Linda Lee, Incorporated Part 30

In the meantime Lucinda had moved to the Hollywood Hotel, the Lontaines to a furnished bungalow nearby, where they vainly pressed her to join them. She thought it wiser to decline.

"I'm far too fond of both of you to risk living with you," she explained. "It's no good deliberately placing ourselves in a position to get fed to the teeth with one another. Besides, I've got to get accustomed to shifting for myself, and it's high time I was learning to breathe in a proper motion-picture atmosphere."

This the Hollywood provided to admiration. Summerlad a.s.sured Lucinda, and on her own observation she could well believe, that at one stage or another of their careers almost every motion-picture player of consequence in the country must have registered at this hotel. Many continued to reside there, though no reason existed why they should not observe the custom of other happy holders of long-term contracts and move into homes of their own. Aside from such fixtures--and a non-professional element composed mainly of middle-aged folk with set incomes who had contracted the habit of spending their Winters and not much else in California--the hotel boasted a restless movement of birds of pa.s.sage: stars of the legitimate stage brought on from New York to play in a single picture, lesser lights coming West at their own risk to solicit a "try-out;" playwrights and novelists with reputations in two continents declining to profit by the experience of innumerable predecessors, fatuously a.s.suming that imagination, intelligence and honest workmanship had a dog's chance in the studios; directors enjoying their favorite pastime of hopping from Coast to Coast with everything paid; overlords of the cinema visiting the West Coast to look after their own or their rivals' fences and filch actors and directors from one another. These came and went by every trans-continental train.

Remained the incurable addicts with yet another element, hardly less habitue but humbler, maintaining precarious residence in the hotel on meagre means, on remittances from home or G.o.d knew how (and, knowing, wept) hanging on desperately to hope of happier tomorrows, when they, too, would have their own cars call to take them to their daily toil, instead of trudging or trolleying from studio to studio in pursuit of the elusive day's work as an extra: a cla.s.s largely feminine and insistently youthful.

With most of these Lucinda became acquainted by sight, with many she grew accustomed to exchange smiles and the time of day. They were a friendly lot, indomitably cheerful and brisk. If sheer joy of living didn't keep their eyes bright, belladonna did; their hand-painted smiles were unfailing; their slender, silken legs twinkled in vivacious by-play on veranda steps and in the public rooms; by every sign they were ever on the wing and jolly glad. Lucinda liked them all involuntarily, and wished them well; and when she came to know some of them better her heart ached for them.

This was inevitable. The most glacial reserve must have melted to the warmth of such gayly casual overtures. It was good business to know Miss Linda Lee, and they made it their business without undue delay. She had not been twenty-four hours a sister-guest before all these young things knew an astonishing lot about her that wasn't so, and a deal that was.

Lucinda was a raw tenderfoot who was going to finance her own company, a prominent stage favorite trying her luck under an a.s.sumed name, a Baltimore society beauty with the motion-picture bee in her bonnet, n.o.body at all except the dear friend of this or that nationally known man, who was paying to put her into pictures to get rid of her. It didn't matter who or what she was, more than what was irrefutably established: that she was Linda Lee, she had simply sloughs of coin, she was to star in her own productions, Barry Nolan had been engaged to direct her, Lynn Summerlad had gone nutty about her; all of which summed up to this, that Lucinda was in a position to utter words of power whose fruit might be days and days of work at ten or fifteen per--who knew?--perhaps the miracle of a steady job!

They made up to her saucily or shyly, according to the style they believed became them best, with a.s.surance or with humility, with ostensible indifference, and some in open desperation. But on one point they were all agreed: they wanted work. Lucinda spoke about two or three of them to Lontaine, who laughed and advised her to recommend them to Barry Nolan's a.s.sistant, when that far day dawned on which the question of casting subordinate roles would be in order. She spoke to Lynn Summerlad, and was rewarded with a worried frown, the first sign of care she had ever detected in him, together with some well-chosen thoughts on the dangers of contracting haphazard hotel acquaintanceships. Lucinda explained that she hadn't sought them, they had been practically forced upon her; she could see no merit in being rude and "upstage." Summerlad retorted darkly that one never could tell; the motion-picture colony harboured any number of queer birds; it wouldn't do for her of all women to pick up with a wrong one.

"First thing you know, they'll be trying to borrow money from you."

Lucinda was silent for want of a conscience that would sanction an indignant rejoinder.

"I was afraid of this when you moved into the hotel. But then I told myself not to be a fool, you weren't the sort to encourage total strangers."

With malice, Lucinda enquired absurdly: "Are you reproaching me with relaxing from the conventions of my former milieu, Mr. Summerlad?"

"You know very well what I mean, Linda."

"You think, perhaps, I'm growing to be a shade too free and easy?"

"If you must know, I do."

"But this is, after all, Hollywood."

"No excuse for doing as the Hollywoodenheads do."

"Then, I take it, you think it might be more discreet of me to stop going about with you alone."

Since the same roof no longer sheltered them, the Lontaines had ceased invariably to include Lucinda in their plans and gaddings, as when social courtesies were extended them by people whom Lontaine met in the way of business and to whom Lucinda was not known at all. So she was enjoying some little time to herself, when Summerlad's attentions permitted; and when they didn't, felt free to follow her inclination and dispense with chaperonage on occasion, irrespective of the looks of the thing. (If anything could be held to have any particular "looks" where principles of laissez-faire and a.s.siduous attention to one's own concerns were so generally vogue.) Linda Lee, furthermore, could do as she pleased when her pleasure must have been taboo to Mrs. Bellamy Druce.

"O Lord!" Summerlad groaned. "I might've known better than to start an argument with a woman."

"I don't relish being reproached by you for lack of decorum."

"Decorum! I'm only anxious you shan't get in with the wrong sort, be victimized or worse."

"Touching thoughtfulness on my behalf.... But Lynn: what do you mean by 'worse'?"

"Not sure I know, myself. I don't want anything to happen to worry you."

"What could?"

"Oh, I don't know. If I did, I could take measures to prevent its happening. But not so long as you insist on living here. A hotel's no place for a woman alone. People all the time coming and going.... Who knows who and what they are? You might be recognized."

"So that's what's on your mind?"

"I don't like to think of any outside influences working on you just now."

"Just now?"

"Distracting your attention from really important matters, like me and what you're going to do about me. I'm so desperately in love with you, Linda."

Lucinda said nothing for a little. She had been expecting this for days.

Now that it came it found her, of course, unprepared. Nothing to complain of in that; a declaration of love always finds a woman unprepared, no matter how long she may have been preparing for it. The primitive instinct of flight from the male is deathless, though it manifest only as in that one brief moment of panic that Lucinda knew.

She was glad of the darkness of that section of the hotel veranda where they had been sitting for a quarter of an hour after returning from diner a deux in the city. It had seemed early to part, as people interested in each other reckon the age of an evening together--not much after ten--and since no one was visible on the veranda, Lucinda had suggested that Summerlad stop and chat a while. Now she wished she hadn't.

Not that it made much difference. This had been bound to come before long. One knew the signs in a man who had held his peace about as long as he could. Five weeks since that night when, in the Beverly Hills bungalow, she had concluded that Summerlad's interest in her was neither impersonal nor of a transitory nature....

An amazingly long time for him to wait, had she but known, a tribute to the sincerity of the pa.s.sion she had inspired, to the respect in which he held her whose training had not been such as to encourage much respect for women in general. Almost anybody in Hollywood would have told her that Lynn Summerlad was "a fast worker." That no one had done so was probably due in most part to an impression that to carry such information were work of supererogation....

The worst of it was, she was glad.

How strange (and what proof of her heart's unique intricacy!) that she should be affected by such paradoxical displeasure in the pleasure it gave her to hear Lynn profess a pa.s.sion of which she had been so long and well aware; as if it grated upon some slumbering sense of what was fitting; as if any reason today existed why Lynn shouldn't be in love with her and, for the matter of that, she with him (only, of course, she wasn't) or why he need hesitate to speak and she be loath to listen....

"Well, Linda?"

She put away her pensiveness, smiling softly in the darkness that enfolded them, smiling to see Summerlad bending forward in his chair, whose arm just failed to touch the arm of hers, anxiously searching her face for a clue to her mind, but with the anxiety of impatience more than the anxiety of doubt. He wanted to have her in his arms. A pleasant place to be, perhaps; but she wasn't ready yet, she was not yet sure....

"Well, my friend!" she said in amused indulgence--"so it seems you love me."

"How long have you known it?"

"Quite as long as you have loved me."

"And you----?"

"I don't know yet."

He ventured too confidently: "I don't want to hurry you----"

"You couldn't, Lynn. And--you won't be wise if you count on me."

"You don't mind my loving you, Linda?"

"No. I think it makes me happy."

"Then I'm going to count on you--unless you want me to think you're merely amusing yourself."

"But you don't think that. So be patient."

"I'm not at all sure patience and love are even related."