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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Linda Lee, Incorporated," Louis Joseph Vance masterfully interweaves elements of suspense and romance, exploring the complexities of identity and ambition in the burgeoning business landscape of the early 20th century. Vance'Äôs literary style employs vivid characterizations and sharp dialogue, creating an atmosphere charged with intrigue and emotional resonance. Set against the backdrop of a rapidly industrializing society, the narrative delves into the life of Linda Lee, a resilient and resourceful protagonist whose fervent desire for independence challenges societal norms and the expectations of her time. Louis Joseph Vance, an accomplished author and playwright, drew upon his own experiences and keen observations of contemporary society to craft this engaging tale. Active during the 1910s and 1920s, Vance was known for his innovative plotting and dynamic characters. His awareness of the cultural shifts and the evolving roles of women informed his portrayal of Linda, illustrating both the challenges and triumphs faced by those pursuing success in a male-dominated world. This compelling narrative is highly recommended for readers interested in historical fiction that combines social critique with engaging storytelling. "Linda Lee, Incorporated" not only captivates with its thrilling plot but also invites reflection on the themes of personal empowerment and the quest for self-identity.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Linda Lee, Incorporated
Table of Contents
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 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.
"Linda?" Bel's tongue, as thick as she had expected it to be, called again, insistently: "Linda? 'Wake, Linda?"
She made no stir at all, and presently he closed the door and she heard him grumbling, then a click as he switched off his bedside lamp.
Later he began to snore, something he never did unless he had been drinking heavily.
Her drowsy time had passed, not to return. She lay for hours, looking wide-eyed into darkness, thinking.
How had Dobbin known—or guessed—she was unhappy?
She wasn't, she was neither happy nor unhappy, she was just a little lonely ... wasted....
III
Bellamy Druce began the day frugally with grapefruit, the headlines of the Herald, and coffee. It is no more than fair to state that he seemed to hold all three in one degree of disfavour. The interest he showed in the other dishes set forth for his sustenance and delectation on the small table in the bow-window of his sitting-room, was limited to a single jaundiced glance at the ensemble.
From the news of the day, too, he turned affronted eyes. Strong daylight on white paper was trying to optic nerves this morning. Over his coffee he lighted a cigarette, but after a few puffs took it from his lips and examined it with louring distrust which suggested the birth of a suspicion that his tobacconist was not a true friend. Hastily putting the thing from him, he shuffled listlessly the dozen or so envelopes on the breakfast table, put these aside in turn, and for a time sat morosely contemplating his joined fingers, trying to recollect something confoundedly elusive. The mental effort contributed nothing toward assuaging a minor but distinct headache, just back of his eyes.
At thirty-five or something less, Bellamy was beginning to notice that even a few drinks tended to play the deuce with one's memory. He liked to boast and believe he never drank to excess, but it was none the less true that, of late, his alcoholic evenings were frequently much of a blur in retrospect.
After a while he unlaced his hands, held them out to the light with fingers spread, and frowned to observe their slight but unmistakable tremor.
In a petulant voice he asked the time of his valet and, learning it, ruefully digested the reflection that he had eight hours more of life to live, if it could fairly be called living, before the hour of the first cocktail.
As a man of strong principles, he made it a rule never to drink before six in the evening.
After another minute of wasted endeavour to put salt on the tail of that tricky memory, he made a disconsolate noise, told his valet to order the car round, and bestirred himself to finish dressing.
Bellamy Druce buttoned himself into his coat before a mirror. Like many men who make no pretensions to deserve the term handsome, he was inordinately finical about his person. His relations with his tailors, boot and shirt-makers, were intimate and marked by conferences as solemn and consequential as those which keep European premiers out of mischief, but no more so. No valet had yet succeeded in earning his confidence in such questions as that of the right shirt for the lounge suit of the day.
But the inspection he gave his attire this morning was perfunctory, his graver concern was with the tone of his complexion and the look of his eyes.
To his relief the one proved to be clear and of good colour, the other betrayed ravages of dissipation only in a hint of heaviness. More than this, the tremor of his hands had in the last few minutes become barely perceptible. Already a strong constitution, hardened by an athletic history and inured to abuse, was beginning to react to restorative measures taken immediately after waking, deep breathing, a steaming hot bath, an icy needle-shower, a rub-down.
Drawing one more long breath, he straightened his shoulders, lifted his chin a trifle, and went to pay his matutinal addresses to Lucinda, hoping she wouldn't notice anything, or, if she did, would be enough of a sportswoman to let it pass without comment.
He found Lucinda seated on a chaise-longue in her boudoir, running through her morning's mail by way of preparation for the daily half-hour with her secretary which it demanded. Posed with unfailing grace in a négligé scarcely more than a sketch in lace and ribbon, with the light from the windows seemingly drawn to a focus by hair abundant, always rebellious, and the hue of ripe corn-silk, she seemed as pretty, as fair and fragile as a porcelain figurine. Bellamy needed only to see her thus to know a stab of shame and self-reproach.
Why must he be such a fool as ever to let himself be flattered into forgetting sheer perfection was to be found nowhere if not within the walls of his own home?
Bending to kiss his wife, he put that thought behind him. He couldn't afford to dwell upon it. Already he was too far committed in this new affaire to withdraw without losing face. But he would find some way soon to make an end of it (thank God! they all had an end sometime) and this would be the last—"and after this, never again!"
He really meant it this time, he vowed he did....
"Rest well, dear? Don't need to ask that, though, only need to look at you. Besides, you know you went to sleep as soon as you got home; you were dead to the world when I came in."
"You didn't stay late at the Brook?"
"As a matter of fact, made excuses to get away early. But you were too quick for me, my dear."
Bellamy sat down on the foot of the chaise-longue and helped himself to one of Lucinda's cigarettes. To his relief, it tasted remarkably like tobacco.
"Never looked sweeter in your life than last night, Linda. I was quite jealous of old Daubeney, monopolizing you...."
"You needn't have been, Bel."
"Don't know about that. Dick took it pretty hard when you accepted me, and if I'm any judge now, he's come back only to be hit twice as hard, in the same place, too. If not, he's got no right to look at you the way he does."
"I don't think you were in a good condition to judge." Bel winced, because he had laid himself open to this, and it could be taken two ways, neither comforting. It was actually a relief to hear Lucinda add: "You seemed to be fairly preoccupied yourself, at the table."
"Oh, bored to tears, assure you. Amelie's a pretty little thing, amiable enough, but nobody to talk to—no conversation whatever."
Lucinda limited comment to a mildly quizzical look. Her maid, having answered the door, was announcing that the car was waiting for Mr. Druce. Bellamy nodded, but seemed in no hurry. What was on his mind?
"Doing anything special today?"
Lucinda shook her head slowly, watching him with a half-smile lambent with lazy intelligence. He felt vaguely uneasy, as who should of a sudden find himself hard by the brink of some abysmal indiscretion.
"Thought we might meet somewhere for luncheon, if you're lunching out."
"I'd love to." Lucinda put out an arm deliciously rounded beneath skin of a texture fairer and finer than any other Bellamy had ever seen, and took a morocco-bound engagement book from her escritoire. "Let me see...." She riffled the leaves. "I know I've got some shopping to do——"
"Have you, now!"
"And Mrs. Rossiter Wade's bridge-tea for some charity or other this afternoon, but.... Oh, yes! I'm having Fanny Lontaine to lunch at the Ritz, with Nelly Guest and Jean Sedley. What a pity. Though nothing can prevent your coming, too, if you like."
A dark suspicion knitted Bellamy's eyebrows. "Some actress? Sounds like it."
"Fanny Lontaine?" Needless to ask which he meant, the other women were fixtures of their immediate circle. Lucinda laughed. "Nothing of the sort. Fanny was at school with me—Frances Worth——"
"Chicago people?" Bellamy put in with symptoms of approval. "Not a bad lot. Old man Worth—'Terror of the Wheat Pit', they called him—died not long ago in the odour of iniquity, leaving eighty millions or so. Your little schoolmate ought to be fairly well-fixed."
"I don't know, I'm sure. I believe it's something to do with the will that brought them over. Fanny's father disliked Harry Lontaine, so Fanny had to run away to marry him and was duly excommunicated by the family. She's lived in England ever since; her husband's an Englishman."
"I see: another of your charity cases."
"Hardly. They're stopping at the Ritz, that's where I met Fanny the other day."
"Anybody can stop there, but not everybody can get away."
"Does it matter?"
"It's only I don't like seeing you made use of, Linda. Your name makes you fair game for every climber and fortune-hunter who can claim or scrape acquaintance with you."
"But my friends——"
"Oh, you're forever being too friendly with stray cats. Why did you ask Nelly and Jean to meet this woman if it wasn't in the hope they'd take her up, too?"
Lucinda shrugged. "Come to my luncheon and see for yourself. Not that I think you'd care for Fanny, though she is pretty to death."
"Why not, if you like her so much?"
"She's not at all the type you seem to find most attractive. Why is it, I've often wondered, the women you lose your head about are almost always a bit—well——!"
Bellamy flushed sullenly. It was one of his crosses that he seemed never to have the right answer ready for Lucinda when she took that line. After all, there is only one salvation for a man married to a woman cleverer than himself: to do no wrong.
"Oh, if you're going to rake up ancient history——!"
But Lucinda pursued pensively, as if she hadn't heard: "I presume you've got to run after that sort, Bel, because they don't know you as well as I do—can't."
Even a slow man may have wit enough not to try to answer the unanswerable. Bellamy got stiffly to his feet.
"I'll drop in at the Ritz if I can make it."
"Do, dear ... And Bel!" Lucinda rose impulsively and ran to him. "I'm sorry, Bel, I was so catty just now. Only, you know, there are some things one can't help feeling keenly. Dear!"
She clung to him, lifting to his lips a face tempting beyond all telling. Insensibly his temper yielded, and catching her to him, he kissed her with a warmth that had long been missing in his caresses.
"Linda: you're a witch!"
"I wish I were ... enough of a witch, at least, to make you realize nobody cares for you as I do, nor ever will. Bel: don't go yet. There's something I want to ask you...."
"Yes?" He held her close, smiling down magnanimously at that pretty, intent face. As long as she loved him so, couldn't do without him, all was well, he could do pretty much as he liked—within reasonable limits, of course, bounds dictated by ordinary discretion. "What's on the busy mind?"
"I've been wondering if we couldn't go away together somewhere this Winter." Lucinda divined hostility in the tensing of the arm round her waist. "We're not really happy here, dearest——"
"But you were in Europe all Summer."
"Not with you, except for a few weeks. You took me over but left me to come back to business affairs that could have got along perfectly without you. And while you were with me, what was different from our life here? Nothing but the geography of our environment. Meeting the same people, doing the same things, living in the self-same groove abroad as at home—that sort of thing's no good for us, Bel."
"What's wrong with the way we live?"
"Its desperate sameness wears on us till we turn for distraction to foolish things, things we wouldn't dream of doing if we weren't bored. Look through my calendar there; you'll find I'm booked up for weeks ahead, and week in and week out the same old round. And so with you. Consciously or unconsciously you resent it, dear, you're driven to look for something different, some excitement to lift you out of the deadly rut. As for me ... Would you like it if I took a lover simply because I was bored silly, too?"
"Linda!"
"But don't you see that's what we're coming to, that is how it's bound to end with us if we go on this way, all the time drifting a little farther apart? Why can't we run away from it all for a while, you and I, forget it, and find ourselves again? Take me to Egypt, India, any place where we won't see the same people all the time and do the same things every day. I feel as if I'd lost you already——"
"What nonsense!"
"Oh, perhaps not altogether yet. But slowly and surely I am losing you. Bel: I want my husband and—he needs me. Give me a chance to find him again and prove to him I'm something better than—than a boutonnière to a man of fashion."
"Boutonnière?"
"A neglected wife, the finishing touch."
Bellamy laughed outright, and Lucinda's earnestness melted into an answering smile. "What a notion! How did you get it, Linda?"
"Thought it up all out of my own head, strange as it may appear. You see—this is the danger of it all—you make me think, dear. And if you keep that up, first thing you know I'll be all mental—and that would be too awful!"
Bel laughed again, more briefly, and slackened his embrace; and she understood from this that, if she had not actually lost, she had gained nothing.
"Perhaps you're right. At all events, it's worth thinking about."
"You will think it over, Bel—promise?"
"Word of honour. But now—late for an appointment—must run."
Against the better counsel of her instinct, Lucinda put all she had left unsaid into her parting kiss—and felt that his response was forced.
In chagrin she wandered to a window and stood gazing blankly out till recalled by a new voice: "Good morning, Mrs. Druce."
Lucinda wadded the handkerchief into her palm and turned to her secretary, an unruffled countenance.
"Good morning, Elena."
Elena Fiske was conscientiously unalluring in the livery affected by intellect in reduced circumstances. Thanks to a cultivated contempt for powder, her good features wore an honest polish. She walked with a stride and looked you in the eye. Erroneously she conceived her opinion of Lucinda to be privately entertained.
"If you're ready for me," she suggested with perfect poise.
"Yes, quite ready."
Elena consulted a sensible note-book. "I was to remind you to telephone Mrs. Rossiter Wade."
"Oh, yes."
Lucinda took up the telephone but only to find the wire already in use; that is to say, somebody in another part of the house was talking without having thought to disconnect the boudoir extension. Recognizing Bel's voice, she would have hung up at once had she not overheard a name.
"Lucky to catch you in, Amelie," Bellamy was saying in the blandishing accents she knew too well. "About our luncheon, you know——"
"See here, Bel: you're not going to put me off at the last minute!"
"Rather not! But for reasons which I confidently leave to your imagination, it might be better to make it any place but the Ritz. What do you say to the Clique? It's at least discreet——"
"But Bel!" the mocking voice of Amelie Severn put in——"we settled on the Clique instead of the Ritz last night, just before you went home. What's happened to the old memory?"
Bellamy was still stammering sheepishly when Lucinda cutoff.
IV
Frost in the air of that early Winter day lent its sunlight the cold brilliance of diamond-dust. The sky was turquoise glaze, more green than blue, incredibly hard, shining, high and resonant. Though the new year was well launched, snow had not yet fallen, no dismal sierras of mud, slush and rubbish disfigured the city streets and hindered their swift business. But on Fifth avenue, by that mid-morning hour, the crush of motor-cars had grown so dense that one could hardly hope to drive from the Plaza to Thirty-fourth street in less than thirty minutes.
Bellamy, nursing a mood blackly malcontent, fumed over every halt dictated by the winking semaphore lights of the traffic towers. He could have made far better time afoot, and would infinitely have preferred the exercise—indeed, felt need of it. But in his understanding it was essential that the car should set him down in front of the sedate pressed-brick structure on East Thirtieth street whose entrance was flanked by an ever-stainless plate of brass advertising in dignified black letters Offices of the Druce Estate—necessary for the planting of what he was pleased to term his "alibi." It made his mind easier to know he could prove by the chauffeur that he had "gone to business." What he did with himself after passing through those austere portals the chauffeur couldn't know, couldn't be expected to know, consequently couldn't tell.
It was true, Lucinda had never deigned to question a servant about his comings and goings, he had no reason to believe she would ever be so far forgetful of her dignity. Still, if one will flirt with fire, the first rule is to take out insurance.
Notwithstanding the numerous occasions when his own laches and errors of judgment had betrayed Bellamy, his life of a licensed philanderer (so he rated himself) remained one endless intrigue of evasion, a matted tangle of lies, equivocations, shifts and stratagems, to keep account of which was not only a matter of life and death with him but a task to tax the wits of any man. The wonder was less that feet which trod such treacherous ground were known to slip, than that they slipped so seldom.
Merely to admit the need for all this involution of ambiguity and double-dealing grievously affronted self-esteem. Deceit was strangely distasteful to this man who was forever floundering in a muck of it, a quagmire from whose grim suck his feet were never wholly free. In saner interludes, times of disillusion and clear inner vision such as this, he loathed it all, himself most of all. Naturally fastidious, he felt himself defiled, much as if he were constrained continually to dabble those well-manicured hands in a kennel. He would have given half of all he possessed to be free of this feeling of personal dishonor which was the fruit of self-indulgence. A quaint contradiction was to be read in the fact that he knew no way to satisfy his vanity but at the cost of giving his vanity offence.
Today found Bellamy more out of humour with himself than ever before, more disposed to consider turning over a new leaf, a project often mooted by his conscience (always when he was falling out of love) often approved but never seriously tackled.
Now, however, he had every incentive: self-esteem sick to death in sequence to last night's dissipation, anxiety to reanimate it with a noble gesture; mortification due to that lapse of memory which had laid him open to Amelie's derision, accompanied by reluctance to see the lady soon again; most of all, Lucinda's unmistakable appeal to his senses and sensibilities both, in their interview just ended.
There was no one like Linda, not a woman in New York who could hold a candle to her for looks, wit and intelligence, none other whom he could trust, no one who loved him so well. And it would be such a simple matter to do as she suggested, humour her, make her happy—clear out of New York and not return till time had wiped the slate clean of his score, then settle down to behave, and incidentally to respect, himself.
Where was the sense in holding on this tack, ignoring Linda, making her miserable, storing up sure retribution, and meantime playing the silly goat, all for the sake of a few hours of facile excitement? It wasn't as if he couldn't help himself, as if his fatal beauty rendered it impossible for women to resist him. No: the women he flirted with were as ready to flirt with any other man who has as much to offer them....
Why, then go on?
Bellamy assured himself he was damn' sorry that he hadn't, while calling Amelie up from the library, obeyed his first impulse and broken off the appointment altogether. Chances were her resentment would have resulted in a permanent breach. In which event all hands would have been happier. While if he went on now to meet her at this shady Clique Club, the end might easily be, what the outcome of persistence in his present courses must surely be, heart-break, unhappiness, the slime of the divorce courts.
Thrice in the course of the scant hour he spent at his desk Bellamy put out a hand to the telephone, meaning to call up Amelie and call it off; and thrice withheld his hand, partly because he hated the thought of a wrangle over the wire, partly because he was afraid the girl at the switchboard might listen in.
In the end he left his office half an hour earlier than he need have, and telephoned the Severn apartment from the Waldorf, only to learn from her maid that Mrs. Severn was not at home.
Divided between relief and annoyance, he took a taxi to the Clique, arriving twenty minutes before the time appointed, and Heaven alone knew how long before he might expect Amelie. For Amelie was one of those who, having no personality of their own worth mentioning, build themselves one of appropriated tricks and traits, as a rule those which are least considerate of the comfort of others. Amelie believed a certain distinction inhered in being always late for an appointment.
Now Bellamy detested waiting, especially in a public place, and never more than in the little foyer of the Clique, with its suggestively discreet lighting; the last place where one cared to be hung up on exhibition.
The Clique Club was a post-Prohibition institution of New York, run in direct, more or less open, and famously successful defiance of the Eighteenth Amendment. One had to become a member in order to obtain admission, or else be introduced as the guest of a member; and the initiation fee was something wholly dependent on one's rating in the esteem of the Membership Committee, whose powers had been delegated en bloc to an urbane brigand, the club steward, Theodore by name: in more humid days the more than ordinarily supercilious, courted and successful maître-d'hotel of a fashionable restaurant. Once a member and within those unhallowed precincts, "everything went," in the parlance of its frequenters, "you could get away with murder." There was a floor for dancing, with the inevitable jazz band, rather a good one. Rooms were provided for private dinner parties of every size, however small. In the restaurant proper an improper degree of privacy was obtainable at will simply by drawing the curtains of the booths in which the tables were individually set apart. The cooking was atrocious, the wines and liquors only tolerable, the tariffs cynical.
Amelie Severn kept Bellamy kicking his heels a bad quarter of an hour longer than she need have; and those fifteen minutes, added to the twenty which he had inflicted upon himself, served to draw his temper fine. Nothing of this, however, was apparent in his reception of her, in fact much of it was obscured for the first few minutes by the admiration which her undeniable good looks could hardly have failed to excite. There was, after all, a measure of compensation in the knowledge that one had made a conquest of so rare a creature.
It didn't count that there had been more truth than good faith in Bellamy's statement to his wife that Amelie was "amiable enough, but nobody to talk to." Good humour, easy, spirits, grace of manner and charm of person will carry even a dull woman far. Amelie was neither stupid nor witty; she was shrewd. Mainly through instinct but in part through education she was shrewd, she knew what she wanted, which was every luxury, and how to go about obtaining it, which was simple; all one needed to do was to fix on some tedious man to flatter with one's attentions. For the more dull the man, the better the dividends returned by such inexpensive investments; the more keen-witted, the more disposed to count the cost.
If there was nothing subtle in the philosophy of Amelie, it boasted this rare virtue, it was practical and practicable in the extreme; just as it is practised to an extent few men dream of.
To women of this type love is the poppy of hallucination, calling for ruthless extermination if found in one's own garden, but sure to produce goodly crops if cultivated by fair, skilled hands in the fields of the neighbouring sex.
Amelie had married Ross Severn because he was well-to-do, uninteresting, middle-aged, of good family; and had quickly repented because he spoiled her and showed no intention of ceasing to be a good insurance risk. So she craved much exciting indiscretions as this assignation with another's husband at the Clique Club of questionable repute.
She frankly owned as much while Bellamy was helping her with her wrap in the semi-seclusion of their as yet uncurtained booth.
"—Thrilled to a jellybean!" she declared, employing an absurdity which she had promptly pirated upon hearing the laugh that rewarded its use by another woman. "Thanks, old dear." She shrugged out of her furs, planted elbows upon the table, cradled her chin upon the backs of engaged fingers, and peered about the room with quick, inquisitive, bird-like glances. "Ross would be furious."
"Hope so. If he weren't, he ought to be spoken to about it. Or don't you think he has any right to object to your doing as you please?"
"Oh, why worry about Ross's rights? He's just a husband."
"And husbands haven't any rights worth considering. Quite so! All the same, sometimes they assert 'em."
"I'd like to see Ross...." A laugh of lazy insolence rounded off Amelie's thought. "Besides, I'm not doing anything wrong...."
"Not yet," Bellamy admitted equably. He nodded to their hovering waiter. "What kind of cocktail, Amelie? Everything else is ordered."
"Thank goodness: I'm famished. A T-N-T, please."
The waiter noted down this frightful prescription with entire equanimity, but lingered. "And monsieur——?"
"Nothing, thank you."
"Nothing, monsieur?" Professional poise was sadly shattered for an instant. Why should one punish oneself with the cuisine of the Clique and reject the solitary compensation the establishment had to offer? Ejaculating "Nothing!" once more, in a tone of profound perturbation, the waiter retired.
Bellamy tried to cover his annoyance with a laugh, but surprised a look of dark resentment in Amelie's eyes and opened his own. "Hello?"
"Why did you do that? Simply to mortify me?"
"Afraid I don't follow——"
"Do you want the waiters to think you bring me here solely to satisfy my appetite for liquor? It isn't as if you were a plaster saint in that line yourself—not exactly."
"Sorry, Amy. Make it a rule never to drink before evening."
"Then why come here at all?"
"Thought we'd agreed a little everyday discretion wouldn't do us any harm."
"What are you afraid of? Your wife?"
Bellamy answered only with a fatigued look. The cocktail was being served.
"And the melon, monsieur—shall I bring it at once?"
"Please."
The tone was crisp if the word was civil. Amelie sipped her mixed poisons, mysterious malice informing the eyes that watched Bellamy over the rim of the glass.
"Why take it out on the waiter if you're in a temper with me?"
"I'm not, Amy, I—" Bellamy caught himself, and permitted impatience to find an outlet in a sound of polite expostulation: "Really!"
Amelie put aside an empty glass. Refreshed and fortified, she brooded with sultry eyes while wedges of under-ripe casaba bedded in cracked ice were set before them.
"You know, Bel," she observed in the dispassionate accents of the friend who wouldn't for worlds mention it, only it's for your own good—"you really ought to be more careful about your drinking. You barely escaped being pretty awful at times, last night."
An indictment the more unkind because a cloudy memory refused to affirm or deny its justice. Bellamy began to repent his fidelity to the six o'clock rule.
"Fancy your forgetting we'd agreed to meet here instead of at the Ritz. That ought to show you how lit you were."
"Sorry——"
"That's all very well: but suppose you hadn't had sense enough to call up this morning, suppose I had come here to meet you, just as we'd arranged, and had to go home after waiting around for hours like some shop-girl forgotten on a street corner——"
"Poetic justice, if you ask me—something to offset some of the hours you've kept me fidgeting, wondering if you meant to show up at all."
Injudiciously, Bellamy added a smile to the retort, by way of offsetting its justice.
"So it amuses you to think of making an exhibition of me in a place like this!"
"Oh, I don't know." Bellamy surveyed the restaurant without bias. "Not a bad little hole for people in our position."
The melon, inedible and uneaten, was removed, soup in cups was substituted.
"'People in our position'! I'm to understand, then, any 'little hole' is good enough for me, so long as I don't interfere with Lucinda's parties at the Ritz."
Bellamy straightened his spine and put down his spoon. An understanding captain of waiters read his troubled eye and made casual occasion to draw the curtains across the front of the booth.
"It is because Lucinda's lunching at the Ritz today, isn't it?"
"My dear Amy," said Bellamy coolly: "I'm unaware of having done anything to provoke this, and if I've sinned unwittingly, I beg your pardon very truly. Won't you believe that, please, and let me off for today? I'm feeling rather rusty myself, my dear, and this is beginning to get on my nerves."
At his first words the woman drew back, flushing, eyes stormy above a mouth whose gentle allure lost itself in a hardening line. Then swiftly reconsideration followed, visibly the selfish second thought took shape in the angry eyes and melted their ice to a mist of unshed tears beneath lids newly languorous. The petulant lips, too, refound their tremulous tenderness. Amelie's hand fell upon Bellamy's in a warm, convulsive clasp. She leaned across the corner of the table.
"Kiss me, Bel—I'm so wretched!"
He kissed her adequately but without any sort of emotion, thinking it strange, all the while her mouth clung to his, that he should so clearly know this to be good acting, no more than that, no less. Bellamy was not accustomed to see through women at so young a stage of intimacy; that came later, came surely; but never before had it come so soon. And in a little quake of dread he wondered if it were because he had grown old beyond his years, too aged in sentimental tippling to have retained the capacity for generous credulity of his younger years. Or was it that the woman's insincerity had so eaten out her heart, no technical perfection could lend persuasion to her playing, her caresses potency? Or that he had, since morning, fallen in love with his wife all over again and so truly that no rival passion could seem real?
It was true, at least, that his thoughts were quick and warm with memories of Linda even while he was most engaged with the effort to do justice to Amelie's lips. And perceiving this to be so, self-contempt took hold of him like a sickness.
They resumed their poses of nonchalant and sophisticated creatures amiably discussing an informal meal. But first the woman made effective use of a handkerchief.
"Forgive me, dear," she murmured. "I know it was perfectly rotten of me, but I couldn't help it. I'm a bit overwrought, Bel, not too happy; being in love with you has made the way things are at home doubly hard to endure, you must know that; and then—of course"—she smiled nervously—"I'm jealous."
He was silent, fiddling with a fork, avoiding her eye.
"Of Lucinda—you understand."
He said heavily: "Yes...."
She waited an instant, and when he failed to say more began to see that she had overplayed her hand.
"You do love me, don't you, Bel?"
"Of course."
"Then you must know how hard it is for me, you can't blame me for growing impatient."
This time he looked up and met her gaze. "Impatient for what?"
"Why, for what every woman expects when she's in love and the man whom she loves loves her; something definite to look forward to, I mean. We can't go on like this, of course."
"No, not like this."
"I'm not the kind of a woman for a hole-and-corner affair, Bel. If I were, you wouldn't be in love with me."
He nodded intently: "What do you propose?"
"I've been waiting for that to come from you, dear; but you never seem to live for anything but the moment."
"I've got to know what's in your mind, Amy. Tell me frankly."
"Well, then!"—she saw the mistake of it instantly, but for the life of her couldn't muffle the ring of challenge—"I fancy it means Reno for both of us."
"Meaning I'm to divorce Linda and marry you?"
She gave a deprecating flutter of hands. "What else can we do?"
Bellamy said with a stubborn shake of his head: "Never without good cause; and as far as I know, Linda's blameless. I'm a pretty hopeless proposition, I know, but not quite so bad as all that."
Amelie sat back, her colour rising. She could not misinterpret the determination in his temper; yet vanity would not permit her to forego one last attempt. "But if she should divorce you?"
"Deal with that when it comes up. Frankly, don't believe it ever will. Don't mean to give Linda any reason I can avoid."
"What you mean is, you really love——!"
"I mean," he cut in sharply, "whatever my shortcomings, I respect Linda, I won't hurt her if I can help it."
"How charming of you!"
For all acknowledgment she received a silent inclination of his head; and she began to laugh dangerously, eyes abrim with hatred, the heat in her cheeks shaming their rouge.
"Well, thank God I've come to understand you before we went any farther!"
"Amen to that."
"And so all your love-making has been simply——"
"The same as yours, Amy."
"Then why did you ever make love to me at all, please?"
"Because you let me see you wanted me to."
The brutal truth of that lifted the woman to her feet. "I don't think I care for any more luncheon," she said in a shaking voice. "If you don't mind...."
Bellamy rose, bowing from his place: "Not at all."
He offered to help her with her fur, but she wouldn't have that, threw the garment over her arm and flung round the table, then checked and looked back. "You understand—this ends it—for all time?"
"I couldn't do you the injustice of thinking anything else."
She made a tempestuous exit through the curtains. Bellamy grunted in self-disgust, lighted a cigarette, and looked up to see the suavely concerned countenance of Theodore.
"Something is wrong, Mr. Druce? The lady——?"
"Was suddenly taken ill. Be good enough to cancel the rest of the order, Theodore, and let me have my bill. And—yes, think I will—you may send me a Scotch and soda."
Bellamy consulted his watch. Just on two: Linda's luncheon party would be in full swing. He had nothing better to do, might as well look in at the Ritz. Linda would like it....
V
"Three o'clock, Thomas, say a quarter to."
"Yes, madam."
The footman performed a faultless salute and doubled round to hop into place beside the chauffeur, while the door-porter shut the door with a bang whose nicely calculated volume told all the world within ear-shot that the door-porter of the fashionable hotel of the day was banging the door to Mrs. Bellamy Druce's brougham.
The technique of every calling is similarly susceptible of refinement into an art.
Two Lucinda Druces crossed the sidewalk and passed through the turnstile of bright metal and plate-glass which served as a door at the Forty-sixth street entrance to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel—the one perceptible to mortal vision a slender and fair young person costumed in impeccable taste and going her way with that unstudied grace which is the last expression of man's will to make woman a creature whose love shall adorn him.
To the luncheon-hour mob that milled in the meagre foyer of this hotel, which holds its public by studiously subjecting it to every Continental inconvenience, she presented the poise of a pretty woman who has never known care more galling than uncertainty as to her most becoming adornment. Not even the shadow of that other Lucinda who walked with her, who was no more separate from her than her own shadow, who ceased not to beat her bosom and cry to Heaven for help, was to be detected in the composed, steady eyes that searched swiftly, but without seeming to see, the faces of that congested congregation of fashionables and half-fashionables and would-be fashionables, their apes and sycophants and audience.
Seeing nowhere those whom she was seeking, Lucinda made her way to the lounge; or it would be more true to say a way was made for her by the simple prestige of her presence, by the magic whisper of her name from mouth to mouth commanding a deference neither beauty nor breeding alone could have earned her.
The lounge was at that hour three-quarters invested by an overflow of tables from the dining-room proper, only at its eastern end a few easy chairs and settees had been left for the accommodation of those lucky enough to win past the functionary who guarded the portals, charged with winnowing the sheep from the goats, admitting the elect to this antechamber to the one true Olympus, shunting off the reject to the limbo of the downstairs grill.
Sighting Lucinda from afar, with a bow of ineffable esteem this one glided forward. "Mrs. Sedley and Mrs. Guest are waiting for you, Mrs. Druce." At the same time Lucinda herself discovered her friends occupying a settee, with Fanny Lontaine between them. "Your table is quite ready. Do you wish luncheon to be served at once?"
Lucinda assented pleasantly and passed on. Immediately the headwaiter caught the eye of a subaltern in the middle of the room, and in intimate silence conversed with him without moving a muscle more than the superciliary. The confederate acknowledged this confidence by significantly dropping his lashes, then in even more cryptic fashion flashed on the inspiring intelligence to that statuesque figure which, from the head of the stairs, between lounge and oval dining-room, brooded with basilisk eyes over the business of both. Thus a minor miracle was worked, bringing that one at once to life and down to earth; in another moment the maître-d'hôtel himself was attentive at Lucinda's elbow.
"But I never dreamed you three knew one another!" she was exclaiming in the surprise of finding Fanny Lontaine on terms with those whom she had bidden to meet her. "Fanny, why didn't you tell me——?"
"But I didn't know—how should I?—your Nelly Guest was Ellen Field married."
"That's so; I'd completely forgotten you both come from Chicago."
"Hush!" Nelly Guest gave a stage hiss. "Someone might hear. You never forget anything, do you? And all these years I've tried so hard to live it down! It's no fair...."
Impressively convoyed, the quartet proceeded to "Mrs. Druce's table" in the oval room. Rumour of gossip and turning of heads attended their progress, flattery to which Lucinda, Nelly and Jean were inured, of which they were aware only as they were of sensuous strains of stringed music, the orderly stir of waiters, the satisfying sheen of silver and napery, the brilliance and brouhaha of that gathering of amiable worldlings, and the heady breath of it, a subtly blended, oddly inoffensive mélange of scents of flowers and scented flesh, smells of cooked food and cigarette smoke.
But in the understanding of Fanny Lontaine, accustomed to admiration as she was, and no stranger to the public life of European capitals, the flutter caused by the passage of her companions through a phase of existence so polite and skeptical conferred upon them an unmistakable cachet. She had been long abroad and out of touch, she had never been on intimate terms with New York ways, but the busy mind at work behind her round eyes of a child was like a sponge for the absorption of delicate nuances and significant signs of all sorts. Life had made it like that.
Six years married, and two years older than Lucinda Druce, Fanny retained, and would till the end, whatever life might hold in store for her, a look of wondering and eager youthfulness. Romance trembled veritably upon her lashes. She had a way of holding her lips slightly apart and looking steadily at one when spoken to, as if nothing more interesting had ever been heard by the ears ambushed in her bobbed, ashen hair. Her eyes of a deep violet shade held an innocence of expression little less than disconcerting. Her body seemed never to have outgrown its adolescence, yet its slightness was quite without any angularity or awkwardness, it achieved roundness without plumpness, a stroke of physical genius. In the question of dress she showed a tendency to begin where the extreme of the mode left off, a fault held venial in view of her apparent immaturity. And then, of course, she had lived so long in England, where people are more broad-minded....
Apparently not talkative but a good listener, she had a knack of making what she did say stick in memory, not so much for its content as for its manner, a sort of shy audacity that pointed observations often racy and a candour sometimes devastating. But unless one happened to be looking at Fanny when she spoke, her remarks were apt to seem less memorable, her humour less pungent.
"It's heavenly," she now declared, coolly staring at their neighbours through the smoke of her cigarette—"simply divine to be home. I'm sure I'd never want to see Europe again if it weren't for Prohibition."
"You're not going to suffer on that account today," Jean Sedley promised, producing from her handbag a little flash of jewelled gold.
