Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

by Louis Joseph Vance

Naturally she blamed Bellamy....

In a way he asked for this, giving her too little chance to forget that the sunlight had been kind before his shadow fell again athwart her eyes. Now when skies were overcast and the wind had a tooth, Bel figured in the picture as a sort of stormy petrel, forever to be seen wheeling somewhere within the vague of the horizon.

Fare where she would on diversion bent, Lucinda seemed fated always to encounter Bel, and too often in the company of the Marquis girl; while at the studio it didn't matter much which way she turned, she could hardly avoid the sight of her husband buzzing about on the business of his new enterprise, and apparently finding it all great fun.

To one who recalled the dilettante Bellamy of New York days, there was matter enough for amazement in the gusto he had lately discovered for work that nothing required him to do, in the amount of real energy, enterprise and executive ability which he was contributing to this new amusement. For Lucinda refused to take seriously his infatuation with the motion-picture business; it wasn't real, she insisted to herself, it wouldn't last, he was putting it on just to plague her....

None the less he went to work with a will, and took little more than a week to assemble a producing unit, engage a company of players, and cause camera-work to be begun under the direction of one who, observed occasionally and from a distance, conveyed a refreshing impression of quiet authority.

Inasmuch as special sets could hardly have been designed and erected on such short notice, most of the company's first activities were staged away from the studio, "on location," and Lucinda knew nothing of them save through hearsay. Gossip had it, however, that Bellamy was employing no star to carry his initial production, but was rather making a "special"—the term which the motion-picture trade reads to mean a picture basing its claims solely on the strength of its story as interpreted by a well-balanced cast. Glimpses of Nelly Marquis in make-up, now and then, warranted the assumption that she had been given a part in the picture.

But their paths seldom crossed, notwithstanding that they were using the same studio, and when it did the young woman somehow always happened to be possessed by an abstraction too profound to permit of her seeing Lucinda.

Bel, on the other hand, was already ready with a smile and a friendly hail—"The top of the morning to you, Miss Lee! 'Tis hopeful I am the work, God bless it! is doing well"—or some similar absurdity; but never a hint that there had ever been any terms between them other than the most formal.

Gratitude for this much consideration rendered it no more easy to respond in the same spirit. Lucinda had never known anything more baffling than the absence of any justifiable grounds for objecting to Bel's presence in the studio. For if it were her privilege to seek to become a star of the cinema, it was equally his to launch out as a producer....

The daily disappointment that waited on efforts to find other quarters aggravated her sense of hardship. Lucinda learned to listen impatiently for the expressions of despair which unfailingly wound up Lontaine's reports: "If we've got to clear out of this—I don't know, Linda—I'm afraid it means either buy or build." She began to be afraid it did. Studio accommodations were reported never to have been so much in demand on the Coast. Every available stage was doing double duty, two companies crowding their activities wherever possible into a space formerly reserved for one. Neither knew they any rest by night, when belated souls would see the great roofs of glass livid with the incandescence of Cooper-Hewitt tubes, burning like vast green opals against the dense blue-black of early morning skies.