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.
Like one that hath been stunned, Andrew bought the paper and scanned the story while going up in the elevator. All was there in astonishing exactness of detail–the origin of the sermon in “the internationally renowned painter” Michael Wilde’s remarks at the Marquis dinner party, Marquis’s demand for another sermon, Andrew’s own airplane trip to West Virginia, and copious faithful quotations from “The Hog in the House” itself. As he read the ruinous exposure, Andrew grew panicky under the insistent reflection that Jaeckel’s column was reprinted daily by mechanical magic in several hundred journals throughout the land which passed before the eyes of twenty-five million citizens, most of them presumably addicted to the use of soap and the radio.
The doorknob of Andrew’s apartment was festooned with telephone messages: “Call Mr. Van Wirt immediately when you come in”; “Call Mr. Grovill–urgent”; “Call Miss Marquis around noon”; and last because oldest, “Laura Beaton called.” Glancing through these, our hero became singularly animated, opened his door hurriedly and rushed to the telephone without troubling to take off his hat, It is a plain fact, though a startling one, that he proceeded to call, not his superiors, not the raven-haired goddess of his choice, but only his rejected sweetheart, Laura. Surely a young man in whom the pure motive of courtesy could so triumph over both interest and love, is not unworthy of being the subject of a history.
The quality of telephoned speech resists capture by that obsolescent device, a narrator’s pen. The future of Homer’s craft, in a time of machinery, probably lies with the mechanical storytellers such as the cinema and the colored-cartoon booklet, which may soon render all imaginative prose superfluous. Meantime, in this last gasp of the old method, let us use the poor resource of italics, intended here so convey not emphasis, but the far-off, disembodied and pathetic quality which a human personality acquires upon being reduced to electric pulses and recreated as the vibrations of a little iron disc.
Andrew Reale listened with a thumping heart while the call bell rhythmically rang once, twice, three dines; then came the click as the phone was answered.
“Hello?” said a clear young voice.
Andrew had not heard Laura speak since her utterance of the words, “I think that what you are doing is contemptible.” It seemed strangely pleasant to hear her now, as though they were communicating after a prolonged separation, although the actual interval had been four days. “Honey, this is Andy,” he said.
“Oh.” A slight catch of breath, and a pause. “How are you, Andy?” The voice was hesitant.
“Very well, Honey. I’m sorry I was out when you called.”
“It was nothing important.” Long pause. “I see in the paper that you’re having trouble with Aurora Dawn. I’m sorry.”
“We’ll be all right,” said Andrew. “I’d like to know how on earth Jaeckel got that story.” He stopped, and there ensued the silence which on the telephone is so freighted with tension because the demon of electricity waits to leap miles from one face to the other with more words and frets at delay. Andrew finally said awkwardly, “Did you want to tell me something, Laura?”
“Only to apologize,” said the faltering voice, “for Mother’s rudeness yesterday and to–to ask you what it was you wanted to say to me.”
To alter the whole course of this tale was now within the power of our hero, but not of the historian, who is a helpless bystander, writing down what happened. Andrew Reale stammered, and stuttered, and began again, and stammered some more, and said at last that he had only wanted to congratulate her on her forth-coming marriage, and find out when it was taking place.
“Oh. Thank you … it’s tomorrow afternoon, at the Episcopal Church.… And when will you be married, Andy?”
Replying that his plans were not yet definite, Andrew somehow felt himself shrinking all over, as though he had eaten the wrong side of Alice’s mushroom.
“One more thing, Andy.” The voice was crystalline and sweet “I behaved badly Saturday evening. If I said anything bitter, I no longer mean it. You have my wishes and my prayers for your true happiness.”
Andrew acknowledged these pleasant sentiments with uncouth phrases of gratitude.
“Good-by, Andy.”
A click cut short the vibrations of human sentiment, and the instrument was as dead as Old Marley.
So Andrew Reale disposed of less important business and went on to telephone, in rapid succession, the immediate Mr. Van Wirt, the urgent Mr. Grovill and the beloved Carol Marquis, in that order. He quickly learned that the tide in the affairs of Aurora Dawn had gone past flood and was spilling over the disaster bulwarks, as the next chapter will graphically describe.
CHAPTER 20
Containing an account of the great battle
between the soap potentate and
the Faithful Shepherd.
THE IRRESISTIBLE FORCE of Talmadge Marquis’s money had run into the immovable object of Father Calvin Stanfield’s principles.
This was the phrase buzzing through the halls of Radio as the big battle loomed. Like many catchy phrases, it was philosophically unsound, implying the existence at the same time of the two contradictory categories, “irresistible” and “immovable.” The truth of one of the words implies per se the falsity of the other, or, to put it another way, only one of these two statements can possibly be correct:
1. An irresistible force exists.
2. An immovable object exists.
Readers of high-school age wil
l find this analysis useful when next confronted with the sage inquiry, “What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?” For the mature audience, it is adduced to indicate what the outcome of the struggle had to be: either Marquis must prove resistible, or Father Stan-field movable. Few wagers were made on the issue, widespread though interest was. The movability of Stanfield was widely assumed to be the only likely outcome, failing that kind of intervention from Above, which economists, politicians, and even priests count on not to happen in these graceless times.
The structure housing the Republic Broadcasting Company was a vast cubic stone tomb, soundproof and lightproof, built to protect its treasure of wireless entertainment, like the frail mummy of a Theban princess, from the corrosive outer world. It was built in tiers, honeycombed with studios, filled with complicated electrical machines, transfixed with elevator shafts, and lighted and decorated with a subdued mathematical balance of solid colors and soft materials which made human beings in these austere spaces feel and look as intrusive as large monkeys. Whether this bleak emphasis on the animal aspect of our race was in itself depressing, or whether the combined effects of artificial light and pumped-in air were deleterious to good cheer, there were few happy faces to be seen in this prosperous and useful hive, most of its inhabitants looking either as though they were pursuing someone, or (in the greater number of cases) being pursued. Since they were almost all making large amounts of money, it is hard to understand why this should have been so. Possibly their preoccupation with time–for all happenings here were regulated to the second–kept the image of mortality constantly before them, placing them in the predicament of the guests of the legendary Baron Rothschild whose clock was supposed to boom out every hour, in the midst of the revelries in his castle, the words, “One Hour Nearer Death!”