Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel. Vance Louis Joseph

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      Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

      AUTHOR'S NOTE

      There are no portraits of living persons in the following pages.

      The incidents related in illustration of present-day methods of motion-picture production are, on the other hand, with one minor exception, drawn from first-hand observation in the California studios.

      Under the title of THE COAST OF COCKAIGNE, an abridged version of this story was published serially, during the Winter of 1921-22, in McCall's Magazine.

      Louis Joseph Vance

      Darien, 20 January, 1922.

      I

      "Mrs. Bellamy Druce! Rather a mouthful, that."

      "Is that why you make a face over it?"

      "Didn't expect me to relish it, did you, Cinda?"

      "I'm afraid I wasn't thinking of you at all, Dobbin, when I took it."

      "Meaning, if you had been, you might have thought twice before taking?"

      "No fear: I was much too madly in love with Bel."

      "Was?"

      "Dobbin!"

      "Sorry – didn't mean to be impertinent."

      "I don't believe you. Still, I'm so fond of you, I'll forgive you – this once."

      "Won't have to twice. I only – well, naturally, I wanted to know whether or not it had taken."

      "Taken?"

      "Your matrimonial inoculation."

      "I think one may safely say it has. I've grown so old and wise in marriage, it really seems funny to remember I was ever an innocent."

      "Four years – "

      "Going on five."

      "It's seemed a long time to me, too, Cinda – five years since these eyes were last made glad by the sight of you."

      "At least, time hasn't impaired your knack at pretty speeches."

      "Nor your power to inspire them."

      "I'm not so sure. To myself I seem ever so much older." Lucinda Druce turned full face to the man on her left, anxiety feigned or real puckering the delicately pencilled brows. "Doesn't it show at all, Dobbin, the ruthless march of advancing years?"

      The man narrowed critically his eyes and withheld his verdict as if in doubt; but a corner of his mouth was twitching.

      "You are lovelier today than ever, lovelier even than the memories of you that have quickened my dreams – "

      "All through these years? How sweet – and what utter tosh! You know perfectly well your heart hasn't been true to Poll – "

      "Unfortunately, the damn' thing has. Oh, I'm not pretending I didn't do my level best to forget, tried so hard I thought I had won out. But it only needed this meeting tonight to prove that the others were merely anodynes for a pain that rankled on, as mortal hurts do always, 'way down beneath the influence of the opiate."

      "Truly, Dobbin, you've lost nothing of your ancient eloquence. That last speech quite carried me back to the days when, more than once, you all but talked me off my feet and into your arms."

      "Pity I ever stopped talking."

      "I wonder!"

      "You wonder – ?"

      "Whether it's really a pity you never quite succeeded in talking me into believing I loved you enough to marry you, whether we wouldn't all have been happier, you, Bel, and I."

      "Then you aren't altogether – "

      "Hush! I haven't said so."

      "No; but you've had time to find out."

      "Perhaps…"

      "And you know your secrets are safe with me."

      "That's why I'm going to say – what I am going to say."

      "O Lord! now I shall catch it."

      "Don't be afraid, Dobbin, I'm not going to scold. But I know you so well, how direct and persistent you are – yes, and how sincere – it's only fair to tell you, the traditions of our kind to the contrary notwithstanding, I'm still in love with my husband."

      For a moment Richard Daubeney was silent, staring at his plate. Then he roused with a light-hearted shrug and smile.

      "And that's that!"

      Lucinda nodded with amiable emphasis: "That's that."

      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