"Three o'clock, Thomas, say a quarter to."
"Yes, madam."
The footman performed a faultless salute and doubled round to hop into place beside the chauffeur, while the door-porter shut the door with a bang whose nicely calculated volume told all the world within ear-shot that the door-porter of the fashionable hotel of the day was banging the door to Mrs. Bellamy Druce's brougham.
The technique of every calling is similarly susceptible of refinement into an art.
Two Lucinda Druces crossed the sidewalk and passed through the turnstile of bright metal and plate-glass which served as a door at the Forty-sixth street entrance to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel—the one perceptible to mortal vision a slender and fair young person costumed in impeccable taste and going her way with that unstudied grace which is the last expression of man's will to make woman a creature whose love shall adorn him.
To the luncheon-hour mob that milled in the meagre foyer of this hotel, which holds its public by studiously subjecting it to every Continental inconvenience, she presented the poise of a pretty woman who has never known care more galling than uncertainty as to her most becoming adornment. Not even the shadow of that other Lucinda who walked with her, who was no more separate from her than her own shadow, who ceased not to beat her bosom and cry to Heaven for help, was to be detected in the composed, steady eyes that searched swiftly, but without seeming to see, the faces of that congested congregation of fashionables and half-fashionables and would-be fashionables, their apes and sycophants and audience.
Seeing nowhere those whom she was seeking, Lucinda made her way to the lounge; or it would be more true to say a way was made for her by the simple prestige of her presence, by the magic whisper of her name from mouth to mouth commanding a deference neither beauty nor breeding alone could have earned her.
The lounge was at that hour three-quarters invested by an overflow of tables from the dining-room proper, only at its eastern end a few easy chairs and settees had been left for the accommodation of those lucky enough to win past the functionary who guarded the portals, charged with winnowing the sheep from the goats, admitting the elect to this antechamber to the one true Olympus, shunting off the reject to the limbo of the downstairs grill.
Sighting Lucinda from afar, with a bow of ineffable esteem this one glided forward. "Mrs. Sedley and Mrs. Guest are waiting for you, Mrs. Druce." At the same time Lucinda herself discovered her friends occupying a settee, with Fanny Lontaine between them. "Your table is quite ready. Do you wish luncheon to be served at once?"
Lucinda assented pleasantly and passed on. Immediately the headwaiter caught the eye of a subaltern in the middle of the room, and in intimate silence conversed with him without moving a muscle more than the superciliary. The confederate acknowledged this confidence by significantly dropping his lashes, then in even more cryptic fashion flashed on the inspiring intelligence to that statuesque figure which, from the head of the stairs, between lounge and oval dining-room, brooded with basilisk eyes over the business of both. Thus a minor miracle was worked, bringing that one at once to life and down to earth; in another moment the maître-d'hôtel himself was attentive at Lucinda's elbow.
"But I never dreamed you three knew one another!" she was exclaiming in the surprise of finding Fanny Lontaine on terms with those whom she had bidden to meet her. "Fanny, why didn't you tell me——?"
"But I didn't know—how should I?—your Nelly Guest was Ellen Field married."
"That's so; I'd completely forgotten you both come from Chicago."
"Hush!" Nelly Guest gave a stage hiss. "Someone might hear. You never forget anything, do you? And all these years I've tried so hard to live it down! It's no fair...."
Impressively convoyed, the quartet proceeded to "Mrs. Druce's table" in the oval room. Rumour of gossip and turning of heads attended their progress, flattery to which Lucinda, Nelly and Jean were inured, of which they were aware only as they were of sensuous strains of stringed music, the orderly stir of waiters, the satisfying sheen of silver and napery, the brilliance and brouhaha of that gathering of amiable worldlings, and the heady breath of it, a subtly blended, oddly inoffensive mélange of scents of flowers and scented flesh, smells of cooked food and cigarette smoke.
But in the understanding of Fanny Lontaine, accustomed to admiration as she was, and no stranger to the public life of European capitals, the flutter caused by the passage of her companions through a phase of existence so polite and skeptical conferred upon them an unmistakable cachet. She had been long abroad and out of touch, she had never been on intimate terms with New York ways, but the busy mind at work behind her round eyes of a child was like a sponge for the absorption of delicate nuances and significant signs of all sorts. Life had made it like that.
Six years married, and two years older than Lucinda Druce, Fanny retained, and would till the end, whatever life might hold in store for her, a look of wondering and eager youthfulness. Romance trembled veritably upon her lashes. She had a way of holding her lips slightly apart and looking steadily at one when spoken to, as if nothing more interesting had ever been heard by the ears ambushed in her bobbed, ashen hair. Her eyes of a deep violet shade held an innocence of expression little less than disconcerting. Her body seemed never to have outgrown its adolescence, yet its slightness was quite without any angularity or awkwardness, it achieved roundness without plumpness, a stroke of physical genius. In the question of dress she showed a tendency to begin where the extreme of the mode left off, a fault held venial in view of her apparent immaturity. And then, of course, she had lived so long in England, where people are more broad-minded....
Apparently not talkative but a good listener, she had a knack of making what she did say stick in memory, not so much for its content as for its manner, a sort of shy audacity that pointed observations often racy and a candour sometimes devastating. But unless one happened to be looking at Fanny when she spoke, her remarks were apt to seem less memorable, her humour less pungent.
"It's heavenly," she now declared, coolly staring at their neighbours through the smoke of her cigarette—"simply divine to be home. I'm sure I'd never want to see Europe again if it weren't for Prohibition."
"You're not going to suffer on that account today," Jean Sedley promised, producing from her handbag a little flash of jewelled gold.
"But I shall!" Fanny protested with tragic expression. "It's the frightful hypocrisy that's curdling my soul and ruining my insides. It makes one homesick for England, where people drink too much because they like it, and not to punish themselves for electing a government which conscientiously interprets the will of the people—and leaves them to interpret their wont."
"No dear, thanks." Smilingly Nelly Guest refused to let Jean fill her glass.
"The figure?" Jean enquired in deep sympathy.
"I've positively got to," Nelly sighed. She cast a rueful glance down over her plump, pretty person. "Compassionate Columbia simply must not waddle when she pokes her horn of plenty at famine-stricken China."
"Oh, that wretched pageant!" Lucinda roused from a lapse into communion with the Lucinda who made an unseen fifth. "When is it? I'd forgotten all about it." Nelly Guest named a day two weeks in the future. "And I haven't even thought about my costume! Oh, why do we punish ourselves so for Charity's sweet sake?"
"Because deep down in our hearts we all like to parade our virtues."
"Much virtue in that plural," Nelly Guest commented.
"Well, I don't like parading mine in pageants, I assure you."
"Don't you, honestly, Cindy?" Fanny asked. "I should think you'd love that sort of thing. You used to be perfectly mad about acting."
"So is every woman—isn't she?—at one stage or another of her life convinced she's truly a great actress cheated out of her birthright."
"I know. All the same you know you've got talent. Don't you remember our open-air performance ofMuch Ado About Nothing? You were a simply ravishing Rosalind."
"Heavens! What do amateur theatricals prove?"
"For one thing," Jean Sedley commented, "how long-suffering one's friends can be."
"And one's enemies. Consider what they sit through just to see us make public guys of ourselves."
"Well!" Nelly Guest lamented: "my pet enemies are going to have a real treat at the pageant unless I can find some way to reduce, inside a fortnight."
"There was a man in London had a marvelous system," Fanny volunteered. "Everybody was going to him last Season. There ought to be somebody like him over here."
Duly encouraged, she launched into a startlingly detailed account of London's latest fad in "treatment"; and Lucinda's thoughts turned back to her other self, insensibly her identity receded into and merged with its identity again and became lost in its preoccupations.
How to go on, how to play out this farce of a life with Bel when faith in him was dead?
Strange that faith should have been shattered finally by such a minor accident as her overhearing that morning's treachery. As if it had been the first time she had known Bel to be guilty of disloyalty to her! But today she could not forget that neither love nor any kindly feeling for his wife, nor even scruples of self-respect, but only dread of a contretemps had decided Bel against lunching Amelie in that very room, making open show o£ his infatuation before all those people who knew them both and who, being human, must have gloated, nudged, and tittered; who, for all Lucinda knew to the contrary, were even now jeering behind their hands, because they knew things about Bel and his gallivantings which all the world knew but his wife. Even the servants——!
Her cheeks kindled with indignation—and blazed still more ardently when she discovered that she had, in her abstraction, been staring squarely at Richard Daubeney, who was lunching with friends at a nearby table.
But Dobbin bowed and smiled in such a way that Lucinda's confusion and her sense of grievance were drowned under by a wave of gratitude. She nodded brightly and gave him a half-laughing glance.
Good old Dobbin! She had never appreciated how much she was missing him till he had turned up again last night and offered to take his old place in her life, on the old terms as nearly as might be, the old terms as necessarily modified by her own change of status.
What a pity!
Those three words were so clearly sighed in her mental hearing that Lucinda, fearing lest she had uttered them aloud, hastily consulted the faces of her companions. But they had exhausted the subject of reducing régimes and passed on naturally—seeing that Nelly and Jean were approaching that stage when such matters become momentous—to that of "facials."
"... Parr's fuller's earth and witch hazel. Make a thick paste of it and add a few drops of tincture of benzoin, then simply plaster it all over your face, but be careful not to get it near your eyes, and let it dry. It only takes a few minutes to harden, and then you crack and peel it off, and it leaves your skin like a baby's."
"Elizabeth Baird charges twenty-five dollars a treatment."
"But my dear, you can see for yourself how stupid it is to pay such prices to a beauty specialist when the materials cost only a few cents at any drug-store, and anybody can apply it, your maid if you don't want to take the trouble yourself...."
What a pity!
But was it? Would she have been happier married to Dobbin? Was it reasonable to assume that Dobbin would not have developed in the forcing atmosphere of matrimony traits quite as difficult as Bel's to deal with? In this wrong-headed world nobody was beyond criticism, and anybody's faults, condonable though they might seem at a distance, could hardly fail of exaggeration into vices through daily observation at close range. Impossible to imagine any two human creatures living together, after the first raptures had begun to wane, without getting on each other's nerves now and then.
Wasn't the fault, then, more with the institution than with the individuals?
Lucinda remembered having once heard a physician of psycho-analytic bent commit himself to the statement that in ten years of active professional life he had never entered one ménage where two people lived in wedded happiness. And sifting a list of married acquaintances, Lucinda found it not safe to say of one that he or she was happy; of most it was true that they had the best of reasons for being unhappy. It was true of Nelly Guest and Jean Sedley, it was true of herself, doubtless it was true of Fanny. Lucinda had yet to meet Lontaine, and if Fanny's looks were fair criterion, she was the most carefree of women; and yet...
Fanny caught Lucinda eyeing her and smiled.
"What under the sun are you thinking about so solemnly, Cindy?"
"You, dear. You haven't told me anything about yourself yet."
"No chance. Give me half a show"—Fanny glanced askance at Jean and Nelly, now amiably engaged in bickering about the merits of various modistes—"and you shall know All."
"I'd dearly love to. You must lunch with me at home some day soon; and then I want you and your husband to dine with us—say next Thursday?"
"I don't know. That's one of the exciting things about being married to Harry Lontaine, one never knows what tomorrow will bring forth. We've got to go to Chicago soon, because—daresay you know—father relented enough to leave me a little legacy, nothing to brag about, but nothing people in our position can afford to despise, either."
Lucinda made a sympathetic face and said something vague about everybody in England still feeling the pinch of the War. But Fanny elected to scorn generalizations.
"Oh, the only effect the War could have had on our fortunes would have been to kill off the half a dozen relatives that stand between Harry and the title. But he was out of luck—served three years in France and Flanders and got all shot up and decorated with the dearest little tin medals on the prettiest ribbons, while his precious kinsmen held down cushy berths in the Munitions and kept in training for the longevity record."
"But how proud you must have been——!"
"Of Harry? On account of his decorations? My dear: heroes are three-a-penny in England today. You see, everybody, more or less, barring Harry's family, had a shot at active service, just as almost everybody has a shot at marriage sooner or later; only, of course, the percentage of unscarred survivors of the War was higher."
(Fanny, too! What a world!)
"For all that, I do want to meet your husband."
"You will, soon enough. He's lunching some men down in the grill, a business luncheon, American cinema people; and I told him when he got rid of them to wait for me in the lounge. Very likely we'll find him there on our way out."
"How nice. He's interested in the motion-picture business then?"
"In a way. That is, he was, in England, for a while, after the War. And when we decided to come over about my legacy, he secured options on the American rights to some Swedish productions. Somebody told him you were having a run on foreign films over here, so Harry said he might as well try to turn an honest penny. I told him it wouldn't do him any harm, he'd enjoy the adventure."
"I see," said Lucinda a bit blankly. "I don't know much about it, of course, almost never go to see a motion picture; that is, unless it's Elsie Ferguson, I've always been mad about her."
She looked round to the waiter who was substituting a finger-bowl for her neglected sweet. "We'll all want coffee, Ernest, and you may bring it to us in the Palm Room."
"Four demi-tasses: yes, Mrs. Druce."
"Nelly! Jean!" These Lucinda haled forth from the noisome morass of the newest divorce scandal. "Fanny's first husband is waiting for her in the lounge, and she's getting nervous."
"Good-looking, I suppose?" Jean Sedley enquired, and got a merry nod from Fanny. "She ought to be nervous. A New York Winter is the open season for other women's good-looking husbands, it doesn't do to leave them standing round loose—here of all places!"
Fanny's husband came in shortly after Lucinda and her guests had settled down to coffee and cigarettes in a Palm Room now rapidly regaining its legitimate atmosphere of a lounge, as the extemporized tables were vacated, dismantled, and spirited away.
He fitted so neatly into the mental sketch of Lucinda's unconscious preconception, that she was naturally prejudiced in his favour. She liked Englishmen of that stamp, even if the stamp was open to criticism as something stereotyped, liked their manner and their manners and the way they dressed, with an effect of finish carelessly attained, as contrasted with the tight ornateness to which American men of the same caste are so largely prone.
Tall and well made, Lontaine had the good colour of men who care enough for their bodies to keep them keen and clean of the rust that comes of indoor stodging. The plump and closely razored face seemed perhaps a shade oversize for features delicately formed, and the blue eyes had that introspective cast which sometimes means imagination and frequently means nothing at all more than self-complacence. He affected a niggardly moustache, and when he spoke full lips framed his words noticeably. His habit was that of a man at ease in any company, even his own, who sets a good value on himself and confidently looks for its general acceptance.
He talked well, with assurance, some humour, and a fair amount of information. He had lived several years in the States, off and on, and on the whole approved of them. In fact, he might say there were only two sections of the country with which he was unacquainted, the South and the Pacific Coast; defects in a cosmopolitan education which he hoped to remedy this trip, as to the Coast at least. He had pottered a bit with the cinema at home, and it was just possible he might think it worth his while to jog out to Los Angeles and see what was to be seen in that capital of the world's motion-picture industry. England, he didn't mind admitting, had a goodish bit to learn from America in the cinema line. They were far too conservative, the cinema lot at home, behind the times and on the cheap to a degree that fairly did them in the eye when it came to foreign competition. On the Continent, too, the cinema was making tremendous strides, while in England it was merely marking time. If you asked Lontaine, it was his considered belief that the really top-hole productions of the future would come of combining American brilliance of photography and investure with European thoroughness in acting and direction.
This by no means unintelligent forecast was uttered with an authority that impressed even Lucinda, elaborately uninterested as she was. Conscious of a rather pleasing deference in Lontaine, who was addressing himself to her more directly than to any of the others, she maintained a half-smile of amiable attention which would have deceived a sharper man, and let her thoughts drift on dreary tides of discontent.
Hour by hour the conviction was striking its roots more deeply into her comprehension that life with Bel on the present terms was unthinkable. And yet—what to do about it? She hadn't the remotest notion. Obviously she would have to arrive somehow at some sort of an understanding with Bel. But how? The one way she knew had failed her. And she knew no one to confide in or consult.
Her father had died several years before her marriage, her mother soon after. Of her immediate family there remained only an elder sister, married and living in Italy.
She saw herself a puny figure, with only her bare wits and naked need for allies, struggling to save her soul alive from a social system like a Molock of the moderns, a beast-god man has builded out of all that he holds hateful, all his fears and lusts and malice, envy, cruelty and injustice, and to which, having made it, he bows down in awe and worship, sacrificing to it all that he loves best, all that makes life sweet and fair....
A losing fight. One were mad to hope to win. Already Bel was lost, caught in the mad dance of the system's bacchants, already drunkard and debauchee.... Nor might all her love redeem him.... And O the pity!
Aware of pain welling in her bosom, a sense of suffocation, tears starting to her eyes, she jumped up hastily lest her friends should see, mumbled an excuse, and made her way out to the foyer, turning toward the women's cloak-room.
A few moments alone would restore equanimity, a little rouge and powder mend the wear of her emotions.
The foyer was still fairly thronged; she was almost in Bel's arms before she saw him, so near to him, when she stopped in shocked recognition of his grimace of affection, that she caught, as she started back, a heavy whiff of breath whiskey-flavoured.
She heard him say, "Why, hello, Linda! what's the hurry?" and cut in instantly with a gasp of indignation: "What are you doing here?"
"Thought I'd look in on your party. You know, you asked me——"
She could not trust her tongue. If she said more in her anger, she would say too much, considering that time and place, lose what poor vestiges of self-control remained to her, make a scene. She cried all in a breath: "Well, go away, then! I don't want you, I won't have you!"—and pushing past Bel, fled into the cloak-room.
He lingered half a minute, with perplexed eyes meeting the amused stares of those who had been near enough to catch an inkling of the altercation; then drew himself up sharply and ironed out all indications of his embarrassment, assuming what he believed to be a look of haughty indifference.
But he was hurt, stricken to the heart by Lucinda's treatment. He couldn't think what he'd done to deserve it, he felt sure she couldn't have noticed the few drinks that had constituted luncheon for him. But whatever had been the matter, obviously it was up to him to find some way to placate Linda. He was through with Amelie and all such foolishness, from now on he was going to be good to Linda; and it wouldn't do at all to begin his new life by getting on the outs with her.
His gaze focused intelligently upon the glass case that displays the wares of the hotel florist. Women liked flowers. But there were four in Linda's party, her guests would think it funny if he joined them bringing flowers for his wife only.... A tough problem. He decided to step round to the club and mull it over....
He had disappeared by the time Lucinda felt fit to show herself again. Inwardly still forlorn and disconsolate, but outwardly mistress of herself, she resumed her chair; and had hardly done so when she saw Richard Daubeney pass by with his luncheon party, pause at the door and take leave, then turn back and make directly for her corner. And instantaneously Lucinda experienced a slight psychic shock and found herself again the individual self-contained, the young woman of the world whom nothing could dismay.
Dobbin knew everybody except the Lontaines; and when the flutter created by his introduction had subsided, he found a chair by Lucinda's side and quietly occupied himself with a cigarette until the conversation swung back to the pageant; whereupon he took deft advantage of the general interest in that topic to detach Lucinda's attention.
"I couldn't resist the temptation to butt in, Cinda. Hope you don't mind."
"I do, though, fearfully. It's always nice to see you."
"Many thanks. Appreciation makes up for a lot of neglect."
"Poor old soul: somebody been neglecting you again?"
"Somebody's always neglecting me and my affectionate disposition. That's why I've wiggled to your side, wagging a friendly tail, ready to lick your hand at the first sign of an inclination to adopt me."
Lucinda eyed him in grave distrust. "Dobbin: are you trying to start something? I thought we'd settled all that last night, agreed I wasn't in a position to adopt stray men, no matter how nice."
"That was last night. You've had time to sleep on it. Lots of things can come up overnight to change a woman's mind. Don't tell me: I can see something unusual has happened."
"Oh! you can?"
"Don't be alarmed: you're not wearing your heart on your sleeve. I can see you're troubled about something, simply because I know you so much better than anybody else. Oh, yes, I do. You never knew how thoroughly I studied you in the dear, dead days of yore. I'll lay long odds no one else has noticed anything, but to my seeing eye you've been flying signals of distress all during luncheon. That being so, it wouldn't be decent of me not to give you a hail and stand by in case I'm needed—now would it?"
Momentarily Lucinda contended against temptation. Then, "You are a dear, Dobbin," she said almost regretfully. "But it isn't fair of you to see too much. If it's true I have secrets I don't want to share, it would be kinder to let me keep them—don't you think?"
"Lord bless you, yes! But it's my observation the human being in trouble has got to talk to somebody, and will to the wrong body if the right isn't handy. Not only that, but you'll find most people will listen to your troubles only to get a chance to tell you their own; whereas I have none except the one you know all about. So you needn't fear reprisals."
She pondered this, sweetly serious, then in little better than a whisper said: "At least, not now...."
Jean Sedley was claiming her attention. "What do you think of that, Cindy? Isn't it a ripping idea?"
"Afraid I didn't hear—I was flirting with Dobbin."
"Yes, I know. But Mr. Lontaine has just made a priceless suggestion about the pageant. He says we can have moving-pictures taken as we enter the ball-room and shown before the evening is over."
"But is that possible?"
"Oh, quite," Lontaine insisted—"assure you. It's really extraordinary how they do these things, three or four hours is all they require to develop and prepare a film for projection. Say your pageant starts at ten: by one you can see yourself on the screen."
"Everybody would adore it!" Nelly Guest declared with deep conviction.
"And you could arrange it, Mr. Lontaine?"
"Easily, Mrs. Druce—that is to say, if I'm still in New York."
"What do you think, Cindy?" Jean urged. "Almost everybody is moving-picture mad. We could sell twice as many tickets on the strength of such a novelty. And it is a charity affair, you know."
"Meaning to say," Dobbin put in, "you're rather keen about it yourself."
"Of course—crazy to see myself as others see me. So is every woman—Fanny, Jean, Cindy——"
"I don't know," Lucinda demurred. "It must be a weird sensation."
"Not one you need be afraid of," Lontaine promised. "If you don't mind my saying so, you would screen wonderfully, Mrs. Druce."
"You think so, really?"
"Oh, no doubt about it, whatever. You're just the type the camera treats most kindly. If you wanted to, you could make a fortune in the cinema. No, seriously: I'm not joking."
"I'm glad of that," Lucinda returned soberly. "It wouldn't be at all nice of you to trifle with my young affections. Still, I will admit I'm skeptical."
"Tell you what," Lontaine offered eagerly: "Suppose you take test, what? No trouble at all to fix it up for you—chaps I know—only too glad—anything I say. I'd like to prove I know what I'm talking about. Take us all, for that matter, just as we are. What do you say?"
"I say it's perfectly damn' splendid!" Jean Sedley declared. "We'd all love it. When can you arrange it?"
"Any time you like—this afternoon, if that suits everybody. Only have to telephone, and in half an hour they'll be all ready for us. Shall I?" Lontaine got out of his chair. "Do say yes, all of you. Mrs. Druce? I know the others will if you do?"
"I don't mind...."
"Right-O! Give me five minutes...."
Lontaine brought back a gratified countenance from the telephone booths. As he had promised, so had he performed. This cinema chap he knew, Culp, had professed himself only too delighted. Rum name, what? A rum customer, if you asked Lontaine, diamond in the rough and all that sort of thing, one of the biggest guns in the American cinema to boot.
Dobbin wanted to know if Mr. Culp wasn't the husband of Alma Daley, the motion-picture actress. Lontaine said he was. Extraordinary pair. Married a few years ago when they were both stoney, absolutely. Now look at them; Culp a millionaire and better, Miss Daley one of the most popular stars. You might say he'd made her and she'd made him. Showed the value of team-work in marriage, what? You pulled together, and nothing could stop you. You pulled in opposite directions, and what happened? You stood still! What?
(Lucinda remarked the patient smile with which Fanny listened. But repetition is, after all, a notorious idiosyncrasy of the married male.)
Charming little woman, Miss Daley. As it happened, she was working in a picture at the studio now. Rare luck; they'd get a look in at practical producing methods in addition to getting shot for their tests. Not bad, what?
Somebody echoed "shot" with a puzzled inflection. But that term, it appeared, was studio slang; one was shot when one was photographed by a motion-picture camera. No doubt because they first aimed the camera at one, then turned the crank—like a machine-gun, Lontaine meant to say.
Lucinda discovered that it was already three o'clock, and wondered how long they would need to get properly shot. Lontaine protested it would take no time at all. Astonishing chaps, these American cinema people, absolutely full of push and bounce, did everything in jig-time, if you knew what he meant.
With two cars at its disposal, the party split up into threes, Mrs. Sedley, Mrs. Guest, and Lontaine leading the way. On the point of entering her own car after Fanny, however, Lucinda recalled her promise to look in at the bridge-tea for the Italian Milk Fund, and bidding Dobbin keep Fanny amused while they waited for her, turned back into the hotel to telephone Mrs. Wade that she would be a little late.
Having seen no more of Bellamy since their encounter near the cloak-room, she had assumed that he had taken her at her word, and had dismissed from her calculations the possibility of his returning. The surprise was so much the more unwelcome, consequently, when on leaving the telephone booth she saw her husband with his hat on the back of his head and his arms full of lavender orchids, wavering irresolutely in the entrance to the Palm Room, surveying with a dashed expression its now all but deserted spaces; a festive spectacle that left no room for surmise as to what he had been up to. And with sickening contempt added to the bitterness already rankling in her heart, Lucinda made hastily for the revolving door.
Simultaneously Bel caught sight of her and, with a blurred travesty of his really charming smile, and a faltering parody of that air of gallant alacrity which she had once thought so engaging, moved to intercept Lucinda. And finding her escape cut off, she paused and awaited him with a stony countenance.
"Ah! there you are, eh, Linda! 'Fraid I'd missed you. Sorry couldn't get back sooner, but——"
"I'm not," Lucinda interrupted.
"Had to go over to Thorley's to find these orchids...." Bel extended his burden as if to transfer it to Lucinda's arms and, when she prevented this by falling back a pace, looked both pained and puzzled. "Ah—what say? What's matter?"
"I said," Lucinda replied icily, "I'm not sorry you couldn't get here sooner. Surely you can't imagine I'd care to have my friends see you as you are, in the middle of the afternoon. It's bad enough to have them know you get in this condition nearly every night."
"But—look here, Linda: be reasonable——"
"I think I have been—what you call reasonable—long enough—too long!"
Bellamy hesitated, nervously moistening his lips, glancing sidelong this way and that. But there was nobody in the foyer at the moment but themselves; even the coatroom girls had retired to their office and were well out of ear-shot of the quiet conversational key which, for all her indignation, Lucinda had adopted. For all of which the man should have been abjectly grateful. Instead of which (such is the wicked way of drink) Bellamy took heart of these circumstances, their temporary isolation and Lucinda's calculated quietness, and offered to bluster it out.
"Here—take these flowers, won't you? Plenty for you and all your friends. Tha's what kept me so long—had to go all over to find enough."
Again Lucinda defeated his attempt to disburden himself. "Oh, Bel!" she cried sadly—"how can you be such a fool?"
"How'm I a fool? Like flowers, don't you? Thought I was going to please you.... And this is what I get!"
"You know all the orchids in New York couldn't make up for your drinking."
"Why cut up so nasty about a little drink or two? Way you talk, anyone'd think I was reeling."
"You will be before night, if you keep this up."
"Well, I'm not going to keep it up. I've made arrangements to have the afternoon free, just to be with you. We'll go somewhere—do something——"
"Thank you: I'd rather not."
"Don't talk rot." Most unwisely, Bellamy essayed the masterful method. "Of course we'll go some place——"
"We will not," Lucinda told him inflexibly. "My afternoon is booked full up already, and——"
"Where you going? I don't mind tagging along——"
"Sorry, but I don't want you."
Injudiciously again, Bellamy elected to show his teeth, stepped closer to Lucinda and with ugly deliberation demanded: "See here: where you going? I've got a right to know——"
"Have you, Bel? Think again. I never ask you such questions. If I did, you'd either lose your temper or lie to me, and justify yourself by asserting that no man ought to be asked to stand prying into his affairs. So—I leave you to your affairs—and only ask that you leave me to mine."
"Meaning you won't tell me where you're going?"
Lucinda shrugged and turned away; but Bellamy swung in between her and the exit.
"See here, Linda! there are limits to my patience."
"And to mine—and you have found them. Let me go."
She didn't move, but her face had lost colour, her eyes had grown dangerous. Neither spoke in that clash of wills until Bellamy's weakened, his eyes shifted, and he stepped aside, slightly sobered.
"Please!" he begged in a turn of penitence. "Didn't mean.... Frightfully sorry if I've been an ass; but—you know—pretty well shot to pieces last night—had to pull myself together somehow to talk business at luncheon——"
"Oh! it was a business luncheon, then?" asked Lucinda sweetly, pausing.
"Of course."
With an ominous smile she commented: "It has come to that already, has it?"
"Ah—what d'you mean?"
"Since you tell me it was a business luncheon, you leave me to infer that your affair with Amelie has reached the point where you take her to the Clique Club to talk terms." Bellamy's jaw sagged, his eyes were dashed with consternation. "What else do you wish me to think, Bellamy?"
He made a pitiable effort to pull himself together. "Look here, Linda: you're all wrong about this—misinformed. I can explain——"
"You forget I know all your explanations, Bel; I've heard them all too often!"
"But—but you must give me a chance! Damn it, you can't refuse——!"
"Can't I? Go home, Bel, get some sleep. When you wake up, if you still think you have anything to say—consider it carefully before you ask me to listen. Remember what I tell you now: you've lied to me for the last time, one more lie will end everything between us, finally and for all time!"
Conscious though she was that her wrath was righteous, she experienced an instant of irresolution, of yielding and pity excited by the almost dog-like appeal in his eyes. But immediately she remembered Amelie, hardened her heart and, leaving him agape, pushed through the door to the street.
And instantly she effected one of those shifts of which few but the sensitive know the secret, who must hide their hurts from alien eyes though they spend all their strength in the effort; instantly she sloughed every sign of her anger and with smiling face went to rejoin Fanny and Dobbin.
As soon as she appeared the latter jumped out of the car and offered his hand. He said something in a jocular vein, and Lucinda must have replied to the point, for she heard him chuckle; but she could not, a minute later, recollect one word of what had passed between them.
With her hand resting on Dobbin's she glanced back and saw Bellamy—still with his armful of orchids—emerge from the hotel. He halted, his face darkening as he watched Daubeney follow Lucinda into the car. It drew away quickly, giving him no chance to see for himself that it held another passenger.
He stood still upon the steps, deep in sombre and chagrined reflection, till a touch on his arm and a civil "Pardon!" roused him to the fact that he was obstructing the fairway. As he moved aside he was hailed by name.
"Well, I'm damned! Bellamy Druce drunk, dressed up, and highly perfumed."
In his turn, he recognized the speaker, a personage of the theatrical world with modest social aspirations and a noble cellar.
"Why, hello, Whittington!" said Bellamy, smiling in spite of his disgruntlement, to see that carved mask of a wise clown upturned to his. "All by yourself? What's happened to the girl crop you should be so lonesome?"
Without direct reply, Mr. Freddie Whittington linked his arm and began to walk toward Fifth avenue.
"Just the man I'm looking for," he declared without a smile. "Come along. Got a thousand women I want you to meet 'safternoon. They'll take care of your orchids."
"Well," Bellamy conceded, "that sounds reasonable. But what do you say, we drop in at the Club? Got something there won't do us any good—in my locker."
On the far West Side, well beyond the drab iron articulation of the Ninth Avenue Elevated, in a region of New York whose every aspect was foreign to Lucinda's eyes, the brougham drew to a shuddering stop, in thoroughbred aversion to such surroundings, before a row of blank-avised brick buildings whose façades of varying heights and widths showed them to have been originally designed for diverse uses. That they were today, however, united in one service was proved by the legend that linked them together, letters of black on a broad white band running from end to end of the row beneath its second-story windows:
ALMA DALEY STUDIOS—CULP CINEMAS INC.—BEN CULP, PRES'T.
ALMA DALEY STUDIOS—CULP CINEMAS INC.—BEN CULP, PRES'T.
Across the way unsightly tenements grinned like a company of draggletail crones who had heard a rare lot about the goings-on of picture actors and, through this happy accident of propinquity, were in a position to tell the world it didn't know the half of it. Children liberally embellished with local colour swarmed on sidewalks where ash and garbage-cans flourished in subtropical luxuriance, and disputed the roadway with the ramshackle wagons and push-carts of peddlers, horse-drawn drays, and grinding, gargantuan motor-trucks that snarled ferociously at the aliens, the frail, pretty pleasure cars from Fifth avenue. Apparently an abattoir was languishing nearby, discouraged in its yearning to lose consciousness of self in the world's oblivion. At the end of the street the Hudson ran, a glimpse of incredible blue furrowed by snowy wakes.
Such the nursery in which what Mr. Culp (or his press agent) had brilliantly imaged as the youngest, fairest sister of the plastic arts was fostering the finest flower of its expression, to wit, the artistry of Alma Daley....
"Like a lily springing from the mire," Fanny Lontaine murmured.
Lucinda laughed and gave Fanny's arm a mock-pinch, grateful for any gleam of wit to lighten life's dull firmament. The temper in which she had left Bel at the Ritz had been quick to cool; and though its cooling had not affected her determination to brook no longer his misconduct, she was beginning to experience premonitions of that débâcle whose event was certain if this breach, so lately opened, were to widen.
If it should come to a break asunder, what would become of her? of the home she loved so well? and what of Bel, whom she loved best of all?
In the eyes of Dobbin, as he waited for her at the main entrance to the building, she read too shrewd a question; and understanding that she had for a moment let fall her mask, she hastily resumed that show of debonair amusement which was her heart's sole shield against the tearing beaks and talons of envy, malice and all manner of uncharitableness.
Fortunately there was something to jog her sense of humour in the utter absence of preparations to receive them, such as Lontaine had confidently promised.
A sense of hostility made itself felt even in the bare antechamber, a vestibule with makeshift walls of match-boarding, and for all features a wooden bench, a card-board sign, NO CASTING TODAY, a door of woven iron wire at the mouth of a forbidding tunnel, and a window which framed the head of a man with gimlet eyes, a permanent scowl, and a cauliflower ear.
Interviewed by Lontaine, this one grunted skeptically but consented to pass on the name and message to some person unseen, then resumed his louring and distrustful watch, while beyond the partition the professional sing-song of a telephone operator made itself heard: "Lis'n, sweetheart. Mista Fountain's here with a party, says he's got 'nappointmunt with Mista Culp.... Wha' say?... Oh, a'right, dearie. Say, Sam: tell that party Mista Culp's into a conf'rince, but they kin go up to the stage if they wanta an' stick around till he's dis'ngaged."
With every symptom of disgust the faithful watchdog pressed a button on the window ledge, a latch clicked, the wire door swung back, the party filed through and in twilight stumbled up two flights of creaking steps to a tiny landing upon which a number of doors stood all closed, and each sternly stencilled:PRIVATE.
After a moment of doubt during which even Lontaine began to show signs of failing patience, one of the doors opened hastily and ejected a well-groomed, nervously ingratiating young man, who introduced himself as Mr. Lane, secretary to Mr. Culp, and said he had been delegated to do the honours. A public-spirited soul, he shook each visitor warmly by the hand, protested that he was genuinely pleased to meet them all, then threw wide another of thePRIVATEdoors.
"This is the main stage, ladies. Miss Daley is working on one of the sets now, making the final scenes for her latest picture, 'The Girl in the Dark'; so if you'll be kind enough not to talk out loud while she's before the camera.... Miss Daley is very, er, temperamental, y'understand...."
Reverently the barbarians obeyed a persuasive wave of Mr. Lane's hand and tiptoed into the studio, to huddle in a considerately awe-stricken group on one side of an immense loft with a high roof of glass.
Stage, as the layman understands that term, there was none; but the floor space as a whole was rather elaborately cluttered with what Lucinda was to learn were technically known as "sets," in various stages of completion and demolition; a set being anything set up to be photographed, from a single "side" or "flat" with a simple window or door, or an "angle" formed of two such sides joined to show the corner of a room, up to the solid and pretentious piece of construction which occupied fully one-half of the loft and reproduced the Palm Room at the Ritz-Carlton, not without discrepancies to be noted by the captious, but by no means without fair illusion.
On a modest set near at hand, apparently a bedchamber in a home of humble fortunes, a bored chambermaid in checked shirt and overalls, with a cigarette stuck behind his ear, was making up the bed.
In another quarter a number of workmen were noisily if languidly engaged in knocking down a built wall of real brick and lugging away sections of a sidewalk which had bordered it, light frames of wood painted to resemble stone.
At the far end of the room a substantial set represented a living-room that matched up with the bedchamber nearer at hand, or seemed to, for a good part of it was masked from Lucinda's view by a number of massive but portable metal screens or stands arranged in two converging ranks, at whose apex stood a heavy tripod supporting a small black box. To these stands lines of insulated cable wandered over the floor from every quarter of the room. Just back of the tripod several men were lounging, gazing off at the set with an air of listless curiosity. The spaces between the screens afforded glimpses of figures moving to and fro with, at that distance, neither apparent purpose nor animation.
Elsewhere about the studio, in knots, by twos and singly, some twenty-five or thirty men and women, mostly in grease-paint and more or less convincing afternoon dress, were lounging, gossiping, reading newspapers, or simply and beautifully existing.
An enervating atmosphere of apathy pervaded the place, as if nothing of much moment to anybody present was either happening or expected to happen. An effect to which considerable contribution was made by the lugubrious strains of a three-piece orchestra, piano, violin, and 'cello, stationed to one side of the living-room set.
At first sight this trio intrigued Lucinda's interest. To her its presence in a motion-picture studio seemed unaccountable, but not more so than patience with its rendition of plaintive and tremulous melodies of a bygone period, tunes which one more familiar with the cant of the theatre would unhesitatingly have classified as "sob stuff," and to which nobody appeared to be paying any attention whatever.
Mystified to the point of fascination, she studied the musicians individually.
The pianist, perched sideways on his stool and fingering the keyboard of an antique upright without once looking at the music on its rack, as often as not played with one hand only, using the other to manipulate a cigarette which he was smoking in open defiance of the many posted notices that forbade this practice.
The violinist, stretched out with ankles crossed, occupied a common kitchen chair which his body touched at two places only, with the end of his spine and the nape of his neck. His eyes were half-shut, his bowing suggested the performance of a somnambulist.
The 'cellist, too, seemed to be saved from falling forward from his chair solely by the instrument which his knees embraced. His head drowsily nodding to the time, the fingers of his left hand automatically stopped the strings at which his right arm sawed methodically. An honest soul, a journeyman who for a set wage had contracted to saw so many chords of music before the whistle blew and was honestly bent on doing his stint....
Mr. Lane, having excused himself for a moment, returned from consulting some member of the group round the tripod.
"'Sall right," he announced with a happy smile. "They won't begin shooting a while yet. You can come closer if you want, I'll show you where to stay so's you won't be in the way."
Guided by him, the exotics gingerly picked their way across the banks, coils, loops and strands of electric cable that ran in snaky confusion all over the floor, like exposed viscera of the cinema; and Lucinda presently found herself on the side lines of the living-room, between it and the dogged orchestra, and well out of range of the camera.
She could now see three people on the set, two men with a girl whom, thanks to the wide circulation of the lady's photographs, she had no difficulty in identifying as Alma Daley herself—a prepossessing young person with bobbed hair, a boldly featured face, comely in the flesh rather than pretty, and a slight little body whose emaciation told a tale of too-rigorous dieting and which she used not unpleasingly but with a rather fetching effect of youthful gaucherie. Her make-up for the camera was much lighter and more deftly applied than seemed to be the rule. Gowned effectively if elaborately in a street dress hall-marked by the rue de la Paix, she was leaning against a table and lending close if fatigued attention to the quiet conversation of the two men.
Of these one was tall and dark, with a thick mane of wavy black hair, a wide and mobile mouth, and great, melancholy eyes. His well-tailored morning-coat displayed to admiration a splendid torso. The other was a smaller, indeed an undersized man, who wore a braided smoking-jacket but no paint on his pinched, weather-worn face of an actor. His manner was intense and all his observations (and he was doing most of the talking) were illustrated by gesticulation almost Latin in its freedom and vividness.
"King Laughlin," Mr. Culp's secretary informed Lucinda—"man in the smoking-jacket, he always wears one when he's working—greatest emotional director in the business, nobody can touch him. Why, alongside him, Griffith's a joke in a back number of Judge. You wouldn't guess what he gets: thirty-five hundred."
"That's almost a thousand a week, isn't it?"
"Thousand aweek!" Mr. Lane suspiciously inspected Lucinda's profile. Could it be possible that this well-born lady was trying to kid him? But no; he could see she was quite guileless. In accents of some compassion he corrected: "Three-thousand five-hundred every week's what King Laughlin drags down in the little old pay envelope. But that's Mr. Culp all over; expense's no object when he's making an Alma Daley picture, nothing's too good."
"I'm sure...." Lucinda agreed vaguely.
Out of the corner of an eye the director had become aware of a new audience and one worthy of his mettle, and he was already preparing to play up to it. Dropping the easy, semi-confidential manner in which he had been advising the younger and taller man, with surprising animation Mr. King Laughlin snatched a silk hat and stick from the other's unresisting hands.
"Right-O, Tommy!" he said in the nasal tone of the English Midlands. "I think you've got me now, but just to make sure I'll walk through it with Alma." He turned graciously to the woman: "Now, Alma dear...."
Miss Daley, herself not unconscious of a fashionable gallery, shrugged slightly to signify that she didn't mind if Mr. Laughlin thought it really worth while, it was all in the day's drudgery, and made a leisurely exit from the set by way of a door in its right-hand wall. At the same time Mr. Laughlin walked off by a door approximately opposite, and the young man in the morning-coat strolled down to the front of the set and settled himself to observe and absorb the impending lesson.
Mr. Laughlin then re-entered in character as a dégagé gentleman with an uneasy conscience, indicating this last by stealthily opening and peering round the edge of the door before coming in and closing it with caution, and gentility by holding hat and stick in one hand and carelessly trailing the ferrule of the stick behind him. Relieved to find the room untenanted, he moved up to the table, placed the hat on it crown-down, propped the stick against it, turned and gave the door in the right-hand wall a hard look, then bent over the table and pulled out and began to ransack one of its drawers. Thus engaged, he said clearly: "All right, Alma!" and immediately gave a start, whereby it appeared that he had heard footfalls off, and slammed the drawer. At this Miss Daley entered, a listless little figure so preoccupied with secret woe that she quite failed at first to see Mr. Laughlin, and when she did gave a start even more violent than his had been, clasping both hands to her bosom and crying out in a thrilling voice: "Egbert!"
Mr. Laughlin kept his temper admirably under the sting of this epithet; all the same, anyone could see he didn't fancy it a bit. However, first and always the gentleman, he offered Miss Daley a magnanimous gesture of outstretched hands. Instantly the poor girl's face brightened with a joyous smile, a happy cry trembled upon her lips as she ran to his arms. He enfolded her, with a fond hand ground her features into the shoulder of his smoking-jacket, and turned his own toward the camera, working them into a cast of bitter anguish.
Gently rescuing herself, Miss Daley discoveredEgbert'shat and stick, turned to him and looked him up and down with dawning horror, audibly protesting: "But Egbert! you are going out!" He attempted a disclaimer, but it wouldn't wash, the evidence of the top hat and the smoking-jacket was too damning; and in the end he had to give in and admit that, well, yes, he was going out, and what of it.
Evidently Miss Daley knew any number of reasons why he ought to stay in, but she made the grave mistake of trying to hold him with affection's bonds, throwing herself upon his neck and winding her arms tightly round it. And that was too much:Egbertmade it clear that, while he'd stand a lot from a woman to whom he was Everything, there was such a thing as piling it on too thick. And against her frenzied resistance he grasped her frail young wrists, brutally broke her embrace, and flung her from him. She fell against the table, threw back her head to show the pretty line of her throat, clutched convulsively at her collar-bone, and subsided upon the floor in a fit of heart-broken sobbing; whileEgbertcallously took his hat, clapped it on his head, and marched out by a door in the rear wall, his dignity but slightly impaired by the fact that the hat was several sizes too large and would have extinguished him completely if it hadn't been for his noble ears.
Without pause Mr. Laughlin doubled round to the front of the set, threw the waiting actor a brusque "See, Tommy? Get what I mean?" and encouraged Miss Daley with "That's wonderful, Alma dear. Now go on, right through the scene."
Miss Daley, lying in complete collapse, with her head to the camera, writhed up on an elbow, planted her hands upon the floor and by main strength pushed her heaving shoulders away from it, keeping a tortured face turned to the camera throughout. Then she got her second wind, caught hold of the edge of the table, pulled herself up, looked around wildly, realized that she was a deserted woman, saw her hat by Tappé hanging on the back of a morris-chair by Ludwig Baumann, seized it, rushed to the door by whichEgberthad escaped, and threw herself out in pursuit.
Mr. Laughlin clapped gleeful hands.
"Fine, Alma, wonderful! You're simply marvelous today, dear. Now Tommy, run through it just once with Alma, and then we'll shoot."
Mr. Lane bustled about and found chairs for Lucinda and her friends, upon which they composed themselves to watch Tommy interpret Mr. King Laughlin's tuition in the art of acting for the screen.
To the best of Lucinda's judgment, however, the greater part of Mr. Laughlin's efforts had meant to Tommy precisely nothing at all. Beyond the rudimentary mechanics of the physical action sketched in by the director, Tommy made no perceptible attempt to follow pattern, and disregarding entirely its conventional but effective business, embellished the scene instead with business which was, such as it was, all his own, or more accurately that of a dead era of the speaking stage.
Like a wraith of histrionism recalled from the theatre ofEast LynneandThe Silver King, Tommy carved out his effects with flowing, florid gestures, and revived the melodramatic stride and heroic attitudinizing; and though he wilfully made faces at the camera throughout, he demonstrated the deep veneration in which he really held it by never once showing it his back, until, having duly spurned the clinging caresses of Miss Daley, he was obliged to march to the door, and even then he made occasion to pause with a hand on the knob and, throwing out his chest and fretfully tossing rebellious black locks from tragic brows, granted the camera the boon of one last, long look at him ere making his exit.
And when Mr. Laughlin tranquilly approved this performance and announced that they would forthwith "shoot it," Lucinda began to wonder if there were possibly something wrong with her own powers of observation.
"But," she protested to Mr. Lane, who had coolly elected himself her special squire and placed his chair close to hers—"that man they call Tommy—he didn't play the scene as Mr. Laughlin did."
"Oh, Tommy Shannon!" said Mr. Lane equably—"Tommy's all right, he knows what he's doing—best leading man in the movin' picture business, bar none. King Laughlin knows he can trust Tommy to put it over his own way. All you got to do is to let Tommy Shannon alone and he'll ring the gong every shot."
"But if that's the case, why did Mr. Laughlin take so much trouble to show him——?"
"Well, you see, it's this way," Mr. Lane explained: "King's all right, and Tommy's all right, too, both stars in their line; but if Tommy don't see a scene the way King shows him, and King starts to bawl him out, why, Tommy'll just walk off the lot. And then where are you? You can't finish your picture without your leading man, can you? And there's maybe a hundred-and-fifty or two-hundred thousand dollars invested in this production already. One of the first things a director's got to learn in this game is how to handle actors. That's where King Laughlin's so wonderful, he never had an actor quit on him yet."
"I see," said Lucinda thoughtfully. "The way to handle an actor is to let him have his own way."
"You got the idea," Mr. Lane approved without a smile.
"But suppose," she persisted—"suppose the leading man insists on doing something that doesn't suit the part he's supposed to play, I mean something so utterly out of character that it spoils the story?"
"Sure, that happens sometimes, too."
"What do you do then?"
"That's easy. What's your continuity writer for?"
"I don't know, Mr. Lane. You see, I don't even know what a continuity writer is."
"Why, he's the bird dopes out the continuity the director works from—you know, the scenes in a picture, the way they come out on the screen: Scene One, Scene Two, and all like that."
"You mean the playwright?"
"Well, yes; only in pictures he's called a continuity writer."
"But that doesn't tell me what you do when an actor insists on doing something that spoils the story."
"That's just what I'm trying to tell you, Mrs. Druce. You get your continuity writer, of course, and have him make the change."
"You mean you change the story to please the actor?"
"Sure: it's the only thing to do when you got maybe a hundred-and-fifty or two-hundred thousand dollars hung up in a picture."
"But doesn't that frequently spoil the story?"
"Oh, what's a story?" Mr. Lane argued reasonably. "People don't go to see a story when they take in an Alma Daley picture. They go because they know they get their money's worth when they see a Ben Culp production that's taken from some big Broadway success and costs a hundred-and-fifty or maybe two-hundred thousand dollars. But princip'ly, of course, they go to see Alma Daley, because she's the most pop'lar actress on the screen, and makes more money than Mary Pickford, and wears the swellest clothes that cost sometimes as much as twenty thousand dollars for each picture; and besides she's the grandest little woman that ever looked into a lens, and there's never been no scandal about her private life, and an Alma Daley picture's sure to be clean. Why, Mr. Culp wouldn't let Miss Daley act in any picture where she had to be wronged or anything like that. When he buys a play for her and the heroine's got a past in it or anything, he just has the story changed so's there's never any stain upon her honour or anything anybody could get hold of. That's one thing Mr. Culp's very partic'lar about; he says no wife of his shall ever go before the public in a shady part."
"Has he many?"
Mr. Lane looked hurt, but was mollified by the mischief in Lucinda's smile.
"Well, you know what I mean. But we better stop talking, if it's all the same to you, Mrs. Druce, or Miss Daley'll get upset. They're going to shoot now."
The warning was coincident with the sudden deluging of the set with waves of artificial light of a weird violet tint, falling from great metal troughs overhead and beating in horizontally from the metal stands or screens, which were now seen to be banks of incandescent tubes burning with a blinding glare.
Nor was this all: shafts and floods of light of normal hue were likewise trained upon the scene from a dozen different points, until the blended rays lent almost lifelike colouring to the faces of the actors, whose make-up had theretofore seemed ghastly and unnatural to uninitiate eyes.
Stationed just beyond the edge of the area of most intense illumination, the audience sat in a sort of violet penumbra whose effect was hideously unflattering. In it every face assumed a deathly glow, resembling the phosphorescence of corruption, the red of cheeks and lips became purple, and every hint of facial defect stood out, a purple smudge. So that Lucinda, reviewing the libelled countenances of her companions, breathed silent thanks to whatever gods there were for their gift of a complexion transparent and immaculate.
"Camera!"
The command came from King Laughlin. Lucinda could just hear a muffled clicking, and seeking its source discovered a youngish man, with a keen face and intelligent eyes, standing behind the tripod and turning in measured tempo a crank attached to the black box.
Coached by Mr. Laughlin, who danced nervously upon the side lines, the scene was enacted.
"Now, Tommy, come on—slowly—hold the door—look around, make sure the room is empty—hold it—now shut the door—up to the table—don't forget where to put your hat—'sright, splendid! Now you look at the other door—listen—show me that you don't hear anything—good! Open the drawer—easy now, remember you're trying not to make a noise—look for the papers—show me you can't find them.My God! where can they be!That's it. Now you hear a noise off—(Ready, Alma!)—shut the drawer—start to pick up your hat—too late—! Come on, Alma—come on! You don't see him, you look out of the window and sigh—let's see you sigh, Alma—beautiful! beautiful! Now, Tommy, you move—she sees you—see him, Alma. Slowly—hold it—wonderful! Now call to him, Alma—Egbert! Egbert!!"
The little man's voice cracked with the heart-rending pathos he infused into that cry; but he did not pause, he continued to dance and bark directions at star and leading-man till the door closed behind Miss Daley's frantic exit; when all at once he went out of action and, drawing a silk bandanna from his cuff to mop the sweat of genius on his brows, turned mild, enquiring eyes to the cameraman.
"Got it," that one uttered laconically.
"Think we want to take it over, Eddie?" The cameraman shook his head. "Good! Now we'll shoot the close-up. No, Tommy, not you—the only close-up I want for this scene is Alma where she gets up. We must get those tears in, she cries so pretty."
There was some delay. The camera had to be brought forward and trained at short range on the spot where Miss Daley had fallen; several stands of banked lights likewise needed to be advanced and adjusted. And then Miss Daley had to be given time to go to her dressing-room and repair the ravages her complexion had suffered inEgbert'sembrace. But all these matters were at length adjusted to the satisfaction of director; the actress lay in a broken heap with her face buried on her arms, the camera once more began to click, Mr. King Laughlin squatting by its side, prepared to pull the young woman through the scene by sheer force of his inspired art.
But now the passion which before had kept him hopping and screaming had passed into a subdued and plaintive phase; Mr. Laughlin was suffering for and with the heroine whose woes were to be projected before the eyes and into the hearts of half the world. He did not actually cry, but his features were knotted with the anguish that wrung his heart, and his voice was thick with sobs.
"Now, dear, you're coming to—you just lift your head and look up, dazed. You don't realize what's happened yet, you hardly know where you are.Where am I, my God! where am I?That's it—beautiful. Now it begins to come to you—you remember what's happened, you get it. He has cast you off—O my God! he has deserted you.Fine—couldn't be better—you're great, dear, simply great. Now go on—begin to cry, let the big tears well up from your broken heart and trickle down your cheeks. Fine! Cry harder, dear—you must cry harder, this scene will go all flooey if you can't cry any harder than that. Think what he was to you—and now he has left you—who knows?—perhaps for-ev-er!Your heart is breaking, dear, it's breaking, and nobody cares. Can't you cry harder? Listen to the music and.... Good God! how d'you expectanybody to cry to music like that?"
The last was a shriek of utter exasperation; and bounding to his feet the little man darted furiously at the musicians, stopping in front of the trio and beginning to beat time with an imaginary baton.
"Follow me, please—get this, the wayIfeel it. So—slowly—draw it out—hold it—get a little heart-break into it!"
And strangely enough he did manage to infuse a little of his fine fervour into the three. They abandoned their lethargic postures, sat up, and began to play with some approach to feeling; while posing before them, swaying from the toes of one foot to the toes of the other, his hands weaving rhythms of emotion in the air, the absurd creature threw back his head, shut his eyes, and wreathed his thin lips with a beatific smile.
Throughout, on the floor, before the camera, under that cruel glare of lights, Alma Daley strained her face toward the lens and cried as if her heart must surely break, real tears streaming down her face—but cried with fine judgment, never forgetting that woman must be lovely even in woe.
And while Lucinda watched, looking from one to the other, herself threatened with that laughter which is akin to tears, a strange voice saluted her.
"Saw me coming," it observed, "and had to show off. He's a great little actor, that boy, and no mistake—never misses a chance. Look't him now: you'd never guess he wasn't thinking about anything but whether I'm falling for this new stunt of his, would you?"
Lucinda looked around. Mr. Lane had mysteriously effaced himself. In his place sat a stout man of middle-age with a sanguine countenance of Semitic type, shrewd and hard but good-humoured.
"How d'you do?" he said genially. "Mrs. Druce, ain't it? Culp's my name, Ben Culp."