Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

In a moment of disconcerting lucidity she saw him as a strange man, flushed with drink and blown with license, looking on other women with a satyr's appraising eyes, bandying ribald wheezes with the lips she had so lately kissed. And she winced and drew away, recalling that abandon of affection with which she had given herself to his embrace at the hotel, feeling of a sudden soiled and shop-worn as from common handling.

A strange man, a man she had known but a few brief weeks!

Covertly watching him, she saw Summerlad in the middle of a passage of persiflage start and fall silent, his lips in an instant wiped bare of speech. And following the line of his stare, she espied, at some distance, at a table near the edge of the dance-floor, Bellamy sitting with a woman.

He saw her but made no sign more than to intensify his meaning smile, and immediately returned courteous attention to his companion.

At this last Lucinda stared in doubt for several seconds, she was so changed. But finery that shrieked of money spent without stint or taste could hardly disguise the wild and ragged loveliness of Nelly Marquis.

XXXII

In a freak of unaccountable reluctance to believe it was really the Marquis girl, Lucinda looked a second time. More than a month had passed since that brief, distressing chapter of their acquaintance, which Lucinda had put out of mind so completely that her efforts to recall the features of the other conjured up only a foggy impression of a shabby, haggard, haunted shadow, by turns wistful and feebly defiant, that bore what might be no more than chance likeness to this figure of flaunting extravagance at Bellamy's table.

A question forming on her lips, Lucinda turned back to Summerlad, but surprised the tail of his eye veering hastily away, and fancied a shade of over-elaboration in the easy, incurious air he was quick to resume; as if he wished her to believe he either hadn't noticed those two or else saw no significance in their association on terms apparently so intimate and mutually diverting.

So she held her tongue for a while, till the comforting suggestion offered that Lynn in all probability had but sought to spare her feelings…

She stole another glance across the room. By every indication Bellamy found his company most entertaining; he was paying her sallies a tribute of smiling attention which she as evidently found both grateful and inspiring. It was plain that she had had enough to drink and something more; but on that question she held strong views of her own, and while Lucinda was looking drained her highball glass and with an air peremptory and arch planted it in front of Bellamy to be replenished; a service which he rendered with the aid of a pocket flask – adding to his own glass, however, water only.

Not that that necessarily meant anything. Bellamy knew the chances were that Lucinda was watching him. Still, one had to admit he was showing none of those too familiar symptoms; in that gathering, where the cold sober were few and far between, Bel looked conspicuously so. Was he, then, to be believed when he insisted he had finally foresworn alcohol in remorse for having driven Lucinda to leave him? One wondered…

Summerlad was eyeing her with a quizzical air. Lucinda managed half a smile.

"Having a good time, Linda?"

"I can't complain." A slight movement of shoulders rounded out the innuendo.

Summerlad made a mouth of concern. "Tired, dear? Want to go home?"

"Afraid Fanny and Harry wouldn't like it…"

Was one unfair in reading disappointment where Lynn wished solicitude only to be read?

"How about another little drink?" Lucinda shook her head decidedly. "Well, then: what say we dance?"

She surveyed the crowded floor dubiously. "It's an awful crush, I'm afraid…" Nevertheless she got up and threaded the jostling tables with Lynn at her heels: anything for respite from the racket the Lontaines and their crew were kicking up.

Odd, how those two, so quiet and well-behaved when she had first met them in New York, had let go in this demoralizing atmosphere of what Fanny had rechristened the loose and windy West. Odd, but in a way quite British. The Anglo-Saxon temperament inclines to lose its head once the shackles of home-grown public opinion are stricken off. Long ago a wise man pointed out that there wouldn't be any night life in Paris worth mentioning if it weren't for strict enforcement of the early closing law in London…

It was an awful crush. Few better dancers than Lynn Summerlad ever trod a ball-room floor, but even he was put to it to steer a safe course in that welter. It was, after all, not much of an improvement on sitting still and trying to appear unaware of Bellamy and that weird Marquis creature. Lucinda felt sure, now, she had not been mistaken about the girl, but concluded to ask Lynn anyway; and her lips were parting with this intention when she heard a hiss of breath indrawn and looked up to see Lynn's face disfigured by a spasm of pain. In the same instant he stopped short, in the next he groaned between set teeth.

"Have to get out of this, I'm afraid," he grunted. "My foot – somebody with a hoof like a sledge-hammer landed on it just now. That wouldn't matter, only the confounded thing got caught between a couple of logs while we were doing that river stuff. The swelling went down several days ago, and to tell the truth I'd forgotten about it… But this reminds me plenty!"

He had an affecting limp on the way back to their table, where he delayed long enough to tell his story and receive commiserations, then announced that, though desolated to leave such a promising young party, he would have to get home and out of his shoes before he could hope to know another instant's ease. If the Lontaines wouldn't mind seeing that Lucinda got back to the Hollywood all right…

The Lontaines were ready enough to undertake that responsibility, but Lucinda wouldn't hear of staying on. Lynn's chauffeur could as well as not take her to the Hollywood after dropping Lynn in Beverly Hills… She was glad enough of the excuse, of course, but she did resent, what she couldn't help covertly looking for on the way out, the sardonic glint in Bel's eyes.

Really, Bel's effrontery seemed to know no limit. To protest at noon that "casual women" meant nothing to him any more, and at midnight to make public parade of his interest in a demi-rep! On top of that, to give his wife that odious look of understanding when she passed him with Summerlad, a look implying privity to some indecorous secret involving them!

Simmering indignation rendered her demeanour unsympathetic, perhaps, while Lynn was being made as comfortable as might be in his car, with the shoe removed from his poor hurt foot and the latter extended on one of the forward seats. And for some minutes after they had got under way she maintained, in the face of inquisitive sidelong glances, a silence which Lynn seemed loath to break. But in time it began to wear upon his nerves.

"Cross, sweetheart?" he enquired gently. "I'm sorry you let me drag you away – "

"It isn't that," Lucinda replied, almost brusquely. "I wasn't enjoying myself, anyway – wanted to leave almost as soon as we arrived."

"Then what is it?"

She asked evasively: "How's your foot?"

"Much better, thanks. Guess I must've dislocated one of the smaller bones, in that logging stunt. It doesn't feel just right. I'll get an osteopath in tomorrow morning and see what he makes of it."

"It really was hurt while we were dancing, then?"

"What do you think? That I'd make a fuss like that and spoil my party just for fun?"

"I thought possibly you were pretending on my account."

"You mean, because your husband was there."

"So you did see him, after all."

"Yes – but rather hoped you hadn't."

"He wasn't alone, Lynn."

"I noticed that, too."

"It was Miss Marquis, wasn't it?"

"Yes, Linda – afraid it was."

"Afraid – ?"

"Your amiable husband's in for an interesting life, if that young woman has got her claws into him."

"Lynn: where do you suppose the girl has been all this time, since that night she left the hotel?"

"Good Lord! how should I know?"

"People don't drop out of sight like that in Hollywood. One keeps meeting them if they're in Town, one can't help it – there are so few places to go. It seems funny she should disappear so completely for – how long is it? four weeks? five? – and then turn up in Bel's company."

"It is funny," Summerlad agreed in a tone that rang true.

"I'm only wondering where he fell in with her."

"Well," Lynn submitted: "I daresay if you were to ask him…"

"Or if you were to ask her!"

But immediately Lucinda repented her resentment of what she had hastily taken to be an attempt to becloud impatience with ill-timed levity. For Lynn treated her to the reproof of a sulky silence, in which he persisted till she felt constrained, in self-justification, to adopt the very tone that had vexed her.

"Or don't you think that would be a good idea, Lynn?"

The man shifted in his corner till he sat half-facing her, his manner seriously defensive.

"Look here, Linda! I've known a long time you suspected there was something between this Marquis girl and me – or had been – "

"Wait a minute, Lynn: I may be stupid, women in love usually are, they say; but that thought never crossed my mind before the moment when, back there in the restaurant, I saw you didn't want me to know you'd seen her."

"Then it must have been my conscience, I guess." Lynn fumbled for and found her hand beneath the rug that covered their knees. "You see – "

"Oh, I see!" Lucinda snapped, and drew her hand away.

"No, you don't – "

"But I do, Lynn: and I'm quite reasonable about it. Only, I presume, I needed this to make me understand the kind of man I'd given my heart to."

"That's unfair. You know perfectly, nine times out of ten the man isn't to blame. Besides – "

"Say, rather, I have wit enough to know the causes underlying every form of human relationship are obscure past comprehending… It isn't a question with me of blame or excuse, it's just a feeling that's suddenly come over me, a thought come home I've been refusing to think ever since we fell in love, Lynn, that I've committed my life to the care of a man who can never be wholly mine, whom I must always share with his memories of other sweethearts."

"Well, but what about my feelings? Do you suppose it makes me happy to be all the time reminded that Bellamy Druce – ?"

"Please, dear, don't. Forgive me – I couldn't help it. Besides, there's this to be said: if I did love another man before I met you, he was the only one; while you have known so many loves like – like this Marquis girl – not, you know, not quite – "

"Oh, I get you!" Summerlad laughed harshly. "You don't have to be more plain-spoken. And I can't deny you've got some excuse. On the other hand, if you love me, you must love me for what I am, not as I might have been if I'd stuck to pounding the ivories in Winona's leading nickelodeon."

"Pounding the ivories?"

"Playing piano in a moving-picture theatre in a Wisconsin village."

"I thought you told us, one night, you'd never done any work before going into pictures?"

"Wouldn't call that work," Summerlad explained in haste and not too convincingly. "Work is something that puts real money in the old pay envelope. I'd be ashamed to tell you what the nickelodeon handed me Saturday nights. But it was just a sort of a lark for me. The regular orchestra was an old schoolmate of mine and when he went on his vacation I doubled for him, you see. Of course my folks kicked like steers about my taking a common job like that, but I thought it was fun; and watching the screen for music cues put it into my head I could show 'em something if I ever got a chance in pictures…" Here Summerlad was troubled by a dim reminiscence of some statement with which this account, likewise, failed to jibe, and sheered back to his former thread of argument. "Anyway, you're all wrong about Nelly Marquis. She's one that didn't happen, if you've got to know the truth."

"Oh!" Lucinda commented without emotion – "didn't she?"

"Along with a hundred others I get the credit for – "

"I daresay, by Hollywood standards, 'credit' is the right word."

"Oh, hang it all, Linda! you must understand. A man in my line… Oh, you know how it is… There'll always be women ready to make fools of themselves over any man who manages to get a certain degree of prominence. And an actor has got to keep in the public eye. Men are just as bad, for that matter; they'll run in circles around an actress, simply because she's on the stage, who can't hold a candle for looks or good disposition to the little girl who lives two doors away on their home street. I met Nelly Marquis shortly after I'd made my first real dent in pictures. She'd come out here to try her luck, after some experience on the legitimate stage. She was so hard hit I used to be afraid to leave the house until I'd sent out scouts to make sure the coast was clear. I've always thought that trouble of hers was more than half responsible for her mania about me."

"What trouble?"

"Dope. She's a hop nut. Coke – cocaine's her big bet. That's what her friend the doctor boggled about telling you – must've been the trouble, that time you found her stretched out: an overdose. I didn't like to tell you because – well, frankly, I didn't want you to think I knew so much about the girl."

"Oh, what a pity!"

"I can't hold myself responsible – "

"But why should you?"

"I mean, I don't believe it was simply disappointment drove her to it… Hang it! I can't seem to help talking like an ass tonight. What I'm trying to say is this: Nelly took to the dope after I'd met her, but only, I believe, because she got in with the wrong crowd. That's easy in Hollywood. It's hard to tell till you are in with them. And there's an awful lot of that sort of thing goes on more or less quietly out here. They lead one another on. When they've tried everything else they take a chance on the hop to see if there's really anything in it; and then they're gone. They drift into little cliques and have parties, ether parties and that sort of thing, you know, where they choose one by lot to stay off the stuff and watch the others to make sure nobody strangles to death while they lie around him in a circle – "

Lucinda lifted her hands to her ears. "Please, Lynn, please! I don't want to hear any more. It's too dreadful!"

"I'm sorry. I only wanted you to understand why I felt I had to warn you against Nelly. She's unfortunate, God knows, but she's dangerous, too. They all are, once the stuff gets a hold on them, there's nothing they won't do, no lie they won't tell…"

"And this is what goes on in this earthly paradise!"

"It isn't California, it isn't Hollywood, it's human nature, one sort of human nature. You'll find the same thing going on in every big city; read the newspaper accounts of the campaign against the drug traffic. Only, out here we know more about it, because the studios make it more or less one big village, and it's hard to keep anything quiet, talk will get about…"

They were drawing near the cross-road that led to Summerlad's bungalow. He bent forward and spoke to the driver, and the car held on toward Hollywood.

"I'm taking you home first, Linda. My foot isn't troubling me now to speak of, and… Well: talking about how rapidly gossip spreads made me think it would be better you shouldn't be seen driving up to my place with me at this time of night."

With a stabbing pain of loneliness and penitence, Lucinda perceived that she had only Lynn's love and consideration to rely upon for salvation from the gins and pitfalls of this outré world in which she lived, self-outlawed from her kind. No one else cared, not another soul in all Los Angeles would lift a hand in her behalf save at the dictates of self-interest.

And in a sudden passion she turned and clung to him again, begging forgiveness for her suspicions and complaints. And Summerlad soothed her, patting gently the head that rested on his shoulder, smiling over it confidentially at the smiling midnight moon.

XXXIII

Lucinda dated from that Saturday the dawn of a fortnight when everything went wrong for her with such regularity that, in the end, the burden of its crosses grew too sore, the woman had been something more than merely mortal whose stores of fortitude and forbearance had not run low.

Naturally she blamed Bellamy…

In a way he asked for this, giving her too little chance to forget that the sunlight had been kind before his shadow fell again athwart her eyes. Now when skies were overcast and the wind had a tooth, Bel figured in the picture as a sort of stormy petrel, forever to be seen wheeling somewhere within the vague of the horizon.

Fare where she would on diversion bent, Lucinda seemed fated always to encounter Bel, and too often in the company of the Marquis girl; while at the studio it didn't matter much which way she turned, she could hardly avoid the sight of her husband buzzing about on the business of his new enterprise, and apparently finding it all great fun.

To one who recalled the dilettante Bellamy of New York days, there was matter enough for amazement in the gusto he had lately discovered for work that nothing required him to do, in the amount of real energy, enterprise and executive ability which he was contributing to this new amusement. For Lucinda refused to take seriously his infatuation with the motion-picture business; it wasn't real, she insisted to herself, it wouldn't last, he was putting it on just to plague her…

None the less he went to work with a will, and took little more than a week to assemble a producing unit, engage a company of players, and cause camera-work to be begun under the direction of one who, observed occasionally and from a distance, conveyed a refreshing impression of quiet authority.

Inasmuch as special sets could hardly have been designed and erected on such short notice, most of the company's first activities were staged away from the studio, "on location," and Lucinda knew nothing of them save through hearsay. Gossip had it, however, that Bellamy was employing no star to carry his initial production, but was rather making a "special" – the term which the motion-picture trade reads to mean a picture basing its claims solely on the strength of its story as interpreted by a well-balanced cast. Glimpses of Nelly Marquis in make-up, now and then, warranted the assumption that she had been given a part in the picture.

But their paths seldom crossed, notwithstanding that they were using the same studio, and when it did the young woman somehow always happened to be possessed by an abstraction too profound to permit of her seeing Lucinda.

Bel, on the other hand, was already ready with a smile and a friendly hail – "The top of the morning to you, Miss Lee! 'Tis hopeful I am the work, God bless it! is doing well" – or some similar absurdity; but never a hint that there had ever been any terms between them other than the most formal.

Gratitude for this much consideration rendered it no more easy to respond in the same spirit. Lucinda had never known anything more baffling than the absence of any justifiable grounds for objecting to Bel's presence in the studio. For if it were her privilege to seek to become a star of the cinema, it was equally his to launch out as a producer…

The daily disappointment that waited on efforts to find other quarters aggravated her sense of hardship. Lucinda learned to listen impatiently for the expressions of despair which unfailingly wound up Lontaine's reports: "If we've got to clear out of this – I don't know, Linda – I'm afraid it means either buy or build." She began to be afraid it did. Studio accommodations were reported never to have been so much in demand on the Coast. Every available stage was doing double duty, two companies crowding their activities wherever possible into a space formerly reserved for one. Neither knew they any rest by night, when belated souls would see the great roofs of glass livid with the incandescence of Cooper-Hewitt tubes, burning like vast green opals against the dense blue-black of early morning skies.

The tidal wave of the cinema craze that in those years swept the world was rearing its golden crest to its giddiest height; and the people of the studios rode in glee where the aureate spindrift blew, reckless of the law that every wave that lifts must fall, too drunk with money, altitude and speed to know that already, beneath their very feet, the crest was curving in upon itself, the fanged rocks were waiting.

Zinn, wily campaigner that he was by instinct and training, shrewd reader of signs and portents illegible to the general, foresaw the coming débâcle and – when he had made every provision against being overwhelmed in it – assumed in private the prophet's mantle.

"Been a good game while it lasted," he observed to Lucinda one day, "but it's on its way now, all right. I was reading a piece in the paper last night, all about how California seen three big booms, that time when they discovered gold, next a real estate speculation craze, and now the movin'-pictures. The first two blew up, same as this will before long. I guess I and you are lucky fools to of got a look in while the going was good."

"Lucky?" Lucinda questioned dubiously.

A grin of indescribable irony glimmered on the swarthy, shrewd features. "Something to tell the kiddies about when they gather around your knee, Miss Lee: 'What Grandma done and seen in the wild old days in Hollywood.'"

"I don't know about that. And what makes you think times will ever be different?"

"Take it from me, little lady, things can't hold up much longer the way they been in pictures. Nobody with a brain in his bean would look for it. Trouble is, nobody like that would take the fillum business serious when it was learning to walk. Now it's wearing long pants and driving its own machine, it's no use expecting it to listen to what brains got to tell it. All the same, if it don't – good night!

"Ah, I see what's going on all the time! Audiences sick of punk pictures and putting up a howl for better, producers combing the world for authors, artists, dramatists, all the people what have got the stuff pictures need to make 'em good – and the old guard back here dug in and ready to die before they'll surrender the trenches to anybody that knows more'n they do. And why wouldn't they? It's meat and drink and gasoline to them to keep things going like they are. Where'd be the sense in them giving the glad hand to the guy who's got it in him to do them out of a nice soft job?

"Take authors, now. We're having a big run on authors just't present. The producer figures anybody who's got brains enough to write a novel that won't wobble if a person gives it a hard look, ought to have brains enough to do as good with a picture story. But does he get a chanst? Don't make me laugh. The poor simps come out here on every train with their eyes shining, full of joy and pep on account of what the producers promised they was going to let 'em do in pictures. And every train takes 'em back. What's the answer?

"The answer gen'ly's a bird in ridin'-breeches and a property high-brow, calls himself director-general or something gaudy like that – same bird's been making the pictures the producers want to make better. He gives Friend Author the glad smile and a hard look and starts right in telling him all what he can't do in pictures. Author wants to know how come. 'Because I say you can't, and I know everything they is to know about pictures.' Author asks producer what about it. Producer says, says he: 'If my director-general says you can't, stands to reason you can't. Say: how do you get this way? I brought you out here to learn you to make pictures, not for you to learn my director-general.' Author sees the point and fades back East. Director-general tells producer: 'Too bad about that poor fish, but he didn't savvy the picture angle, and I couldn't make him see it nohow.'

"Or take another case. Producer buys a big story, like, now…"

"Paradise Lost," Lucinda suggested mischievously.

"Who wrote it?"

"John Milton."

"Never heard of him. Make a good picture?"

"I'm afraid it would be difficult. But it's a big story."