Part 11

As it toiled with stertorous pantings on up-grades seemingly interminable, the night grew cool again but by no means so cold as at bedtime. The outposts of Winter had been passed. The porter who tidied up the drawing-room in the morning opened a window and adjusted a cinder-screen: the breath of the desert was warm but deliciously sweet. Outside, heat-devils jigged above a blasted waste that was, as Lucinda viewed it, weirdly beautiful. The noontide air at Barstow had all the fever of a windless day of August in the East. Within the riven scarps of the Cajon Pass it was hotter still. A long, swift down-swoop toward the Pacific brought them by mid-afternoon to San Bernardino, set in emerald, where people lolled about the platform in white flannels and airy organdies.

The panorama of sylvan loveliness, all green and gold, commanded by the windows from San Bernardino onward, prepared for a Los Angeles widely unlike the city of Lucinda's first confused impressions, for something Arcadian and spacious instead of a school of sky-scrapers that might have been transported en masse from almost any thriving commercial centre of the North Atlantic seaboard. She was sensible of dull resentment as Summerlad's car--an open one but of overpowering bigness and staggering in its colour-scheme of yellow and black with silver trimmings--progressed in majesty through streets where monstrous trolleys ground and clanged, motor vehicles plodded, champing at the bits, in solid column formation, and singularly shabby multitudes drifted listlessly between towering white marble walls.

Only train-weariness and the glad prospect of a tub bath earned the Hotel Alexandria forgivenness for its sin of ostentation in pretending to stand at Broadway and Forty-second street, New York.

That sense of having been somehow swindled was, if anything, stronger in consequence of an expedition afoot with Fanny after breakfast, in the course of which the two women explored the shopping and business district adjacent to the hotel. The imaginations responsible for the plan and building of the city had suffered from that deadly blight of imitativeness which afflicts the American mentality all the land over, restricting every form of emulation to charted channels, with the result that ambition seldom seeks its outlet in expression of individuality but as a rule in the belittling of another's achievement through simple exaggeration of its bulk and lines, in being not distinctive but only bigger, showier, and more blatant.

Having lunched with Fanny (Lontaine was busy, it was understood, promoting his indefinite but extensive motion-picture interests) Lucinda returned to rooms which Summerlad had caused to be transformed in her absence into the likeness of a fashionable florist and fruiterer's shop; and while she was trying to decide whether to move half the lot or herself out into the hall, the telephone rang and a strange voice announced that Mr. Summerlad's chauffeur was speaking and Mr. Summerlad's car was at the door and likewise at the disposition of Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Lontaine for the afternoon.

"Ought we?" Lucinda doubted with a little grimace.

"Why not?" Fanny asked.

"It seems just a bit.... Oh, I don't know. I presume it would be ungracious to question Californian hospitality."

"Copy-Californian," Fanny corrected. "Chances are you'll find Summerlad's a native son of Omaha or some point East. Does it matter? He means well, and we want to see Los Angeles."

"But that car!"

"It is rather a circus-wagon; but judging by what we've seen in the streets today, the way to make oneself conspicuous here is to sport a car of gaudy black or screaming navy blue. In the racy idiom of the Golden West--let's go."

They went. In ten minutes Los Angeles of the sky-scrapers was forgotten. For three hours league after league of garden-land, groves, plantations, ocean beach, bare brown hills, verdant valleys wide as an Eastern county, all bathed in sunlight of peculiar brilliance and steadiness falling through crystalline air from a sky innocent of cloud, passed in review before beauty-stricken eyes.

In the end the car turned without warning off a main-travelled highway, swept the bluestone drive of what might well have been parked private grounds, and stopped before the imposing, columned portico of an old Colonial mansion.

The chauffeur turned back a friendly, grinning face. "This is where Mr. Summerlad works," he announced--"the Zinn Studios."

"Studios!"

"Yes, ma'm--where they make the movin'-pictures."

Lucinda stared unbelievingly at the building, finding it hardly possible to reconcile such mellow beauty of scheme and proportion, so harmonious with the spacious lawns and massed foliage of its setting, with memories of those grubby, grimy, back-street premises tenanted by the Culp studios in New York.

A screen-door beneath the portico opened, Mr. Summerlad emerged, a shape of slender elegance in Shantung silk, and ran impetuously down to the car. With more deliberation Lontaine appeared and waited.

"Mrs. Lee, Mrs. Lontaine: I hope you'll forgive me for telling Tom to stop in here instead of taking you back to the hotel. Lontaine's here, and we've planned a little surprise, dinner at my place out in Beverly Hills, just the four of us. You won't say no and spoil everything? That's splendid! But it's early, and perhaps you'd like a look around a regular movie factory first...."

Conducting them through the building by way of a panelled entrance hall, Summerlad explained that the stages were temporarily idle, due to the fact that photography on two productions in process had recently been finished and their casts disbanded, only the directors and their staffs remaining to cut and title the films; while the production in which Summerlad was to play the lead was as yet not ready for the cameras.

The working premises lay behind the administration building. But here again Lucinda noted few points of close resemblance to the Culp studios. A field several acres in extent, about half in turf, was surrounded by a sizeable village of glass-roofed stages and structures housing the technical and mechanical departments--a laboratory, a costumier's, property, carpenter and scene-painting shops, directors' offices, dressing, projection and cutting-rooms, a garage, sheds to shelter motor-cars and trucks by the score, stables, a small menagerie, a huge tank for "water stuff," a monolithic fire-proof vault of cement for the storage of film.

Due in great measure to temporary suspension of active camera-work, the place seemed very peaceful and pervaded by an atmosphere of orderliness and efficiency. There were no actors wasting time about the grounds, no sets occupied the huge enclosed stages, the men at work in the several departments seemed all to be busy.

"Well, Mrs. Lee: what do you think of a California studio? Not much like what you've seen back East, eh?"

Lucinda shook her head, and smiled. "I am enchanted with this country," she said; "if what I've seen of it this afternoon is any criterion, I'm afraid it's going to be hard to go away from...."

"You haven't begun to see it yet." Summerlad declared. "Wait till we've had a few motor trips."

"As for your studio, it is most marvellous to me. If they're all like this, I don't wonder people are mad to act in motion-pictures. If Mr. Culp had promised me anything like this, I don't believe I should have had the courage to refuse."

"It's not too late to change your mind, Mrs. Lee," Lontaine suggested. "In fact, if I thought there was any hope you would, I'd go down on my knees to you. Oh, not to act for Culp, but for me; or rather, for yourself, as the head and the star of your own company. No: I'm serious. I've been talking with several people today who want me to try producing out here. I can get unlimited capital to back me. This country today is crying for better pictures--and I know how to make them. I can bring to the American cinema the one thing it needs, a thorough knowledge of European methods. Only one thing makes me hesitate, the lack of a suitable star. All the people of real ability seem to be tied up under long-term contracts. I may lose months looking for the right actress unless you----"

"Why pick on me?" Lucinda laughed. "I'm not even an actress."

"Ah! you forgot I've seen you prove on the screen what you can do. You don't know yourself, Mrs. Lee. There isn't a woman in the country can touch you, if you'll take your ability seriously. You need only two things to make you great, a good director, and self-confidence."

"Aren't you running a great risk, making such flattering overtures to an untried, unknown amateur?"

"Don't worry about me. If I had any hope of being able to persuade you to try it on, I'd tell you to name your own terms, and shoulder the risk without a murmur."

Lontaine's earnestness was so real that one might no longer meet his arguments with levity. There was a strained look of anxiety in the blue eyes, a restrained passion of pleading in the ordinarily languid accents. Or else Lucinda fancied these things.

But a sidelong glance showed that Fanny, too, was apparently hanging between hope and fear....

And a thought revived that had once or twice before presented itself, a suspicion that all was not as well as one might wish with the state of the Lontaine fortunes, strengthening the surmise that Lucinda's decision meant more to them both than Lontaine had confessed.

Still one hesitated to believe....

"But you can't be serious! Do you really want me to become a movie actress under your management?"

"You can't think of anything I wouldn't do to persuade you."

"Why not, Mrs. Lee?" Summerlad urged. "It would be great fun for you, and you can't fail, you can't lose anything. If you only knew how inferior most stars are to you in every way...."

"And if you should fail, Cindy," Fanny chimed in--"what does it matter? Who would know? It wouldn't be you, it would be Lucinda Lee."

"No," Lontaine insisted: "I've got a better screen name than that for her. Not Lucinda: Linda Lee."

"Come, Mrs. Lee: say you'll try it on, if only for the lark of it."

"If I should, Mr. Summerlad, it wouldn't be for fun."

"So much the better."

"Then you will?" Lontaine persisted. "Do say yes."

"Let me think...."

And why not? Lucinda asked herself. She was alone in the world, lonely but for these good friends who needed her help, or seemed to. It would be good fun, it would be interesting, it would satisfy a need of which she had been discontentedly aware even in the days when she had yet to dream of leaving Bel. And--even as Fanny had argued--if she should fail and have to give it up, who would care what had become of "Linda Lee"?

"Very well," she said at length, with an uncertain smile--"suppose we try."

XX

"To tomorrow's morning star of the screen, Linda Lee!"

Thus Lynn Summerlad, mildly exalted, graceful and gracious even beyond his studied habit, flourishing a glass of California champagne above the dinner table in his bungalow in Beverly Hills.

The toast went by acclamation, and Lucinda laughed, at once gratified, diverted, and disposed to deprecate the spirit of these felicitations as premature.

It all seemed rather ridiculous, when one stopped to think, this taking for granted the success of a venture projected so lately, by no strain of imagination to be considered as already launched, and based wholly upon the postulation that the greenest of novices might by some sorcery of the cinema be ripened overnight into a genius of sorts.

A phrase of Culp's recurred unbidden: "A lot of kids, that's what we got to make pitchers with, a lot of kids."

It was childish, in a way; on the other hand, it was undeniably pleasant to think of oneself as one was being tempted to, as a sort of Sleeping Beauty of the screen only waiting to be awakened to vivid life by one wave of the witching wand of courage and self-confidence; pleasant to let oneself go and believe such things might be.

Nor was this difficult. Whether it resulted from the catching enthusiasm of her company, or from self-reliance new-born of her success in doing without Bellamy, or whether it were the glamour of this romantic land, where man since time out of memory had been accustomed to see his maddest dreams come true, certain it was that there seemed nothing essentially improbable in the assumption that "Linda Lee," could figure if she would as "tomorrow's morning star of the screen."

One had only to listen to the gossip of Lontaine and Summerlad to appreciate that stranger things had happened in the history of motion-pictures. Nothing, indeed, was conceivably more strange than that same history, more fantastic and incredible than the record of its growth, almost within the span of a single decade, from the status of a toy to that of an institution forming an inseparable part of the fabric of life, taking its toll of the humblest, and throning and dethroning kings of finance with the impersonal ruthlessness of an elemental force.

One of the greatest of the producing organizations, whose studios covered whole blocks of the heart of Hollywood, had had its beginnings in a trifling story photographed under a big sun-umbrella in a vacant lot. Its most formidable rival, with which it had ultimately amalgamated, had been first financed with the mean savings of a fur-cutter from the lower East Side of New York. Men whose abilities had proved inadequate to command steady employment at fifty dollars a week in the legitimate theatre were drawing a daily wage of five hundred dollars as directors of motion-pictures. The one-time pantomime comedian of an English company presenting a knockabout vaudeville act had made himself a multi-millionaire through clowning before a camera. Young men whose dramatic equipment was limited to the knowledge of how to show their teeth and slick their hair, young women who had walked into favour on the strength of their noble underpinning alone, were selling their services to the cinema under contracts running for terms of years at five thousand dollars a week; and you could take it from Mr. Summerlad that most of these had come to Los Angeles with not more than one dollar to click against another.

"Why, look at me," he invited in an expansive moment: "never had earned a dollar in my life. Didn't have to, you know: folks had a little money. Six years ago my little sister caught a bad cold and the doctor prescribed a Winter in California. Mother and I brought her out and rented a bungalow in the foothills, up back of the Hollywood Hotel. One day while I was wandering about I saw a car-load of people in paint and evening clothes stop in front of a house with good-looking grounds. I stopped, too. So did others; quite a crowd collected while they were setting up the camera. Presently a little fellow in riding-breeches, with an eyeshade, a shock of red hair, and more freckles than anybody ever saw on a human map before or since, came weaving through the crowd as if he was looking for somebody. When he saw me, he stopped and said: 'You'll do. Got a dress suit?' I laughed and said I had. He took out a little book, wrote down my name and address and said: 'Studio tomorrow morning at eight, made up. We'll need you about three days. Five a day.' Then he hustled on. I went home and told my mother and sister the joke. They egged me on to try it for the fun of it. Within two months I was on the payroll at a hundred a week, and now...."

Summerlad flashed an apologetic smile. "One of the worst faults we movie actors have, Mrs. Lee, is talking big about our salaries. So I wont say any more than this: outside the Big Four--Mary and Doug and Charlie and Bill Hart--there's mighty few that drag down as much green money a week as I do."

"I'm glad to absolve you of the sin of boasting, Mr. Summerlad."

"I suppose that did sound funny; but then, you see, I _am_ a movie actor, I don't pretend to be better than the rest of us.... You wouldn't guess who that director was--assistant director he was then--who gave me my first engagement: Barry Nolan!"

The name was apparently known to Lontaine, for he exclaimed "You don't mean it!" as if no more exciting information had come to his ears in many days.

"The man I've got in mind to direct you in your first picture, Mrs. Lee; that is, if you can get hold of Barry. You couldn't do better, but his salary's ee-normous. He's working down in Culver City now, and I don't know how long his contract runs, but you might be lucky enough to make a deal of some sort. I'd give him a ring and find out for you, but I happen to know Barry's got a party on at Sunset tonight. We might jump into my machine and blow down there, if you like."

"There's no hurry, Mr. Summerlad. Remember, Mr. Lontaine hasn't taken the first step toward forming a company yet; he isn't in a position to make Mr. Nolan any definite offer."

"Well, but I'd hate to have you lose a chance. Barry's a wonder. Even Griffith takes a back seat when Barry Nolan picks up the megaphone. And there isn't anything I wouldn't do for him. Lord! how he worked to break me in."

Summerlad sighed, reminiscent. "Them was the happy days. We worked hard for little money, but we had a good time and a healthy one, out in the open air practically all day long. Light effects were then just beginning to be discussed; I don't believe two studios on the Coast had enclosed stages. Generally speaking, all our work was done either on location or on open stages under diffusers."

Lucinda repeated the last word with an enquiring inflexion, and Summerlad explained.

"You see, in those days we had to depend on the sun to light our interior sets, and direct exposure meant hard contrasts of light and shadow that didn't look natural. So we stretched great sheets of thin cloth on wire frames overhead, and they broke up the sun's rays and diffused an even glow all over the sets. But of course that restricted us to overhead lighting for all interiors, and that was monotonous and unnatural besides, because ordinary rooms aren't lighted from the ceiling. And my! but it used to be cosy, working under diffusers on a summer's day!"

"But if you depended on the sun so exclusively," Fanny wanted to know, "what did you do in the rainy season?"

"Loafed, that's all: just loafed. There wasn't anything else to do but loaf around and watch the sky for signs of a break and tell each other how good we were. That was another reason why artificial lighting had to come; it cost too much to carry studio overheads with all production at a standstill during a rainy season that would maybe last five months, or a heavy production payroll when often the rain would stop camera-work for five days on end, and you never could count on two clear days together. So, one after another, the big studios began to build enclosed stages and work more and more by Kliegs and Cooper-Hewitts, till at last--well, today the open stage is almost a thing of the past, and acting for the camera isn't the good fun it used to be--kenneled all day long on a sweltering stage, and the lights getting your eyes like they do. Sometimes, after a spell of work on interiors, I'm as good as blind for a week.... Funny to think--isn't it?--the California studios are using artificial light almost exclusively, except of course for location work, when what brought them out here was steady sunlight that didn't cost anything seven or nine months out of each year."

"But if there is no longer any real reason, such as the economy of sunlight, why do the producers stop on here?"

"Because they took root in Los Angeles in the early days, before people had forgotten that principles of ordinary economy might be applied to making pictures, and what took root grew, till today there are hundreds of millions invested in picture plants here. Also because all the picture people have dug in around the plants. Nearly every good actor has his permanent home here, likewise most of the bad ones; and those who do get a job in the East hurry back as soon as they finish up, so as not to be among the missing if they're wanted for another job. You can cast almost any picture perfectly in a few days in Hollywood, whereas any place else, except maybe New York, it would take weeks to locate your people and bring them together, and there'd be transportation to pay for into the bargain."

Lontaine interposed a question of a technical nature, and as Summerlad answered him at length, Lucinda's attention wandered, she began to think more about the speaker, less about what he was saying. Undeniably a most satisfying creature, at least to look at. Bending over the table, his face glowing as he illustrated his meaning with an animated play of hands: though his words were all for Lontaine. Summerlad's consciousness was constant to Lucinda, his quick eyes were forever seeking hers.... Hard hit and making no secret of it.

Not that it mattered, more than for the good it did one's self-esteem to be respectfully if openly adored by a personable young man whom one found agreeable. Vanity had been sorely sprung by Bellamy's sacrifice of his wife's love to his appetite for the cheap excitement of flirting with women of cheap emotions. His pursuit of her Lucinda valued at no more than one last effort to salve the hurt her desertion of him had dealt to his vanity. Neither had Daubeney's devotion meant a great deal: being something too familiar through old acquaintance not to be misprized. It had needed some such new conquest as this to make Lucinda think well of herself again; this at least proved her charms not yet passee. Reassurance for which she was disproportionately grateful; and gratitude is commonly the most demoralizing of vices.

Lucinda inclined to approve the style in which Summerlad maintained himself. The bungalow, secluded in wide and well-kempt grounds, might have served as the warm-weather retreat of a Grand Duke. And if there was a suspicion of rule-of-thumb in some of its effects, at least it could be said that Summerlad had shown sound judgment in selecting an interior decorator of sound taste.

The dinner had been well cooked and served by a deft Japanese. As it neared its close a more cheerful partie carree would have been far to seek. Indeed, had Lucinda entertained genuine misgivings as to the wisdom of her decision to try her luck on the screen, they must have been compensated by its action on the spirits of her friends. And it couldn't have been anything else, for they had partaken sparingly of the native champagne which, while fair enough of its kind, was nothing to seduce palates educated on London Dry. Yet Fanny's effervescence outvied that of the wine. Lontaine's eyes had lost altogether their tense expression, Summerlad was on his mettle in his dual role of host and courtier, Lucinda herself was stirred by a gayety she had too seldom known since the first years of her marriage.

By merely turning her head she could look out through an open casement to a lawn where moonlight like liquid silver slept between mysterious, dense masses of purple shadow. The breath of the night was bland and fragrant. Somewhere at a distance a sentimental orchestra was playing, possibly at the Beverly Hills Hotel. In Chicago the thermometer had shivered in the neighbourhood of zero; New York, according to telegraphic news, was digging out from under a snowfall second only to that of its legendary blizzard.

"I want to purr," Lucinda confessed, finding Summerlad's eyes upon her.

"You're beginning to fall under the spell of California."

"I told you this afternoon I was already sensitive of its enchantment. Tonight, I think, completes its work: I am enslaved."

"I must make the most of these moments, then. Presently we'll both be busy, you in especial far too busy to give me many evenings like this."

"I'm not at all afraid of being doomed to ennui through any lack of ingenuity in you."