Lucinda at about this time began to know imitations of a psychic
phenomenon working within herself for which she could find no better
name than that of multiple personality. She was well aware that she
didn't mean by this precisely what the term would have connoted to the
mind of a psychoanalyst, but it was as near as she was able to come to a
description of the disconcerting performances of the several Lucindas
who seemed to tenant her by turns and be forever warring for the right
to rule her daily actions and form her final destiny.
Figuring her soul in the likeness of a ship at sea, her sensations much
resembled those which might conceivably inform a passenger watching half
a dozen captains who were continually elbowing one another aside and
taking command and steering each a quite new course of individual
preference; with the inevitable result that a chart of any one day's run
must have closely counterfeited the trackings of a fly that had crawled
out of an ink-pot upon a fair white sheet of paper.
Most puzzling circumstance of all, the one true captain seemed to be
standing apart throughout and observing the antics of these upstart
understudies with considerable interest, not a little wonder, and some
alarm.
Certain it was that she had ceased to be the single-minded and
straightforward young woman she had been accustomed to think herself, a
creature moulded in an uncompromising cliche of caste and moving through
life upon lines definitely laid down, thinking only the thoughts,
uttering only the formulae, describing only the motions, experiencing
only the sentiments and sensations considered suitable to one of her
condition.
One act of mutiny had made an end to that one's reign and left an empty
throne to be contested by this odd crew of usurpers, who were so many
and so various, and in general so vaguely defined, that they defied
cataloguing; though a few there were who by virtue of pronounced
idiosyncrasy came to be recognized familiars.
There was one clear of vision, unillusioned even unto cynicism, but
honourable, straight-spoken and fair-dealing, at once proud and
unpretending, who was mostly in evidence in her hours of social life
with the Lontaines, as distinguished from the time she spent with them
in the way of business. This was Mrs. Bellamy Druce of her equivocal
phase, who had ceased to be a wife and had yet to become unwedded: a
woman worldly-wise and a trifle weary, but warm of heart, tolerant, and
companionable.
Then there was Linda Lee, the rather excited and ambitious young thing
who was all the while flying hither and yon in motor-cars, making
curious acquaintances by the score, simulating an intelligent interest
in affairs, legal matters, comparative merits of different studio
accommodations, cost of equipment, salaries of employees, all those
questions upon which Lontaine did her the honour of consulting her,
knowing full well that she was fully satisfied as to his competence and
incredulous of her own, and would faithfully endorse any course he might
take or recommend. The first function of Miss Lee's office in the scheme
was apparently that of drawing cheques. She led a busy life.... It was
also anything but an uninteresting one, though Miss Lee often wondered
what it was all about and how she had come to be in it and sometimes
felt that she was no better than a poor impostor and doomed in due
course to be disgracefully shown up.
Another was a rare, shy visitant, never viewed by mortal eyes, who held
dominion only in the dead hours of these nights when Lucinda lay
wakeful and lonely, feeling lost without that which for so long had
seemed an essential part of life, Bel's love and the dearness of him. A
pathetic spirit, prone to tears and sighs and bitter self-reproachings.
But when morning came, this one had always retreated to the outermost
marches of memory, where she lingered, looking back a little wistfully,
a timid wraith with pleading eyes, tenuous and evanescent as the
souvenir of some caress long perished.
Again one was aware of a Lucinda who, abhorring the vacuum of empty
hours, committed the maddest extravagance and fairly ran amok in shops,
buying right and left with a recklessness that soon made her unawares
the axis of a gale of whispers; in this manner dissipating a minor
fortune before her first month in Los Angeles had run out.
Lamentably there was a Lucinda who did not scruple to resort to the
shabbiest shifts to compass her ends; who, for example, without one
qualm of conscience wrote to Harford Willis that, having been influenced
to delay proceeding to Reno, she had fallen under the spell of Southern
California, thought seriously of making it her future home, and would be
glad if he would turn her certain investments into ready cash against
the contingency of her deciding to purchase some princely property.
Last of all the major company of these lately apprehended Lucindas was
the woman emotionally malcontent, newly fallen out of love but none the
less still in love with love, who with eyes now amused, now indulgent,
now shocked or startled, saw herself slowly and reluctantly but surely
weakening to the wooing of Lynn Summerlad.
In a way the thing seemed fated. She knew nobody else, aside from the
Lontaines. She was meeting people daily, of course, but not on terms to
warrant any but the most commonplace civilities: men of affairs who
reasonably reckoned her a pretty nonentity and concentrated on Lontaine
as the person with money to spend; now and again some minor celebrity of
the cinema colony, who, if male, would find some means to let her know
she wouldn't be too ill treated should she succumb, or if female, would
both envy and resent her inimitable chic, and at the same time put her
in a place as a mere amateur who mustn't expect too much.
When she came to look back at those days, Lucinda saw herself as one
always on the go with the Lontaines and Summerlad in his spectacular
motor-car: pelting headlong for some objective leagues away, Riverside
for luncheon at the Mission Inn, San Diego for a week-end, Santa Barbara
for the drive along the magnificent Coastal Highway, or any other of
two-score remote play-grounds; going out of an evening to one of the
local restaurants, Victor Hugo's for its good food and urbane service,
Marcelle's for dancing and its dumbfoundering scheme of decorations,
Sunset Inn for the lark of it and the people one saw, the Ship for its
wild traditions, or to some lost place in the labyrinth of strange
streets below South Main, to which Summerlad alone knew the way, where
one might get food purely exotic in character, Spanish, Chinese,
Japanese; or (and this was part of the programme of nearly every night)
braving the bill-of-fare at one or another of the city theatres or their
arrogant rivals, the sumptuous cinemas.
In the course of that first month Lucinda sat through more photoplays
than she had ever seen before, interested even when, as all too often,
they were overweeningly ambitious of intention and sorry in execution;
determined to read their riddle and learn what Summerlad and Lontaine
were talking about when they argued in the jargon of the studios.... But
it was really the audiences that thronged these thundering temples of
the silent drama that fascinated her, audiences of a texture
inexplicably strange to Eastern eyes, like the street crowds from which
they were drawn, so dense and constant that one was tempted to believe
the people of Los Angeles never went home except to sleep.
Such torrents of motor vehicles brawled through the city channels, the
only wonder was that anybody ever walked. Yet it was seldom Lucinda's
fortune to view the sidewalks in the heart of town when they were not
aswarm with moving masses of the most heterogeneous composition,
shuffling, staring, oddly taciturn.
The great body of these seemed to be sober-sided souls in steady
circumstances; a bourgeoisie smug and semi-shabby, ignorant of its past,
heedless of its future, largely unconcerned with its present;
self-dedicated to existences as uninteresting and useful as a cow's.
Summerlad cursed it with a local aphorism to the sense that Los Angeles
was governed by small-town people from the Middle West who had come to
California each with one lung and one dollar and a grim determination to
hang onto both to the bitter end.
Infiltrating this primary element was one alien to it but comprehending
also figures that might have served for a pageant of North American
history, figures many of them like old wood-cuts brought to life; red
Indians, Down East Yankees, Mexicans, gaunt hillsmen from Kentucky and
Tennessee, towering Texans, ranchmen from the plains, and folk in whose
eyes shone the brooding abstraction of the desert; in the main
ill-clothed and uncouth of gesture, hiding behind apathetic masks a
certain awe and sense of awkwardness.
And then, like spume wind-torn from the crests of sullen seas,
glittering with rainbow iridescence, a froth of creatures money-drunk
and amusement-mad, drones lured to California by its fabled Winter
climate, and an earth-born army audaciously experimenting with wings
bestowed by the careless bounty of the cinema.
Against this picture of a ceaseless crush in the centre of the city,
Lucinda set in contrast so sharp that it never lost its power to stir
her wonder, a picture on every hand repeated off the main arteries of
traffic in the radiating residential suburbs: an interminable street of
broad-eaved white bungalows hugging the ground, each isolate in its
unfenced plot of green, to each its vines, its flower beds, its
stripling orange trees, and each and every one silent and in all seeming
lifeless, cowering in the day-long glare of that vast and empty vault of
blue, like a city of doll-houses which the children had outgrown....