Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

by Louis Joseph Vance

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.