The “Fay place” gave a first impression of having been an orange plantation transformed into a vast garden. There were acres and acres of land, Denin could not guess how many. In the midst of orange trees in fruit and blossom, and pepper trees shedding coral, and tall palm trees with long gray beards which were last year’s fronds, stood the big, rambling pink bungalow that had been Barbara’s home. Its tiled roof and wide loggias were just visible from the road; but the Mirador, to which the driver pointed, was in plain sight. Denin’s heart bounded. He almost expected to see a young girl with smoke-blue eyes and copper-beech hair (it had been red in those days, she’d told him) open one of the shuttered windows and look out with a smile.
Once, while she and her mother were staying at Gorston Old Hall, he had tried to teach Barbara chess. In the midst of a game which she hoped to win, she suddenly saw herself facing defeat. “Let’s begin again, and play it all over!” she had cried out, laughing.
Ah, if they could do that now: begin again, and play the game all over!
Well, the ghost of John Denin could begin to play hero with the ghost of Barbara Fay’s childhood, when he came to have his home in her old playhouse. He knew that this must and should be his home, now that he had come and seen the place and felt its influence even more subtly than he had thought to feel it. He could not get through his shorn life anywhere else.
The Mirador was distant at least four acres from the house. It too was pink, like the parent bungalow, or it had once been pink, before the fire which destroyed the addition for servants at the back had marred the rose color of its plastered adobe walls. A roof of Spanish tiles dropped low like a visor, giving cover to the balcony of the upper story; and the floor of that balcony roofed the one below. On each of these balconies only one window – which was also a door – looked out; but it was a huge window, with green exterior shutters; and the stout, square columns of the two verandas were almost hidden with roses, passion-flower, and convolvulus which had either survived the fire or grown up since. Though the front was so nearly intact, from each side of the little house could be seen the blackened wreck of burnt beams; and to screen the parent bungalow from any possible glimpse of this eyesore, a high barrier of trellis-work had been erected about two hundred feet distant from the Mirador. Over this barrier some quick-climbing creepers had been trained, and they had grown in such thick masses that an almost impenetrable green wall had already grown up between the big house and the tiny one.
“This will suit me exactly,” said Denin, trying to speak coolly. “We’ll drive back at once, please, to the agent who has the selling of the Mirador.”
·····
He was almost afraid to hear the price, lest his last dollar might not suffice to secure the treasure. But the agent in whose hands “old Drake” had put his business named the sum of two thousand dollars. This, he said, was a mere song for land so near Santa Barbara; and, no doubt, he was right. But it was a large slice of John Sanbourne’s capital, and left him only a small remnant for repairing the place, as he must agree to do before the contract could be signed.
The journey from New York had cost a good deal, and – he must live somehow, unless he could get work fitted for a “lame dog” to do. Mr. Sibley had talked vaguely of “royalties,” but it seemed impossible to Denin that many people should actually care to buy his book – the strange little book written for himself, and sent wandering out into the world to find Barbara. Even if people did buy it, the sales could surely never go beyond the three thousand dollars Eversedge Sibley had recklessly pressed upon him in advance! However, Denin did not hesitate for any of these reasons. “I’ll buy the Mirador and the acre and a half of ground Mr. Drake is willing to sell with it,” he said to the agent. “And I’d like to pay for it if possible and settle up everything to-day. Then I could move into the house at once.”
The agent stared. “There’s no furniture,” he said.
“I can get in enough to begin with, in an hour or two, surely,” Denin persisted. “I’m used to roughing it.”
The other could well believe that, from the look of the queer fellow! As a business man, he would certainly not accept a check, and would be inclined to ask expert opinion even on bank notes, paid by an unknown client with such scars, and such clothes, and in such a hurry!
“You could hardly live in the house while the repairs you must agree to are being made,” the agent reminded the would-be buyer. “Don’t you think you had better – ”
“I can manage all right,” Denin cut short the advice. “As for the repairs, I shall make them of course. What Mr. Drake asks is for the house to be restored to its former appearance (aren’t those the words?) not enlarged. Well, I must tell you frankly that I can’t afford to pay for labor. I will guarantee to make the Mirador look just as it used to look, and do it all with my own hands. I can’t work very fast, because – you can see, I’ve been disabled. But I shall have an incentive to finish as soon as possible, if I’m actually living in the house.”
“You had a severe accident, I suppose?” the curious agent could not resist suggesting.
“It was – in a way – an accident,” said Denin, and his smile was rather grim.
When he had paid for the place, had bought materials for restoring the house and improving the garden, had collected a few bits of furniture and added some other necessaries, the owner of the Mirador had only seven hundred dollars left out of his fortune. Nor did he at that time know how he was to earn more dollars. Nevertheless he had come as near to be being content as he could ever hope to be in this world. He had given his own old home to Barbara, and there was no place for memories of him there. But she had given her old home to him (unconsciously, it was true; yet it seemed to be her gift) and memories of Barbara would be his companions each hour of the day. Besides, he had the task of restoring every marred feature of the little Mirador exactly as she had described it to him. He bought a ladder and plaster and paint, and did mason’s work and painter’s work with a good will. In the four rooms which were more or less intact – bedroom, sitting-room, miniature kitchen and bath – he put a few odds and ends of second-hand furniture, enough for a hermit. And when his labor of love on the house was accomplished, he set to work in the garden. Some day, he told himself, he should find in the garden the greatest solace of all.
In his deep absorption, he forgot the book for days on end. Even in his dreams he did not remember it, for in the room where Barbara had lain ill with scarlet fever, dreams lent her to him, a childish Barbara, very kind and sweet. He knew the date on which the book was to come out, but he had lost count by a day or two, therefore it was a shock of surprise to open a parcel which arrived one morning by post, and to see six purple volumes. On each cover, in gold lettering, was printed “The War Wedding: John Sanbourne.”
His hand shook a little as he opened the front page, and began to read. Strange, how poignantly real the story was in this form, more real even than when he had written it, or read it over in manuscript that first day in New York many weeks ago now. He went on and on, and could not stop. There was no servant in the Mirador to look after his wants, and so he had no food till evening; none until he had finished the book, and had walked for a long time in the garden, thinking it all over with passionate revival of interest. After that night the book again shared his dreams with Barbara. Sometimes in dreaming, he saw Barbara reading the story; but when he waked, he said to himself there were ten chances against one that she would ever hear of it.
When “The War Wedding” in volume form was about a fortnight or three weeks old, a thick envelope full of American press cuttings arrived for “Mr. John Sanbourne,” from Eversedge Sibley and Company. Every critic, even those of the most important newspapers; praised the work of the unknown author with enthusiasm. A notice signed by a famous name said, “In reading this story, told with a limpid simplicity almost unique in the annals of story-writing, one forgets the printed page and feels that one is listening to a voice: not an ordinary voice, but the voice of a disembodied soul which has forgotten nothing of this existence and has already learned much about the next: a philosopher of crystal clearness and inspiring serenity.”
Nearly all the criticisms had something in them of the same curious exaltation of mood. The writers asked: “Who is John Sanbourne, that he can work this spell upon us?” And one said, “Whoever he is, he is bound to get post-bags full of ‘appreciations’ from half the women in the world, and a good many men.”
A letter from Sibley was enclosed with the cuttings, congratulating the author. “This is only the first batch,” he wrote, “but it’s a phenomenally big one for this short time. Evidently these hardened critics shared my weakness. When they began the book they couldn’t put it down till the end, and then they had to relieve their pent-up feelings by dashing them onto paper at white heat. Many of these reviews, as you’ll see by the date, appeared on the day after publication, most of the others on that following. Such opinions by such critics in such papers have sold the book like hot cakes. Luckily we expected a huge demand, or we should already be unable to supply it. Thanks to our foresight we have a second and third big edition ready, and an immense fourth one in the press. We have heard by cable that our history over here is repeating itself in England. The exact wording is, ‘Reviews and orders unprecedented.’ You will be getting offers from all the publishers for your next work, but we hope you’ll be true to us. I am in earnest when I speak of this, for if I am interviewed, I should like to be able to say, ‘Mr. Sanbourne has already an idea for another book which we hope to publish about a year from now.’ That will keep them remembering you! Not that they’re likely to forget for awhile. They’ll be too busy crying – the women, I mean, and I shouldn’t consider a man safe without his handkerchief. Please wire about the new book. Also whether we are at liberty to answer the numerous journalistic questions we’re getting about you, with any personal details, or whether you prefer to hide behind a veil of mystery. I’m not sure myself which is preferable.”
But Sanbourne was very sure. He left his garden work to walk to Santa Barbara and send a telegram.
“Say nothing about me to any one, please, except that I shall never write another book.”
PART II
THE LETTERS
CHAPTER VII
John Sanbourne had smiled when he read the critic’s prophecy that he was “bound to get letters of appreciation from half the women in the world,” and he had thought no more of the comic suggestion until the letters began to come. But the letters were not comic.
They were forwarded in large packets by Sibley and Company, and there were many, incredibly many of them; some from men, but mostly from women. The writers felt impelled to tell the author of “The War Wedding” what a wonderful book they thought it was, or how much good it had done them in their different states of mind. These states the readers of Sanbourne’s book described almost as penitents confessing to a priest detail their sins. And the strange confidences, or pitiful pleadings for advice and help from one who “seemed to know such glorious truths about life and death,” were desperately pathetic to Denin. He was utterly amazed and overwhelmed by this phase of his unlooked-for success, and knew not how to cope with it.
The first thousand and more letters were all from people in the United States. Then letters from Canada began drifting in. At last, when “The War Wedding” had been on sale and selling edition after edition for eight weeks, a rather smaller parcel than usual arrived from the publishers. Denin, who was in the garden, took it from the postman, at the new gate which led to the Mirador. It was in the morning, and he had been gathering late roses; for every day he decorated with her favorite blossoms the two principal rooms of the house which child-Barbara had loved. He had a big pair of scissors in his hand; and sitting down on a bench, in the cool strip of shade that ran the length of the lower balcony, he cut the string which fastened the packet. This he did, not because he was impatient to see what it contained, but because he was warm and tired after two hours of garden work and wanted an excuse to rest. The letters of so many sad women who begged for counsel that he knew not how to give, were having a shattering effect upon his nerves. He had not supposed that there were so many tragic souls of women in the world, outside the war-zone, and he dreaded the details of their lives. Sometimes he was half tempted to put the letters away or destroy them, unread.
There was a vague hope in his mind that this parcel might have something other than letters in it: but as the shears bit the tightly tied string, the stout linen envelope burst open and began to disgorge its contents: letters – letters – letters!
Between his feet John Sanbourne had placed the basket of roses; and the letters, falling out of the big envelope, began to drop onto the green leaves and crêpy-crisp blooms of pink and white and cream.
“English stamps!” he said aloud – for the habit had grown upon him of talking to himself. Bending down to pick up the letters, a dark flush streamed to his forehead. There was one envelope of the same texture, the same gray-blue tint, and the same long, narrow shape that Sir John Denin had liked and always used at Gorston Old Hall. It had fallen face downward; and as he rescued it from a fragrant bath of dew, he slowly turned it over. There was an English stamp upon this envelope also, and it was addressed to “John Sanbourne, Esq., care of Messrs. Eversedge Sibley and Company,” in Barbara’s handwriting.
For an instant everything went black, just as it had done months ago when he had got on his feet too suddenly in hospital. He shut his eyes, and leaned back with his head against the house wall – the wall of Barbara’s Mirador. It was as if he could hear her voice speaking to him across six thousand miles of land and sea. But it spoke to John Sanbourne, not to John Denin.
“My God – she’s read the book. She’s written!”
He had to say the words over to himself before he could make the thing seem credible.
And even then he did not open the letter. He dreaded to open it, and sat very still and rigid, grasping the envelope as if it were an electric battery of which he could not let go.
What if she hated the book? What if she wrote, as a woman who had been twice a war bride, to say that a subject such as he had chosen was too sacred to put into print? What if she felt bound to reproach the author for treading brutally on holy ground?
If that was what the letter had to say to him, his message of peace had failed, and all his patched-up scheme of existence broke down in that one failure.
The thought that he was a coward shrinking from a blow nerved him to open the letter. He was on the point of tearing the envelope, but he could not be rough with a thing Barbara had touched, nor could he deface it. He took up the scissors and cut off one end of the envelope, then drew out a sheet of the familiar gray-blue paper. Unfolding it, his hands trembled. All the rest of his life, such as it was, he felt, hung on what he was about to read.
The letter began abruptly. “You must have many letters from strangers, but none will bring you more gratitude than this. If you are like your book, you are too generous to be bored by grateful words from people whose sore hearts you helped to heal, so I won’t apologize. You could not write as you do, I think, if you didn’t want to do good to others. Will you then help me, even more than you have helped me already, by answering a question I am going to ask? Will you tell me whether the wonderful things you say, to comfort those of us who are losing our dearest in battle, are just inspired thoughts, or whether you have yourself been very near death, so near that you caught a vision from the other side? If you answer me, and if you say that actual experience gave you this knowledge, your book – which has already been like a strong hand dragging me up from the depths – will become a beautiful message meant especially for me out of all the whole world, making all my future life bearable.
“Every night for months I’ve gone to bed unable to sleep, because I’ve felt exactly as if my brain were a battlefield, full of the agony and hopelessness of brave men dying violent and dreadful deaths, cut off in the midst of youth, with the stories of their lives tragically unfinished. But since I read in your book that marvelous scene with those suddenly released spirits – young men of both sides, friends and enemies, meeting and talking to each other, saying, ‘Is this all?’ ‘Is this the worst that death can do to us?’ why, I seem to pass beyond the battlefield! I go with those happy, surprised young men who are seeing for the first time the great ‘reality behind the thing’ and a feeling of rest and immense peace comes to me. I don’t keep it long at a time. I can’t, yet. But if you write and say you know, I think I may some day learn to keep it.
“I have the English edition of your book, but I have read in a newspaper an extract from the interview a journalist had with the publisher in New York. You see, everybody who has some one dear in the war, or has lost some one beloved, is reading and talking of the book. They all want to know things about you, but perhaps not all for as real a reason as mine. Some people have said that perhaps the author may be a woman, who chooses to write under a man’s name. I felt sure from the first it couldn’t be so, for only a man could say those things as you say them; but I was glad of your publisher’s assurance that you are a man, and that your home now is in the far West in America. Perhaps I shouldn’t have dared write you if you were in this country, because – but no, I needn’t explain.
“My name can be of no interest to you, yet I will sign it.
“Yours gratefully, Barbara Denin.”
“Barbara Denin.” … She had kept his name!
Many a woman did (he was aware) after a second marriage continue to use the name of her first husband, in order to retain a title. But all he knew of the girl Barbara Fay made it amazing to him that she should hold to the name of a man she had never loved, after becoming the wife of a man she had loved since childhood.
A wild doubt set his brain on fire. Could there have been some terrible misunderstanding? Was it possible that after all she had never married Trevor d’Arcy? … Carried away on the flame of passion fanned by her letter, Denin told himself that it might be so, and that if she were free he would still have the right to go back to her. If she had not given herself to another man she belonged to him, to him alone, and she would not hate him if he explained the sacrifice he had made for her sake.
He was on his feet before he knew what he was doing. The blinding hope lit body and soul as with some curative ray beyond the ultra violet. It shot, through his worn frame, life and abounding health, making of him for a magical moment more than the man he had been a year ago. But it was only a moment; indeed, less than a moment. For it did not take him sixty seconds to remember how he had heard of Barbara’s marriage to her cousin Captain d’Arcy. Walter Severne the airman had said that her wedding had taken place on the same day with his own. Severne had blamed her. Every word he had said was branded on Denin’s brain. There could be no mistake. Whatever the motive might be for signing herself Barbara Denin, she was in all certainty d’Arcy’s wife.
With the violent reaction of feeling came a sense of physical disintegration. A heavy fatigue that weighted his heart and turned his bones to iron followed the brief buoyancy of spirit. Yet he could not rest. He had to walk, to keep in constant movement, to escape some tidal wave which threatened suddenly to engulf his soul. He passed out from the cool shadow of the balcony into the blaze of sunlight and drank in the hot perfume of the flowers. At the end of a path a tall cypress held its black, burnt-out torch high against the sky. Denin went and leaned against it; doubly glad of his loneliness in this refuge he had found, and thankful that none but the trees and flowers of his garden could see him in his weakness and his pain.
The dark cypress he looked up to seemed to have gone through fire and to have triumphed over death. Denin felt a kind of kinship with it, wishing that from the tree and from all nature calmness and strength might pass into his spirit. He imagined that he could hear the rushing of sap deep under the rough bark. Generations of joys and sorrows had come and gone since the tree was young, and had vanished, leaving no more trace than sun or storm. So it would be with what he was suffering now. The things that mattered in the life of this earth were strength and steadfastness. Denin prayed for them, a voiceless prayer to Nature.
When he grew calmer he walked again, and lifted up his face to the sun. “I’ll answer her letter,” he thought. It seemed strange to him now, after the shock of what had happened, that when the letters began to come, he had never imagined himself receiving one from Barbara. He had had the book published in order that it might have some chance of reaching her, of helping her; yet the proof that she had been reached and helped had come upon him like a thunderbolt.
Of course he was thankful, now that he put it to himself in such a way. He ought to be almost happy, he tried to think; but he was at the world’s end from happiness. A hurricane had swept through his soul, and it would take him a long time to build up again the miserable little refuge which had been his house of peace. Still, it didn’t matter about himself. He would write to Barbara, and give her the assurance she asked for. He was glad now of a whim that had led him to learn typewriting two or three years ago, for he could not trust to disguising his hand so well that she might not recognize it. It was many months since he had practiced typing, but he thought that in a few hours he might again pick up the trick which he could not quite have lost.
Rather than let himself think any longer, he went out at once, walking to the town, where he bought a small typewriter of a new make. Its lettering was in script, which seemed less offensive and coldly businesslike for a letter than print. Back again at the Mirador he tried the machine, and sooner than he had expected the old facility returned. Then he was ready to begin his answer to Barbara; but for a long time he sat with his fingers on the keys, his eyes fixed upon them aimlessly. It was not that he could find nothing to say. He could find too many things, and too many ways of saying those things. But all were expressions of thoughts which he might not put on paper for Barbara to read.
Even after he began to type, he took page after page out of the machine and tore up each one. Vaguely he felt that the right way was to be laconic; that he ought to show no emotion, lest he should show too much. Finally he finished a few paragraphs which he knew to be lame and halting, like himself, stiff and altogether inadequate. Yet he was sure that he would be able to do no better, and so he determined to send his letter off as it was.
“You say you are grateful to me,” Denin began as abruptly as Barbara had begun in writing to him, “but it is for me to be grateful to you really, for speaking as you do of my story, ‘The War Wedding.’ I am answering your letter the day it has reached me, because you are anxious to have a reply to your question. It is what you wished it might be. I have been very near to death, so near that I seemed to see across, to the other side of what we think of as a gulf. If I saw aright, it is not a gulf… Those voices of young men passing suddenly over in crowds, I thought, I believed, and still believe I heard. I can almost hear them now, because one does not forget such things if one comes back. I trust this answer may be of some comfort to you; and if you can feel, as you say you will feel, that my book has a message especially for you, I shall be very glad and proud.
“Yours sincerely, John Sanbourne.”
When he re-read the typed letter, one point struck him which had not so sharply pierced his intelligence before. The effect of the appeal from Barbara, the miracle of its coming, and the poignant obligation it thrust upon him had been too overpowering at first. He had not stopped, after breaking short his wild hope of her freedom, to dwell on the strangeness of one part of her letter above another. But now, in judging his own phrases, he came to a stop at a sentence towards the end of the page: “I trust this may be of some comfort to you.”
“Won’t that way of putting it sound conceited?” he asked himself. But no; she had used that very word “comfort” in her letter. As he remembered this, the thought suddenly woke in him that she had written as a woman might write who was in deep sorrow. Yet she could not be in deep sorrow. She had her heart’s desire, and at worst, her feeling for the man who was gone – John Denin – could only be a mild, impersonal grief that his life had to be the price of her happy love.
He had longed, in writing the story of “The War Wedding,” to show Barbara why even that mild grief was not needed, because in giving great joy to another soul a woman earned the right to her own happiness. Denin could not bear to think that pity for him might shadow Barbara’s sunshine, but he had not dreamed until to-day that the shadow could be dark. Now, the more intently he studied her appeal to the author of the book, the more difficult he found it to understand her state of mind.
Barbara spoke of herself as one of the many women whose “sore hearts” ached for healing because they were losing their “dearest” in battle. And she said that, if he could give her the assurance she asked for, the story of “The War Wedding” would seem to hold a personal message, making her “future life bearable.”
What a generous and sensitive nature she had, and what beautiful loyalty, to mourn sincerely for a man she had never loved, but to whom she owed a few material advantages! It was wonderful of the girl, and he worshiped her for it. His sacrifice for her was easier because of this warm sense of her gratitude, and he kissed the paper he had just written on for her, because some day it would be touched by her hands.
“If I only dared to say more to comfort her, and beg her to be happy!” he thought. But the one safe way had been to make his answer to her calmly impersonal, perhaps even a little cold. For fear he might be seized with an irresistible desire to add something more, something from his heart instead of his head, Denin put the letter into an envelope and sealed it.
Then, however, he stumbled upon a new difficulty which had not occurred to him before. He was in the act of addressing her as “Lady Denin” (since she chose to keep his name), when his heart stood still in the face of a danger he had barely escaped.
How was a stranger like John Sanbourne to know that she was Lady Denin?
If, inadvertently, he had written the name thus, and sent the letter to the post, even so slight a thing might have made her guess the truth. Instead of comforting, he might have plunged her into humiliation and despair.
Barbara had not spoken of herself in the letter as being married. For all John Sanbourne was supposed to know, she might be a girl, mourning a brother or a lover. At last he addressed her as “Mrs. or Miss Denin, Gorston Old Hall.” And with several other letters which he forced himself to write, he enclosed the stamped envelope in a note to Eversedge Sibley. “Please post these in New York,” he begged. “I don’t care to have every one know where I live.”