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 feted 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_.