The finding of Nelly's body crushed beneath the wreckage of a motor-car
on the beach some fifty miles north of Los Angeles, gave the story of
the Summerlad shooting an extended lease of twenty-four hours only on
front-page space in the newspapers. In none of these was the ownership
of the car called in question; in which circumstance Lucinda thought to
detect the influential hand of "Mr. Bellamy Druce of New York," finding
further support for this surmise in the fact that even Bel's name came
in for astonishingly occasional mention, considering his active part in
the aftermath of the affair, and especially considering the civic zeal
ordinarily displayed by the local press in playing up the presence in
"the Queen City of the Sunny Southland" of personages of social or
financial consequence in the East.
Then, since the death of the unhappy woman had defeated all hope of
lurid court proceeding, and rendered piquant exploitation of "wild life
inside the movie colony" an open invitation to actions for criminal
libel as soon as Summerlad got well enough to reckon damages to his
reputation, the cause celebre went into quick eclipse. The newspapers of
the third morning carried brief notices inconspicuously placed to the
effect that Summerlad was reported out of danger, though his complete
recovery promised to be a matter of many weeks, and that the body of his
wife was being shipped East to her parents. And the affair was never
mentioned more.
Lucinda spent the best part of that day (and a good part of the next two
as well) in the projection-room with Zinn and Wallace Day, her new
director, sitting in judgment on thirty-six reels of film, the
accumulated sum of Nolan's fumbling with about two-thirds of a picture.
Not that such extravagance was anything extraordinary under prevailing
methods of production. It remains to this day quite in order for a
director to photograph between fifty and sixty-thousand feet of scenes
on celluloid, only forty-five hundred feet of which will ever be
revealed to the public. The ordinary photoplay, Lucinda learned, runs to
not more than six reels, or six-thousand feet of film, approximately
one-fourth of which is devoted to reading matter, leaving forty-five
hundred feet or less to carry on the story in terms of pictorial action.
The more than seven miles of photography which constituted Nolan's
legacy to his successor would consequently require boiling down to about
one-twelfth its length to make room for the third of the picture which
he had left undirected.
This monumental feat of waste had been achieved by means of
photographing every scene, even the simplest, in inordinate length, over
and over again, and from every conceivable angle, much of the time with
three cameras in simultaneous operation, and by making provision to
break up each scene with close-ups of the principal players heaving
their chests and mugging intimately at audiences as yet undreaming of
their treat in store.
Thus it came to pass that Lucinda, who had at first welcomed the
prospect of the seclusion which the projection-room was to afford her,
the freedom which those blank black walls would insure from
consciousness of fleering eyes and tongues over-ready to whisper evil
concerning her relations with the wounded man--Lucinda, long before a
fourth part of the rough footage had been unreeled for her inspection,
began to find inexpressibly tiresome the sight of her shadow-self
mincing and simpering through endless repetitions of business with which
she was already conversant to satiety, and with all her heart wished
herself back again in the uncompromising glare of the Kliegs, where at
least, though onlookers might mock and mouth lies, she would have work
to do that would help her to forget.
As it was, though her eyes were constant to the screen, her attention
was forever flagging, her thoughts harking back along old trails where
heartaches haunted....
The lively disputes between Zinn and Day which from time to time
interrupted the procession of the scenes, as those two debated ways and
means to cut and eliminate and avoid retaking, contributed little to the
relief of her afflicted spirit. Hourly its burden of boredom grew more
nearly insufferable, toleration of it more seemingly insane.
The business as a whole seemed so stupid, so puerile, so hopelessly
inconsequential.
Pictures! her very soul sickened at the sound of the word. As if
motion-pictures mattered, or whether they were good or bad, inanely done
or cleverly. People went to see them anyway, paid money to sit goggling
at them, and incomprehensibly dispersed without tearing down the
theatres which had taken such cheap advantage of their confidence!
All this bickering about "saving" a production whose asininity one
esteemed beyond repair as long as one lacked the moral courage to touch
a match to its interminable footage of footless photography!
If it hadn't been for that last quarrel with Bellamy, if it were not for
seeming to give in to his wishes and thus giving him more encouragement
to tamper with her concerns, Lucinda before the end of that first day in
the projection-room would have cried off her agreement with Zinn,
abandoned the production then and there, pocketed her loss without
murmur, and let the looks of it go hang.
But still the secret springs of vanity were subtly at work. For her own
sake, she insisted, for the sake of her pride, false pride though it
might prove in the end, she couldn't draw back at this juncture, she had
to go on and, if it were in her so to do, make good her claims to
consideration as one who had shown at least a certain promise of value
to the screen.
So though she shuddered to contemplate the weeks to come, she steeled
heart and soul to see her picture through to the very end.
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 asserted 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 assassination 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 nobody 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 Fanny'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 Fanny'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 nobody left but Fanny; and she was coming daily to repose
less faith in Fanny's loyalty.
She was feeling very sorry for herself, and very lonely, and when most
in need of friendly companionship--that is to say, when she wasn't busy
at the studio--Fanny was seldom at her call. Fanny had given up the
bungalow and moved to a residential hotel on the outskirts of the
Wiltshire 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 Wiltshire
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 Fanny'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 Wiltshire 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 Fanny'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 friendship 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 passages 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 association 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 rehearse 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 spaced 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 God'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
glass-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 hearsed 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 penmanship 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....
In the upshot Lucinda acknowledged receipt of neither, but for two
mornings her waste-basket, with its deep drifts of note-paper minutely
scrapped, bore witness to her endeavors to frame a reply at once final
and not too cruel.
Better (she decided) send no word at all than a letter which could only
hurt his pride ... _if_ Lynn still believed he loved her ... if he had
ever!...
The talk of the studio kept her advised concerning the good progress of
his convalescence. She knew no doubt at all but that he would as
speedily get well of his disappointment in her.
For her part, the thing was dead and done and finished and as something
that had never been; the only wonder was, it ever had....
One evening, as she was leaving the studio, she met Wallace Day on the
steps of the administration building, and learned from him that, making
fair allowance for every imaginable delay, he counted on making an end
to camera-work in two days more.
Accordingly, instead of going directly home to the Hollywood, Lucinda
motored to Los Angeles and booked reservations for Reno by the night
train of the second day following, a slow train but the first that she
could feel sure of catching.
She had meant to keep her purpose secret, holding it of no consequence
to anybody but herself what she might elect to do, once her work was
finished, and bearing in mind the possibility that, if news of her
intention should by any chance leak out at the studio, it would find its
way to the ears of Summerlad. She understood that he was now far enough
forward on the road to recovery to spend part of each day in an invalid
chair, and thought it wise to run no risk of finding out that his
improvement had been understated.
Conscience nevertheless reproached her when she thought of Fanny, and on
the way back to the Hollywood she instructed her chauffeur to make a
detour and stop at Fanny's hotel.
If Fanny had no prior engagement, they might have one last evening
together. But she would hold back her news till the moment came to say
good-bye....
Drawing near the hotel, she recognized the conspicuously ornamental car
of Barry Nolan waiting at the carriage-block, and as she bent forward to
tell her chauffeur not to stop, she had changed her mind, she saw Fanny
come out of the entrance, Nolan ambling, with an air of contented habit,
at her elbow.
At the same time Fanny caught sight of Lucinda, pulled up short in
confusion, then smiled brightly and waved a hand, while Nolan rather
blankly fingered the visor of his cap. And Lucinda nodded, smiled in
turn, and passed, wondering if the deep colour she had remarked in
Fanny's cheek had been merely the sunset's mordant comment on an artful
glow of pink.
Well: that was that....
Yet it was long before the picture faded of that girlish figure, posed
prettily in startlement, brief skirts whipped about it by the evening
wind, with its gay look of mirth, half shame-faced, half-impudent,
wholly charming ... sweet grist for the mills whose grinding knows no
rest.
The pity of it!... Or was it? Had one the right to say? The mills of
Mammon grind ever but free will alone keeps the hoppers filled. The
choice had been with Fanny, she had chosen in conformance with the
dictates of predisposition.
And who could say she hadn't chosen wisely, who had every gift that
makes for swift and prosperous progress along the road she had preferred
to go?--beauty and wit, ready adaptability, and that highly developed
sense of self which often enables the worst of women to travel far and
thriftily. Idle to waste time deploring that she had seen fit to throw
herself away on Nolan: she hadn't, Nolan, though he might never know it,
was but a stepping-stone, a single link in a chain that led to a far
shore whose sands were dust of gold....