Linda Lee, Incorporated Part 61

Young Mr. Day on improved acquaintance appeared to be an amiable and modest person with a fair grasp of the rudiments of his calling; and presently surprised Lucinda by proving himself the "clever kid" that Zinn had a.s.serted he was; immolating himself with the three-dozen reels in the cutting-room for forty-eight hours, at the end of which period he emerged with an eight-reel edition of Nolan's unfinished opus which, when still further abbreviated and publicly shown, ultimately drove its author half-mad with chagrin.

Upon Zinn, however, the effect of this accomplishment was to dispel altogether the gloom in which he had been plunged ever since the attempted a.s.sa.s.sination of his most profitable star had halted for an indefinite term a costly production within a few days of its completion.

Even Lucinda plucked up heart, began to cherish regenerated hopes....

To the weariness of those days wasted in waiting for camera-work to begin again, the visit of Harford Willis came as a welcome interlude, notwithstanding the effort required to show him an undiscouraged countenance and, at the same time, the tale of losses sustained through the mismanagement and knavery of Lontaine.

On the other hand, the gentleman of early vintage knew nothing of the Summerlad chapters; and it did Lucinda good to hear him growl and scold about anything as relatively inconsiderable as the lunacy of throwing money away--"like water!"--and then refusing to set the machinery of the law in motion to apprehend and punish Lontaine. But nothing he found to say shook her determination not to make an example of the defaulter at the expense of his wife.

"The poor child's been made miserable enough by her marriage," Lucinda declared. "And now Lontaine's deserted her she's got n.o.body left but her people, who were opposed to Harry from the first and were, I haven't the faintest doubt, to a considerable extent responsible for making her life with him the wretched muddle it turned out. If they'd treated Harry half-way decently, when treating him harshly couldn't change the fact that he was f.a.n.n.y's husband, if they'd interested themselves to give him a chance to make a comfortable living for himself and her, it's more than likely he would never have dreamed of doing anything wrong. Now his troubles have driven him to it, I'm not going to add to f.a.n.n.y's by bringing him back to the notice of her family branded a thief. Let things alone and they may make up their differences with her...."

"Such magnanimity is costing you a pretty penny," Willis suggested mildly.

"It isn't anything of the sort," Lucinda pointed out with some heat.

"Putting Harry Lontaine in a penitentiary won't put back in my pocketbook one cent of the money he made away with. In fact, to do nothing about him is the only inexpensive way to deal with his affairs....

"Besides," she added with a shy, sly twinkle, "whatever this experience has cost me in money, it's taught me something I would never have learned in any other way, something I badly needed to be taught, too."

"And that is----?" Willis prompted.

"Shan't tell you. I'm not sure I'm quite ready to admit all it's taught me, even to myself."

With this she left Willis to his vain surmises, confident that he would aim the shrewdest of them wide of the mark.

Otherwise, she found irritating the open gratification with which Willis took note of Bellamy's neighbourhood and drew an easy inference.

But he had the wisdom to refrain from mentioning the possibility he foresaw of such propinquity; and Lucinda was generous enough to imitate this reticence and spare Willis the pain of hopes disabused.

He went his way at length not, everything considered, dissatisfied with the way events, as he read them, were shaping social salvation for the young woman in whom he took an interest so genially paternal.

And Lucinda took leave of him with dewy eyes ... her one true friend....

Now she had n.o.body left but f.a.n.n.y; and she was coming daily to repose less faith in f.a.n.n.y's loyalty.

She was feeling very sorry for herself, and very lonely, and when most in need of friendly companions.h.i.+p--that is to say, when she wasn't busy at the studio--f.a.n.n.y was seldom at her call. f.a.n.n.y had given up the bungalow and moved to a residential hotel on the outskirts of the Wilts.h.i.+re district, whose accommodations she claimed were cheaper than the Hollywood's; pointing out that she hadn't anything now but the wage she earned by playing in Lucinda's picture, which wouldn't last much longer, and that she had to acquaint herself with the uses of economy.

Furthermore she knew several picture players who made the Wilts.h.i.+re hotel their home, and they were nice to her, always asking her out to dinner and the movies, or somewhere. It helped her hold her head up, she said, helped her to carry on.

She employed the slang phrase in its late British sense. Lucinda wondered if the significance of its older American usage were not perhaps more applicable to this instance. The duration of f.a.n.n.y's love-life with Lontaine had been too brief to keep her faithful to his memory.

Deep in Lucinda's subconsciousness an incidental recollection turned in its sleep. Somewhere, sometime, she had heard that Barry Nolan had a bungalow down Wilts.h.i.+re way. Or hadn't she?

At all events, he had: the address listed opposite his name in the telephone directory proved that.

After a time she ceased to suggest the little dinners and drives and minor distractions which would have interfered with f.a.n.n.y'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 friends.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sages 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 a.s.sociation 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 rehea.r.s.e 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 elan. 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 s.p.a.ced 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 G.o.d'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 gla.s.s-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 hea.r.s.ed 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 penmans.h.i.+p 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....