"I feel," Lucinda confessed, "precisely like a weathervane in a
whirlwind, I mean the way it ought to: every few minutes I find my nose
pointing in a new direction."
"You dear!" Seated opposite her at the windows of the Lontaine
drawing-room, Fanny leaned over and squeezed her hand affectionately. "I
can't tell you how happy I am that pretty nose is pointing now the same
way as ours."
"And I, Fanny. It's really a wonderful sensation, you know, after all
that worry and uncertainty, to know one's life is mapped ahead for a few
days at least. I don't believe any lost puppy ever felt more friendless
than I did just before we met, when I thought I was going to get off at
Kansas City. And my present frame of mind is that same puppy's when it
finds itself all at once adopted by a family that likes animals."
Kansas City was already the idle menace of a dimming dream. Awkward but
unavoidable explanations, haltingly offered, had been accepted without
question: a manifestation of tactful sympathy which had not only won
Lucinda's heart completely but, working together with her reluctance to
proceed to Reno before she could feel reasonably sure of being suffered
to live there unmolested, had influenced her to agree to go on with the
Lontaines to Los Angeles; whither (she was tacitly led to infer) his
motion-picture interests had peremptorily called Lontaine.
It seemed a sensible move as well as one most agreeable in prospect. She
could rest in comfort and friendly companionship for a few weeks,
consult with Harford Willis by letter, at leisure and with a calm mind
plan for the future. She now saw, as if new light had somehow been cast
upon her problems by this meeting of happy chance, that there was really
no hurry, no reason why she shouldn't take her time about the unpleasant
business, attend to its transaction only when and as it suited her will
and convenience. It wasn't as if she wanted to remarry, or was in any
way dependent upon Bel and must beg the courts to make him provide for
her. If anything, her personal resources exceeded Bellamy's.
And then it would be amusing to see Los Angeles under the wing of so
well-informed a motion-picture impresario as Lontaine. That afternoon at
the Culp studios had been fascinating; how much more so would it be to
live for a time in a city that was, at least as Lontaine limned it, one
vast open-air studio, to be associated with people who were actually
doing something with their lives. What a change from the life that had
grown to seem tedious and unprofitable even before Bellamy had made its
continuance intolerable!
"But you haven't told me," she complained, "about those tests. Did you
go to see them that day? How did they come out? How did I look?"
"Oh, Cindy! what a shame you missed it. You were adorable, everybody
simply raved about you."
"Fact, Mrs. Druce. You outclassed even Alma Daley in that Palm Room
scene. No, but seriously: it was you first, Miss Daley second, Fanny a
good third, the rest nowhere. You missed scoring no end of a personal
triumph in the projection-room. Though, if you ask me, Miss Daley was
just as well pleased."
"You're making fun of me."
"Absolutely not."
"Well, it's hard to believe, but if you mean it, the Culps and their
cameraman would seem to have been right."
"Oh, I'd almost forgotten!" Fanny cried. "Mr. Culp was terribly put out
because you weren't there, and made me promise faithfully to ask you to
call him up and make an appointment for another private showing."
"Right about what?" Lontaine earnestly wanted to know.
"Why, they were so sure I would screen well, as they put it, Mr. Culp
made me an offer, as we were leaving, to act with his wife in her next
picture."
Lontaine's eyes widened into a luminous blue stare; and abruptly, as if
to hide the thought behind them, he threw away a half-smoked cigarette
and, helping himself to another, bent forward, tapping it on a
thumb-nail.
"Really, dearest? How priceless! And what did you say to the creature?"
"Oh, I was kind but firm."
"Ben Culp's a big man in the cinema game," Lontaine commented without
looking up. "His advice is worth something, Mrs. Druce. If he says you'd
make a hit, you might do worse than listen to him. That is, of course,
if you should ever think of taking a flyer in the motion-picture
business."
"I'm not even dreaming of such a thing. Why, it's absurd!"
"I'll wager you wouldn't say so if you once saw yourself on the screen.
Only wish I had a print of those tests to show you."
"I'm not curious."
"Then you're the modern miracle, Mrs. Druce--a woman without either
vanity or a secret ambition to be a cinema star." Lontaine laughed and
lazily got up. "I can only say you've got a chance to make a name for
yourself I wouldn't overlook if I stood in your shoes.... But if you'll
excuse me now, think I'll roll along and arrange matters with the
conductor and porters."
"You're too good to me," Lucinda protested. "I know I'm imposing----"
"Absolutely nothing in that. Only too happy."
The door was behind Lucinda's shoulder. Closing it, unseen by her,
Lontaine contrived to exchange with his wife a look of profound
significance. Then he lounged thoughtfully forward to the club car and
delayed there, in deep abstraction, long enough to smoke two cigarettes
before proceeding to hunt up and interview the conductor about Lucinda's
change of destination, then instruct the porters to shift her luggage to
the Lontaine drawing-room and his own effects to the section she was
vacating.
Into making this move Lucinda had been talked against her half-hearted
demurs. She knew very well it wasn't the right thing to do, to take
advantage of their kindness of heart, to separate husband and wife; but
they wouldn't listen to her; and after all it was hardly in human nature
to undergo again the ordeal of the open sleeping-car by night if one
might by any means avoid it; while Lontaine insisted he wouldn't mind in
the least.
"I'm an old hand at travelling under any and all conditions," he had
asserted--"accustomed to roughing it, you know. Even upper berths hold
no terrors for me, while a whole section is simply sybaritic sensuality.
If one hadn't brought Fanny along, it would never have entered the old
bean to do oneself better than a lower. Absolutely. You don't imagine
Fan and I could rest in comfort, knowing you were unhappy back there?
Rather not!"
In point of fact, Lontaine had been at once eager to earn Lucinda's
favour and not at all averse to a move which promised more personal
liberty than one could command penned up in a stuffy coop with one's
wife. Oh, not that he wasn't fond enough of Fan, but--well, when all was
said, one was bound to admit Fan was a bit, you know, American. Not to
put too fine a point on it, decidedly American. Nobody's fool, Fan. Had
a head on her shoulders and used it, and a way of looking at one,
besides, as if she were actually looking through one, now and then, that
made one feel positively ratty. Chap could do with an occasional
furlough from that sort of thing.
It wasn't as if they were still lovers, you see. Rough going, the
devil's own luck and mutual disappointment had put rather a permanent
crimp into the first fine raptures. They got along well enough nowadays,
to be sure, but it was no good pretending that either couldn't have done
just as well alone. But then it had hardly been in the first place what
one might call a love match. Oh, yes, tremendously taken with each
other, and all that; but if you put it to the test of cold facts, the
truth was, Fan had married with an eye to that distant title, whose
remoteness the War had so inconsiderately failed to abridge, while
Lontaine had been quite as much influenced by Fan's filial relationship
to a fortune of something like eighty millions. But that hope, too, had
long since gone glimmering.
Rotten form, not to say vicious, on the part of the Terror of the Wheat
Pit, to cut off his only begotten daughter with a shilling, one meant to
say its equivalent measured by the bulk of his wealth. The legacy Fan
had picked up in Chicago would have been barely enough to satisfy their
joint and several creditors. Not that one was mad enough to fritter the
money away like that. But if this Los Angeles venture were to turn out a
bloomer....
But why anticipate the worst? Buck up and consider the widely advertised
silver lining.... A bit of luck, falling in with this Druce girl, under
the circumstances. No question about the solid establishment of her
financial standing: the good old Rock of Gibraltar was a reed in the
wind by comparison.... Now if only one dared count on Fan's being
amenable to reason, grasping the logical possibilities, doing her bit
like a sensible little woman....
Seated in Section 10, waiting for the porter to bring back his personal
impedimenta from the drawing-room, Harry Lontaine turned a handsome face
to the window, frowning absently, the nervous frown of a man whose
cleverness has never proved quite equal to the task of satisfying
appetites at once strong and fastidious.
By degrees its place was taken by a look of dreaming: Lontaine was
viewing not the dreary wastes of Kansan lands under the iron rule of
Winter but a California of infatuate imagining, a land all smiling in
the shine of a benign sun, set with groves of orange trees and olives,
dotted with picturesque bungalows whose white walls were relieved by the
living green of vines, and peopled by a race of blessed beings born to a
heritage of lifelong beauty, youth, and love-in-idleness; a land in
whose charmed soil fortunes grew of seeds of careless sowing, and
through whose scenes of subtropical loveliness prophetic vision descried
a heroic figure moving, courted and applauded by happy, unenvious
multitudes, the figure of Harry Lontaine, Esq., newest but mightiest
overlord of the cinema....
From this delectable realm the dreamer was recalled by consciousness of
somebody standing in the aisle and staring impertinently. Racial shyness
erased all signs of wistfulness in one instant and cloaked sensitiveness
in a guise of glacial arrogance; in another, recognition dawned, and
hauteur was in turn discarded and a more approachable mien set up in its
stead. Lontaine was too diligent a student of motion-pictures not to
know at sight the features of Lynn Summerlad, by long odds the most
popular male star of the American cinema. A personage worth knowing....
Misreading his expression, Mr. Summerlad felt called upon to apologize.
"Beg your pardon, but I was expecting to find a lady in this section, I
may say a friend: a Mrs. Druce. Do you by any chance----?"