It was lonely here in the pines. He wondered why he had never caught before that chill pervading sense of solitude--sad solitude. The pines whispered. It was not merely poetry. They whispered plaintively. . . . And he was very tired.
Rebellion came flaming into his apathy and Kenny caught his breath and held it, fiercely striking his hands together again and again. Sacrifice and suffering! Must it be like this? What had he written in his notebook anyway? He seemed almost to have forgotten.
The book opened at a touch to the page he wanted.
"Sunsets and vanity," he read drearily and penciled the rebuke away with a faint smile. Like his hairbrained, unquenchable youth, bright with folly, the sunsets and vanity lay in the past. Vanity! Ah, dear God! he could not feel humbler.
Nor was he irresponsible--or a failure as a parent. He had made good to-night. Surely, surely, he had made good to-night. The one thing that he might not mark out was his failure as a painter.
"Need to suffer and learn something of the psychology of sacrifice." Well, he was--learning. . . . Nay, he had learned. Kenny fiercely drew his pencil through the sentence and read the rest.
The truth, though he did not fully understand it, he would always try to tell. He had no debts. The chairs in the studio were cleared of litter. A plebeian regularity had made him uncomfortably provident.
So much for that part of his self-arraignment. One by one he marked the items out and stared with a twisted smile at the next.
"I borrow Brian's girls, his money and his clothes!" Hum! Once Garry had barked at him for sending orchids to a girl or two whom Brian liked.
The money, the clothes, the paraphernalia he had pawned, were returned. As for the girls--well, Brian had retaliated in kind and perhaps the debt in its concentration of payment, was abundantly squared.
"Indolence." That the record of his winter could disprove.
And finally, he read what, after Adam's telling of the truth, he had scribbled at the end.
"Life is a battle. I do not fight. And life is not an individual adventure."
"I do not fight," he read again and crossed it out.
"Adam, old man," he said wryly, "I think to-night I've done some fighting. And the fight has just begun."