Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

"Have you got a riding costume, Linda?"

"No; but I daresay I can pick one up in Los Angeles this afternoon."

"Do that, will you, Miss Lee, if you can? And be on the lot at eight tomorrow, made up, please. It's a forty-mile run to the location, and we want to get there early's we can so's to get all set to shoot when the light's right."

Actor and director pranced grateful attendance on the two women as they returned to their motor-car; and when it had vanished down the drive, Summerlad fell upon Jacques and shook him fervently by the hand.

"You're a true friend, Joe!" he declared in mock-emotional accents. "I'll never forget what you've done for me this day."

"Worked out pretty, didn't it?" the director grinned. "What d'you know about them dames walking in on us, just when we'd got it all doped? But you always were a fool for luck, Lynn, s'far's the skirts are concerned – you old hyena!"

"I am this flop, anyway," Summerlad mused with a far-away look. "Those white riding-breeches were a regular inspiration, Joe: if she finds a pair before night, I miss my guess."

"Well, it don't do to ride your luck too hard. You've got all afternoon with the coast clear – maybe! Get your make-up off and beat it quick."

XXV

As it turned out, however, Lucinda experienced no great difficulty in fitting herself acceptably with a ready-made costume of white linen for cross-saddle riding, and light tan boots of soft leather.

The prospect of at last doing real work before a camera, after her long wait since falling in with Lontaine's scheme, inspired a quiet elation. She had already been elaborately tested and re-tested, of course, by the cameraman under contract with Linda Lee Inc.; she had ceased to feel self-conscious in the fierce white light of the Kliegs, and was familiar almost to satiety with the sensation, at first so nightmarish, of sitting in a darkened chamber and watching herself move to and fro upon a lighted screen. This last, however, had given Lucinda confidence in the photographic value of her good looks; and she had furthermore learned, through measuring her unproved abilities by those of established screen actresses daily displayed to the millions, not to be apprehensive of scoring an utter failure when her time came to entertain with the mobile shadow of her self audiences that had paid to be amused.

So she felt assured of doing well enough in her work with Summerlad. And if her mood was serious, when she alighted at the hotel and gave a bellboy her purchases, it was because she was thinking of nothing but her immediate purpose, which was to try on her costume all complete, with hat, boots, gloves and riding-crop, before a mirror, partly to make sure every detail was as it should be, but mostly to satisfy herself that she would look as fetching as she felt she must.

It wasn't till she found herself in the corridor leading to her suite that Lucinda remembered Nelly Marquis; she hadn't given the girl two thoughts since morning, and in all likelihood wouldn't have given her another had she not met the bellboy returning from delivering the parcels to her maid, and paused to tip him in front of the door to the corner room. Then, as he thanked her and passed on, she noticed that the door was slightly ajar, the room beyond dark with early dusk, and finally, where the light from the corridor struck in across the threshold, a white hand at rest upon the floor, a woman's hand, palm up, the fingers slightly contracted, absolutely still. A startling thing to see…

For a few seconds Lucinda stood entranced with premonitions of horror. Then she moved to the door and rapped on it gently. There was no response, the hand didn't stir. She called guardedly: "Miss Marquis!" – and when nobody answered laid hold of the knob. The door met a soft obstacle when less than half-open, and would yield no farther. The light now disclosed an arm bare to the elbow. With a shiver Lucinda stepped in and groped along the wall till her fingers found and turned the switch illuminating the central chandelier.

Nelly Marquis lay supine, breathing if at all so lightly that the movement of her bosom, beneath the ragged lace of a dingy pink silk négligé, was imperceptible. Her lids, half lowered, showed only the whites of rolled up eyes, her lips were parted and discoloured, her painted pallor was more ghastly even than it had been in the morning. On the evidence of her body's posture in relation to the partly opened door, she had been taken suddenly ill, had rushed to call for assistance, and had fallen in the act of turning the knob.

Lucinda shut the door, knelt, touched the girl's wrist, and found it icy cold. But her bosom was warm, the heart in it faintly but indisputably fluttering.

In relief and pity, she essayed to take the girl up in her arms and carry her to the bed, but found the dead weight too great.

Casting round at random for something in the nature of a restorative, smelling salts or the like, she saw nothing that would serve, at first, only a disarray of garments and other belongings characteristic of natures in which care for appearances and personal neatness has become atrophied through one cause or another – if it ever existed. But she noticed absently that one of the windows stood wide to the veranda, and went to close it and draw the shade before pursuing her search.

Then, in the bathroom, she found a bottle of aggressive toilet water and a pint flask of whiskey, half emptied.

Alternately moistening the pale lips with the whiskey and bathing the brows and temples with the pungent water, she observed for the first time a reddish bruise under the left eye, the mark of a blow, possibly sustained in falling. But there was nothing nearby that the girl could have struck to inflict such a hurt except the door-knob, and if she had struck this with such force she must have slammed the door.

It was puzzling…

Her ministrations eventually began to take effect. The bleached lips quivered, closed, then opened and closed several times. The woman's lashes trembled and curtained her eyes. Lucinda went to the bathroom for water. When she returned with half a glassful liberally laced with whiskey, Nelly Marquis was conscious; but her eyes, with pupils inordinately expanded, remained witless until she had drained the glass with convulsive gulps and Lucinda had set it aside.

"Do you think you're strong enough now to get to bed, if I help?"

The girl nodded: "… try," she whispered. Using all her strength, Lucinda succeeded in getting Nelly Marquis on her feet. About this time the clouded faculties began to clear. Clinging to Lucinda's arm, Nelly started as if in a spasm of fear, darted swift glances of terror round the room, then turned a look of perplexity to Lucinda.

"Where is he?" the whisper demanded. "Has he – has he gone?"

"There is no one else here, nothing to be afraid of. Come: let me help you to bed."

Recognition dawned as she spoke, with a movement of feeble fury the girl threw Lucinda's arm away, but deprived of its support staggered to the foot of the bed, to which she clung, quaking.

"You!" she cried – "what you doing here?"

"The door was open, I saw you lying senseless on the floor. I couldn't go on and leave you like that. You'd have done as much for me."

"Oh! would I? A lot you know!" Her knees seemed about to buckle; will-power alone kept Nelly Marquis from sinking; yet she persisted: "I suppose I ought to thank you. Well: much obliged, I'm sure. Is that enough?"

"Quite enough. I've no wish to annoy you. Only, let me suggest, you need a doctor. May I ask the office to call one?"

"When I want a doctor, I'll call him myself. Good night."

"I'm sorry," said Lucinda simply.

With no choice other than to go, she went. But the vision she carried away, of Nelly Marquis glaring at her with eyes malevolent, her frail body vibrating so that it shook the bed, must have haunted Lucinda's conscience all evening long had she let the affair drop then and there.

Returning to her room, she telephoned the office and asked for the hotel physician. The clerk reported that the doctor was out, but promised to advise him of her call as soon as he came in.

Upwards of an hour later a knock ushered in a quiet young man with weary, understanding eyes, who attended gravely to what Lucinda had to tell him.

"She seems to have taken such an inexplicable dislike to me," Lucinda wound up, "I'm sure she won't see you if she knows you come through me. But the girl is really ill and needs help. So, I thought, perhaps you might find someone else in the hotel who knows her and could get her to consent to see you."

"I fancy I know her well enough myself to excuse a friendly call," the physician answered. "She's an old patient of mine, though she hasn't been in Hollywood for some time, I believe."

"Then you must know what's the matter with her…"

"Yes, I know… But it would be unprofessional to tell you, of course, Miss Lee."

"Then tell me this much: that you can help her."

"I'm not sure of that. Not unless she's willing. To do her any real good, I'd have to have her under observation for some weeks. And cases like hers are peculiar, peculiarly strong-headed… However, I'll see if I can do anything with her now, and let you know."

Three minutes after he had left, he knocked again.

"Too late, Miss Lee," he reported. "Nelly Marquis checked out about a quarter of an hour ago, they tell me at the desk – called for an auto and left no address."

XXVI

The indigene of Southern California has long since ceased to regard with much interest the publicly practised tribal customs of those clans which herd upon the motion-picture reservation. He no longer thinks he's seeing life when he comes upon troops of fairy policemen rapturously chasing their trails by broad daylight, or woebegone gentlemen with too much trousers popping out of manholes in public thoroughfares, or painfully unconscious sweethearts in broad-minded evening dress at high noon fondling each other in front of, say, the Hollywood Hotel. He no more knows a thrill when motor-loads of revellers in giddy costume and with sanguine noses blow by his unromantic bungalow at breakneck speed, preceded or followed by other cars filled with bored proletaires in workaday clothes, among them one embracing affectionately the slim young limbs of a camera tripod. And if he should chance to observe his next-door neighbour lamming the everlasting daylights out of his wife on the front lawn, he would make sure there was no camera within range before telephoning for the police.

A month of Hollywood had so accustomed Lucinda to such sights that she became a part of them, at least in as far as involved coursing through the streets in full make-up, without any sense of making herself unduly conspicuous.

She even forgot to think it strange that she, Lucinda Druce, should not resent being made love to unprofessionally, that is to say without an eye to the camera, by a man with rouge on cheeks and lips and eyelashes beaded with mascaro.

If the feeling that she had cast her lines in strange places was quick to wear off, in those three days of work with the Summerlad company, the fun of it wasn't. Lucinda threw herself into the detail of every hour with tremendous zest, and liked it all as she seldom had liked anything before.

To rise hours before the time at which use had habited her to waking, rout the drowsiness from her flesh with a cold plunge, dress hastily in her becoming white costume, snatch a bite of breakfast and dash out into the cool glow of morning sunlight to rendezvous at the studio; to pick up Lynn and Fanny for company on a cross-country race to a wild canyon of the Sierra Madre; to change to horseback when the going grew perilous for motor travel, and ride five miles farther up a trail that now ran level with the rushing waters of a mountain stream, now climbed dizzily above it on rocky ledges barely wide enough to afford foothold for one horse at a time, ending in a lovely wilderness spot which Jacques had selected because, he said, it hadn't been "shot to death"; to idle, chat and giggle with Lynn, Fanny and Alice Drake during the long delays devoted by Jacques to making up his mind what he wanted the company to do in preference to the action indicated in the continuity which he was politely presumed to be producing; to lunch al fresco, grouped round a blanket on which a decidedly rude and hearty picnic meal was spread; to frolic through a few minutes of make-believe while the camera clicked and Jacques bawled directions through a megaphone; then to drive back in the evening lull, with lights breaking out in lilac dusk like fireflies in a tinted mist; to get home so weary that she could hardly keep awake long enough to wolf down the dinner for which she was ravening, then to fling herself into the warm, all-obliterating haven of bed; and all the while to be falling more and more madly in love but still practising delectable, self-tantalizing self-denial: this wasn't work in any sense, but play, sheer play of a most gorgeous sort and of which surely one could never tire.