Aurora Dawn (30 page)

The young man dug into his breast pocket and brought out a folded sheet of white paper which he opened and passed to the clergyman.
There were several typed paragraphs on it.

“I assure you the matter
is
urgent,” he said. “Will you be good enough to sign this?”

As Stanfield glanced over the paper, Andrew drummed his fingers on the side of his leg, pressed his lips tightly together
and stared with tired, reddened eyes.

This was what the preacher read:

“For the purpose of clarifying recent unfortunate incidents in connection with my broadcasts under the sponsorship of the
Marquis Company, makers of Aurora Dawn products, and to correct unfair and misleading impressions now current, I, Father Calvin
Stanfield, wish to make the following statements:

“First, that throughout my association with Mr. Talmadge Marquis I have found him always courteous, tolerant, understanding
and liberal, and that he displayed all these qualities unfailingly in his attitude toward my sermon, ‘The Hog in the House’;

“Second, that wild and irresponsible newspaper gossip, not Mr. Marquis, was solely responsible for the deplorable turmoil
regarding that sermon;

“Third, that I freely extend to the Marquis Company permission to use these-statements in newspaper advertisements or in any
way they choose, for the express purpose of preventing further injustice to Mr. Marquis, whom I regard with the highest respect
and esteem.

“Calvin Stanfield.”

“Whew!” exclaimed the Shepherd, and let the paper fall to his lap. He looked inquiringly at Andrew, who returned the look
with an impassive expression. “I don’t rightly know what yer game is, son,” said the clergyman at last. “You know I ain’t
gonna sign this. You knowed it when you come here.”

“I think you will sign,” said the hero of this history, “after I explain a few things to you.”

“Nothin’s impossible, I reckon,” said Stanfield, “but that’ll be some blue-ribbon explainin’.”

“You may not know,” said Andy, “that Marquis is in very difficult circumstances as a result of your sermon. He has to face
an inquiry by his board of directors, and they have the power to throw him out. You won the fight. Be generous. Sign that
paper, so that he can produce it at the meeting. It will save him. Otherwise he will probably be ruined.”

Stanfield regarded him soberly. “I’m sorry fer Marquis, but they is more hope fer a fool than fer a man wise in his own wisdom.
I ain’t ruinin’ him; he ruined hisself. It ain’t fer me to save him, ’specially with no outrageous lie.”

Andrew, paler and more haggard than ever, said, “I regret you feel that way.” With this he reached into the breast pocket
again and handed to the cleric his letter to Gracie Smollett, saying, “I have some information about Mrs. Smollett for you.”

The preacher’s eyes widened as he took the note; then he smiled. “You seen her afore I did, eh? I figgered I’d lose her in
the crowd. What’s she like?”

“A little British lady—very sweet,” said Andrew. “Quite pretty. Hair just has a touch of gray. She’s at the Buchanan Hotel
now.”

A tender, wistful and melancholy light was in the Faithful Shepherd’s eyes. “A touch of gray, eh?” he repeated softly. “A
touch of gray.”

Andrew picked his hat off the table where he had laid it, and turned it rapidly round and round in his hands. “I’m genuinely
sorry, believe me, Father Stanfield,” he said in a low voice, looking at the moving hat, “that Mrs. Smollett stumbled into
me and inadvertently disclosed as much of your private affairs as she did. She’s very simple, and not discreet.”

“Shucks, it don’t signify none what she told you,” said the Shepherd gently and absently. “It all belongs in the long ago.”

“Not quite,” said the dauntless lover of Carol Marquis. “It’s not right for me to tell you first, I suppose, but the fact
is, sir, you have a son who was adopted by the man Smollett, and brought up as his own child. Father Stanfield,” he hurried
on, as the preacher registered dumb amazement, “this interview is becoming more and more painful to me, and I must get to
the point. Please believe that for reasons it would be useless to dwell upon, my situation is fully as desperate as Mr. Marquis’s
because of what happened with ‘The Hog in the House.’ I must ask you again to sign that paper, or I will not keep the information
about your past to myself. I will,” said our hero, keeping his eyes steadily away from the preacher’s face, “give it to Milton
Jaeckel, with consequences to your reputation and the prosperity of your Fold which you can readily imagine.”

The preacher sat without sound or motion for a while, then said thoughtfully, “This boy—where’s he at?”

“Cape Town,” said Andrew. “The Smolletts went to South Africa to live in 1921. Mrs. Smollett became a widow last January.
She came here for an operation on her eyes. But you probably know all that.”

“I didn’t know nuthin’,” said Stanfield, “’ceptin’ that Gracie was in Boston. Buchanan Hotel, eh? Reckon I’ll talk to her.”

As he reached for the telephone Andy said hastily, “I’m sure you don’t want me intruding any longer. If you’ll just be good
enough to sign that paper and let me have it–”

“Oh, yes. The paper.” The Shepherd looked at the document in his lap as though it were a strange cat that had crept there.
“You comin’ at me with too many things at once, son. How was all that about Milton Jaeckel? Guess I wasn’t payin’ no mind.”

Feeling as though he were making a second effort to ignite a sodden firework, Andrew repeated his proposal. The preacher regarded
him with an increasingly quizzical, disturbing gaze.

“Son,” said Father Stanfield when he ended lamely in the middle of a sentence, “what is it in this world that you want so
very bad?”

Our hero suddenly wished that he had slept and eaten before coming to this critical scene. Clearly, he was weak; Stanfield’s
simple question affected him like a surprise blow to the stomach. Actually trembling in all limbs, he mustered language to
say, “That’s beside the point. But if you must know, my whole happiness depends on this matter. That’s why I’ll seize any
weapon.”

“Yer right in what you say,” answered the preacher, “but not the way you think. Yer whole happiness depends on lookin’ into
yer soul and figgerin’ out what wrong notions got you crawlin’ so low. The first night you sat alongside o’ me at the Old
House, eatin’ soup, Reale, I liked you. I ain’t never felt no different, spite o’ all the hocus-pocus I seen you mixed up
in, but yer sick, boy, you got the sickest spirit I seen in a long time. This is one rotten big snowball of a sin you come
rollin’ into my presence this mornin’. I reckon you been tumblebuggin’ her along fer quite a spell. She’s growed big, she’s
jest about ready to take charge an’ roll away downhill with you thrashin’ around in the middle.”

Andrew murmured, “That may all be, but I’d still like you to sign that paper, if you please.”

“Or else we git this here big turrible exposure of me and my iniquity, eh? Why, go to it, son,” said the preacher. “I intend
to make public confession before the Fold, but if yer newspaper friend will git extra good outta the story, why, give it to
him. What I got to bear fer my sin I got to bear, but somehow I think I done my penance in twenty years of loneliness and
they ain’t no harm gonna come of this turn. When the Lord hits, he hits like a hammer, and when he blesses, it’s a pleasant
harvest time with no rain. He sends me Gracie, and he gives me a son. All will be well. Praise Him!” Father Stanfield looked
out of the window and turned his face to the sky. Andrew Reale experienced a desire to slide under the carpet unperceived.

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.

In which our hero really reaches bottom

—and learns, like Dante, that beyond the Nadir

there lies the climb to Hope.

B
IG 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.”