CHAPTER VIII
It was the day he finished re-plastering the house-wall, that the celebrity was “discovered” by Santa Barbara.
Denin stood half way up a ladder with a trowel in his hand, when a young man in a Panama hat and a natty suit of gray flannels came swinging jauntily along the path: altogether, a “natty” looking young man. He would probably have chosen the adjective himself.
“Good morning!” he confidently addressed the lanky, shirt-sleeved figure on the ladder. “Do you happen to know if Mr. John Sanbourne is at home?”
“I am John Sanbourne,” said Denin, making no move to descend the ladder. He wanted to get on with his work, and expected the newcomer’s errand, whatever it might be, would be over and done with in a minute. He thought that the young man had probably come to sell him an encyclopedia or a sewing machine, because the only other visitors he had had – except the postman, and the boy from the grocer – had pertinaciously urged that the Mirador was incomplete without these objects.
The young man looked horrified for an instant, but being a journalist and used to rude shocks, he was able hastily to marshal his features and bring them stiffly to attention. He had already learned that the Mirador’s new owner was “peculiar,” a sort of hermit whom nobody called on, because he did his own work, wore shabby clothes, and made no pretense of having social eminence. Indeed, it had never occurred to any one (until the idea jumped into the reporter’s brilliant brain) that a person who could buy and inhabit that half ruined “doll’s house” could be of importance in the outside world. The journalist it was who, happening to meet the postman near the Drake place that morning, saw a huge envelope addressed to “John Sanbourne.” He flashed out an eager question: “Is there a John Sanbourne living near here?” He was answered: “Yes, a fellow by that name’s bought the Mirador”; quickly elicited a few further details, and, abandoning another project, arrived when the postman was out of the way, at the Mirador gate. It was a blow – severe if not fatal – to romance to find John Sanbourne splashed with whitewash and looking as a self-respecting mason would be ashamed to look. But perhaps he was a socialist. That would at least make an interesting paragraph.
“Are you
the
John Sanbourne, the man who wrote ‘The War Wedding’?” the visitor persisted.
Denin was surprised and disconcerted. “Why do you ask?” he sharply answered one question with another; then added, still more sharply, “And who are you?”
“My name’s Reid. I work for a San Francisco paper, and I’m correspondent for one in New York. If you wrote the book that’s made such a wonderful boom, my papers want to get a story about you.”
“Thank you. That’s very kind of you and of them,” said Denin coolly. “But I haven’t a ‘story’ worth any newspaper’s getting. I’m sorry you should give yourself trouble in vain. Yet so it must be.”
“When I say ‘a story,’ I mean an article – an interview,” Reid explained to the amateur intelligence. “I think,” he went on, beginning to find possibilities in the hermit and his surroundings (voice with charm in it: fine eyes: striking height: peculiar fad for solitude, etc.) – “I think I see my way to something pretty good.”
“I’m afraid,” Denin insisted, speaking with great civility, because he had suffered too much to inflict the smallest pin-prick of pain upon any living thing if it could be avoided. “I’m afraid I must ask you not to rout me out of my burrow with any searchlight. You can see for yourself I’m no figure for a newspaper paragraph. If the public really takes the slightest interest in me, for Heaven’s sake leave them to their illusions. Please write nothing about me at all. But I can’t let you go without asking you to rest and drink a glass of lemonade. I’m ashamed to confess” – and he laughed – “that I’ve nothing stronger to offer you. I lead the simple life here!”
As he spoke he came down from the ladder, trying not to show inhospitable reluctance, and invited the reporter to sit in the shade of the veranda. Reid, seeing that the man was in earnest, not merely “playing to the gallery,” showed his shrewd journalistic qualities by acquiescence. He accepted the situation and the lemonade, and kept his eyes open. He did not abuse the hermit’s kindness by outstaying his welcome, but took leave at the end of fifteen or twenty minutes. At the gate, he held out his hand and Sanbourne had to shake it with a good grace. Noticing for future reference, that the author of “The War Wedding” had a hand as attractive as his scarred face was plain, Reid said resignedly, “Well, Mr. Sanbourne, thank you for entertaining me. But I’m sorry you don’t want me to write about you. Sure you won’t change your mind?”
“Sure,” echoed Sanbourne, and went thankfully back to put the last touches on the house-wall. About half an hour later the work was finished, and he had time to remember that several letters and papers, brought by the postman, were lying unopened. Standing on his ladder, he had asked to have the budget left on the balcony table. Then he had forgotten it, for he dreaded rather than looked forward to the letters of his unknown correspondents; and even if Barbara acknowledged his answer (which seemed to him unlikely) it would be many days before he could expect to hear from her.
This time there was the usual fat envelope, stuffed with smaller ones, forwarded by Eversedge Sibley; also there was a letter from Sibley himself. Denin put off delving into the big envelope, and opened Sibley’s. Quite a friendship had developed between them, and he liked hearing from the publisher, who wrote about the great events of the world or advised the reading of certain new books, which he generally sent in a separate package. Sometimes he sent newspapers, too, fancying that Sanbourne saw only the local ones. They were having a discussion through the post, the American trying to instruct the Englishman in the intricacies of home politics; but the letter which Denin now opened did not refer to that subject, nor did it finish with the usual appeal: “When will the call to work get hold of you again, or when will the spirit move you to think of writing me another book?”
“Dear Sanbourne,” Sibley began. “This is an interlude, to the air of ‘Money Musk’! Our custom, as you may vaguely have noticed in the contract I forced you to sign, is to make royalty payments to our authors twice a year. But you have bought a house and land, and Heaven knows what all, out of your advance, you tell me. Seems to me you can’t have left yourself much margin. You mentioned the first day we met that you were a poor man; so I have unpleasant visions of what our latest star author may have reduced himself to, while the men whose job it is to sell his masterpiece are piling up dollars for his publishers. The check I lay between these pages (so as to break it to you gently) is only a small part of what we know the ‘Wedding’ to have made up to date. Never in all my experience has a book advertised
itself
as yours seems to have done. One reader tells a dozen others to buy it. Each one of that dozen spreads the glad tidings among his or her own dozen. So it goes! The ‘Wedding’ has now been out three months and is in its tenth edition, the last six whacking big ones. It won’t stop short of at least a million, I bet, with Canada, England, and the Colonies as well as our immense public here. With this assurance, you can afford to use the present check as pin money. Yours ever, E. S.”
Denin turned the page, and saw a folded slip of yellow paper: a check payable to John Sanbourne for two thousand five hundred dollars.
He thought no more about the journalist. But the journalist was busily thinking about him. Mr. Reid was not writing an “interview” with Mr. Sanbourne, because he had promised he would not do that. Sanbourne had, luckily for Reid, let his request stop there. Reid considered himself morally free to write something else, which did not compose itself on the lines of an interview. He wrote what he called “A Study of John Sanbourne, Author and Hermit,” making it as photographic, yet at the same time as picturesque, as he knew how. Just as an “artist photographer” takes dramatic advantage of high lights and shadows, so did Reid the reporter put to their best use the splashes of whitewash on his celebrity’s black hair and scarred brown face, and spots of pink paint on his shirt sleeves. He described the Mirador as it had been after the fire, and as it had become since John Sanbourne bought the little ruined “doll house” with its patch of garden walled off from the Drake (once the Fay) place, near Santa Barbara. He mentioned his own surprise at finding so famous a man voluntarily hidden from the world, in these quaint surroundings, when, if he chose, he could be fêted by “everybody who was anybody” for miles around.
When Reid had finished his “study,” he was as proud of it as his victim was of the plaster and paint on the Mirador walls. It was too good, thought the journalist, for a local paper. Why, it was a regular “scoop”! He would send it “on spec.” to the
New York Comet
which occasionally accepted an article from him. This, he had no doubt, would not only be accepted but snapped at, for the great Sunday supplement which the
Comet
brought out. In that case, he would get a good price for his work, far better than local pay, to say nothing of the kudos; and as a queer fish like Sanbourne wasn’t likely to “run to” the Sunday
Comet
, or to a press-cutting subscription, he would probably never see the “stuff.” This thought relieved Reid of his one anxiety. Sanbourne had trusted him. And the difference between an “interview” and a “study” was perhaps too subtle for an outsider to understand.
As it happened, Mr. Reid was right in all three of his suppositions. The New York
Comet
did approve his manuscript: theirs was a dignified cross between accepting and snapping. John Sanbourne did not see the Sunday supplement, nor did he take in any of the many newspapers which quoted it. He did not subscribe to a press-cutting bureau; and the agencies which had applied for his patronage, being discouraged by his silence, did not send to him.
Eversedge Sibley, on the other hand, always saw the Sunday supplement of the
Comet
, which specialized on literary subjects. He read the “Study of John Sanbourne, Author and Hermit,” and was astonished that so retiring, almost mysterious a person, had granted it. On further deliberation, however, Sibley decided that material for the article must have been got on false pretenses. He read the “stuff” through again, and felt that, though interesting to the public, Sanbourne would think it hateful. If a journalist had caught him unawares, he would be distressed to find his privacy so violated; and Eversedge Sibley did not want Sanbourne to be distressed. Consequently he did not forward the supplement, nor the cutting his firm afterwards received of it; and as no one else thought of sending, Sanbourne continued peacefully to forget his morning visit from a journalist. Even the fact that he was stared at in the street more intently than he had been at first, when an errand took him into town, did not remind him of the call or cause him to put two and two together. He did not indeed know that he was being stared at. He did not look much at people, because he did not wish to be looked at. And his thoughts were more for the place and the scenery which Barbara had loved and he was learning to love than for his fellow creatures, who seemed infinitely remote from him.
“How wonderful that that John Sanbourne who wrote ‘The War Wedding’ should be here, and none of us even dare try to get to know him!” some women said, when they had seen extracts from Reid’s “study” in newspapers they took in. These women thought Sanbourne’s scars actually attractive. Others announced that they didn’t believe the man
was
the real John Sanbourne. There must be some mistake.
This
one didn’t look like a gentleman. At least his clothes didn’t. And
anybody
could pretend to be John Sanbourne if they liked. Lots of frauds did that sort of thing when a novel by an unknown author made a great success.
John Sanbourne felt richer with his new check and the astonishing prospect held out by Sibley than Sir John Denin had ever felt at Gorston Old Hall with his big income. But his one extravagance was to buy some books and shelves to put them on. In that way he soon collected all his old, best friends around him; for that was the one joy of having books for friends. No matter where you went, you could always send for them and have them with you. You could never be entirely alone in the world.
When the time came that Denin might receive a letter from Barbara, he tried not to think of it. He said to himself that he knew it would not come, that he ought not to want it to come, that if it did come, it would only prolong the agony. He read hard, and worked hard in the garden, and took long walks, though he limped slightly still, for he was losing the worst of his lameness and might actually hope to become in the end (as the German surgeon had prophesied) as “good a man as he had ever been.” Perhaps in some ways – ways of the mind and spirit – he was better. But there was no soul-doctor to judge of such improvement. Certainly Denin was unable to do so himself.
Nothing on earth or in heaven could distract his thoughts from the letter, however, when it began to loom before him as a possibility. Constantly he found himself saying, “To-morrow it might come.” And then, “To-day.”
When it was “to-day,” he began courageously to plan an excursion which for some time he had been meaning to make. If he left early in the morning – long before the postman was due – he need not get back till night. But his strength failed at the moment of starting. He went no farther than the gate.
Should
there be a letter while he was away, the postman must leave it on the table outside the house, for the door would be locked. Then, Denin argued, if any mischievous person should slip in and steal it, he would never know what he had missed. And he was rewarded for staying. The letter did come. It was only when he held it in his hand that he realized how desperately he had wanted it, what a black dungeon the beautiful summer day of sunshine would have been without it.
“Thank you more than I can say for answering me!” he read. “You wrote me on the very day you had my letter, and I am doing the same with yours, for it has just arrived. Now, since you have told me you
heard the voices with the ears of your own spirit
, the book can be mine – my own message, meant for me. Perhaps others say this very same thing to you – though it seems that no one can need such a message as much as I need it. I wonder if it would be wrong to tell you why?
“Maybe your first thought when I ask that question, will be – why should I
want
to tell you? But if I do tell you, then you will see why. We are strangers to each other, living thousands of miles apart, and we shall never meet; yet because you have written this book, I feel that you are my friend. You have helped me as no one else could. And I have no one else to help me at all —
no one
.
“Yes, I must tell you! – for in one way I and the girl in your story have lived through the same experience. Only there is one great difference between us. She didn’t love the man she married, and that hurt her, in thinking of him afterwards when he was dead. I loved the man I married so much that it is killing me because I didn’t tell him. There was a reason why I didn’t tell. It seemed then that I could not. But oh, do you, who know so much, think he understands now, and does he still care, or is he too far away? Could he understand my having done a thing since he went, a thing that looks like disloyalty – treason – to his memory, though indeed it was not that. It was done to save a life. You will say, ‘This is a mad woman who asks me such questions.’ But I almost wish I were mad. If I were, I mightn’t realize how I suffer. Yours – Barbara Denin.”
He was stunned by the letter, and its revelation. She had
loved him
.
CHAPTER IX
The thought filled the man’s soul and surrounded it as water fills and surrounds a ring fallen into the sea. Barbara had loved him. There was nothing in the world outside that thought.
At first, it caught him up to heaven, and then just as he saw the light, it flung him down to hell.
Fool that he had been, never to see the truth under her reserve, while seeing would have meant standing by her, keeping her forever! But he had let her go, and it was too late now, even for explanations. He had shut an iron door between them; and standing with her on the other side of that door was a man who called her his wife. There was the situation; and he, by his silence, had created it. He was condemned to perpetual silence; for it was the wildest, most hopeless mockery of all which brought to John Sanbourne a knowledge of Barbara’s love for John Denin.
Fate had been laughing at him while he wrote his book with a message of peace for her, laughing wicked and cruel laughter, because through the message he was to come into touch with Barbara and learn the tragic failure of his sacrifice. That seemed to Denin a vile trick for life to play upon a man, and whipped by the seven devils of thwarted love which had entered into him he cursed it; cursed life and fate, himself and Trevor d’Arcy, and was ready to deny Justice, even Justice blindfolded.
His heaven lasted for a moment at best. For many hours Cain and Abel in him fought each other in hell. But he had been down in depths well nigh as black, and had struggled out to the light. Remembering this, he struggled out once more, at last, and perceived that, somehow, to his own wondering surprise, he had stumbled up to a higher level and a stronger footing than before. Within distant sight he visioned those serene mountain tops where light is, the light that never shines on sea or land for those who have not suffered.
Only a short time ago he had begun daily to realize and tell himself that strength and steadfastness alone really mattered; that suffering was but a flame which passed. This was still true, as true as it had ever been. A man could choose whether the flame should consume or purify him in its passing; and here and now the immediate hour of his choice was on the stroke. At the end of that day of turmoil, Denin seemed still to be looking down at himself, as a crouching prisoner in a dark underground cell. Yet he knew that he was his own prisoner, not really a helpless captive of the Fate he had cursed. Fate had no power after all to make men prisoners. It was their business to find this out, and to prove that they had only to release themselves, in order to be free. He felt this to be an abstract fact of life; and if he meant to live he must make it concrete.
The underground hole where he so miserably crouched was but the cellar of his darkest self. If he but thought so, he had strength enough in him to fight his way up into the high, bright tower which was also himself, a tower with a wide view on every side, over the sunlit mountains from whose peaks he could already catch some glimmering vision.
Even the thought of the mountain tops – that they were there, shining, and always had been and always would be – made Denin lift his head and draw deep breaths into his lungs. That part of him which had yearned to write the book for Barbara and had conquered difficulties to write it, came like a strong brother to the rescue of a weak brother and pulled him up by main force out of the dark. He tried to reassure himself, over and over, that he need never again crawl back into the darkness. He had seen the view from the tower, and the tower was his to reach.
Denin had not worked out for his own guidance any clear-cut philosophy of life. He had just stumbled along with strength for his goal mark, trying now and then to recall some whisper or note of music he had caught from the other side before he came back. He had written down in his book, for Barbara, all that had been tangible under his pen. But now, knowing she had loved him, he saw how much more help she needed than he had given, and how much more – how very much more – he owed her.
Not that he had deliberately stood aside and left the girl unprotected. When in the German hospital he had drifted back to a knowledge of realities past and present, he had seen almost at once that, even if the news were unwelcome, he must not let his wife live in ignorance that she was still bound. It was only after hearing from Severne of Barbara’s marriage to d’Arcy, that he had said, “John Denin is dead and buried, and his ghost laid.” He had meant to make the supreme sacrifice for Barbara’s good, and there had been no shadow of doubt in his mind that he was right in making it. Now he asked himself if even then it might not have been best to let the truth come out. No one was to blame for the mistake in a dead man’s identity, nor for what had happened afterwards through that mistake. Barbara would have had a hard choice before her; yet she might, if she possessed strength and courage enough, have chosen from the two men who had come into her life, the one she loved. The whole world would have rung with the tragic story, but at the end Barbara might have lived down the tragedy. If he had been her choice, he would have helped her to live it down, by the gift of such love as no man had ever given to a woman.
As it was, he had dared to play the potter. He had taken the clay of Barbara’s destiny into his own awkward hands, to shape it as he thought best, and he had let the vase break in the furnace. He could never make it what, but for his meddling, it might have been; yet he must piece the delicate fragments together if he could, not caring for – not thinking of – his bleeding hands.
This, then, was the debt Denin owed to Barbara. And to pay it he saw that he must begin by remaking himself, before he could give her anything worth the having. He must become a thing of value, in order to be of value to her. Those faint whispers and snatches of music from the other side of the hidden river, which he had jumbled into “The War Wedding,” confusedly, hurriedly, fearing to lose their echoes, he must now carefully gather up again and sort out with method. He must dip into his brain where half-remembered thoughts seethed in solution. He must see the rainbow in every tear drop, and crystallize it into a jewel for Barbara. Thus developing himself, he might have some worthy offering for her at last.
He could not write that day, nor the next, for it seemed that the only things worth saying were the things which would not let themselves be said, things which swept through the background of his mind like a flight of chiming bells in the night, elusive as waiting souls for which no bodies have yet been made. But though he could not write, he called thoughts, which he had once seen and let go, to come again to him. He sent himself back along the road he had traveled beyond the milestones. He searched by the wayside for beautiful memories he had dropped there, and some of them he found grown up tall and white as lilies in moonlight. Whatever he found was for Barbara.
On the third night after the revelation, he had gathered something to give her, and strength enough to feel sure he would not put into his letter the question which must not be asked: “What was the reason you couldn’t tell your husband that you loved him?”
Denin wrote with a typewriter, as he had written before, on blank paper with no address, because it was better for Barbara to come in touch with him only through his publishers. In that way, she would be spared any sense of constraint she might have to feel in knowing that he lived among her neighbors of long ago. She had given him her name frankly, and she might fear some inadvertent mention of it to people she had met as a child. If he were to be of real use to her, he thought, he must be known only as a distant Voice, an Ear, a Sympathy, almost impersonal outside his letters.
Denin wrote to her that he was sure, entirely sure, the man she loved was “not too far away to know.”
“You will only have to send him a thought, and it must reach him behind that very thin wall we call death. The way I imagine it, such a message goes where it’s directed, just as when we call ‘Central’ through the telephone. They, whom we speak of as dead, have their own work to do and their own life to live, so perhaps they don’t think of us every moment. But surely we’ve only to call. They may not see us in the flesh, any more than we can see them in the spirit; but it came to me when I was very close to the other side, that our bodies don’t enclose us quite. We’re half-open jewel-boxes, that let out flashes of emerald, or sapphire, or diamond light, according to the strength of our vibrations – or aspirations, if you like (I begin to realize that these are much the same thing!). It is the flashes of light which are seen and recognized by the ones who have passed farther on. The lights are our images, as well as messages for them. But when I say ‘farther on,’ it’s only a figure of speech. They are not far off.
“We can see the rain. We can’t see the wind, even when it is so close we can lean on it like a wall. And so we can lean on their love, strong as a wall, stronger than anything visible to us, because love is the strongest thing there is. You see, life wouldn’t be worth living for any of us – it wouldn’t have been worth creating – if the dead really died. The glory of the deathless dead lights our way, with the bright deeds they have done, till we come where we can see for ourselves that there’s no dividing line. ‘The milestones end.’ That’s all. They’re not needed any more.
“I heard other people talking of these things when I went where the milestones end. Since then I’ve wondered why I didn’t know the things before.
Listen to your hopes
, and
you
can know without waiting; because hope is the voice of instinctive knowledge, and soul-instinct is what we were
born
knowing. Believe this, and you won’t have to stumble slowly up, as I did, with a hod full of old precepts on my back. You can plane down from the sky with your arms full of stars, and live with them, as I live with the flowers in my garden.
“The accident which put me into close touch with what we call ‘death,’ put me out of touch – mentally – with life on this side for a while. An operation brought me back. Just as, hovering between the known and the unknown, I let my past drop, so on my return to it I had for a while no memories of the borderland. My brain busied itself picking up lost threads. I recalled the instant when I thought I was meeting death: a great shock when all supports fell away as from under a ship that is launched, and I plunged into measureless depths. Beyond that sensation, there was blankness. By and by glimpses of something bright came and went, oftenest in dreams. The effort to seize their meaning waked me with a start. It is only now that I am beginning to hold some of the best