There was at this time little room in Lucinda's inner life for other people's troubles, she was much too agreeably engrossed in doting on this radiant new avatar of Linda Lee, victress in a form of duel of which Summerlad was reputed a master who had never known defeat. Rumours current of his success with women had found her credulous and lenient; mortal vanity saw to that. It feeds on strange foods, vanity, it waxes fat on inconsistencies. Think as well as you will of yourself, you shall not find unacceptable the belief that one well loved by many has been laid low by love of you alone.... And indeed a great part of that indecision at which Lucinda in those days played so daintily was due to the knowledge, unformulated in her consciousness but none the less exercising constant influence on her moods, that she was less in love with Lynn than in love with being loved by Lynn Summerlad the idolized.
In many ways admirable, a fine animal who kept himself always exquisitely fit, intelligent enough to share or seem to share her every taste and prejudice, Lynn had laid a spell upon her mind no less than on her senses. The minor faults of which she had earlier been aware, the little things he sometimes did or said that jarred, he had amended. Or she was no longer competent to perceive them....
So she put away all care on account of the strange woman whose unhappiness had excited her quick compassion, and let fancy have its fling at the dissipation of thinking how blessed was her lot, how supremely distinguished as fortune's favorite she was who had everything, youth, beauty, health and riches, and to whom all things good were granted, love, friends, admiration and envy of the general, and—never to be misprized—a life, in its present phase, of vicissitudes highly diverting.
And if she knew seasons when memories twinged like an old wound slow to mend beneath its scar, she found a certain casuistry to console regrets and compound with conscience, holding herself spiritually, as in material circumstances, a free agent, free to listen to any man, if she would, and if she would to love him. The phantom fiction of a legal bond, all that was left of her married life, she could do away at will, at little cost in inconvenience....
That morning, as every morning now, she woke with a smile responsive to the smiling promise of the day; and when she had lazily girded on her armour against fault-finding eyes, called for her car and sallied forth to while away yet another day of idleness.
Her rooms were so situate, at the end of one wing of the hotel and on the lower floor, that to reach the main entrance she had to pass the corner-room now occupied by Nelly Marquis; and malicious luck would have it that the two should meet.
The Marquis girl had been out and was returning with a small packet gripped in a shabbily gloved hand. A well-made woman with a graceful carriage, her face held elements of beauty of a wild, sweet sort, but dimmed and wasted by despondency and impaired health. Today the dark rings under her eyes were deeper, the eyes themselves more desperate than when their look had first appealed to Lucinda's sympathies. And seeing her so, Lucinda with a solicitous cry—"Why, Miss Marquis!"—paused and extended an impulsive hand.
The girl swerved away from the hand, shrinking to the wall, her scant natural colour ebbing till the rouge was livid on cheeks and lips, while her eyes grew hard and hot.
"Well!" she said sullenly—"what do you want?"
Confounded by this proof of a hostility as pertinacious as it was perverse, Lucinda faltered: "But—you are ill——"
"Well: and if I am, what's that to you?" The words uttered in a level tone nevertheless seemed to force explosively past the tremulous, waxen lips. "Oh, don't worry your head about me; think about yourself. Don't forget you can be contaminated by a creature like me, don't forget"—she accomplished a singularly true reproduction of Summerlad's tone—"I'm 'really not the sort you can afford to get mixed up with'!"
"I'm so sorry you heard, Miss Marquis. Of course neither of us had any idea you were——"
"Eavesdropping! why don't you say it? I'm not ashamed."
"But are you fair to me? I meant you no harm, I didn't say—what you resent—you know."
The girl gave a grimace of pure hate. "No," she snarled—"youdidn't say anything unkind, you were too busy posing as Lady Bountiful to pass uncharitable remarks! But he—he said enough—enough for me. Oh, I'm not saying he didn't tell the truth! I'm 'a bad lot,' all right—a rotten bad lot, if you want to know—and I'll be worse before I'm better. So you watch out and keep away from me—d'you hear? I want and warn you to keep away from me. I don't want your pity or your charity or any of your holier-than-thou butting in—all I want's just to be let alone. Any time I change my mind, I'll send you an engraved notice.... I trust I make myself clear, Miss Lee!"
"Yes, thank you," said Lucinda coolly—"quite"—and went her way.
Insolence so patently hysterical could neither hurt nor harden her heart. She consigned the affront to the limbo of the insignificant, and had put all thought of it away when, fifteen minutes later, her car brought her to the Lontaine bungalow.
Here Lucinda had to rout Fanny out of bed and make her dress, against her protestations that she'd been on a party the night before, with Harry and some people, so needed rest and kind words more than exercise and open air.
The reflection cast a shadow as transitory as a flying cloud's upon the bright tranquillity of Lucinda's temper, that Fanny, by her own frank account, had been going in for parties rather heavily of late, and it wasn't doing her any good. Not that she showed ill effects more than in a feverish look that really enhanced her blonde prettiness. But with Fanny's insatiable appetite for the sort of thing that she called fun....
After all, that was Fanny's concern, and Harry's. One had confidence in their ultimate good sense, in their knowing where to draw the line, when to call a halt.
From the Lontaine bungalow the two proceeded to the Zinn Studios, having nothing better to do and thinking to pick up Harry there and run him down to the Alexandria for luncheon. But the shabbily furnished little office assigned to Linda Lee Inc. was empty, the blue-and-white car was missing from the yard, and nobody had any information concerning Lontaine's whereabouts or probable return.
This was nothing unusual, Lontaine was always on the wing, blowing to and fro between Los Angeles and the studio; but his absence left the young women at loose ends until Fanny suggested that they look up Lynn, find out what he was doing, and make him stop it.
Summerlad's company was busy doing nothing at all on one of the enclosed stages, contentedly lounging in and about a bizarre ball-room set and waiting for something to happen; the occupation which, Lucinda by this time had come to know, earns the motion-picture actor about ninety per cent. of his wages; the other ten being paid him for actual acting. Neither Lynn nor Joseph Jacques, his director, was in evidence, but the cameraman said the two of them had retired to the director's office for a conference.
To the office Lucinda and Fanny accordingly repaired and—their knock being answered by a morose growl—there discovered Summerlad, in elaborate evening clothes, tilted back in a desk-chair, a thoughtful scowl on his handsome, painted face, with Jacques, a mild-mannered, slender young cinema sultan in riding-breeches and boots, sitting on the desk itself and moodily drumming its side with his heels. These got upon their feet in such confusion that Fanny was moved wickedly to enquire whether Lucinda or herself had been the subject of their confabulations. "And," she further stipulated, sternly, "what you were saying about whichever of us. I never saw two people look more guilty of scandal."
"It wasn't scandal," Jacques insisted with an air of too transparent virtue. "We had been talking about Miss Lee, though."
"Wondering if you'd care to be an angel to us, Linda."
"Look out, Linda," Fanny warned, "when a man begs a woman to be an angel to him, he's generally working her up to do something she oughtn't."
"What is it?" Lucinda enquired, laughing at Summerlad's dashed expression.
"I'm not sure you ought to, at that," he replied—"in your position, that is. But it'd be sure angelic of you."
"Help us out of the worst sort of a hole, Miss Lee," Jacques added. "I wish you would."
"But what is it?"
"Oh, nothing at all!" Summerlad assured her with a laugh that decried the very idea—"all we want you to do is forget you're a star, or going to be, and play a little part with me in this picture we're doing now."
"But how can I? I'd love to—you know that, Lynn—but we've no way of knowing when Mr. Nolan will be ready."
"That's just it, Miss Lee. It isn't any part at all, so to speak, we'll only need you three or four days; what Mr. Summerlad's afraid of is, you'll think it beneath your dignity."
"Is it such an undignified part?"
"Well, you'd have to play second fiddle to Alice Drake."
Miss Drake was Summerlad's leading woman pro tem. Lucinda made a laughing face.
"Is that all? Going on the fuss you make, I thought you'd at least want me to play a Sennett Bathing Beauty. I see no reason in the world why I should balk at playing second to as good an actress as Miss Drake."
"Well, not only that, but the part isn't big enough for you, Linda—only a bit, you know, so little it's scarcely worth mentioning."
"Then who will know or care who acts in it? I'd perfectly love to do it for you, if you think I can."
"Knew she would!" Jacques crowed. "What'd I tell you? A thoroughbred's a thoroughbred every time!"
"You are a brick, Linda, and no mistake. You've no idea what a load you've taken off our minds. You see, this part, while nothing to speak of in itself, is awfully important to the picture in one way; it absolutely demands somebody who's got everything you've got."
"If we stick in anybody that hasn't," Jacques interpolated, "the whole works will postolutely go ker-flooey."
"We did the best we could," Summerlad pursued, "had Gloria Glory engaged; but this morning, when she was to report for work, she sent round word she had ptomaine poisoning and was being taken to a hospital."
"Gloria Glory?" Fanny put in. "Why, I saw her down at Sunset last night. And the only thing the matter with her then wasnotptomaine poisoning."
"Too much party," Jacques interpreted. "I had the hunch, all right. Gloria sure do crook a mean elbow when she gets it unlimbered."
"Then you'll do it, Linda?"
"I'll love doing it. What do you want me to wear?"
"You'll do!" Summerlad chuckled. "Only a natural-born picture actress would ask what to wear before wanting to know what the part was. You begin tomorrow if you can get your costume ready, and you'll only want one, a riding habit."
"Cross-saddle costume, Miss Lee," Jacques explained. "White breeches and a pair of swell boots—you know—like the society dames wear when they go hoss-backing in Central Park, New York, if you've ever seen 'em."
"Yes," said Lucinda soberly—"once or twice."
"Have you got a riding costume, Linda?"
"No; but I daresay I can pick one up in Los Angeles this afternoon."
"Do that, will you, Miss Lee, if you can? And be on the lot at eight tomorrow, made up, please. It's a forty-mile run to the location, and we want to get there early's we can so's to get all set to shoot when the light's right."
Actor and director pranced grateful attendance on the two women as they returned to their motor-car; and when it had vanished down the drive, Summerlad fell upon Jacques and shook him fervently by the hand.
"You're a true friend, Joe!" he declared in mock-emotional accents. "I'll never forget what you've done for me this day."
"Worked out pretty, didn't it?" the director grinned. "What d'you know about them dames walking in on us, just when we'd got it all doped? But you always were a fool for luck, Lynn, s'far's the skirts are concerned—you old hyena!"
"I am this flop, anyway," Summerlad mused with a far-away look. "Those white riding-breeches were a regular inspiration, Joe: if she finds a pair before night, I miss my guess."
"Well, it don't do to ride your luck too hard. You've got all afternoon with the coast clear—maybe! Get your make-up off and beat it quick."
As it turned out, however, Lucinda experienced no great difficulty in fitting herself acceptably with a ready-made costume of white linen for cross-saddle riding, and light tan boots of soft leather.
The prospect of at last doing real work before a camera, after her long wait since falling in with Lontaine's scheme, inspired a quiet elation. She had already been elaborately tested and re-tested, of course, by the cameraman under contract with Linda Lee Inc.; she had ceased to feel self-conscious in the fierce white light of the Kliegs, and was familiar almost to satiety with the sensation, at first so nightmarish, of sitting in a darkened chamber and watching herself move to and fro upon a lighted screen. This last, however, had given Lucinda confidence in the photographic value of her good looks; and she had furthermore learned, through measuring her unproved abilities by those of established screen actresses daily displayed to the millions, not to be apprehensive of scoring an utter failure when her time came to entertain with the mobile shadow of her self audiences that had paid to be amused.
So she felt assured of doing well enough in her work with Summerlad. And if her mood was serious, when she alighted at the hotel and gave a bellboy her purchases, it was because she was thinking of nothing but her immediate purpose, which was to try on her costume all complete, with hat, boots, gloves and riding-crop, before a mirror, partly to make sure every detail was as it should be, but mostly to satisfy herself that she would look as fetching as she felt she must.
It wasn't till she found herself in the corridor leading to her suite that Lucinda remembered Nelly Marquis; she hadn't given the girl two thoughts since morning, and in all likelihood wouldn't have given her another had she not met the bellboy returning from delivering the parcels to her maid, and paused to tip him in front of the door to the corner room. Then, as he thanked her and passed on, she noticed that the door was slightly ajar, the room beyond dark with early dusk, and finally, where the light from the corridor struck in across the threshold, a white hand at rest upon the floor, a woman's hand, palm up, the fingers slightly contracted, absolutely still. A startling thing to see....
For a few seconds Lucinda stood entranced with premonitions of horror. Then she moved to the door and rapped on it gently. There was no response, the hand didn't stir. She called guardedly: "Miss Marquis!"—and when nobody answered laid hold of the knob. The door met a soft obstacle when less than half-open, and would yield no farther. The light now disclosed an arm bare to the elbow. With a shiver Lucinda stepped in and groped along the wall till her fingers found and turned the switch illuminating the central chandelier.
Nelly Marquis lay supine, breathing if at all so lightly that the movement of her bosom, beneath the ragged lace of a dingy pink silk négligé, was imperceptible. Her lids, half lowered, showed only the whites of rolled up eyes, her lips were parted and discoloured, her painted pallor was more ghastly even than it had been in the morning. On the evidence of her body's posture in relation to the partly opened door, she had been taken suddenly ill, had rushed to call for assistance, and had fallen in the act of turning the knob.
Lucinda shut the door, knelt, touched the girl's wrist, and found it icy cold. But her bosom was warm, the heart in it faintly but indisputably fluttering.
In relief and pity, she essayed to take the girl up in her arms and carry her to the bed, but found the dead weight too great.
Casting round at random for something in the nature of a restorative, smelling salts or the like, she saw nothing that would serve, at first, only a disarray of garments and other belongings characteristic of natures in which care for appearances and personal neatness has become atrophied through one cause or another—if it ever existed. But she noticed absently that one of the windows stood wide to the veranda, and went to close it and draw the shade before pursuing her search.
Then, in the bathroom, she found a bottle of aggressive toilet water and a pint flask of whiskey, half emptied.
Alternately moistening the pale lips with the whiskey and bathing the brows and temples with the pungent water, she observed for the first time a reddish bruise under the left eye, the mark of a blow, possibly sustained in falling. But there was nothing nearby that the girl could have struck to inflict such a hurt except the door-knob, and if she had struck this with such force she must have slammed the door.
It was puzzling....
Her ministrations eventually began to take effect. The bleached lips quivered, closed, then opened and closed several times. The woman's lashes trembled and curtained her eyes. Lucinda went to the bathroom for water. When she returned with half a glassful liberally laced with whiskey, Nelly Marquis was conscious; but her eyes, with pupils inordinately expanded, remained witless until she had drained the glass with convulsive gulps and Lucinda had set it aside.
"Do you think you're strong enough now to get to bed, if I help?"
The girl nodded: "...try," she whispered. Using all her strength, Lucinda succeeded in getting Nelly Marquis on her feet. About this time the clouded faculties began to clear. Clinging to Lucinda's arm, Nelly started as if in a spasm of fear, darted swift glances of terror round the room, then turned a look of perplexity to Lucinda.
"Where is he?" the whisper demanded. "Has he—has he gone?"
"There is no one else here, nothing to be afraid of. Come: let me help you to bed."
Recognition dawned as she spoke, with a movement of feeble fury the girl threw Lucinda's arm away, but deprived of its support staggered to the foot of the bed, to which she clung, quaking.
"You!" she cried—"what you doing here?"
"The door was open, I saw you lying senseless on the floor. I couldn't go on and leave you like that. You'd have done as much for me."
"Oh! would I? A lot you know!" Her knees seemed about to buckle; will-power alone kept Nelly Marquis from sinking; yet she persisted: "I suppose I ought to thank you. Well: much obliged, I'm sure. Is that enough?"
"Quite enough. I've no wish to annoy you. Only, let me suggest, you need a doctor. May I ask the office to call one?"
"When I want a doctor, I'll call him myself. Good night."
"I'm sorry," said Lucinda simply.
With no choice other than to go, she went. But the vision she carried away, of Nelly Marquis glaring at her with eyes malevolent, her frail body vibrating so that it shook the bed, must have haunted Lucinda's conscience all evening long had she let the affair drop then and there.
Returning to her room, she telephoned the office and asked for the hotel physician. The clerk reported that the doctor was out, but promised to advise him of her call as soon as he came in.
Upwards of an hour later a knock ushered in a quiet young man with weary, understanding eyes, who attended gravely to what Lucinda had to tell him.
"She seems to have taken such an inexplicable dislike to me," Lucinda wound up, "I'm sure she won't see you if she knows you come through me. But the girl is really ill and needs help. So, I thought, perhaps you might find someone else in the hotel who knows her and could get her to consent to see you."
"I fancy I know her well enough myself to excuse a friendly call," the physician answered. "She's an old patient of mine, though she hasn't been in Hollywood for some time, I believe."
"Then you must know what's the matter with her...."
"Yes, I know.... But it would be unprofessional to tell you, of course, Miss Lee."
"Then tell me this much: that you can help her."
"I'm not sure of that. Not unless she's willing. To do her any real good, I'd have to have her under observation for some weeks. And cases like hers are peculiar, peculiarly strong-headed.... However, I'll see if I can do anything with her now, and let you know."
Three minutes after he had left, he knocked again.
"Too late, Miss Lee," he reported. "Nelly Marquis checked out about a quarter of an hour ago, they tell me at the desk—called for an auto and left no address."
The indigene of Southern California has long since ceased to regard with much interest the publicly practised tribal customs of those clans which herd upon the motion-picture reservation. He no longer thinks he's seeing life when he comes upon troops of fairy policemen rapturously chasing their trails by broad daylight, or woebegone gentlemen with too much trousers popping out of manholes in public thoroughfares, or painfully unconscious sweethearts in broad-minded evening dress at high noon fondling each other in front of, say, the Hollywood Hotel. He no more knows a thrill when motor-loads of revellers in giddy costume and with sanguine noses blow by his unromantic bungalow at breakneck speed, preceded or followed by other cars filled with bored proletaires in workaday clothes, among them one embracing affectionately the slim young limbs of a camera tripod. And if he should chance to observe his next-door neighbour lamming the everlasting daylights out of his wife on the front lawn, he would make sure there was no camera within range before telephoning for the police.
A month of Hollywood had so accustomed Lucinda to such sights that she became a part of them, at least in as far as involved coursing through the streets in full make-up, without any sense of making herself unduly conspicuous.
She even forgot to think it strange that she, Lucinda Druce, should not resent being made love to unprofessionally, that is to say without an eye to the camera, by a man with rouge on cheeks and lips and eyelashes beaded with mascaro.
If the feeling that she had cast her lines in strange places was quick to wear off, in those three days of work with the Summerlad company, the fun of it wasn't. Lucinda threw herself into the detail of every hour with tremendous zest, and liked it all as she seldom had liked anything before.
To rise hours before the time at which use had habited her to waking, rout the drowsiness from her flesh with a cold plunge, dress hastily in her becoming white costume, snatch a bite of breakfast and dash out into the cool glow of morning sunlight to rendezvous at the studio; to pick up Lynn and Fanny for company on a cross-country race to a wild canyon of the Sierra Madre; to change to horseback when the going grew perilous for motor travel, and ride five miles farther up a trail that now ran level with the rushing waters of a mountain stream, now climbed dizzily above it on rocky ledges barely wide enough to afford foothold for one horse at a time, ending in a lovely wilderness spot which Jacques had selected because, he said, it hadn't been "shot to death"; to idle, chat and giggle with Lynn, Fanny and Alice Drake during the long delays devoted by Jacques to making up his mind what he wanted the company to do in preference to the action indicated in the continuity which he was politely presumed to be producing; to lunch al fresco, grouped round a blanket on which a decidedly rude and hearty picnic meal was spread; to frolic through a few minutes of make-believe while the camera clicked and Jacques bawled directions through a megaphone; then to drive back in the evening lull, with lights breaking out in lilac dusk like fireflies in a tinted mist; to get home so weary that she could hardly keep awake long enough to wolf down the dinner for which she was ravening, then to fling herself into the warm, all-obliterating haven of bed; and all the while to be falling more and more madly in love but still practising delectable, self-tantalizing self-denial: this wasn't work in any sense, but play, sheer play of a most gorgeous sort and of which surely one could never tire.
If this were all there was to motion-picture acting, then Lucinda could not wonder that, as she was one day informed by a crusty veteran of the colony: "Bums may turn revivalists, and lawyers honest, but there ain't no known cure for a lens lizard."
In the name of all things reasonable! why sigh to be cured of a vocation at once so profitable and so enthralling?
There was another side to the business, of course, there had to be. One knew it couldn't be all beer and skittles, one heard dark hints of the uglier side, one even caught glimpses of it and its workings now and then, as in the instance of Nelly Marquis; but awareness of it had no perceptible effect upon the spirits of those with whom Lucinda found herself associated for the time being. Some of the younger members of the acting division seemed to take life a thought seriously—"life" meaning, as a rule, themselves—but the more experienced, and the men of the technical groups, the directors, cameramen, and their assistants, the property men and jacks-of-all-trades, went about their work with jests ever on their lips. Lucinda heard few orders given or acknowledged other than in the semi-jocular vein known as "kidding." Even Jacques, whose office clothed him with a certain dignity, by which he was intermittently depressed, seemed in his most earnest moments to find it difficult to express himself in terms of becoming gravity. The common attitude summed up to this: that making pictures was all a huge lark and (strictly between those engaged in it) a darned good joke on the people who paid the bills.
As for the part she was supposed to play in this picture of Summerlad's, Lucinda never managed to secure an intelligible exposition of its nature or its relation to the plot. Both Summerlad and Jacques seemed strangely vague in their own minds concerning it, and Alice Drake frankly confessed she hadn't read the 'script and hadn't the faintest notion what the picture was about. She did what Jacques told her to do, and did it very well, and so long as there were no complaints and her weekly cheque turned up on time, she didn't care (she said) a thin red hoot about the story. Neither was this an uncommon attitude, she averred; not infrequently directors imposed it upon the actors and actresses working under them. There was George Loane Tucker, who had directedThe Miracle Man; Miss Drake had worked for him and could testify concerning his methods. He never told any of the cast what the story was, only what he wanted them to wear and do and how and when to do it; that was all. He had even invented a secret system of numbering the "takes," so that he alone could properly assemble the thousand or so separate scenes and close-ups which go to make up the average motion-picture when photography on it is finished, scenes which are never by any chance photographed in consecutive order. Nor was Tucker the only one....
Later on, in the projection-rooms of the Zinn Studios, Lucinda saw the "rushes" of the scenes in which she had played; "rushes" being the first positive prints made from the uncut negative: "takes" running anywhere from twice to a hundred times the length of the scene to be finally incorporated into the finished picture and disclosed to the public. She was well content with the way she had done what little had been given her to do, but was left in the dark as to what it was all about. And in the final cutting and editing, that sequence of scenes dropped out of the film altogether. So that nobody ever knew, except possibly Summerlad and Jacques....
To the best of her observation her rôle was that of an involuntary vamp. Not vampire: vamp. No other term will serve so well. Originally a derisive diminutive, the usage of the studios has endowed this monosyllable with a significance all its own, not readily definable. A vamp no longer means of necessity a vampire, a scarlet-mouthed seductress of strong men's souls. A vamp may be a far more socially possible person that that, in fact any attractive woman who comports herself toward another woman's man consistently with the common amenities of civilized intercourse.
As an involuntary vamp, then, Miss Lee was to meet Mr. Summerlad under romantic circumstances and innocently wean him from strict fidelity to the charms of his betrothed (or it may have been his wife) Miss Drake. Of this situation Miss Drake was in due course to become cognizant. What was to happen after that between Miss Drake and Mr. Summerlad was no concern of the involuntary vamp's. Furthermore, she never learned.
The said romantic circumstances proved sufficiently thrilling to bring about an early wedding in most films. Miss Lee was run away with by her horse while taking an early morning canter in mountains conveniently adjacent to her family's suburban villa. Mr. Summerlad, similarly engaged in health-giving equestrianism, happened along at the right time to observe her peril, pursue, and snatch her bodily from her saddle to his arms at the very instant when her mount was plunging headlong over a precipice. After which he escorted her to her home, and on the way the two indulged in such normal love-making as was only to be expected when the facts of the case were taken into consideration.
Jacques used up all of one day and two-thirds of the next staging and shooting the runaway and the rescue scenes, in none of which either Lucinda or Summerlad figured in person. Lucinda, it is true, was photographed from several angles, riding along the mountainside trail at a point where it was broad enough for her horse, with safety to its rider, to shy and start to run away. The animal was an unusually intelligent, perfectly trained and docile trick-horse that, given the right signals, would perform a number of feats such as shying, running away, stopping short, falling dead under its rider. And Lucinda was a good horsewoman, though not good enough for such rough and really dangerous riding as would be required after the start of the runaway. A double was therefore provided for her, a tough and wiry young person of about her height and weight who made her living by risking her life in just such ways, and who, with Lucinda's white coat, hat and boots added to her own white riding-breeches, passed well enough for Lucinda in "distance shots."
A double was likewise provided for Summerlad, though he was a superb rider and vigorously asserted his right to take what chances he pleased with his own neck. But Jacques explained it wasn't Summerlad's neck he cared about, it was finishing a picture in which eighty thousand dollars had already been sunk and for whose completion Summerlad's services would be required for four more weeks. Thereafter he could break his neck as often and in as many places as he liked, for all of Jacques.
So Summerlad held his peace and his place at Lucinda's side, well out of harm's way, while Jacques went ahead and directed the rescue.
Runaway, pursuit and rescue were all staged on a ledge-like trail three hundred feet above the boulder-strewn bed of the brawling stream, and were photographed simultaneously by three cameras, from the river-bed shooting upwards, from the opposite side of the canyon on a level with the trail, and from the trail itself but at a distance great enough to prevent the fact that doubles were used from becoming evident when the pictures were projected.
It was all honestly hazardous and ticklish work, rendered doubly and trebly so by the fact that each part of the action had to be replayed over and over again to satisfy Jacques, an old hand at "stunt stuff" and a painstaking one.
Lucinda's heart, as she looked on, was in her mouth more often than not. It made no difference that it was all played at a far slower tempo than would appear when it was screened; the projection-machine flashes the pictures across the screen at a faster rate than that at which they are taken; consequently it is only necessary to crank the camera at slower than normal speed to attain an effect of terrific speed in projection. Fast or slow, it was risky enough in all conscience; and Lucinda was more than glad when the last repetition had been shot and Jacques gave orders to shift to a location near the mouth of the canyon.
For those scenes of sentiment which Lucinda and Summerlad were to play in person, Jacques wanted the contrast of richer and more abundant vegetation, and the location he selected brought the party at length to a point below that at which the automobiles had been forced to stop.
Here Lucinda and Summerlad were photographed time and again, in distance shots, medium shots, and close-ups, riding side by side, registering the dawn of a more intimate interest each in the other, dismounting to rest in a sweet sylvan glade by the side of the stream, and finally in each other's arms, with Miss Drake riding up to surprise them as they kissed.
Whether by intention or because such scenes are a commonplace of picture-making, Lucinda could not say, but she had not been in any way prepared for the fact that she was to be kissed by Summerlad; whereas she had been flirting with him decorously but dangerously for the best part of three days. Now suddenly, toward the close of the third, she was instructed to permit his embrace, submit to his kiss, and kiss him in response.
She made no demur, for that would have seemed silly, but did her best to ape the matter-of-course manner of all hands, and went through it with all the stoicism, when the camera wasn't trained on her, that was compatible with the emotions she must show when it was.
But her heart was thumping furiously when she felt Summerlad's arms for the first time enfold her; and when, murmuring terms of endearment appropriate to both the parts the man was playing, he put his lips to hers, she knew, both despite and because of the tumult of her senses, that she was lost. Control of the situation between them passed in that instant from her hands to his.
Released at length, she looked round, dazed and breathless, to find that, during the business of the kiss, a party of uninvited onlookers had been added to their professional audience.
A motor-car had slipped up on the group and stopped, and one of its two passengers had alighted and drawn near to watch.
This was Bellamy.
Momentarily stunned eyes saw the face of Bellamy only as a swimming blur of flesh-colour shaded by a smile of hateful mockery. Then, not unlike rays of the sun escaping from complete eclipse, Lucinda's wits struggled from out a dark penumbra of dismay to make new terms with the world—or try to, under the handicap of panicy conviction that it was all up now with Linda Lee.
Such was her first thought.... In another minute or two, as soon as she was able to acknowledge what she might not much longer ignore, Bellamy's attitude of patient but persevering attention, everybody present must learn that she had no right title to the style by which she had palmed herself off on Hollywood; by nightfall the studios would be agog over the news that Linda Lee was no less a personage than Mrs. Bellamy Druce.
She was curiously disturbed less because of the circumstances in which her husband had found her out than on account of the menace he presented to the plans she had of late begun to nurse so tenderly. All at once Lucinda discovered how passionately her heart had become implicated in this adventure, how deeply the ambition had struck its roots into her being to win by native ability unaided to those starry eminences whereon the great ones of the cinema sojourned. To hear the inevitable verdict read upon her career before it was fairly launched, "Another screen-struck society woman!" were an affront to decent self-esteem by the side of which it seemed a trivial matter that Bellamy, no more her husband but by grace of the flimsiest of civil fictions, had caught her in the act of kissing another man.
Notwithstanding, her cheeks were hot, she experienced infinite vexation of the knowledge; and—all her efforts to recover hindered by a silence damnably eloquent of general sensitiveness to a piquant and intriguing moment—she was shaken by gusts of impotent irritation in whose grasp she could almost without a qualm have murdered Bellamy where he stood, if only to quench that graceless grin of his, and the more readily since he, on his part, seeing her reduced to temporary incompetence, chose to treat her with the most exemplary and exasperating magnanimity.
Hat in hand, the other proffered in sublime effrontery, smiling his winningest smile, Bel strode blithely into the forbidden ground of the camera lines; while his gay salutation fell upon ears incredulous.
"How d'you do, Miss Lee. Don't say you've forgotten me so soon! Druce, you know, Bellamy Druce——"
"Don't be ridiculous, Bel!"
"Can't blame me for wondering—can you?—the way you stare, as if I were a ghost."
"So you are," Lucinda retorted, shocked into gasping coherence by this impudence. "I can't imagine a greater surprise...."
"I believe you. But think of mine—I mean, of course, my astonishment."
Bel would have her hand, there was no refusing him that open sign of friendship; for an instant Lucinda let it rest limply in his grasp, appreciating there was nothing she could do now but take his cues as they fell, and treat the rencontre as one of the most welcome she had ever experienced....
"But wherever did you bob up from, Bel?"
"From the East, naturally—last night's train. The Alexandria told me where you'd moved, the Hollywood directed me to your studio, somebody there said you might be found out here—'working on location,' think he called it. So took a chance—and here I am. Hope you don't mind...."
"Mind? Why should I?"
"Couldn't be sure I wasn't violating Hollywood etiquette. Never saw a movie in the making before, you know. Most entertaining. Congratulate you and Mr. Summerlad on the way you played your little scene just now. Only for the camera over there, I'd have sworn you both meant it."
"Don't put too much trust in the camera, Mr. Druce," Summerlad interposed blandly. "Rumour to the contrary notwithstanding, the blame' thing has been known to lie."
"H'are you, Mr. Summerlad?" Bellamy met his impudence with irresistible audacity. "So we meet again. Sure we would some day. Well: pleasanter circumstances than last time, what?"
"Conditions are what one makes them, out here in California. I hope you'll find the climate healthier than Chicago's."
"Trust me for that," Bellamy retorted in entire good-humour. "But, I say"—he glanced in feigned apprehension toward the camera—"not obstructing traffic, am I?"
"No fear, or Jacques would've bawled you out long ago."
"'Sright," Jacques averred, coming forward to be introduced. "All through for today, folks," he called back. "Le's go!"
Breaking into small knots and straggling off to the waiting motor-cars, the company prepared for its journey home, while cameras and properties were packed up and the horses herded away toward their overnight quarters in Azusa.
Slender, fair, insouciant, looking a precocious little girl in her extravagantly brief skirts, but with all the wisdom of Eve a-glimmer in her wide eyes, Fanny sauntered up and permitted Bellamy to be presented.
"My chaperon," Lucinda explained with the false vivacity of overtaut nerves—"the straight-laced conservator of les convenances."
"I hope very truly," Bel asserted, bowing over Fanny's hand—"you never need one less charming or more complaisant."
Fanny giggled, enjoying the contretemps hugely and determined it shouldn't lose savour for want of ambiguous seasoning.
"As for complaisance, the camera covers a multitude of indiscretions. That aside"—her glance coupled Lucinda and Summerlad in delicately malicious innuendo—"taking one consideration with another, a chaperon's lot is not a vapid one."
"I'm sure of that," Bellamy agreed with a straight face. "Not only that, but if you've any time at all to spare for your job, Mrs. Lontaine, the percentage of impaired eyesight among native sons must be high."
"Appreciation is such a beautiful thing!" Fanny purred. "Dear man! I do hope you'll be lingering in our midst a long, long time."
"No such luck for me. A few days at most. I only ran out to go over some matters with my man of business out here."
"The square-headed body with the blue gimlet eyes?" Fanny enquired, openly appraising the person who had accompanied Bellamy to this meeting, but who remained in the car with stony gaze riveted on nothing in particular—"who looks like a private detective in a five-reel re-hash of the eternal triangle?"
"The same."
"You have so many interests in California, you need a man on the spot to look after them?"
"Not many but, such as they are, of prime importance to me," Bellamy corrected with meaning.
"How romantic!" Fanny sighed, with a look so provocative that Bellamy's mouth twitched involuntarily and he hoped fervently that Lucinda wasn't looking.
He needn't have worried. Lucinda was too thoroughly occupied with her own reactions to the several more agitating aspects of this predicament to have any thoughts to spare for frivolous by-issues.
Not only that, but in pace with the growth of her interest in Summerlad, the sense of detachment from all actual relationship to Bellamy had come to be so absolute it could never have occurred to her to be anything but entertained by the notion of a reciprocal interest springing up between Fanny Lontaine and her husband. Fanny knew her way about, in the by-ways of flirtation was as sure of foot as any chamois on its native crags. As for Bellamy, in Lucinda's sight he was no longer property of hers, he was free to follow the list of his whim, free as the wind, as free as herself....
But the bare conception of anything of the sort was far from her mind just then, too many graver considerations were making imperative demands. To begin with, she was at one and the same time grateful to Bellamy for being so decent about her assumed identity and in a raging temper with him for having dared to follow her across the Continent, in sequel to the even more intolerable insolence of setting detectives to spy upon her. No more than in Fanny's mind was there question in Lucinda's as to the real calling of that "man of business" whom Bellamy had left in his car. But she earnestly wanted to know how long and how closely that one had been her shadow, and what he had reported concerning the interests professional and social which had been engaging her.
More than this, Lucinda was at a loss to think how to deal with Bel, now he was here. Patently on his good behaviour, taking care of himself, not drinking too much; more like the man she had married for love so long ago; showing so vast an improvement over the Bellamy of later years that his unpretending presence alone somehow was enough to diminish the stature of every man present and place even Summerlad on the defensive—Lynn Summerlad, the crowned exquisite of the screen!—obviously the Bel of today was not to be reckoned with as readily as one had reckoned with the drink-stupid, conscience-racked Bel of yesterday.
Disturbed by the sound of a voice addressing her in a tone pitched to pass unheard by Bellamy, she lifted perplexed eyes to Summerlad's face.
"You're dining with me tonight. Don't forget."
"I don't know ..." Lucinda doubted. "Ought I?"
"Why on earth not? Surely you won't lethiminfluence you?"
"I don't know what's best. It might be better to see him tonight and get it over with."
"Don't be foolish. Besides, I'm telling you, not asking you. I'll call for you as soon as I can get home, change, and run back to the Hollywood."
She liked and resented this dictation, and showed both emotions in a semi-petulant smile which she intended as a preface to a retort that was never uttered. For Bellamy interrupted, and immediately she was glad of Summerlad's insistence and forgave him.
"Anxious to see you, Linda, of course, and have a talk, some time when you're not professionally engaged. Tonight be agreeable?"
"Sorry, Bel, but I'm booked for tonight."
"Tomorrow, then?"
"But tomorrow night Cindy has a date with us," Fanny objected.
"I'm out of luck. Never mind: I know Linda won't keep me in suspense forever."
"No: you may call on me the next night, Bel."
"That will be Friday. At the Hollywood, of course? Many thanks. And now I mustn't keep you, it's a long ride back and you must be quite tired out with your long day's work, the emotional strain and everything."
Bellamy was punctiliously gallant about helping Lucinda and Fanny into their car, then returned to his own, wagging a cavalier farewell to Summerlad as the latter sped away with Jacques in the orange-and-black juggernaut.
When they had been some time under way Fanny broke in upon Lucinda's meditations with an ecstatic murmur: "Priceless!"
Lucinda came to with a frown. "I'm glad you think so," she said shortly.
"Don't be upstage. You know it's priceless. Why didn't you tell me your Bel was such a lamb?"
"He's not my Bel any more, and I don't consider him a lamb."
"Then I presume you've no objection to my vamping him?"
"None whatever, if it amuses you, dear. But why waste your powder on such small game? Any pretty piece can vamp Bel. I'm not sure she need even be pretty."
"Only for your sake, darling. I don't fancy the brute, thanks."
"For my sake?"
"Don't you see through his little game? He's out here to persuade you he's a changed man, a reformed character, and beg you to take him back on probation."
"Then he's far stupider than I imagined."
"Whereas if he falls for my girlish wiles, I'll have shown him up in all his deceitfulness."
"Don't put yourself out on my account." Lucinda curled a lip. "I wouldn't take Bel back no matter how absolute his reformation."
Fanny wanted to ask more questions but, heeding the counsel of discretion, contented herself with a little private sigh. Going on her tone, Lucinda quite meant what she had just said. Good news for Harry, whose plans would be seriously embarrassed if there were any real reason to fear the defection of Lucinda through reconciliation with her husband. For of course, if she took Druce on again, it would mean an end to the still young history of Linda Lee: Druce never would consent to let his wife continue in the picture business.
"All the same, if you don't mind, I think I'll practise on Bellamy."
"Oh, I don't mind. But Harry might."
"Oh, Harry!" Fanny had a laugh of light scorn. "For all Harry cares——!"
But Lucinda was inattentive; she had lapsed swiftly into an abstraction which had little or nothing to do with the unseasonable reappearance of Bellamy or the prospect of a wearing time with him before he could be finally discouraged. Whatever proposals Bel might wish to make, the answer to them all stood immutably decreed by Lucinda's heart.
It was not with matters of such certainty that she was concerned, but with the problematical issue of the Summerlad affair, an issue whose imminence was to be measured now by hours. Nothing that had happened since had served to erase the impression of that first kiss, nothing conceivable could seem half so momentous. The presence of the camera had meant nothing, they had kissed in earnest; mute, her lips had confessed too much. It remained only to be determined whether or not Summerlad had understood their message. If he had, Lucinda well knew, she was a lost woman.
She was possessed with a species of rapturous alarm....
In sequel Lucinda knew two days made up of emotions singularly stratified. This notwithstanding the fact (of which she needed to remind herself with provoking frequency) that she had put Bel out of her life for good and all, he was less than nothing to her now and, in the simple nature of things, seeing she was pledged to another, never could be more—more, at least, than the trial his pertinacity was rendering him at present.
Most of the time, of course, all of it spent with Lynn or in dreaming of him, she was merely but comprehensibly a young woman in love and glad of it; pleased with herself, pleased with her lover, delighting in the sweet secrecy with which it were seemly for the while to screen their love.
Nevertheless, dark hours alternated in apprehension of what she was resolved must be her final talk with Bel. But how successful dared she hope to be in the business of making Bel agree even to that? Lucinda found it by no means easy to compose an attitude which she could depend upon to dishearten Bel decisively, without going to the length of telling him point-blank that she was in love with another man and meant to marry him as soon as her professional commitments would leave her free to go through the mill of Reno. And to know Bellamy as she did was to have a good warrant for mistrusting lest, far from reeling down to defeat under the impact of that revelation, he might be moved merely to make fun of it. It would be just like Bel to refuse to believe that Lucinda Druce née Harrington meant to marry a movie actor.
"Go ahead, Linda, by all means divorce me if your heart's set on it"—one could almost hear him say it—"but don't tell me you're doing it just to marry a man who paints his nose for a living."
Somehow one got scant comfort of the retort obvious, that if Lynn did paint his nose he at least did it with nothing more harmful than paint.
At all costs, then, she must avoid the risk of telling Bel what she intended, and keep the tone of the impending scene in tune with the dignity which she had thus far been successful in maintaining, be firm but cool, and give him clearly to understand it was hopeless his attempting to make whole again that sacred vessel which his impious hands had shattered.
Maintained upon such a plane that scene must have been both beautiful and conclusive. And no doubt it would have been so but for one circumstance: Bel not only failed to call on Lucinda at the time appointed but failed even to send word of apology or explanation. An affront whose realization transmuted nobility of spirit into resentment most humanly rancorous.
Lucinda had sacrificed the evening to sense of duty; a true sacrifice, for Lynn was leaving early next morning to spend a fortnight with his company in an Oregon logging camp. So this would have been their last evening together for fourteen livelong days, if Lucinda hadn't promised it to Bellamy, and if Summerlad hadn't mournfully agreed (measurably to Lucinda's disappointment in him) that she could not afford to dishonour her promise. Surely their secret happiness was enough to compensate for that much self-denial, especially when it meant the last of Bellamy....
Losing patience after hours of waiting, Lucinda called the Alexandria on the telephone, and was informed that Mr. Druce had "checked out" early in the morning, saying nothing of an intention to return.
Mystified even more than angry, Lucinda went to bed, but lay wakeful a long time trying to fathom the enigma of such conduct in one whose need of her had brought him all the way across America to beg that very audience which had been granted only to be coolly ignored. The readiest explanation, likewise at first blush the likeliest, was none the less at odds with the premeditation to be read in Bel's leaving his hotel before noon, which wasn't the action of a man whom drink had made forgetful, but rather that of one who repented his haste in suing for something which sober second-thought had satisfied him he didn't really want.
How funny, if so! How very human!
Lucinda contributed her first smile since nightfall to the darkness of her bedchamber.
But having smiled, she frowned involuntarily....
No note came from Bellamy the next morning, and nothing transpired in the course of the next several weeks to afford any clue to the riddle; with the upshot that Lucinda thought about her husband a great deal more than she wanted to or had at any time since leaving Chicago. Curiosity being piqued no less than vanity, though she kept assuring herself it was a matter of indifference to her what Bel did or didn't nowadays, invariably the consideration followed that, all the same, it was strange, it wasn't like Bel to treat any woman so rudely.
She would, in those days, have been glad and grateful for some interest so absorbing as to relegate this vexing question to the realm of the immaterial, where rightly it belonged. But, with Summerlad away, nothing much happened with enervating regularity, the most interesting hours Lucinda knew were those spent in her rooms waiting for Lynn to call up on the long distance telephone. This he did every evening, and though she was thus daily provided with exhilarating moments, those that followed always seemed desperately the duller. The truth was, lacking the sense of danger, of flirting with fire, that was intrinsic in their love-making, lacking the sense of doing something that she oughtn't, calmly flouting the rigid code of her caste and having nothing to pay, Lucinda was beginning to find her environment a trifle tiresome. Say what one would, there was a certain cloying sameness about it all.
Somebody once said in her hearing that there wasn't any weather in Southern California but only climate. And it was true that at times the wonder and beauty of everlasting sunlight seemed a poor offset to its monotony; so that Lucinda would sometimes find herself grown a little weary of the sky's dense, inexpressive, day-long blue; and even its nightly extravagance of stars now and again impressed her as being too persistently spectacular, an ostentation on the part of Nature as tasteless as many jewels plastered on a woman's pretty bosom. One rather wanted to recommend the chiffon of clouds....
Then, too, one grew acquainted with certain, definite limitations restricting the amount of amusement to be had of taking active or passive part in the simple, rowdy pleasures of the motion-picture peerage. When one had several times attended the festivities these staged in the public resorts most in favour or in their private homes, one was apt to feel moderately surfeited with jazz of all sorts, mental and moral as well as musical, and a society made up in the main of men who thought it too much trouble to dress and women who as a matter of habit airily consummated the contradiction of being at one and the same time under and over-dressed. And once the novelty of learning to speak a strange tongue had worn off, no great amount of intellectual nourishment was to be extracted of studio shop-talk, which commonly was concerned in the ratio of one to ten with the business of making motion-pictures and with the private, broadly speaking, lives of the people who were making them, lives seldom held worth the discussing when their conduct was decorous.
Though personal liberty of action and freedom of speech be part of the inalienable heritage of the American people, it was the sum of Lucinda's observation that in the studios both were practised to the point of abandon. She considered herself the most liberal-minded of women, the life she had led till now had left her few illusions, she had even been known to enunciate an aphorism in the sense that hypocrisy is a lubricant essential to the mechanism of society: here, however, she remarked, such lubrication was so generally dispensed with that oftentimes the bearings screeched to Heaven.
But Heaven made no sign, and the Hollywood of active and retired tradespeople, to which the studios had brought prosperity beyond its maddest dreams, stuffed its ears and made believe there was nothing to hear.
As for the studios, busy, complacent, and well-content to be spared the troublesome necessity of pretending to be better than they were, they forgot (if, indeed, they ever stopped to think) that they did not constitute the whole of the community, and chuckled openly over a saying that ran their rounds that season, the mot of one of their own wits:
"Are you married? Or do you live in Hollywood?"
Lucinda had by now become sufficiently conversant with the ways of directors to hear without much surprise—if with a little sinking of her lonely heart—the news which Summerlad had to communicate on the tenth day of his absence, when he telephoned that Jacques was threatening to find a fortnight too little for the work that had taken the company away from Los Angeles.
And the next day, when she paid the studio the perfunctory call of routine—to learn, as usual, that Barry Nolan had as yet sent no word concerning the date when he expected to begin directing for Linda Lee Inc.—Lucinda saw, as she left her car in front of the administration building, the owner of the premises lounging against one of the fluted columns of the portico and mumbling an unlighted cigar, and got from him a moody nod instead of the beaming salutation he had taught her to expect.
Himself a monstrously homely man, short, stout and swart, Zinn had an alert eye for feminine good looks, which had never before neglected to give Lucinda to understand that it was on her and humid with approbation.
By birth a Russian Jew, offspring of immigrants from Odessa, Isadore Zinn had worked his way into the producing business, as the saying ran, through its backdoor; that is to say, from the exhibitors' side. Indefatigable industry and appetite for hardship coupled with quenchless greed and a complete absence of scruples and moral sense, had promoted him from the office of usher in a "nickelodeon" of the cinema's early days successively to be the proprietor of the enterprise, organizer of a chain of motion-picture theatres, and president of a league of exhibitors, which last had eventually pooled its resources and gone into the business of producing as well as that of showing pictures. The money of this league had built what were today the Zinn Studios; just how this property had come to pass into Zinn's sole possession was a matter of secret history concerning which there were many rumours, all unsavory. Zinn was reputed by his loving employees to set no more store by a dollar than by an eye-tooth or an only child.
On leaving, half an hour later, Lucinda found the man in the same spot and pose. Apparently he had not moved a muscle in that interval. She paused to ask why, and was frankly told.
"I'm figuring on killing a director, Miss Lee, and wondering if maybe I couldn't get away with it. I could all right, if you only could believe all you hear. You ask any of them fellers in there"—Zinn jerked his head toward the building behind him—"takes my good money and calls me Mister Zinn—and they'll tell you I get away with murder every day or worse." He sighed dismally. "If they was any truth in that, I'd be a happy kike and a lot of directors' wives wouldn't have nothing on their minds no more, only their hair. The way I am today, the first one I'd take a load off her intellect would be Mrs. Jacques."
"I didn't know Mr. Jacques was married."
"Maybe he ain't right now, it's hard to tell. You take actors and directors, they're all the same, you never know when they ain't married or how long they been that way. The way it seems to me, they get married off and on just to see what difference it will make if any. 'Most everybody you know's got a loose wife or husband kicking around somewhere this side the Cajon Pass. The only way you can keep track of them is don't try."
"It must be frightfully embarrassing at times...."
"Ah, they don't mind! I had one little feller working for me, playing leads in two-reel comedies, his director was his first wife's second husband, and the little lady played opposite him was his second wife once removed. They got along fine s'long's they was on the lot, but outside the studio they wouldn't speak, only bark when they passed."
"But you haven't told me what Mr. Jacques has been doing...."
"Oh, him—! I got a wire from him just now, says he's going to have to keep the Summerlad outfit up in that logging camp maybe another couple weeks. Joe could of shot all the scenes he had to shoot up there in a week if he'd of went at it the right way; so I give him two weeks, and now he wants four. And I don't dare give him the razz for fear he'll make it six weeks or quit."
"But if you aren't satisfied, surely you can find another director."
"Sure I can. And the first thinghe'lldo is run all the rushes in the projection-room and tell me they're rotten and got to be retook the way he sees it. And then he'll rewrite the continuity and, just to show me what a low piker Jacques was, he'll stick in a lot of new stuff that'll cost maybe another hundred thousand dollars."
"I don't understand," Lucinda objected. "Why should Mr. Jacques deliberately waste time on a production?"
"He's getting his two thousand a week, ain't he? And if he makes this picture cost less than the last one Summerlad done, how's he going to keep his tail up with the other dogs, next time the hooch hounds meets down to Santa Monica? Not only that, if he should ever get a rep for making pictures quick and cheap, the only jobs he'll be offered will mean honest-to-God work."
"But, Mr. Zinn: if that's the usual director's attitude toward his job, I should think you would do as we're doing with Mr. Nolan, pay each a fixed sum for every production he makes."
Zinn drew down the corners of his mouth in sour pity for Lucinda's innocence. "Twenty-five thousand a picture's what Nolan's going to drag down, ain't it? When a director gets that class, he's doing you a favour to make pictures for you, to start off with; and then he spreads himself to spend more coin more ways than any other director ever thought of, just to show you he's the big-money boy. A director don't think big means anything without a dollar-mark parked in front of it; and the producer's the poor sap that puts up the dollar-mark every time. They's only one way a producer can beat a director, the way it is today, and that's quit the fillum business cold."
"I presume that's what you'll do, if the directors persist in making it impossible for you to make any money."
A twinkle kindled in the beady eyes, a rougishly confidential grin formed on the fleshy features. "Now, listen, Miss Lee: I never told you I wasn't making money, did I? It's the jack directors waste on me I'm kicking about. Any time things get so bad you can't give one of them megaphone nurses his head and still get your production cost back and something over, I got it all framed so I can ease out and never be missed."
And when Lucinda had obliged by voicing a polite doubt that such a thing as this could ever come to pass, Zinn concluded with grim humour: "I got everything all set to sell the studio to the county for an insane asylum; then nobody in Hollywood won't never know the difference."
Running true to the form thus forecast, Jacques kept the Summerlad company away so long that its return found the first Linda Lee production in full swing, with Barry Nolan in command, Lucinda playing the supple puppet of his whim from sun to sun, Fanny demurely walking through the feminine part of second importance, and Lontaine functioning at the peak of his capacity as executive genius of the organization and showing the strain of it all in his prominent blue eyes.
Why it should be so hard on him nobody seemed to know and Lontaine was too busy to explain; while Lucinda, in the prepossession of her anxiety to give a good account of herself before the camera, carelessly accepted that prodigious display of activity, that mien of unremitting abstraction, as phenomena doubtless common to men of affairs, and never paused to wonder why Lontaine need be so fretted and fretful when everything was now in the hands of Nolan and his assistants, who did pretty much as they pleased anyway, as a rule consulting Lontaine if at all only after acting on their own initiative and leaving to his office merely the routine of financial matters.
Nevertheless Lontaine was ever the first of the Linda Lee forces to show up at the studio in the morning, the last to leave it at night, and between whiles kept incessantly on the go: trotting from his desk to the stage to give Nolan the benefit of advice which was invariably attended to with much patience and disregarded with more promptitude as soon as its source turned his back; to the laboratory to run a wise eye over negative newly developed as it came dripping from the vats to be stretched to dry upon huge revolving drums; to the studio of the technical director, to badger that competent and long-suffering gentleman about sets and their dressing; to Zinn's sanctum overlooking the "lot," where that old-timer sat spying out on the comings and goings of his employees and spinning his endless schemes of avarice, but ever ready to lend an ear and give cunning counsel to a tenant who paid his rent on the nail; to the projection-rooms to view the rushes; back to the stage to flatter Lucinda, felicitate Nolan, and buttonhole subordinate players for earnest conferences apart concerning their performances—this last a habit which, since it afforded the actors a chance to talk about themselves, earned Lontaine the loving gratitude of all hands, barring the directorial staff whose job it was to undo all that he did, were it well done or ill, for the sake of morale and to preserve unimpaired the precious prestige of Barry Nolan.
At other times members of the cast loafing about the lot while they waited to be called to work on the stage, would observe the president of Linda Lee Inc., at the window of his tiny office in the administration building, brooding portentously over documents of legal aspect, or with fine flourishes of the fountain-pen affixing his hand to those cheques which, issuing forth in a steady stream, kept the treasury always at low ebb no matter how often or how generously Lucinda might replenish it.
Neither did the silver-and-blue car know overmuch rest. In view of the man's ubiquity in the studio, it was surprising how often Lontaine was to be seen speeding down Sunset Boulevard, bound for the business centre of Los Angeles, to other studios for mysterious conferences with local somebodies who had no known interest in the destinies of Linda Lee Inc., or to objectives whose nature remained a close secret between Lontaine, his chauffeur, and his God.
To all these picturesque symptoms of hustle and bounce, so little in character with the Briton of tradition, his wife played silent but attentive audience; though oftentimes her pretty eyes would light up with an unspoken comment too pungent to be wasted and, discreetly questing a sympathetic confidant would find it without fail in Barry Nolan, who learned to watch for that look whenever one of Lontaine's antics made a more than everyday appeal to his sense of humour.
Irish both by descent and profession, Nolan had at least that sense conspicuously developed. What others he possessed of which as much might be asserted, was a question which came to occupy many of Lucinda's spare moments. She was not at all disposed to be hypercritical, in the beginning, she had yet to cultivate conceit in her abilities as an actress, she knew that she knew little more than nothing about the manufacture of motion-pictures; and Summerlad had so highly recommended Nolan she inclined to suspect there must be something radically wrong with her judgment. With all this, she couldn't pretend to account for Nolan's high place in the hierarchy of the cinema, unless a sprightly and affectionate disposition, a fetching grin, infectious verve, impudence without end, and a distinctly indicated vein of genius at crap-shooting, summed up the essential qualifications of a director who pretended to earn a wage of twenty-five thousand dollars per production. Certainly nothing that Nolan was contributing to this present picture, in the way of action, business, sense of dramatic proportion and feeling for pictorial values, appealed as in any way inspired—except occasionally by a retentive memory.
True that common usage in methods of production, working together with such special circumstances as Lucinda's inexperience and the absence of any fixed plan of plot development other than in the omniscience of Barry Nolan, made it anything but easy to judge the man fairly by the record of his work from day to day.
In the continuity which Nolan concocted to supplant that prepared by Zinn's staff writer—as in every proper continuity—each scene had been placed in its right sequence, where anybody uninstructed in the way of a director with a picture might reasonably look to see it appear in the completed photoplay. But as soon as the typist had transcribed Nolan's dictation, the new continuity was turned over to his assistants to be dismembered and rebuilt with its scenes arranged as they were to be photographed, by groups, without respect to chronological sequence.
Obviously it would be stupid (as Lucinda was quick to appreciate) to take the scenes as laid out in the continuity; for example, to photograph Scene 1 in a studio set, transport the company ten miles to photograph Scene 2 on, say, an ocean beach, and jump back to the studio to take Scene 3 on the same set as used for Scene 1. Consequently all scenes indicated for each particular set were shot seriatim; after which the set would be promptly demolished, to clear the stage for the erection of another.
It resulted from this that only an intelligence comprehending the whole plan and scope of both story and continuity could have kept track of the scenes as photographed and rated each rightly at its proportional value. Even in the ranks of studio veterans, minds of such force and grasp are few and far to seek. The Linda Lee company hadn't been at work two days before Lucinda began to feel in relation to the story like one lost in a fog, helplessly dependent upon the guiding hand of Barry Nolan, and none too well satisfied that he knew his way about as well as he pretended to in that beclouded labyrinth.