The Loved One Read Online Free PDF Page A

illustrious body was given more than usually splendid honors or some new acquisition was made to its collected masterpieces of contemporary art. Of recent weeks his interest had been livelier and more technical for it was in humble emulation of its great neighbor that the Happier Hunting Ground was planned. The language he daily spoke in his new trade was a patois derived from that high pure source. More than once Mr. Schultz had exultantly exclaimed after one of his performances: “It was worthy of Whispering Glades.” As a missionary priest making his first pilgrimage to the Vatican, as a paramount chief of equatorial Africa mounting the Eiffel Tower, Dennis Barlow, poet and pets’ mortician, drove through the Golden Gates.
    They were vast, the largest in the world, and freshly regilt. A notice proclaimed the inferior dimensions of their Old World rivals. Beyond them lay a semicircle of golden yew, a wide gravel roadway and an island of mown turf on which stood a singular and massive wall of marble sculptured in the form of an open book. Here, in letters a foot high, was incised:
THE DREAM
    Behold I dreamed a dream and I saw a New Earth sacred to HAPPINESS. There amid all that Nature and Art could offer to elevate the Soul of Man I saw the Happy Resting Place of Countless Loved Ones. And I saw the Waiting Ones who still stood at the brink of that narrow stream that now separated themfrom those who had gone before. Young and old, they were happy too. Happy in Beauty, Happy in the certain knowledge that their Loved Ones were very near, in Beauty and Happiness such as the earth cannot give.
    I heard a voice say: “Do this.”
    And behold I awoke and in the Light and Promise of my DREAM I made WHISPERING GLADES.
    ENTER STRANGER and BE HAPPY.
    And below, in vast cursive facsimile, the signature:
WILBUR KENWORTHY, THE DREAMER.
    A modest wooden signboard beside it read:
Prices on inquiry at Administrative Building. Drive straight on.
    Dennis drove on through green parkland and presently came in sight of what in England he would have taken for the country seat of an Edwardian financier. It was black and white, timbered and gabled, with twisting brick chimneys and wrought-iron wind-vanes. He left his car among a dozen others and proceeded on foot through a box walk, past a sunken herb garden, a sundial, a bird-bath and fountain, a rustic seat and a pigeon-cote. Music rose softly all round him, the subdued notes of the “Hindu Love-song” relayed from an organ through countless amplifiers concealed about the garden.
    When as a newcomer to the Megalopolitan Studios he firsttoured the lots, it had strained his imagination to realize that those solid-seeming streets and squares of every period and climate were in fact plaster façades whose backs revealed the structure of bill-boardings. Here the illusion was quite otherwise. Only with an effort could Dennis believe that the building before him was three-dimensional and permanent; but here, as everywhere in Whispering Glades, failing credulity was fortified by the painted word.
    This perfect replica of an old English Manor,
a notice said,
like all the buildings of Whispering Glades, is constructed throughout of Grade A steel and concrete with foundations extending into solid rock. It is certified proof against fire, earthquake and Their name liveth for evermore who record it in Whispering Glades.
    At the blank patch a signwriter was even then at work and Dennis, pausing to study it, discerned the ghost of the words “high explosive” freshly obliterated and the outlines of “nuclear fission” about to be filled in as substitute.
    Followed by music he stepped as it were from garden to garden for the approach to the offices lay through a florist’s shop. Here one young lady was spraying scent over a stall of lilac while a second was talking on the telephone: “… Oh, Mrs. Bogolov, I’m really sorry but it’s just one of the things that Whispering Glades does not do. The