Where the Path Breaks

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 meanings, I think. I have come back with a little star-dust, even I; and by its glimmer, in good moments, I try to interpret my own dreams.

“If I read them rightly, I’ve told you only an old, old truth in saying that there should be no such word as death, or grief for it among the living. We’ve only to lift the veil of Death to see the face of Life – a wonderful, shining face with no pain in its smile. Looking into its eyes, what we do, instead of ‘dying,’ is to flow over our own narrow limitations as growing vines flow over the high wall of a little garden. We escape out of bounds into the boundless and are part of it.

“Don’t, then, let the life of the man you have loved be darkened by feeling that he has darkened yours. Stand up, lift your head, and you’ll see how your sorrow will have to lie down at your feet as shadows lie.”

When Denin ended his letter, he found that in trying to help Barbara, he had helped and heartened himself. He had unfolded a flag and waved it to the sky.

He went out, though it was after midnight, and posted the letter. Later, he was able to sleep as he had not slept since the night he wrote the last words of his book. As usual he dreamed of Barbara, but this time it was a new dream. He saw himself painting her portrait; and when he waked in the sunrise he wondered why he had never tried to paint such a likeness from memory. He could see her as clearly before him as though she had come to the door, opened it, and looked at him.

The thought gave him something more to live for. He would do the picture, and so bring Barbara herself to the Mirador where, guessing nothing of the truth, she sent her thoughts to John Sanbourne.

CHAPTER X

It seemed to Denin that he knew the day and even the moment when his letter reached Barbara.

He was working on her portrait, to which he gave every instant of his spare time between dawn and dusk. A strange, elusive impression of a girl it was; a girl in white looking through a half-open door. She stood in shadow, but leaning forward a little so that her eyes and hair and a long fold of her dress caught the light. Denin’s portrait work before had been done with charcoal or colored chalk. Such mediums were too crude, however, for this labor of his love. He was trying pastels, and had expected to make many false starts and failures. But he had only to open the door to see the girl standing just outside, looking straight at him with smoke-blue eyes under level brows and warm shadow of copper-beech hair; so after all he could not go wrong with his work. He had but to paint what he saw, and the picture took life quickly, as his book had taken life, because it was easier to go on than to stop. One evening, he was straining his eyes for the last ray of daylight, when a blue flash seemed to leap from the eyes of the portrait. He could hardly believe that it was only an illusion of an overworked optic nerve. It was as if Barbara had somehow found out about the portrait, and compelled it to speak for her, to tell him something she wished to say.

“She has got the letter!” was the thought that compelled his mind to accept it. And then – “She will answer at once.”

The difference in time between Santa Barbara and Gorston Old Hall was about twelve hours; and fifteen days ago, he had posted his letter. It was just possible, even in war-time delays, that it had reached her, he calculated, as the eyes of the portrait held him spellbound.

When the picture was finished, he took its measurements and ordered a glass to protect the fragile colors, delicate as the microscopic plumes of a moth’s wing. But he could not content himself with any design for a frame. He went to shop after shop, and even traveled as far as Los Angeles, in the hope of finding the right thing. But nothing was right as a frame for Barbara. The handsomer a frame was, the more conventional and banal it looked in Denin’s eyes, when he tried to associate it with her. At last he decided to carve out the frame with his own hands, from the beautiful fluted redwood of the great sequoias of California: wonderful, ruddy wood with an auburn sheen and a wave running through it like that of Barbara’s hair.

The idea seized him and brought extraordinary delight. He took three lessons from an astonished cabinet-maker of whom he was able to buy the redwood, and then with confidence and joy began his work. In two days it was finished, and the picture in place. It was almost as if he had built a house for Barbara, and she had come to live in it, and look out of the door at him.

The portrait was half life-size; and rimmed in its rich fluted setting of redwood a thousand years old, it was of exactly the right length and shape to hang on the door of child-Barbara’s bedroom – his bedroom now. It was for that place he had planned it, because in these days he had lost the unbroken privacy of his first weeks at the Mirador. John Sanbourne had been “discovered,” and without churlishness was unable to remain any longer a hermit. He went nowhere, except for the long, solitary walks he loved, and refused all invitations, but he could not lock his gate against the three or four kindly persons who ventured with the best intentions, to “dig him up” and “keep him from being lonely.” His memory-portrait of Barbara was too strikingly like her, in its strange impressionist way, not to be in danger of recognition by some old acquaintance of her childhood. Besides, a picture of his love, even if unrecognized, was far too sacred to be seen by stranger eyes. In Denin’s bedroom the smiling visitant was safe. No one but himself ever went there. And with the heavy frame firmly clamped to the door panels, the effect of the girl gazing out into the room was thrillingly intensified for Denin. Thus hung, the portrait was opposite his camp bed; and when he waked at sunrise, Barbara and he looked at each other.