Aurora Dawn Page 6

  Father Stanfield has finished his prayers. Now he rises and goes down the wooden stairs of the Old House to the dining room, where he breakfasts with Aaron Pennington, the little large-nosed gray man who, you remember, thumped the rostrum so eloquently for contributions during the revival meeting. Esther, the plain girl whose face is as unmarked by bought color as her soul is by artifice, waits on them humbly and neatly. The two men speak in low tones of practical matters; the destinies of the Fold are determined at these breakfasts. So well do they understand each other that a reproduction of their conversation would reveal nothing. A few words of obscure reference, a grunt, a nod, comprise a discussion and a decision. Pennington is dry, dull, narrowly wise and devoted to the Fold and the Father. His tendency is to grasp and to build. Father Stanfield has gradually passed most of the administration of the Fold into his hands, but he retains a firm control over his manager, whose usefulness is limited by the fact that he has no intuition at all of the spirit of charity which animates the undertaking. This is not to say that Pennington’s religion is anything but strict. In fact, were we to translate the cabalistic conversation between the men now, an exchange more animated and protracted than usual, we would learn that it consists of vehement objection by the manager to the presence of Andrew Reale in the Old House and to the implied consideration that the Father is giving to the prospect of going on the radio. It is a venture off the soil, into places of urban carnality, that offends Pennington’s mode of thought. The Father is reassuring him that nothing will be done to hurt the Fold, but he will not promise to send Reale off without further discussion, and the breakfast ends in a silence that is not one of harmonious accord. Pennington moves dourly off to inspect the cattle.

  Look well to your kine, Aaron Pennington, for I strongly fear that your master grows neglectful of his muttons. The smoothly-spoken young man from the city has descended to take breakfast and is talking to him now. The Faithful Shepherd is listening attentively and saying little, but every now and then he nods pleasantly. The young man grows warm and terribly earnest; his food is hardly touched; and now he has taken a paper out of his pocket and placed it in the Father’s hands. The Father reads it with an expression of growing approval and pleasure. The young man falls silent. O, Pennington, Pennington, what is this? The stranger is taking a fountain pen from his pocket; the Father accepts it; he bends over the table; he puts his pen to the paper; he signs!

  Does dry, gray Aaron pause in the midst of scolding a young farmhand for slovenly cleaning of his beasts, and does a chill of foreboding pass over his frosty spirit? Looking through the barn door, he sees the young man from the world of advertising, the red valley of Hinnom, walk out of the Old House with a cheer in his expression and a spring in his step that argue triumph. What has he said, what has he done, so completely to conquer the violent antipathy of the Shepherd to commercial radio?

  At a bound, Andrew Reale has brought himself close to the riches that his soul desires. Father Stanfield has agreed to take the Fold of the Faithful Shepherd on the air–under the sponsorship of Aurora Dawn soap.

  CHAPTER 6

  In which an important piece of the machinery

  is set a-whirring.

  THE NEXT DAY Laura Beaton sat with two men at a table in the famous New York restaurant, “Le Boeuf Gras,” on East Fifty-second Street, doing justice to a delectable luncheon and unconsciously spoiling the meals of a large number of people in her vicinity. She was painfully fair to look upon. She was a taunt to man, a reproach to woman. Faithful husbands felt a stir of mild grief as, against their will, they compared her to their spouses and knew that Fate had caged them forever in gray little traps. The flames of ardent lovers flickered and guttered as though the wind of truth had suddenly blown a gust into their overheated imaginations, and an odious little voice warned them that their rosy Celias were, after all, but so many muddy-complexioned, lumpy wives-to-be. Young bachelors fumed; old bachelors mourned. Not a woman within range but felt her presence as an indignity and took revenge in a patronizing analysis of her lure. Poor things, what did the details matter? They noted the cut of her dress, the style of her hair, the slant of her hat, the color of her nails; and each, even in the act of disparaging, resolved in her heart to correct one or more points of her person after the manner of Laura, as though these things counted a straw, and as though such trifles lent magic to the girl, instead of the other way around. Alas, when large and potent industries are built on that trivial illusion: the transfer of a young girl’s charm to the articles hung on her body: how were these unhappy females to free themselves of it in the presence of Laura’s murderous beauty?

  Laura’s escort was Stephen English; against the background of this expensive dining room his correct clothes, slightly worn handsomeness and general quality of good breeding rendered him as invisible as a chameleon. It is an indication of the quality of the third diner at the table that his identity was not entirely quenched by the girl’s refulgence, and that the gaze drawn to her was eventually transferred, however briefly, to him. He was a pale, thin person in his early thirties, with a narrow face, black hair thinned at the forehead, and an arresting air of poverty mingled with arrogance. His clothes were shabby and unpressed, and a poorly-knotted, garish tie was twisted to one side of his soft shirt, of which the collar was open. His shoes were scuffed and his hair unruly; as he slouched in his chair with one hand hung over the back of it, exhibiting nails not innocent of dirt, his face shone with perspiration, and he waved the other hand about at a great rate, for he was talking, and had been talking almost uninterruptedly since the beginning of the meal. This picaro seemed no less in place in this retreat of moneyed people than the banker, English, but he dominated the scene instead of melting into it. The confidence in his eye and the ease in the attitude of his body belied his ill-kept garments–a second glance at which showed that they were of costly material–and his air of poverty was not unlike that of a monk from beneath whose coarse robe there might peep excellent and highly polished shoes. He was Mike Wilde, the celebrated painter.

  “I will not paint this girl for you, English,” he was saying, “until she promises to go back to Albuquerque on the day I finish, never to visit New York again until every hair on her head is gray. I like this girl. I love her, without a shred of personal feeling. She is the central radiance. She breathes hills, and plains, and stars in a dying sunset, and everything that is clean and good a thousand miles from the city. The city, too, is beautiful, but it is a beauty to the taste of Baudelaire, a fleur du mal. This girl is a fleur de la nature. I love all beauty because I see with the eye of a saint, and there is no ugliness in the world, only beauty in varying patterns, harsh or gentle. I want her to go home because here she is incongruous, she is out of her pattern. When she takes on the patina of the city she will fade into something else and eventually glow with the beautiful phosphorescence of decay, which might be equally pleasing to my eye, but which will be hell for her. I speak now out of compassion, which is a high sentiment, and I tell her what my seeing eye sees. Beaton, will you go back to Albuquerque?”

  “I will not,” said Honey, industriously applying herself to a large steak. “Please pass the chili sauce.”

  “Why not?” inquired Wilde, belligerently.

  “Because I’m making a lot of money,” quoth Honey. “Stephen, the asparagus.”

  “A sensible reply,” said English, handing her the dish with an approving grin.

  “What the devil do you know about life, English?” growled Wilde. “You are insulated with so many layers of money that the electricity of existence has never shocked you into awareness. Wealth is a nonconductor of truth. It is the only condition of life more narrowing than poverty. You look at Beaton with the piggish eyes of desire, and you only see Beaton.” (“Come, now, Mike,” murmured English, but the protest was lost.) “I look at Beaton and I see every well-favored girl that has ever come to New York to make a lot of money as a model. I see them leaving the farms, streaming
out of the hills, swarming from the small towns and funneling into the city’s maw. I see the charm of young womanhood being skimmed like sweet white cream from the nation and poured down the drain of commerce. It is a vast, terrifying picture. It is a subject for a symbolic panorama. I shall probably compose a double-spread cartoon in the manner of William Blake and sell it to Harper’s Bazaar.–Beaton, go home, I beg of you!”

  “May I have the celery?” said Laura to him politely. “Stephen, do you look at me with piggish eyes?”

  “Not in the least, Laura,” answered English. “Of course I think you’re very beautiful–I’d be an ass if I didn’t–and that makes your presence delightful. It’s also the reason for this luncheon, despite the odd turn of the conversation. I think a painting of you in the character of Charity by Michael Wilde would be a perfect theme for the Community Chest drive. Knowing Mike as I do, I think we must give him his head for another fifteen minutes before he will come out with a rational answer.”

  “You talk of trifles while I am fighting for a girl’s happiness,” said Wilde, having paused just long enough to insert the greater part of a lamb chop in his mouth. “Beaton, listen to me, for I am a saint and can prophesy. I do not know to whom you are engaged, but the quality of your ring and the size of the stone tell me that he is some young man, simple in heart and not rich. If he is in New Mexico, go back to him. If he is here, marry him at once and drag him far from the city. You are in great danger. The virtue that breathes from you cannot last another year in this climate. You are selling your body in a way that the manners of the day pass as respectable–in photographs. You do not know it, but with each picture you are selling a little chunk of your soul. There is not the gulf that you imagine between hawking the shadow and vending the substance. The savages who refused to permit strangers to take pictures of them knew a deep truth that you poor, money-mad, fame-crazed models find out only too late. Go home, Beaton. Stop putting out your charms for hire to increase the sale of vanities. The money you are earning is the gold that drips from the hot walls of Hell. Go home!”

  Laura put down her knife and fork, leaned back in her chair, and turned her renowned blue eyes on him in a long, serious look. “You play rough,” she said.

  Wilde reached into his pocket, drew out a bag of peanuts and offered them to her. “This is a better dessert than any you can order,” he said. “English, I’ll do her as Charity. It will be an abominable painting which will cause the whole town to praise me in the streets. Also, it will force me to postpone work on Talmadge Marquis’s portrait, which will infuriate him. That is possibly the chief inducement. Peanuts, Beaton?” He rustled the paper sack.

  “I don’t want peanuts, thank you,” said Honey, “and I’m not sure I want you to paint me. You’re very strange.”

  “Her spirit is infected with urbanity already, English,” said Wilde, proceeding to shell the nuts noisily. “In New Mexico she probably ate peanuts with simple gusto.”

  “Laura, you’re making Mike very happy,” said English. “Shocking people is his one delight, aside from hearing his own voice. He will pose as anything to achieve surprise–this Savonarola vein is a new thing which he seems to have cooked up just for you. Actually, he’s a good fellow.”

  “I am not,” said Wilde. I am a still, small voice and a devouring fire, and my vision will one day be everyone’s, but meanwhile I must suffer scorn like all true Evangelists. Next time we dine, young lady, I shall, for your especial benefit, devour a plate of locusts and wild honey. Perhaps then you will take me seriously.”

  Laura burst out laughing. English joined. Wilde’s face remained impassive.

  “Mike, you’re splendid,” said English. “For all your wind, you have just donated a gift worth many thousands of dollars to the Chest, not to mention the immense value it will have in the campaign, and all you’re trying to do is cover up your generosity.”

  “All you’re trying to do is seduce this poor girl,” said Wilde. “I am pleased to observe enough force of character in her to resist you successfully.”

  “That charge, Mike, is plausible enough to be dignified with a denial. Laura, I assure you I have no such deplorable intention,” said English, turning toward her.

  “Matters stand much worse than I thought, then,” said Wilde. “You are thinking of prisoning this child in the echoing golden dungeon of your wealth by marrying her. I am not at all sure she has the strength to resist that.”

  “Hello, Honey,” said a new voice. The three diners glanced up. Andrew Reale was standing beside their table.

  If the reader has been enduring Michael Wilde’s nonsensical farragoes with half the impatience with which the author has been forced to set them down, he may wish to abandon the book now. I think it only fair to warn the audience that this harlequin is one of the key figures in the pantomime. It is regrettable, because he is capable of taking up an entire chapter with a speech (he does so, in fact, in Chapter 13); and were this anything but a true tale, I would surely remove him with surgical dispatch. As it happened, however, it was unquestionably Michael Wilde who started the great Aurora Dawn scand … but it is poor storytelling to anticipate.

  Andrew, then, fresh from sleep in a luxurious Pullman compartment, glowing with the secret of his triumph at the Old House, had just arrived at Le Boeuf Gras to take a fortifying lunch before his appointed interview with Talmadge Marquis, a prospect at which men usually quaked. The fact that he was the bearer of good news reassured him only slightly, for it was known that the most pleasant conversation with Marquis could take a turn that would suddenly break a man’s career and leave his children without bread. It was no great coincidence that brought Andy to the very eating place in which his sweetheart was dining with a millionaire and a well-known painter, for despite the number of restaurants in New York, there are only a half dozen at which a certain segment of the population will ever manifest itself, and, in the neighborhood of East Fifty-second Street, Le Boeuf Gras is as much the place to go to as, say, Mahomet’s tomb is in Mecca.

  Honey introduced her fiancé to her companions, and he cheerfully accepted their prompt invitation that he join them at table. It was no new thing for him to find his sweetheart dining with strange and attractive gentlemen, for he was aware of the obligations of her profession. He trusted her utterly, with the careless confidence of a young man who has been permitted by a young lady to find out that she adores him. This reaction, predictable as the tendency of a man to stand with his back to a fire, is discerned by some young ladies early in life, and cynics say that occasionally they even use it to advantage, but this pen explores no such dark corners of experience.

  It was not long before the conversation disclosed that both the painter and Andrew were to meet with Talmadge Marquis shortly after lunch–Wilde to observe his subject at work, and obtain what he called “the nasty dimension of truth” for his portrait; our hero, of course, to report on his foray to the valley of the Faithful Shepherd. They agreed to share a taxi to the Empire State Building, where, cutting a cross-section two stories thick across the upper part of the tower, the great enterprise of Aurora Dawn hummed.

  While Andrew ate, the others were entertained by a harangue on the beauty of young love and the desirability of the immediate retirement of Honey and her betrothed from New York, of which Michael Wilde delivered himself without interruption, except as he paused to greet by name several wealthy, celebrated, or notorious people as they moved past his table. Since the reader is acquainted with his views on this subject, neither conscientiousness nor truth require the reproduction of his words, for which the laboring author is grateful.

  The sermon was choked off by the arrival at the table of an anecdotal newspaper columnist, one Milton Jaeckel, who lived at the time by amassing and reprinting the witty remarks of well-known people. The value of a quotation being, for his purpose, always in direct proportion to the notoriety of the originator, it was often in inverse ratio to the content of wit, an excellent thing, since it sa
ved the columnist’s readers from puzzlement. This man of letters frequented the half-dozen dining places mentioned above, scurrying around the whole circle thrice during twenty-four hours: at dinner, after the theater, and in the early morning hours. He was rarely seen by day, but the feast of St. Patrick had altered his habits and activated him this noon. At night, the casual stroller along Broadway, taking pleasure in the agreeable contrast of the constellation of Orion and the electric cinema displays, would probably be startled and possibly knocked over by this pale, bird-visaged, stooping creature, scuttling through the gloom from one restaurant to another as though pursued by a fiend.

  It was this same littérateur who, espying Michael Wilde, hurried to the table, drew up a chair, sat down without an invitation, and, pulling out a worn paper notebook, said, “Got something for me, Mike? Hello, Honey. Hello, Mr. English.”–Nobody at the table seemed in the least surprised by this proceeding. Everything in the world is strange; singularity is only a matter of insufficient repetition.–Michael Wilde, hardly pausing for breath, switched from his exhortation of the lovers to a series of anecdotes about himself, one of which candor requires that we set down. A publisher, it appears, had asked the painter to write a history of American art. “You’re too late,” Wilde quoted himself as answering. “I have already sold the rights to my autobiography.” The columnist’s pencil swooped at this one; then he stood up, muttered an excuse, and vanished.

  Luncheon over, the party rose from the table. Laura, with the utmost decorum, managed to find her way to Andrew’s side and slip her fingers lightly through his, and out again. There were at least three men in the room who could have, and gladly would have, given a sum in excess of Andy’s boldest aims for that touch and what it implied. Andrew was very pleased by it, to be sure, and whispered in return the one word, “Success!”–“Wonderful, come home to dinner,” said Laura quietly. Andrew nodded. They walked out into the sunny canyon of windows and stone along which March was doggedly fighting its cold and windy way from the river. March came into Fifty-second Street like a lion at the bank of the Hudson, but, impeded by the buildings, usually was a very tired lamb at Fifth Avenue. This, however, was a vigorous March day, and there was a pleasant sting in the wind. Andrew Reale and the painter stepped into a taxicab while Laura took the arm of Stephen English and walked briskly by his side toward Radio City.