CHAPTER V
Four-thirty in the afternoon was Eversedge Sibley’s hour for leaving his office. If he had cared about escaping earlier he could easily have got away, for since his father’s death he stood at the head of the old publishing house; but to him business was the romance, poetry, and adventure of life. He passionately loved the champ and roar of the printing-presses as many people love a Wagner opera. There were never two days alike. Something new was always happening. Yet just because he was young for his “job,” and knew that he was a man of moods and temperament, he forced himself to be bound by certain rules. One of these rules was, even if he chose to linger a few minutes after four-thirty, that no caller need hope to be admitted. That was a favorite regulation of Sibley’s. It made him feel that, after all, he was very methodical. One afternoon, however, he did a worse thing than break this rule. He went back from the elevator, the whole length of the corridor to the outer office, simply to enquire about a man he had met at the lift door.
They almost collided as the man was stepping out and as Sibley was about to step in. But he did not step in. He let the lift shoot down without him, while he paused to stare after the man.
“Strange-looking customer!” he thought.
Sibley himself was a particularly immaculate person. Being somewhat of the Latin type, black eyed and olive skinned, he was shamefacedly afraid of looking picturesque. He dressed, therefore, as precisely as a fashion-plate. The man who had got out of the lift might have bought his clothes at a junk-shop, and a foreign junk-shop at that. They were not clothes a gentleman could wear – yet Sibley received a swift impression that a gentleman was wearing them at that moment: a remarkably tall fellow, so thin that his bones looked somehow too big for him.
He walked past Sibley with no more than a glance, yet it was partly the glance which impelled Sibley to stop short and gaze at the back of a badly made tweed coat, the worst sort of a “reach-me-down” coat.
The quick mind of the publisher was addicted to similes. (He had once written a book himself, under a nom de guerre. It had failed.) The thought sprang to his mind that the glance was like the sudden opening of a dingy box, which let out a flash of secret jewels.
In spite of his shocking clothes, the man had the air and bearing of a soldier. Sibley noticed this, in criticizing the straight back, and it aroused his curiosity more than ever in connection with the scarred face.
Any one who got out at the tenth floor of the Sibley building must want to see Eversedge Sibley or one of his partners, so evidently this person intended to ask for some member of the firm. He looked the last man on earth to be a budding author; yet Eversedge Sibley had caught sight of a paper-wrapped roll of manuscript. One who was not of the publishing or editorial world might have mistaken it for something else; but no manuscript would disguise itself from eyes so trained to fear and avoid it.
“Looks more like a heavy-weight champion invalided after a desperate scrap, than a writer; or like Samson betrayed by Delilah,” thought Sibley, rather pleased with the fancy.
He put out his hand to touch the bell for the lift to come up again, but did not touch it. Instead, he turned and walked back along the marble-walled corridor to the door of the reception room. The tall man had just arrived and was talking to a wisp of a creature facetiously known in the office as “the chucker out.”
“Mr. Sibley has gone, sir,” little McNutt was insisting, with dignity. “He doesn’t generally receive strangers. Mr. Elliot is in, though, and might see you if you could wait – ”
As he spoke, McNutt caught sight of his “boss” at the door, and by looking up a pair of thick gray eyebrows, he made a distressful signal of warning. It would be awkward for Mr. Sibley to be trapped and buttonholed here, just as he had been officially described as out. McNutt could not remember the boss ever coming back after he had gone for the day, and appearing in the publicity of the reception room. If he had forgotten something, why didn’t he let himself in at the door of his own private office, which was only a little further along the hall? But, there he was, and must be protected.
“Who is Mr. Elliot?” enquired the stranger.
Eversedge Sibley spent a short holiday in England every summer, and knew that the vilely dressed man had the accent of the British upper classes. His curiosity grew with what it fed on.
“Mr. Elliot is the third partner in the firm,” explained McNutt, to whom such ignorance appeared disgraceful.
“Thank you, I’d rather wait until to-morrow and try to see Mr. Sibley himself,” said Denin.
“I am Mr. Sibley,” the publisher confessed, on one of his irresistible impulses. “I’ve just come back for something forgotten. I can give you a few minutes if you like.”
The man’s face lit. It could never have been anything but plain, almost ugly, even before the scars came; yet it was singularly arresting. “That’s very good of you,” he said.
Sibley ushered the odd visitor into his own private office, but before he could even be invited to sit down, Denin got to his errand.
“You must have thousands of manuscripts sent to you,” he began, with a shyness which appealed to Sibley. “I – suppose you hardly ever read one yourself? You have men under you to do that. But I felt I shouldn’t be satisfied unless I could put the – the stuff I’ve written into your own hands. Probably all amateurs feel like that!”
“Manuscripts which our readers pronounce on favorably I always go through myself before accepting them,” Sibley assured his visitor. “But of course, there are a good many that – er – they don’t think worth bothering me with.”
“There’s no reason for me to hope that mine will deserve a better fate,” Denin said. “All the same it would – be a great thing for me if you should bring it out – publish it on both sides of the water. It isn’t as if I expected money for my work. I don’t. I shouldn’t even want money. On the contrary – ”
Sibley cut him short with a warning. “We’re not the sort of publishers who print books that authors have to bribe us to put on the market. If a book’s worth our while to publish, it’s worth our while to pay for it.”
Denin laughed. “I wasn’t going to suggest any arrangement of that kind,” he apologized. “I’m too poor for such a luxury. I’ve just come to New York, third class, and I must ‘hustle’ to make my living. But I wrote this on shipboard, while I had the time – ”
“You wrote a whole book on shipboard!” exclaimed Sibley.
Denin was taken aback by the publisher’s surprise. “Well, it was a slow boat – twelve days. And my mind was full of this story. I had to write it. I kept at it night and day. But for all I know there mayn’t be enough to make a book. That would be a bit of a blow! I’m as ignorant as a child of such things.”
“About how many thousand words does your manuscript amount to?” Sibley asked, glancing at the rather thin brown packet tied with a string.
“I haven’t the remotest idea!” Denin admitted. “It didn’t occur to me to count words.”
“H’m!” muttered the publisher. “You say it’s a story – a novel?”
“It’s a sort of a story,” its writer explained. “I may as well mention – you’re sure to guess if you glance over my work – that I’ve been fighting in France. I was pretty badly knocked out – some months ago. And you can see from the look of me that I can’t be of use as a soldier while the war lasts, if ever. Otherwise I shouldn’t be in New York now. One doesn’t chuck fighting in these days unless one’s unfit. While I was in hospital, I got to thinking how a man might feel in certain circumstances – (not like my own, of course; but one imagines things) – and – well, the idea rather took hold of me. Here it is. I don’t expect you to read the thing yourself. It’s not likely that – ”
“I promise you so much,” said Sibley, with suppressed eagerness. “I will read it myself before handing it over to any one else.”
The scarred face flushed; and again came that sudden light as from a secret glitter of jewels. “I can’t thank you enough!” Denin almost stammered.
“Don’t thank me yet. That would be very premature!” Sibley smiled generously; but even if he had wished to do so, he couldn’t have patronized the fellow. “You mustn’t be too impatient. I’m a busy man, you know. I’ll have a go at your manuscript as soon as I can, but you mustn’t be disappointed if you don’t hear for a week or ten days. By the way, you’d better give me a card with your name and address.”
Denin laughed again, a singularly pleasant laugh, Sibley thought it. “I haven’t such a thing as a card! My name is – John Sanbourne. And if I may have a scrap of paper, I’ll write down my address. I forgot to put it on the manuscript. I mayn’t be at the same place when you’re ready to decide. But I’ll tell them to forward the letter, and then I’ll call on you. I’d rather do that than let the story go through the post. I’ve got – fond of it in a way – you see!”
Sibley did see. And the man being what he was, the fondness struck the publisher as pathetic, like the love of Picciola for his pale prison-flower. Reason told Sibley that the ten or twelve days work of an amateur (one who had lived to thirty or so, without being moved to write) would turn out mere twaddle. Yet instinct contradicted reason, as it often did with Sibley. He had a strong presentiment that he should find at least some remarkable points in the work of this scarred soldier, whose square-jawed face seemed to the secretly romantic mind of Sibley a mask of hidden passions.
Only a few times since he became head of the house had Eversedge Sibley consented to see a would-be author whose fame was all to make. The few he had received had been fascinating young women of society with influence among his friends, famous beauties, or noted charmers; but he had never taken so deep an interest in one of them as in the poverty-stricken, steerage passenger. He went as far as the reception room in showing his guest out; and then instead of going down to his motor, which would be waiting for him, let it wait. He returned to his office, and looked again at the address which the author had laid on his parcel of manuscript.
“John Sanbourne!” Eversedge Sibley said to himself, aloud. The man’s face was as sincere as it was plain, nevertheless Sibley was somehow sure that his real name was not Sanbourne. He was sure that the inner truth of the man, if it could but be known, was a contradiction of the rough and strange outside; and he wished so intensely to get at the hidden inner side that he could not resist opening the parcel there and then.
Never had Eversedge Sibley seen such a manuscript. He was used to clearly typed pages of uniform size, as easy to read as print. This was written partly with pencil, partly with pen and ink, apparently three or four different kinds of pens, each worse than the other. The paper, too, consisted of odds and ends. The whole thing suggested poverty and the meager condition of a steerage passenger. But this squalor, which in most circumstances would have caused Sibley to fling down the stuff in fastidious disgust, sent a thrill through him. No ordinary man with ordinary things to say could have had the courage to struggle through such difficulties, to any desired end. The longing to tell this story, whatever it was, must have been strong in the man’s soul as the urge of travail in the body of a woman.
In spite of the mean materials, the writing was clear, and suggested – it seemed to the mood of Sibley – something of the man’s strength and intense reserve.
“’The War Wedding,’” he read at the top of the first page. “Heavens, I hope it’s not going to be in blank verse!”
It was not in blank verse. He had to read only the first lines to assure himself of that.
The story began with the description of a garden. It was simply done, but it painted a picture, and – praise be to the powers, there were no split infinitives nor gush of adjectives! Eversedge Sibley saw the garden. He was the man who walked in it, and met the girl who came down the stone steps between the blue borders of lavender. The story became his story. For an hour he forgot his office, his waiting chauffeur, and everything else that belonged to him.
So he might have gone on forgetting, if Stephen Eversedge, his junior partner and cousin, had not peeped anxiously in at the door. “They said you’d gone away and then come back. I thought I’d just ask if anything was the matter,” he excused himself to the master mind.
“The matter is, we’ve got hold of the most wonderful human document – good God, yes, and soul document! – that any house in this country or any other has ever published!” The words burst out from Sibley like bullets from a mitrailleuse.
CHAPTER VI
Denin hardly knew what to think of the telegram which came next morning. It asked him to call at once on Mr. Sibley; but Denin, warned that the manuscript story could not be read for a week or more, did not dream that the publisher had already raced through it. His fear was that a mere glance at the first page had been enough, showing the skilled critic that the work lacked literary value; or else that the bulk was insufficient to make a book. Mr. Sibley might, in kindness, wish to end the author’s suspense, and put him out of misery.
When the message arrived, Denin was reading and marking newspaper advertisements. He meant to go without delay to several places of business that offered more or less suitable work; but he was ready to risk missing any chance, no matter how good, when the fate of his ewe lamb was at stake. He was too despondent at the thought of its rejection to plan placing it elsewhere, but he could not bear to lose time in reclaiming it.
He felt, as he was led once more into Sibley’s private office, as if he had to face a painful operation without anesthetics, so sensitive had he come to be on the subject of his story – the manuscript of his heart, written in the blood of his sacrifice. There lay the familiar pages on the desk, all ready, he did not doubt, to be wrapped up and handed back to him. He had so schooled himself to a refusal that the publisher’s first words made his head swim. He could not believe that he heard aright.
“Well, Mr. Sanbourne, I congratulate you!” Sibley said, getting up from his desk-chair and holding out a cordial hand. “We congratulate ourselves on the chance of publishing your book.”
Denin took the hand held out and moved it up and down mechanically, but did not speak. Following the publisher’s extreme graciousness his silence might have seemed boorish, but Sibley knew how to interpret it. He realized that the other was struck dumb, and he felt a thrill of romantic delight in the situation, in his own august power to confer benefits. He was not conducting himself as a business man in this case, but he knew by sureness of instinct that the strange amateur would take no mean advantage of his confessed enthusiasm.
“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.”