Linda Lee, Incorporated Part 47

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 pa.s.sable 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 with _Nelly_.

Here, in his bachelor apartment, _Nelly_ was 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, and _Nelly_ was to accept him, momentarily carried off her feet by the sincerity of his pa.s.sion as much as by the glamour of his wealth and social position.

While this was going on, _d.i.c.k_, the son, pa.s.sing in the street, was to catch a glimpse of _Nelly's_ shadow 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 conduct _Nelly_ to the private hallway and leave here there with the understanding that, while he was letting _d.i.c.k_ in at the front door, she was to slip away by the back.

Instead of doing so, _Nelly_ was 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, _Nelly_ was to confront the two and, while confessing she had planned deliberately to marry either one or the other of them for his money, a.s.sert herself to be too good to be the wife of either.

It is ill.u.s.trative 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 when _d.i.c.k_, pa.s.sing 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, when _Nelly_ opened 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 of _Nelly's_ quality in circ.u.mstances 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 apprentices.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sumed 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, as _Nelly_, 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 believed _Richards_ and _d.i.c.k_ could 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's _that_ for? 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 against _Nelly_ in 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.

"_What_ struck you as so funny?" he exploded. "Show me anything funny about this scene and I--I'll eat my megaphone. What's so d.a.m.n' 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 about _Richards_ being 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. "h.e.l.l! 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 expect _Nelly_ to carry on when she hears what she hears. She isn't in love with _Richards_, she isn't even in love with _d.i.c.k_; 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 hears _Richards_ confess, 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 like _Nelly_ to 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 with _Richards_, but she wouldn't tear around in this corner like a--like Lillian Gish in _Broken Blossoms_ when'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, you _win_. 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.

x.x.xVI

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.

f.a.n.n.y 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 s.p.a.ce 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 f.a.n.n.y, that she might have a little time alone with Lynn.

Relentless a.s.sociation 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 att.i.tude 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-s.h.i.+eld, 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 pa.s.sionate 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, pa.s.sing without noticing Lucinda. Then the illumination from the lobby, escaping through the front door, had shown her countenance printed with the look of a d.a.m.ned soul hunted to its last gasp, a look to haunt one's dream with a sense of terror abject and unabated, of savage pa.s.sions 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 embarra.s.sments....

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.

"h.e.l.lo, people!" he saluted affably. "How you making out?"