At last the Shepherd turned and looked at him, a serene, searching look. “They ain’t much I kin do fer yer spirit, though I’d sure like to. Yer a bearer of good tidin’s, and under that choke of weeds in yer heart I think mebbe it ain’t all bad ground.” He paused for a long moment, then picked up a pen on the table beside him and signed the paper clearing Marquis. “This is the first lie I’ve told since I was younger’n you,” he said, holding the sheet out to Andrew. “Whatever yer after, I reckon you gotta git it afore you’ll smell the sulphur and brimstone in it. God help you, son, and give you what you really need—a understandin’ heart.”
An observer might have deduced, seeing the strange contortions of face and body that Andrew Reale hereupon underwent, that it cost him an effort of will to reach out and grasp the paper not less than it might have required had the object been a live coal; but he took it, and fairly bolted from the Faithful Shepherd’s presence.
As he closed the outer door he could not help throwing a quick glance over his shoulder; so that he carried with him down the elevator, and out of the lobby, and into the hot, noisy street, and for a longer time than the ordinary persistence of vision could possibly explain, the picture of Father Stanfield, his face aglow with happiness such as Andrew had not seen on the faces of the richest, most powerful executives of radio and advertising, sinking to his knees by the window in the streaming sunlight.
CHAPTER 26
In which our hero really reaches bottom
—and learns, like Dante, that beyond the Nadir
there lies the climb to Hope.
BIG WITH A PROJECT for the use of the trophy he had ingeniously garnered, Andrew Reale rushed up to the clerk’s desk in his hotel and snatched his key and several letters; but before he could examine the correspondence his attention was arrested by a hand on his elbow and a sad voice saying, “Hello, Andy.” He turned to see the eminent Walter Grovill at his side, dejected and deflated as only a jolly fat man can look who has lost much flesh. “Didn’t expect to see me this early in the morning, did you?” said the advertiser, and added a thin sound such as a ghost might make, giggling by itself in a haunted house. “I’ve been up all night with T.M.”
Andrew politely declared his delight and invited Grovill to accompany him upstairs, directing the clerk, as he left the desk, to summon a messenger boy for him. In his suite, the ambitious Andrew begged Grovill to forgive him while he attended to pressing business. The peaked guest dropped wearily on a couch. Andrew threw the handful of letters on his desk unread, sat down and speedily penned the following note:
Dear Mr. Marquis:
I obtained the enclosed document from Father Stanfield this morning; not without some difficulty, as you may imagine, but here it is, and it speaks for itself. I believe you will find it useful at your directors’ meeting.
If I can be of further service to you please call on me. I will remain in my rooms all day.
Respectfully,
Andrew Reale.
He sealed this message in a long envelope together with the paper Stanfield had signed, laid the packet aside, and picked up the conversation with Grovill by solicitiously observing that he did not appear in good health.
Venting many moans, the fat man recounted a number of woes with which the reader is familiar: the flight of his wife, the loss of his business partner, and the extended harrying by Marquis, for whom Grovill, one of the last of his faithful adherents, had become a beast of all burdens: adding this new information, that on the day Flame Anders had abandoned him he had succumbed to a fit later diagnosed as a mild heart attack. Regarding this lengthy catalogue of misery Andrew was sympathetic, reserving a proper curiosity as to what it all meant, here and now. The advertiser put a period to the roll-call of his afflictions at last, and proceeded thus:
“Andy, T.M. likes you. We both think you’re the most promising young fellow we’ve seen in the radio and advertising field since—well, since Tom Leach started in my office fifteen years ago. Tom didn’t do badly with me. When he walked out so stupidly, so pointlessly, he was making fifty thousand. He would have gone to fifty-five next year.
“I’m old and sick, Andy, and I need a partner like Tom. There are people in my office that I could jump up, but they’re all hacks. No flair, no zip, no depth.”
Andrew’s heart seemed to be beating somewhere up in his throat, interfering with his respiration.
“You’ve got what I need, and I’m willing to pay for it—youth, knowledge, imagination, and spirit. I’ve come to offer you Tom Leach’s job, Andy—junior partner in my firm, which will become Grovill and Reale—and I’ll start you at twenty-five thousand a year.”
So simply, so baldly, like a hot red sun rising out of a tropic sea, did the great ambition of Andrew Reale appear at last over his horizon as a reality. Before he could get his mouth open to frame a speech of thanks, the doorbell rang. It was a messenger boy, to whom Andrew entrusted the precious envelope for Marquis with a generous gratuity to speed the delivery. When he returned to his sitting room he found Walter Grovill pushing himself to his feet, ready to depart.
“Don’t give me your answer right this minute, Andy,” he said. “Think it over. None of us knows where we’re at right now. T.M. has postponed cancellation of the Republic programs, at least until this directors’ meeting blows over. We’d just better pray that he pulls through. Our office runs on Aurora Dawn money, Andy; all the other accounts wouldn’t pay the salaries. The managers don’t like us, so if anything happens to Marquis we just shut up shop, and I retire. Maybe I ought to do it anyway.”
Andrew issued a stream of polite reassurances on Grovill’s health which seemed to cheer the wilted fat man no little. While Andy’s tongue was thus occupied with routine work, his mind weighed the advisibility of telling Grovill about the Stanfield statement, but found sufficient reason to break silence wanting.
“Well, thanks, Andy,” replied Grovill to the words of comfort, “but I’m not as young as I look, and heart trouble isn’t like a cold in the head, you know. You might find yourself—” he interjected a giggle in a sufficiently minor mode, almost, to pass as a sob—“Andrew Reale, Incorporated, sooner than both of us think.”
Scoffing away the lugubrious suggestion, Andrew accompanied the plump dignitary to the elevator door with repeated phrases of gratitude, and promised an early answer to the flattering offer. His guest safely off, he returned to his rooms and sank giddily into the chair at his desk.
Now was the glorious summer of his content at mid-June, according to all his schemes and dreams. Carol was won; Marquis would surely remain in power; and rule of an advertising agency was his for the asking. The climb was over. Andrew Reale stood at the summit of life.
To what must we compare the vista before him? Reach into childhood memory, reader, and blow the dust off the picture of Jack, having climbed up through the very clouds to the top of the Beanstalk, looking around at the strange Giants’ land into which he had come: a flat new landscape having no relation at all to the world below, and conveying no impression of altitude attained. Andrew seemed now to find himself in a swampy vastness under a sky of gray, facing a long road which lost itself far off among bleak hills. There appeared no way to turn, left or right or backward, that offered surprise, interest or pleasure, and it was evident that he must simply plod along this road until, somewhere in the distance, he died. Nothing in his life seemed green, nothing purposeful. His imagination painted in a new detail to the dismal picture: Marquis, springing like the Old Man of the Sea from the back of the tottering Grovill on to this new Sinbad, himself: a burden to be carried along the road for ever.
And now, in the exaltation brought on by the thin atmosphere of the peak of success, a tremendous event took place in Andrew Reale’s life. He philosophized.
The things that Michael Wilde and Father Stanfield had said about his way of life rose in his consciousness with the regality of wisdom, except that he somehow forgot he had heard them before, and they see
med profound new perceptions of his aroused intellect. “Why,” he concluded to himself, “what are we but a crowd of well-kept slaves in golden chains, wearing out our lives in a devil-dance of lying, throat-cutting, sensuality, luxury, cheating, conniving, and fooling the public?” He loathed himself and his life. He felt a desperate urge to write a book. The many pleasant and comfortable years he had known, the agreeable times that the career had given him, the boon of care-lightening amusement that he had helped to bring his countrymen by taxing his nerves in the tasks of radio: all these were erased from his memory. In this great awakening of conscience (which the moral reader may ascribe to the influence of Father Stanfield, and the practical reader to lack of sleep: here only the facts are given), he felt only the single quickening urge of the reforming enthusiast: Destroy! O for two pillars to tug down, and bring the Philistine temple of radio and advertising tumbling to ruin!
“Why,” he sneered, “no wonder we are paid so much. We do the dirtiest work in the land. What self-respecting street sweeper would change places with me if he knew what I had to do for my pay?”
Bent under this admirable self-scourging, he threw his head on his hands and leaned his elbows forward upon the desk in an attitude of despair. Thus directed downward, his eyes fell on the letters he had not yet read—and on top of these he now noticed a thick envelope addressed in the hand of Carol Marquis. He picked it up, turned it over and was startled to read the following message on the sealed flap: “Take a deep breath, Teeth dear.”
This document requires to be reproduced in full, and the historian himself is impatient as our hero fumbles with the envelope in his anxiety to tear it open, and finally strips it off the letter like a fruit peeling to read—what you will now peruse:
Darling Teeth:
I don’t know how to tell you this, but straight is good enuf, I guess. By the time you read this I will probably be married to Mike Wilde. We’re taking the midnite plane to Mexico …I know I owe you all kinds of apologies, specially for last nite … Honestly, I’m sorry.…
You’ll surely think I’m the worst female alive, and you may be rite, but really, Andy dear, I do like you a terrific lot. If Mike hadn’t happened, who knows what mite have been … but what’s the use … I hope I won’t lose your friendship, because I admire you and I know you have a splendid future in the advertising business. All your dreams you told me about will come true soon enuf, I feel sure … I wish I deserved to be the one to share them with you, but that’s out, I suppose. I’ll always be proud of you, tho.…
Teeth, I’m writing this in an awful hurry and I’m also trying not to hurt you but I want you to know the truth.… I was just a silly kid when we met. I played up to you because I wanted to see whether I could get you away from Honey Beaton. But I was really beginning to be terribly, terribly fond of you, and then … Mike happened. You mean a whole lot to me, Andy, tho, don’t think you don’t. You sort of woke me up. After knowing you I was able to really appreciate Mike—that isn’t exactly what I mean … You understand, tho …
Mike says he’s marrying me for my money … he’s a beast, and I wish I weren’t so absolutely mad over him … but he says that that’s all you were trying to do, too, and so I shouldn’t feel bad about you, I’m too conceited to believe that about either of you … anyway, I know you liked me … and I want to thank you for your loyalty to my Dad. You won’t be sorry for that, tho …
There’s something on my conscience that you must know, but don’t ever, ever tell Dad. Teeth, I’m responsible for the whole Aurora Dawn riot … Mike’s been coming up to the house to see me every nite, usually very late, for the past few weeks. Well, the day Stanfield’s sermon came in the mail—you know, the day you left me at lunch and flew down to West Virginia—Dad came home roaring mad and showed the sermon to me at dinner, and then stuck it into his inside pocket. He was fast asleep when Mike came … I told Mike the story and he rolled around laughing and insisted that I get him the sermon. I know it wasn’t rite, but I sneaked into Dad’s room, got the envelope out of his pocket and brought it to Mike. He read it over and said it was too rich, he’d have to show it to Milton Jaeckel … I can’t stop him from doing anything, Andy …he rushed out and came back with it an hour later, and I stuck it back in Dad’s coat. Now what do you think of little Carol? You’re probably glad you’re not marrying such a friteful little fool. I mean well, tho … and I really like me at heart … I know me best.…
Forgive me for everything, Andy, and wish me luck. You’ll come across another girl like Honey who’s really rite for you, and then you’ll be happy that this happened.… You still have the nicest smile I’ve ever seen or hope to see, and how I wish Mike could dance the rhumba like you … I guess we can’t have everything, tho … you see, I’m growing up already. Good-by now. We’re honeymooning in Taxco, and then … whatever Mike says …
Always,
Carol.
P.S.—I’ll never forget the snowstorm and the rose garden.
C.
The author must intervene, before permitting the hero to react to this vital document, to state that, although it is extremely unlikely that any description of posterity will read this account, the remotest risk must not be taken at this point; and it must here be declared plainly in defense of the American educational system of the first part of the twentieth century that young ladies like Carol Marquis were all very well versed in spelling, grammar and punctuation; and that the departures from good usage in the above epistle were deliberate misdemeanors. The reader will please consider the plight of a young lady compelled to transfer her fascination to the baldness of ink on paper in a time when the literature on which she is fed boasts emaciation of vocabulary and either flippant or burly attitudes toward romance, thus excluding her from a knowledge of the graceful ways of language suitable to her purpose. One does not expect a young lady to spend her winged days rooting in libraries. As a consequence, striving for some measure of femininity at any cost, she may be driven to bizarre violation of the rules of composition, causing the male correspondent to puzzle his head over her reasons for mutilating the mother tongue. Mystery, at least, is thereby achieved, and mystery is no small element of feminine charm, they say. All this is no explanation, but a humble guess, put forth with the utmost lack of confidence, for we are here contemplating a black riddle from which we shrank in the opening chapter, the workings of a young lady’s mind.
Andrew Reale’s new philosophic detachment from the vanities of radio disappeared like a dream under the rude shaking of this letter, and his first clear thought through the blood-mist of agony brought on by the thrust to the quick of his ego was, “How do I stand now?” Even as he groaned and writhed, he calculated, and the result was not unfavorable. In no way did it seem that Carol’s jilting of him could disturb his advantageous position with Marquis and Grovill, which depended on his demonstrated cleverness alone; indeed, mutual chagrin might bring the soap man and himself closer, for he could not but believe that Marquis would regard askance the alliance with Bohemia. All was not lost. Only Carol was lost. Speedily reaching this view of things, our hero found it easier to breathe.
As, when the dentist, having firmly clasped his cruel forceps on the aching bicuspid, with a mighty pull wrenches it out of the mouth, the moment of unendurable pain is the moment that cures, and the exhilaration of convalescence floods in on the weary sufferer, rendering the after-pangs of the extraction a fading discomfort easily borne; so did Carol Marquis’s letter bring to Andrew Reale’s spirit the sharpest anguish that young men are given to know, followed soon by a curious sense of undefined relief and gladness. His first calculating thoughts had been reflexive, the cat tumbling through space and twisting to land on its feet; now, sore but upright, he surveyed his situation with brightening eyes. He was glad to see that the single misfortune had hardly damaged the pattern of his success, for, philosopher or no, he retained a workman’s pride in the smooth clicking together of a plan, and a young man’s horror of being d
umped into confusion by a faithless girl. The question rose again: did he want what he had won?
As he paced around his room digesting these thoughts, an electric shock of remembrance coursed through his nerves. He suddenly recalled the paper which Father Stanfield had signed, now either in Marquis’s hands or on its way to them. His meditation went no further. Upon the instant his hat was on his head and the front door was closing on him with a vigorous slam.
CHAPTER 27
In which this true tale comes to an end
—whether happily or not,
the reader can best determine.
EVERY NOVEL NOWADAYS is supposed to have a purpose, not the purpose of instructive entertainment which was the sole aim of literature for several thousand years until it suddenly obsolesced a few decades ago, but the purpose of correcting a specific social disorder such as capitalism, deforestation, inadequate city planning, war or (as some authors view it) religion. All this began, it is said, when a great French realist, Zola, discovered at the start of the century that “Truth is on the march.” It is evidently still marching, and will continue to march as far into the future as anyone can peer, and so it behooves literature to get into step and move to the regulated cadence of Purpose, if it is not to be damned for dawdling by the wayside while Truth marches away over the horizon. Truly, we live in a gay parading epoch, do we not? Time marches; Truth marches; Man marches; it is hardly to be doubted that the very March hares march. Critics will justly scan this history with the question in their minds, what is its purpose? Sifting the light stuff of which it is made, they may legitimately conclude that they have found the tiny gritty nugget of a message in Michael Wilde’s strictures against the trade of modeling–therefore the author begs leave to point out that this cannot possibly be the case.