Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

After a time she ceased to suggest the little dinners and drives and minor distractions which would have interfered with Fanny's social commitments. And her loneliness grew more and more wearisome. Times were to come when she would almost have welcomed even the sight of Bel. But then he was away.

A week from the night of their rencontre in Summerlad's bungalow, Bellamy called – first telephoning to ask if he might – to tell Lucinda he was leaving for New York the next morning. Zinn would take charge of his producing interests during his absence. He couldn't say just how long that might be. He had several matters on his mind that he wanted to arrange before returning. If he could be of any service to Lucinda in the East, he would be glad…

She thanked him quietly, said there was nothing she could think of.

Bel was glad to state his belief that the Summerlad business had blown over without her name being even privately whispered as in any way involved. He fancied she would hear nothing more of it. If she did, if anything unpleasant happened or threatened, she knew where a telegram would reach him, and upon receipt of it he would drop everything and hurry back.

Lucinda thanked him again, gravely, professing an entire lack of apprehensiveness. If anything did happen, however, she promised not to trouble him; she'd manage somehow to fight her own battles after this; it was high time she learned to do it, who had a lifetime of independent action to look forward to and was unconscious of holding any lien on Bellamy's time or consideration.

"It isn't that," he stammered – "I mean to say, I wish you wouldn't look at it that way. You punished me more cruelly than you knew; but I deserved it all, and I've no complaint to make and hold no grudge. In fact – the truth is – I've got a lot to be grateful to you for, Linda; you cured me of my two greatest vices, and whatever the future may hold for me one thing is sure: I won't go to smash on account of either wine or women. And so, though I quite understand what your feeling toward me is, and how useless it would be to ask you to forget, I'll always be glad if anything I can do will serve in part payment of my debt. It would make me very happy now if I could go away believing that in any time of trouble you would turn to me as to, at least, a friend."

"I understand, Bel, and I'm most appreciative, but" – Lucinda smiled with a shadow of sadness – "it wouldn't do, what you suggest. I hear what you say, I know what you have in mind, and – it would never do. After what has been, there could be no friendship in true sense between you and me; we're neither of us people whom half-measures would content. And since we are as we are, since with us it must be all or nothing…"

She made an end by rising in a manner he couldn't misinterpret.

"It must be nothing?" he implored, holding her hand.

Behind the mask of her composure Lucinda was absurdly agitated and, on that account, a little angry. She refused to admit she had any excuse for feeling upset; she had the upper hand with Bel and meant to hold it, she had nothing imaginable to fear; yet she was horribly afraid he might see…

"Good-bye, Bel," she said, with not unkind decision but decision unmistakable for all that. "And good luck. But … please never come back…"

That night she sobbed herself awake from dreams of dear days dead, and lay for hours hating the cheerless comfort of hotel rooms, missing poignantly the intimacy of her home and the sense of security she had known nowhere else. Would she ever find such another haven for her drifting soul?

It wasn't that she was in any way hindered from settling down wherever she liked and surrounding herself with possessions. But could any place where love was not be fairly termed a home?

In the morning she rose with a heart as heavy as any she had ever known to address herself to the daily grind – to term which deadly were but to cheapen the detrition of morale resulting from its wear upon the soul.

Yet she had to be fair, she couldn't pretend she had any right to whimper; she was having her own way, getting precisely what she had all along been asking for; and viewed at a purely material angle, her affairs were as prosperous as heart could wish. The new director was living up to and even beyond all Zinn's claims, his revision of the continuity for the sequences remaining to be taken had been as adept as his editing of those thirty-six reels of pictorial farrago, and he was handling the crowded scenes on the supper-club set and the more intimate dramatic passages staged in the living-room with equal competence and the ease of one conscious of but not self-conscious about thorough mastery of his craft.

In this new association the low spirits lifted which latterly had oppressed the mercurial cameraman; Iturbide chirked up amazingly and made it plain that he looked upon Mr. Day as a man, a brother, and an artistic peer.

Between Wallace Day and Lucinda there was no friction, and under his sympathetic guidance she felt she was doing better work than she had ever hoped to do.

Only Zinn, though he observed with every indication of pleased approval the rapid strides the production was making, was known to wag a head weighted with foreboding and utter dismal croaks.

"He's a wonder," he said one day to Lucinda, while they stood aside watching Day rehearse a scene in which she happened to have no part – "a holy wonder and no kidding. Every so often in the fillum business a miracle man happens like that. But they never last. It can't be done. Stands to reason. What chanst they got? If women don't get 'em the big-head does, and if they happen to get by with both them drags they run into studio jealousy waiting round the corner with a blackjack. What's that the feller says about self-preservation being the first law of nature? Well, if you don't believe he spoke a mouthful, you want to watch what he said work out in the picture business. Any time they see a bird coming along that's got something on the rest of the gang, they just naturally knock him on the head and save their jobs."

But neither the promising status of the picture nor her growing confidence that, when it was put on public exhibition, her work would justify her pretensions, could revivify the old élan. The novelty had worn too thin, its excitation had lost all potency. Day after day Lucinda went to her work without enthusiasm, and if she left the studio of an evening with reluctance it was solely because of the desolation long drawn-out that she must somehow live through ere she could look for sleep to bestow a little, brief oblivion.

And even the hours spent in make-up knew too many pauses, too long delays spaced her appearances before the camera, when Lucinda must needs stand idly by while Day drilled others in their business, or else sit solitary in her dressing-room, waiting to be called, with mind unemployed but for painful introspection and the ceaseless cark of longing for old delights forever forfeit; till discontent frayed out endurance and she learned to loathe every facet of this life whose whole had once seemed so enthralling: smell of grease-paint warmed by human flesh, smell of distemper drying on newly builded sets, the hot smell of dust that scurrying feet kicked up on the lot, the pungent smell of sensitized celluloid; moaning orchestras without whose strains no true artistic temperament could reasonably be expected to function at the peak of its capacity, sizzling of arcs, the magnified howls that issued from directorial megaphones, of argument and exposition, instruction and command, encouragement, expostulation, denunciation, rage; clock-work ticking of camera mechanisms, distant drumfire of automobile exhausts in the parking yard, the hammering and banging without which property men and carpenters never are known to materialize, the unending drone of babble, like the thick rumour of an off-stage mob, as actors strolled and schooled and talked about themselves; the restless phantasmagoria of painted faces, dusted with yellow powder, beaded with sweat, inhuman enough in God's sunlight and in the blue-green glare of the Cooper-Hewitts sicklied over with a livid cast of dissolution, as they were dead walking; suffocating heat of still air boxed in beneath the glass-roofed stages when the sun was strong, drifts of chill across the lot when evening shades closed in…

And as in the studio, so was it when her occupation took Lucinda abroad. Many of the scenes which had been adjudged to need retaking were those staged in natural settings – "location stuff." These Wallace Day put off till he had finished with the supper-club and living-room. Thereafter Lucinda had for some ten days to face the camera in the open air. Nor was she often able to arrive at the designated spots except by rising early and taking long motor rides alone, which she came to hold in an aversion scarcely second to that which she entertained for her nightly welcome by that emptiness which in her rooms made its abode. In her seeing the groomed beauties of the lowlands had lost all grace, she saw them trivial … blurs of viridescent tarnish mottling a blasted waste … cracked enamel on the face of a senile courtesan failing to cover its wrinkles and blotches… From which her eyes, revolted, turned ever with a sense of terror to the inland ramparts of bare, seamed hills that, with haggard heads stencilled in raw ochre against the blue, looked down upon the pleasure-lands like a herd of couchant monsters bound by some old enchantment for a time to make no move, but biding their day, a day whose secret was hearsed in their rocky hearts, when the spell upon them would be lifted and, rising up, they would march shoulder to shoulder down to the sea, annihilating all things in their way, all puny things that lived and toiled and loved under that remote and hollow canopy of sky, in that fixed and brazen grin of sun…

They brimmed her moods with a disquietude formless and irrational, those everlasting hills, yet she could never keep from dwelling on them, whose heart was ever yearning over them and beyond, into the unknown and unguessable tomorrows they walled away, that occult destiny toward which she must turn her face as soon as her work here was done.

She counted hourly the tale of the days between…

The hole left in her life by the casting out of Bel ached now incessantly and ever more intolerably, since she might no longer drug her mind with that infatuation whose strength had departed. And she knew times whose pain was such that almost she repented having lost capacity for surrender to the anodynous action of that strange phase of love which had so nearly delivered her to Lynn.

Today she called it strange…

Twice she heard from Summerlad: on the day following Bellamy's departure, a pencilled scrawl, informing her that he was now permitted to receive callers and protesting his impatience for the visit which he knew her charity would not permit her to deny him; and four days later another letter and a longer, bringing proof of steady improvement in less infirm penmanship and phrases turned more carefully, repeating all the first had said and calling attention to the venerable saw about the ill wind; on the writer's side at least every impediment to their marriage had been abolished…

In the upshot Lucinda acknowledged receipt of neither, but for two mornings her waste-basket, with its deep drifts of note-paper minutely scrapped, bore witness to her endeavors to frame a reply at once final and not too cruel.

Better (she decided) send no word at all than a letter which could only hurt his pride … if Lynn still believed he loved her … if he had ever!..

The talk of the studio kept her advised concerning the good progress of his convalescence. She knew no doubt at all but that he would as speedily get well of his disappointment in her.

For her part, the thing was dead and done and finished and as something that had never been; the only wonder was, it ever had…

One evening, as she was leaving the studio, she met Wallace Day on the steps of the administration building, and learned from him that, making fair allowance for every imaginable delay, he counted on making an end to camera-work in two days more.

Accordingly, instead of going directly home to the Hollywood, Lucinda motored to Los Angeles and booked reservations for Reno by the night train of the second day following, a slow train but the first that she could feel sure of catching.

She had meant to keep her purpose secret, holding it of no consequence to anybody but herself what she might elect to do, once her work was finished, and bearing in mind the possibility that, if news of her intention should by any chance leak out at the studio, it would find its way to the ears of Summerlad. She understood that he was now far enough forward on the road to recovery to spend part of each day in an invalid chair, and thought it wise to run no risk of finding out that his improvement had been understated.

Conscience nevertheless reproached her when she thought of Fanny, and on the way back to the Hollywood she instructed her chauffeur to make a détour and stop at Fanny's hotel.

If Fanny had no prior engagement, they might have one last evening together. But she would hold back her news till the moment came to say good-bye…

Drawing near the hotel, she recognized the conspicuously ornamental car of Barry Nolan waiting at the carriage-block, and as she bent forward to tell her chauffeur not to stop, she had changed her mind, she saw Fanny come out of the entrance, Nolan ambling, with an air of contented habit, at her elbow.

At the same time Fanny caught sight of Lucinda, pulled up short in confusion, then smiled brightly and waved a hand, while Nolan rather blankly fingered the visor of his cap. And Lucinda nodded, smiled in turn, and passed, wondering if the deep colour she had remarked in Fanny's cheek had been merely the sunset's mordant comment on an artful glow of pink.

Well: that was that…

Yet it was long before the picture faded of that girlish figure, posed prettily in startlement, brief skirts whipped about it by the evening wind, with its gay look of mirth, half shame-faced, half-impudent, wholly charming … sweet grist for the mills whose grinding knows no rest.

The pity of it!.. Or was it? Had one the right to say? The mills of Mammon grind ever but free will alone keeps the hoppers filled. The choice had been with Fanny, she had chosen in conformance with the dictates of predisposition.

And who could say she hadn't chosen wisely, who had every gift that makes for swift and prosperous progress along the road she had preferred to go? – beauty and wit, ready adaptability, and that highly developed sense of self which often enables the worst of women to travel far and thriftily. Idle to waste time deploring that she had seen fit to throw herself away on Nolan: she hadn't, Nolan, though he might never know it, was but a stepping-stone, a single link in a chain that led to a far shore whose sands were dust of gold…

XLV

When she had bribed her maid to observe discretion concerning her plans, and had herself attended to the business of checking her trunks through to Reno, thus keeping her destination secret even from the woman, Lucinda felt fairly confident of getting away unhindered and unpursued.

In the middle of the afternoon, finding she was to be detained at the studio till the last moment, Lucinda telephoned the maid to take her hand-luggage to the station and have it put in her drawing-room. She caught the train with little to spare, and not until it was in motion did she discover the box of roses in the luggage-rack overhead.

Her favorites, Hadleys, two dozen suavely moulded blooms of deepest crimson, exquisitely fresh and fragrant; roses such as Bel had been accustomed to send her daily, once upon a time … how long ago!..

Eyes cloudy with the dreams of yesterday their breath inspired, Lucinda sat a long time with the open box upon her lap.

An age since any one had sent her flowers…

The box bore the name of a city florist, but was untagged and contained no card to identify the donor.

From Summerlad, by any chance? Lucinda didn't think so. If Lynn had thought it worth his while to try to win her back with roses, he wouldn't have waited so long, and he would never have neglected to enclose a card or a note.

No: that chapter was closed, and Lynn must surely know how wasted would be his every effort to reopen it.

In the end Lucinda concluded that the maid had bought the flowers for her, as a gift of gratitude. Wildly fanciful as this hypothesis might appear, there had in this instance been unusual provocation, Lucinda in all her dealings with the woman had been more than generous.

And, after all, flowers were plentiful in Los Angeles and among the few things reasonably priced.

Arranged in the metal catch-alls in the corners of the drawing-room, stems bedded in wet tissue-paper, they made a brave show through the evening, and proved rare company, too, trembling with eagerness to salute Lucinda with lovely, friendly nods, and drenching the dead atmosphere with a witching sweetness that called up memories like gentle ghosts.

Their rich yet subtle perfume saturated her mood and coloured every thought as she lay wakeful in the dark, watching the ghastly panorama of the Cajon Pass, basking in unearthly moonlight, unfold like a march upon the hitherside of Hell, and, later on, the vast, still ranges of the desert, where tortured cacti entreated Heaven with frozen gestures of torment and terror, while from afar the goblin hills looked on in dark, sphinxlike disdain.

Here, linking widely spaced oases, where the pepper-tree and eucalyptus shadowed roofs of ribbed iron, and the pineapple palm posed its graceful fronds against the ungainly bulks of water-tanks on stilts, dim trails ran with the tracks, and ever and again panting and bouncing flivvers would spring up out of the night to race the train for a mile or so, or, less frequently, cars more powerful would overtake and distance it as it laboured up-grade; shapes of solid shadow hurtling through the night as if breaking their hearts in hopeless efforts to overtake the fugitive fans of light thrown out by their lamps … as men pursue hope through life … as women pursue love…

And Lucinda, watching, wondered at life's strangeness and its sadness, and marvelled at the mettle men are made of to sustain them through the race, though they know the end is ever failure, heart-break, death.

The scent of roses numbed mind and senses: pain and opiate in one…

And it was as if she had slept not at all, save that she felt rested; as if she had closed her eyes on darkness and unclosed them an instant later to find the very scene she had been gazing on bathed in hot splendor of sunlight, warm with colour. Still the desert stretched its flats of sand and alkali, sage and cactus, to a far, notched rim of hills, still the train drudged stoutly on an up-grade, buffeting the hushed air with stentorian gasps; still upon the trail beside the tracks raced the motor-car Lucinda had been watching when sleep claimed her…

Another car, of course. Nevertheless the coincidence was surprising.

She lay for a little lazily watching it; a powerful, spirited piece of machinery, well-driven, breasting gallantly that long ascent about which the train was making such great ado; drawing abeam, forging ahead, flirting derisively a tail of dust as it vanished from the field commanded by the window… Bound whither? upon what urgency of life or death? that it must make such frantic haste in the heat of the desert sun!..

Heat was already beginning to make the tiny drawing-room resemble a cubicle in Tophet. Lucinda rose, ransacked her luggage for her flimsiest garments, gave her flesh the sketchy sponging which was all that facilities permitted, dressed, and rang for the porter and a waiter from the dining-car. While her room was being tidied up she ordered breakfast. Before it could be served the porter turned the drawing-room over to her again.

She waited by the window, looking out upon without seeing the few rude buildings that composed a tank town at which the train had made a halt for water. After that brief respite from the scent of roses she was finding reintroduction to its influence overpowering. It took her by the throat and subjugated her, reducing her to a most miserable estate of nostalgic longing…

The waiter was knocking. She started up, hastily dried her eyes, pronounced a tremulous "Come in!"

Bel entered, shut the door, dropped upon the red plush seat a duster and cap caked with desert alkali, and stood apprehensive of his welcome, his heart in his eyes.

She fell back to the partition, breathing his name, her whole body vibrating like a smitten lute-string.

In a choking voice he cried: "Linda! for God's sake listen to me. I've been up all night, driving against time to overtake you and beg you to listen to this last appeal. I want you to promise me not to go to Reno. Not yet, at least. Give me a little more time, a little chance to prove to you that you're the only woman in the world for me, that I'm living the life you'd want your husband to live, and have been ever since you left me. Because I want you back, because I'm lost without you, because I want to make you happy … as you were happy when you first loved me, long ago…"

She lifted shaking hands to him, cried his name again, swayed blindly into his arms.

"Take me back, Bel," she whispered. "Make me happy … Be kind to me, Bel, be fair…"

THE END