Kenny Part 41

It had no shadows for her wondering eyes; the shadows lay behind her.

New York with its shops where with Ann she had gasped and laughed and colored and stared into mirrors, its lights, its crowds, its theaters, its opera where Max Kreiling sang and left her with a sob in her heart, its amazing Bohemia of success of which Kenny was a part, seemed to her but a never-ending sparkle of romance and kindness. She spent unwearied hours in Ann's studio, masquerading in a sculptor's smock and staring at clay and marble with eyes of unbelief. And she tarried for amazed intervals in the studio upstairs where Margot Gilberte plied Cellini's art, embedding pennyweights of metal in hot pitch that, cooling, held it like a dark and shapeless hand while Margot sculptured elfin leaves and scrolls upon it. Curious things came to the jeweler's desk where Margot worked; jewels cut and uncut, soft-colored sea-pebbles, natural lumps of greenish copper, silver and gold and bra.s.s (to Margot's eye there were no baser metals) malachite and coral and New Zealand jade. Joan handled them all with gasps of reverence.

"And this, Margot? How green it is!"

"A peridot for a dewdrop in a leaf of gold. And there, Question-mark, are the pink tourmalines I propose to use for rosebuds in this necklace of silver leaves."

"And blue sapphires!"

"They are for pools of sea-water in some golden seaweed and the pearls are for buds in some cherry leaves."

"What an odd frail little tool, Margot!"

"I made it myself," said Margot. "And now, cherie, if you don't run along to Madame Morny, Kenny will scold me."

She delighted Madame Morny with her willingness to work. She delighted Kenny with her willingness to play. Nothing tired her. Together they roamed to the quaint little restaurants of Bohemia; the Italian table d'hotes where Kenny was inclined to twinkle at the youthful art students who affected pretentious ties, the quiet old German restaurant that once had been a church, Chinatown where you ate unskillfully with chopsticks upon a table of onyx, and the Turkish restaurant where everything, Sid said, was lamb.

"Garry found it," he insisted. "I didn't. I'm glad I didn't, though a lot of the Salmagundi men go over there and like it. The art students too. Forty cents. Proprietor's the real thing--he wears a fizz."

"Fuzz, darlin'," corrected Kenny gently.

"Fez!" sputtered Sid in disgust. "Fez, of course. Everything's got lamb in it, even the pastry and the coffee. I swear it has! I--I hate lamb. Didn't know the Turks went in for it so much, did you, Kenny?

Jan computed a table of lamb percentages on the menu and I felt like bleating. 'Pon my word I did. Menu's got a glossary and needs it.

Pilaf--that's rice. Lamb's something else. No, pilaf's lamb, and rice is something else. Oh, hanged if I know. Lamb's lamb no matter how you spell it."

"Come along with us," suggested Kenny. His kindliness of late had startled more than one, accustomed to his irresponsible caprices.

"Please do!" said Joan; and Sid, delighted, and amazed as always, repudiated at once his hatred of lamb. It was nourishing, he recalled at once with a brazen air of sincerity, and the Turks disguise it in amazingly enticing ways.

Joan laughed.

"Sid," she said, "you're a dear, blessed fibber and we want you with us."

Her poise and adaptability were startling. Her simplicity won them all. To the girls who lived in Ann's studio building she seemed all laughter and happiness and breathless eagerness to please.

"She's just herself," said Peggy Jarvis, who lived with Ann and smiled over the footlights each night in comedy that was comedy and to crowds that were crowds, "She doesn't know that half the world is posing."

Joan spent an afternoon in Peggy's dressing room during a matinee and came home with moist, excited eyes.

"Think, Peggy, think!" she exclaimed. "Once long ago that was my mother's life."

Peggy kissed her and rummaged for cigarettes. Joan's eyes rested upon her pretty face with troubled indulgence.

"Oh, Peggy," she pouted. "Why do you smoke?"

"Because," said Peggy honestly, "I like it. Does it shock you, dear?"

"It did at first," admitted Joan. "And even now I shouldn't care to smoke myself. But then when that old painter Kenny likes so came here with his wife, and her hair was so white and her face so kind, and she smoked like a chimney--"

"Joan!"

"She did," insisted Joan. "Well, then, Peggy, I just stayed awake that night and thought it all out. Peggy, do all painters' wives smoke? I mean--" she flushed and stammered.

Peggy's eyes were demure and roguish.

"You ridiculous child!" she said. "Who's the painter?"

Joan turned scarlet and bit her lip.

"And what, sweetheart," begged Peggy with ready tact, "did you think out?"

"If you smoke," said Joan, "because you really want to, Peggy, it's all right. But if a girl smokes just to--to appear startling and make men look at her, then it's all wrong!"

Peggy kissed her.

"Joan, dear," she said, "you've the most amazing intelligence in that small head that I ever met. Hum. If I'm not mistaken that's Kenny at the door. He never stops ringing until he's sure you know he's there."

Joan raced away to change her dress.

With excitement in her cheeks and eyes she was extraordinarily lovely.

Kenny with difficulty kept his feet firmly upon the floor a yard away from her. Peggy laughed up at him, her piquant face impudent and understanding.

"Kenny," she said under her breath, "I suppose you know you're in love with your ward?"

Kenny had had his flare with Peggy; and he had come out of it with wounded vanity, somewhat baffled at Peggy's professed belief in the transiency of feminine love. After all, Peggy said pensively, she knew too many charming men to promise an indeterminate interval of concentration upon one. Kenny deemed such a viewpoint heretical and masculine; women were meant to be faithful.

Now he stared at the girl's saucy face with a startled flush.

"Peggy!" he said, "you little wretch!"

It was growing harder day by day to keep his love a secret.

Joan's first dance at the Holbein Club brought a train of complications.

Ann, interpretative, dressed her in snow-white tulle with here and there a glint of silver. The soft full skirt floated out above her silver slippers like a cloud, but little whiter than her throat and arms. Peggy and Ann never told the tale of her rebellion or her frantic wail:

"Oh, Peggy, Peggy! I can't go. They forgot the sleeves."

She came down the stairway like a flower, but her eyes were wistful and troubled.

"Kenny, should I?"

"Should you what, dear?"

"Dance when--when Uncle--"

"If your heart is glad and your feet want to dance, mavourneen," said Kenny gently, "then no conventional pretense of mourning shall stop them. You were kind and merciful while he lived. Even he, dear, would not ask more."

"If my Victrola arm has been winding in vain while you two practiced half the floor off the studio," put in Ann, "I shall be offended. I dreamed last night that I was an organ-grinder teaching Sid to dance."