Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

"I see: another of your charity cases."

"Hardly. They're stopping at the Ritz, that's where I met Fanny the other day."

"Anybody can stop there, but not everybody can get away."

"Does it matter?"

"It's only I don't like seeing you made use of, Linda. Your name makes you fair game for every climber and fortune-hunter who can claim or scrape acquaintance with you."

"But my friends – "

"Oh, you're forever being too friendly with stray cats. Why did you ask Nelly and Jean to meet this woman if it wasn't in the hope they'd take her up, too?"

Lucinda shrugged. "Come to my luncheon and see for yourself. Not that I think you'd care for Fanny, though she is pretty to death."

"Why not, if you like her so much?"

"She's not at all the type you seem to find most attractive. Why is it, I've often wondered, the women you lose your head about are almost always a bit – well – !"

Bellamy flushed sullenly. It was one of his crosses that he seemed never to have the right answer ready for Lucinda when she took that line. After all, there is only one salvation for a man married to a woman cleverer than himself: to do no wrong.

"Oh, if you're going to rake up ancient history – !"

But Lucinda pursued pensively, as if she hadn't heard: "I presume you've got to run after that sort, Bel, because they don't know you as well as I do – can't."

Even a slow man may have wit enough not to try to answer the unanswerable. Bellamy got stiffly to his feet.

"I'll drop in at the Ritz if I can make it."

"Do, dear … And Bel!" Lucinda rose impulsively and ran to him. "I'm sorry, Bel, I was so catty just now. Only, you know, there are some things one can't help feeling keenly. Dear!"

She clung to him, lifting to his lips a face tempting beyond all telling. Insensibly his temper yielded, and catching her to him, he kissed her with a warmth that had long been missing in his caresses.

"Linda: you're a witch!"

"I wish I were … enough of a witch, at least, to make you realize nobody cares for you as I do, nor ever will. Bel: don't go yet. There's something I want to ask you…"

"Yes?" He held her close, smiling down magnanimously at that pretty, intent face. As long as she loved him so, couldn't do without him, all was well, he could do pretty much as he liked – within reasonable limits, of course, bounds dictated by ordinary discretion. "What's on the busy mind?"

"I've been wondering if we couldn't go away together somewhere this Winter." Lucinda divined hostility in the tensing of the arm round her waist. "We're not really happy here, dearest – "

"But you were in Europe all Summer."

"Not with you, except for a few weeks. You took me over but left me to come back to business affairs that could have got along perfectly without you. And while you were with me, what was different from our life here? Nothing but the geography of our environment. Meeting the same people, doing the same things, living in the self-same groove abroad as at home – that sort of thing's no good for us, Bel."

"What's wrong with the way we live?"

"Its desperate sameness wears on us till we turn for distraction to foolish things, things we wouldn't dream of doing if we weren't bored. Look through my calendar there; you'll find I'm booked up for weeks ahead, and week in and week out the same old round. And so with you. Consciously or unconsciously you resent it, dear, you're driven to look for something different, some excitement to lift you out of the deadly rut. As for me … Would you like it if I took a lover simply because I was bored silly, too?"

"Linda!"

"But don't you see that's what we're coming to, that is how it's bound to end with us if we go on this way, all the time drifting a little farther apart? Why can't we run away from it all for a while, you and I, forget it, and find ourselves again? Take me to Egypt, India, any place where we won't see the same people all the time and do the same things every day. I feel as if I'd lost you already – "

"What nonsense!"

"Oh, perhaps not altogether yet. But slowly and surely I am losing you. Bel: I want my husband and – he needs me. Give me a chance to find him again and prove to him I'm something better than – than a boutonnière to a man of fashion."

"Boutonnière?"

"A neglected wife, the finishing touch."

Bellamy laughed outright, and Lucinda's earnestness melted into an answering smile. "What a notion! How did you get it, Linda?"

"Thought it up all out of my own head, strange as it may appear. You see – this is the danger of it all – you make me think, dear. And if you keep that up, first thing you know I'll be all mental – and that would be too awful!"

Bel laughed again, more briefly, and slackened his embrace; and she understood from this that, if she had not actually lost, she had gained nothing.

"Perhaps you're right. At all events, it's worth thinking about."

"You will think it over, Bel – promise?"

"Word of honour. But now – late for an appointment – must run."

Against the better counsel of her instinct, Lucinda put all she had left unsaid into her parting kiss – and felt that his response was forced.

In chagrin she wandered to a window and stood gazing blankly out till recalled by a new voice: "Good morning, Mrs. Druce."

Lucinda wadded the handkerchief into her palm and turned to her secretary, an unruffled countenance.

"Good morning, Elena."

Elena Fiske was conscientiously unalluring in the livery affected by intellect in reduced circumstances. Thanks to a cultivated contempt for powder, her good features wore an honest polish. She walked with a stride and looked you in the eye. Erroneously she conceived her opinion of Lucinda to be privately entertained.

"If you're ready for me," she suggested with perfect poise.

"Yes, quite ready."

Elena consulted a sensible note-book. "I was to remind you to telephone Mrs. Rossiter Wade."

"Oh, yes."

Lucinda took up the telephone but only to find the wire already in use; that is to say, somebody in another part of the house was talking without having thought to disconnect the boudoir extension. Recognizing Bel's voice, she would have hung up at once had she not overheard a name.

"Lucky to catch you in, Amelie," Bellamy was saying in the blandishing accents she knew too well. "About our luncheon, you know – "

"See here, Bel: you're not going to put me off at the last minute!"

"Rather not! But for reasons which I confidently leave to your imagination, it might be better to make it any place but the Ritz. What do you say to the Clique? It's at least discreet – "

"But Bel!" the mocking voice of Amelie Severn put in – "we settled on the Clique instead of the Ritz last night, just before you went home. What's happened to the old memory?"

Bellamy was still stammering sheepishly when Lucinda cutoff.

IV

Frost in the air of that early Winter day lent its sunlight the cold brilliance of diamond-dust. The sky was turquoise glaze, more green than blue, incredibly hard, shining, high and resonant. Though the new year was well launched, snow had not yet fallen, no dismal sierras of mud, slush and rubbish disfigured the city streets and hindered their swift business. But on Fifth avenue, by that mid-morning hour, the crush of motor-cars had grown so dense that one could hardly hope to drive from the Plaza to Thirty-fourth street in less than thirty minutes.

Bellamy, nursing a mood blackly malcontent, fumed over every halt dictated by the winking semaphore lights of the traffic towers. He could have made far better time afoot, and would infinitely have preferred the exercise – indeed, felt need of it. But in his understanding it was essential that the car should set him down in front of the sedate pressed-brick structure on East Thirtieth street whose entrance was flanked by an ever-stainless plate of brass advertising in dignified black letters Offices of the Druce Estate – necessary for the planting of what he was pleased to term his "alibi." It made his mind easier to know he could prove by the chauffeur that he had "gone to business." What he did with himself after passing through those austere portals the chauffeur couldn't know, couldn't be expected to know, consequently couldn't tell.

It was true, Lucinda had never deigned to question a servant about his comings and goings, he had no reason to believe she would ever be so far forgetful of her dignity. Still, if one will flirt with fire, the first rule is to take out insurance.

Notwithstanding the numerous occasions when his own laches and errors of judgment had betrayed Bellamy, his life of a licensed philanderer (so he rated himself) remained one endless intrigue of evasion, a matted tangle of lies, equivocations, shifts and stratagems, to keep account of which was not only a matter of life and death with him but a task to tax the wits of any man. The wonder was less that feet which trod such treacherous ground were known to slip, than that they slipped so seldom.

Merely to admit the need for all this involution of ambiguity and double-dealing grievously affronted self-esteem. Deceit was strangely distasteful to this man who was forever floundering in a muck of it, a quagmire from whose grim suck his feet were never wholly free. In saner interludes, times of disillusion and clear inner vision such as this, he loathed it all, himself most of all. Naturally fastidious, he felt himself defiled, much as if he were constrained continually to dabble those well-manicured hands in a kennel. He would have given half of all he possessed to be free of this feeling of personal dishonor which was the fruit of self-indulgence. A quaint contradiction was to be read in the fact that he knew no way to satisfy his vanity but at the cost of giving his vanity offence.

Today found Bellamy more out of humour with himself than ever before, more disposed to consider turning over a new leaf, a project often mooted by his conscience (always when he was falling out of love) often approved but never seriously tackled.

Now, however, he had every incentive: self-esteem sick to death in sequence to last night's dissipation, anxiety to reanimate it with a noble gesture; mortification due to that lapse of memory which had laid him open to Amelie's derision, accompanied by reluctance to see the lady soon again; most of all, Lucinda's unmistakable appeal to his senses and sensibilities both, in their interview just ended.

There was no one like Linda, not a woman in New York who could hold a candle to her for looks, wit and intelligence, none other whom he could trust, no one who loved him so well. And it would be such a simple matter to do as she suggested, humour her, make her happy – clear out of New York and not return till time had wiped the slate clean of his score, then settle down to behave, and incidentally to respect, himself.

Where was the sense in holding on this tack, ignoring Linda, making her miserable, storing up sure retribution, and meantime playing the silly goat, all for the sake of a few hours of facile excitement? It wasn't as if he couldn't help himself, as if his fatal beauty rendered it impossible for women to resist him. No: the women he flirted with were as ready to flirt with any other man who has as much to offer them…

Why, then go on?

Bellamy assured himself he was damn' sorry that he hadn't, while calling Amelie up from the library, obeyed his first impulse and broken off the appointment altogether. Chances were her resentment would have resulted in a permanent breach. In which event all hands would have been happier. While if he went on now to meet her at this shady Clique Club, the end might easily be, what the outcome of persistence in his present courses must surely be, heart-break, unhappiness, the slime of the divorce courts.

Thrice in the course of the scant hour he spent at his desk Bellamy put out a hand to the telephone, meaning to call up Amelie and call it off; and thrice withheld his hand, partly because he hated the thought of a wrangle over the wire, partly because he was afraid the girl at the switchboard might listen in.

In the end he left his office half an hour earlier than he need have, and telephoned the Severn apartment from the Waldorf, only to learn from her maid that Mrs. Severn was not at home.

Divided between relief and annoyance, he took a taxi to the Clique, arriving twenty minutes before the time appointed, and Heaven alone knew how long before he might expect Amelie. For Amelie was one of those who, having no personality of their own worth mentioning, build themselves one of appropriated tricks and traits, as a rule those which are least considerate of the comfort of others. Amelie believed a certain distinction inhered in being always late for an appointment.

Now Bellamy detested waiting, especially in a public place, and never more than in the little foyer of the Clique, with its suggestively discreet lighting; the last place where one cared to be hung up on exhibition.

The Clique Club was a post-Prohibition institution of New York, run in direct, more or less open, and famously successful defiance of the Eighteenth Amendment. One had to become a member in order to obtain admission, or else be introduced as the guest of a member; and the initiation fee was something wholly dependent on one's rating in the esteem of the Membership Committee, whose powers had been delegated en bloc to an urbane brigand, the club steward, Theodore by name: in more humid days the more than ordinarily supercilious, courted and successful maître-d'hotel of a fashionable restaurant. Once a member and within those unhallowed precincts, "everything went," in the parlance of its frequenters, "you could get away with murder." There was a floor for dancing, with the inevitable jazz band, rather a good one. Rooms were provided for private dinner parties of every size, however small. In the restaurant proper an improper degree of privacy was obtainable at will simply by drawing the curtains of the booths in which the tables were individually set apart. The cooking was atrocious, the wines and liquors only tolerable, the tariffs cynical.

Amelie Severn kept Bellamy kicking his heels a bad quarter of an hour longer than she need have; and those fifteen minutes, added to the twenty which he had inflicted upon himself, served to draw his temper fine. Nothing of this, however, was apparent in his reception of her, in fact much of it was obscured for the first few minutes by the admiration which her undeniable good looks could hardly have failed to excite. There was, after all, a measure of compensation in the knowledge that one had made a conquest of so rare a creature.

It didn't count that there had been more truth than good faith in Bellamy's statement to his wife that Amelie was "amiable enough, but nobody to talk to." Good humour, easy, spirits, grace of manner and charm of person will carry even a dull woman far. Amelie was neither stupid nor witty; she was shrewd. Mainly through instinct but in part through education she was shrewd, she knew what she wanted, which was every luxury, and how to go about obtaining it, which was simple; all one needed to do was to fix on some tedious man to flatter with one's attentions. For the more dull the man, the better the dividends returned by such inexpensive investments; the more keen-witted, the more disposed to count the cost.

If there was nothing subtle in the philosophy of Amelie, it boasted this rare virtue, it was practical and practicable in the extreme; just as it is practised to an extent few men dream of.

To women of this type love is the poppy of hallucination, calling for ruthless extermination if found in one's own garden, but sure to produce goodly crops if cultivated by fair, skilled hands in the fields of the neighbouring sex.

Amelie had married Ross Severn because he was well-to-do, uninteresting, middle-aged, of good family; and had quickly repented because he spoiled her and showed no intention of ceasing to be a good insurance risk. So she craved much exciting indiscretions as this assignation with another's husband at the Clique Club of questionable repute.

She frankly owned as much while Bellamy was helping her with her wrap in the semi-seclusion of their as yet uncurtained booth.

" – Thrilled to a jellybean!" she declared, employing an absurdity which she had promptly pirated upon hearing the laugh that rewarded its use by another woman. "Thanks, old dear." She shrugged out of her furs, planted elbows upon the table, cradled her chin upon the backs of engaged fingers, and peered about the room with quick, inquisitive, bird-like glances. "Ross would be furious."

"Hope so. If he weren't, he ought to be spoken to about it. Or don't you think he has any right to object to your doing as you please?"

"Oh, why worry about Ross's rights? He's just a husband."

"And husbands haven't any rights worth considering. Quite so! All the same, sometimes they assert 'em."

"I'd like to see Ross…" A laugh of lazy insolence rounded off Amelie's thought. "Besides, I'm not doing anything wrong…"

"Not yet," Bellamy admitted equably. He nodded to their hovering waiter. "What kind of cocktail, Amelie? Everything else is ordered."

"Thank goodness: I'm famished. A T-N-T, please."

The waiter noted down this frightful prescription with entire equanimity, but lingered. "And monsieur – ?"

"Nothing, thank you."

"Nothing, monsieur?" Professional poise was sadly shattered for an instant. Why should one punish oneself with the cuisine of the Clique and reject the solitary compensation the establishment had to offer? Ejaculating "Nothing!" once more, in a tone of profound perturbation, the waiter retired.

Bellamy tried to cover his annoyance with a laugh, but surprised a look of dark resentment in Amelie's eyes and opened his own. "Hello?"

"Why did you do that? Simply to mortify me?"

"Afraid I don't follow – "

"Do you want the waiters to think you bring me here solely to satisfy my appetite for liquor? It isn't as if you were a plaster saint in that line yourself – not exactly."

"Sorry, Amy. Make it a rule never to drink before evening."

"Then why come here at all?"

"Thought we'd agreed a little everyday discretion wouldn't do us any harm."

"What are you afraid of? Your wife?"

Bellamy answered only with a fatigued look. The cocktail was being served.

"And the melon, monsieur – shall I bring it at once?"

"Please."

The tone was crisp if the word was civil. Amelie sipped her mixed poisons, mysterious malice informing the eyes that watched Bellamy over the rim of the glass.

"Why take it out on the waiter if you're in a temper with me?"

"I'm not, Amy, I – " Bellamy caught himself, and permitted impatience to find an outlet in a sound of polite expostulation: "Really!"

Amelie put aside an empty glass. Refreshed and fortified, she brooded with sultry eyes while wedges of under-ripe casaba bedded in cracked ice were set before them.

"You know, Bel," she observed in the dispassionate accents of the friend who wouldn't for worlds mention it, only it's for your own good – "you really ought to be more careful about your drinking. You barely escaped being pretty awful at times, last night."

An indictment the more unkind because a cloudy memory refused to affirm or deny its justice. Bellamy began to repent his fidelity to the six o'clock rule.

"Fancy your forgetting we'd agreed to meet here instead of at the Ritz. That ought to show you how lit you were."

"Sorry – "

"That's all very well: but suppose you hadn't had sense enough to call up this morning, suppose I had come here to meet you, just as we'd arranged, and had to go home after waiting around for hours like some shop-girl forgotten on a street corner – "

"Poetic justice, if you ask me – something to offset some of the hours you've kept me fidgeting, wondering if you meant to show up at all."

Injudiciously, Bellamy added a smile to the retort, by way of offsetting its justice.

"So it amuses you to think of making an exhibition of me in a place like this!"

"Oh, I don't know." Bellamy surveyed the restaurant without bias. "Not a bad little hole for people in our position."

The melon, inedible and uneaten, was removed, soup in cups was substituted.

"'People in our position'! I'm to understand, then, any 'little hole' is good enough for me, so long as I don't interfere with Lucinda's parties at the Ritz."

Bellamy straightened his spine and put down his spoon. An understanding captain of waiters read his troubled eye and made casual occasion to draw the curtains across the front of the booth.

"It is because Lucinda's lunching at the Ritz today, isn't it?"

"My dear Amy," said Bellamy coolly: "I'm unaware of having done anything to provoke this, and if I've sinned unwittingly, I beg your pardon very truly. Won't you believe that, please, and let me off for today? I'm feeling rather rusty myself, my dear, and this is beginning to get on my nerves."

At his first words the woman drew back, flushing, eyes stormy above a mouth whose gentle allure lost itself in a hardening line. Then swiftly reconsideration followed, visibly the selfish second thought took shape in the angry eyes and melted their ice to a mist of unshed tears beneath lids newly languorous. The petulant lips, too, refound their tremulous tenderness. Amelie's hand fell upon Bellamy's in a warm, convulsive clasp. She leaned across the corner of the table.

"Kiss me, Bel – I'm so wretched!"

He kissed her adequately but without any sort of emotion, thinking it strange, all the while her mouth clung to his, that he should so clearly know this to be good acting, no more than that, no less. Bellamy was not accustomed to see through women at so young a stage of intimacy; that came later, came surely; but never before had it come so soon. And in a little quake of dread he wondered if it were because he had grown old beyond his years, too aged in sentimental tippling to have retained the capacity for generous credulity of his younger years. Or was it that the woman's insincerity had so eaten out her heart, no technical perfection could lend persuasion to her playing, her caresses potency? Or that he had, since morning, fallen in love with his wife all over again and so truly that no rival passion could seem real?

It was true, at least, that his thoughts were quick and warm with memories of Linda even while he was most engaged with the effort to do justice to Amelie's lips. And perceiving this to be so, self-contempt took hold of him like a sickness.

They resumed their poses of nonchalant and sophisticated creatures amiably discussing an informal meal. But first the woman made effective use of a handkerchief.

"Forgive me, dear," she murmured. "I know it was perfectly rotten of me, but I couldn't help it. I'm a bit overwrought, Bel, not too happy; being in love with you has made the way things are at home doubly hard to endure, you must know that; and then – of course" – she smiled nervously – "I'm jealous."

He was silent, fiddling with a fork, avoiding her eye.

"Of Lucinda – you understand."

He said heavily: "Yes…"

She waited an instant, and when he failed to say more began to see that she had overplayed her hand.

"You do love me, don't you, Bel?"

"Of course."

"Then you must know how hard it is for me, you can't blame me for growing impatient."

This time he looked up and met her gaze. "Impatient for what?"

"Why, for what every woman expects when she's in love and the man whom she loves loves her; something definite to look forward to, I mean. We can't go on like this, of course."

"No, not like this."

"I'm not the kind of a woman for a hole-and-corner affair, Bel. If I were, you wouldn't be in love with me."

He nodded intently: "What do you propose?"

"I've been waiting for that to come from you, dear; but you never seem to live for anything but the moment."

"I've got to know what's in your mind, Amy. Tell me frankly."

"Well, then!" – she saw the mistake of it instantly, but for the life of her couldn't muffle the ring of challenge – "I fancy it means Reno for both of us."

"Meaning I'm to divorce Linda and marry you?"

She gave a deprecating flutter of hands. "What else can we do?"

Bellamy said with a stubborn shake of his head: "Never without good cause; and as far as I know, Linda's blameless. I'm a pretty hopeless proposition, I know, but not quite so bad as all that."