In this new association the low spirits lifted which latterly had oppressed the mercurial cameraman; Iturbide chirked up amazingly and made it plain that he looked upon Mr. Day as a man, a brother, and an artistic peer.
Between Wallace Day and Lucinda there was no friction, and under his sympathetic guidance she felt she was doing better work than she had ever hoped to do.
Only Zinn, though he observed with every indication of pleased approval the rapid strides the production was making, was known to wag a head weighted with foreboding and utter dismal croaks.
"He's a wonder," he said one day to Lucinda, while they stood aside watching Day rehearse a scene in which she happened to have no part—"a holy wonder and no kidding. Every so often in the fillum business a miracle man happens like that. But they never last. It can't be done. Stands to reason. What chanst they got? If women don't get 'em the big-head does, and if they happen to get by with both them drags they run into studio jealousy waiting round the corner with a blackjack. What's that the feller says about self-preservation being the first law of nature? Well, if you don't believe he spoke a mouthful, you want to watch what he said work out in the picture business. Any time they see a bird coming along that's got something on the rest of the gang, they just naturally knock him on the head and save their jobs."
But neither the promising status of the picture nor her growing confidence that, when it was put on public exhibition, her work would justify her pretensions, could revivify the old élan. The novelty had worn too thin, its excitation had lost all potency. Day after day Lucinda went to her work without enthusiasm, and if she left the studio of an evening with reluctance it was solely because of the desolation long drawn-out that she must somehow live through ere she could look for sleep to bestow a little, brief oblivion.
And even the hours spent in make-up knew too many pauses, too long delays spaced her appearances before the camera, when Lucinda must needs stand idly by while Day drilled others in their business, or else sit solitary in her dressing-room, waiting to be called, with mind unemployed but for painful introspection and the ceaseless cark of longing for old delights forever forfeit; till discontent frayed out endurance and she learned to loathe every facet of this life whose whole had once seemed so enthralling: smell of grease-paint warmed by human flesh, smell of distemper drying on newly builded sets, the hot smell of dust that scurrying feet kicked up on the lot, the pungent smell of sensitized celluloid; moaning orchestras without whose strains no true artistic temperament could reasonably be expected to function at the peak of its capacity, sizzling of arcs, the magnified howls that issued from directorial megaphones, of argument and exposition, instruction and command, encouragement, expostulation, denunciation, rage; clock-work ticking of camera mechanisms, distant drumfire of automobile exhausts in the parking yard, the hammering and banging without which property men and carpenters never are known to materialize, the unending drone of babble, like the thick rumour of an off-stage mob, as actors strolled and schooled and talked about themselves; the restless phantasmagoria of painted faces, dusted with yellow powder, beaded with sweat, inhuman enough in God's sunlight and in the blue-green glare of the Cooper-Hewitts sicklied over with a livid cast of dissolution, as they were dead walking; suffocating heat of still air boxed in beneath the glass-roofed stages when the sun was strong, drifts of chill across the lot when evening shades closed in....
And as in the studio, so was it when her occupation took Lucinda abroad. Many of the scenes which had been adjudged to need retaking were those staged in natural settings—"location stuff." These Wallace Day put off till he had finished with the supper-club and living-room. Thereafter Lucinda had for some ten days to face the camera in the open air. Nor was she often able to arrive at the designated spots except by rising early and taking long motor rides alone, which she came to hold in an aversion scarcely second to that which she entertained for her nightly welcome by that emptiness which in her rooms made its abode. In her seeing the groomed beauties of the lowlands had lost all grace, she saw them trivial ... blurs of viridescent tarnish mottling a blasted waste ... cracked enamel on the face of a senile courtesan failing to cover its wrinkles and blotches.... From which her eyes, revolted, turned ever with a sense of terror to the inland ramparts of bare, seamed hills that, with haggard heads stencilled in raw ochre against the blue, looked down upon the pleasure-lands like a herd of couchant monsters bound by some old enchantment for a time to make no move, but biding their day, a day whose secret was hearsed in their rocky hearts, when the spell upon them would be lifted and, rising up, they would march shoulder to shoulder down to the sea, annihilating all things in their way, all puny things that lived and toiled and loved under that remote and hollow canopy of sky, in that fixed and brazen grin of sun....
They brimmed her moods with a disquietude formless and irrational, those everlasting hills, yet she could never keep from dwelling on them, whose heart was ever yearning over them and beyond, into the unknown and unguessable tomorrows they walled away, that occult destiny toward which she must turn her face as soon as her work here was done.
She counted hourly the tale of the days between....
The hole left in her life by the casting out of Bel ached now incessantly and ever more intolerably, since she might no longer drug her mind with that infatuation whose strength had departed. And she knew times whose pain was such that almost she repented having lost capacity for surrender to the anodynous action of that strange phase of love which had so nearly delivered her to Lynn.