Laura English lies injured in a hospital bed, true enough, but surely no one believes that every model, bruised of heart, who marries a rich man, is forthwith struck down by a delivery truck. On the contrary, to develop the aforesaid Purpose artistically, the historian would have first falsified the events so that Laura remained unharmed; he would then have portrayed her at a moment when she was swimming in the luxuries bestowed on her by her opulent husband: an exquisite gown, a rich fur wrap, gleaming silver, lush furniture, glowing jewels, rare perfumes, long, low, sleek, purring roadsters (see the fiction in any current ladies’ magazine for the rest of the details); and then, by ironic touches, would have conveyed that all these treasures were as dross to her and brought no true warmth to her frostbitten heart. The very acuteness of Honey Beaton’s misfortune makes her atypical. Let it be taken as understood, then, that neither the brief scene that follows nor anything else in the book is aimed to discredit the glamorous profession, modeling, or the honest agencies that buy and sell young ladies’ charms. What the Purpose is comes out at the end of the chapter, and it is disappointingly simple.
Despite Stephen English’s insistence that he could walk with a cane, the hospital doctor ruled that he must be trundled to Laura’s bedside in a wheelchair for his first visit to her following their accident. This happy reunion took place at approximately the time that Andrew Reale slammed his door in the last chapter. It is hard to say whether Laura was more moved by the sight of her proud spouse being wheeled into her room, or English by the melancholy case in which he found her; for, though her greeting was jolly, her voice clear, if weak, and her eyes bright, she was far from being a suitable subject for fashion photography. One side of her face was bandaged, and a thickness under the coverlet in the lower part of the bed indicated plaster around a broken limb. They exchanged quiet inquiries about each other’s condition until the attendant left them, when English abruptly changed his tone.
“Laura, I’m desperately sorry about what has happened,” he said, “and I wish I could rid myself of a feeling that it’s my fault.”
His wife cast a puzzled, half-smiling glance at him. “That’s a strange notion,” she said. “It was just a piece of bad luck, and well both recover from it soon enough.”
The millionaire shook his head. “I’m afraid I challenged my destiny when I asked you to marry me,” he said, “and the challenge evidently has been thrown back into my face–which I can bear–but the demonstration seems to have been mainly at your expense.”
“Stephen,” said Laura, “the smells of a hospital depress me, too. I’m quite sure you’ll forget these thoughts when we’re back again in the sunshine. Everything will turn out well.”
English regarded her uncertainly for several moments. “I have a very astonishing piece of news,” he said. “Mike Wilde is married. He eloped last night. He telephoned me just before the event.”
“Well!” exclaimed Laura, animation evident in her voice despite its lack of strength. “Who is the lady?”
“Carol Marquis,” said the millionaire.
Laura started up from her pillow, and sank back immediately. She did not speak for a while, and her voice was faint when she said at last, “They’re wide apart in many ways, but I think they can be happy.”
“Have you no other comment?” said English.
“I think not,” said Laura, her eyes on the window opposite her.
“This will make a great difference, I should imagine,” said the banker, “in Andrew’s plans, as you described them to me.”
“But Andrew’s plans can make no difference to me,” said his wife.
“In this matter, Laura,” said English in gentle tones, “the frankest self-searching offers the best chance of happiness.”
Laura turned her head and looked into his eyes. “Dear Stephen,” she said, “we are married.” She held out her hand, and he reached to take it, with a hopeful smile. Their palms met. Their fingers clasped.
* * *
Why did Andrew Reale rush out of his room upon thinking of the Stanfield statement?
In military life, where it is maintained that men act logically, in order that committers of errors may always be compelled to explain “why they did so” (“Because I made a stupid mistake” being insufficient), it is customary for generals or admirals, in justifying a decision, to say, “Having considered factors Alpha, Beta, and Omicron and having weighed the choice between courses One, Two, and Seven, it was determined to close with the enemy and open fire”; when the admiral knows that, in truth, a dispatch was thrust in his hand, a diagram held before his eyes; his soul leaped at the prospect of the lifelong-awaited battle; and he gave the order, which everyone knew he must give. This pleasant myth of logical behavior, which lends form and ritual to martial life, is not in place in a serious history. Perhaps in the afterglow of life Andrew’s wiser mind, wandering through the corridors of memory, will come upon this episode, framed and varnished by time, and, surveying it with a wry smile, will determine how the picture fits together, motive to action. But you know, good reader, that under pressure of This Minute your logical mind is usually no better than a horseman carried away by a runaway nag, worrying more about staying in the saddle than directing the course. With no tally of our hero’s motives, then, let us rejoin him as he jumps from a taxicab one block from Marquis’s house and proceeds cautiously up the street, keeping himself out of the angle of vision of the Marquis windows.
It was exactly an hour since he had entrusted the packet to the messenger boy. An alert, conscientious lad could have delivered it and returned to his post thirty minutes ago. Andrew remembered, however, that the courier, a tall starveling of spotty complexion, had looked glittering gratitude when he received the dollar bill intended to encourage haste. There seemed some chance that he had improvised a detour in his route by way of the nearest ice-cream store. For once, Andrew hoped for weak character in a messenger boy, and posted himself in a shadowed doorway to wait.
And soon, springing into sight around the corner, welcome to Andrew’s eyes as the ace of spades to a gambler, the messenger boy came on at a trot, salving his professional conscience for the purloined half-hour with a few saved seconds. Andrew fell out of ambush on the astounded Mercury as he was mounting the Marquis steps. A few words of explanation, another dollar bill, the envelope was his, and the bony runner was fading down the street in the direction of a cafeteria. Your reader of the dialectical materialist persuasion will call this a last-minute but excellent touch of social irony: Marquis, the capitalist, deprived of the means to save his skin, because of the appetite of a boy insufficiently nourished under capitalism. This work needs every shred of praise it can earn, but it can accept none through false pretense; and the historian must confess that, though merit may lie in current ideas for remaking the social fabric, he believes that boys will be voracious and dilatory under any economic system whatever.
It is certainly true, all the same, that on so slender a pivot as the conscience of a messenger boy did the destinies of Andrew Reale and Talmadge Marquis turn. In this way was our hero enabled to halt the Moving Finger, and lure it back to cancel half a line regarding his conduct in the affair of Father Stanfield. Could we take down the Recording Angel’s ledger for 1937 and see the account of this matter, it might read so:
“Sent Mr. Marquis the statement, thus assuring himself a fortune.
“For reasons not specified, reconsidered, tore the statement to fragments on the very steps of Mr. Marquis’s home, and scattered them to the winds. Did this while sound in mind, knowing that he was probably destroying Mr. Marquis’s power and with it his own excellent chances for becoming very rich very quickly.
“Here ends the tale of Andrew Reale in radio.”
If the Recording Angel wrote it so, he is much more kindly than the poets would have him, for in calling Andy “sound in mind” he generously overlooked a fact that must be told here. The incomprehensible Andrew Reale, having ripped to pieces and thrown away a
golden future with his own hands, capered off down the street, shouting, loud enough to bring wondering old ladies to their windows, “Free! Free!”
* * *
Softly, friend; tread softly, pray. A hospital corridor echoes to careless footfalls. We follow Andrew, who no longer capers, just a little farther: to the bedside of Laura English. Here is the room with the clean little card over it bearing that strange new name. Andrew has permission to draw aside the white curtain and visit for a few minutes. Let us stop at the door.
Advised by telephone who her visitor is, Laura is still making pathetic efforts to improve her appearance when he comes in. She has brushed her beautiful hair out over her shoulders, straightened her negligée and even put on lipstick with a shaky hand that has left an inartistic red smudge in one corner of her mouth. Her hands are smoothing her hair as Andrew enters; hurriedly she drops them and folds them on the coverlet before her. Not looking around, she attempts a cordial expression of welcome when she hears the curtain drawn aside, but the words catch in her throat, and she has to turn her face to him silently. Her eyes are bright and tearful, and she smiles–but not such a smile as she wore in church, nor such a one as she displayed last April on the cover of Frivol Magazine; the kind of smile, in fact, that no human being has ever seen on her face except Andrew. Our hero, however, observes only the bandages and the evidence of a broken bone; he wavers, and falls on his knees beside the bed, and buries his head in her arms, and weeps aloud. Laura hesitates for just a moment, then presses his head to her bosom, quite as though they were young lovers still. “Oh, don’t, Andy, dearest, don’t,” she says. “The doctor tells me it will only leave a little scar–and my leg will be well so soon! Don’t cry, my darling, I can’t bear it. It’s so awful to see a man cry!”
Our heroine speaks to the point. Need we spy further on Andrew in his weakness? Draw the curtain.
What history except a true one could come to a climax with the hero on his knees and in tears? A hundred years ago the author might have capped the scene with Scripture: “The Lord is nigh unto the broken-hearted, and will save those of a contrite spirit,” but this work is addressed to a generation for whom the Lord has been satisfactorily explained away as a cosmic projection of the father-urge. As for the Absolute Unknowable Life Force, what does it care about broken hearts and contrite spirits? It runs the universe unknowably and evolves new life-forms through natural selection, and there an end.
This is the place to state the Purpose, and now the historian is in for it, for he has to admit that he has no genuine message, but only a moral, to offer. What a shoddy substitution! Your literary message throws an arc light into the far future, whereas a moral casts a candle-glow on a small area of the present. A message boldly claims for the novelist fields heretofore usurped by politicians, economists, scientists, social philosophers, and theorizers of every description; a moral bashfully remains within the old limits of common human experience. The author bows to all the rebukes he is going to get for his moral, and wishes it were not too late to rebuild the tale around some new, inspired communication.
However, here it is, for I mean to be as plain as Aesop’s compilers were. You will recognize it; it is only the Pardoner’s Latin platitude, threadbare half a thousand years ago:
Radix malorum est cupiditas,
or, to revert to the plain English of the first sentence of this book,
The road to happiness does not necessarily lie in becoming very rich very quickly.
Stating the Purpose thus in black-and-white instead of implying it subtly is another offense, but the author has to risk it. Otherwise, in these days when the Muse is supposed to incite Iliads instead of recording them, readers might have believed that it was, “Radio and advertising are the curse of our age.” Friends, the old punch-and-judy show of Folly has been played against a thousand backgrounds, and the curtain will yet rise and fall on a thousand more. There are good people and bad people scattered through all the paths of the living. I should not care to debate out the proposition, “Resolved: that authors are better men than advertisers.” The author has but one excuse for writing about other people’s follies, the classic apology of the selfsame Pardoner:
“For though myself be a ful vicious man,
A moral tale yet I yowe telle can.”
EPILOGUE
In which the author takes discreet cognizance
of the maxim, “The tale may have a moral,
but plain folks follow the story.”
THE PLAY is played out, but see, there is an afterpiece. The curtain is going up once more.
Stephen English sits in the spacious, high-ceilinged library of his apartment, reading a letter. The room looks out on the wide East River with its inglorious traffic of ferries, barges, tugs, dredges, and the small craft that swarm in an inland waterway. Such as it is, the view is costly to apartment dwellers, containing as it does a genuine, if jagged horizon and almost a quarter-sphere of hazy sky. The dark wooden walls of the room are filled with books, most of which are beautiful enough to grace shelves for the effect on the eye rather than on the brain. Irregularity of placing and traces of wear in the bindings indicate that this is an unusual rich man’s library in which ink and paper, as well as calfskin and buckram, come under scrutiny.
The banker is one of those lucky people whom advancing age changes by a gradual, not unsightly lessening of substance, going first to leanness and at the last to boniness, rather than by the sag and spread of all the lines of his physique. The date-line of the letter he is reading shows the year 1945, but, except for a somewhat spare appearance and a more general gray in his hair, he scarcely looks different from the bridegroom who was joined to Laura Beaton eight eventful years ago. The letter is from that same paragon among human females, and the last page, to which he is even now turning, runs so:
The doctor says it will be in mid-September. Andrew, junior, has worn me to a shadow already. How I will cope with two children I can’t tell, and that brings me to the point. If the child had your character and sweetness he’d be no trouble–and just on the chance that naming him after you might help, I’d like your permission to call him Stephen English Reale. Don’t ask me how I know it will be a boy. Andy’s family never have girls, it seems, or so he maintains.
Dear Stephen, I’m being flippant about something that means very much to me. I have never known anyone as decent and as generous as you, and I expect I never shall. Even the man in Bleak House, which you read to me in the hospital (was the appropriateness a complete accident?) only released a girl who was engaged to him–and I thought he was impossibly good! Whenever the war depresses me too much about human beings, I remember you and instantly feel better.–Please write soon, telling me that you consent. I will love the baby more if I can call him Stephen.
Andy is out with the animals, as usual, but he asked me to greet you for him. He’s very well, and I pray that this letter finds you so. When will you come to stay with us?
Affectionately,
Laura.
The millionaire dropped the letter on a small table beside his armchair, and stared with visionary eyes at a high-backed old chair on the opposite side of the room, in which his wife had sat on that important night, their delayed wedding night, the first night after her release from the hospital. The dimness which Time casts over most scenes of the past it had somehow neglected to supply in this instance, for the amount of imaginative effort necessary to enable English to see his former wife still sitting there was astonishingly small–a little less, in fact, and the memory could properly be called a hallucination. There she was, in a plain black gown which emphasized her pale charm as a black velvet case does that of a pearl, erect and prim in the chair, her hands firmly gripping the ornamental knobs of the arm rests, her face impassive as it had been in the church, her eyes following his movements like the eyes of a dog watching a stranger. The cinema of memory reviewed, with painful accuracy, the desultory, unmeaning conversation that had preceded his sudden
, determined statement: “Laura, I wish to have our marriage annulled.” Then came the stormy part, the long protests from her, the brief rejoinders by himself, while (how clearly!) he saw a wild rising hope wrestle with a sense of duty in his maiden wife’s spirit. Once again he felt his own hopes flag and perish under the reiterated vehemence of her objections, obviously the product of determination to do right, and nothing more. Once again he brought himself to mention the freedom of Andrew Reale, and to inquire whether she did not wish her marriage vows unsaid as they were unconsummated. The wraith in the high-backed chair responded as always: with a weak unfinished sentence, with shamed silence, and with a flood of wretched tears, her yellow hair falling about her bowed head, the new red scar vivid on her cheek and neck.
Stephen English sighed and shook his head. The scene ran out. All the incidents that followed belonged in the Ever-after which the storytellers never record, his memory being no better. He picked up a leather writing-portfolio and a pen from the table and commenced to write:
Dear Laura,
By now I am almost an old man, and many things are plain to me that were once obscure, but I have yet to find out just what virtue there abides in giving, when it is the only possible course for a man to follow. It seems to me that I have never been charitable, for charity is the privilege of those with limited means, or kind, for kindness is admirable only when unkindness exists as a profitable alternative. I cannot accept the honor of being Stephen English Reale’s godfather as though it were my due for any act of mine. If you and Andrew wish to be so gracious out of friendship, I will accept the favor with gratitude. The Roman, Marcus Aurelius, whose ideas seem increasingly sensible to me as I grow up, says, “It is possible to be happy–” here the banker broke off, crossed out the reference to the philosopher, and then crumpled the whole page quickly and started a new one: