As for that, it might have been merely her fancy that Lontaine thenceforward betrayed a disposition to keep out of her way, and when he couldn't was at pains to iron out the wrinkles in his temper before venturing to respond to her always friendly advances; that perceptible hesitation prefaced the utterances Lontaine addressed to her, constraint had crept into their relations, till then so easy and cordial, and added opacity was to be remarked in the stare of those introspective blue eyes.
Since it was unthinkable that she should be long embarrassed, for want of ready money, or that Lontaine should believe she could be, Lucinda couldn't imagine why he should show such signals of a mind perturbed, and could only do her best to dwell upon the matter not at all. Heaven knew she had other worries a-plenty to cope with!
It was annoying, for example, to feel that one was expected to feign blindness to what was going on under one's very nose, namely Fanny's essays in the ancient and vulgar art of vamping, with Bel in the rôle of voluntary victim—or a vastly better actor than he had ever before shown himself to be. Nor did the quite transparent naivete of Fanny's methods, as Lucinda viewed them, cause patience to be any the less a labored virtue. If you asked Lucinda, Hollywood had added no finish to Fanny's cosmopolitan technique of flirtation, but rather the reverse; in this respect, as in too many others, Fanny seemed to have taken on a shade too much the colour of her environment. One looked and made allowances for the crudely obvious in women educated by directors to believe that certain elementary gestures (for which see any screen) were surely efficacious with men of every class alike. But Fanny knew better than to make herself grotesque.
Such, however, was the one word that seemed to suit the way she went with Bellamy. And when one had watched her practise and repeat without end the trick of the upward, sham-timid glance of eyes demurely wise, accompanied by the provocative pout of aggressively kissable life, the look that said openly: I think you're rather nice and I know I am; so why are we wasting time?—and had seen it work an apparently invariable effect upon one who called himself a man of the world, who should long since have graduated from the social kindergartens where such tactics are vogue—well, one simply longed to cuff his ears and tell him to quit being such a silly fool. It gave one furiously to repent having relinquished the right to bestow upon Bel gratuitous advice for his own good.
Wherefore it came to pass that, as a general thing, whenever Fanny was wanted for a scene and was not to be found in the neighbourhood of the set, she would ultimately be discovered somewhere on the lot, more often than not in the most public corner of it, industriously rehearsing her wiles for the debatable benefit of Bellamy.
And this the man who had declared that his besetting sin had lost all savour for him since it had done its part to alienate his wife!
Lucinda nevertheless assured herself that she didn't so much mind Bel's inconsistency—for what were his protestations to her today?—or even Fanny's commonplace coquetries; it was the surreptitious airs with which Fanny sought to envelop these goings-on, the reticence which she persisted in observing in respect of their effect, that made their joint stupidity maddening. For never since that afternoon when Bel had caught Lucinda in the act of kissing Summerlad before a camera, and Fanny had playfully announced her intention of vamping him to a fare-ye-well, had she chosen to mention his name in any relation to herself. In the local vernacular which she had been so quick to pick up, Fanny seemed to think she was getting away with something.
Lucinda resisted the temptation to disillusion her friend mostly because of a faint-hearted hope that Fanny might at any moment redeem herself with a scornful report of Bel's gullibility, but in part because of doubt whether Bel were being taken in as completely as he appeared to be. It was just possible that this old hand at philandering was simply playing Fanny's game to find out what she meant by it. Certainly he showed no propensity to favouritism. The path of his amourette with the Marquis girl ran parallel to that which he pursued with Fanny, perhaps ran faster, but strangely proved not half so tiresome to the spectator. In spite of all that Summerlad had said of her, Lucinda entertained an honest admiration for the Marquis as she was today, considered her physically quite a fascinating creature, which she unquestionably was in this revised phase, and found what Bel saw in her far more easy to understand than what he saw in Fanny. This was something partly to be accounted for by the circumstance that Lucinda saw comparatively so little of Miss Marquis, saw her so seldom save at a distance and when she was on her dignity—when, as Summerlad had it, she had slapped on thick the make-up of a lady. That it was in good measure make-up merely Lucinda had memories to testify. For all that, she saw the girl comporting herself toward Bellamy with a manner which she thought Fanny might have copied to good profit. But when she confided as much to Summerlad she found him darkly suspicious of Nelly's present good behaviour.
"Don't worry," he advised: "That young woman will surprise you yet. She's being nice now and enjoying the novelty. Chances are she took the cure, that time she disappeared. But it never lasts. Once the old hop gets its hooks into anybody it never lets go, really. It may seem to be licked for a while, but it's only waiting for a moment of weakness. Wait till Nelly gets bored playing up to the gentlemanly attentions of your friend, Mr. Druce, wait till she wants him to do something he doesn't want to. Just wait. If you admire fireworks, believe me, Linda, your waiting won't be wasted."
Having said which, Summerlad made haste to change the subject. But Lucinda had already learned that any reference to Nelly Marquis was calculated to make him restive. A circumstance in itself not the least irksome of the many which she counted as afflictions. She needed badly a congenial confidant, and Lynn was newly become anything but that, had, indeed, never seemed quite the same since the first night of his return. Another black mark to add to Bellamy's score. For Lynn was inevitably and pardonably disgusted with the situation at the studio, where he couldn't turn around without running into either the Marquis girl or the husband of the woman he loved. Then much of the old delight in sharing working-quarters had been lost through their tacit agreement that, under these changed conditions, a trifle more reserve wouldn't come amiss when they met under the public eye. But now, even when they were alone, the old-time spontaneity was missing, and, Lucinda was sure, through no fault of hers. It was in Lynn that she thought to detect a strange new absence of ease, what she could almost have termed a hang-dog air, a furtive fashion of watching her, if he thought she wasn't aware, that was swift to change, as soon as he found she was, to a species of feeble bravado distastefully reminiscent of Bel when Bel had been drinking just enough to feel it and not enough to have become callous; an air of having done something he oughtn't and living in instant dread of being found out.
Lynn had such an air with her, that is, if Lucinda were not self-deceived, if she didn't imagine it all, if it were anything but an hallucination conjured up by a mind morbidly conscious of Bel's shadow in the offing, the shadow of that relationship which, while unresolved, must ever rest between the lover and the wife.
But these peculiar tribulations rankled neither severally nor even in their sum more distressfully than did the trouble at the studio, where daily the tension of ill-feeling between actress and director grew more taut, as Lucinda's earlier misgivings ripened into articulate dissatisfaction with Nolan's methods and their fruits, and as that sensitive artistic soul reacted deplorably, in terms of begrudged civility at best, and at other times of stubborn Celtic oppugnancy.
Dilatory tactics in directing had become too fast a habit with Nolan to be broken at will, and had forced him to forego his chance at that attractive job in the East. For which, of course, he would never forgive Lucinda. And he was otherwise so fed up with the feeling that he was unappreciated, that he had taken to fuming nastily over every set-back which put off the final "take" by so much as an hour, and indeed was more than once only restrained from "walking off the lot and leaving the picture flat" by the consideration that he had as yet been able to wheedle out of Lontaine a mere niggardly half of his contract fee in advance.
Aware of what was in the air, the supporting players held their collective breath against that explosion which all felt was due at any moment to hoist them into the same element and leave them there, belike, in indefinite suspense. Individually they went with a nice if naïve diplomacy in all their dealings with Miss Lee and Mr. Nolan individually; for who could foresay whose hands would hold the symbols of power when the dust had settled? But the sympathies of the producing staffs, to a man, Lucinda was sensible, were with Nolan; and though this nettled her at times, she consoled herself with the reflection that it was after all only natural, since the best directors, that is to say those with the most artful and resourceful press-agents, hand-pick their lieutenants as a general custom and carry them along as they lightly flit from berth to berth. And she derived a little comfort from the belief that the cameraman was on her side.
Cameramen, being highly trained specialists in an exacting art, are more often than not men of independent minds, iconoclastic in their attitude toward the directors with whom they work. Iturbide was of this tribe. He knew his trade, not Nolan or any other could instruct him in it. If he reckoned the light not right for any take, that scene would wait though Nolan raved and the heavens quaked. In the choice of the right angle for any shot his judgment was final, even Nolan learned in time not to dispute it. And he accomplished his will with a singular economy of words and emotion, the more remarkable in view of the mercurial temper with which tradition accredits the race from whom he sprang. He was Mexican, a tall and rangey body, with eyes as beautiful as a woman's, and much to the silken courtesy of the Spanish whose blood he shared. "No, Mr. Nolan," he would announce in a strongly accented and resonant voice, shaking his head sorrowfully after setting up his camera and assaying the light by peering through a strip of negative film exposed behind the lens—"no, I no take—light no good. Tomorrow we take, maybe light better then." And while Nolan, who as like as not had voluptuously kept a regiment of extra people waiting all day to work in this the last hour of the afternoon—while Nolan spluttered and swore and offered to go down on his knees if prayers would move Iturbide to change his mind, the cameraman would be placidly superintending the demounting of his camera, and pocketing the darling lens whose care he never would trust to hands other than his own. And that scene would not be taken until the next day—not then, if the light were not exactly to Iturbide's liking. Which was one among a number of reasons why his photography was credited with having saved many a picture otherwise without virtue.
Scrupulous always to avoid giving unprovoked offense, in the series of skirmishes which made the final two weeks of Nolan's engagement memorable, Iturbide played the part of benevolent neutral; but if Lucinda were not mistaken in her reading of his eyes, the best of his benevolence was reserved for her.
Historically—and setting aside minor clashes of opinion as mere affairs of outposts—the private war progressed to its conclusion in three stages, which for convenience may be named the Battle of the Supper Club Set, the Affair of the Comedy Feet, and the Last Stand in the Living-Room Doorway.
In the novel from which the picture in production took its name and little else, most of the plot development was worked out in a fashionable supper club, where Lucinda in the character of a professional dancer, figured nightly as what for some reason New York that stays up nights knows by the name of "hostess." The rooms of the club as described bore close resemblance to the premises for years tenanted by the Club de Vingt in East Fifty-eighth street, to whose general plan, however, fanciful embellishments had been added in an effort to make it a frame worthy of the dancer's charms.
Over the lay-out, or scheme, for this set, Lucinda had spent many hours and much thought—before Nolan found time to give the production any attention whatever—in consultation with Harry Lontaine and Mr. Coakley, the talented young man who served the Zinn Studios in the capacity of general technical director: an office which as organized by the motion-picture trade, comprehends those—among others—of architect, landscape-gardener, scene, house, sign and artist-painter, interior decorator, and amateur of the art of every era, from the Eolithic to that of East Aurora. And in the end Lucinda had turned to her work before the camera well-satisfied that Mr. Coakley knew what to do and how to do it, and would assemble an excellently suitable room if left to exercise his own good taste and ingenuity.
The most pretentious bit of building required by the production, the supper club was the last to be erected, and wasn't ready till the beginning of the fourth week of Nolan's reign; as Lucinda learned it was, one evening, when the assistant-director circulated a call for the entire company to work on it the next day.
Accordingly, Lucinda and Fanny strolled over to the main stage, where, behind a flimsy fence of sides—frames of wood and paint-smeared canvas held up by struts—the precincts of the supper-club basked in the cynical glare of Cooper-Hewitts overhead.
Inside the barricade, Lucinda halted with a cry of shocked remonstrance.
In the middle of the floor, upon which she was to give the solo dance which she had been weeks rehearsing under a veteran professional, Nolan stood vivaciously lining out tomorrow's proposed campaign for the benefit of a group composed of his first assistant, Mr. Wells, Iturbide and the second cameraman, and Mr. Coakley.
There was nothing else to break the full force of the blow which fate had prepared for Lucinda's expectations.
Of the gay, exquisite scheme upon which she and Coakley had agreed, guided by the novel, there wasn't a sign. The main masses of woodwork were here all a dull, blank black. The panels, which were to have framed baskets of fruit and garlands of flowers, in low poly-chrome relief-work, had yielded place to paintings in the style of French posters, of women in antic postures and clothed only enough to accent their nakedness. The little tables that lined the walls were dressed with cloths checquered staringly in red and white. The imbecile geometry of the Cubists had patterned all the draperies and upholstery materials in weird juxtapositions of colour apparently intended to give away the grisly cosmic secret that there was something rotten in the solar spectrum. And at the far end of the room there was.... Lucinda looked twice to make sure her eyes did not deceive her. But, no; there it was: a bar, a veritable zinc of the common Parisian cabaret.
And while she gaped aghast, hysterically torn by a desire to scream with lunatic laughter and an impulse to weep and dance with rage, Nolan spied her and, deserting his audience, tripped briskly over, beaming happily.
"Well, Miss Lee! how about it, eh? A little slice off the top of the real Bohemia, I'll tell the world. And wait till you see how she screens. O bay-bee! but this glad young set's gonna photograph like a million dollars."
Lucinda choked down the anger with which her lips were tremulous. For an instant she stared hopelessly at Nolan, comprehending that this vile parody of the design she had approved was due wholly to his arbitrary action in contradicting the plans without reference to her wishes. And she could have cried with disappointment and vexation. As a matter of simple fact, her eyes did fill in that bitter moment when she was made poignantly aware of how high her hopes had been and how heartlessly frustrated, and how helpless she was to express a tithe of her indignation without jeopardizing the good of the picture.
If she spoke her mind it were inconceivable that Nolan should consent to continue as director. And grave and well-grounded as was her dissatisfaction with him, Lucinda was not yet ready to believe it would benefit the picture to have it finished by another intelligence than that under whose guidance it had been so ill-begun.
And it is by this that the potential artistic stature of Linda Lee is to be reckoned, that in this the young beginning of her career she had already learned, what many who walk with the great ones of the screen have never learned and are incapable of learning, to think of her work before herself, to esteem her rôle as something less than the story which gave it excuse for being, to hold the welfare of the picture as a picture more important than her own.
While still she faltered, fearing to speak her mind, Coakley came up with the others. To him she turned reproachfully.
"Oh, Mr. Coakley!whydid you do this?"
Before Coakley could reply Nolan cut in irritably: "Do what? What's the matter now?"
"I'm asking Mr. Coakley why he didn't carry out the design we agreed on for the supper club."
Coakley grinned and scratched an ear. "Mr. Nolan's ideas, Miss Lee," he drawled uncomfortably.
"Mr. Nolan ordered this change?"
Nolan brusquely interposed: "Of course, I did. What's wrong with the set?"
"And you didn't consult me, Mr. Coakley?"
"I supposed you knew, Miss Lee."
"Say, listen here!" Nolan snapped—"what's the grand idea? I said I was responsible for this set, didn't I? I gave Coakley's lay-out the once-over, saw it wouldn't do, and told him what I wanted. And why wouldn't I? Look't what we got. Not much like that glorified tea-room you were satisfied with, is it?"
"No, Mr. Nolan—not much. I grant you that."
"Well, then, what's the big objection?"
"Simply that the set is out of harmony with the rest of the picture——"
"Out of harmony! Why, it's going tomakethe picture! You ask Harry Iturbide here. He'll tell you, when that set's flashed on the screen it's going to knock your eye out."
"I'm sure he will," Lucinda agreed, smiling at the cameraman.
"Well, Harry?" Nolan insisted—"what about it? Who's got the rights of this argument?"
"Miss Lee," the cameraman said, sententious.
"Miss Lee has! Say: how do you make that out?"
"You don't want to make your background too prominent, Mr. Nolan," Iturbide explained patiently. "This set is going to stick out in front of the actors. You won't be able to see what they're doing against a checker-board like that."
"Ah, you give me a pain!" Nolan retorted crushingly. "That background's all right—going to photograph like a million dollars, I tell you."
"But, Mr. Nolan," Lucinda resumed with more confidence: "don't you see that the set is completely out of key with the atmosphere of the story? It isn't in the least like the supper club the author described."
"Bet your sweet life it isn't! Look here: I read that story, and I know all about it, and I can show you where the author was all wrong with his idea of the kind of a jointNellywas running——"
"It wasn't what you call a 'joint,' to begin with, Mr. Nolan."
"That's just the very point I'm trying to make. If it isn't a joint you're dancing in, where'sRichardsget off with his kicking about you not being good enough to marry his son? It's got to be a joint, or there won't be any sense in the way he fusses when he finds out you andDickare stepping out together. If that place in the book wasn't a joint, I'm a kike!" Nolan paused in triumph to let his argument sink in. "Now"—he brandished a hand at the set—"thisisa joint, and a regular one, if you want to know. Some class to this. I doped it all out myself. Take those tablecloths, now: that's the identical kind they were using in Montmartre last time I was in New York. And those panels on the walls—I got the idea for them from Reisenweber's Paradise Room, only these are sportier. And that black woodwork and all.... Why, we've taken the best points of all the classiest joints in New York and lumped them into one set, and improved on them at that. Now when this poor fish of aRichardssees his son dancing with you in a joint like this, he'll have some excuse for claiming you ain't all you might be."
"The trouble is," Lucinda replied gravely—"I mean, from your viewpoint the trouble will be—Richardswill never seeDickdancing with me in this set."
"What's the reason he won't?"
Lucinda smiled slightly, shook her head slightly, slightly shrugged. In the course of Nolan's harangue it had been revealed to her that no greater calamity could possibly be visited upon the picture than to permit its essential colour of good taste to be vitiated by the introduction of this purely atrocious set. It would be like asking the public to believe that people accustomed to sup and dance in the Crystal Room at the Ritz had transferred their favour to the roughest cabaret in the purlieus of Longacre Square.
"What's the reason he won't?" Nolan repeated, raising his voice angrily.
"Because I won't work on this set, Mr. Nolan—until it is restored to the design I approved."
"But—my Gawd!—you can't do that, Miss Lee—you can't hold up this production like that. Why, it'll take weeks——"
"How long will it take, please, Mr. Coakley?"
"Well, I don't know, Miss Lee—I might be able to rush it through for you in a week or ten days."
"There!" Nolan obtruded an excited smirk and weaving hands between Lucinda and the technical director. "You hear what Coakley says. Ten days! You can't hold up this production ten days, Miss Lee."
"I can," Lucinda corrected coldly, "and will, no matter how long it takes to make this set resemble a place self-respecting people would patronize."
"But—listen here!—you can't go to work and upset all my plans at the last moment, like this. Company called for half-past eight—fifty extra people hired for four days' work—orchestra from the Alexandria and all—the best caterer in Los Angeles engaged to serve the eats—! You can't throw me down like this——"
"I'm sorry, Mr. Nolan. You should have consulted me before ordering such changes on your own responsibility——"
"Look here: am I directing this picture, or ain't I?"
"I'll answer that question when you answer mine: Am I paying for this production or are you? And if I am, are you the only one whose wishes are to be considered?"
"Listen, now, Miss Lee." Nolan made a frantic effort to be calm and urbane. He swallowed hard. "Listen: I don't want to have any trouble with you, but you're making it all-fired hard for me. I've been in this business ever since there was a studio in Hollywood, I've directed hundreds of productions, hundreds of 'em, I ought to know my business——"
"It was on that assumption precisely that you were hired," Lucinda reminded him sweetly.
"But ever since I been working with you, I've felt—you've made me feel—damn it! you've been watching me and thinking sarcastic things about the way I do——"
"Did you never before suspect you were psychic, Mr. Nolan?"
"And now you openly criticize my judgment about this set and say you won't work on it——"
"You understand me exactly," Lucinda assented.
"You mean that?"
She nodded.
"Well, that—settles—it!" Nolan flung both hands above his head and waggled them insanely. "Thatsettlesit! I'm through—I'm finished—done! I'm out! I quit!"
He hesitated a single instant, searching Lucinda's face to see it blench at this awful threat; and in disappointment whirled on a heel and barged out of the set so blindly that he blundered into one of the frames and knocked it flat.
Lucinda nodded quietly to the technical man.
"Please make the changes as soon as you can, Mr. Coakley. It's all right: don't apologize any more. I quite understand it wasn't your fault."
The president of Linda Lee Inc. wasn't in his office, neither was his car in the parking yard; but Nolan evidently knew where to find him, for Lucinda had not been twenty minutes in her rooms at the Hollywood when Lontaine's knuckles rattled on the door. His agitation, when she admitted him, was intense, almost pitiable. One gathered that he considered a tiff between star and director a catastrophe second only to national censorship of pictures. He stammered painfully over his account of Nolan's ultimatum, which had been accompanied by a demand for the balance of his pay in full and at once.
"I presume you haven't heard from your lawyer yet, Linda ..."
"He hasn't had time to get my letter."
"I don't suppose—you couldn't wire him now? It would give us a frightful black eye if Nolan were able to say we couldn't pay him."
"But he's had twelve thousand or so already. Why should he get the balance of his fee if he refuses to earn it?"
"But he claims you as good as fired him——"
"No doubt he would." Lucinda corrected to the last letter that misstatement of fact.... "So you see, the truth is, Mr. Nolan fired himself in a pet because I refused to let him ruin the supper club sequences. Now if he wants the rest of his twenty-five thousand, he'll have to hire himself on again."
And eventually despairing of a change of heart in Lucinda, Lontaine took himself off to test his powers of moral or other suasion on Nolan; and at intervals during the evening called up to report progress, or rather that absence of progress which rewarded his best endeavours. Hope died hard in him, however; and some time after midnight the telephone routed Lucinda out of her bed to receive a somewhat disconnected communiqué to the effect that Lontaine's cunning as a diplomat had at length wrung from Nolan a promise to return to work the next day.
Strains of jazz which filtered over the wire, a singing background for the muzzy accents which retailed this glorious news, led Lucinda to infer that Lontaine was calling from Santa Monica, and to suspect that Nolan's capitulation had been to some extent at least due to the humanizing, at times, influences of the stuff the genial bootlegger vends; but perhaps no more than to the intoxicating kindness of Fanny's eyes....
To her taste the Affair of the Comedy Feet was something more farcical, though Nolan did take it in a depressing spirit of deadly seriousness.
In fact, one of the heaviest handicaps under which this young man laboured in his progress through life was a tendency to take frivolous matters, including himself, a shade over-seriously; a fault he shared with so many of his fellows of the studios that Zinn one day was moved to comment on its cause, not without psychological insight.
"One of the big troubles with the fillum business," he observed sagely, "is the way it's made a lot of people rich what wasn't never meant to be that way. And take it from me, pictures ain't never going to be right, really, until most of that bunch gets out of the business or gets over their surprise.
"Independence," he mused, "is one of the dangerousest weapons a person can put in the hands of an ignorant guy."
Next to himself and his amours, the thing Barry Nolan took most seriously was Comedy, so much so that he clothed the word with the capital even in his private meditations, and devoted a good part of his professional life to perspiring efforts to interject Comedy into the pictures he directed, especially those in whose composition Comedy, as he conceived it, had no business to find place.
Thus with the picture upon which his genius was at present engaged. Over the unfolding of its story the Comic Spirit did indeed preside, but manifested only in the rustle of its satiric wings, in a whisper of wit ever and anon animating the speech of its creatures; never in the head-on collision of two actors trying to pass through one doorway in opposite directions, never in the capers of a cross-eyed comedian dogged to his undoing by a pack of wild pies. So that Nolan felt it devolved upon him to save the picture by distorting situations integral in its plot and by devising others for interpolation, to the end that Comedy, the Comedy of the cinema, of physical mishaps and deformities, might mow and bow upon the screen its bid for guffaws.
If the results he gained were often lamentable, Lucinda ceased to offer comment when her first diffident strictures had been ungraciously overruled. It would be time enough to fight for a decision, she reflected, when the picture was ultimately cut to length and assembled; in which process much of this deplorable stuff would be sure to go by the board, for very lack of space.
Piqued to find her so unresponsive, Nolan issued secret orders that his most ambitious comic flights were not to be shown Lucinda with the other rushes, and confined further efforts in the vein to scenes in which she took no part.
And it was thus that the Comedy Feet crept up on her unawares.
Some time subsequent to the Battle of the Supper Club Set, when his equanimity seemed to have been completely restored, Nolan acquainted Lucinda with the details of an utterly unique method of screen introduction which he had invented, all out of his own head, with a view to lending distinction to her début.
By this device the public was first to make her acquaintance through the medium of a close-up framing two pair of dancing feet,Nelly's(that is to say, Lucinda's) and her professional partner's. Then, as these rested, the partner's feet were to be eliminated, and the close-up, after lingering one fond, reluctant moment on Lucinda's ankles, was to travel up her person until it hovered upon her head and shoulders.
If not strikingly novel, the business seemed simple and innocuous enough to Lucinda, and she posed for it according to instructions and without misgiving.
But when, the next day, she sat with Nolan in the projection-room, reviewing the rushes, this is what the screen revealed to her astounded eyes:
She saw first a stripling fashionable, an admirer of hers in the story, stroll down a section of sidewalk in the Los Angeles shopping district (which Nolan asserted was "Fifth Avenue to a T") enter a florist's shop, select roses, and scribble a card to accompany them, while the florist summoned an errand boy, a repulsive white slug of a child, eight or nine years of age, heavy with unwholesome fat and wearing an habitual look of hopeless vacuity, whom Lucinda had several times noticed, not without wonder, as he loitered drearily about the stage.
As she now saw him, the boy had been heartlessly shoe-horned into the brass-bound livery of a page, and wore upon his feet a brace of leathern wrecks which even the broad charity of a Charlie Chaplin would have hesitated to call shoes.
Waiting for the card to be written, this bleached sausage of a child restlessly shuffled his tragic feet, and again and again wiped them on each other. To make sure that nothing of the fine Comedy of the business would be overlooked, the feet were isolated in an heroic close-up.
She saw the boy take the box of roses and leave the shop to deliver them. As he emerged to the street the fiendish camera pounced upon his feet and again held them up to derision in a close-up wherein they resembled more than anything else abnormal vegetable growths uncannily animate. Nor was this enough. With the savage elemental humour of a Yahoo the camera hounded those fungoid feet as they clumped and dragged and faltered along the sidewalk, their monstrosity painfully stressed by contrast with the trim legs and dainty feet of feminine passers-by, the decently shod feet of men.
When unstinted quantities of film had been squandered in this delectable pursuit, the Comedy Feet were shown performing a side-splitting stumble over the threshold to the supper club establishment.
The close-up of Lucinda's feet with her dancing partner's was then disclosed; and the camera shifted its intimate attentions to another pair of feet disgracefully clad, which were discovered in the act of pressing the pedals of a piano and appeared to belong to a low comedy stage mother whom Nolan had foisted upon Lucinda in his version of the continuity. These last the camera followed as they left the piano and shuffled across the floor to meet the feet of the errand-boy, then as they crossed to halt near the feet of Lucinda.
Followed the ascent of the close-up to frame on Lucinda's face as she smiled down at her armful of roses.
The film ran out then, darkness fell, the ceiling light came on, and Nolan, who had the chair immediately in front of Lucinda's, twisted round with a bright, expectant grin to study her face for the glow of glad appreciation which he felt his ingenuity had earned.
She managed a wan little smile for him, but her eyes held still a look of bewilderment too deep to be readily erased, too despairing to be misread. Nolan flushed, but wasn't ready to admit defeat.
"I'll tell the world," he declared defiantly, "the screen never seen an introduction like that before!"
Anxious to avoid a repetition of their former squabble, Lucinda sought vainly for some equivocal phrase that would content the man's stupendous vanity. But, inconceivably inane as it sounds, the business of the Comedy Feet has been here set forth without the faintest colour of exaggeration; and her wits were numb from the impact of its wanton stupidity.
"Well!" Nolan sneered in an effort to reassert his authority—"I can see it didn't make a whale of a hit with you, Miss Lee, but believe me, the audiences will eat that stuff up, simply eat it up!"
"Don't you think," Lucinda ventured—"perhaps it's a little long, Mr. Nolan?"
"Oh, maybe a little trimming here and there won't do any harm. But it can't come down a whole lot without hurting the Comedy effect."
"But—I don't like to seem hypercritical—but that's what's troubling me. You see, it doesn't seem terribly amusing to me."
Nolan's eyes snapped, but as yet he had his temper under fair control.
"I'd like to know why not," he replied with more civility than the bare words as quoted can convey.
"If you'll be patient with me, I'll try to explain. It seems to me in a story of this sort, about real people struggling with real emotions, whatever comedy is introduced ought to be in character or consistent with the general tone of the picture."
"Well?" Nolan drawled wearily.
"Well—assuming there's really something funny about that child's pitiful feet—it's utterly at odds with probability to place him, dressed as he is, in the shop of a Fifth avenue florist. No such establishment would dream of employing such a caricature of an errand boy.... Don't you see?"
"No," Nolan replied with an offensive echo of her inflection—"no, I don'tsee. It's Comedy, audiences are always howling for Comedy, and if anything on God's green earth can save this rotten picture it'll be the Comedy I'm sticking into it."
"Then I'm afraid it's hopeless."
"But I'll tell you what I do see." Nolan leaned over the back of his chair and grinned mirthlessly into Lucinda's face. "I see what I've seen all along, and that is there's no pleasing you, Miss Lee! Ever since I started on this picture you've had the old harpoon out for everything I did, and this, what you're saying today about this introduction I invented for you, is all of a piece with the way you've been acting all along."
"But, please, Mr. Nolan!"—Lucinda was trying her best to be temperate—"surely this isn't a reasonable attitude to take, surely you can make allowances for honest difference of opinion."
"Ah, it ain't your fault!" Nolan jerked angrily out of his chair and turned to the door, but delayed long enough to deliver a valedictory: "And I'm a sap to let anybody that knows as little about pictures get my goat like you do. Have it your own way—chuck the whole sequence out, if you don't like this introduction I framed special for you. It's your picture, I should worry what the piece of junk looks like when you're through with it. But I tell you one thing: If that introduction don't stand, my name can't go on the picture as its director. And that's flat, my lady!"
And before Lucinda could take advantage of this wide invitation to a withering retort, the door slammed on Nolan's impassioned exit.
The day of the Last Stand in the Living-Room Doorway began auspiciously enough with receipt of a night-letter from Harford Willis stating that money matters had been arranged in conformance with Lucinda's wishes, and adding that Willis hoped before long to give himself the pleasure of calling on her in person; the business of another client was requiring his supervision in San Francisco, on the way out he could readily stop over in Los Angeles for a day or two, he was leaving New York the day he telegraphed.
Not a little to her own wonder, Lucinda found herself pleasantly excited by the thought that she was to see this old friend so soon again. Had his telegram come a week or so earlier, she must have been quite as much annoyed, have deemed its implicit promise of meddling in her affairs an inexcusable impertinence. But a week or so ago, at least up to the time of Bellamy's reappearance, she had been comparatively serene, smug with self-contentment because of the semblance of success which had thus far attended the rather off-hand measures she had adopted in dealing with the larger issues of her life. Now, however, she knew no more peace of mind, in the last fortnight the pressure of perplexities had grown so heavy that she found herself eagerly looking forward to the arrival of one in whom she could confide, of whom she could ask counsel, without fearing to hear self-interest sound in his responses.
Harford Willis might disapprove the roads she chose to go, but so long as she kept within certain bounds, which she herself would never dream of overstepping, he wouldn't censure; and if she found the going rough in the ways of wilfulness, his sympathy would none the less be constant, he'd never say, "I told you so;" and never would he be guilty of advising any course of action to the end that he himself might profit. Take him for what he was, there was nobody like him, nobody else whom she could so trust ... not even Lynn....
Not even Lynn! A bitter thought to have to think, but a true, and one it were not the part of wisdom to ignore, that she couldn't look to the man she loved with all her heart, and who loved her well in his way, she knew, for sympathy in her trials and for unselfish advice, as she could to another in whose consideration she was merely a pretty, headstrong girl whom he had known since she was little, the daughter of an old friend.
For the truth was (idle to deny it longer or hope against hope that one might be mistaken) Lynn was changed, had ceased to be the light-hearted and irresponsible but tender lover of the days before Bellamy had come back to play skeleton at their feast, of late had grown irritable in a fashion new to Lucinda's knowledge of him, somewhat sulky and suspicious of temper, impatient of Lucinda's troubles when she wanted condolence and soothing, and over-ready to remind her he had troubles of his own.
She wasn't disposed to quarrel with him on that account, she was too fair-minded to deny him his grievances or the right to nurse them. Surely the situation in which Lynn now newly found himself was one to play the deuce with the sunniest of dispositions—to be an accepted lover and have a husband continually if with pretended playfulness snapping at one's heels, or else circling watchfully in the not too remote distance and showing his teeth, every time one looked his way, in a grin as malicious as it was brilliant.
Then there was that trouble with Lynn's foot, something that had turned out, rather to Lucinda's astonishment, to be a real injury, no make-believe feigned for an occasion. At the studio second-hand accounts came to her, of how Summerlad's foot had slipped, while he was doing "river stuff," and had been severely pinched between two logs. It hadn't seemed much of a hurt at the time, and Summerlad had made light of it, just as today he made light of it; but it had been slow to mend, and even now, though he usually managed to get through his work for the camera without registering the injury, there were days when he walked with a noticeable limp, when inability to get about with comfort interfered seriously with the amusements he had been accustomed to share with Lucinda.
So she wasn't seeing so much of him as aforetime, and when she did, what with natural preoccupation in their respective afflictions, to say nothing of the greater annoyance that afflicted them in common, the old unconstraint was grievously missed.
But nothing in this life lasts (Lucinda insisted on iterating, in a temper doggedly philosophic) and even as that earlier time of ecstasies had passed, this time of trial would pass, the day would come when, her picture finished, she would be free to leave the studio and forget Bellamy's existence, go on to Reno and get her freedom, when Lynn would be hers alone and they two could look back at this time and laugh to think how it had galled them.
Busy with such reflections, and with the pleasing prospect of soon having a willing audience for her complaints, Lucinda made nothing of the fact that Lontaine showed the whites of his eyes and shied back like a skittish cob from the telegram which she submitted to his inspection, and was even not much tranquillized by the cheque which, at the same time, she gave him for the replenishment of the company's coffers. And in her most amiable temper she hurried from his office to her dressing-room, into the newest, prettiest and most becoming dance frock she had ever owned, who had owned so many, and then out to the stage.
The company was waiting, the cameras were waiting, Nolan with an air of noblest patience was waiting. All of which was quite needless, for there was other work in abundance that could have been attended to, there were scenes in the same sequence in which she didn't appear and which might easily have been rehearsed if not photographed even though Lucinda was a bit tardy. But that wouldn't have suited Nolan's little book: having told Lucinda when he would want her at a fixed hour, he was determined that nothing should go forward till she showed up. That wasn't the Nolan method in dealing with women, to let them play fast and loose with his mandates and pretend it didn't matter. Was he not Barry Nolan, well-known for his success in taming temperamental actresses? A reputation honestly earned and of which he proposed that Lucinda should now be reminded in no uncertain accents. And if one had ventured to question his policy, he would have pointed out that company morale was bound to suffer if the director neglected to "go to the mat with" his star every so often. The success of every human undertaking depended on undisputed authority vesting in one and only one directing head—in moving-pictures, the director's. A lesson every star needed to be taught upon occasion. You had to keep hammering it into the poor dumb-bells, or they got the swelled head—and then where were you?
In point of sober fact, Nolan was enjoying himself tremendously, though to have admitted as much, even to his private conscience, would have spoiled the fun entirely. He couldn't possibly have been having such a good time if he hadn't been in such a vile temper.
Up to the moment of Lucinda's appearance, he had been whiling away the Wait by delivering a monologue of spontaneous generation, a discourse having for its subject the habits of stars in general and of self-made feminine stars in especial, studiously impersonal in phrasing but mordant of wit, and delivered with an air of gentle and melancholy detachment which took no perceptible account of the snickerings of his henchmen and the ill-hidden smiles of actors who, in the absence of Lucinda, were hazarding no guesses as to which side their bread was buttered on.
As Lucinda drew near, Nolan hoisted himself out of the basket-chair in which he had been lounging, with something more than a suggestion of limbs cramped by prolonged inactivity, and bowed politely, too politely.
But Lucinda was feeling much too kindly minded toward all the world, that morning, to resent his nonsense, though by no means unaware of its cause and aim. And with every intention of keeping the peace she returned a brief but good-natured nod and smile.
"Sorry if I've kept you waiting, Mr. Nolan, but I had some business with Mr. Lontaine we couldn't put off."
"No matter at all, Miss Lee, I assure you—no matter a-tall! My time is yours, the company's time is yours, all the time thereisis yours, to use or waste, just as you think best."
Lucinda couldn't very well let offensiveness so pointed pass without comment. She stopped, turned squarely to face Nolan, with a keen smile, looked him deliberately up and down, a movement of shoulders summing up clearly enough the substance of her impressions.
"Thank you for telling me," she said sweetly. "And nowthatis understood, suppose we try to make up for the time I've wasted, if possible, by getting to work at once...."
The only retort that occurred to Nolan as at all appropriate he felt instinctively to be inadequate in point of elegance; so he judiciously refrained from uttering it. And anyhow, the day was young yet, his hour would come.
"Fair enough," he agreed with a passable display of good spirit. "Le's go to it, then." He approached the set on which two cameras stood trained at close range, with Klieg lights focussed. "Now, Miss Lee, I'll just line in what I want of you this scene."
The set was a simple angle, where two walls met in an apartment hallway, with a door that opened inward from a living-room set beyond. In this last the big dramatic moment of the play was to be staged, a scene involving Lucinda and her two leading-men, the heavy father and the juvenile, his son, both of whom were understood to be in love withNelly.
Here, in his bachelor apartment,Nellywas to call at midnight on the father, seeking him without care for appearances in an hour of desperation, to beg him to intervene with the villain of the piece and save her wayward brother from imprisonment on a charge of theft.
The madly infatuated father was to take this opportunity to propose marriage, andNellywas to accept him, momentarily carried off her feet by the sincerity of his passion as much as by the glamour of his wealth and social position.
While this was going on,Dick, the son, passing in the street, was to catch a glimpse ofNelly'sshadow on the window-shade and, wild with jealousy, demand admittance. The father, divining his son's suspicions and desiring to allay them, furthermore at a loss for a fair excuse for refusing to see the boy, was to conductNellyto the private hallway and leave here there with the understanding that, while he was lettingDickin at the front door, she was to slip away by the back.
Instead of doing so,Nellywas to linger behind the door and overhear the quarrel between father and son, in the course of which it was to transpire that the former had once offered to wager the latter that he could make the girl his mistress within a given period of time. Whereupon, in revulsion of feeling,Nellywas to confront the two and, while confessing she had planned deliberately to marry either one or the other of them for his money, assert herself to be too good to be the wife of either.
It is illustrative of the topsy-turvey methods of cinema production that no part of this sequence had as yet been photographed except the scenes in the street whenDick, passing on the way home to his own bachelor quarters, looked up and espied Lucinda's shadow; and that Lucinda was now to enact the scene at the doorway before taking part in the living-room scenes which in the photoplay would precede and follow it.
The angle had been set up directly adjoining the living-room set, in order that the door, whenNellyopened it to denounce father and son, might reveal a glimpse of that interior with the two men standing thunderstruck.
Nolan proceeded now to act out in his own person the business which he conceived to be in character for a girl ofNelly'squality in circumstances so contrived as to make voluntary eavesdropping on her part seem constructively defensible. And Lucinda looked on with earnest attention and puckered brows, eager to catch every hint that would help her become a better actress. Her distrust of Nolan extended only to his abilities as a constructive builder of story-telling pictures and a judge of pictorial values. For the very considerable amount of raw power as a pantomime which he indubitably possessed, she had much respect. Prior to invading the realm of motion-pictures, Nolan had served long and arduous apprenticeship as a general utility actor in stock companies of the Middle West and the Pacific Coast. He knew every trick of gesture and expression and how to communicate the secret of their most effective use in the delineation of theatrical as distinguished from real emotion. In this respect his greatest fault was a tendency to overdo things, to let enthusiasm for acting run away with discrimination.
This enthusiasm was running away with him now, he was building the solo scene which Lucinda was to play on lines of broad emotional melodrama widely inconsistent with the situation. Forgetting that, while the conversation assumed to be going on beyond the door was one well calculated to annoy and disgust her whom it concerned, its revelations were after all hardly of a character to break her heart, who was in love with neither of the speakers—indifferent to these considerations, Nolan was, asNelly, ranting and raving in the angle like one gone half-mad with shock and grief. Yet such was the fire he infused into the performance that for the time being he truly succeeded in perverting Lucinda's grasp of the scene, and won her admiration in spite of her latent dislike. So that when, having exhausted his repertoire of emotional artifice, he stepped out of the camera lines, consulting Lucinda with a glance and the stereotyped enquiry, "See what I want, dear?" she replied without thinking—"You make it most real. I'll do my best"—and stepped into character and the set as the lights blazed on, the cameras began to tick, and Nolan seized his baton of authority, the megaphone which he invariably used while directing, though he had as much need of it now as the cameras had of telescopic lenses.
"Now, dear," he blared through this instrument—"go to it and show us all you've got. Don't be afraid of letting yourself go. Remember, this is your Big Scene, biggest you've got in this story, your one grand little chance to put it over that you're a sure-enough actress.... That's it"—the elderly leading-man ushered Lucinda into the set from the living-room side, laid a finger to his lips, and pointed down the hallway before disappearing—"that's it—nod to show you know what he means. Now you start for the back door. You haven't thought yet it would be a swell idea to stop and listen to all they're saying about you. But now you do, now you hesitate, turn, look back at the door, frowning. Pretty work. Now go back, but not all at once. Make us see you don't think you ought to do this sort of thing, make us see the big struggle with your better nature, and better nature losing out. Good. Now you put your ear to the crack in the door and hear your name. Give a big start and look horrified. You never dreamed men could talk about women like that, you know, you wouldn't have believedRichardsandDickcould talk that way about you. Show us horror, dear, and make it strong, you can't make it too strong. Remember: you're just realizing the man you love is such a rotten cad he could make a bet about your virtue. It just makes you feel sick all over——!
"Great snakes! what'sthatfor? What's the matter?"
For of a sudden Lucinda laughed outright, suddenly the heart-rending tremolo of Nolan's voice as he detailed the awful offense Richards had committed againstNellyin the play tickled irresistibly her sense of the absurd; and her laugh followed naturally, inevitably, uncontrollably.
Now as Nolan with a frantic wave bade the cameraman cease cranking, she made a sign of helpless appeal and, inarticulate with mirth, rested weakly against the door and held her sides.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Nolan," she gasped. "Forgive me, I—I didn't know I was going to laugh till—till—till it struck me as so funny——!"
Her voice rose and broke in another peal of hysterical merriment, her words became unintelligible, while Nolan literally ground his teeth.
"Whatstruck you as so funny?" he exploded. "Show me anything funny about this scene and I—I'll eat my megaphone. What's so damn' funny?"
"Oh, I am sorry!" Lucinda was doing her utmost to sober herself, but still her voice shook and her body rocked with recurrent spasms of idiotic mirth. "You see—when you said that—what you said aboutRichardsbeing a rotter—all at once it struck me—I'm sure I don't know why—as funny, too awfully funny for words!"
"Well, why?" Nolan insisted, all but dancing with rage. "Hell! Give me a reason. Why's it funny?"
"Because—well, you see—I don't like to criticize, you resent my suggestions so—but really, you know, this is a ridiculous way to expectNellyto carry on when she hears what she hears. She isn't in love withRichards, she isn't even in love withDick; and surely"—Lucinda was now rapidly growing serious in her anxiety to justify herself to Nolan's face of a thunderhead—"surely she oughtn't to go all to pieces just because she hearsRichardsconfess, what she's known all along, that he's the sort of a man he is."
"Listen here: who's directing this scene, you'r me? Who wrote the continuity, you'r me? Who knows best what this story's all about, heh, you'r me?"
"But, Mr. Nolan, I'm sure, if you'll just think a moment you'll see it isn't natural for a girl likeNellyto rant like a tragedy queen over this situation. She'd be hurt, I grant you, and she'd be angry, angry with herself as much as withRichards, but she wouldn't tear around in this corner like a—like Lillian Gish inBroken Blossomswhen's she's trapped in the scullery and her father's breaking in to murder her. Don't you see?"
"Sure I see." Nolan spoke with an unwonted evenness of tone, for him; but the tone was ugly. "I see a lot of things. I see you've made up your mind to try to make a fool of me, arguing about my visualization of this scene like you have. I see you're dead-set on making me so mad I'll give up my job rather than go on trying to make an actress out of screen-struck near-society dame. Well, all right, youwin. I resign. I'm out. You've got your wish. And this time I don't come back, not if you was to go down on your knees to beg me to finish this fool picture!"
In an abrupt break of fury, oddly out of keeping with the level tone he had used, Nolan raised the megaphone above his head and with all his might cast it upon the floor at Lucinda's feet.
"And that ends that," he announced quietly, and walked off, leaving Lucinda in a temper curiously divided between relief and regret. For this time, she was sure, Nolan meant it.
At a late hour that afternoon the war council of the incorporators of Linda Lee Inc. stalled on dead centre.
Prolonged discussion had failed to suggest any means of salvaging the argosy of their fortunes from speedy foundering. No sort of success had rewarded the quest of a navigator at once competent and free to take command of the venture which Nolan had bungled and abandoned; so far as could be determined, there was none such at liberty. And when Lucinda had once more iterated her unshakable refusal to countenance overtures looking toward the reinstatement of Nolan, silence spellbound the four gathered together in that tiny, ill-furnished room which served Lontaine as an office, the silence of spiritual discouragement and mental enervation.
Fanny alone seemed quick with an elfin fire which enabled her to skim lightly the surface of that slough of despond in which the others were one and all so sadly bogged. Perched on the writing-bed of Lontaine's war-worn desk, she sat swinging pretty legs in the space between the pedestals, and smoking a cigarette, her abstracted but amused gaze roving out through the single window, the most elusive and illegible of smiles flickering about her paint-smeared lips.
Against an end of the desk leaned Iturbide—bidden to the conference because of his wide and intimate knowledge of directors—with hands plunged deep into trouser pockets, his oval face of olive tint wearing that sullen cast which in the Latin is so often indicative of nothing worse than simple thoughtfulness.
In a common chair tilted back against the opposite wall Lontaine sat absently worrying his scrubby moustache with an exquisitely manicured thumb and forefinger. His look, too, was sullen, but with the sullenness of fears aggravated by patience worn thin and threadbare. He had not said or suggested as much by syllable or glance, yet Lucinda felt that he held her solely responsible for the break with Nolan, and was weary of the whole business to boot, and heartily wished himself out of it. But she regarded him without sympathy if with little resentment: his suggestion and his insistence had first wrung from her a reluctant consent to try her luck in pictures, his mismanagement alone (who had plighted such brave work of his superior intelligence!) had been responsible for the engagement of Nolan; now it was for him to find some way out for them all.
But the most curious of her impressions concerning Lontaine was one that seemed absurdly unfair, yet one from which she could by no means divorce her imagination, a feeling at once unfixable and insistent, that at heart Lontaine didn't really care, that he was contemplating quite callously the threatened wreck of his fair hopes and fine promises, was more concerned with enigmatic premonitions of a nature wholly personal and selfish.
Lucinda herself occupied the desk-chair of the president. Profound weariness temporarily held her faculties in suspense. Her least formless thoughts were of the evening to come, when she and the Lontaines were to dine with Summerlad in Beverly Hills. She was deciding to be beforehand with Harry and Fanny, that she might have a little time alone with Lynn.
Relentless association of ideas stirred up thoughts of Bel, speculations as to whether he had heard as yet, and what he had said, or what he would say and think when he did hear. Nothing would please him more than to see her pretensions collapse like a house of cards. Well ... her temper grew hard with defiance ... he would be disappointed if he counted on her heart faltering at this juncture. No matter how black the present outlook, she would go through to the end, be it sweet or as gall, and bow to the verdict of the public only, never to the blind bludgeonings of mischance.
For a little she pondered in mild puzzlement the riddle of Bel's relations with Nelly Marquis, recalling a scene that recently had been enacted by those two without their knowledge that she was near. A few nights since (last Tuesday, in fact; easy to date, because Lynn had attended the boxing-matches at Vernon, as he did every Tuesday, leaving Lucinda with an evening empty) she had been sitting alone on the veranda of the Hollywood, in a chair near the entrance but at the same time well back in the shadows, when Bel brought Nelly home at an hour indicating a late and leisurely dinner.
His car had swung up the drive to stop at the main entrance to the hotel, but neither Bel nor the girl made any move to alight. Unconscious of or else indifferent to observation, they had remained in the rear seat, pursuing a tense discussion, its nature unknown since only the confused rumour of their voices reached the ears of the onlooker; Bel forcing the argument, advocating Heaven-knew-what with a great deal of intensity, not much like his insouciance of everyday, while the girl, on her part, treated all his recommendations and prayers with an air of trifling, semi-coquettish, faintly derisive. But Bel's attitude wasn't in the least loverlike, more that of a man discharging a duty which he found distasteful but still couldn't bring himself to neglect, something that had to be attended to no matter how thankless....
The dispute continued for several minutes without appearing to get anywhere; and presently Bel leaned forward and spoke to his chauffeur round the side of the tonneau wind-shield, whereupon the car rolled out into the street and stopped again at the curb. Then Bel got down and helped Nelly out, and the two of them sauntered up and down the sidewalk, now visible, now hidden by the fretted screen of subtropical growths, but always with their heads close together, always with Bel maintaining his air of almost passionate seriousness, and always with the girl lightly obstinate and teasing.
In odd contradiction to this impression of her, Lucinda set the memory of Nelly's face viewed at close quarters when, having parted with Bellamy, she hurried up the drive and into the hotel, passing without noticing Lucinda. Then the illumination from the lobby, escaping through the front door, had shown her countenance printed with the look of a damned soul hunted to its last gasp, a look to haunt one's dream with a sense of terror abject and unabated, of savage passions unappeased and unappeasable.
What all this had meant, Lucinda couldn't guess. Of one thing only she felt fairly confident: it hadn't been a lover's quarrel.
Curious that one's mind should revert to that memory, at a time when it ought by rights to be exclusively occupied with one's own, peculiar, and never more critical embarrassments....
Altogether without warning Lucinda found herself staring into the homely, greasy grin of Isadore Zinn.
The owner of the studios, without troubling to knock, had opened the door far enough to permit the introduction of his head and nothing more of his person. For a moment or two he held this posture playfully, looking from one to another of the unhappy four with a leer at once inquisitive, knowing, and hideous. Then he thrust the door wide open, came in, and shut it behind him.
"Hello, people!" he saluted affably. "How you making out?"
"Ah, that good Mr. Zinn!" Fanny airily replied. "If you really must know, we're not."
Iturbide stirred and shook his head, smiling gravely. "We talk and talk all day, Mr. Zinn," he said gently, "but we don't get some place. You want to know why? Because there is no place for us to get."
"It's an impasse," Lontaine stated. Then remarking Zinn's nonplussed stare, he interpreted: "We're all in a blind alley, you know."
"Bet your life I know you are," Zinn agreed vigorously. "That's what I butted in to see you about. If I ain't in the way...." The four made reassuring noises. "I was thinking maybe they was something I might do to help out."
"I'm afraid not, Mr. Zinn, thank you," Lucinda replied with regretful gratitude. "That is, unless you can find us a director."
"Funny. That's just what I was going to suggest." The instant stir of animation encouraged him to grin more abominably than ever. "Lay my hands on the very man you want inside five minutes; only they's one catch to it—he's under contract to somebody else."
"Then I don't quite see—" Lucinda began. But Lontaine interrupted: "You mean we can buy the fellow's contract, what?"
Zinn wagged his head. "Not a chanst," he uttered in lugubrious accents—"not a chanst. I wouldn't sell that boy's contract for no amount of money you'd want to name. Best little comer't ever breathed hard into a megaphone, and I got him so's he'll eat out of my hand right now, and I'm going to get at least two good pictures out of him before I let him loose to get all ruined up by kind treatment. Wally Day's the lad I'm talking about. Got everything a guy ought to have to make a loud splash in pictures except the big-head, and he'll get that, too—all you got to do's give him time. Just now he's the only man I know could pull you out of the hole you've got yourselves into."
"But what's the use of tantalizing us?" Lucinda demanded fretfully—"if Mr. Day's services can't be begged, bought, or borrowed——"
"Well, I just got an idea maybe we could come to some sort of agreement about letting Wally finish up your picture. Like this, now: I been watching you people, the way you work, the way you been doing things, and seen a lot of your rushes, and I got an idea maybe I know how to make your picture right, maybe I and Wally could fix it up between us. Now listen: you've spent a bale of green money, I don't know how much, but a lot, maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars, maybe more. That's all right. We don't have to worry about that till I come to look at your books——"
"Look at our books!" Lontaine expostulated.
Zinn pacified him with a gross hand that patted the air. "Sure I got to look at your books, ain't I, if I sit in on this production? What I mean is like this: You sell me the production as is, story, continuity, Miss Lee's contract, all your properties 'n' everything, and I'll pay you fifty per cent what it cost you to date, cash money. Then I and Wally and Miss Lee here'll go ahead and finish up, and it won't cost you anything more, Miss Lee, and I'll give you ten per cent. the net profits. Meanwhile you"—he nodded to Lontaine—"can be fussing around and taking your time about finding a studio all your own and getting all set to use Miss Lee again when I and Wally are done with her. If that ain't a sporting offer, I don't know. What you say?"
Lucinda looked dubiously to Lontaine. His eyes had suddenly grown more stony and staring than she had ever seen them, and she fancied that he had lost a shade of colour; but he met her glance with a quick nod and said in a husky voice: "I agree with Mr. Zinn, Linda."
"You advise——!"
"I think he's made a very handsome offer. It—it's a clear and easy way out for us. You can't lose as much as you stand to under our present arrangements, assuming things shouldn't turn out as well as we've been hoping, and you may make some money. And, as he points out, it will give us time to look around and make up our minds just what we want to do next. If I were you, I'd accept."
Lucinda delayed another moment, then turned to Zinn with a smile. "Very well, Mr. Zinn. If Mr. Lontaine's agreeable, I don't mind...."
"Fine business!" Zinn held out a mottled, hairy paw. "I and you don't need any writing between us, do we, Miss Lee? Your word's good enough for me, all right...."
His hand was warm and moist and strong....