Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

"I think he hunted Nelly up, if you want to know, and induced her to come back here, in violation of her agreement."

"But Bel… I don't quite see…"

"He wanted Nelly on the spot as a sort of club over my head. He hasn't given you up yet" – Summerlad laughed shortly – "not by a long sight."

"A club over your head? I don't understand."

"Not meaning to use it as long as we behaved ourselves."

"Behaved ourselves! Lynn!"

"Oh, forgive me! I didn't mean to say that."

Summerlad's look mirrored a real and poignant contrition as he saw her colouring with affronted sensibility, drawing back from him, momentarily slipping farther beyond his reach. "Linda!" he implored – "don't look at me that way. I can't help what your husband thinks, can I? I didn't ask him to come out here and be the pest he is, did I? After all, what have I done? I lied about Nelly – yes – but only to spare your feelings. I didn't want you to think people might be talking about you, stepping out with a married man. If you'd thought that, you'd have given me my walking papers and … and I couldn't do without you, dear – I can't! The others never mattered much, they sort of came and went, mostly I didn't care which they did. But you're so different, you're so wonderful, everything a fellow dreams about. I've never known anybody like you, never will again. If I lost you I'd – I'd – I think I'd go out of my mind!"

And suddenly, before she could stir to escape, he caught her to him and held her fast.

"Linda, sweetheart; don't be angry with me. I've tried so hard to be good enough for you. And you – you've loved me, too! Don't let this rotten accident spoil everything for us. If you love me – and you know I love you – what does anything matter? What if we are both married? What difference need that make? Love can still be sweet…"

She made no show of opposition, only drew back her head to cheat his lips; but when she tried to brave his eyes, thinking to read therein his heart and mind, she winced from recognition of the hunger that informed them, hunger that she wittingly had whetted, hunger such as she herself had too often known of late, like warm wine running in one's veins…

But always ere now she had fortified and shriven her conscience with the belief that they were of one mind, it must and would be Reno first…

Now Reno no longer held forth any promise of salvation, of the law's sanction, the church's countenance. Even though she were to find there her own freedom, Lynn would still be bound. It wasn't in reason to hope that the woman who had rejected his money would listen to other arguments. Today and henceforward it must be all for love or … nothing … a break final and irreparable…

And for all the shock she had suffered, for all the wrong Lynn had done and the pain of which his ill-faith had been the cause, the love she had given the man still was dear, dangerously sweet and disarming. Already she was aware of anxiety to grasp at excuses for him, to comfort the ache in her heart with the thought that she was according charity to a dear transgressor, already she felt her strength to resist being sapped, flesh and spirit succumbing anew to the spell he knew too well how to weave.

She wrestled with a weakness stronger than all her strength. They couldn't go on like this… Lynn hadn't said it, but they both knew it … without going farther… Even Reno couldn't save her now, only the instinct of self-preservation latent in her, not even that if she failed to find in herself the will to hear and be guided by its admonishments. It was make or break…

The scales hung long in trembling. They turned only when Summerlad unwisely, losing patience, sought to take by storm the lips she had not yet made up her mind to surrender, and thus aroused resistance till then dormant.

With an ease that in a queer, detached way she found surprising, she managed to break his embrace. Nevertheless the effort left her faint. She faltered to the fireplace and rested a hand on the mantel, her forehead upon the hand. Lynn followed, stood by her side, not touching her but keeping her enveloped in the lethargizing knowledge of his nearness, his strength, his passion. Over and over he murmured gently: "Linda, Linda, Linda…" Shaking from head to feet, she made a feeble sign of appeal. He disregarded this entirely, his arms again stole round her and would have drawn her to him but that, of a sudden, her mind caught at a straw of memory, she drew away, with a hand upon his bosom put him firmly from her, eyes that were melting none the less denying him, lips that were a-quiver with "Yes" resolutely pronouncing "No!"

"You are cruel…"

"No, Lynn. Wait. Tell me something… You say she – your wife agreed to divorce you?"

"I made her promise," Summerlad asserted grimly.

"When was that? The day she disappeared? The day I found her lying senseless in her room?"

"I suppose so. Does it matter? Well, then – yes."

"You'd just left her when I found her?"

"I daresay – approximately."

"Tell me what you said to persuade her."

"See here: what is all this? What are you driving at?"

"I want to know… Did you have much of a scene?"

"I'll say it was some stormy young session."

"Is that why you found it necessary to strike her?"

Summerlad started. "What! Strike her! What do you mean?"

But his eyes winced from hers.

"She – Nelly had a bruise on her cheek, that afternoon; and it wasn't an old bruise. Lynn: you struck her!"

"Perhaps. Maybe I did forget myself, I don't remember. What if I did? She asked for it, didn't she? Do you think I've got the patience of Job, to let her get away with insisting on standing between you and me? I'd have half-killed her if she'd stuck to her refusal to go back East!"

Realizing that his tongue was again running away with his discretion, he curbed it sharply, on the verge, perhaps, of admissions yet more damaging, and in panic essayed to win back lost ground.

"But what of that? It's ancient history, Linda."

She started back in repulsion, but he overtook her in the middle of the room and again crushed her to him.

"Linda, Linda! what do these things matter? I love you, dearest, you love me, nothing else matters, nothing can possibly matter but our need for each other. For God's sake be kind to me! forget – "

The fury of her antagonism found him unprepared. Once more his arms were empty. And this time when he started in pursuit, something he couldn't see struck him brutally in the chest and bodily threw him back. In the same instant he heard a heavy, crashing noise he couldn't account for. An inhuman sound. It shook the room, beat deafeningly upon one's ears. As if someone had overturned a heavy piece of furniture. Only, no one had. Certainly he hadn't, certainly Lucinda hadn't. She was flattened against the farther wall, watching him with a face of horror, blanched and gaping.

Enraged, he put forth all his strength to recover from that inexplicable blow. And instantly it was repeated. And again. Each time accompanied by that savage, crashing noise. Like thunder cut off short. And each time he reeled under the impact, and sickening pains shot through him, like knives white-hot. He felt himself sinking…

In expiring flashes of consciousness he saw Lucinda, still flat against the wall, staring not at him but at a French window nearby. Between its curtains a woman's arm was thrust, the hand grasping an automatic pistol with muzzle faintly fuming. There was a face of shadowed pallor dimly visible beyond the curtains, a face with wild, exultant eyes … Nelly's…

XXXIX

To the woman pinned to the wall by shock – the shimmering frivolity of her evening gown, a flimsy, fluttery affair of silver tissue, lilac and blue, lending form and colour to the illusion of a bright butterfly impaled – the moments immediately following that murderous fusillade were a raving welter of horrors.

Between two heartbeats she saw Lynn, with a face as blank as paper, spinning, toppling, beating the air with aimless arms, pitching to the floor like something blasted, resting there in a sickening, inert crumple; and was keenly aware of the acrid reek of smokeless powder cutting, as acid cuts oil, the sensuous scent of the roses that dressed the room in her honour; and all the while was conscious of the pistol nosing in between the draperies like an animate thing of infinite malice, and the pallid oval of the face behind it, that seemed to float in the dark as might the mask of some mad ghost.

As the din of those three shots, beating from wall to wall, lost weight and volume, a thin shouting became audible from some point outside the house, and Nelly Marquis with the sweep of a fury broke through the hangings at the window, and pulled up with pistol levelled point-blank at Lucinda's breast.

Through the least of pauses, the merest fragment of a second, a time measureless in its lapse to one whose every function was frozen in paralysis of fear, a single thought persisted: Another instant and I shall be as Lynn… Nelly's eyes were burning like black malignant opals in a countenance at once luminous and wan. Death's icy grin glimpsed in the play of light along that blunt blue barrel. Lucinda felt as one caught fast in the pitiless jaws of some tremendous vice whose pinch stilled the beating of her heart and arrested her labouring lungs.

Then abruptly through the window a dark body hurled and fastening upon the woman's back, swinging her aside, the pistol detonated with a bellow, the bullet plumped into the wall close by Lucinda's head.

She heard a voice crying out again and again: "Bel! Bel! Bel! …"

Her own voice…

For an indeterminable time she hung in dread upon the issue of that swaying combat: while Bel clung to the woman's arm, muttering and panting in futile efforts to wrest her weapon away; while Nelly clawed, bit, kicked, pounded her free fist repeatedly into Bel's face, and wrenched madly at her captive wrist.

Of a sudden, from her hand a spiteful tongue of fire licked out at Bel, his right arm flailed back and fell useless, agony convulsed his features; and free, the woman bounded away and with the laugh of a maniac swung the pistol to bear upon his head.

Lucinda's faculties clicked together then as gears mesh when the motor has been idling; the call of the emergency met with response in the form of instant and direct action. Without knowing what she did, she flung herself upon Nelly's arm and bore it down. With deflected muzzle the pistol exploded for the last time. Dropping it, Nelly turned on Lucinda and dealt with her as might a madwoman. Impressions grew confused beyond assortment, of flopping wildly this way and that, of hot breath beating into her face, of her bare flesh suffering a rain of cruel blows; of elemental lusts to maim and kill awakening from lifelong slumber, in this moment of close grips with a warm, living, hating and hateful human body…

Thrown off without warning, how she couldn't guess, she felt herself reeling back, tripping, falling. Something struck the back of her head a stunning blow, and she knew flickering nausea while dense night like a moving cloud on every hand closed in upon her, and the world, in the likeness of a rainbow swirl streaked with fiery paths of sparks, guttered into blank nullity…

Nothingness absolute and still received her, harboured her for a space, spewed her back into life again.

Cold rain spattering cheeks and brows … once more the heart-rending perfume of roses … anguish incomparable racking her temples … her heart a wild thing caged … ammonia in strangling whiffs…

Choking and coughing she unclosed her eyes upon the vision of Bel's face. A hand holding a bottle of smelling salts dropped away from her nose. Bel saluted her reviving intelligence with an even growl: "Coming round, eh? About time. You'll do now, I guess. Try to pull yourself together. No time to lose."

She was on the floor, the bulk of the lounge between her and the spot where Summerlad had fallen; her shoulders propped against Bel's knee, her head resting in the crook of his arm. Summerlad's Jap boy was standing by with water in a silver vessel. At a nod from Bel he filled a glass and, bending over, set it to Lucinda's lips. While she was gulping thirstily, Bel said something she didn't catch; but as soon as she turned her head from the glass, the Japanese took it away and himself as well.

The living-room, with its softly lighted walls and draped black rectangles of windows open to the night, presented itself in a guise inexplicably unfamiliar. She felt as if she had been a long time away. In mystification, looking back to Bel, she asked: "I fainted, didn't I?"

He grunted: "You struck your head, when that hell-cat threw you – went out for ten minutes by the clock. How do you feel now?"

"My head aches…" She discovered that Bel was in his shirt-sleeves, with the cuff turned back above his right elbow, the forearm rudely bandaged with torn linen on which a deep stain was spreading. "But Bel – your arm – ?"

"Hurts like hell, but that's the worst of it, thank God. Bullet ploughed through the underside from wrist to elbow, nearly. I'd be dead if you hadn't jumped for her."

"And I, if you hadn't come through the window when you did."

"If you're grateful for that – try to get up."

"But … Lynn?"

Bel laughed shortly. "The excellent Mr. Summerlad's all right – I mean to say, still breathing. That's all we can tell till the surgeon gets here. I've telephoned. The fellow ought to show up any minute now. If you can manage to get a grip on yourself, I'd be glad to get you out of here first."

"I don't understand… What became of – her?"

"Got away clean, worse luck! – ducked past me and through the window like a shot. I tried to follow but she gave me the slip in the dark. That's all right: she won't trouble us again. She left her pistol behind – anyway, it was empty – and the police will pick her up before morning… Now: how about getting up?"

"I'll try," Lucinda said meekly. "Please help me." But then, appreciating that she was in no way incapacitated, she got up unaided, and steadied herself with a hand on the back of the lounge.

Summerlad lay where he had fallen, on the far side of that piece of furniture. His face, upturned to the staring light, was like a thing of sculptured ivory, expressionless and bleached; the lips ajar, the whites of his eyes alone visible under the half-shut lids with their effeminate lashes. The shirt beneath the flowered dressing-gown was hideously blotted. He was so deathly still that terror took hold on Lucinda's heart and mind.

"You think… O Bel! do you really think he will live?"

"No fear," Bel sneered. "He'll make a fool of many another woman before he's finished. Here: put this on, will you?"

He was proffering her wrap. Like an automaton Lucinda accepted it, but seemed to forget that the thing was meant for wear.

"Where's your car?"

"I told my driver to call up about ten – "

"I'll attend to that, then. My chauffeur will run you down to the hotel. I think he's to be trusted. Wish I felt as sure of that Jap."

"Sure of him?"

"Why do you suppose I'm hurrying you away? Do you want the papers to get hold of the fact you were keeping an assignation with this actor when his wife caught you and shot him?"

Lucinda flinched, faintly remonstrated: "Bel!"

"Well?" he demanded – "got anything to say to that?"

"You don't think … nobody would dare…"

"What's the reason I don't think? Why wouldn't anybody dare? I presume you expect the world – this good, kind, charitable world we live in – to believe 'appearances are against you'!"

Affronted, she held her answer, seeing her husband as with eyes from which scales had newly dropped, as a man she barely knew, whose fleshy husk alone was familiar in her sight, but whose spirit was altogether strange: a man self-reliant and resolute, skeptical, cold and hard of temper, estranged and unforgiving; witness the contemptuous incredulity that animated his regard.

Smouldering indignation blazed, she threw back her head with eyes as cold as his, a mouth as hard.

"You are insolent," she pronounced slowly. "If you think – if you dare think what you hint – what is it to you whether I go or stay?"

"You forget you neglected to get rid of a husband before taking on with this busy lover … who got precisely what was coming to him, if you want the truth for once!"

"Do I hear you setting yourself up to judge him, Bel?"

"Do you know anybody better qualified?"

"By what right – "

"The husband's right! Do you think I want every paper in the country linking your name – my wife's – with Lynn Summerlad's as his latest mistress, the woman who made his deserted wife so jealous she tried to murder him?"

Lucinda let her wrap fall. "If my relationship to Lynn is what you imply – then my place is here with him."

"Please yourself. But remember, the papers are going to make big capital out of this scandal in the movie colony. They've been itching for it for years, licking their chops with impatience, knowing it was bound to break some day… Good God! what's got into you, Linda? How long do you imagine it'll be, after this affair gets into print, before the reporters will ferret out the fact that 'Linda Lee' is Mrs. Bellamy Druce? Do you want to go into a witness-box and testify against that demented creature when she's tried for murder? Do you want everybody who knows you – all your friends back home – to think what everybody in his sane mind has every right to think?"

"What you think…"

"What the devil do you care what I think? But if it comes to that, tell me this: If you aren't what people are going to say you are, what are you doing here, alone with Summerlad, in his own home, at night?"

"The Lontaines were coming to dinner, but – "

"'But'!" Bel snorted. "Oh, all right! I'll be a high-minded ass, if that'll satisfy you; I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, if that'll induce you to clear out of this before it's too late. But don't forget I'm the only one who will. His wife wouldn't – didn't. Neither will another living soul who knows you were here when this thing happened. Your only salvation now is to get back to the hotel and lie low; if you hear any rumours, be as much surprised as anybody; if you're asked any questions, know absolutely nothing. If you'll do that, and leave the rest to me, perhaps I can save you."

"You are too kind – "

"I'm not. Don't fool yourself. I'm thinking of nobody but Bellamy Druce. All I'm after is to save my name from being linked up with this rotten business. Think of yourself, as I'm thinking of myself, then. Think whether it's going to be worth the name you'll get, to have the satisfaction of this heroic gesture, this theatrical effect of sticking bravely by the side of your actor lover – so nobly wounded! – this man whose promiscuous amours have made his name a by-word even here, even in Hollywood!.. But for the love of God, think quickly!"

He ceased upon a note of impatient admonishment, then, when Lucinda remained silent, changed his tone.

"I treated you badly enough, God knows! but you paid me out properly, you can afford to be magnanimous now. I've done nothing to deserve your active ill-will since you left me. And it isn't as if you could do Summerlad any good by staying. His fate's all up to the surgeons. And you can trust me to see that everything possible is done for him. I'll keep you posted, I'll come to the hotel tonight and tell you what the surgeon says."

He bent with painful effort and lifted her wrap. She took it without a word, swung it round her shoulders, turned and left the room.

Bellamy followed as far as the front door. His car was waiting on the drive, its motor running. The chauffeur, already instructed, held the tonneau door for Lucinda, closed it smartly, smartly climbed into place at the wheel. She looked back as they drew away. Bellamy stood en silhouette against the light, nursing his bandaged arm. A turn in the drive blocked out that picture, the car wheeled sharply into the public street, gathered speed. And Lucinda crouched down in her corner, chilled to her marrow by realization of the loneliness of her lot, from whom Life had stripped away even the forlorn company of her last, most dear illusion…

XL

Amazing to learn, upon authority as sound as that of the clock in the hotel lobby, that the age of the evening was still something short of nine … preposterous to credit that lapse of time so little could have wrought the transformation of life's kindly countenance at close of day to its present cast, so bleak, forbidding, and implacable…

Yet neither circumstance was a whit less certain or more disputable than the other. And that the hour was what it was, no earlier, no later, gave one good reason for thanksgiving. For now the miscellaneous dinner mob with its components of envious sharp eyes and ungenerous tongues had scattered on its various ways; while the cinemaniacs were not yet due to come trooping home from the neighbouring halls of their addiction. Only the elderlies remained in evidence, that element of the clientele which Fanny had styled the Grumpies in discrimination from the Gaddies; staid, smug bodies in black taffeta, old lace fichus and rocking-chairs, or stiff collars, shapeless trousers and blunt-nosed boots, devoted to solitaire, fancy-work, and gossip of the home-brewed brand that cheers but not inebriates; a species of migratory perennials to whom the cotton-wool climate of Southern California is a sort of gracious prelude to the grave; at once avidly intrigued by and as honestly innocent of that other Hollywood with whose lively denizens they rubbed shoulders daily, as of the other world and its press of equally unquiet souls.

Dotting the public rooms with little groups, engrossed in cards, knitting, and placid prattle, these took only casual account of the flying transit of that vision of elegance and youthful charm with evening wrap caught high about the pretty face. Such sightly shapes were too much a commonplace of their deliberate and self-sufficient days, and always passed in haste; as young blood does ever, irrationally enough, having so much time before it, so little patience…

So, though she knew them for a pack of greedy scandal scavengers, and conceived every eye among them to be regardful of her and all her shifts to deceive them spent for naught, not one who observed her guessed with what agitation she was a-quake, what unrelenting urgency whipped on her feet till they all but stumbled in their eagerness to find her sanctuary behind locked doors, where she might ease off at last the tension of self-control, pillow her sore and aching head, and give range to the pent tempest of emotions brewed by love thwarted and chagrined, faith confounded, dreams done shamefully to death…

Fleeting free of that gauntlet, she gave a sigh to find herself in the quiet corridor leading to her apartment. How good it was to think she would in another minute be alone, what an inspiration had been hers when, looking forward to an evening long drawn out, she had given her maid liberty till morning!

She passed the door through which she once had ventured to discover Nelly Marquis lying in a faint brought about by Lynn's cruelty… And now what would become of that one? Whither had she turned in her flight? with what hope of asylum or immunity? A hapless creature beating blindly through the night, a land-bird swept to sea by an off-shore gale, questing what it might never hope to find…

Lucinda slipped into her sitting-room, turned the key, found the switchbox near the door, and in an abrupt blaze of illumination stood, startled beyond speech, face to face with the woman the riddle of whose fate had been riding her imagination.

One of Nelly's hands was planted flat against the wall; but this support helped not at all to abate the vicious racking of her body by nerves deranged. The other, a begrimed fist, was fumbling at her mouth. Those eyes whose haunted beauty had first laid claim to one's humanity were now – their blazing madness of a short hour since dispelled – black pools of pathos in a face whose chalkiness was runneled by tears and framed in hair like tarred rope unravelled. Her dress of hackneyed smartness was bedraggled, the skirt marked by knees that in some fall had ground into loam. The black satin slippers were pale with dust, and the openwork stockings, which boasted two great tears as well.