He would probably have been surprised to know that all this while the girl was also giving him a thorough if less direct scrutiny, that she had noted with approval the squareness of his shoulders, clearly a tribute to his bone structure and not to his tailor, as well as his curly, sandy hair, his handsome if rather long features, and above all his well-cut mouth and the flashing beauties it contained. He would surely have been astonished to know that she had given him a nickname within five minutes of the moment she had first noticed him, and that she thought of him as “Teeth.”
Along came the coffee, and the silence was broken up, all too effectively for Andrew. It was bad enough that he told her the story of his life, from his origin in a Colorado schoolmaster’s abode through his young manhood at Yale and his rapid rise since then into his present position (described at length, with names of important people studding the account like raisins in a bun); bad enough that he soared into a dithyramb on his plans for the future, omitting, as he now recalled with shame, any reference to his beloved Honey; but, worst of all, in an incredible fit of weak-mindedness, he disclosed to her the whole truth of his present enterprise. A tingle of remorse crawled up his spine as he recalled this. The girl had been a gratifying audience. It is in the nature of young ladies, under certain circumstances, to rise to great heights of prolonged and artistic listening. She fixed grave wide eyes on him when he was serious, sparkled with laughter at his least sally, filled his pauses with quick questions that spurred him on to fresh bursts of monologue, and, in fine, subtly conveyed to him that he was rather a wonderful fellow. This elevation of spirits lasted for several hours, as they moved back to the parlor car without a perceptible break in Andrew’s epic narrative. Then, just when he was becoming a bit giddy with success (this was in the midst of spilling the beans about his current adventure), he thought he noticed a tinge of quiet amusement in the girl’s expression at the wrong times. It was impossible to define, much less to challenge, but, illusion or no, it made him uneasy, and his cataract of eloquence suddenly lagged to a sluggish trickle, then vanished into the sands of silence.
The girl, after vainly roweling him with a few more questions, seemed satisfied that he was exhausted, and did a little talking herself. Said she:
“Well, I’m certainly glad I ran into you. This train kills me. I die every time I have to take it. If you knew how I hate to get up at three o’clock in the morning to catch a train–I don’t as a rule, I just stay up all night, that’s what I did last night, I rhumba’d until two-thirty, then went home, took a shower and changed my clothes. I probably look it. I loathe morning trains. I feel so filthy by ten o’clock I can’t bear to touch myself. My face is like a cobblestone street this minute–” (it was like the blandest Bavarian cream, thought Andrew). “The only good thing about this train is that it gets me to Mother’s six o’clock at night, so that all I do is eat dinner and fall into bed, and that’s one day out of two killed. I visit my mother every now and then for a weekend–my parents are divorced. Mother isn’t bad, but her husband is the most horrible goon.”–(The word “goon,” a main prop of young feminine conversation in that decade, meant a harmless, fumbling, shambling fellow. It was loosely used to refer to all males except the current object of a young lady’s desire.)–“He writes books–novels and biographies and things that nobody ever buys. He just wrote a book about Thomas Chatterton–what a pancake! Not that he has to worry, the way Mother is fixed. He was her English instructor at Wellesley. Mother is a terrific aesthete, anyway. She had a sensational crush on him at college–that’s nothing, I’m mad about my Fine Arts prof and I know he’s a goon, but I can’t help it, he’s beautiful–but Mother never outgrew hers. Three and a half years after she married Dad she decided that old Literature A-4 was the big thing in her life, and she walked out on Dad, leaving me in the middle. I don’t mind it except when I have to visit Mother and her husband is around. He’s so polite I could die, and I know he despises me. He always wants to talk about school, and how my painting is coming, and–”
“Do you paint?” interrupted Andrew with some surprise.
“Yes. Oh, nothing good, yet–but I’ll be good some day. I’m going to spend a year in Mexico as soon as I can talk Dad into it. He thinks I’ll be raped by bandits.”
The porter here put his head and one white, starched sleeve into the car and announced, “Washington, D.C., five minutes.”
“I change here,” said the girl, cutting off her disquisition abruptly and beginning to wriggle into a camel’s hair coat as lethally casual as the rest of her array. Andrew sprang to her assistance and swung a heavy bag down from the rack overhead with an easy movement which the girl watched appreciatively. For more than an hour Andrew had been increasingly aware of a very awkward circumstance; they had, in this extravagant barter of confidences, somehow neglected the detail of exchanging names. They had passed so quickly from formality to the mushroom intimacy which springs up between wayfarers who have no intention of meeting again, that Andrew had never introduced himself. He suddenly felt that this was an impossible situation, that she must not be allowed to vanish into anonymity.
“It’s a little late for this,” said he with one of his pearliest smiles, “but anyway, my name’s Andrew Reale.”
“How do you do, Mr. Reale?” said the girl. “It’s been fun talking to you.” With this she relapsed into a prim silence, smoothed her coat once more, and folded her gloved little hands in her lap with feline grace.
Andrew, a little out of countenance, could not let it rest so. “And what’s yours?” he inquired, with as much genial music as he could instill into the syllables.
The girl looked at him with the oddest expression, not unfriendly but quite unfathomable. “I don’t feel like telling you,” she said in a pleasant and definite tone.
Our hero felt as though he had driven a car at sixty miles an hour into a rock wall. The three minutes that elapsed before the train drew into the station were longer than the three hours which had preceded them. Not another word could Andrew dredge out of his reservoir of easy civilities. He sat in silence until the girl left the car with an airy “So long,” which he barely acknowledged with a grated “Good-by.”
As Andrew’s recollections took this turn he groaned aloud. “Rough road if you ain’t used to it,” commented the bus driver, a gaunt gray man in blue denims, taking a bite from a large meat sandwich and resting it on the ledge in front of him.
“How much longer to Smithville?” asked Andrew, bracing himself on his bucking seat.
“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.
CHAPTER 3
Containing some very sound reflections
and introducing the heroine and other
important personages.
BULFINCH 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, volunteer
ed 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.