In sequel Lucinda knew two days made up of emotions singularly
stratified. This notwithstanding the fact (of which she needed to remind
herself with provoking frequency) that she had put Bel out of her life
for good and all, he was less than nothing to her now and, in the simple
nature of things, seeing she was pledged to another, never could be
more--more, at least, than the trial his pertinacity was rendering him
at present.
Most of the time, of course, all of it spent with Lynn or in dreaming of
him, she was merely but comprehensibly a young woman in love and glad of
it; pleased with herself, pleased with her lover, delighting in the
sweet secrecy with which it were seemly for the while to screen their
love.
Nevertheless, dark hours alternated in apprehension of what she was
resolved must be her final talk with Bel. But how successful dared she
hope to be in the business of making Bel agree even to that? Lucinda
found it by no means easy to compose an attitude which she could depend
upon to dishearten Bel decisively, without going to the length of
telling him point-blank that she was in love with another man and meant
to marry him as soon as her professional commitments would leave her
free to go through the mill of Reno. And to know Bellamy as she did was
to have a good warrant for mistrusting lest, far from reeling down to
defeat under the impact of that revelation, he might be moved merely to
make fun of it. It would be just like Bel to refuse to believe that
Lucinda Druce nee Harrington meant to marry a movie actor.
"Go ahead, Linda, by all means divorce me if your heart's set on
it"--one could almost hear him say it--"but don't tell me you're doing
it just to marry a man who paints his nose for a living."
Somehow one got scant comfort of the retort obvious, that if Lynn did
paint his nose he at least did it with nothing more harmful than paint.
At all costs, then, she must avoid the risk of telling Bel what she
intended, and keep the tone of the impending scene in tune with the
dignity which she had thus far been successful in maintaining, be firm
but cool, and give him clearly to understand it was hopeless his
attempting to make whole again that sacred vessel which his impious
hands had shattered.
Maintained upon such a plane that scene must have been both beautiful
and conclusive. And no doubt it would have been so but for one
circumstance: Bel not only failed to call on Lucinda at the time
appointed but failed even to send word of apology or explanation. An
affront whose realization transmuted nobility of spirit into resentment
most humanly rancorous.
Lucinda had sacrificed the evening to sense of duty; a true sacrifice,
for Lynn was leaving early next morning to spend a fortnight with his
company in an Oregon logging camp. So this would have been their last
evening together for fourteen livelong days, if Lucinda hadn't promised
it to Bellamy, and if Summerlad hadn't mournfully agreed (measurably to
Lucinda's disappointment in him) that she could not afford to dishonour
her promise. Surely their secret happiness was enough to compensate for
that much self-denial, especially when it meant the last of Bellamy....
Losing patience after hours of waiting, Lucinda called the Alexandria on
the telephone, and was informed that Mr. Druce had "checked out" early
in the morning, saying nothing of an intention to return.
Mystified even more than angry, Lucinda went to bed, but lay wakeful a
long time trying to fathom the enigma of such conduct in one whose need
of her had brought him all the way across America to beg that very
audience which had been granted only to be coolly ignored. The readiest
explanation, likewise at first blush the likeliest, was none the less at
odds with the premeditation to be read in Bel's leaving his hotel before
noon, which wasn't the action of a man whom drink had made forgetful,
but rather that of one who repented his haste in suing for something
which sober second-thought had satisfied him he didn't really want.
How funny, if so! How very human!
Lucinda contributed her first smile since nightfall to the darkness of
her bedchamber.
But having smiled, she frowned involuntarily....
No note came from Bellamy the next morning, and nothing transpired in
the course of the next several weeks to afford any clue to the riddle;
with the upshot that Lucinda thought about her husband a great deal more
than she wanted to or had at any time since leaving Chicago. Curiosity
being piqued no less than vanity, though she kept assuring herself it
was a matter of indifference to her what Bel did or didn't nowadays,
invariably the consideration followed that, all the same, it was
strange, it wasn't like Bel to treat any woman so rudely.
She would, in those days, have been glad and grateful for some interest
so absorbing as to relegate this vexing question to the realm of the
immaterial, where rightly it belonged. But, with Summerlad away, nothing
much happened with enervating regularity, the most interesting hours
Lucinda knew were those spent in her rooms waiting for Lynn to call up
on the long distance telephone. This he did every evening, and though
she was thus daily provided with exhilarating moments, those that
followed always seemed desperately the duller. The truth was, lacking
the sense of danger, of flirting with fire, that was intrinsic in their
love-making, lacking the sense of doing something that she oughtn't,
calmly flouting the rigid code of her caste and having nothing to pay,
Lucinda was beginning to find her environment a trifle tiresome. Say
what one would, there was a certain cloying sameness about it all.
Somebody once said in her hearing that there wasn't any weather in
Southern California but only climate. And it was true that at times the
wonder and beauty of everlasting sunlight seemed a poor offset to its
monotony; so that Lucinda would sometimes find herself grown a little
weary of the sky's dense, inexpressive, day-long blue; and even its
nightly extravagance of stars now and again impressed her as being too
persistently spectacular, an ostentation on the part of Nature as
tasteless as many jewels plastered on a woman's pretty bosom. One rather
wanted to recommend the chiffon of clouds....
Then, too, one grew acquainted with certain, definite limitations
restricting the amount of amusement to be had of taking active or
passive part in the simple, rowdy pleasures of the motion-picture
peerage. When one had several times attended the festivities these
staged in the public resorts most in favour or in their private homes,
one was apt to feel moderately surfeited with jazz of all sorts, mental
and moral as well as musical, and a society made up in the main of men
who thought it too much trouble to dress and women who as a matter of
habit airily consummated the contradiction of being at one and the same
time under and over-dressed. And once the novelty of learning to speak a
strange tongue had worn off, no great amount of intellectual nourishment
was to be extracted of studio shop-talk, which commonly was concerned in
the ratio of one to ten with the business of making motion-pictures and
with the private, broadly speaking, lives of the people who were making
them, lives seldom held worth the discussing when their conduct was
decorous.
Though personal liberty of action and freedom of speech be part of the
inalienable heritage of the American people, it was the sum of
Lucinda's observation that in the studios both were practised to the
point of abandon. She considered herself the most liberal-minded of
women, the life she had led till now had left her few illusions, she had
even been known to enunciate an aphorism in the sense that hypocrisy is
a lubricant essential to the mechanism of society: here, however, she
remarked, such lubrication was so generally dispensed with that
oftentimes the bearings screeched to Heaven.
But Heaven made no sign, and the Hollywood of active and retired
tradespeople, to which the studios had brought prosperity beyond its
maddest dreams, stuffed its ears and made believe there was nothing to
hear.
As for the studios, busy, complacent, and well-content to be spared the
troublesome necessity of pretending to be better than they were, they
forgot (if, indeed, they ever stopped to think) that they did not
constitute the whole of the community, and chuckled openly over a saying
that ran their rounds that season, the mot of one of their own wits:
"Are you married? Or do you live in Hollywood?"