Aurora Dawn (22 page)

The four men availed themselves of theft dismissal quickly and without words. As they went out, the pink Mr. Rousseau went
in with a sheaf of papers, passing them with a very white smile. He was much too young to be palsied, and the agitated rustling
of his papers could only have been part of a general similitude of briskness which Mr. Marquis exacted of all his inferiors
on pain of thunderbolt dismissal.

Seldom had Andrew Reale looked with heavier heart out of the window of his high, handsome apartment on Central Park South
than when he was hastily packing for this airplane trip to West Virginia. The green oblong of the park seemed filmed over
with dust, and the air currents twenty-five stories above the streets brought no relief from the choking heat. New York was
a stone oven, slowly baking its inhabitants. The one pleasant aspect of this dispiriting errand, it seemed to him, was that
he was leaving the city.

He had hardly closed the door of his apartment, valise in hand, when he heard the telephone; but, having not a moment to spare,
he stepped into the elevator and was gone. The bell jingled, and jingled, and jingled, and became discouraged and stopped.
A few minutes later a page boy hung the operator’s message on the doorknob, as the custom was, and departed. Andrew had done
well not to wait, for it was an unimportant message, requiring no briskness and promising neither advantage nor pleasure.
The note read, “Laura Beaton called.”

In which the reader will begin to suspect

that the author is not quite so artless as he seems,

and that the most minor characters in the history,

such as Milton Jaeckel, are indispensable to it.

C
ERVANTES
, in his preface to the book of books (this side of Holy Writ, of course) heaps red coals of satire on pedantry that should
scorch, to this day, the skins of some writers. Lest anyone think I have neither read nor taken to heart that lesson, I say
here (being minded of it by the reference, in the last chapter, to Aristotle) that I do not expect the kindest critic to mistake
such scraps of learning for scholarship. Every author is entitled to take his hobby-horse for a brief canter now and then;
mine is a partiality toward the ancients among whose useless works I like to wander like an ignorant tourist in the Acropolis.
My quotations are snapshots of ruins among which I have idled away too many hours. Excepting scholars, for whom it is a matter
of bread and butter, no practical man should concern himself with a word written on any subject prior to seven years ago:
or whatever date is prescribed in the statute of limitations on money agreements: and I mention this to warn away from the
practice any young readers who may regard as an accomplishment what is nothing but a moony eccentricity.

To correct such a tendency, let us dutifully observe the life and ways of Mr. Milton Jaeckel, whose devotion to matters of
the present moment to the exclusion of anything spoken, written, or done in the previous six thousand years of recorded time
was above reproach.

The chartered plane that was bearing Andrew Reale southwestward flew across the setting sun and cast a flickering shadow for
an instant across the face of Jaeckel, who had just risen from sleep and was glancing out of his window to see what sort of
weather he would have for his night’s work. Not for him blushed the rosy-fingered dawn; each day he was awakened by the scarlet
claw of the sunset. He had no interest in the orderly, logical business which men did by day, dreary stuff drearily chronicled
by clerks and adding machines. He knew that people said and did what was necessary and proper (and therefore boring) in the
light of the sun, but that wit and amorousness, his literary harvest, were night-blooming plants, and he bad accordingly adjusted
his life so that he slept away the empty daylight. To him the world was always lit with an electric glare, and the glowing
red ball which was this moment sinking behind the palisades and crimsoning the surfaces of the Hudson River and himself was
an astronomic fact which he accepted but hardly expected to play an important part in his lifetime: more or less like Halley’s
comet.

A family man, Jaeckel breakfasted with his wife and two children, kissed the sleepy young ones good night and ventured forth
to greet the evening. In his breast pocket were notebook and pencil, his tools. The routine of his work was as repetitious
as a postman’s, for wit and amorousness, too, fall into narrow patterns and ruts; Le Boeuf Gras, the Club Ferrara, the Krypton
Room, Oppenheim’s, the Two Two Two, the Griffin; round and round the small bright area carved by fashion out of the wide gloom
of the city; so many stops, so many paragraphs; the good restaurants for jests, the exclusive dancing rooms for new, significant
victims of Cupid; four pages of notes to a column. Like all true workmen Jaeckel found unending variation and novelty within
a task which to a duller eye might have appeared stale unto weariness. It is with the lubricant of such love of labor that
the world’s business moves forward.

But all good workmen have times when things go badly, and this evening was Milton Jaeckel’s worst. Two complete circuits of
“the town” (as he called the five streets among which he moved) had filled a scant page and a half in the notebook. The celebrated
wits were borrowing from each other at such speed that this night he had encountered the same new quip at seven different
places. Husbands were adhering to wives with obdurate fidelity, for without exception the pairings he had seen were either
unimportant or legitimate. In short, nothing worth a journalist’s attention was happening. His deadline an hour away, Jaeckel
was hunched over a cup of coffee at the Two Two Two, his white visage drooping at the end of his thin frame like a dried flower.
He was moodily planning to fill his column with political opinions and predictions when Michael Wilde walked in. The newspaper
man was at his side immediately, for between the two there was the sort of natural understanding that subsists between the
Nile crocodile and the bird
Aegyptius Pluvius
; as the reader knows, the greater beast gapes and suspends the natural motion of his jaws to permit the lesser one to find
what nourishment it can, lodged in the fangs. The painter valued popularity sufficiently to interrupt any business in order
to allow the columnist to pick over the shreds of his talk.

Wilde was alone, and the two men sat down at Jaeckel’s table. See how the persistent, undismayed workman is at last rewarded!
They had not been conversing five minutes when the artist brought out of his pocket a document which Jaeckel fell upon with
grateful joy and commenced copying furiously into his notebook. It filled the four pages and overflowed–five, six, seven pages;
the notebook became a Joseph’s granary, with surplus for lean times to come. Here was a single item, hot and juicy, to fill
a whole column and crowd all other jottings into the future!

The treasure, dear reader, was nothing but the very copy of “The Hog in the House” which we have recently seen creating such
a turmoil in the office and breast of Talmadge Marquis. Logic requires an explanation of how it came into Michael Wilde’s
hands; Art requires the postponement of that explanation to a more appropriate time. Enough, for the moment, that Milton Jaeckel
has the forbidden sermon and the whole tittletattle surrounding it. Trust the storyteller, and come along to see how Andrew
Reale is faring on his second mission to the Fold of the Faithful Shepherd.

The true satirist of our time, who played such a hugely successful joke on us that his works are still taught in our schools
as economic treatises–a procedure as sensible as using
Gulliver
for a textbook in geography–said with his usual penetration that inventions like the airplane, far from easing the burden
of living, work to increase it because, while such devices do greatly help the process of concluding business, they also multiply
the occasions for starting it, and since man’s tendency to create confusion has, since the beginning of time, slightly outrun
his capacity to cope with it, these toys of a new age simply project the old losing race on a gigantic scale, with man yielding
ground by the increased drain on his nervous system.

Had Andrew Reale been concerned with such sociological chopping of hairs, he would probably have admitted the point after
his bulletlike visit to Father Stanfield, for he was whisked through space to meet with mortification no less inevitably,
if more quickly, than if he had gone on foot. Received by the preacher with courtesy, but with sternness marking an abrupt
change from rustic joviality, Andrew suspected within ten minutes after entering the Old House that the case was beyond his
talents, which were really limited to blandishment, easy language, and a nice sense of the favoring moment. In a silence that
contrasted disagreeably with his first dinner at the Old House, Andrew ate with the Father and Aaron Pennington, whose face
had assumed the texture and animation of an old leather bag; and even the innocent Esther, who served them as of yore, handled
Andrew’s plates with a cold roughness implying that, although she might not understand what he was up to, she was against
it. When, pressed by duty, he at last opened the subject, the Shepherd’s broad upraised hand cut short his first sentence.

“Jest fergit what you come here fer and we kin pass the evenin’ sociable,” he said gravely. “I ain’t got nothin’ against you,
son. Yer a young colt fallin’ all over yerself tryin’ ter git runnin’, and any kicks you give a body don’t count; although
if you was an old hoss like Mr. Marquis you would have a whalin’ with a barrel stave comin’, too.”

“He ain’t so young but what he can talk some old heads into doin’ some pup tricks,” murmured Pennington, evidently addressing
a jelly bun, which he forthwith devoured.

“I won’t attempt to apologize for Mr. Marquis,” said Andrew suavely. “Men with power who have no brains also have no manners–that’s
an old story, even to a young fellow like me. But there are more important things involved. The Faithful Shepherd hour is
the most potent religious force in radio, and to cut it short now–”

“Cut it short?” said Stanfield.

“I know Marquis,” cried Andrew, “When he makes up his mind, it’s like a December freeze. He owns that radio time. He’ll cancel
the program if you don’t write a new sermon. Believe me,” went on our hero, thoroughly believing himself for the moment, “all
I want now is to keep the Fold on the air. It’s beautiful, it’s deep, it’s American, it justifies the whole existence of radio–”

“Save yer talk, son,” said the Faithful Shepherd. “I’m a-goin’ on the air Sunday night, and my sermon’s gonna be ‘The Hog
in the House.’ Jest fly back and tell that to Mr. Marquis, and so let’s talk about somethin’ else. We got a square dance in
the Social Hall tonight–”

“I’m afraid it takes someone like you, not like me, to talk that way to Mr. Marquis,” said Andrew. “Of course, I don’t blame
you for letting me do it. It’s an unpleasant chore.”

Father Stanfield looked at him long and quietly. Aaron Pennington, remarking, “This table’s crowded,” put down a half-finished
cup of coffee and left the room.

“Reale,” said the Father at last, “you got room in yer airplane fer two more?” Andrew uneasily replied that he had. “Pennington
and I will go with you to the city in the mornin’,” the preacher said. “Excuse me, and good night.” He hauled his black-clad
bulk out of the armchair and ambled away without a backward glance. Andrew was conducted by Esther to his room. There he had
leisure to congratulate himself on the quick thinking with which he had evaded the horrible responsibility of reporting the
Shepherd’s answer to Marquis who, as he knew well, often took vengeance on the innocent bearer of bad news, like a mad king
out of Shakespeare.

This sort of adroit trick had been a large element in his success since college days, but tonight the attendant sensations
were new. Everything in his world seemed to be turning topsy-turvy since the night of the fatal dinner party; for, in place
of the self-congratulatory warmth that usually followed such a coup, he had nothing but a sense of shame. Examining his conduct
from the very start of his relationship with Father Stanfield, he could discover no act that he had not done or seen done
often in the radio circle to the applause of everybody; and he could only decide that as a result of association with a zealot
like Stanfield he was losing his grip on reality, This intelligent conclusion not only enabled him to fall tranquilly asleep,
but on the following day sustained him throughout the dismal airplane journey to New York.

Plunging down out of the brilliant noonday blue into the steamy haze under which New York lay with only peaks of skyscrapers
poking through the dimness, the airplane flitted to the surface of the planet, touched its wheels to the earth, rolled to
a stop and disgorged the pilot and the three passengers.–Critic, stop to consider that from the time the world began, up until
forty years ago, such a sentence would have placed this history squarely among the fairy tales. You and I are living a fantasy
that would have cost Scheherazade her head on the second night for the narrator’s crime of implausibility; and have you strained
to swallow a curious incident or two in this veracious account? I look about me, and blush at the commonplaceness of my tale.–Andrew
brought his guests to his own hotel where his company maintained a suite for important visitors. Having provided for their
accommodation, he was about to go to his own rooms when a headline in a newspaper on the clerk’s desk shattered his newly-glazed
serenity. “Soap Czar Throttles Faithful Shepherd’s Sermon,” read the big black type introducing Milton Jaeckel’s column which,
evidently because of the scandalousness of its contents, had been inducted into the dignity of the front page.