Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

The black arm of a waiter came between them, and the woman let an abstracted gaze stray idly across the shimmering field of the table, while the man at her side ceased not to remark with glowing appreciation the perfection of her gesture, at once so gracious, spirited, and reserved.

Never one to wear her heart on her sleeve, Lucinda. Look at her now: Who would ever guess she had lived to learn much, to unlearn more, in so brief a term of married life? Surely the sweet lift of her head, the shadowy smile that lurked ever about her lips, the exquisite poise of that consummate body bespoke neither disillusionment nor discontent. And who should say the dream was not a happy one that clouded the accustomed clearness of her eyes?

Unclouded and serene once more, these turned again his way.

"It's like you, Dobbin, to start making love to me all over again, precisely as if my being married meant nothing, in the first minutes of our first meeting in five years, without offering to tell me a single thing about yourself."

"Nothing much to tell. Everybody knows, when you engaged yourself to marry Druce, I rode off to the wars. Oh, for purely selfish motives! If I'd stayed, I'd have made a stupid exhibition of myself one way or another, taken to drink or something equally idiotic. So vanity prompted me to blaze a trail across the waters for my beloved country to follow when its hour struck."

"And when the war was over, what did you then?"

"Knocked about a bit with some pals I'd picked up."

"We heard you'd taken up ranching in the Argentine, and made a tidy fortune."

"I didn't do badly, that's a fact. But what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"

"Please don't look at me as if I knew the answer."

"It's a question we've all got to face, soon or late."

"You forget the life one leads: a studied attempt to forget that such a question ever was asked."

"Find it succeeds?"

"Only part of the time, at best. But is one to understand you lost your soul in the Argentine? It sounds so amusingly immoral."

"At least I realized down there my soul was in a fair way to prove a total loss. We were rather out of the world, you know, away back from anywhere; so I had lots of time to think, and learned I hadn't found what I'd gone to France to seek; that there'd been nothing really elevating or heroic about the war, only sound and fury; in other words that, when all was said and done, you were all that had ever really mattered. So I sold out and shipped for home."

"Hoping to find me unhappy enough with Bel – ?"

"That's unworthy of you, Cinda. No: simply to be in the same world with you."

After a little Mrs. Bellamy Druce said severely: "Dobbin, if you keep on that tack, you will make me cross with you; and that wouldn't be nice, when I'm so glad to see you. Let's talk about anything else. How does New York look to an exile of long standing? Much changed?"

"Oh, I don't know. Skirts and morals both a bit higher, jazz a little more so, Prohibition just what one expected, society even more loosely constituted – a vast influx of new people. Time was when it would have seemed odd to see a strange face at one of the Sedley's dinners. But tonight – I don't know half these people. Astonishing lot of pretty girls seem to have sprung up since my time. Who's the raving beauty on Bill Sedley's right?"

"Amelie Severn, Amelie Cleves that was before she married. Surely you remember her."

Daubeney stared in unaffected wonder.

"Good heavens! she was in long dresses when I saw her last."

"Pretty creature, don't you think?"

"Rather. Can't blame the chap next her for his open infatuation."

Laughter thrilled in Lucinda's reply: "Why, don't you recognize him? That's Bel."

As if the diminutive pronounced in the clear accents of his wife had carried through the murmur of talk, Bellamy Druce looked up. Perceiving Lucinda's smile at the end of an aisle of shaded lights, he smiled in turn, but with the muscles of his face alone. And looking from him to the flushed and charming countenance of the young woman on his left, bending low over her plate to hide confusion engendered by Bel's latest audacity, Lucinda thought, with a faint pang, more of impatience than of jealousy: He's in love again.

II

With a small sigh of animal delight in the caress of fur and the chill, sweet draught from the open window upon her face, as well as in the sense of effortless power animating that luxurious fabric which the gods had so thoughtfully provided for her ease, Lucinda Druce settled back in the town-car, aware yet unmindful of the fluid nocturne of Fifth avenue, a still, black river streaming beneath the car, its banks of soft fire strung with linked globes of milky light, its burnished surface scoured by the fleet gondolas of landsmen, in number beyond counting, skimming, swooping, stopping, shoaling.

Bel had asked to be dropped at the Brook, alleging a rendezvous of one sort or another, safely masculine of course. Beyond reflecting that Bel was in all likelihood lying, Lucinda had paid slight heed to his excuses. It didn't matter whether they were fair or false, so long as he wanted to do whatever it was he wanted to do with the rest of his evening. She had little faith in that theory with which too many are infatuate, on which too many marriages are wrecked, that affection is to be persuaded, that loyalty comes of being made to toe the mark.

Then, too, she was not ill-pleased with having herself all to herself, in this thoughtful mood which had become hers since leaving the Sedleys', not an unhappy mood, but one curiously mused. Besides, Bel had been making too free with the Sedley cellar. Not that she was disposed to hold this a grievance, thoroughgoing mondaine that she was, saturate with the spirit of a day that was learning to look tolerantly upon intemperateness as a fashionable form of protest against Prohibition. No: it wasn't that, it was the fact, established by long observation, that Bel seldom drank more than he could manage gracefully unless on the verge of some new gallantry. A little wearily, Lucinda wondered why. Bel assuredly didn't need anything to stimulate his enterprise. She fancied it must be that alcohol served as a sort of anæsthetic for his conscience.

She had a smile transiently bitter. Bel's conscience! The most feather-headed, irresponsible of philanderers, the most incorrigible; between whiles the most contrite…

That, she supposed, was why she had always found it in her heart to forgive him, why she had never experienced any real pain because of his perennial peccadilloes. He couldn't help himself, it was his nature so to do. And somehow or other she always found him out, the poor boy was singularly unfortunate in his efforts to keep her in the dark, singularly clumsy and sanguine at one and the same time. Or else cynical. Sometimes she was tempted to think Bel didn't care, or thought she oughtn't to. Often his attitude seemed to be posed upon the assumption that everybody was doing it; so why affect a virtuous eccentricity?

On the other hand, his fits of penitence were terribly real, when she caught him misbehaving. Or was that, too, merely part of the game with Bel? Was it just a conventional gambit to make-believe repentance and promise faithfully never, never to be naughty again?

A disquieting question was raised by the circumstance that she seemed to be taking tonight's discovery less to heart than ever before. Somehow it didn't seem to matter so much. Was she growing hardened, then, beginning to care less for Bel than she had always cared? Or was it…

Between her dreaming eyes and the silhouetted backs of the footman and chauffeur imagination made a memory momentarily real; she saw, as it were limned darkly upon the plate-glass partition, the face of Dobbin, Richard Daubeney as that night had reintroduced him: the bold, brown face, lighted by clear eyes and an occasional gleam of teeth, of the adventurer into whom exile had metamorphosed Dobbin. Understanding, self-reliant, dependable: qualities that might have made Dobbin a rival for Bellamy to reckon with had he been able to boast them of old. But in those days he had been no more than ardent and eloquent and dear. He had needed to go away to war to find what he had lacked to make him – well, yes, dangerous. Dangerous, that is, to any but a woman well in love with her husband…

She discovered that the car was already at a standstill. Immersed in reverie, she hadn't noticed the turn off from the Avenue.

As always, her home enfolded her in its comfortable atmosphere of security from every assault of adversity by virtue of the solid wealth upon which it was founded, that formidable whole into which two great fortunes had been fused by her marriage with Bellamy. Neither she nor Bel had ever known one qualm of financial uneasiness, neither by chance conceivable ever would. That irking insecurity which so largely poisons the common lot was something wholly foreign to the ken of the Druces, they must brew their own poisons to take its tonic place. None the less the feeling of her home's stability was precious, Lucinda basked in it like a cat on an accustomed hearth, wanting it she must have felt hopelessly lost and forlorn.

She went slowly up to her rooms. And here, where so large a part of her life was lived, the sense of completely satisfying personal environment was more than ever strong.

Pensively giving herself into the hands of her maid, she stood opposite a long mirror. A shade of concern tinged the regard she bent upon that charming counterfeit, her interest grew meticulous as she observed that slender and subtly fashioned body emerge from its silken sheaths. Where were the signs of age, of fading charm? What was it Bel saw in other women and failed to see in her? What could they give him that she had not to give? Was her real rival only man's insatiable appetite for some new thing?

She was as vain as any woman, if no more so than the next; and if she failed to perceive flaws, she failed with more excuse than most could claim.

Supple and young and fair, and slighted…

Her heart, too, she searched. But there was nothing wanting there that the most exacting husband and lover could require. She had told Dobbin the simple truth: she still loved Bel.

But love and beauty, it seemed, were not enough.

For a long time she lay awake in bed, the book unopened in her hands, again a creature of unthinking gratification in the consciousness of Home.

Dark and still but warm with the life she had breathed into it, monolithic in the mass and firmness of its institution yet a web of her own weaving, it endured about and around her, cradled her, dug its roots deep into earth that it might sustain her, held its head up to the skies that it might shield her from the elements, opposed the thickness of its walls between her and the world of ungenerous passions: her Home, the one thing in her life she could assert she had created.

Twenty-six, mistress of riches she had never needed to compute, safe at anchor in an enviable station, idle but for an ordered round of duties and diversions so stale it was hardly of more mental moment to her than the running of her blood, not yet a mother…

At length she opened the book. But its lines of print ran and blended, hypnogogic images, fugitive and fragmentary, formed and faded on the type-dark pages: Dobbin's face again, so changed yet the same, with that look at once disturbing and agreeable of curbed hunger in the eyes; the face of Amelie Severn, with a stagey effect of shadows cast by table-lights, piquant with mirthful mischief as she looked round, at once challenging and apprehensive of Bel's next essay in amorous impudence; and Bel's face with glimmering eyes and that tensity in the set of the jaw which, in the sight of his wife, had but one meaning…

An echoless clap of sound penetrated the walls, the slam of a cab door. Lucinda dropped her book. The front doors crashed resoundingly. She turned out her light and lay listening, watchful.

Beneath the door that communicated with Bel's room a rim of gold shone out. She heard him stumble against a chair and swear at it, turned quietly on her side, away from the door, and composed herself to sleep.

Some minutes after, a yellow light splashed athwart her bed.