As he wavered outside the sanctified portal, a strong hand gripped his elbow. “Hullo, you here, too? We’re almost late. Let’s go in,” said the voice of Michael Wilde, and before the bemused Andrew could greet the painter, he had been propelled out of the hot white sunshine into the peaceful dimness of the church. Still holding Reale’s arm, the artist sidled into one of the rear pews and sat down with him. “Reale, your presence is a reassuring note,” he said in subdued tones. “It argues a flicker of good conscience in you, whereas I have been thinking that you had died down to a complete advertising man. You have come, I trust, to halt this horrid mummery?” Andrew glanced at the painter to see whether he was joking, but Wilde’s face was pale and serious. The young executive stammered in a whisper that, on the contrary, he wished the couple all happiness, and saw no reason to interrupt.
“Damn! Spare me those lies,” growled the painter. “You love Beaton from the bottom of your soul, and she loves you. I have seen you together; you move like one person. Her marriage to English is an offense against Heaven, Reale, and it is your duty to stop it, because you are the cause of it.”
There was a murmur among the small knot of guests clustered in the forward pews around the center aisle, as the organist, a tiny man with a large head and wisps of silvery hair, took his place at his instrument and touched it, drawing forth sonorous chords.
“I came here today,” went on the painter in a soft but urgent voice, “not knowing whether I myself might not rise to protest. Believe me, there are reasons. Wake up, boy! Your wife, the love of your life, is in that dressing room twenty feet behind you, about to be taken away from you by an old man. Go in there. Throw yourself at her feet. Get her to pardon you–it will take about twenty seconds–and then carry her out to another church and marry her!”
The worn harmonies of the Lohengrin Wedding March commenced vibrating in the air, the organist using so little effort that it seemed the organ would play on by itself if he were to take away his hands. Now, with grave step and slow, the minister entered and walked to his place before the altar. Andrew felt strangely dizzy as he heard the music, and the painter’s insistent whispering seemed to increase his vertigo. But he stared ahead, and said nothing.
“Listen, Reale,” pursued the painter, gently shaking his arm, “English wanted me to be best man, do you know that? And I refused because he told me he knew Beaton doesn’t love him. She’s not getting married, she’s becoming a sister in the nunnery of money. Stop her.”
–A pathetic remembrance of the lost days–
Andrew found breath to mutter, “Laura must know what she’s doing,” and lapsed into silence again.
The music grew louder, and the bridegroom entered from a side door with a stout, gray-haired best man, the general manager of his bank. It was an interesting touch to the picture because English’s portly companion shed a quality of reliable sedateness that enveloped both of them; so that even the rapturous Mrs. Beaton, watching from the front pew as the two men proceeded to their stations before the minister, thought with a twinge in her heart that it would not have hurt had the millionaire been just a little younger. Such fond might-have-beens are natural last qualms in a bride’s mother, as pointless as her tears.
“What a blind bungler you are!” whispered the irrepressible artist to Reale. “Do you think it isn’t evident to me that you’re giving up Beaton in the hope of marrying Carol Marquis? Why? That little beast has no heart. She’ll never give herself to you; what do you offer her? She’ll marry some fop of a rich man’s son. Maybe she’ll fall into the hands of an adventurer who’ll take her little mind and witch’s body for the sake of the seven million dollars which she’ll have after her father’s last apoplexy. You’re a rotten dub of a fortune hunter. You have no title and no notoriety, and you’re awkwardly simple.”
“It’s none of your business, Wilde,” retorted Andrew, stung at last, “but as it happens Carol Marquis loves me and I love her. Drop the subject.”
The music changed to the Mendelssohn March, the tear-starting, heart-cutting bride’s melody, and Laura Beaton appeared at the rear of the center aisle, and commenced to move toward the altar with small, hesitant steps.
She was alone. There was no male relative within a thousand miles of New York to give her away: her uncle in Albuquerque was too ill to fly to the ceremony: and she had insisted on walking unescorted rather than on the arm of a stranger. Admiring murmurs arose from the guests as the solitary white figure emerged from the gloom at the back of the church and stepped into a glory of colored light slanting down from a high stained window. Since this weary world was fresh and new, no daughter of man ever found more favor in the eyes of those who saw her than did the famed Honey Beaton on this wedding day. Her well-advertised figure swayed with a sweet grace that agitated every man who beheld it; her face had the pensive mournfulness of a seraph in an old sad painting. Our hero, who had risen to his feet at her appearance, found it necessary to steady himself on the back of the pew as he looked at these charms which he had recently discarded, for his dizziness became unaccountably much worse. Now she was pacing so close to him that he could smell the perfume which she had worn ever since he had given her the first bottle of it; and now, to his confusion, the blue eyes that had been fixed ahead moved, looked straight into his own without altering expression, and then returned to a rigid forward gaze. She passed him–passed him as silently and irrecoverably as an hour of happiness passes you, reader. Michael Wilde muttered fiercely in his ear, “Grab her around the waist and run like the wind! She’ll still go with you.”
Andrew flung himself away from the painter with a despairing exclamation and placed himself in a pew across the aisle. All eyes being on the bride, his violent movement was unnoticed. Laura reached Stephen English’s side, and the ceremony began.
“And as one sees most fearful things
In the crystal of a dream,”
the ambitious young radio executive saw his first love formally united to a rich and pleasant gentleman. The words were said, the ring went on her finger, and the proceeding was ratified with a brief and genteel kiss. Soul and body, Laura Beaton belonged to Stephen English.
A sort of temperate jubilation ensued. Guests came forward to salute the happy couple, and surrounded them with a discreet murmur of congratulations. Nobody seemed sufficiently ill-bred to shout or laugh or even cry; Mrs. Beaton herself, out of a feeling for tradition, pressed a handkerchief repeatedly to her eyes, but it was innocent of moisture. In the same fine moderation of spirit the couple was followed up the aisle and out the door by the little crowd, without jostling or jokes. Andrew, left sitting alone in the church (for the painter mingled with the departing guests), heard a very mild cheer arise, while the roar of an automobile motor told of the departure of the newly-knit one flesh. The burden of Honey had been finally lifted from his shoulders, and the road to success, as he had logically planned it all out, now lay broad and open. This polite wedding had already fulfilled one of his clear-headed prophecies of the night in the yellow taxicab.
Do not press, reader, for an explanation of our hero’s failure to display gaiety at this desired unfolding of events. It must be obvious by now that he behaves with a jerky inconsistency which makes it impossible to pass him off as an author’s invention; for the figures in novels dance to a most logical fugue of motives and counter-motives, while Andrew Reale repeatedly violates the rules, and behaves much as your wife, your brother, your enemy, and you are constantly doing in that least probable of all stories, your own life. Who can explain why this clever young man sat in a gloomy pew in a deserted church staring at the altar as though he saw a ghost there? Perhaps the everlasting note of mystery in marriage had sounded through his muffling layers of worldliness and set up an echo in his heart. A very strange thing had just happened, after all. A few sentences had been uttered, a trinket passed, and a woman had yielded up her identity and her person to a man. What mightiness lay in the words, or in the place where they we
re spoken, or in the bland little man who spoke them, to effect such an earthquake in three–that is, in two lives? These are suggested as possible processes in the mind of our hero to cause his curious petrifaction in the empty church. His stream of consciousness at the moment not having been recorded, it is unavailable to illuminate this obscure passage of the story.
At last he rose, and, in the somnambulistic manner in which he had come, left the church and plodded his way back toward the Republic Building. So sunk was he in his peculiar abstraction that he walked unheeding by a large circle of people, gathered in the street at a corner a few blocks from the church in sufficient numbers to halt automobile traffic, pushing, staring, and chattering in the immemorial manner of simians or humans observing a curiosity. Unfortunately for the proponents of premonition, warning, second-sight, or associated psychic phenomena, it must be recorded that Andrew Reale thus passed within ten yards of a spot where Stephen English and his bride lay senseless, and had not an inkling that this was the case, but returned to his work glumly sure that the Englishes were enjoying the sweets of wedlock in perfect health and bliss.
The fact is, however, that inside the ring of onlookers which he passed, a delivery truck stood smoking in the middle of the intersection, its front end smashed; lying on its side in front of the truck lay a long blue limousine, surrounded by shattered glass; and even as Andrew trudged obliviously by the sad scene, two policemen pried the twisted door of the automobile upward like a trap door and gently lifted out the white-clad, bloodstained, and apparently lifeless figure of Mrs. Stephen English.
It is supposed by many readers, most critics, and all publishers that an author has unlimited power over his characters and can guide events in his tale at will, and from these there should be vigorous protests at this accident. Critics may say that it is too opportune, readers that it is too cruel, publishers that only Russian novelists can afford to injure their heroines. Good friends, you may all be right, but this accident is, unhappily, what occurred at this point in the astonishing history of Aurora Dawn. The author humbly submits that, since the tale is a true one, Fate and not he must apologize, if apology be necessary; and perhaps the Hooded One would not lack for arguments, pointing out to you that your own meeting with your wife (or husband) must in retrospect seem so opportune that you can almost see the glint of puppet wires against the dark backdrop, also that the deaths of children are senselessly unfair, and so forth, and so forth, and finally offering to show you within the next thirty seconds just how cruel and arbitrary she can be, if she chooses–at which moment you would doubtless abandon the discussion with some haste. At any rate, the historian cordially begs you to turn the page, inasmuch as the best part of these extravagant events begins in the next chapter.
CHAPTER 22
In which the great Aurora Dawn scandal
reaches its climax, and our hero acts drastically
to protect an investment.
WE ARE BLESSED above the other nations in the number of our inhabitants who understand and easily explain anything that happens in our land; most of them write in daily or weekly news publications. This recorder, however, cannot grasp the wonder of our free, sweet, strong country no matter how hard he ponders over it and is even more at a loss to account for single occurrences such as the one about to be narrated. It is a fact that our populace, with large good nature, permits the men of power to have their way so long as the days are rubbing along without too much stress, but occasionally rises like a wakened lion to roar mighty displeasure over what seems a trifle. A president may change the whole money system; let him beware of changing the date of Independence Day. A senator may nefariously acquire ten million dollars, and then fall to infamy for giving his daughter an expensive coming-out party. Perhaps a deep-running native wisdom sees, in these tiny events which burgeon into national alarums, a significance which escapes the owl eyes of historians.
At any rate, this plain work will make no effort to interpret the phenomenon that was commonly called “the Aurora Dawn riot,” but will simply state what everyone who was reading newspapers in the year 1937 knows anyhow namely, that it happened; and since for most of the audience it will be a twice-told tale, will give only the briefest possible sketch of it.
The huge modern wall clock in the lobby of the Republic Broadcasting Building was slowly ticking off some of the most expensive time of the week, Sunday afternoon and evening. Once every minute the long steel wand of the second hand made the circuit of twelve jet balls, disposed around the face where numerals are in old-fashioned timepieces as though to indicate that for the radio people who lived under the duress of Time the angle between the clock’s hands was information enough, and the vulgar obviousness of numbers could be abandoned. Five-thirty, said a narrow angle in the lower right quadrant and the time belonged to the Argonaut Cheese Corporation. Six, said the long vertical line of the two hands, and a small parcel of eternity was doled to the Oakleaf Beer Company. Six-thirty, said the downward congruence of the hands, and the inheritance passed to Warwick Cigarettes. Only two hours remained before the appointed rendezvous of the Fold of the Faithful Shepherd with the American people, and Time was rolling toward the moment as it had rolled toward the death of David and the birth of Shakespeare, at the same rate, with the same inflexibility and nobody in the living world knew as yet whether or not Father Stanfield would go on the air.
Outside the Pennsylvania Railroad Station a turbulent mass of people, perhaps thirty or forty thousand souls, had gathered to cheer the Faithful Shepherd’s expected arrival in New York. In the explicable way in which a dog tapped on a steeple or a woman with her stomach where her heart should be can suddenly become the center of the burning attention of a hundred million Americans, the case of Father Stanfield had grown in three days into a celebrated cause about which no citizen in the hills or in the plains, by the great river valleys or along the coasts, had failed to form an aggressive opinion. The spark of interest struck by Jaeckel’s monstrously popular column had been fanned by spontaneous editorial comment into a spreading blaze of indignation. Jaeckel’s–that is to say, Wilde’s–one-sided view of the story: the throttling of a courageous pastor by a money-bagged tyrant: had been swallowed everywhere in default of any reply from Talmadge Marquis, who had driven all reporters from his doors. Letters and telegrams, ranging in style horn the elegant prose of college presidents to obscene threats of guttersnipes, started to pile up in the offices of Marquis and the Republic Broadcasting Company. Ministers called special church meetings and urged their flocks to cry out against the injustice; amateur crusaders talked on street corners; Congressmen ventured bravely to add their august voices to the clamor. Chester Legrand, scared by the threat of an avalanche of public disfavor, had gone to Marquis and urged him to reconsider, but the soap manufacturer was not to be moved. The only man with the power to bend his will, Stephen English, lay enfeebled in a hospital, and nobody had dared further to mention the disasters looming for the sales of Aurora Dawn soap, after pink little Martin Rousseau had been dismissed and kicked head first out of Marquis’s inner chamber for bringing up the subject. Since most of the soap man’s unyielding reactions found their way at second hand into the press, which was devoting as much space to the episode as it usually reserved for crimes of passion, the general prejudice against him was more violently confirmed with each edition. He was universally excoriated as the type of irresponsible money-autocracy, and it is safe to say that throughout the length and breadth of the land not a voice was lifted to plead that he was merely suffering from an absence of Being where Being should be.
To all newspaper queries, Father Stanfield had given only one genial answer, “I’ll be there Sunday night”; and this widely publicized utterance had called into existence the good-humored throng that now pressed around the railroad station waiting to accompany him to the studio. Nobody could accurately state the composition of this mob. There were college clubs, young people’s church groups, women’s leagues, veterans’
posts, fraternal lodges and the like in definite little clumps, but they were submerged in a horde of undifferentiated human beings, many of them probably on hand mainly to watch the fun. It was an unorganized demonstration. One inspired editor later called it “an exercise of the people’s sacred and seldom-invoked right peaceably to assemble for the redress of a grievance.” The college boys had brought red torch flares with them, and a small number of communists, overcoming their repugnance to Stanfield’s religion in their affinity for public commotion, had provided big banners proclaiming Mr. Marquis’s shortcomings in satiric terms.
Into the streets had also come a large number of blue-coated patrolmen, who, with a sensible intuition of what was afoot, confined their watchfulness to the thwarting of vandalism and fist-fighting; and they had so little to do that most of them caught the hilarious air of the crowd and wore broad smiles as they moved to and fro. What with blazing red lights, swaying banners, plenty of police, and a restless crowd of high-spirited people, the whole scene outside the Pennsylvania Station on this fateful Sunday evening was as picturesque and stirring as any the usually cold city had ever provided.