Aurora Dawn by Herman Wouk Read Free Book Online Page B

made a desk-thumping
     appeal in a shrill, emotional voice for money to continue “the Fold’s great work,” and ordered baskets passed among the hundreds
     of tourists who crowded the Tabernacle to the last row of its narrow wooden-pillared balcony. The singing was real, and the
     confessions were real: the music was sung with uninhibited heartiness by the mountain folk of the Fold as well as by many
     of the visitors, the confessions came pouring straightforward from the people with directness of narrative, quaint turn of
     local speech, and touches of unexpected detail almost impossible to contrive. Father Stanfield absolved them, sometimes with
     gravity, sometimes with a rough jocular comment on their misdeeds, and evidently derived much pleasure from the showmanship
     of the ritual with the robes.
    Reserving judgment, Andrew grew more and more positive that the man was accessible to the scheme he had in mind, and his prize
     of twenty-five thousand a year seemed drifting within his grasp. Momentarily his mind wandered from the strange pageant before
     him. He saw an apartment on Park Avenue in the Seventies, richly furnished, saw himself and Honey moving graciously among
     a gathering of radio and advertising executives, his guests; he smelled the hors d’oeuvres, he tasted the wine, his eye lingered
     on the clever matching of the dark maroon satin drapes with the Turkish carpet. He exchanged a casual word or two with a couple
     of his guests in a quiet corner of a room–just the word or two necessary to win a huge new account, doubling his income at
     a stroke and paying for the party ten times over. The apartment was cramping, after all. The house in Sands Point owned by
     Chester Bullock, of Bullock and Griffin, with the veranda facing sunsetwards over the blue Sound, was much more to his taste.
     Now he could afford to build one like it and start working toward his real aim, an advertising agency of his own. The first
     requisite, of course, was a home where he could do the large-scale entertaining which would open the golden gates. An aureate
     haze enveloped his thoughts. They lost coherence and became a series of broken images of luxury: a white motor yacht with
     a beautifully sheered bow, himself as skipper resplendent in a yachting uniform; Honey in mink, Honey and he in a box at the
     opera, bowing to the grand Davidoffs in the central box and being invited to join them for supper afterward; a two-month vacation
     at Colorado Springs, playing golf (he would always keep in shape, of course), being very gracious to his old friends and even
     to Curran, the flinty course manager who had gouged him so mercilessly in his caddie days; Honey the center of all eyes when
     they walked into the long, elegant dining room at night–except that Honey unaccountably was shorter and had black hair and
     thin, tense, active little hands like cats–but that was impossible–
    He was roused from his dozing by a burst of music, the closing song of the repentance period, a lively air:
    Their sins they were as scarlet,
    They are now as white as snow;
    Their sins they were as scarlet,
    They are now as white as snow—
    Their souls are back with ]esus
    And the devil hides below—
    For they’re washed in the blood of the Lamb.
    The meeting broke up, following a benediction by Father Stanfield. With a rich noise of cheery converse the crowd went outside,
     where buses waited lined up to take them back to town. The people of the Fold melted into the gloom of the lawn. Conducted
     to a high, deep feather bed in a room in the Old House by Elder Pennington, Andy fell asleep almost immediately, to renew
     his visions of riches in the more brightly glowing hues of deep dreams.
    Not being of the school of literature which deals analytically with the phantasms of slumber, this history makes no effort
     to follow our hero into the land of Nod, although doubtless the whole truth about him could thereby easily be laid bare under
     a