It was a pleasant refuge from the autumn storm--that grill. The dark old wood framed light and color, sketches and a line of paintings.

Mac's sculptured ragam.u.f.fin looked wistfully down from his niche near the open rafters upon a Round Table inst.i.tutionally fraternal. He seemed always seeking warmth and food. Kenny's old peasant in wrinkled apple-faced cheer smiled broadly from the wall, listening to the click of billiard b.a.l.l.s with his painted eyes upon the doorway.

The hum and clatter at the Round Table stopped as Kenny entered. It was followed by an immediate sc.r.a.ping of chairs, pushed back, and a hearty chorus of greeting but Kenny knew, intuitively, that the talk had been of him.

He ate but little and went back to the studio to play dummy bridge with Mac and Whitaker. A loud thump on the studio door and a Morse dot and dash announcement of ident.i.ty on the bell just as he had pieced a pack of cards together, filled him with intense resentment.

"Max Kreiling!" he said with a sniff. And a little later: "Caesare!"

He thought perhaps, feeling as he did in a mood for murder, he wouldn't let them in, abuse the door panel and the bell as they would. Whitaker did it for him.

"They'll come in and play music on my piano," he insisted sulkily, "and sing notes into my air and I repeat I'm in no mood for music."

But Kreiling, big, blond and Teutonic, was already striding in with Caesare at his heels. They filled the air with joyous greetings, thumped upon the intervening wall for Garry and unloaded their pockets and an inst.i.tutional leather bag.

"Cheese," rumbled Kreiling, "jam, coffee and mince pies."

Caesare unsheathed his fiddle and played a preposterous rag-time interpretation of the Valkyrie's battle-cry. It evoked an instant response from the telephone.

"It's Mac," said Whitaker. "He says he'll be down in a jiffy and bring Jan with him."

"Tell him," grumbled Kenny, "to bring beer instead. No fault of mine, Max," he added, "if Jan comes down here and eats your cheese. He's a cheese lunatic. Blame Tony. He comes into my studio, does a Pied Piper stunt on his fiddle and the whole building appears."

To Whitaker's amus.e.m.e.nt n.o.body heeded Kenny's petulance. Caesare was already building a wood-fire in the fireplace, complaining of the chill. Max Kreiling was furiously hunting missing sheets from a ragged stack of music on the piano and grumbling in German about his host's habits. The fire flared. Caesare's dark face, always tense, relaxed into smiles. When Garry appeared the wood-fire was blazing and Caesare was plucking in nervous pizzicato at the strings of his fiddle. Later Mac arrived with beer, a loaf of rye bread and Jan, who gravitated at once by permanent instinct to the cheese.

Kenny morosely hunted cigarettes and reflected with raised eyebrows that the studio was never entirely his, not even when he wanted vehemently to quarrel with Whitaker. And last came Sidney Fahr, round and merry, who looked casually in, nibbled at a gumdrop and professed amazement to find so many there. Kenny unreasonably chose to take affront at his chronic amazement and withdrew to a corner in a state of gloom and disgust, whence Kreiling, sensitively alive to atmospheric dissonances, routed him forth with the heated accusation that he was not _gemutlich_.

Whitaker looked on through a film of smoke. Ordinarily he knew it was the sort of evening that fired Kenny to his maddest mood of fun and sparkle. It was the romance of his Bohemia, the thing upon which he fed his sense of the picturesque, ignoring the lesser things that bothered Brian. Men loved him. In the glow of their camaraderie he was always at his best, excited, joyous, irresponsibly gay and hearty.

But to-night the fun and sparkle pa.s.sed him by. Garry was right. He was surely not himself. Could it be--just Brian?

"'Pagliacci!'" demanded someone.

Kreiling laughed indulgently and beckoned Jan to the piano. His big voice, powerful and tender, swept into the hush like a splendid bird.

Kenny snapped off the lights, plunged into tragic sadness by the pa.s.sion of his voice. Somehow its poignant sweetness hurt. The droplight over the music and the flare of the fire leaped out of the darkness like medallions. Faintly from a corner came the whisper of Caesare's violin, offering obligato.

Then he closed his eyes to block but the sight of rain splashing on the window. Enchanted rain surely! For it transformed the single pane into many, like a checkerboard of gla.s.s, and through it he was staring queerly into the farm.

Kreiling mopped his forehead at the end and switched on the lights.

The silence he understood and liked but his keen eyes lingered in surprise on Kenny's face. His color was gone, his eyes curiously tired and wistful.

"So!" said Kreiling gently and pa.s.sed on to the cheese with deliberate tact, pushing Jan away. A minute later his hand came down with heartiness on Kenny's shoulder.

"Spitzbube!" he rumbled affectionately.

Kenny laughed but Whitaker saw that his cigarette was shaking.

"Music," he reflected, feeling sympathetic, "always makes him wild and sentimental. And Max sang like an archangel."

"Now, Kenny," commanded Kreiling, nibbling cheese and rye bread, "play."

Kenny sullenly obeyed. After the first effort, something rebellious touched his sullen mood to fire and he played fragments of the Second Rhapsodic with madness in his touch.

Sid, aware of it, stared in round-eyed apprehension at his back.

"He's just in the mood again for rocketing," he decided.

From then on Kenny's reckless gayety kept them in an uproar.

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 G.o.d'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 a.s.sure 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 G.o.d you've had no newspaper training."