Aurora Dawn (20 page)

The mother dismisses the seamstresses and, while Laura changes her dress, reviews the details of the wedding with her son-in-law,
in the conviction that she is attending to the affair as a bride’s mother must, with the convenient help, as it happens, of
English’s domestic staff. When Laura reappears, the loving couple proceed to an earnest discussion of honeymoon projects,
the mother busying herself to serve tea. The visit passes in a bright description by the millionaire of the pleasure places
of the globe–for he proposes nothing less than a trip around the world to ensure the happiness of his bride–to all of which
Laura gives her respectful approval. The world has been toured in talk horn Antibes to Zanzibar, English has just risen to
leave, and Laura is accompanying him to the door, when the telephone jangles a summons.–It would certainly be breaking literary
ground here to insert a sublime apostrophe to the telephone; modernists would scoff at the manner, and classicists at the
matter; but I put it to my readers to grant, in the teeth of pedants of all stripes, that the ringing of the telephone has
filled human hearts with more intense emotions in our time than any of the accepted objects of rhapsody, such as windswept
hills, the ocean, flowers, music, kisses, and such stuff. Nevertheless, to avoid controversy the tribute shall die in the
inkwell.–For no dear reason, I say, the sound of that telephone set up a tumult in the breasts of the three people who heard
it. English looked sharply at Laura; Laura stopped moving and stood like a statue. Mrs. Beaton, nearest the instrument, picked
it up, listened briefly, glanced at the other two, and then, saying “I’m sorry, but you have the wrong number,” hung up. There
was the slightest silence, broken by English, as he courteously bade them farewell, kissed Laura, and left.

The girl walked back into the apartment and said, with no perceptible shade of feeling, “That was Andy, wasn’t it, Mother?”
Mother and daughter being females, there were certain matters in which deception was impractical. “Yes, it was,” said Mrs.
Beaten. “I’m sorry, but it seemed the best thing. Did I do wrong, dear?”

Our heroine moved to the window and looked down at the street. Twelve stories below her she saw English’s limousine, parked
on the very spot where the Yellow Cab 774 had stood, somewhat more than a hundred hours ago.

“You were quite right,” she said, in a voice a little fainter than usual. “Thank you, Mother.” She kept her face turned to
the street for some time, but it was not to hide the bright tears starting out of her eyes and rolling down her cheeks, for
she was not aware of them.

In this rude way did Andrew Reale discover that his relationship with the Beaton household had changed. Having jilted the
daughter, he might have anticipated a cooling of sentiment toward him in that quarter; but, such is the lag between action
and understanding in a rising young man, he was surprised not to encounter the same generous forgiveness and forgetfulness
which he had wanted to express to Honey concerning her forthcoming marriage. He hung up the telephone slowly, baffled in his
desire to do a kind deed; and, as he returned to the table at which Carol–

But in order to bring the reader up to the moment in our hero’s own marital fortunes, we must briefly retrace our steps.

The decisive breakfast with Carol on Sunday morning, following the unfortunate but necessary occurrence in the yellow taxicab
Saturday night, proved to be less than decisive, after all. Andrew arrived at the Marquis home at what he hoped was a logical
breakfast hour–eleven o’clock–groomed to the tips of his ears, excellently dressed in a soft blue English cashmere suit which
had cost him two hundred and twenty dollars, with a snowy white shirt and a happy choice of maroon knitted tie, truly the
complete wooing male, his plumage as attractive as the taste of the time permitted. The world looked clean and golden and
the air smelled sweet as he marched to the Marquis threshold, and his pulses quickened painfully as the door opened and he
stepped in past the butler and the geometrical horse to claim his bride. Almost instantly, however, his pulses slowed, for
it was obvious that the supreme moment would have to be delayed. He could hear from the living room the voices of Carol, Talmadge
Marquis, and Michael Wilde.

Scampering out to meet him came the soap heiress, her hair carelessly pinned back, her eyes shining, her face aglow, looking
oddly wholesome in a smeared white painter’s smock. “Hello, Teeth, you darling,” she whispered, kissing him and pressing his
hand for a moment against her soft side, “I talked Mike Wilde into staying overnight to look at my paintings this morning.
He’s ripping them apart. What fun! Come on.” She tugged him into the living room, saying, “Look, here’s Andy Reale. Go on,
Mike. What’s the matter with that red one?”

The artist sat in a deep chair, holding at arm’s length a painting about two feet square representing, all in tints and shades
of red, a rolled up piece of carpet, a chair, a box of strawberries, and a shawl. Around on the Boor, or leaning against Wilde’s
chair or propped up on other pieces of furniture, were more specimens of Carol’s inspiration: oils, water colors, pastels,
and pencil sketches, crudely mounted and very much the worse for careless handling. Wilde was regarding the red picture with
a pained expression, while Talmadge Marquis watched his face like a hound striving to fathom human speech.

“Young Marquis,” said the painter, not looking at Carol or Andrew, “there is no use in my spending any more time on this stuff.
I would say you have not an atom of talent, except that the atom is no longer believed the smallest particle in the universe,
and ‘not an electron of talent’ sounds forced. Your draughtsmanship is inferior to that of an advertising comic strip, and
your sense of color, which you think is your main point, is banal, so that your effects are either oversweet or disgusting.
Asking me to criticize these things is like asking Einstein to correct high-school algebra papers. Give me coffee and I shall
go home.”

“You don’t think I should encourage her in her art courses, Mr. Wilde?” said Marquis.

“Don’t be an ass, Marquis,” said the painter. “Keep her at it until the day she marries. The Victorians, at whom we sneer,
knew the value of wrapping a girl in the cotton wadding of aesthetic studies. It’s the only way to keep fresh the sparkle
of her ignorance, virginity’s thief charm. A girls’ school today sullies and dulls young females to a middle-aged familiarity
with sex machinery and domestic management before they have been authentically kissed. Let her paint or act or sing or write
until she charms and weds a young man as rich and untalented as herself. Only, in all charity, never expose her products again
to a man of taste. They are puppy yappings.”

Our hero, glancing around at the paintings, opened his mouth and spake on behalf of his loved one thus: “Well, I don’t know
much about art, but–” whereupon Wilde interrupted him with, “It would be cruel of anyone to suggest that you do, Reale, and
to ask you for an opinion on the subject. Join us in coffee.”

The breakfast which followed, served on the terrace of the rose garden, bore small resemblance to the lovers’ tryst that Andrew
had planned, consisting as it did of a disquisition by the painter on the theme that flowers were higher in the evolutionary
scale than man, a stand which he maintained with such arguments as, “We give flowers to each other as tributes, whereas, if
it were possible, it would be ludicrous and offensive in a rose to present another rose with a nosegay of human beings.” Talmadge
Marquis, stuffing himself with pancakes and sausages, hardly listened; Andrew sulked; Carol drank in his words with wide-eyed
attention. Time for young Reale seemed shackled. He thought it took three hours before the painter left and Marquis withdrew
with a brief grunt, whereas the unreliable sun had changed its position by twelve degrees, exactly as though only fifty minutes
had passed.

–
The value of wrapping a girl in the cotton wadding
–

Privacy brought no relief to his bursting bosom. The black-haired maiden chattered on about painting as though the great Bezalel
were still present or, rather, she seemed to be venting all the conversation which had been dammed up by his loquacity. Andrew,
with a heart strained by suspense, was forced to listen to an hour of enlightenment about “plastic form” and “color orchestration”
and “space values” as much to his purpose as extracts from the Babylonian Talmud; and what was worse, the girl handed all
her works to him one by one, compelling feeble, increasingly morose compliments from him.

It is bard to say that Carol Marquis habitually followed patterns of action found in the Bible, or that she had conned the
Book of Esther before this breakfast. Certain it is, though, that in this case she adopted the Persian queen’s scheme for
stretching male curiosity to the breaking point, by inviting a questing gentleman to one meal only to invite him to another.
When Andrew finally, desperately, brushed two small oil paintings out of her hands with the surly exclamation, “Now look,
Carol,” she hid her hand on his mouth and said, “Not a word about anything big. I have to drive out to our country place with
Dad now. I’ll be back in town Tuesday. Meet me here at ten o’clock. We’ll ride horseback in the park and have lunch at the
Tavern-on-the-Green, and then I’ll say what you want me to say–I think.” Her arms went around him; her lips were on his, off
them, and vanishing into the house with the rest of her before the ambitious lover could gather his wits to pursue the tender
topic. Evidently he was in a new, heady intimacy with her; she permitted him to find his own way to the door.

It was to a table at the Tavern-on-the-Green, therefore, to which Andrew Reale was returning to join Carol, three days later,
following the unsuccessful telephone call to Honey which was described above, and which came about thus: The heiress, all
during the horseback ride around the reservoir, had maintained an irrelevant vein of chatter until Andrew felt on the verge
of a violent act; and as they sat down to lunch on the outdoor terrace, he had clenched both fists on the sides of the table,
leaned forward with sparks in his eye and taken a deep breath to deliver an ultimatum when the girl suddenly produced a folded
newspaper sheet from her wide purse and thrust it at him saying, “Haven’t you seen this yet?” It was a piece of the morning
paper, with “Jaeckel’s Jottings” heavily outlined in Carol’s lip rouge. Staggered when he read it–for he had been too distraught
to glance at the day’s news–Andrew brought out a broken sentence about his pleasure at the development and his desire to congratulate
his former fiancée, and marched off to be rebuffed at the telephone.

Older readers know the natural tempo of misfortune: long peace, followed by a brisk series of increasingly heavy blows. When
Andrew returned to the table the head waiter was there with a note. It was a telephoned summons from Van Win to abandon lunch
and come to the office of Talmadge Marquis at once, a desperate crisis having arisen concerning the Father Stanfield program.
Silently cursing his error in having told his secretary where he would be for lunch, Andrew bade adieu to the object of his
desires, who accepted the note as very sufficient excuse for his departure, and said sympathetically, “Watch out for Dad.
When he’s bad he’s ghastly.”

With the burning question of his life still unanswered, with no food in his stomach, with a sick fear in his breast of the
legendary terror of a Marquis rage, Andrew Reale rushed to his apartment, changed his clothes and set his course into the
teeth of the gathering storm.

In which the Marquis office undergoes

a Christopher Situation,

and Andrew Reale flies forth to save the day.

T
ALMADGE MARQUIS WAS BELLOWING
, and the buildings of New York skipped like rams. He roared; the foundations of the city were moved. At least, such was the
impression of the people who gained their livelihood by a capacity for staying in proximity to Mr. Marquis throughout his
tantrums. Given the choice, they would probably have endured a bad earthquake rather than one of his frenzies. Indeed, an
office wit had performed an immortal prank (a few months before the nervous breakdown which ended his business life) by telephoning
Fordham University after Mr. Marquis’s paroxysm brought on by a poor comedy program, and inquiring whether any disturbance
had registered on the seismograph.