Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

From the doorway an unctuous voice announced: "Dinner is served, madam."

XI

In this newest phase of that day's protean gamut, in this temper of reckless yet cool determination to avenge her pride and coerce life into rendering up all that it had of late withheld, she put every curbing consideration behind, and resolutely set herself for that night at least to live only for the moment and wring from each its ultimate drop of pleasure, to be amused and to be amusing, to make fête and to be fêted.

Daubeney, wanting whom all her efforts must have been wasted, for whether she love him or not a woman needs a man in love with her at hand to be at her best – Dobbin was fairly dazzled, not so much by charms of person never more witching as by gay spirits the gayer for this sudden indulgence after long inhibition, by delicate audacity, wit swift, mutable and pungent, and passages of sheer bravura in Lucinda's exposition of the arts of coquetry.

The way she flirted with him was something shameful. For the matter of that, never a masculine moth blundered into the Druce box during the entr'actes but flopped dazedly away, wondering what the deuce was the matter with old Bellamy, had he gone absolutely balmy. But Dobbin in his capacity of cavalier servente suffered more than anybody, for she took an impish delight in luring him beyond his depth and then leaving him to flounder out as best he might.

"See here!" he reminded her indignantly as the curtain rose on the last act of Louise– "you promised to play fair." Lucinda arched mocking brows above round eyes. "Don't call this sort of thing keeping your word, do you?"

"Aren't you having a good time, Dobbin dear?" In the half-light of the box Lucinda leaned slightly toward him, and her delicious voice dripped sympathy. "I'm so sorry, I've been trying so hard not to bore you."

"I didn't say I was bored. I ain't – I'm being plagued by a heartless young she-devil that ought to be spanked and sent to bed. Damn it, Cinda! you not only ought to, you do know better. You know I take it seriously. But you – you're merely playing."

"But with fire – eh, Dobbin?"

"You know that, too."

"And you're warning me lest I get singed?" Lucinda contrived to look a little awed. "How thoughtful!"

"Don't make me out a greater dunce than I am."

"Meaning you don't think I'm in any danger of getting scorched, carrying on with you?"

"Worse luck!"

"Dobbin: have you been deceiving me, aren't you the least bit inflammable, after all?"

"You know jolly well I took fire years ago and have never since managed to get the conflagration under control. Isn't ladylike to put the bellows to flames you don't mean to quench."

"How appallingly technical! But you do sputter so entertainingly, Dobbin – burning under forced draught, I presume you'd say, with your passion for riding a metaphor till it flounders – I'm not sure I'd care to see you quenched; I hate to think of you being put out with me."

"You play with words precisely as you play with me."

"You think so? Well, perhaps, but – Dobbin – don't be too sure. Think how sad it would be if you were to find out, too late, you'd been mistaken, you'd meant more to me than words could tell, more than you knew."

Over this equivoque Dobbin shook a baffled head; and Lucinda laughed, glanced carelessly toward the stage to make sure that the act still was young, and offered to rise.

"Let's not stay any longer, Dobbin, or we'll be caught in the carriage jam. Let's trot along and have a good time."

"What's the next jump?"

"To the Palais Royal." Dobbin uttered an involuntary sound of dissent. "Why not? Julie Allingham wants us to join her party – says everybody goes there nowadays, and it's desperately rowdy and loads of fun – said to ask for her box and make ourselves at home if we got there before she did."

Mrs. Allingham was not one of Daubeney's favorites. A persevering body, with a genius for trading in last season's husband for the latest model, gifted likewise with incurable impudence and poverty of tact, both of which she was clever enough to veneer with vivacity and exploit as whimsical idiosyncrasies, she failed to measure up to his notion of the type of woman with whom Lucinda ought to be seen. He had been civil, no more, when she had danced into the box during the first entr'acte to make a public fuss over her darling Cindy, and then – engaged in small-talk by Julie's satellites, two sleek but otherwise featureless bloods – had failed to hear her invitation; and Julie had carefully forgotten to remind him of it on taking her leave.

So Daubeney wasn't pleased as he helped Lucinda with her wraps; and she read disgruntlement in his silence and constraint.

"You don't want to go, Dobbin? With me? Why?"

"With you, anywhere. But…" He mustered an unconvincing grin. "Oh, it's all right, of course. But Julie Allingham – you know – really!"

Lucinda's mouth tightened, for an instant her eyes held a sullen light. "How tiresome! You sound just like Bel. How often have I heard him use almost the same words: 'Julie Allingham – you know – really!'"

"Sorry," Dobbin said stiffly.

"What's the matter with Julie Allingham?" Lucinda demanded in a pet. "She's amusing, I like her."

"Then there's nothing more to be said."

"Oh, you're all alike, you, Bel, and all the rest of you!"

"Think so?"

"What if Julie has made history of a few husbands? At least, she's been honest about her changes of heart; when she tired of one, she got rid of him legally before taking on another. I call that more decent treatment than most men give their wives."

"Never having had a wife, can't argue."

"Oh, you sound more like Bel every minute! Do come along."

All at once her succès had evaporated into thin air, the flavour of it, that had been so sweet, had gone flat, like champagne too long uncorked. And all (she thought) because Dobbin with his stupid prejudices had reminded her of Bel!

It began to seem as if there might have been more truth than she had guessed in her assertion that men were all alike in their attitude toward women, toward their wives and toward – the others.

But if that were so (surely she wasn't the first to glimpse an immortal truth) why did women ever marry?

And why, in the name of reason! having once worried through the ordeal of having a husband, did any woman ever repeat an experiment which experience should have taught her was predestined to prove a failure?

She emerged from a brown study to find herself in the car, with Dobbin at her side watching her thoughtfully.

"Cross with me, Cinda?"

With an effort Lucinda shrugged out of her ill-humour.

"No, of course not. With myself, rather, for being a silly. Dobbin: you're a dear."

"I know," he agreed with comic complacence; "but it doesn't get me anywhere."

"You're not very flattering. I don't tell every man he's a dear."

"I'm wondering what the term means to you."

"It means a great deal."

"But what are the privileges and appurtenances of a dear's estate in your esteem? Does it carry the right to take liberties?"

"It might be worth your while to try and find out."

"Well… It's been a question in my mind ever since last night, and something you said just now… Is the inference justified, you and Druce aren't getting along too well?"

"Oh, do stop reminding me of Bel! I do so want to forget him for tonight."

"Then it's worse than I thought."

"It's worse than anybody thinks that doesn't know, Dobbin."

"So he hasn't changed…"

"How do you mean?"

"Why, I used to know Bellamy pretty well, pal around with him and that sort of thing…"

"No," said Lucinda slowly, eyes straight ahead – "if you mean what I mean, Bel hasn't changed."

"Then…" Daubeney found a hand which Lucinda resigned to his without a struggle. "As a man who truly loves you, dear, and always has, I think the right is mine to ask yet another question: What are you going to do?"

She shook her head dolefully: "I don't know yet."

"You said last night you were still in love…"

"Last night it was true."

"But today – ?"

"I don't know."

"I won't ask you what has happened, Cinda – "

"Please don't. I don't want to talk about it."

"Only I must know one thing: Is there anyone else – with you, I mean?"

Lucinda met those devoted eyes honestly. "No, Dobbin, I'm sorry – not even you…"

"Then that's all right. No need for either of us to worry. You'll come through with flying colours. Only, don't do anything in haste, and right or wrong, count on me."

Lucinda gave his fingers a friendly pressure and disengaged her hand. "Dear Dobbin," she said gently.

The car was pulling in toward a corner.

XII

Though they had left the Metropolitan long before the final curtain, on Broadway the midnight tidal bore of motor traffic was even then gathering way and volume, the first waves of after-theatre patrons were washing the doorsteps of those sturdy restaurants which had withstood the blast of Prohibition, the foyer of the Palais Royal already held a throng of some proportions. In this omnium-gatherum of confirmed New Yorkers and self-determined suburbicides, arrayed in every graduation of formal, semi-formal and informal dress, and drawn together by the happy coup of that year's press-agent in heralding the establishment as a favorite resort of what the Four Million still styles its Four Hundred, the women stood grouped in their wraps and wistfully watching their men-folk importune a headwaiter who was heroically holding the staircase against all-comers, passing only the fore-handed in the matter of reservations, and putting all others to ignominious rout with the standardized statement that there was not a table upstairs left untaken.

At first glance, the huge main room on the second story, with its serried semicircles of tables and its flamboyant colour scheme, seemed less frequented by clients than by waiters; but the influx of the former was constant, and when, shortly after Lucinda and Daubeney had been seated, a gang of incurable melomaniacs crashed, blared and whanged into a jazz fox-trot, the oval dance floor was quickly hidden by swaying couples.

For some minutes Lucinda sat looking out over without seeing these herded dancers, only aware of the shifting swirl of colour and the hypnotic influence of savage music, her thoughts far from this decadent adaptation of jungle orgies which she had come to witness. And presently a smile began to flicker in the depths of her eyes.

"Oh!" she said, rousing when Daubeney uttered a note of interrogation – "I was thinking about this afternoon, remembering that funny little man moping and mowing in his magnificent delusion that he was conducting an orchestra."

"It was amusing, illuminating, too. One begins to understand why the movies are what they are. If I'm not mistaken, the author of that asinine exhibition is rated as one of the ablest directors in the business."

Lucinda quoted Mr. Lane's eulogy of King Laughlin.

"Well, there you are," Dobbin commented. "I presume genius must be humoured in its poses; even so, I saw nothing in Laughlin's directing to offset the silliness of his performance with the orchestra. I should say the business is poorly organized that permits men of his calibre, with so little sense of balance, to hold positions of absolute authority."

"You don't think Mr. Lane may have exaggerated Mr. Laughlin's importance – "

"Perhaps; though he was honoured with suspicious reverence by everybody present."

"Except Mr. Culp."

"Well, yes; Culp didn't seem so much overpowered. All the same, I noticed he didn't attempt to call Laughlin to order."

"But possibly the man is a genius. He seemed to know what he was about when he was showing them how to play that scene."

"I'll admit his grasp of primary mechanics; but the scene as he built it would have been ridiculous in the theatre."

"But it wasn't for a theatre, it was for the movies."

"Precisely my point. Why should motion-picture plays be less plausibly done than plays on the stage? The American theatre outgrew 'Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model' long before motion-pictures were seriously thought of; I mean, American audiences outgrew such trash. Yet today our movies are shaped on identically the lines of the popular melodrama that was laughed off the boards a generation ago. There's something wrong."

For some reason which Lucinda didn't stop to analyze, Daubeney's arguments stirred up a spirit of contentiousness.

"At all events, Mr. and Mrs. Culp seemed satisfied."

"Two people who have made a huge lot of money in an astonishingly short time: it isn't likely they'd be disposed to interfere with the system that enriched them, even allowing that they are sensible of its defects."

Lucinda caught herself frowning, then had the grace to laugh. "Can't make me believe they're lacking in artistic appreciation, Dobbin."

"Why not?"

"You don't know about the handsome offer Mr. Culp made me, with his wife's approval, just as we were going away."

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