Spurred by irrational fear lest Bellamy wake up, discover her flight, and give chase, Lucinda made in haste for Fifth avenue; but had not taken half a dozen steps when a cab slid up to the curb by her side, its driver with two fingers to his cap soliciting a fare. He seemed Heaven-sent. Lucinda breathed the first address that came to mind—"Grand Central, please"—hopped in, and shrank fearfully away from the windows.
On second thought, the destination she had named seemed a sensible choice. Any one of the several hotels which tapped the railroad terminal by subway would take her in for the night. In the morning she would be better able to debate her next step. At present she felt hopelessly incapable of consecutive thought.
At the station a negro porter with a red cap opened the cab door and took possession of her single piece of luggage, and when she had paid off the taxi and looked to him in indecision, prompted her with: "What train was yo' wishin' to tek, ma'm?"
An instant later Lucinda was wondering why she had replied: "The first train for Chicago, please." She knew no reason why she should have named Chicago rather than any other city where she was unknown and where, consequently, she might count on being free to think things out in her own time and fashion.
"Ain't no Chicago train befo' eight-fo'ty-five tomorrow mawnin', ma'm."
"Very well. I'll go to a hotel for tonight."
"Yes'm. W'ich hotel, Commodo', Biltmo', Belmont?"
Lucinda settled on the Commodore, because it was the largest of the three and she would be lost in the multitude of its patrons.
She registered asMrs. L. Druce,Chicago, and, before proceeding to her room, arranged to have the head porter purchase her ticket and reservation the first thing in the morning.
Some hours later she was awakened by a cramp in one of her arms and found that she had fallen asleep while sitting on the edge of her bed. In a daze she finished undressing, and sleep again overwhelmed her like a dense, warm, obliterating cloud.
It seemed but a minute or two before she was being scolded awake by the shrewish tongue of the telephone by the head of the bed, to hear a dispassionate voice recite the information that it was seven o'clock, the hour at which she had asked to be called.
She felt as if she had not slept at all.
Again, in the train, the aching misery of heart and mind could not prevent her nodding and drowsing all morning long; and after a meal of railroad food by way of luncheon, she gave up trying to stave off the needs of a highly organized nature fatigued by inordinate strains, called the porter, had him make up the lower berth in her drawing-room, and went to bed.
In the neighborhood of midnight she woke up to discover, first by peering out under the edge of the window-shade at concrete platforms bleakly blue and bare in the glare of unseen lamps, then by consulting a timetable, that the train was in Cleveland.
As it pulled out again, she resigned herself to the inescapable. Rested, her mind clear and active, and with nothing to do but think for eight hours more, she must go down into the hell appointed.
Nor was she spared any portion of its torments. Successively and in concert, vanity wounded to the quick, sickening self-pity, and implacable, grinding regret laid hold on her heart and soul and worried them till she had to bury her face in the pillow and sink her teeth into it to keep from screaming.
It was cruel enough to have loved and lost, but to have lost and still to love seemed punishment intolerable. The shameful knowledge that body and spirit still hungered for the man who had served both so shabbily ate into her amour-propre like a corrosive acid.
To her agonized imagination she figured in the semblance of a leaf harassed by that high wind of fatality which latterly had swept into and through her life with Bel, driving them asunder; a leaf torn from the homely branch that had given it life and nurtured it, a leaf hunted helplessly into strange ways and corners, even now being hounded on and on.... And to what end?...
She burned with resentment of her persecution by those unknown powers whose ill-will she had not wittingly done anything to invite, she writhed in the exasperation bred of her impotence to placate them or withstand their oppression.
A lull fell at last in the transports of her passion, she lay quite still, and her mind too grew calm in awareness of the quiet, resolute mustering of all her forces to wrest from malicious chance and circumstance the right to live a life of her own choosing; as if her soul, drawing strength from new-found knowledge of its indestructible integrity, lifted up its head and with calm eyes challenged Fate.
Her paroxysms were now spent and ended, the past had been put definitely behind her, it was with the future alone that she had need to be concerned.
She addressed herself to the task of taking stock of Lucinda Druce, the woman all alone, her condition and resources, and of trying to map out for her a new and independent existence that would prove somehow livable.
If she had not succeeded in this undertaking when the train breathed its last weary puffs under the echoing glass canopy of the La Salle Street station, success was not forfeited, it was but deferred. There was so much to be taken into consideration, she could not yet see further than tomorrow, if so far. Certain immediate steps were indicated to her intelligence as requisite and reasonable; whither they would lead she could by no means guess.
Bred on the Atlantic seaboard, she knew more of Europe than of the United States west of the Alleghenies. Chicago to her was a city that once had burned to the ground because a cow kicked over a lighted lamp; a city famous for great winds, something known as "the Loop," something hardly less problematic called "stock-yards." The name of a hotel, too, the Blackstone, had found lodgment in her memory.
The short drive in a yellow taxicab from the station to the hotel through a labyrinth of back streets a-brawl with traffic, failed to register any impressions other than of cobblestones, blasphemous truck drivers, street-cars pounding and clanging, begrimed buildings, endless columns of self-absorbed footfarers. The hotel itself seemed in grateful contrast, it might have been one of her own New York. Only the view from her rooms, many stories above the street, of a public park bleached, frost-bitten, desolate, and slashed by a black railroad cutting, and beyond this a vast expanse of tumbled waters, slate-grey flecked with white, blending with a grim grey sky, drove home the fact that her first uncertain gropings toward a new life were to be framed in a foreign, and to her perceptions an unfriendly, environment.
But she turned from the window with the light of battle in her eyes. Nature was wasting its effects, she was not to be disheartened by an ill-dispositioned day.
After breakfast she went out to do a little necessary shopping, and spent the morning and most of her cash in hand as well in department stores which she was unreasonably surprised to find differed not materially from establishments of the same character in the East, save in the crowds that thronged them, drab rivers of people persistently strange in her sight.
But the experience served to remind her that she had more material problems to solve than those provided by her inner life. She found herself running short of ready money and with a checque-book valueless unless she were willing to prove her identity as the wife of Bellamy Druce.
She thought of telegraphing old Harford Willis, who had been her father's close friend, legal adviser, and executor of his estate, as he was today steward of Lucinda's. But he could not be expected to understand a peremptory demand for money in Lucinda's name, from a city which he had no reason to believe she had ever even thought of visiting, without explanations too lengthy and intimate for transmission by telegraph. The alternative was to write him, and that meant a long, full letter, for (Lucinda suddenly discovered) Willis was the one man in the world whom she could safely and freely confide in, consult and trust.
She did not even remember Dobbin's pretensions to such standing with her. In the first twenty-four hours of her flight from Bellamy she had not thought of Daubeney once. Now, when she thought of him at all, it was as of some revenant of kindly countenance from a half-forgotten dream.
She spent most of the afternoon composing her letter and despatched it after dinner, a rather formidable manuscript under a special delivery stamp.
After that there was nothing to do but fold her hands and commend her soul to patience.
Three eventless days dropped out of her history. The dreary weather held, there was rain and snow, gales like famished banshees pounded and yammered at the hotel windows. She seldom ventured into the streets, even for exercise. She read a great many novels purchased at the hotel news-stand, or pretended to, for her mind refused as a general thing to travel with the lines of print. Her most exciting diversion lay in reviewing and enlarging the list of things she meant to buy as soon as she was able. And one afternoon she went to see Alma Daley in her latest production (not "The Girl in the Dark," of course, it was too soon for that) at a motion-picture theatre near the hotel.
She came away confirmed in her belief that Miss Daley was an unusually attractive and capable young mistress of pantomime. But the picture-play itself had seemed frightfully dull stuff. Indeed, Lucinda had experienced considerable difficulty in following its thread of plot, and sat it out only because of her personal interest in the actress.
Returning to her rooms possessed by memories of that afternoon she had spent at the studios of Culp Cinemas Inc., the last afternoon of her life as Bellamy's wife, she wondered, not with any great interest, how her tests had turned out, what the others, Dobbin and Jean and Nelly, and Fanny Lontaine and her husband, had thought of them; whether any one had known or guessed the reason for her absence, when they had gathered in Culp's projection-room for the showing; whether any one had cared.
Dobbin had cared, of course. At least, Dobbin had believed he cared. So had Lucinda, then....
How long ago it seemed!
INEXPRESSIBLY SHOCKED ARRIVING TO-MORROW WILL CALL ON YOU TEN A M MEANWHILE BANK OF MICHIGAN WILL SUPPLY YOU WITH FUNDS IN ANY AMOUNT YOU MAY REQUIRE IF YOU WILL BE PLEASED TO IDENTIFY YOURSELF TO MR. SOUTHARD THERE.
INEXPRESSIBLY SHOCKED ARRIVING TO-MORROW WILL CALL ON YOU TEN A M MEANWHILE BANK OF MICHIGAN WILL SUPPLY YOU WITH FUNDS IN ANY AMOUNT YOU MAY REQUIRE IF YOU WILL BE PLEASED TO IDENTIFY YOURSELF TO MR. SOUTHARD THERE.
The author of this telegram, which was delivered on the morning of Lucinda's fifth day in Chicago, was punctual to the minute of his appointment; otherwise he would hardly have been the rectilinear gentleman of the frock-coat school that he was.
Notwithstanding that Harford Willis was pledged to a code of morals and manners vinted in the early Eighteen-Eighties, and so implacably antagonistic to the general trend of present-day thought on the divorce question, his great affection for Lucinda predisposed him to allow that the course she had taken with Bellamy had been the only one his conduct had left open to her.
On the other hand he was unhappily unable to hide the disconcertion inspired by the simple gladness of her greeting, the spontaneity of which was in such marked contrast to his own well-composed demeanour of honorary pall-bearer at a fashionable funeral.
"If you only knew how good it is to see a friendly face for the first time in a whole week!"
"But, my dear Lucinda," Willis intoned deliberately in his well-modulated voice of a public speaker, "I must say you seem to be bearing up remarkably well, all things considered, re-mark-ably well."
"I've stopped howling and drumming the floor with my heels," Lucinda admitted—"if that's what you mean. When I found it didn't do any good, I gave it up, and I've felt more cheerful ever since."
"Cheerful!" Willis repeated in a sepulchral voice.
"More like an average human being who's been horribly hurt but who can't see why life should be counted a total loss for all that; less like the wronged wife in a movie, mugging at a camera."
"But, my poor child! how you must have suffered."
"Let's not talk about that, please," Lucinda begged. "It only makes me vindictive to remember; and I don't want to feel that way about Bel, I don't want to be unjust. It's bad enough to have to be just."
"Must you?" Willis asked, shaking a commiserative head.
"Yes." Lucinda met his skeptical old eyes with eyes of clear candour. "Absolutely," she added with a finality not to be discredited.
Willis sighed heavily, released her hand, sat down, and meticulously adjusted the knees of striped grey trousers.
"I will confess I had hoped to find you of another mind."
"I'm sorry. Please don't think me hard or unforgiving, but ... I've had plenty of time to mull things over, you know; andIknow I couldn't consider going back to Bel, no matter what he might be ready to promise. Bel can't keep a promise, not that kind, at least."
"I feel sure you wrong him there; it's true I don't know your husband as well as I know you, my dear, but I assure you that amongst men he has the reputation of a man of honour."
"Man of honour meaning, I presume, one who won't cheat another man but will cheat a woman."
"Oh, come! that's a bit sweeping."
"The men who know Bel know how he's been treating me—all New York knows! If he treated them as treacherously, would they call him a man of honour?" Willis gave a vague gesture of deprecation, and Lucinda laughed a little, but not in mirth. "Women are at least more honest among themselves; if a woman knows another who isn't playing fair with her husband, she either keeps quiet about it or calls her a cat, and lets it go at that—she doesn't call her a woman of honour."
"You don't think it would be worth while," Willis suggested as one in duty bound, "to forgive Bellamy, give him another chance?"
"I don't know I've got anything to forgive him, Mr. Willis. Bel did the best he could. And that's the whole trouble. Why should I forgive him for being true to himself? It's myself I can't forgive, because I was silly enough to let him go on as long as I did, making me a laughing-stock.... Besides, I'm not so sure it's good for us to be forgiven our sins; we're all such vain creatures, we're too apt to take forgiveness as a license to misbehave still more.... Don't you see?"
"I see you are beginning to formulate a philosophy of life."
"Isn't it about time?"
"You will need it, my dear, if you mean to fight this out alone. Philosophy is good medicine only for lonely hearts. The others it merely hardens."
Lucinda eyed Willis sharply. "Bel has been to see you."
"He looked me up," Willis admitted in mild surprise, "two days after your disappearance, thinking you might have communicated with me. Of course, I could tell him nothing. But how did you know——?"
"That suggestion, the underlying thought that I might not be intending to fight out my fight alone—that originated with Bel, didn't it?"
"Well!" Willis stammered, trying to smile disarmingly—"I confess——"
"It wasn't enough, of course, that I should have found Bel out for the dozenth time, there had to be a lover inmybackground to account for my leavinghim! Did he mention any name?"
Willis made a negative sign. "Bellamy didn't imply—he merely said he was afraid——"
"It doesn't matter. What else did he have to say?"
"He seemed most remorseful——"
"I know how remorseful Bel can seem."
"And determined——"
"In what way?"
"To find you——"
"He'd only be wasting his time."
"He spoke of employing detectives to trace you, when I assured him I knew nothing of your whereabouts and that when—and if—I did hear from you, I would necessarily be guided by your wishes."
"Thank you," said Lucinda. "It wouldn't do Bel any good to see me; it would only irritate him to find I could hold out against a plea he made in person."
"I understand," Willis agreed; and then with a quizzical look: "You seem to know your own mind, young woman; so I shan't attempt to advise you. But would you mind telling me what you have decided to do?"
"I shall divorce Bel, of course."
"You don't think it might be advisable to wait a while? It makes me very sad to think of you in relation to divorce proceedings. But then, of course, I belong to a generation that viewed divorce in a different light." Lucinda was silent. "Ah, well!" Willis sighed, and renounced hope then and there—"if you must, you must, I presume; and I will do my best to serve your wishes, my dear. Only tell me how...."
"Why, naturally, I want to get it over with as quickly and quietly as possible, with the minimum amount of public scandal."
"Then you won't sue in New York State."
"Why not?"
"Its laws recognize only one ground for absolute divorce."
"No," Lucinda concluded thoughtfully; "I'd rather not drag others into the case, I'd rather get my freedom, if I can, without making anybody unhappy, more than us two."
"The laws of the State of Nevada are most liberal. But it would be necessary for you to establish a legal residence by living in Reno for, I believe, six months."
"I suppose that's unavoidable."
"I will look up the most reputable firm of lawyers there, and recommend you to them. If you find yourself in need of other advice, write or telegraph me and I will come out to confer with you."
"I hope I won't have to impose on your kindness to that extent."
Willis blinked, removed the gold-rimmed pince-nez of his fading day, and polished the lenses with a silk handkerchief.
"I should not consider it an imposition, but a privilege, Lucinda. I can think of nothing I wouldn't do for your father's daughter, or for yours, if you had one."
"Thank God I haven't!"
"I'm afraid I can't say Amen to that. But then, as I have already remarked, I am in many respects a survival, an interesting one, I trust, but a survival none the less, of a conservative-minded generation."
He replaced the glasses.
"Is there anything else, my dear? If so, we can take it up over our luncheon. That is to say, I am hoping you will find it convenient and agreeable to lunch with me today."
Bowing punctilious acknowledgment of Lucinda's acceptance, he sat back and joined the fingers of both hands at his chin. "And now," he pursued—"if you don't mind satisfying an inquisitive old man—I would very much like to know what you propose to do with your freedom, when you get it."
Lucinda jumped up and turned away with a quaver of desolation.
"Ah, I wish you hadn't asked me! That's what I'm trying all the time to forget——"
"I thought so."
"The emptiness to come!... Whatcana woman do to round out her life when she's lost her husband and is fit for nothing but to be a wife?"
"She can find another husband. Many do."
"Marry again!" A violent movement of Lucinda's hands abolished the thought. "Never that! I'm through with love for good and all."
"No doubt," agreed the student of law and life. "But are you sure that love is through with you?"
Willis left for New York on a late afternoon train; and when Lucinda had said good-bye to him at the station, she felt as if she had parted with her one real friend in all the world.
Nevertheless it had done her good to see and talk with him, and it was in a courageous if not altogether a cheerful temper that she bade the driver of her taxi stop at the Consolidated Ticket Office on the way back to the Blackstone.
But a set-back threatened immediately when she applied for transportation and a drawing-room through to Reno. The Winter stampede of California tourists was in full westward swing, she learned, and not only was every drawing-room and compartment sold for the next fortnight on the trains of the Union Pacific system, the direct route to Reno, but she would have to wait several days even if she were willing to content herself with an upper berth.
The appalled expression with which she contemplated this alternative, and tried to make up her mind which would be worse, to nurse her loneliness in Chicago for another two weeks, or condemn herself for three days to the promiscuous indecency of open sleeping-car conditions, enlisted the sympathies of the susceptible if none too brilliant clerk who had dashed her hopes; and promising to see what he could do, he busied himself mysteriously with a battery of telephones, and presently returned in a glow of vicarious delight, to announce that he had arranged to book Lucinda through to San Francisco via the Santa Fé system, with a section all to herself on the California Limited leaving the next night.
To Lucinda's objection that she didn't want to go to San Francisco, she wanted to go to Reno, he explained, and produced bewildering maps and time-tables to prove his contention, that she would not only travel in more comfort but would actually save time by going out immediately via the Santa Fé and returning eastward from San Francisco to Reno, a comparatively insignificant trip of some eleven hours.
To clinch the matter he offered to telegraph for a drawing-room reservation to Reno on the first train to leave San Francisco after her arrival. And Lucinda feebly humoured his anxiety to be of service to a pretty lady.
Perhaps it was just as well, after all, that she wouldn't be able to shut herself up on the train and mope alone, perhaps it would take her out of herself a bit to be thrown into indiscriminate association with fellow-travellers.
Among the first purchases she had made after calling at the Bank of Michigan were a wardrobe trunk and a fitted dressing-case. And when the trunk had been checked and trundled away by a porter, the next morning, Lucinda had a long afternoon to fill in, and accomplished this by attending a matinée.
Returning to the hotel about five, she was approaching the elevators when, midway in the foyer, she stopped stock still, even her heart and lungs momentarily refusing their office, transfixed by the sight of Bellamy standing at the registry desk, in earnest consultation with one of the clerks.
Apparently Bellamy had just learned what he wanted to know; Lucinda recognized the backward jerk of the head that was an unfailing sign of gratification in him, and saw him turn away from the desk. Galvanized, she hurled herself toward one of the elevator shafts, the gate to which was even then being closed. Luck and agility enabled her to slip through before the gate clanged and the car shot upward—the passengers eyeing Lucinda in amusement or amazement or both, the operator treating her to a dark overshoulder scowl.
But she didn't care, her recklessness had purchased her a respite, provisional and short-lived though it might prove; and when the elevator had discharged its other passengers on floors below hers, she found a richly compensating tip for the attendant.
"Sorry if I frightened you," she apologized. "There was somebody in the lobby I didn't want to see me, and I had to act quickly."
"'Sall right, ma'am," the boy grumbled, pocketing the money. "Only yeh don' wanta count on gettin' away with that sort of thing often, yeh might of got yehself killed."
"I'll be more careful," Lucinda promised humbly, as the car stopped to let her off. "And will you do something for me, please: tell the management I'd like my bill sent up to my room at once, and that, if anybody asks for me, I'm not in."
"Sure I will, ma'm."
When she entered her room the telephone was calling. She locked the door; and for as long as it continued to ring, which it did for upwards of five minutes with brief rests in discouragement, Lucinda did not move or cease to regard it in frightened fascination, as if it were a thing of malign intelligence which all her wit and ingenuity would hardly serve to frustrate. At length it gave it up as a bad job, and she sank limply into a chair near the door, and there remained stirless, trying to master demoralized nerves, trying to think, till a knock brought her to her feet in a flutter.
She had trouble finding voice enough to be heard through the door: "Who is it?"
"Your bill, ma'm."
Not Bel's voice. Still it might be a trick. When she forced herself to turn key and knob, she more than half expected to see her husband. But the bellboy was alone. Lucinda took the bill and was counting out the money, when the telephone began to trill again.
"Take those bags, please," she said, indicating the new dressing-case and the bag which she had brought from New York, "put them in a taxi at the door, and hold it till I come down. I shan't be long."
Alone, she answered the telephone.
"Hello? That you, Linda? It's I, Bel."
"Y-yes, I—I know."
"Thank God, I've found you! See here: I'm coming up, if you don't mind. All right?"
"Yes, Bellamy—it—it's all right."
Running out into the hall, she found the stairs and pelted up two flights. One of the elevators was rising. It stopped two floors below, then came on up in response to her ring. The attendant whom she had tipped so well was in charge, and there was nobody else in the car.
"Did you let somebody out at my floor?"
"Yes, ma'm, gempman."
"Take me down, please, without stopping."
The car dropped with sickening rapidity, and she stepped out into the foyer, but only to realize in consternation the flat futility of her strategem when Bel placed himself before her, blocking the way to the street.
Her heart checked and raced, she was oddly at once aghast and elated. She couldn't be sorry her ruse had failed, subconsciously she had wanted all along to see Bel, just for a minute, face to face, with her own eyes to see how he looked, how her flight had affected him, whether ill or well.
Though he seemed to be quite himself, neither under the influence of nor suffering from recent indulgence in drink, his face looked thinner, his eyes a trifle more deeply set in his head; and there was new firmness in the set of his mouth.
In this new guise, the old appeal was strong. For a space of several beats her heart misgave her....
In a matter-of-course way Bel offered a hand, and Lucinda touched it mechanically.
"Sorry, Linda, if I disappointed you, but thought I recognized your handbag being carried to the door, and waited for this car to come down on the off-chance...."
"I see," she articulated with an effort.
"Hope you're not angry...." Bel smiled as if he read her weakness, smiled with a fatal trace of over-confidence. "Had to see you, couldn't let you get away without giving me a hearing, after all the trouble I've had finding you."
"It's too late, I'm afraid—this isn't the place, either, to discuss such matters. Besides, I'm in a great hurry."
"You can give me a few minutes, surely. If you'll step into the reception-room with me for a minute——"
"Bel: I tell you it's too late."
Struggling to keep his temper, Bel caught his underlip between his teeth, while Lucinda cast witlessly about her for some way of escape. None offered. But she noticed that a young man standing nearby was observing them with keen interest, a rather brilliantly good-looking young man, brilliantly well dressed. As Lucinda's glance rested transiently on him, his face brightened with a tentative smile, and she thought he started as if he were impulsively minded to approach. If so, he reconsidered instantly. With a frown she looked back to Bel.
He made a gesture of entreaty. "You can't put me off like this, Linda, when I've come so far, gone through so much——"
"I can because I must, Bel—I will."
"No, by God! you can't and shan't!"
He caught her arm lightly as she tried to pass. She stopped, her face hardening.
"Are you going to make another scene, publicly disgrace me again even when sober?"
His hand dropped to his side. Lucinda began to walk rapidly toward the street entrance, but had taken few steps when Bellamy ranged alongside.
"Linda: you'vegotto listen to me! There's something I've got to tell you——"
"Then go back to New York and tell it to Harford Willis. If it's anything I want to hear, he will write me."
"Harford Willis! What's he—!" The significance of her words seemed to come to Bel all at once. "You don't mean to say you're going—! You can't be meaning to—!" With a long stride Bel swung in front of her again at the head of the stairs to the street. "At least, tell me what you mean to do."
"I mean to go to Reno, as soon as you let me pass."
Bellamy's eyes narrowed as if in physical pain. He threw out a hand of inarticulate protest, and let it fall in despair. Subduing a strong desire to bolt for it, Lucinda began to descend at a pace not inconsistent with dignity. At the same time, sensitiveness to the situation, the feeling that they had been playing a scene of intimate domestic drama for the edification of an entire hotel, made her aware that the young man whose interest had first manifested near the elevators had followed and was now standing at the head of the steps, over across from Bellamy.
Pushing through the door, she breathed thankfully the stinging winter air. The canopy lamps made the sidewalk bright and discovered her bellboy shivering by the open door of a taxicab. As she moved toward it she heard the revolving door behind her buffet the air, then Bel's voice crying out her name.
Abandoning all pretense, Lucinda ran. The bellboy caught her arm to help her into the cab and chattered: "W-where t-t-to, m'm?" She was prevented from answering by Bel, who elbowed the boy aside and caught her by the shoulders.
"No!" he cried violently. "No, you shan't—d'you hear?—you shan't go without listening to me!"
By some means, she did not know quite how, Lucinda broke out of his hands and stepped back.
"Let me alone!" she insisted. "Let me——"
Somebody came between them. Startled, she identified the strange young man of the foyer.
"Can I be of service?" he suggested in an amused drawl.
Instinctively she gasped: "No, please—!" At the same time Bel tried to shoulder the other roughly out of his way; the gratuitous champion stood firm, merely counselling "Easy, old thing, easy!" Then Bel lost his head. Lucinda heard him damning the other. There was a slight scuffle, in which the two, locked in each other's arms, reeled to one side. The bellboy was shouting "Now, ma'm—now's your chance!" She stumbled into the taxi. Holding the door, the boy demanded: "Where to, ma'm—where to?" She gasped: "Anywhere—only, tell him, hurry!" The door crashed, gears meshed with a grinding screech, the cab leaped forward with such spirit that Lucinda was thrown heavily against the back of the seat.
When she recovered, the vehicle was turning a corner. Through its window she caught a glimpse of the sidewalk in front of the Blackstone, just a bare glimpse of two figures struggling, with several others running toward them. Then the corner blocked out the scene.
Darting and dodging through traffic-choked thoroughfares, the taxicab had travelled a mile and more before Lucinda felt able to give the next steps the careful consideration which this pinch of mischance imposed.
In the upshot, though street clocks advised that she had the best part of two hours to kill before she could board her train, she tapped on the window and directed her driver to proceed to the Santa Fé Station. She felt reasonably safe in assuming that Bel wouldn't look for her there. Since she had told him she was going to Reno, his natural inference would be that she meant to travel by the direct overland route, he would set himself to waylay her in the Union Pacific terminal if anywhere. Provided, of course, that he had succeeded in discouraging the attentions of the gallant busybody in fit shape to make himself a nuisance again that night.
She couldn't help giggling nervously over the picture painted by a superexcited imagination.
The remaining hours of the evening worked out as eventlessly as she had hoped. Bellamy didn't show up at the station, she dined after a fashion in its restaurant, with her nose in a newspaper none of whose intelligence meant anything to hers, as soon as the platform gates were opened she was conducted by a porter to her reservation in the last car of the train but one, the observation-car; and in the latter Lucinda waited till her berth had been made ready. Then she went to bed.
She had planned to read herself asleep, but the armful of books and magazines purchased at the station bookstall either purveyed only fiction of a peculiarly insipid sort or else life itself was just then too richly coloured, too swift of movement to admit of that self-surrender which is requisite if mere artistic effort is to take effect.
And then the thoughtful porter had fastened a folded sheet across the double windows to temper the penetrating breath of that bitter night. So it wasn't possible to divert oneself by watching the snow-clad land unroll its blurred vistas of blue nocturnal beauty.
One could do nothing, indeed, but try vainly not to think, watch the curtains swaying that shut out the aisle, listen to the tireless thrumming of the trucks and the melancholy hooting with which the engine saluted every cross-road, and pray for sleep.
Somewhere a peevish child wailed fitfully for hours on end, somewhere else a man snored as if strangling in his sleep. Till long after midnight noisy feet straggled intermittently to and from the observation car. And once Lucinda, at last on the verge of drifting off, started suddenly wide-awake, stabbed to the heart by tardy appreciation of the fact that, now Bel knew where she was bound, she could not be sure of finding even Reno a refuge from his persistence, his importunities.
For the matter of that, if Bel, or the detectives whom he had told Willis he might employ, had been cunning enough to trace her to Chicago, they would find her no matter where else she might seek to hide herself away.
Only perhaps by changing her name....
But how could she sue for divorce if she lived under an assumed name?
Toward morning she drifted into an uneasy form of semi-slumber, and from this into deep sleep. It was late when she was awakened by the bustle of people fighting with their garments and breaking the trails to the wash-rooms, and in the aisle a negro voice intoning musically: "Las' call fo' brekfus in the dinin'-cyar"—over and over.
To find the dining-car Lucinda had to make her way through so many sleeping-cars that she lost count, cars all alike as to aisles obstructed by people dressing, people passing to and fro, porters dismantling tumbled berths. By way of some slight compensation, she was allotted a small table with places for two, the other chair being untenanted, which she considered much preferable to the tables for four across the aisle. Then, too, the napery was spotless, the silverware lustrous, flowers were brave in a vase at her elbow, the waiter was civil and seemed eager to please.
Lucinda scribbled her order on the blank form provided, then rested her cheek on a hand and gazed moodily out at wheeling perspectives of a countryside blanketed with snow. Reminding herself that the train was due in Kansas City during the morning, she seriously thought of leaving it there and waiting over till accommodations could be had that would insure privacy for the remainder of the journey, even though this might involve weeks of delay.
Grape-fruit, coffee, and toast, all excellent, made her feel a bit better. Nevertheless she made up her mind to ask the conductor to arrange a stop-over for her at Kansas City.
As she was pouring herself a second cup of coffee, the vacant chair at her table was drawn out and an amiable, amused voice asked: "Do you mind my sitting here, Mrs. Druce?"
Lucinda jumped in consternation. The speaker bowed with an ingratiating smile: her unsought champion of the night before!...
She recollected herself and gave a jerky inclination of her head; but all she could find to say was "Oh!" Whereupon the young man laughed quietly and, construing her consent, sat down.
"I'm surprised, too," he confessed—"pleasantly, if you don't mind my saying so. And yet the dear public continually kicks about coincidences!"
Lucinda found her tongue but found it incompetent to frame any but formal phrases: "I have a great deal to thank you for——"
"Please don't think of it that way. To the contrary, I owe you all sorts of apologies——"
"Apologies!"
"For butting in where any rational angel would have been scared to death to tread, and particularly for being here—though that was my fault and this isn't. But I'm glad you're not angry with me—" The waiter thrust an order blank with the bill of fare under the young man's nose, and he concluded to give them attention with an easy: "If you'll excuse me...."
The head he bowed over the cards was well-modelled and thatched with a good quantity of hair, light brown in colour and amazingly lustrous. A skin whose patina of faint tan resembled that of old ivory, with never a blemish, covered boldly fashioned features. The mobile face had a trick of lighting up when its owner was talking as if aglow with the light of his thought, so that his look was in fact more eloquent than his speech. Lucinda thought she had never seen hands more strong and graceful, or any better cared for, not even Bel's. Nor had Bel ever dressed in better taste.
The object of her interest waved the waiter away and met her openly interested regard without loss of countenance.
"I guess it's time I introduced myself, Mrs. Druce. My name is Summerlad." After a slight pause and with a hint of self-consciousness, he amplified: "Lynn Summerlad."
Sensible that he seemed to expect her to think well of that precious name, Lucinda found no echo for it in the chambers of her memory. She bowed and said "Thank you," and all at once discovered that she had reason to be mystified.
"But how is it you know my name, Mr. Summerlad?"
"That's easy: your husband told me."
Again Lucinda was reduced to a blank "Oh!" This time she felt that she was colouring.
"In the police station," Mr. Summerlad added with a broad grin. "But don't be alarmed, we weren't either of us mussed up much. Only, you see, Mr. Druce rather lost his head—can't say I blame him—and when the innocent bystanders insisted on separating us, and a cop happened along and took a hand, he—wouldn't be happy till he'd had me arrested on a charge of assault. So the officer marched us both off to the nearest station-house, with half Chicago tagging at our heels. By the time we got there your husband had cooled down and remembered that publicity wasn't his best bet. So he withdrew the charge."
"How dreadful!" Lucinda murmured, her thoughts with Bellamy. "I'm so sorry."
"No reason to be. If you must know, I enjoyed the adventure tremendously. That's what one gets for having been born with a perverted sense of humour."
"But if you had been locked up——!"
"Oh, it wouldn't have been for long, I'd have got somebody to bail me out inside of fifteen minutes. But there wasn't ever any danger of that, really. You see, the sergeant knew me at sight and—well, the sentiment of all hands seemed to be with me. Besides, it wasn't as if I'd never been pinched before."
"You don't mean to tell me you're in the habit of—of—"
"Of mixing in every time I run across a matrimonial rukus? Hardly! I mean, pinched for speeding. You know what the roads are, out on the Coast, hard and smooth and straight as a string for miles at a time. You can hardly resist them, once you get beyond the city limits. Guess I'll have to after this, though. The last time they got me, the judge gave me his word I wouldn't get off again with a fine, the next offense would mean the hoosegow for mine. And between you and me, I haven't any hankering to see the inside of the Los Angeles County jail."
"I should hope not."
Lucinda caught the eye of her waiter and gave him a bill to pay for her breakfast. But she couldn't escape with good grace just yet, unless she wished to administer a downright snub she would have to wait for her change.
"I'd like to show you what motoring is around Los Angeles," Mr. Summerlad pursued with breath-taking assurance. "If it isn't an impertinent question, may I ask if that's where you're bound?"
"No," Lucinda replied briefly. One began to foresee that to put a damper on such abounding enterprise would prove far from easy.
"I see: taking in the Grand Canyon, I suppose. You'll find it well worth your while. Gorgeous scenery and everything. I've done the Canyon a dozen times, used to run up there whenever I got a week to myself, you know. If it wasn't for this wretched business I'm in"—again that suspicion of self-consciousness—"I'd drop off there for a few days this trip. But I'm afraid it's no go. Too busy. Beastly nuisance. Still, there's nothing more uncertain than a job like mine. So it's well to make pay while the sun shines."
"I'm sure ..." said Lucinda, gathering up her change. And Summerlad's face fell touchingly as he grasped the fact that she was really going to leave him to finish his breakfast alone. "I am deeply indebted to you," she pursued. "No, please don't tell me again I must forget it, because I can't and don't want to. I was at my wits' ends last night. But, of course, it isn't a thing one can talk about——"
"Well, there are lots of other things we can talk about," Summerlad rejoined cheerily. "So let's forget the unpleasant ones. That is—hope you don't think I'm impertinent—but it's a long, lonesome trip, and I'll be very happy if you'll let me prattle in your company now and then."
Since she was leaving the train at Kansas City there was nothing to be gained by being rude. Lucinda contented herself with replying, no, she wouldn't mind, and thrust back her chair. Immediately Summerlad was on his feet, napkin in hand, bowing prettily.
"Awfully good of you, Mrs. Druce. Where shall I find you, say in an hour or two? The observation car?"
"Perhaps," Lucinda smiled.
"Or would you rather I looked you up——?"
"I'm in the last car but one," Lucinda told him sweetly—"Section Ten."
She made her way back to that reservation determined to lose no time about interviewing the conductor. But the porter failed to answer repeated pressures on the call-button, and at length surmising the truth, that he was getting his own breakfast, Lucinda resigned herself to wait. There was plenty of time....
Now that she was extricated from it the comic element in her late rencontre began to make irresistible appeal. She picked up a book, opened it, bent her head low above it to hide smiling lips and dancing eyes from people passing in the aisle; but was not well settled in this pose when she heard a joyful cry—"Cindy! Cindy Druce!"—and rose, dropping the book in her astonishment, to be enfolded in the arms of Fanny Lontaine.
"I feel," Lucinda confessed, "precisely like a weathervane in a whirlwind, I mean the way it ought to: every few minutes I find my nose pointing in a new direction."
"You dear!" Seated opposite her at the windows of the Lontaine drawing-room, Fanny leaned over and squeezed her hand affectionately. "I can't tell you how happy I am that pretty nose is pointing now the same way as ours."
"And I, Fanny. It's really a wonderful sensation, you know, after all that worry and uncertainty, to know one's life is mapped ahead for a few days at least. I don't believe any lost puppy ever felt more friendless than I did just before we met, when I thought I was going to get off at Kansas City. And my present frame of mind is that same puppy's when it finds itself all at once adopted by a family that likes animals."
Kansas City was already the idle menace of a dimming dream. Awkward but unavoidable explanations, haltingly offered, had been accepted without question: a manifestation of tactful sympathy which had not only won Lucinda's heart completely but, working together with her reluctance to proceed to Reno before she could feel reasonably sure of being suffered to live there unmolested, had influenced her to agree to go on with the Lontaines to Los Angeles; whither (she was tacitly led to infer) his motion-picture interests had peremptorily called Lontaine.
It seemed a sensible move as well as one most agreeable in prospect. She could rest in comfort and friendly companionship for a few weeks, consult with Harford Willis by letter, at leisure and with a calm mind plan for the future. She now saw, as if new light had somehow been cast upon her problems by this meeting of happy chance, that there was really no hurry, no reason why she shouldn't take her time about the unpleasant business, attend to its transaction only when and as it suited her will and convenience. It wasn't as if she wanted to remarry, or was in any way dependent upon Bel and must beg the courts to make him provide for her. If anything, her personal resources exceeded Bellamy's.
And then it would be amusing to see Los Angeles under the wing of so well-informed a motion-picture impresario as Lontaine. That afternoon at the Culp studios had been fascinating; how much more so would it be to live for a time in a city that was, at least as Lontaine limned it, one vast open-air studio, to be associated with people who were actually doing something with their lives. What a change from the life that had grown to seem tedious and unprofitable even before Bellamy had made its continuance intolerable!
"But you haven't told me," she complained, "about those tests. Did you go to see them that day? How did they come out? How did I look?"
"Oh, Cindy! what a shame you missed it. You were adorable, everybody simply raved about you."
"Fact, Mrs. Druce. You outclassed even Alma Daley in that Palm Room scene. No, but seriously: it was you first, Miss Daley second, Fanny a good third, the rest nowhere. You missed scoring no end of a personal triumph in the projection-room. Though, if you ask me, Miss Daley was just as well pleased."
"You're making fun of me."
"Absolutely not."
"Well, it's hard to believe, but if you mean it, the Culps and their cameraman would seem to have been right."
"Oh, I'd almost forgotten!" Fanny cried. "Mr. Culp was terribly put out because you weren't there, and made me promise faithfully to ask you to call him up and make an appointment for another private showing."
"Right about what?" Lontaine earnestly wanted to know.
"Why, they were so sure I would screen well, as they put it, Mr. Culp made me an offer, as we were leaving, to act with his wife in her next picture."
Lontaine's eyes widened into a luminous blue stare; and abruptly, as if to hide the thought behind them, he threw away a half-smoked cigarette and, helping himself to another, bent forward, tapping it on a thumb-nail.
"Really, dearest? How priceless! And what did you say to the creature?"
"Oh, I was kind but firm."
"Ben Culp's a big man in the cinema game," Lontaine commented without looking up. "His advice is worth something, Mrs. Druce. If he says you'd make a hit, you might do worse than listen to him. That is, of course, if you should ever think of taking a flyer in the motion-picture business."
"I'm not even dreaming of such a thing. Why, it's absurd!"
"I'll wager you wouldn't say so if you once saw yourself on the screen. Only wish I had a print of those tests to show you."
"I'm not curious."
"Then you're the modern miracle, Mrs. Druce—a woman without either vanity or a secret ambition to be a cinema star." Lontaine laughed and lazily got up. "I can only say you've got a chance to make a name for yourself I wouldn't overlook if I stood in your shoes.... But if you'll excuse me now, think I'll roll along and arrange matters with the conductor and porters."
"You're too good to me," Lucinda protested. "I know I'm imposing——"
"Absolutely nothing in that. Only too happy."
The door was behind Lucinda's shoulder. Closing it, unseen by her, Lontaine contrived to exchange with his wife a look of profound significance. Then he lounged thoughtfully forward to the club car and delayed there, in deep abstraction, long enough to smoke two cigarettes before proceeding to hunt up and interview the conductor about Lucinda's change of destination, then instruct the porters to shift her luggage to the Lontaine drawing-room and his own effects to the section she was vacating.
Into making this move Lucinda had been talked against her half-hearted demurs. She knew very well it wasn't the right thing to do, to take advantage of their kindness of heart, to separate husband and wife; but they wouldn't listen to her; and after all it was hardly in human nature to undergo again the ordeal of the open sleeping-car by night if one might by any means avoid it; while Lontaine insisted he wouldn't mind in the least.
"I'm an old hand at travelling under any and all conditions," he had asserted—"accustomed to roughing it, you know. Even upper berths hold no terrors for me, while a whole section is simply sybaritic sensuality. If one hadn't brought Fanny along, it would never have entered the old bean to do oneself better than a lower. Absolutely. You don't imagine Fan and I could rest in comfort, knowing you were unhappy back there? Rather not!"
In point of fact, Lontaine had been at once eager to earn Lucinda's favour and not at all averse to a move which promised more personal liberty than one could command penned up in a stuffy coop with one's wife. Oh, not that he wasn't fond enough of Fan, but—well, when all was said, one was bound to admit Fan was a bit, you know, American. Not to put too fine a point on it, decidedly American. Nobody's fool, Fan. Had a head on her shoulders and used it, and a way of looking at one, besides, as if she were actually looking through one, now and then, that made one feel positively ratty. Chap could do with an occasional furlough from that sort of thing.
It wasn't as if they were still lovers, you see. Rough going, the devil's own luck and mutual disappointment had put rather a permanent crimp into the first fine raptures. They got along well enough nowadays, to be sure, but it was no good pretending that either couldn't have done just as well alone. But then it had hardly been in the first place what one might call a love match. Oh, yes, tremendously taken with each other, and all that; but if you put it to the test of cold facts, the truth was, Fan had married with an eye to that distant title, whose remoteness the War had so inconsiderately failed to abridge, while Lontaine had been quite as much influenced by Fan's filial relationship to a fortune of something like eighty millions. But that hope, too, had long since gone glimmering.
Rotten form, not to say vicious, on the part of the Terror of the Wheat Pit, to cut off his only begotten daughter with a shilling, one meant to say its equivalent measured by the bulk of his wealth. The legacy Fan had picked up in Chicago would have been barely enough to satisfy their joint and several creditors. Not that one was mad enough to fritter the money away like that. But if this Los Angeles venture were to turn out a bloomer....
But why anticipate the worst? Buck up and consider the widely advertised silver lining.... A bit of luck, falling in with this Druce girl, under the circumstances. No question about the solid establishment of her financial standing: the good old Rock of Gibraltar was a reed in the wind by comparison.... Now if only one dared count on Fan's being amenable to reason, grasping the logical possibilities, doing her bit like a sensible little woman....
Seated in Section 10, waiting for the porter to bring back his personal impedimenta from the drawing-room, Harry Lontaine turned a handsome face to the window, frowning absently, the nervous frown of a man whose cleverness has never proved quite equal to the task of satisfying appetites at once strong and fastidious.
By degrees its place was taken by a look of dreaming: Lontaine was viewing not the dreary wastes of Kansan lands under the iron rule of Winter but a California of infatuate imagining, a land all smiling in the shine of a benign sun, set with groves of orange trees and olives, dotted with picturesque bungalows whose white walls were relieved by the living green of vines, and peopled by a race of blessed beings born to a heritage of lifelong beauty, youth, and love-in-idleness; a land in whose charmed soil fortunes grew of seeds of careless sowing, and through whose scenes of subtropical loveliness prophetic vision descried a heroic figure moving, courted and applauded by happy, unenvious multitudes, the figure of Harry Lontaine, Esq., newest but mightiest overlord of the cinema....
From this delectable realm the dreamer was recalled by consciousness of somebody standing in the aisle and staring impertinently. Racial shyness erased all signs of wistfulness in one instant and cloaked sensitiveness in a guise of glacial arrogance; in another, recognition dawned, and hauteur was in turn discarded and a more approachable mien set up in its stead. Lontaine was too diligent a student of motion-pictures not to know at sight the features of Lynn Summerlad, by long odds the most popular male star of the American cinema. A personage worth knowing....
Misreading his expression, Mr. Summerlad felt called upon to apologize.
"Beg your pardon, but I was expecting to find a lady in this section, I may say a friend: a Mrs. Druce. Do you by any chance——?"
Bridge killed the long hours of that first afternoon on board a train whose windows revealed seldom a prospect less desolate than one of prairie meadows fallowed but frozen, dusky beneath a tarnished sky: a still and roomy land spaciously fenced, scored by rare roads that knew no turning, but ran like ruled diameters of the wide ring of the horizon: the wheat-bin of the world swept and garnished by winter winds.
Lynn Summerlad made a fourth at the table set up in the Lontaine drawing-room; invited by Lontaine as an acquaintance of Lucinda's and a grateful addition to the party because he played something better than merely a good game.
Not only "fearfully easy to look at" (as Fanny confided to Lucinda) but fair spoken and well if at times a shade carefully mannered, he was intelligent and ready of wit; so that, when he proved these qualities by not forcing himself upon the trio at or after dinner, he was missed; and Lucinda, while she waited for sleep to blind her eyes that night, discovered that she was looking forward to the next afternoon, when Bridge would be again in order and infeasible without the fourth.
But she was too sleepy to be concerned about the methods with which Summerlad, making no perceptible effort, had succeeded in winning back the ground which over-assurance had lost for him at the breakfast table. It was enough that he qualified as that all too unordinary social phenomenon, "an amusing person."
She began to study him more intently if discreetly, however, when the train pulled into Albuquerque for its scheduled stop of an hour at noon of the second day, and the Lontaines and Lucinda, alighting to stretch their legs, found Summerlad, alert and debonnaire, waiting on the platform, prepared to act as their guide and protect them against their tenderfoot tendency to purchase all the souvenirs in sight.
This quiet process of noting and weighing ran like a strand of distinctive colour through the patterned impressions of the day, till, retracing it in reverie after nightfall, it was possible for Lucinda to make up her mind that she liked Lynn Summerlad decidedly. True that he was not of her world; but then neither was she herself any more, in this anomalous stage of the apostate wife, neither wife nor widow, not even honest divorcée.
If Summerlad's character as she read it had faults, if an occasional crudity flawed his finish, these things were held to be condonable in view of his youth. He seemed ridiculously young to Lucinda, but sure to improve with age, sure to take on polish from rubbing up against life. Especially if he were so fortunate as to find the right woman to watch over and advise him. An interesting job, for the right woman....
Not (she assured herself hastily) that it would be a job to interest her. An absurd turn of thought, anyway. Why she had wasted time on it she really didn't know. Unless, of course, its incentive had lain in consciousness of Summerlad's naïve captivation. One couldn't very well overlook that. He was so artless about it, boyish, and—well—nice. It was most entertaining.
It was also, if truth would out, far from displeasing.
Apprehension of this most human foible in herself caused Lucinda to smile confidentially into the darkness streaming gustily astern from the observation platform, to which the four of them had repaired to wait while their several berths were being made up. But the hour was so late, the night air so chill in the altitudes which the train was then traversing, that no other passengers had cared to dispute with them the platform chairs; while Fanny had excused herself before and Lontaine had quietly taken himself off during Lucinda's spell of thoughtfulness. So that now she found herself alone with Summerlad, when that one, seeing the sweet line of her cheek round in the light from the windows behind them, and surmising a smile while still her face remained in shadow, enquired with a note of plaintiveness: "What's the joke, Mrs. Druce? Won't you let me in on the laugh, too?"
"I'm not sure it was a joke," Lucinda replied; "it was more contentment. I was thinking I'd been having a rather good time, these last two days."
"It's seemed a wonderful time to me," Summerlad declared in a voice that promised, with any encouragement, to become sentimental.
"Quite a facer for my anticipations," Lucinda interposed firmly—"considering the way I had to fly Chicago and my husband." Then she laughed briefly to prove she wasn't downhearted. "But I daresay you're wondering, Mr. Summerlad...."
"Eaten alive by inquisitiveness, if you must know. All the same, I don't want to know anything you don't want to tell me; and I don't have to tell you, you don't have to tell me anything—if you know what I mean."
"It sounds a bit involved," Lucinda confessed, judgmatical; "still, I think I do know what you mean. And it's only civil to tell you I was leaving to go to Reno by way of San Francisco when my husband found me at the Blackstone. But now the Lontaines have persuaded me to spend a few weeks with them in Los Angeles——"
"That's something you'll never regret."
"I hope so."
"You won't if you leave it to me."
"Yes, I'm sure you mean to be nice to us; but you're going to be very busy when you get to Los Angeles, aren't you?"
"I'm never going to be too busy to——"
"But now you remind me," Lucinda interrupted with decision. "I've got a great favor to beg of you, Mr. Summerlad."
"Can't make it too great——"
"Fanny and I were discussing it this morning, and it seemed wise to us.... You've seen something of how persistent my husband can be——"
"Can't blame him for that."
"Well, then: the only way I can account for his having found me in Chicago is on the theory that he employed detectives. But of course I'd made it easy for them by using my own name wherever I went."
"Why don't you use another name, then?"
"Just what Fanny and I were saying. If I don't, Bel—Mr. Druce—is sure to follow me to Los Angeles, sooner or later, and make more scenes. I'd like to avoid that, if I can."
"Surest thing you know, he'll find out, if the Los Angeles newspapers ever discover Mrs. Bellamy Druce of New York is in the civic midst. The best little thing they do is print scare-head stories about distinguished visitors and the flattering things they say about our pretty village."
"That settles it, then: I'm going to be somebody else for a while. Help me choose a good, safe nom de guerre, please."
"Let's see: Mrs. Lontaine calls you Cindy...."
"Short for Lucinda."
"How about Lee? Lucinda Lee?"
"I like that. But it does sound like the movies, doesn't it?"
"What do you expect of a movie actor, Mrs. Druce?"
"Mrs. Lee, please."
"Beg pardon: Mrs. Lee."
"And you'll keep my horrid secret, won't you?"
"If you knew how complimented I feel, you'd know I would die several highly disagreeable deaths before I'd let you think me unworthy of your confidence."
"That's very sweet," Lucinda considered with mischievous gravity. "And I am most appreciative. But if you will persist in playing on my susceptibilities so ardently, Mr. Summerlad, I'll have to go to bed."
"Please sit still: I'll be good."
"No, but seriously," Lucinda insisted, rising: "it is late, and I want to wake up early, I don't want to miss anything of this wonderful country."
"You won't see anything in the morning but desert, the edge of the Mojave."
"But we've been in the desert all afternoon and I adore it."
"Oh, these Arizona plains! they're not real desert; they're just letting on; give them a few drinks and they'll start a riot—of vegetation. But the Mojave's sure-enough he-desert: sand and sun, cactus and alkali. I'm much more interesting, I'm so human."
"Yes: I've noticed. Masculine human. But, you see, a desert's a novelty. I really must go...."
She went to sleep under two blankets, but before day-break a sudden rise in temperature woke her up.
The train was at a standstill. Lucinda put up the window-shade to see, all dim in lilac twilight, a brick platform, a building of Spanish type, a signboard proclaiming one enigmatic word:NEEDLES.
Sharp jolts in series ran through the linked cars, a trainman beneath the window performed cryptic calisthenics with a lantern, one unseen uttered a prolonged, heart-rending howl, couplings clanked, the train gathered way.
As it toiled with stertorous pantings on up-grades seemingly interminable, the night grew cool again but by no means so cold as at bedtime. The outposts of Winter had been passed. The porter who tidied up the drawing-room in the morning opened a window and adjusted a cinder-screen: the breath of the desert was warm but deliciously sweet. Outside, heat-devils jigged above a blasted waste that was, as Lucinda viewed it, weirdly beautiful. The noontide air at Barstow had all the fever of a windless day of August in the East. Within the riven scarps of the Cajon Pass it was hotter still. A long, swift down-swoop toward the Pacific brought them by mid-afternoon to San Bernardino, set in emerald, where people lolled about the platform in white flannels and airy organdies.
The panorama of sylvan loveliness, all green and gold, commanded by the windows from San Bernardino onward, prepared for a Los Angeles widely unlike the city of Lucinda's first confused impressions, for something Arcadian and spacious instead of a school of sky-scrapers that might have been transported en masse from almost any thriving commercial centre of the North Atlantic seaboard. She was sensible of dull resentment as Summerlad's car—an open one but of overpowering bigness and staggering in its colour-scheme of yellow and black with silver trimmings—progressed in majesty through streets where monstrous trolleys ground and clanged, motor vehicles plodded, champing at the bits, in solid column formation, and singularly shabby multitudes drifted listlessly between towering white marble walls.
Only train-weariness and the glad prospect of a tub bath earned the Hotel Alexandria forgivenness for its sin of ostentation in pretending to stand at Broadway and Forty-second street, New York.
That sense of having been somehow swindled was, if anything, stronger in consequence of an expedition afoot with Fanny after breakfast, in the course of which the two women explored the shopping and business district adjacent to the hotel. The imaginations responsible for the plan and building of the city had suffered from that deadly blight of imitativeness which afflicts the American mentality all the land over, restricting every form of emulation to charted channels, with the result that ambition seldom seeks its outlet in expression of individuality but as a rule in the belittling of another's achievement through simple exaggeration of its bulk and lines, in being not distinctive but only bigger, showier, and more blatant.
Having lunched with Fanny (Lontaine was busy, it was understood, promoting his indefinite but extensive motion-picture interests) Lucinda returned to rooms which Summerlad had caused to be transformed in her absence into the likeness of a fashionable florist and fruiterer's shop; and while she was trying to decide whether to move half the lot or herself out into the hall, the telephone rang and a strange voice announced that Mr. Summerlad's chauffeur was speaking and Mr. Summerlad's car was at the door and likewise at the disposition of Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Lontaine for the afternoon.
"Ought we?" Lucinda doubted with a little grimace.
"Why not?" Fanny asked.
"It seems just a bit.... Oh, I don't know. I presume it would be ungracious to question Californian hospitality."
"Copy-Californian," Fanny corrected. "Chances are you'll find Summerlad's a native son of Omaha or some point East. Does it matter? He means well, and we want to see Los Angeles."
"But that car!"
"It is rather a circus-wagon; but judging by what we've seen in the streets today, the way to make oneself conspicuous here is to sport a car of gaudy black or screaming navy blue. In the racy idiom of the Golden West—let's go."
They went. In ten minutes Los Angeles of the sky-scrapers was forgotten. For three hours league after league of garden-land, groves, plantations, ocean beach, bare brown hills, verdant valleys wide as an Eastern county, all bathed in sunlight of peculiar brilliance and steadiness falling through crystalline air from a sky innocent of cloud, passed in review before beauty-stricken eyes.
In the end the car turned without warning off a main-travelled highway, swept the bluestone drive of what might well have been parked private grounds, and stopped before the imposing, columned portico of an old Colonial mansion.
The chauffeur turned back a friendly, grinning face. "This is where Mr. Summerlad works," he announced—"the Zinn Studios."
"Studios!"
"Yes, ma'm—where they make the movin'-pictures."
Lucinda stared unbelievingly at the building, finding it hardly possible to reconcile such mellow beauty of scheme and proportion, so harmonious with the spacious lawns and massed foliage of its setting, with memories of those grubby, grimy, back-street premises tenanted by the Culp studios in New York.
A screen-door beneath the portico opened, Mr. Summerlad emerged, a shape of slender elegance in Shantung silk, and ran impetuously down to the car. With more deliberation Lontaine appeared and waited.
"Mrs. Lee, Mrs. Lontaine: I hope you'll forgive me for telling Tom to stop in here instead of taking you back to the hotel. Lontaine's here, and we've planned a little surprise, dinner at my place out in Beverly Hills, just the four of us. You won't say no and spoil everything? That's splendid! But it's early, and perhaps you'd like a look around a regular movie factory first...."