated to think, and presently he flung
his pipe across the studio, fuming at what seemed to him unprecedented
disorder. It was getting on his nerves. No man could work in such a
hodge-podge. Even inspiration was likely to be chaotic and futuristic.
Small blame to Brian if he resented it all. To-morrow, if Reynolds
deigned to appear with his check, he would summon Mrs. Haggerty,
and the studio should have a cleaning that the mercenary old beldame
would remember. Kenny vaguely coupled Mrs. Haggerty with the
present disorder and resented both, his defiant eyes lingering with new
interest upon a jumble of musical instruments in a corner.
With a muffled objurgation he fell upon the jumble and began to
overhaul it. The object sought defied his fevered efforts to unearth it
and with teeth set, he ransacked the studio, resentfully flinging a melee
of hindrances right and left.
The telephone rang.
"Kenny," said Garry's patient voice, "what in Heaven's name are you

doing? What hit the wall?"
"I'm hunting the stick to that damned psaltery," snapped Kenny and
banged the receiver into the hook, one hand as usual clenched
frenziedly in his hair.
Later, with the studio a record of earthquake, he found it under a model
stand and wiping his forehead anchored it to the psaltery for good and
all with a shoestring.
Horribly depressed he thumped on the wall for Garry, who came at
once, wondering wryly if Brian had come in and the need again was
mediation.
"You might as well know," began Kenny at once, "that Brian didn't go
up to Reynolds for me this noon--"
Garry stared.
"It was a lie," flung out Kenny with a jerk, "a damnable, deliberate,
indecent lie. Whitaker says he's gone for good." His look was wistful
and indignant. "Garry, what's wrong?" he demanded. "What on earth is
it? Why couldn't things have gone on as they were, without God knows
how many people picking me for a target? As far as I can see I'm
merely maintaining my usual average of imperfection and all the rest of
the world has gone mad."
"I suppose, Kenny," began Garry lamely, "you must be starting a new
cycle. Jan could tell you. He talks a lot about the cycle of dates and the
philosophy of vibrations--"
"I know that I regard the truth as something sacred, to be handled with
delicacy and discretion," began Kenny with bitter fluency. "I'm an
unsuccessful parent with an over-supply of hair and teeth, afflicted with
hairbrained, unquenchable youth. I'd be a perennial in the Land of the
Young and could hobnob indefinitely with his Flighty Highness, the
King of Youth. I'm forty-four years young and highly
temperamentalized. I've made a mess of parenting Brian and I'm an

abject failure."
Garry looked at him.
"Just what are you talking about?" he asked.
"I know," pursued Kenny elaborately, "that it's unfortunate I haven't
wrecked my own life when I'm an accidental success at wrecking
Brian's. I'm full of cobwebs. I damn irrefutable things and I've forced
Brian to a profession of sunsets to gratify my vanity. Can you
personally, Garry, think of anything else?"
"Sit down!" said Garry. "You're about as logical as a lunatic--"
"Tell Whitaker, do," begged Kenny. "There's one he missed. Garry,
what's back of all this turmoil? What's the real reason for Brian's
brain-storm? I'm sick to death of Whitaker's wordy arabesque and
abuse. I want facts."
"Brian said it all last night," reminded Garry. "It's just another case of a
last straw."
"You honestly mean that the ancestors of the straw