Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

She was curiously disturbed less because of the circumstances in which her husband had found her out than on account of the menace he presented to the plans she had of late begun to nurse so tenderly. All at once Lucinda discovered how passionately her heart had become implicated in this adventure, how deeply the ambition had struck its roots into her being to win by native ability unaided to those starry eminences whereon the great ones of the cinema sojourned. To hear the inevitable verdict read upon her career before it was fairly launched, "Another screen-struck society woman!" were an affront to decent self-esteem by the side of which it seemed a trivial matter that Bellamy, no more her husband but by grace of the flimsiest of civil fictions, had caught her in the act of kissing another man.

Notwithstanding, her cheeks were hot, she experienced infinite vexation of the knowledge; and – all her efforts to recover hindered by a silence damnably eloquent of general sensitiveness to a piquant and intriguing moment – she was shaken by gusts of impotent irritation in whose grasp she could almost without a qualm have murdered Bellamy where he stood, if only to quench that graceless grin of his, and the more readily since he, on his part, seeing her reduced to temporary incompetence, chose to treat her with the most exemplary and exasperating magnanimity.

Hat in hand, the other proffered in sublime effrontery, smiling his winningest smile, Bel strode blithely into the forbidden ground of the camera lines; while his gay salutation fell upon ears incredulous.

"How d'you do, Miss Lee. Don't say you've forgotten me so soon! Druce, you know, Bellamy Druce – "

"Don't be ridiculous, Bel!"

"Can't blame me for wondering – can you? – the way you stare, as if I were a ghost."

"So you are," Lucinda retorted, shocked into gasping coherence by this impudence. "I can't imagine a greater surprise…"

"I believe you. But think of mine – I mean, of course, my astonishment."

Bel would have her hand, there was no refusing him that open sign of friendship; for an instant Lucinda let it rest limply in his grasp, appreciating there was nothing she could do now but take his cues as they fell, and treat the rencontre as one of the most welcome she had ever experienced…

"But wherever did you bob up from, Bel?"

"From the East, naturally – last night's train. The Alexandria told me where you'd moved, the Hollywood directed me to your studio, somebody there said you might be found out here – 'working on location,' think he called it. So took a chance – and here I am. Hope you don't mind…"

"Mind? Why should I?"

"Couldn't be sure I wasn't violating Hollywood etiquette. Never saw a movie in the making before, you know. Most entertaining. Congratulate you and Mr. Summerlad on the way you played your little scene just now. Only for the camera over there, I'd have sworn you both meant it."

"Don't put too much trust in the camera, Mr. Druce," Summerlad interposed blandly. "Rumour to the contrary notwithstanding, the blame' thing has been known to lie."

"H'are you, Mr. Summerlad?" Bellamy met his impudence with irresistible audacity. "So we meet again. Sure we would some day. Well: pleasanter circumstances than last time, what?"

"Conditions are what one makes them, out here in California. I hope you'll find the climate healthier than Chicago's."

"Trust me for that," Bellamy retorted in entire good-humour. "But, I say" – he glanced in feigned apprehension toward the camera – "not obstructing traffic, am I?"

"No fear, or Jacques would've bawled you out long ago."

"'Sright," Jacques averred, coming forward to be introduced. "All through for today, folks," he called back. "Le's go!"

Breaking into small knots and straggling off to the waiting motor-cars, the company prepared for its journey home, while cameras and properties were packed up and the horses herded away toward their overnight quarters in Azusa.

Slender, fair, insouciant, looking a precocious little girl in her extravagantly brief skirts, but with all the wisdom of Eve a-glimmer in her wide eyes, Fanny sauntered up and permitted Bellamy to be presented.

"My chaperon," Lucinda explained with the false vivacity of overtaut nerves – "the straight-laced conservator of les convenances."

"I hope very truly," Bel asserted, bowing over Fanny's hand – "you never need one less charming or more complaisant."

Fanny giggled, enjoying the contretemps hugely and determined it shouldn't lose savour for want of ambiguous seasoning.

"As for complaisance, the camera covers a multitude of indiscretions. That aside" – her glance coupled Lucinda and Summerlad in delicately malicious innuendo – "taking one consideration with another, a chaperon's lot is not a vapid one."

"I'm sure of that," Bellamy agreed with a straight face. "Not only that, but if you've any time at all to spare for your job, Mrs. Lontaine, the percentage of impaired eyesight among native sons must be high."

"Appreciation is such a beautiful thing!" Fanny purred. "Dear man! I do hope you'll be lingering in our midst a long, long time."

"No such luck for me. A few days at most. I only ran out to go over some matters with my man of business out here."

"The square-headed body with the blue gimlet eyes?" Fanny enquired, openly appraising the person who had accompanied Bellamy to this meeting, but who remained in the car with stony gaze riveted on nothing in particular – "who looks like a private detective in a five-reel re-hash of the eternal triangle?"

"The same."

"You have so many interests in California, you need a man on the spot to look after them?"

"Not many but, such as they are, of prime importance to me," Bellamy corrected with meaning.

"How romantic!" Fanny sighed, with a look so provocative that Bellamy's mouth twitched involuntarily and he hoped fervently that Lucinda wasn't looking.

He needn't have worried. Lucinda was too thoroughly occupied with her own reactions to the several more agitating aspects of this predicament to have any thoughts to spare for frivolous by-issues.

Not only that, but in pace with the growth of her interest in Summerlad, the sense of detachment from all actual relationship to Bellamy had come to be so absolute it could never have occurred to her to be anything but entertained by the notion of a reciprocal interest springing up between Fanny Lontaine and her husband. Fanny knew her way about, in the by-ways of flirtation was as sure of foot as any chamois on its native crags. As for Bellamy, in Lucinda's sight he was no longer property of hers, he was free to follow the list of his whim, free as the wind, as free as herself…

But the bare conception of anything of the sort was far from her mind just then, too many graver considerations were making imperative demands. To begin with, she was at one and the same time grateful to Bellamy for being so decent about her assumed identity and in a raging temper with him for having dared to follow her across the Continent, in sequel to the even more intolerable insolence of setting detectives to spy upon her. No more than in Fanny's mind was there question in Lucinda's as to the real calling of that "man of business" whom Bellamy had left in his car. But she earnestly wanted to know how long and how closely that one had been her shadow, and what he had reported concerning the interests professional and social which had been engaging her.

More than this, Lucinda was at a loss to think how to deal with Bel, now he was here. Patently on his good behaviour, taking care of himself, not drinking too much; more like the man she had married for love so long ago; showing so vast an improvement over the Bellamy of later years that his unpretending presence alone somehow was enough to diminish the stature of every man present and place even Summerlad on the defensive – Lynn Summerlad, the crowned exquisite of the screen! – obviously the Bel of today was not to be reckoned with as readily as one had reckoned with the drink-stupid, conscience-racked Bel of yesterday.

Disturbed by the sound of a voice addressing her in a tone pitched to pass unheard by Bellamy, she lifted perplexed eyes to Summerlad's face.

"You're dining with me tonight. Don't forget."

"I don't know …" Lucinda doubted. "Ought I?"

"Why on earth not? Surely you won't let him influence you?"

"I don't know what's best. It might be better to see him tonight and get it over with."

"Don't be foolish. Besides, I'm telling you, not asking you. I'll call for you as soon as I can get home, change, and run back to the Hollywood."

She liked and resented this dictation, and showed both emotions in a semi-petulant smile which she intended as a preface to a retort that was never uttered. For Bellamy interrupted, and immediately she was glad of Summerlad's insistence and forgave him.

"Anxious to see you, Linda, of course, and have a talk, some time when you're not professionally engaged. Tonight be agreeable?"

"Sorry, Bel, but I'm booked for tonight."

"Tomorrow, then?"

"But tomorrow night Cindy has a date with us," Fanny objected.

"I'm out of luck. Never mind: I know Linda won't keep me in suspense forever."

"No: you may call on me the next night, Bel."

"That will be Friday. At the Hollywood, of course? Many thanks. And now I mustn't keep you, it's a long ride back and you must be quite tired out with your long day's work, the emotional strain and everything."

Bellamy was punctiliously gallant about helping Lucinda and Fanny into their car, then returned to his own, wagging a cavalier farewell to Summerlad as the latter sped away with Jacques in the orange-and-black juggernaut.

When they had been some time under way Fanny broke in upon Lucinda's meditations with an ecstatic murmur: "Priceless!"

Lucinda came to with a frown. "I'm glad you think so," she said shortly.

"Don't be upstage. You know it's priceless. Why didn't you tell me your Bel was such a lamb?"

"He's not my Bel any more, and I don't consider him a lamb."

"Then I presume you've no objection to my vamping him?"

"None whatever, if it amuses you, dear. But why waste your powder on such small game? Any pretty piece can vamp Bel. I'm not sure she need even be pretty."

"Only for your sake, darling. I don't fancy the brute, thanks."

"For my sake?"

"Don't you see through his little game? He's out here to persuade you he's a changed man, a reformed character, and beg you to take him back on probation."

"Then he's far stupider than I imagined."

"Whereas if he falls for my girlish wiles, I'll have shown him up in all his deceitfulness."

"Don't put yourself out on my account." Lucinda curled a lip. "I wouldn't take Bel back no matter how absolute his reformation."

Fanny wanted to ask more questions but, heeding the counsel of discretion, contented herself with a little private sigh. Going on her tone, Lucinda quite meant what she had just said. Good news for Harry, whose plans would be seriously embarrassed if there were any real reason to fear the defection of Lucinda through reconciliation with her husband. For of course, if she took Druce on again, it would mean an end to the still young history of Linda Lee: Druce never would consent to let his wife continue in the picture business.

"All the same, if you don't mind, I think I'll practise on Bellamy."

"Oh, I don't mind. But Harry might."

"Oh, Harry!" Fanny had a laugh of light scorn. "For all Harry cares – !"

But Lucinda was inattentive; she had lapsed swiftly into an abstraction which had little or nothing to do with the unseasonable reappearance of Bellamy or the prospect of a wearing time with him before he could be finally discouraged. Whatever proposals Bel might wish to make, the answer to them all stood immutably decreed by Lucinda's heart.

It was not with matters of such certainty that she was concerned, but with the problematical issue of the Summerlad affair, an issue whose imminence was to be measured now by hours. Nothing that had happened since had served to erase the impression of that first kiss, nothing conceivable could seem half so momentous. The presence of the camera had meant nothing, they had kissed in earnest; mute, her lips had confessed too much. It remained only to be determined whether or not Summerlad had understood their message. If he had, Lucinda well knew, she was a lost woman.

She was possessed with a species of rapturous alarm…

XXVIII

In sequel Lucinda knew two days made up of emotions singularly stratified. This notwithstanding the fact (of which she needed to remind herself with provoking frequency) that she had put Bel out of her life for good and all, he was less than nothing to her now and, in the simple nature of things, seeing she was pledged to another, never could be more – more, at least, than the trial his pertinacity was rendering him at present.

Most of the time, of course, all of it spent with Lynn or in dreaming of him, she was merely but comprehensibly a young woman in love and glad of it; pleased with herself, pleased with her lover, delighting in the sweet secrecy with which it were seemly for the while to screen their love.

Nevertheless, dark hours alternated in apprehension of what she was resolved must be her final talk with Bel. But how successful dared she hope to be in the business of making Bel agree even to that? Lucinda found it by no means easy to compose an attitude which she could depend upon to dishearten Bel decisively, without going to the length of telling him point-blank that she was in love with another man and meant to marry him as soon as her professional commitments would leave her free to go through the mill of Reno. And to know Bellamy as she did was to have a good warrant for mistrusting lest, far from reeling down to defeat under the impact of that revelation, he might be moved merely to make fun of it. It would be just like Bel to refuse to believe that Lucinda Druce née Harrington meant to marry a movie actor.

"Go ahead, Linda, by all means divorce me if your heart's set on it" – one could almost hear him say it – "but don't tell me you're doing it just to marry a man who paints his nose for a living."

Somehow one got scant comfort of the retort obvious, that if Lynn did paint his nose he at least did it with nothing more harmful than paint.

At all costs, then, she must avoid the risk of telling Bel what she intended, and keep the tone of the impending scene in tune with the dignity which she had thus far been successful in maintaining, be firm but cool, and give him clearly to understand it was hopeless his attempting to make whole again that sacred vessel which his impious hands had shattered.

Maintained upon such a plane that scene must have been both beautiful and conclusive. And no doubt it would have been so but for one circumstance: Bel not only failed to call on Lucinda at the time appointed but failed even to send word of apology or explanation. An affront whose realization transmuted nobility of spirit into resentment most humanly rancorous.

Lucinda had sacrificed the evening to sense of duty; a true sacrifice, for Lynn was leaving early next morning to spend a fortnight with his company in an Oregon logging camp. So this would have been their last evening together for fourteen livelong days, if Lucinda hadn't promised it to Bellamy, and if Summerlad hadn't mournfully agreed (measurably to Lucinda's disappointment in him) that she could not afford to dishonour her promise. Surely their secret happiness was enough to compensate for that much self-denial, especially when it meant the last of Bellamy…

Losing patience after hours of waiting, Lucinda called the Alexandria on the telephone, and was informed that Mr. Druce had "checked out" early in the morning, saying nothing of an intention to return.

Mystified even more than angry, Lucinda went to bed, but lay wakeful a long time trying to fathom the enigma of such conduct in one whose need of her had brought him all the way across America to beg that very audience which had been granted only to be coolly ignored. The readiest explanation, likewise at first blush the likeliest, was none the less at odds with the premeditation to be read in Bel's leaving his hotel before noon, which wasn't the action of a man whom drink had made forgetful, but rather that of one who repented his haste in suing for something which sober second-thought had satisfied him he didn't really want.

How funny, if so! How very human!

Lucinda contributed her first smile since nightfall to the darkness of her bedchamber.

But having smiled, she frowned involuntarily…

No note came from Bellamy the next morning, and nothing transpired in the course of the next several weeks to afford any clue to the riddle; with the upshot that Lucinda thought about her husband a great deal more than she wanted to or had at any time since leaving Chicago. Curiosity being piqued no less than vanity, though she kept assuring herself it was a matter of indifference to her what Bel did or didn't nowadays, invariably the consideration followed that, all the same, it was strange, it wasn't like Bel to treat any woman so rudely.

She would, in those days, have been glad and grateful for some interest so absorbing as to relegate this vexing question to the realm of the immaterial, where rightly it belonged. But, with Summerlad away, nothing much happened with enervating regularity, the most interesting hours Lucinda knew were those spent in her rooms waiting for Lynn to call up on the long distance telephone. This he did every evening, and though she was thus daily provided with exhilarating moments, those that followed always seemed desperately the duller. The truth was, lacking the sense of danger, of flirting with fire, that was intrinsic in their love-making, lacking the sense of doing something that she oughtn't, calmly flouting the rigid code of her caste and having nothing to pay, Lucinda was beginning to find her environment a trifle tiresome. Say what one would, there was a certain cloying sameness about it all.

Somebody once said in her hearing that there wasn't any weather in Southern California but only climate. And it was true that at times the wonder and beauty of everlasting sunlight seemed a poor offset to its monotony; so that Lucinda would sometimes find herself grown a little weary of the sky's dense, inexpressive, day-long blue; and even its nightly extravagance of stars now and again impressed her as being too persistently spectacular, an ostentation on the part of Nature as tasteless as many jewels plastered on a woman's pretty bosom. One rather wanted to recommend the chiffon of clouds…

Then, too, one grew acquainted with certain, definite limitations restricting the amount of amusement to be had of taking active or passive part in the simple, rowdy pleasures of the motion-picture peerage. When one had several times attended the festivities these staged in the public resorts most in favour or in their private homes, one was apt to feel moderately surfeited with jazz of all sorts, mental and moral as well as musical, and a society made up in the main of men who thought it too much trouble to dress and women who as a matter of habit airily consummated the contradiction of being at one and the same time under and over-dressed. And once the novelty of learning to speak a strange tongue had worn off, no great amount of intellectual nourishment was to be extracted of studio shop-talk, which commonly was concerned in the ratio of one to ten with the business of making motion-pictures and with the private, broadly speaking, lives of the people who were making them, lives seldom held worth the discussing when their conduct was decorous.

Though personal liberty of action and freedom of speech be part of the inalienable heritage of the American people, it was the sum of Lucinda's observation that in the studios both were practised to the point of abandon. She considered herself the most liberal-minded of women, the life she had led till now had left her few illusions, she had even been known to enunciate an aphorism in the sense that hypocrisy is a lubricant essential to the mechanism of society: here, however, she remarked, such lubrication was so generally dispensed with that oftentimes the bearings screeched to Heaven.

But Heaven made no sign, and the Hollywood of active and retired tradespeople, to which the studios had brought prosperity beyond its maddest dreams, stuffed its ears and made believe there was nothing to hear.

As for the studios, busy, complacent, and well-content to be spared the troublesome necessity of pretending to be better than they were, they forgot (if, indeed, they ever stopped to think) that they did not constitute the whole of the community, and chuckled openly over a saying that ran their rounds that season, the mot of one of their own wits:

"Are you married? Or do you live in Hollywood?"

XXIX

Lucinda had by now become sufficiently conversant with the ways of directors to hear without much surprise – if with a little sinking of her lonely heart – the news which Summerlad had to communicate on the tenth day of his absence, when he telephoned that Jacques was threatening to find a fortnight too little for the work that had taken the company away from Los Angeles.

And the next day, when she paid the studio the perfunctory call of routine – to learn, as usual, that Barry Nolan had as yet sent no word concerning the date when he expected to begin directing for Linda Lee Inc. – Lucinda saw, as she left her car in front of the administration building, the owner of the premises lounging against one of the fluted columns of the portico and mumbling an unlighted cigar, and got from him a moody nod instead of the beaming salutation he had taught her to expect.

Himself a monstrously homely man, short, stout and swart, Zinn had an alert eye for feminine good looks, which had never before neglected to give Lucinda to understand that it was on her and humid with approbation.

By birth a Russian Jew, offspring of immigrants from Odessa, Isadore Zinn had worked his way into the producing business, as the saying ran, through its backdoor; that is to say, from the exhibitors' side. Indefatigable industry and appetite for hardship coupled with quenchless greed and a complete absence of scruples and moral sense, had promoted him from the office of usher in a "nickelodeon" of the cinema's early days successively to be the proprietor of the enterprise, organizer of a chain of motion-picture theatres, and president of a league of exhibitors, which last had eventually pooled its resources and gone into the business of producing as well as that of showing pictures. The money of this league had built what were today the Zinn Studios; just how this property had come to pass into Zinn's sole possession was a matter of secret history concerning which there were many rumours, all unsavory. Zinn was reputed by his loving employees to set no more store by a dollar than by an eye-tooth or an only child.

On leaving, half an hour later, Lucinda found the man in the same spot and pose. Apparently he had not moved a muscle in that interval. She paused to ask why, and was frankly told.

"I'm figuring on killing a director, Miss Lee, and wondering if maybe I couldn't get away with it. I could all right, if you only could believe all you hear. You ask any of them fellers in there" – Zinn jerked his head toward the building behind him – "takes my good money and calls me Mister Zinn – and they'll tell you I get away with murder every day or worse." He sighed dismally. "If they was any truth in that, I'd be a happy kike and a lot of directors' wives wouldn't have nothing on their minds no more, only their hair. The way I am today, the first one I'd take a load off her intellect would be Mrs. Jacques."

"I didn't know Mr. Jacques was married."

"Maybe he ain't right now, it's hard to tell. You take actors and directors, they're all the same, you never know when they ain't married or how long they been that way. The way it seems to me, they get married off and on just to see what difference it will make if any. 'Most everybody you know's got a loose wife or husband kicking around somewhere this side the Cajon Pass. The only way you can keep track of them is don't try."

"It must be frightfully embarrassing at times…"