Aurora Dawn (15 page)

–Life “as it really is,” according to modern inspiration–

Fifteen hundred people filling the wide, bleak studio barked with laughter all at once. A sinner in sackcloth, a little, thin,
weary-looking farmer, admitted he had given another man’s spouse a hug and squeeze in the vestry of the Tabernacle the previous
Sunday. Upon being asked who his partner in guilt was, he indicated a burly housewife on a penitential stool nearby, whereupon
Father Stanfield asked whether he was confessing to coveting his neighbor’s wife or laboring on the Sabbath. As Carol Marquis
leaned back her head and laughed, throwing her hair in a black shower on the gold stuff of her gown, her eyes chanced to look
full into Andrew’s, and in that exchange of glances, for reasons of the human spirit which could not be fathomed by ten empiric
psychologists running a hundred rats through a thousand mazes for ten thousand days, Andrew felt that this girl was his for
the taking. Since the famous night of the snowstorm he had seen her only once, on a Friday evening when she had suddenly telephoned
and spoken thus: “Hello, Teeth, I’m in from school and I want to rhumba tonight. Take me to the Krypton Room or I’ll tell
everything.” But the tête-à-tête had proved decorous in the extreme, and he had returned the willful maiden to her doorstep
without so much as brushing her lips with his. All the more curious, then, was the unmistakable content of this historic glance.
The girl’s dark brown eyes had laughed into his; then become fixed; then flickered for the merest instant to Laura; then looked
profoundly into his eyes again, for perhaps five full seconds; and then, with a laugh and a toss of her head, she was regarding
the stage once more. Our hero, stirred to his toes, gazed thoughtfully at her small white ear, and the artful tumble of thick
hair pulled back to expose it, and from some gloomy crypt of his soul he heard a slow, clever voice say, “Maybe I could marry
the Marquis girl”; at which precise moment the exquisite hand of Laura softly closed over his with quiet affection.

There is little that could be called heroic about our hero at this point, but worse is coming, and that without delay. In
descending to the next level of infamy, let us follow the example of an illustrious predecessor, and begin a new Canto.

The Dinner Party: I—Containing a skein

of many colors.

N
ATUHAL PHILOSOPHY
has reached a stage of progress at which it can predict with confidence that the mixing of certain substances will produce
a material capable of detonating, to the detriment of the persistence of life and property within a known radius. Unfortunately,
that branch of philosophy dealing with human reactions, known in our time as psychology, has arrived at no such level of certainty,
human spirits proving, for some reason, less amenable to systematizing than gases or metals. That this is only a temporary
setback, and that eventually science will be able to predict the behavior of a middle-aged Caucasian as accurately as it can
that of hydrogen, no one doubts, but in the meantime the margin of uncertainty makes many undertakings risky, and not the
least dangerous of these is the composition of a dinner party. Talmadge Marquis, no close reasoner on human relationships
in any case, can therefore not be blamed for inadvertently compounding a brew of souls which went off with an explosion that
shattered several lives and brought his own pleasure dome down on his head in a tinkling heap.

Andrew Reale and Honey Beaton, in evening dress, stood at the threshold of the Marquis home on East Seventieth Street in New
York, on a warm and humid evening in early July. The old three-story house had been designed by a naïve architect of the last
decade of the nineteenth century to whom walls were not walls unless they were soundproof, ceilings not ceilings unless twice
a man’s height intervened between them and the floor, and fireplaces not fireplaces unless they were places for fires; while
his taste in exterior decorations ran to such things as ornate ironwork and white stone lions. As Andrew rang the doorbell
his fiancée glanced at the evidences of old fashion with surprise, for our hero had been praising the splendors of the Marquis
establishment for a month. Andrew saw her expression and said quickly, “Pay no attention to the outside. It’s all been done
over inside, and–” the opening of the front door interrupted his sentence and rendered further description unnecessary, for,
as Laura stepped past the butler through the doorway, the wonder itself lay before her.

The brass horse in the hallway caught and held her eye immediately. He was not a horse as the lions were lions, ploddingly
taken from life. Oh no! He stood on a severe table before a huge round bronze-tinted mirror imbedded in the dark blue wall,
and he was a horse streamlined, unhorsified, geometrized until nothing equine of him remained but the toss of his head with
which he looked back at his body, contemplating that arrangement of cones and cylinders with vacant dismay. Andrew took Laura’s
arm and led her to the living room, where Marquis stepped out of the group of chatting and drinking guests to welcome them.

Laura’s eyes, as she entered the room, were treated to the sight of a riotous marriage of mathematical forms and pastel tints,
a nuptial delirium of Euclid and Iris. The low tables were planes tangent to and resting on metal circles; the carpet was
a vast gray square, innocent of designs; the chairs were upholstered green parabolas; the huge sofa was a hollowed tan parallelepiped;
the drape masking the far end of the room was a single yellow oblong; the very flower vases and ash trays were coppery polygonal
prisms; and all was lighted from concealed sources with a diffused radiance that cast nothing so irregular and uncalculated
on the scene as a shadow. While Laura scanned these objects of her beloved’s admiration, the soul of the display came tripping
up to greet them in the form of the fair Carol, climactically fashionable in a gray silk gown topped with a wine-red-lined
cowl which she wore demurely over her jetty hair. She greeted Laura familiarly, for she had become friendly with her at Michael
Wilde’s studio, where her presence as a worshipful art student had been tolerated by the painter while he was depicting Laura
as “Charity.” Indeed, Wilde had at first taken some pleasure in reviling the youngster for being a parasite and in exhorting
her to become a nun, but upon seeing that everything he said was received with groveling and meaningless admiration he left
off the uncontested argument in disgust and had permitted the young ladies to chatter. Thus it was that these positive and
negative poles in Reale’s career had become “Carol” and “Honey” to each other. The greeting of Laura by the young hostess
was a long, effusive business, while the welcome to Andrew was a brief “Hello there” and a briefer squeeze of the hand, which
was all very proper.

–The brass horse in the hallway–

Gathered around the honored guest of the evening in the center of the room, a knot of brilliantly bedight ladies and elegant
gentlemen were all talking at once, and like a cornered bear among dogs, Father Stanfield loomed great among them, his shoulders
as high as most of their heads–for you must know, reader, that this feast of Belshazzar was in celebration of the renewal
of the contract between Aurora Dawn and the Faithful Shepherd, after twelve weeks of unique success, with a Hooley which still
floated lonely as a cloud in the cerulean reaches of the high fifties, while the comedians and jazz singers whom he had overtopped
bobbed impotently around thirty-five, like balloons which have reached a height where the thinness of the air nullifies the
buoyancy of their gas. When Laura and Andy arrived, the Shepherd was undergoing a bantering attack for his views on ladies’
clothing and was defending himself with a high good humor which had already sent one blushing matron to the privacy of a bedroom
to revise the steepness of her décolletage. The other guests, drinks in hand, pressed around him to argue and to laugh.

Now dinner was announced, and the banqueters, their souls wafted on the pleasant fumes of the red, brown, green, blue, yellow,
purple, or orange versions of alcohol they had consumed, marched hilariously to the dining room, which might have shocked
them, had they been in a less hedonic state, with the suddenness of its change in style from the living room; for it was “done”
with painful authenticity in the English manner of a hundred and fifty years ago, as though the decorator had indulged a taste
for allegory to testify that, however modern
living
might become,
dining
remained an old-style affair. Each guest was graciously pointed to a place by young Miss Marquis, and the dinner began.

It will be well to trace how the characters were disposed in this fatal symposium. At the head of the table sat Mr. Marquis,
of course, and facing him at the other end was his winsome daughter, the cowl now thrown back from her raven coiffure. On
Marquis’s right hand bulked Father Stanfield. On his left was a lady known to all present as Mrs. Towne: a tall, slender brunette
of perhaps twenty-eight summers, who had little to say but said that little good-naturedly, and who had not been seen to arrive
at the party, having been in the living room, very much at home, when the first guests came. Beside her sat Stephen English,
and next to him, the fair Laura. Walter Grovill, the fat advertising man, giggled at Laura’s left side. In an effort to overcome
his self-conscious stiffness at being in his master’s home he had rapidly swallowed four drinks, and his geniality-mechanism,
broken loose from its moorings, was carrying him away helplessly. Next to him was Mrs. Leach, wife of his small, bitter partner,
who seemed to have shrunk in the course of years from a normal stature to that of her spouse, acquiring all the discontented
wrinkles of his face in so contracting. Since scarcely a day went by wherein this good wife did not calculate how much richer
she would be, and how much more elaborate a household she could afford, if the advertising firm were Thomas Leach, Incorporated,
instead of Grovill and Leach; and since she had already decided this evening that she could easily have a living room like
Marquis’s were it not for the sums that went for Grovill’s salary and dividends; and since she hated Grovill with a separate,
entirely altruistic hatred because of his recent marriage, for reasons which will be clear when the focus shifts to Mrs. Grovill;
her juxtaposition to her husband’s friend depressed her far beyond the poor power of alcohol to add or detract, and rendered
her fully qualified for the ancient office of the Death’s head at the feast.

Between Mrs. Leach and Carol sat Michael Wilde, facing, as he protestingly pointed out, his own handiwork, the portrait of
Marquis which hung on the wall opposite: “I’m perfectly familiar with the piece,” he said, “and placing me here is depriving
someone else of the pleasure and profit of contemplating it”: but the wily Carol who directed the seating would have him no
place but at her right hand. On her left sat Mr. Van Wirt, most unhappily sandwiched between Carol and the strange Mrs. Grovill.
The latter, a very tall, strikingly handsome red-haired young lady about twenty-five years of age, was an old friend of Laura’s,
and had been known in her days of work for the Pandar Model Agency as Flame Anders. Walter Grovill had wooed this auburn beauty
doggedly for two years, and had been startled one day by a sudden and utter capitulation. Edith Grovill–for “Flame” had been
quenched at the altar–worked as a model no more, dropped her former friends, acquired a rich wardrobe, and spent most of her
time in shopping, or in lying around Grovill’s apartment in undress, reading novels. She also gained a singular reserve, and
could go for days without speaking, except when addressed. At this dinner party she had not as yet voiced a syllable, having
answered all greetings and gallantries with a mechanical but dazzling smile that was as acceptable as the best repartee of
the newest wit in town. The astute reader will perceive with no further instruction why this creature was hated by the wife
of her husband’s partner, and why Grovill, like a moon, received some of the reflected green rays of this hatred. But, we
were sympathizing with Van Wirt. The efficient administrator was in a difficult case, since neither short arrogance nor scrambling
humility, his two natural bearings, quite served with these two females, nor was his wide experience with demireps of much
avail. Carol, in her determined prodding of Wilde to elicit remarks she might quote, ignored Van Wirt as though his chair
had been vacant, while Mrs. Grovill paid no more heed to his hard-wrought pleasantries than if she had been deaf. To be simultaneously
snubbed on the left hand and on the right by two beautiful young ladies is possibly the least congenial experience a man in
his late forties can be made to undergo; and therefore, at least to the outward observer of the group at dinner, Van Wirt,
of all present, was most to be pitied.