Aurora Dawn (3 page)

“We’re right close,” answered the driver out of that side of his mouth which was unoccupied, “but you got to change to another
bus and it’s a good twenty minutes from the depot to Father Stanfield’s.”

Andrew started. “Who said I was going to see Father Stanfield?”

“I been on this run a long time.” The driver threw a brief, knowing look at Andrew. “You a tobacco man?”

“No,” said Andrew, and with the bitter reflection that conversations with strangers did not lead him into felicity, he became
silent. The bus joggled, bumped, and whined its way through the deepening twilight. Andrew forced himself to attempt a cool
estimate of his indiscretion with the Beautiful Brahmin. After much shuffling of the ingredients of the situation, he decided
that the girl would probably forget him and everything he had said the moment she resumed her devotional reading in
Harper’s Bazaar;
also that she was an irritating child, and that some vestige of collegiate emotions was responsible for his passing interest.
This palatable conclusion freed his thoughts for weightier matters during the rest of the journey.

In Smithville, a town so entirely composed of low clapboard structures that it seemed to have skipped the brick-baking stage
of history, Andrew changed to a bus labeled “SPECIAL–FOLD.” The coach was crowded with an oddly non-rural group of tourists,
apparently in holiday spirits, well dressed for the most part and conversing noisily. As Andrew took his seat the driver dimmed
the interior lights and started out along the asphalt highway, but soon swung off to a hard dirt road which climbed, descended,
twisted, and wove like an Indian trail through thick overhanging trees that obscured the starlight. The forgotten scent of
night dew on green leaves came agreeably to Andrew as the bus crushed past branches. Ten minutes of this plunge through forest
darkness, and the bus came over a hill and around a bend and was suddenly out in the clear, rolling down a road that sloped
into a wide valley. In the center of the valley floor Andrew could see a cluster of buildings, toward which the bus drove
with increasing speed. The chatter of the tourists became more animated, and they began to put on their coats and pick up
packages. Soon the bus turned through an illuminated archway of stone on which was fastened in white wooden letters the legend:
“The Fold of the Faithful Shepherd.” Rattling the pebbles of a wide gravel driveway, the vehicle slowed and stopped before
a large, auditorium-like building with a wide, whitewashed porch brilliantly lit up.

“Tabernacle,” said the driver. All the tourists descended and streamed eagerly up the steps of the porch–all except Andrew,
who lingered behind and asked the driver, “Which one is the Old House?”

The driver, a wiry little man who looked strangely neat in a gray mail-order suit, eyed Andrew carefully; then he nodded his
head at one of the shadowy buildings, “That’s it.” Andrew thanked him and picking up his bag walked off into the gloom.

Reader, the author is as anxious as you to follow him to the Old House, whatever that may be, and uncover the nature of this
mission which is to bring him closer to the riches his young heart ardently desires. However, we can no longer delay acquainting
you with the true heroine of this tale who even at this instant is engaged in an astonishing episode herself. She is none
other than Laura, alias Honey, Beaton; but it would be as incongruous to meet her at the end of a chapter as it would be to
see the dawn break in the west at the end of a wearying day.

Containing some very sound reflections

and introducing the heroine and other

important personages.

B
ULFINCH OPENS HIS GREAT
“Mythology” with the poignant words, “The religions of ancient Greece and Rome are extinct. The so-called divinities of Olympus
have not a single worshiper among living men.” Since this is true one might think that the nine Muses who were minor deities
in the Zeus heaven would have lost religious currency, too, but, mysteriously, they have survived Olympus, and are evoked
by poets even unto this day. Indeed, there has been talk of a tenth, “American Muse,” who presumably is to descend from the
nonexistent Olympian heaven and sing of railroad trains, smoking factories, broad fields of waving alfalfa, the sweat of workers,
and similar objects of the modern poetic phrensy. Now, present-day authors are technically hobbled by a definite religious
tradition that limits their range of invocation to the divine or holy personages of the Scriptures if, indeed, they have any
religion at all. Invocation is a sound, necessary practice in instances such as the present, when the author frankly requires
supernatural aid to sing the praises of a heroine whose beauty and worth far exceed his capacity for wielding language; but
how can he call on a Muse who has been an exploded myth, an exorcised hobgoblin, for some two thousand years? Shall he invoke
the shade of Solomon, who sang the praises of his love well enough? Alas, the higher critics of the Bible now assure us that
Solomon probably never lived, and that if he did live he was a barbaric Syrian chief named Suleimo, and that in any case the
Song of Songs is not by him at all, but is a clumsy Hebrew paraphrase of a certain well-known Greek love dialogue–so corrupted,
it is true, as to be entirely unrecognizable–which only proves the backwardness of the Semitic adapters.

No, this is the twentieth century, and science alone can aid us; psychology, to be exact, which has developed the great principle
of the association of ideas. This thesis states that if one thing is emphatically presented in juxtaposition with another
thing, the animal and human minds (between which there is no distinction except unscientific prejudice) will inevitably come
to connect the two. Shakespeare, for instance, in such lines as

“But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

It is the East, and Juliet is the sun,”

was groping toward this principle which has been refined today into the subtle superposition of the picture of a partly clad
girl’s body on the billboard image of everything from motor cars to coffins. It is to psychology, therefore, and the association
of ideas, that we turn to help us bring Laura Beaton before you.

Softly, softly, on viol, harpsichord, and flute, play the sweetest crystal melody that Mozart ever wrote. Blow, pink-and-white
cherry blossoms, bravely blow in the sharp zephyrs of spring under a cool blue sky, and let little children laugh with silver
glee, and let us hear their laughter faintly from afar. Open the fragrant chest of memory, and let us take out the most precious,
muskiest remembrance, for now we are to recall the diamond moment of youth when we sat close to our secret beloved in the
darkness, and heard the trivial song which had somehow come to imprison the wild, piercing essence of first love … and our
hands touched, and a delicious shiver shook us.

–The sweetest crystal melody that Mozart ever wrote–

The curtain rises on Laura.

In a white silk slip she sat, brushing her glorious hair and talking calmly and cheerfully with her mother. Her hair was long
and golden, and so heavy that she could not wash it without cloistering herself for a whole day. Her eyes, very large and
gray-blue, and set wide apart under light, arched eyebrows and a square brow, had usually a frank and somewhat merry look;
but sometimes, as now when her mother made a quaint and touching remark, they could all at once blink into a softness that
might melt the heart of a corporation lawyer. She had a straight nose, and a jaw which might have had almost too firm a set,
had not the sweet curves of flesh in her cheeks softened the line. Her inviting mouth, with its slightly protruding lower
lip, was so lovely that cigarette advertisers paid remarkable sums to have their various brands photographed between or near
those lips. (She always threw the cigarette away with a grimace when the pose was completed.)

But your eyes are straying to her other charms. Yes, that perfect bust which she confined habitually out of modesty and not
to assist sculptural Nature, now stood out in clear beauty beneath the silk. Her body was straight, strong and tall as years
of western outdoors and food could make it, and the sweet, exciting outward curve of her hips swept down into the finest,
shapeliest, whitest legs and feet in the world. This rare being was encased in a smooth, healthy skin that looked as though
it would be electric to the touch, and, as she was now wearing his engagement ring, it is not amiss to say that Andrew had
once or twice found it so.

With infinite regret we must now go back twenty-five years. Briefly, you must know that she was the only daughter of a Congregationalist
minister named Gideon James Beaton and his wife, Anna Wilson Beaton, whom he had found and married in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
six months after he had arrived there in 1912 to preach the Word in that wide, sun-baked territory. Gideon Beaton had come
from an eastern divinity school in answer to a letter from the shepherdless congregation to his dean. His first sermon, an
abstruse dissertation on the Book of Jonah emphasizing the necessity of following the call to preach God’s Word wherever it
might be on pain of finding oneself in the dark hell of the fish’s belly if one denied the call, was addressed to his inner
self rather than to the congregation, to whom, indeed, it was not quite complimentary; but the flock, paying slack heed to
the thread of his argument, was thoroughly won over by his deep, resonant voice, his pale yet manly good looks, and the intense
sincerity of his words and gestures. No member of the laity was more impressed than Anna Wilson, gay and pretty daughter of
a prosperous ranchman, who had reached the distressing age of twenty-five with her heart undented by the awkward assaults
of the scions of local good families. Overnight her religious conscience awakened, and she realized with shame how she had
neglected her duties to the church. She revived the languishing Junior Social Circle, volunteered to take the Sunday school
children on summer picnics, contributed her sweet soprano voice to the choir, organized several suppers, and, in short, much
to her astonishment, was proposed to by Reverend Beaton a half year to the day after he preached his first sermon. Her family
consented with mixed feelings to this union with the cloth, and pretty Anna Wilson became the consort of a man of God.

In the years that followed, Anna’s face gradually set in a permanent expression of puzzled and hurt surprise, so often were
such feelings uppermost in her soul. Alas for the maidens who dash into wedlock expecting it to be an endless odorous lane
of lilacs overhead and roses underfoot! The transition was very hard for Anna. Gideon Beaton was a religious man as well as
a minister: gentle as a child in most matters, and adamantly willful as a child where principles of faith were concerned.
It was his conviction that the Lord would provide, and he gave away all the money that came into his hands. Anna eventually
learned to practice innocent deceptions and squirrel away occasional sums for the family’s use, but to come to this from the
insouciant, selfish spending in her parents’ well-to-do home took years of bewilderment not seldom punctuated with tears.
Deprived of most of the lighthearted self-indulgence of her girlhood, she developed a fantastic sweet tooth; her manner of
nibbling at cakes, holding them to her mouth in two dainty hands, together with her practice of storing away money in hidden
places, caused her husband to nickname her “Squirrel” in their private moments of endearment. These were many; indeed, they
loved each other, and were innocent enough to be completely, unreflectively pleased with this love, not having any other experience
with which to compare it and not being aware of the explicit standards set forth in modern treatises on the mechanics of connubial
bliss, or the transcendent ecstasies hinted at in French novels. They grew old together in the unconscious contentment which
the loose nomenclature of former days called happiness. Gideon passed away peacefully–after a heart illness of two days’ duration–at
the age of fifty.