Where the Path Breaks

“We think,” he went on, “that you have written something very original and very beautiful. Without being sentimental, it’s full of that kind of indescribable sentiment which goes straight to the heart. It will be a short book, only about fifty thousand words, or even less; but that doesn’t matter, because a word added or a word left out would make a false note. The thing’s an inspiration. You’ve got a big success before you. You ought to be a happy man, Mr. Sanbourne.”

“You make me feel as if I were in a dream,” said Denin.

“That’s the way your story has made me feel,” said Sibley. “Really, your method has an extraordinary effect. Talking of dreams, it’s almost as if you’d written the whole story in some strange, inspired dream.”

“Perhaps I did write it so,” Denin said, more as if he spoke to himself than to another. “I had no method – consciously. The story just came.”

“One feels that, and it’s the most compelling part of its charm,” said Sibley. “Well, now I’ve paid you your due of appreciation. Sit down, and let us talk business.”

“Business?” Denin echoed, rather stupidly. But he accepted the chair his host offered, and Sibley too sat down.

“Yes, business,” the publisher cheerily repeated. “We should like to rush the book out as soon as possible. It’s too late to have it set up and given to our spring travelers to take round and show to the trade – which is one of the most valuable ways of advertising, I assure you. But in an immense country like America that means months of traveling before a book appears. Yours has a specially poignant interest at the moment, and I have so much faith in its power that I believe it can advertise itself. Of course I don’t mean that we won’t give it big publicity in the newspapers. We shall spread ourselves in that way, and spend a lot of money.”

“And can you get the book out soon in England, too?” asked Denin.

“Oh, yes. We’ll produce here and there simultaneously, and do it in a record rush, if you can promise to stay on the spot and read proofs.”

“I’ll do whatever you wish,” said Denin.

“Now about the question of money,” Sibley went on, exquisitely and literally “enjoying himself.” “Some people call me hard as nails, a regular skinflint. And so I am, with those who try to squeeze me. I don’t think you’ll have any such complaint to make. Your name is unknown, but I believe in your book and I want to be generous with you. What do you say to an advance payment of three thousand dollars, with fifteen per cent. royalty for the first ten thousand sales, and twenty per cent. after that?”

“But,” stammered Denin, astounded. “I told you yesterday I didn’t want payment. That was true, what I said then. It would seem a kind of sacrilege to take money for such a book – a book I wrote because I wanted to – ”

“I don’t see that at all,” Sibley cut in dryly. “You are the first author I – or any other publisher, I should think – ever had to urge to accept hard cash. But you’re probably an exception to a good many rules! We can’t take your book as a present, you know! So if you want it published you’ll have to come round to our terms.”

“You mean that?” asked Denin. “You won’t bring out my story if I refuse your money?”

“I do mean that, though I should hate to sacrifice the book. And I honestly believe that many people would be happier for reading it.”

“Very well then,” Denin answered. “I’ll accept the money and thank you for it. I want my book to come out, more than I want anything else – that – that can possibly happen.”

To a man who had lived from hand to mouth as John Sanbourne had since Sir John Denin died, three thousand dollars seemed something like a fortune. He had lost his old sense of proportion in life, and had almost forgotten how it felt to have all the money he wanted. Perhaps he forgot more easily than most men of his class, for he had never cared greatly for the things which money alone can buy. His tastes had always seemed to his friends ridiculously simple, so simple as to be dangerously near affectation; and as a small boy he had announced firmly that he would “rather be a gardener in a beautiful garden, than one of those millionaires who have to do their business always in towns.” Now, when he had recovered from the first shock of accepting money for the book of his heart, he began to reflect how to plan his life. The thought that he could have a garden was a real incentive, for working in a garden would save him from the unending desolation of uselessness, when the last proofs were corrected and there was no longer any work to do on his story.

Barbara and Mrs. Fay had both talked to John Denin about their old home in California, and with the knowledge that he could afford it a keen wish was suddenly born in John Sanbourne to make some kind of a home for himself in the country where Barbara had lived. She was named, her mother had told him, after Santa Barbara. The girl had been born near Santa Barbara, and had grown up there to the age of thirteen, when her father had died and their place had been sold. After that, the mother and daughter had gone to Paris. Denin recalled with crystal clearness all the girl’s warm, eager picturing of her old home, for he remembered scenery and even descriptions of scenery with greater distinctness than he remembered faces. He had often thought (until he met Barbara, and fell in love) that he cared more for nature and places and things than he could ever care for people, except those of his very own flesh and blood. He knew differently now, but it seemed to him that he would be nearer finding peace in Barbara’s home-country than anywhere else in the world.

There was no danger that she or her mother might some day appear and meet him face to face, to the ruin of Barbara’s dream of happiness with Trevor d’Arcy. Mother and daughter had said that they never wished to go back, now that the old ties were broken. When occasionally they returned to America, they spent their time in Washington and New York; but with Barbara married to Trevor d’Arcy, and mistress in her own right of Gorston Old Hall, all interests would combine to keep mother and daughter in England. John Denin’s ghost might, if it chose, safely haunt the birthplace of his lost love.

The day that the last proof-sheet of “The War Wedding” was corrected, Sanbourne said good-by to Eversedge Sibley and started for California. He could not afford to travel by the Limited or any of the fast trains, so there were many changes and waits for him, and he was nearly a week on the way; but when a man has lost or thrown over the best things in his life there is the consolation that none of its small hardships seem to matter. Besides, he had Santa Barbara to look forward to; and Denin told himself that, things being as they were, he was lucky to have anything to look forward to at all.

When he reached the end of the journey at last it was almost like coming to a place he had known in dreams, so clearly did he recognize the mountains whose lovely shapes crowded towards the sea. Barbara had all their names by heart and treasured their photographs. He remembered her stories of the islands, too, floating on the horizon like boats at anchor; and the trails of golden kelp seen through the green transparence of the waves, like the hair of sleeping mermaids. In the same way he knew the big hotel with its mile-long drive bordered with flaming geraniums; he knew the old town and – without asking – how to go from there to the Mission. Also he knew that, on the way to the Mission, he would find the place which Barbara had cared for most until she fell in love – not with him – but with Gorston Old Hall.

He limped perceptibly still, and could not walk far without pain, so he decided to be extravagant for the first time since “coming into his money” and hire a small, cheap motor-car. It was driven by its small, cheap owner, a young man with a ferocious fund of information about Santa Barbara, and every one who had ever lived there.

“Heard of the Fay place?” he echoed Denin’s first question. “Well, I should smile! Why, me and Barbie Fay are about the same age,” he plunged on, so violently that no interruption could have stopped him. “Not that we were in the same set. Not much! But a cat can look at a king. And any boy can look at any girl, I guess. Gee! That little girl was some worth lookin’ at! Her mother thought she was too good for us plain Americans, so she took her off to Europe and clapped her in a convent, after the old man died. They’ve never been back this way since, nor won’t be now. The girl’s been married twice, I was readin’ in the papers. Once to some English lord or other who left her the same day, and got himself killed in France; and the second time, just a few weeks ago, to a cousin on her mother’s side – a Britisher, too. There was an interview with the mother in the San Francisco Call, I saw. One of our California journalists over there in the war-zone got it – quite a good scoop. Mrs. Fay said it was an old romance between Barbie and this Captain-What’s-his-name. But we never seen him here. I guess he’s English, root and branch. Good thing for that ‘old romance’ they could make sure the other chap was killed all right, all right, wasn’t it? Some of them poor fellows gets blown to bits so you can’t tell one from t’ other, they say. But the girl’s mother mentioned to our Call reporter, that they knew the husband’s body by a stylograph pen in a gold case, which was her own last present to him. If it hadn’t been for that little thing, found in a rag or two left of the feller’s coat, Barbie wouldn’t have dast married again, I bet. Say, that’s one of them anecdotes they put under the heading of ‘Too Strange not to be True!’ ain’t it?”

“Yes, it is strange,” Denin repeated mechanically. It was strange, too – above all strange – that he should have had to come to Barbara’s birthplace to learn this detail casually. A thousand times he had wondered how they had identified John Denin’s body with enough certainty to take it back to England and give it a funeral with military honors. Perhaps, if he had not come to Santa Barbara and in Santa Barbara happened to stumble upon this loquacious fellow with the motor-car to hire, he might have gone through all the rest of his life without knowing. And another strange thing was that he had lent the stylographic pen – Mrs. Fay’s last present – to a man who wanted to write a letter just before the battle. That man, who had been killed, was possibly still reported “missing,” while John Denin’s wife, assured of his death by a peculiarly intimate clue, had been able to take her happiness without fear. If Barbara’s mother had not given him the pen, he would not now be numbered among the dead, but would have been free to go back to his wife of an hour, and perhaps even teach her to love him in the end.

Well, all that didn’t bear thinking of now! He tried, as he had tried a hundred times – but never so poignantly – to hold in his heart the memory of flaming happiness worth all the pain of living through the burnt-out years: the happiness he had put into the pages of his “War Wedding.”

With some people who had known Barbara he would have liked to talk of her, but not with this crude youth who spouted her praises from a mouth full of chewing gum. Denin answered a pointed question of the chauffeur’s by saying that he had enquired about the Fay place because he heard it was worth seeing. He might like to buy a little property somewhere near if it could be got.

“You bet it can be got!” was the prompt answer. “That is, if you want something little enough, you can get a bit of the old Fay property itself.”

“Really?” said Denin. “I thought it was all disposed of years ago.”

“So it was. Eight years ago and a bit. I remember because I made an errand to sneak down to the depot and see Barbie go off in the train, as pretty as a white rose, dressed in black for her pa. I was only a cub of fourteen. An old feller from the East, staying at the Potter, went crazy about the place and bought it at Mrs. Fay’s own price. (Lucky for her! They say she’d nothing else to live on!) Feller by the name of Samuel Drake. He was out in California for his bronchitis or something, and took a fancy to the country. He wanted his married son with a young bride to live with him, so he got a real bright idea. I suppose the folks who told you about the Fay place never said nothing about a kind of little playhouse called the Mirador (Spanish for view-place or look-out, I guess), built at one end of the property that fronts to the sea?”

“I – rather think they did mention something of the kind,” said Denin. The first time he had ever seen Barbara, at a dance soon after she was presented, she had happened to speak of the Mirador. It was a miniature house which her father had built for her at her favorite view point, as a birthday surprise, when she was ten. There was an “upstairs and a downstairs,” a bath, and a “tiny, tiny kitchen” where she had been supposed to do her own cooking. In the sitting-room she had had lessons with her governess. The one upstairs room, with its wonderful view of the bay and the islands, had been turned into a bedroom for her, when she had scarlet fever and had to be isolated with a nurse. She had “loved getting well there, and lying in her hammock on the balcony with curtains of roses.”

“Old man Drake had the smart notion of putting on a couple more rooms in a wing at the back, and offering it to his son and his son’s bride,” the driver of the car was explaining, over the motor’s cheap clatter. “But while the work was going on, the new beams caught fire one night (I guess some tramp could tell why) and the whole addition and a bit of the original burnt down. Just then the son changed his plans anyhow, and decided to go into business with his wife’s folks in the East. That sort of sickened the old man, so he let the Mirador fall into rack and ruin; and now he spends about three quarters of his time in Boston with the son. I guess he’s sorry he was in such a hurry to buy the Fay place. Anyways, he won’t spend money on the Mirador, but rather than it should stay the way it is, he’ll sell it in its present condition with enough ground to make a garden. The thing looks like a burnt bird’s nest – except for the flowers, and the house ain’t much bigger than a baby doll’s house. I suppose it wouldn’t suit you, would it?”

“Perhaps it might,” answered Denin, trying to speak calmly. But in his heart he meant to have Barbara’s Mirador if it cost him every penny he had left from his advance on “The War Wedding.” It was almost as if, to atone for taking herself out of his life, Barbara had given him this dear plaything of her childhood to remember her by.

“Well, you’ll be able to make up your mind,” said his guide, slowing down the rattletrap car. “Here we are at the Fay place, now – or the Drake place, as maybe I ought to call it – and there’s the Mirador. No wonder old Drake wants to get it fixed up again! The way it is now, it spoils the look of the whole property.”

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.”