Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

When at length the car stopped, she jumped out and, leaving Bellamy to the care of the chauffeur and footman, ran up to her room. The maid waiting there she dismissed for the night in half a dozen words whose decision sent the woman from her in astonishment.

Alone, her first move was to secure the door communicating with Bel's rooms. Then she threw herself upon the bed and lay listening to the noise on the stairway of voices and stumbling feet. The door between the hall and Bel's rooms banged. She heard him maundering incoherently to his valet for a time, a long time; the valet seemed to be trying to make him listen to reason and failing in the end. The neck of a decanter chattered against the rim of a glass, there was a lull in the murmur of voices, then a thick cry and the thud of a fall. After that the quiet was little disturbed by the valet's labours with the body of the drunkard. Eventually the man went out and closed the door. In the subsequent silence the clock downstairs chimed twelve.

Lucinda rose then, and changed to her simplest street suit.

For half an hour or so she was busy at desk and dressing-table, packing a checque book and her jewels with other belongings in a small handbag. She did not falter once or waste a single move through indecision. Indeed, it did not once occur to her that there was anything to be done but what she meant to do.

Shortly after one o'clock she left Bel snoring, crept down the stairs and with infinite stealth let herself out to the street.

Nobody saw her go, neither did she hesitate as she turned her back upon the home that had till then held for her every precious thing in life.

XIV

Spurred by irrational fear lest Bellamy wake up, discover her flight, and give chase, Lucinda made in haste for Fifth avenue; but had not taken half a dozen steps when a cab slid up to the curb by her side, its driver with two fingers to his cap soliciting a fare. He seemed Heaven-sent. Lucinda breathed the first address that came to mind – "Grand Central, please" – hopped in, and shrank fearfully away from the windows.

On second thought, the destination she had named seemed a sensible choice. Any one of the several hotels which tapped the railroad terminal by subway would take her in for the night. In the morning she would be better able to debate her next step. At present she felt hopelessly incapable of consecutive thought.

At the station a negro porter with a red cap opened the cab door and took possession of her single piece of luggage, and when she had paid off the taxi and looked to him in indecision, prompted her with: "What train was yo' wishin' to tek, ma'm?"

An instant later Lucinda was wondering why she had replied: "The first train for Chicago, please." She knew no reason why she should have named Chicago rather than any other city where she was unknown and where, consequently, she might count on being free to think things out in her own time and fashion.

"Ain't no Chicago train befo' eight-fo'ty-five tomorrow mawnin', ma'm."

"Very well. I'll go to a hotel for tonight."

"Yes'm. W'ich hotel, Commodo', Biltmo', Belmont?"

Lucinda settled on the Commodore, because it was the largest of the three and she would be lost in the multitude of its patrons.

She registered as Mrs. L. Druce, Chicago, and, before proceeding to her room, arranged to have the head porter purchase her ticket and reservation the first thing in the morning.

Some hours later she was awakened by a cramp in one of her arms and found that she had fallen asleep while sitting on the edge of her bed. In a daze she finished undressing, and sleep again overwhelmed her like a dense, warm, obliterating cloud.

It seemed but a minute or two before she was being scolded awake by the shrewish tongue of the telephone by the head of the bed, to hear a dispassionate voice recite the information that it was seven o'clock, the hour at which she had asked to be called.

She felt as if she had not slept at all.

Again, in the train, the aching misery of heart and mind could not prevent her nodding and drowsing all morning long; and after a meal of railroad food by way of luncheon, she gave up trying to stave off the needs of a highly organized nature fatigued by inordinate strains, called the porter, had him make up the lower berth in her drawing-room, and went to bed.

In the neighborhood of midnight she woke up to discover, first by peering out under the edge of the window-shade at concrete platforms bleakly blue and bare in the glare of unseen lamps, then by consulting a timetable, that the train was in Cleveland.

As it pulled out again, she resigned herself to the inescapable. Rested, her mind clear and active, and with nothing to do but think for eight hours more, she must go down into the hell appointed.

Nor was she spared any portion of its torments. Successively and in concert, vanity wounded to the quick, sickening self-pity, and implacable, grinding regret laid hold on her heart and soul and worried them till she had to bury her face in the pillow and sink her teeth into it to keep from screaming.

It was cruel enough to have loved and lost, but to have lost and still to love seemed punishment intolerable. The shameful knowledge that body and spirit still hungered for the man who had served both so shabbily ate into her amour-propre like a corrosive acid.

To her agonized imagination she figured in the semblance of a leaf harassed by that high wind of fatality which latterly had swept into and through her life with Bel, driving them asunder; a leaf torn from the homely branch that had given it life and nurtured it, a leaf hunted helplessly into strange ways and corners, even now being hounded on and on… And to what end?..

She burned with resentment of her persecution by those unknown powers whose ill-will she had not wittingly done anything to invite, she writhed in the exasperation bred of her impotence to placate them or withstand their oppression.

A lull fell at last in the transports of her passion, she lay quite still, and her mind too grew calm in awareness of the quiet, resolute mustering of all her forces to wrest from malicious chance and circumstance the right to live a life of her own choosing; as if her soul, drawing strength from new-found knowledge of its indestructible integrity, lifted up its head and with calm eyes challenged Fate.

Her paroxysms were now spent and ended, the past had been put definitely behind her, it was with the future alone that she had need to be concerned.

She addressed herself to the task of taking stock of Lucinda Druce, the woman all alone, her condition and resources, and of trying to map out for her a new and independent existence that would prove somehow livable.

If she had not succeeded in this undertaking when the train breathed its last weary puffs under the echoing glass canopy of the La Salle Street station, success was not forfeited, it was but deferred. There was so much to be taken into consideration, she could not yet see further than tomorrow, if so far. Certain immediate steps were indicated to her intelligence as requisite and reasonable; whither they would lead she could by no means guess.

Bred on the Atlantic seaboard, she knew more of Europe than of the United States west of the Alleghenies. Chicago to her was a city that once had burned to the ground because a cow kicked over a lighted lamp; a city famous for great winds, something known as "the Loop," something hardly less problematic called "stock-yards." The name of a hotel, too, the Blackstone, had found lodgment in her memory.

The short drive in a yellow taxicab from the station to the hotel through a labyrinth of back streets a-brawl with traffic, failed to register any impressions other than of cobblestones, blasphemous truck drivers, street-cars pounding and clanging, begrimed buildings, endless columns of self-absorbed footfarers. The hotel itself seemed in grateful contrast, it might have been one of her own New York. Only the view from her rooms, many stories above the street, of a public park bleached, frost-bitten, desolate, and slashed by a black railroad cutting, and beyond this a vast expanse of tumbled waters, slate-grey flecked with white, blending with a grim grey sky, drove home the fact that her first uncertain gropings toward a new life were to be framed in a foreign, and to her perceptions an unfriendly, environment.

But she turned from the window with the light of battle in her eyes. Nature was wasting its effects, she was not to be disheartened by an ill-dispositioned day.

After breakfast she went out to do a little necessary shopping, and spent the morning and most of her cash in hand as well in department stores which she was unreasonably surprised to find differed not materially from establishments of the same character in the East, save in the crowds that thronged them, drab rivers of people persistently strange in her sight.

But the experience served to remind her that she had more material problems to solve than those provided by her inner life. She found herself running short of ready money and with a checque-book valueless unless she were willing to prove her identity as the wife of Bellamy Druce.

She thought of telegraphing old Harford Willis, who had been her father's close friend, legal adviser, and executor of his estate, as he was today steward of Lucinda's. But he could not be expected to understand a peremptory demand for money in Lucinda's name, from a city which he had no reason to believe she had ever even thought of visiting, without explanations too lengthy and intimate for transmission by telegraph. The alternative was to write him, and that meant a long, full letter, for (Lucinda suddenly discovered) Willis was the one man in the world whom she could safely and freely confide in, consult and trust.

She did not even remember Dobbin's pretensions to such standing with her. In the first twenty-four hours of her flight from Bellamy she had not thought of Daubeney once. Now, when she thought of him at all, it was as of some revenant of kindly countenance from a half-forgotten dream.

She spent most of the afternoon composing her letter and despatched it after dinner, a rather formidable manuscript under a special delivery stamp.

After that there was nothing to do but fold her hands and commend her soul to patience.

Three eventless days dropped out of her history. The dreary weather held, there was rain and snow, gales like famished banshees pounded and yammered at the hotel windows. She seldom ventured into the streets, even for exercise. She read a great many novels purchased at the hotel news-stand, or pretended to, for her mind refused as a general thing to travel with the lines of print. Her most exciting diversion lay in reviewing and enlarging the list of things she meant to buy as soon as she was able. And one afternoon she went to see Alma Daley in her latest production (not "The Girl in the Dark," of course, it was too soon for that) at a motion-picture theatre near the hotel.

She came away confirmed in her belief that Miss Daley was an unusually attractive and capable young mistress of pantomime. But the picture-play itself had seemed frightfully dull stuff. Indeed, Lucinda had experienced considerable difficulty in following its thread of plot, and sat it out only because of her personal interest in the actress.

Returning to her rooms possessed by memories of that afternoon she had spent at the studios of Culp Cinemas Inc., the last afternoon of her life as Bellamy's wife, she wondered, not with any great interest, how her tests had turned out, what the others, Dobbin and Jean and Nelly, and Fanny Lontaine and her husband, had thought of them; whether any one had known or guessed the reason for her absence, when they had gathered in Culp's projection-room for the showing; whether any one had cared.

Dobbin had cared, of course. At least, Dobbin had believed he cared. So had Lucinda, then…

How long ago it seemed!

XV

INEXPRESSIBLY SHOCKED ARRIVING TO-MORROW WILL CALL ON YOU TEN A M MEANWHILE BANK OF MICHIGAN WILL SUPPLY YOU WITH FUNDS IN ANY AMOUNT YOU MAY REQUIRE IF YOU WILL BE PLEASED TO IDENTIFY YOURSELF TO MR. SOUTHARD THERE

The author of this telegram, which was delivered on the morning of Lucinda's fifth day in Chicago, was punctual to the minute of his appointment; otherwise he would hardly have been the rectilinear gentleman of the frock-coat school that he was.

Notwithstanding that Harford Willis was pledged to a code of morals and manners vinted in the early Eighteen-Eighties, and so implacably antagonistic to the general trend of present-day thought on the divorce question, his great affection for Lucinda predisposed him to allow that the course she had taken with Bellamy had been the only one his conduct had left open to her.

On the other hand he was unhappily unable to hide the disconcertion inspired by the simple gladness of her greeting, the spontaneity of which was in such marked contrast to his own well-composed demeanour of honorary pall-bearer at a fashionable funeral.

"If you only knew how good it is to see a friendly face for the first time in a whole week!"