Aurora Dawn Page 5
Reserving judgment, Andrew grew more and more positive that the man was accessible to the scheme he had in mind, and his prize of twenty-five thousand a year seemed drifting within his grasp. Momentarily his mind wandered from the strange pageant before him. He saw an apartment on Park Avenue in the Seventies, richly furnished, saw himself and Honey moving graciously among a gathering of radio and advertising executives, his guests; he smelled the hors d’oeuvres, he tasted the wine, his eye lingered on the clever matching of the dark maroon satin drapes with the Turkish carpet. He exchanged a casual word or two with a couple of his guests in a quiet corner of a room–just the word or two necessary to win a huge new account, doubling his income at a stroke and paying for the party ten times over. The apartment was cramping, after all. The house in Sands Point owned by Chester Bullock, of Bullock and Griffin, with the veranda facing sunsetwards over the blue Sound, was much more to his taste. Now he could afford to build one like it and start working toward his real aim, an advertising agency of his own. The first requisite, of course, was a home where he could do the large-scale entertaining which would open the golden gates. An aureate haze enveloped his thoughts. They lost coherence and became a series of broken images of luxury: a white motor yacht with a beautifully sheered bow, himself as skipper resplendent in a yachting uniform; Honey in mink, Honey and he in a box at the opera, bowing to the grand Davidoffs in the central box and being invited to join them for supper afterward; a two-month vacation at Colorado Springs, playing golf (he would always keep in shape, of course), being very gracious to his old friends and even to Curran, the flinty course manager who had gouged him so mercilessly in his caddie days; Honey the center of all eyes when they walked into the long, elegant dining room at night–except that Honey unaccountably was shorter and had black hair and thin, tense, active little hands like cats–but that was impossible–
He was roused from his dozing by a burst of music, the closing song of the repentance period, a lively air:
Their sins they were as scarlet,
They are now as white as snow;
Their sins they were as scarlet,
They are now as white as snow—
Their souls are back with ]esus
And the devil hides below—
For they’re washed in the blood of the Lamb.
The meeting broke up, following a benediction by Father Stanfield. With a rich noise of cheery converse the crowd went outside, where buses waited lined up to take them back to town. The people of the Fold melted into the gloom of the lawn. Conducted to a high, deep feather bed in a room in the Old House by Elder Pennington, Andy fell asleep almost immediately, to renew his visions of riches in the more brightly glowing hues of deep dreams.
Not being of the school of literature which deals analytically with the phantasms of slumber, this history makes no effort to follow our hero into the land of Nod, although doubtless the whole truth about him could thereby easily be laid bare under a skillful probe.
CHAPTER 5
In which the reader, by a magic older
and blander than that of the X-ray,
is permitted a glimpse into
the soul of Father Calvin Stanfield.
IT MAY BE, as Henry George said, that all religions (except yours and mine, friend) seem like the variously distorted apprehensions of a primary truth. Let us say here at once that the Faithful Shepherd’s intimations of his Creator occasionally shaded into the grotesque; for such observations are not amiss in a history of plodding truth. Your novelist affects impartiality in order to lend verisimilitude to the phantoms of his brain, but a historian’s allotted task is to blacken black, whiten white, force facts into his own view of them, and make enlightening comments along the way; for true life accurately retold would be a formless succession of accidents and follies, no more entertaining or improving than is your daily life, dear reader. So I say at the outset, Father Stanfield’s cosmogony was bizarre; you may draw, from the events, your own conclusion as to whether this unfitted him for his post in the world.
The morning sun, which had officially risen seventeen minutes earlier according to local almanacs, now lifted itself radiantly over the eastern rim of the valley and slanted a white beam into the book-lined study of Father Calvin Stanfield, adding an appropriate luminosity to the picture of that divine on his knees on a large crimson cushion, deep in prayer. The sun did him the further grace of falling directly on the section of religious books opposite the window, throwing into clarity the titles of many substantial theological tomes, classical and current, and leaving in decent obscurity shelves of philosophical, biographical, epigrammatic, and fictional works that pertained wholly to the fleshly world. The taste thus shadowed seemed to range across wide areas of literature. The library had the jumbled appearance of one that is frequently and hastily referred to, and since the Father did not trouble to rearrange the books–and the faithful lamb who cleaned the room saw no incongruity–Spinoza rubbed bindings with Mark Twain, Jane Austen with La Rochefoucauld, James Joyce with Lord Chesterfield, Keats with Clarence Darrow, and so on, indefinitely. The last author’s obsolescent books were very well thumbed; they furnished forth an army of familiar atheistical straw men for the Shepherd to strike down in his Sunday sermons.
In morning devotions the Father had a directness which might well be the envy of more polished clerics who sometimes struggle against a wicked intuition that they are mumbling into a void. He had not the slightest doubt but that he was in colloquy with his Maker, who, like himself, appreciated straight talk. It was his way to pray aloud and extemporaneously, alone or in the congregation.
“Lord, I’m doin’ what I kin,” he was saying, “but you know what I got to struggle aginst. You gi’ me the call to preach, but you also gi’ me a clownish soul, and I don’t hardly know what’s religion and what’s my own doggone carryin’ on half the time. All I know is, the Fold has prospered, and my people pray and read their Bible and live Godly lives with their families under these roofs you have blessed me to build; so no matter how unworthy a vessel I seem to be, you must know what you’re doin’. Now this here young man from Radio City, New York, is a-comin’ to tempt me with fine gold, yea, with much fine gold, to put our Saturday night revival meetin’ on the radio. You know I kin use that money; we got seventy families on the waitin’ list that we jest cain’t take into the Fold ’cause they ain’t no room. I could build a whole mess of nice little houses with that there radio money.
“But Lord, my soul is hungerin’ fer the glitter and the glamour and the clamor of fame, and that’s what I’m afraid of. Before honor must come humility, and where-at is my humility? I’m puffed up with pride and success, and if I take that money, I don’ know but what I’m yieldin’ to a temptation that’s goin’ to be the beginnin’ of the downfall of the Fold. I rejected Temptation once, Lord, and here she is, a-walkin’ back and forth in front o’ me agin, Lord, in her black chiffon nightgown.”
For a moment he bowed his head against his hands, which rested on the windowsill. Then he raised it again and spoke in a milder key.
“Lord, I ain’t complainin’. If I didn’ have no problems, it wouldn’ be no glory to you if I triumphed. Only now and then I git cornered, and I got to holler to the Old Man for help. I jest don’ know what to do. Nobody cain’t tell me it’s right fer to use the Gospel to sell things, but here I been a-prayin’ fer money to enlarge the Fold, and here comes the old money, but with a long string attached where I cain’t even see t’other end of it, and I don’ know but what the devil’s holdin’ it.
“Well, lemme git off that fer a minute, I reckon I been layin’ it on enough.
“Lord, I thank you fer the countless blessin’s of my life. When I think of me, a-hangin’ on to this spinnin’ ball in black space, me smaller than a ant in yer eyes, the earth smaller than a ol’ pebble, I wonder how I got the nerve to talk to you, and even more how it is you pay attention to me. But I know you pay attention! When I laid in that mud-puddle in Belg
ium, Lord, with the shells a-screechin’ ever’ which way around me, and vowed if you got me out of that mess I would believe on you, you paid attention. A thousand fell on my left hand, and ten thousand on my right; unto me them shells did not approach. I knowed then that you had me marked out to do some work fer you on this li’l ol’ round ball you got hung up in space fer man to act out his days on. I ben doin’ my best, Lord, take it all around, except fer this clownish streak I got in me, which maybe I sometimes think you put there fer a purpose too, seein’ as how I sure lay it over the regular preachers fer bringin’ the folks in to meetin’ and gittin’ ’em worked up to the love of the Lord. Maybe to herd these mountain sheep you need a real crooked stick, Lord, which is me.
“You blessed me with everythin’, Lord, except the greatest blessin’ of all, a virtuous wife and children. I got no arrows to my quiver, and they ain’t nobody risin’ up in the gate to call me blessed. I ain’t complainin’. I sinned with Gracie in London, I know I did. I dreamed of her last night agin, and she turned into thin air in my arms, same as always. Lord, I dunno if you ever stop to figger that I was unredeemed then and you cain’t hardly hang me as high fer what I done then as what I might of done after. But thy will be done. Not as I will, but as thou wilt. Still, I ain’t no Saint Paul, Lord. I ain’t that pure in spirit, and I’m mighty lonely in the long nights, I don’t mind tellin’ you. Must I go on alone? Even Moses took a Cushite woman, and he was gittin’ on to eighty-three when he done it. ’Course there it is. Him takin’ her got the congregation all riled up and Miriam and Aaron murmured agin’ him, and Miriam wound up with the leprosy and there was general hell to pay. Well, Lord, I reckon even if I did find Gracie after all these years and tried to bring a little English-talkin’ Cockney gal in among these here folks it would bust up the meetin’, is that the idea? I reckon you know best. I sure couldn’t take no other woman, married as we are in yer eyes. I ain’t no Mormon. Thy will be done, Lord.
“Thy will be done in everythin’, Lord. On this here radio deal, how about tellin’ me what to do? I don’ want to take bad money, but I don’t want to let it pass by if it’s permitted me to take it. Will you guide me to the answer, Lord?”
Father Stanfield rose from his knees and walked to a little stand by his desk, on which there rested a large, worn Bible. It had been his practice for twenty years, in moments of extreme perplexity, to open the Good Book at random and put his finger blindly on a verse. If the verse thus isolated could possibly be construed as pertaining to the problem at hand he would abide by the answer with rigid resolve. The morning sun played on his hands as he placed them gently on the Bible, bent his head and said, “The Lord is nigh unto all that call upon him–unto all that call on him in truth.” He opened the book near the middle, and his finger fell upon the forty-second verse of the second chapter of the book of Ezra:
The children of the porters: the children of Shallum, the children of Ater, the children of Talmon, the children of Akkub, the children of Hatita, the children of Shobai, in all an hundred thirty and nine.
Slowly and respectfully, the Faithful Shepherd closed the book, returned to his habitual place of devotion by the window, and knelt again. There was a faint smile on his face, good-natured and a little wry.
“All right, my Father,” he said. “I gotta figger it out alone, is that it? I think the problem is too big fer me but you think it ain’t, and so you tossin’ her right back in my lap. Thy will be done. You know I’ll do the best I kin. Inspire me to do the right thing fer the Fold, Lord. I ain’t worth much, but the Fold is a fair work, a sweet home fer many folks who love God, and also much cattle.”
His voice dropped lower, and he began to murmur rapid, indistinct prayers, evidently routine devotions.
Since we cannot hear him, and since you may suspect a touch of extravagance in the picture of the Faithful Shepherd which we are drawing: a suspicion which, if unallayed, would cloud the veracity of our whole tale: we must fill in a detail or two of his background, at the risk of tedium. One of our beautiful young ladies reappears in the next chapter; you may slop directly to that if you believe unquestioningly all that has been said about the Father.
Calvin Stanfield was born and reared on the slopes of the valley, most of the arable land of which now belonged to the Fold of the Faithful Shepherd. His father was a farmer, remotely of English extraction like most of the valley people, who dug a small living out of an un-co-operative patch of soil, and sought no further satisfaction in the things of this world. The old Bible which we have watched the preacher use was his. As his farm was the only area of the earth that interested him, so the Good Book was the only acreage in the land of literature that seemed to him worth tilling. In his youth he had read two or three novels which had struck him as a lot of silly, protracted, and pointless lies; and he had returned with much satisfaction, and the resolve nevermore to stray, to the Book which could be depended on for truth, and which had such sound sense in it as, “Boast not thyself of tomorrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth,” and “The fool shall be bound with the cord of his own sins.”
Calvin was his one child. The boy, hemmed in by his environment, inherited his father’s two preoccupations: the farm and the Book. It was old Stanfield’s habit to make Calvin read aloud five chapters of the Bible each night, and though the poor lad had treacherous going through the genealogies and the diatribes of the Prophets (for his father skipped nothing), he was well rewarded by the fragrant simplicity of the tales of the Patriarchs, by the gorgeous pageants of Joseph, Moses, and Joshua, and by the thrilling, bloody passages of arms in the books of the Kings. It happened that the boy had a sound, retentive mental apparatus, so that he grew to young manhood with a knowledge of Holy Writ by chapter and verse which might have confounded divines in the cathedrals of remote cities.
At the age of eighteen came the revolt, that occasion in the life of each of us which seems an earthquake, and which is as commonplace as first love, and Calvin decided that his father was a fool, trapped in antique, useless habits of thinking.–How many of us marry our first love? How many of us retain the heady, delightful conviction that the old man was all wrong? How pleasant it would be, indeed, if each of us could strike across untrodden green meadows in the ancient journey! Good friends, who have broken your ankles and scratched your skins and fallen in holes in the green meadows before groping back to the old dirt path, was not that first leap over the stile, into the long grass, unutterably sweet?
Calvin found it so. The first World War took him off the farm and into the roaring excitement of a military camp near a city, and awe for the Good Book crumbled and vanished before the scathing profanity of the incredibly wise shoe salesmen and shipping clerks with whom he mingled. By the time he was transported to England, Calvin was an enthusiastic, even a crusading, heathen; but performance lagged behind conviction, as it usually does, and while in camp he actually did nothing worse than become very drunk two or three times.
Performance overtook conviction in London. The reader will forgive me if I omit the distressing particulars, but, as he may guess, there was a young lady named Grace. Suffice it to say that young Calvin Stanfield began to feel the unease of remorse at approximately the time that his life began to be endangered. It should not be a source of satisfaction to rational churchmen, as it seems to be, that men on battlefields return to their old beliefs: the cries of a scared child to its father have no logical or intellectual force: but anyway, Calvin Stanfield had a sudden great accession of faith while cowering in a shell hole during his first engagement. He quoted aloud psalms of David that were very much to the point, and he vowed that if he were delivered from this pit he would believe and do. He kept his word, and during the rest of that conflict which we once thought of as a Great War, he was known in his regiment as Holy Cal.
So much must be told in order that the reader may understand the motions of Father Calvin Stanfield. The rest would make an absorbing study for a few of my patient audience w
ho are interested in folkways, comparative religion, and sociology. His return to his native valley, his growing reputation among the farm people for sanctity, his impulsive usurpation of the local pulpit and self-ordination when the starving minister abandoned the parish in the black time of the Depression, and the coagulation of a few acts of charity on his part into a self-sustaining rural communal settlement which rapidly expanded, all these things are not without color and excitement, but they took place entirely without the interposition of any pretty young ladies. It is plain and believable, I trust, that a man like Calvin Stanfield should become a lay preacher, and should take dispossessed rural families into his home to labor alike and share alike; and that such a group, fired by religious fervor and released from debt loads and competitive markets, should prosper and grow by degrees into a large, successful co-operative enterprise in agriculture. Such was the Faithful Shepherd, and such was his Fold. In the interest of brevity–for I am sure that some readers, accustomed to staccato loves, killings, hates, rapes, and reconciliations in the modern manner, consider me painfully periphrastic–I will omit recounting how the name “Faithful Shepherd” was acquired, since it would require my reproducing most of the text of Stanfield’s first sermon, preached impromptu one gray Sunday morning when the flock arrived at the local church and found that the minister had quietly abandoned his post.