CHAPTER XI
If he would “stand by her, as her friend”?
Denin could not wait to write. He cabled recklessly. “You have done no wrong. Take all the comfort you need. What you suffer is not punishment. It is martyrdom.”
“God help her!” he prayed. “And let me help her, too – my Barbara!”
He thought of the girl yearningly, as of a tortured child with the heart of a woman. His pain was peace compared to hers; and it was he – the blind man he called “clear-seeing” – who had thrown her to the wolves. If he had not been too blind to see her love, he would have shown his for her as he had not dared to show it, that day in the old garden. Their marriage would have been a real marriage, binding Barbara so indissolubly to him that not to save a life could she have broken the bond. By this time, they would have been together in their home, and not his memory but himself would follow her through the rooms and by the dreamy lake at Gorston Old Hall. Yet even so, could he ever have known the girl from tip to tip of her soul’s wings, as he saw himself destined to know her now, with six thousand miles of sea and land and one man’s death and another man’s life between them? Would he have learned from her lips and eyes the delicate truth of an exquisite worship, as he had learned it to-day from her written tribute to a dead soldier?
“My God! She’s more mine than she could ever have been if I hadn’t died for her!” he heard himself think aloud. After all, life hadn’t been laughing behind his back, while he wrote the book for Barbara. Though Fate snatched her away from him with one hand, with the other it gave her back, irrevocably and forever. It seemed to Denin that, though nothing could bring them together in body, nothing could ever separate them in spirit.
When he wrote that same day, he assured her again, as he had assured her in his cable, that she had a right to every one of the words of comfort he had sent. “And you have a right to lean on that unseen wall of love I told you about,” he repeated. “It is close to you, and meant to lean on. There can be no disloyalty to any one in resting against it. The love that exists for you on the other side of the Great Sea is too vast to be selfish. It asks nothing from you that you ought not to give. It only begs you to be happy, for there’s a kind of happiness without which we fall out of tune with the universe. Don’t say you can have no happiness of any kind. Don’t think it, or that it would be ‘wrong’ or light-minded to be happy if you could. You have seen life draped in black. But black is a concentration of all colors. No opal has such lights as a black opal. The great adventure of life is learning the terror and the beauty and the splendor of it all as one and inseparable.
“I have to confess that I’m no guide for you or any other. I am just groping my way up, out of my own dark places; but I believe that great secrets reveal themselves in flashes, just as – in some mysterious, inspired moments – a sunrise or a sunset tells you the truth of a thing you’ve been groping for years to find out. This obligation to your own soul (and Heaven knows how many others), the obligation of happiness– is one secret which has been opened for me by a magic key. That key is my strong wish to be of use to you. It helps me to feel that I may help you. Perhaps you’ll care to know that? And you can help me, and yourself, and the man who has passed on, by trying to gain the kind of happiness I speak of. It’s the kind that makes you one with the sunlight, a true note in the great music, ringing in tune with the universe.
“I wonder if you happen to remember about the music which the man in my book (the man who was passing) heard over the battlefield, the music of life for which the music of war and death was only the bass, the necessary undertone? I caught just a few snatches of that life music, but once heard it goes on echoing in the ears, teaching you the harmony of all things, if you listen deeply enough. Those young soldiers I tried to write about, who had thrown off their bodies, and even their enmities, with the rags and dirt and blood they left on the battlefield – they were listening to the great music, and hearing in it the call to some special mission which only they were fitted to fulfil, going to it in the summer of their youth, before they had grown tired of anything. I do believe that was more than a dream of mine; that this torrent of splendid youth, this vast crowd of ardent souls suddenly rushed from one plane to another, has some wonderful work to do, which can be done only by souls who go out with the wine of courage on their lips. But we others, we have our mission too. We can’t perform it if we make false notes in the music for the passing souls to hear. And we shall make false notes if we let our high vibrations drop down weakly to depression’s minor tones.
“Perhaps you’ll turn away from this idea of mine. But it’s one that interests me, as you know, because you’ve honored my little book by caring for it. In the dreams I had of things on the other side of sight and hearing, I thought that I saw the real meaning of the war – the hidden cause of this landslide of civilization. I saw a whole nation scintillating with dull red vibrations of fear: fear of attack by other nations, fear of letting neighbors grow stronger than they. Then I saw the dull red glowing brighter with vibrations of anger, a furious desire to grow strong at the expense of others, and to kill and conquer at any cost. Beautiful blue vibrations of intellect, and clear green vibrations of hope and successful perseverance were lost, swallowed up by the all-pervading blood-red. I saw the heavy crimson flood spreading into and lowering the golden vibrations of other great peoples, who had not yet fallen; and in the strange dream of colors pulsing through the ether of earth and heaven, I realized the immensity of the fight; how it reached far beyond the forces we know, being in truth a battle between the light of cosmic day and the darkness of cosmic night. I saw that the danger was defeat of the golden vibrations by the red which would lower the life-force of the whole world; but something told me – some snatch of the great music which interprets secrets – that progress is an integral, unalterable part of evolution; that evil, which is only negative good, can never conquer; and that the gold vibrations must win in the end. In the dream, that knowledge gave me rest. It seemed a pronouncement from the tribunal of the Power which causes all worlds and all beings to take form and exist by vibrations.
“That’s a long homily on my dreams and the theories I’m clumsily founding on them. But I am trying hard myself to vibrate and resound in tune, because each vibration and each note count quite as much as individual soldiers count in war. In this time of earth stress, and after, when civilization is remaking itself in men’s minds, with the loyal ‘spirit of the time’ we must all think gold and blue, the gold of the sun by which our bodies live, blue of the sky when inspirations come. You’ll believe me a ‘mystic’ (whatever that misused word may mean!), but I’m only trying to see the Reality behind the Thing upon which I’ve harped to you already. We are needing to know the Reality as we never needed such knowledge before.
“Be happy then, in the way that unites you with everything in heaven and on earth, all the sweet, kind children of Nature close around you, so that you may learn the different languages of flowers from their perfumes, and what the trees say in the wind. You can’t feel alone in the world if the trees talk to you, and they will if you open your heart to them. You will get to know the oak language, the pine, the elm, the beech languages; and next you will learn how they and the sea and the rivers and brooks, and everything else that makes up the music of nature, give out the same message in a thousand different ways: Be happy. To be happy with your soul, no matter what has hurt your body and tried to spoil your life, is to be strong. Go into your garden, and walk by the lake you tell me of, and don’t be afraid to call the Memory you love to walk with you there or anywhere. The one you have loved understands all, and so there could never be even a question of forgiveness.”
Denin longed to add to his letter the request that she would write often; but he would not ask that of Barbara. He must be ready to give all that she wanted, and beg for nothing in return. Perhaps if she found any small comfort in what he had written this time, she would be satisfied, and feel that nothing more was left to be said on either side. This possibility he tried to keep before his mind, and to think of even as a probability, in order to soften the blow of disappointment if he never heard again. But in his heart he knew that she would write. It seemed to him when he walked in the little garden of the Mirador, or stretched his long body on the warm grass under a big olive tree he loved, that he could hear her thoughts in the garden of Gorston Old Hall. With his ear close to the earth the message Barbara would send by and by seemed to come to him before it had left her mind and taken form on paper.
She answered his cable without waiting for the letter that followed.
“Thank you a thousand times,” she said. “I have always something new to thank you for. What should I have done if your book hadn’t come to me, and given me you for my friend? For a little while, I almost stopped believing in God, for life looked so cruel, not only to me but to every one – or nearly every one – I know, since the war began. Far and wide as I looked, I could find no mercy, no pity. How ungrateful I was, when all the time God was putting it into your mind to write that book, and sending your friendship to me when I needed it as one needs air to breathe!
“Do you know, you are teaching me to think? I feel now as if I had never really thought before. I just dreamed, or brooded. If he had lived, I should have learned from him. That is, I should, if our souls hadn’t gone on forever being shy of one another. When I had him with me, I was too busy loving him and being afraid that he wouldn’t love me, to think about anything outside, though his mind had given my mind a great lift, even then. And another thing I want to tell you. Your way of thinking reminds me of him. I believe you must be a little like him – mentally, I mean. Believing this will make me trust and turn to you, as one who knows the things I long to know. You have his name, too, ‘John.’ And I am going to sign my name always after this, not a mere impersonal initial.
“I am yours, oh, so gratefully, Barbara Denin.
“P.S. Strange, I didn’t notice at first where your cable was dated! I suppose, like the help you send me, it seemed just to come out of space! But reading the message again, I broke open the envelope I had already sealed, to tell you what a throb of the heart I had in seeing ‘Santa Barbara.’ Can it be that you live at Santa Barbara? I was christened after that dear old place, because I was born there, or very near. It’s good – it’s wonderful to have your words come to me from home.”
It was a direct question which she asked. Did he live at Santa Barbara? But Denin thought best not to answer it. She would forget, maybe, or would suppose that he had been staying for a short time in California. Each of his letters to her before, though posted not far from the Mirador itself, had been enclosed in an envelope to Eversedge Sibley. In all but one case, other letters to correspondents brought the author by his book had been sent off in the wrapper with Barbara’s. Denin had taken pains to settle the difficulty of writing to Gorston Old Hall in this way, in order that neither the name of the woman nor the name of the place should be remarked by Sibley. He kept this rule with the letter which followed Barbara’s question, but her next broke the plan in pieces. It crossed one from him, and was written after receiving his letter about the garden.
“Dear Friend,” she named him. “Before I say anything else – and I feel that there are a thousand things, each pressing forward to be said first – I must tell you what I have found out. I’ve learned that you are living in the house my father built for me. Of course that won’t be important to you. Why should it be so? I have to remind myself over and over that I am surely just one of many women who have written to you after reading your book; one of many women you are kind to, out of the goodness of your heart, and the knowledge that’s in it. Can knowledge be in a heart? Yes, yours is there, I think, even more than in your brain. I am nothing to you except a poor drowning creature to whom you have held out a firm hand. But the drowning creature feels that your living in a place she knew and loved gives her a kind of personal right in you.
“I read this very morning in a London paper an extract from a New York one – an article about John Sanbourne. Perhaps you never even knew it was written? I’m sure you gave no permission to have it done. I think you would not like the way the man wrote about you; but I felt, in reading, that he tried hard to bring his work up to a high level and make it worthy of the subject. If you realized the good it has done me to know that you cared enough for my dear little Mirador to want it for your own, and to restore it from ruin, why, you could not be so very angry with the newspaper man!
“That time in California, when I was a little girl, seemed a hundred years ago, or even in another state of existence, till I read the description of you in your garden – once my garden. Then that part of my life came back as if it were yesterday. I can see the big olive tree, which had been let grow as it liked, with all sorts of flowing, dancing gestures of its branches and twisting of its trunk, the way olives grow in Italy and the south of France. I used to call it my ‘silver fountain.’ And under it there was always a look of moonlight, even in the brightest noon. I do hope nothing has happened to the tree? Say kind things to the silver fountain from its little friend Barbara. Write me about it, and tell me, please, if it means anything fairylike to you as it did to me. But I know it must, because of what you say about your garden. How little I thought when the letter came four days ago, that my long-ago garden and your garden of now, were one and the same!
“That letter was more than a letter. It was a saving force. Because it was so much to me, and I wanted to think it all over and over, I couldn’t have dared to answer at once in any case. But it came on an anniversary, August 18th, the day of his passing. I can’t say or write the word ‘death,’ since I have begun to learn from you. It was always a dreadful word, like a bludgeon. But now it’s impossible. For me it has gone out of the language.
“As you walk in your little California garden of the Mirador, will it please you at all to know that you have given me back the joy of the English garden, the beautiful garden and the lake, and the sweet, old, history-haunted house which he left to be mine? Because you, who know so much, say that he understands and doesn’t even need to forgive me, I take your word. I am not afraid to walk with his memory now. I can speak to it as I shouldn’t have had the courage to with him, when he was here in the flesh. And because of your letter, August 18th was not a terrible day. It was more like the wedding day of two spirits than the anniversary of a great grief, and one of the spirits – mine – just released from prison. Not that it can stay out of prison forever. It’s too weak, yet, to feel its freedom for long at a time. I’ve had horrible hours, ever since that day. I shall have them often, I know, for the thing I have done has made daily life a torture. But at worst I can steal away by myself sometimes to read your letters over. They, and my new thoughts, will be for me the tonic of courage; and so I can go on from day to day, not looking too far ahead, into the dark.
“If I haven’t trespassed upon your time and imposed upon your great kindness too much already, will you write me little things about the Mirador and your life there? Will you, if you take photographs, send a snapshot of the wee house as it is now, and perhaps the silver fountain, to – Your grateful friend, Barbara Denin?
“P. S. You will think I am very old-fashioned and early Victorian about my postscripts, and I suppose I am, though I don’t remember tacking many onto other letters, only those to you. This one is just a thought put into my head by some of the last things you said. It is about the war, and it came to me in the garden on August 18th.
“In a world war like this, with all its anguish, can it be meant for the nations, each one that suffers and strives, to develop by and by a new individuality, a great unselfish, selfless Self? Can it be that the Power behind the worlds throws this one now into the furnace because development must come for progress’ sake? When the earth was first created, every least thing that lived fought for itself, and there was no holding together in a large way, anywhere. When civilizations came, they brought no real improvement, for politics and greed divided nations against themselves as well as against each other. Is the true excuse for creation unity, with all the experience of ages to give it value? If it is so, and if each nation can attain to unity through sacrifice and heroism, won’t the next thing to follow be the unity of the whole world? Can this be coming to pass, slowly yet surely, not only with our grain of sand, but with all the worlds, while the Power who created watches through the cosmic days you spoke of? It would make one’s own tears of sorrow seem small, if one could believe this; and yet if we did not grudge the tears, they might count as pearls, poured into a golden cup, to brim it full of jewels worthy of God’s acceptance.
“Perhaps this isn’t much of a thought. But such as it is, there has been light in it for me, on dark days. And as I owe it to you, I felt I should like to tell you about it. It is going to make me realize more than I could before, the brotherhood of all men in war time, even the ones we call the enemy. Why, I used to be stupid and unseeing as a mole! I hardly thought about common people, pasty-faced waiters and weedy under-gardeners and grocer’s boys, as men at all. Now, out of every town and village they are marching with their faces turned to the front, brave and smiling. They are as glorious soldiers as any, and I pray for them as I would pray for my own brothers. Is that a step for me towards the great unity? I wonder – and hope.
“You see, I begin to warm myself at the fire your friendship has kindled. Each letter you write will be a fresh log piled on to feed the flame.”
CHAPTER XII
When Denin wrote again he ventured to give Barbara the name that she had given him, “Dear Friend.” And he enclosed photographs of the Mirador, with its flower-draped balcony, and of the “silver fountain.”
“What you say about my helping you is wonderful to hear, and makes me feel like a comet stuffed with stars,” he wrote. “It is a great honor for me that you care for my letters. It’s true, as you surmise, that others have written and do write to the author of ‘The War Wedding,’ and that is an honor too, in its way. But it’s an altogether different way. I can’t explain why. I won’t try to explain why the call you have sent half across the world is different from any other call. Yet I want you to believe that it is so, that I count it an immense privilege to write to you, and an immense delight to get your answers. What you call your ‘gratitude’ is the highest compliment ever paid to me. In trying to study out your problems, I have solved some of my own. In advising you to be happy, I’ve found a certain happiness for myself; so you see that I have far more cause to be grateful to you than you could possibly have to me.
“For one thing – just a small instance – I had never taken a photograph in my life, until you asked me for snapshots of the Mirador garden. In order to make them for you myself, I learned how. Now I am deep in it. Do you remember the little room that is half underground, yet not quite a cellar? I’ve turned it into a dark room for developing my negatives. I was up all one night watching the birth of my first work. But I don’t tell you that to bid for thanks. I did it because I was too infatuated with the work itself to think of going to bed. These things I send are crude. I am going to try to become what they call – don’t they? – an ‘artist photographer.’ When I can give myself a medal for my achievements, I’ll take some better pictures for you, of the house and garden, and of the Mission and other places in the neighborhood of your old home if you would like to have them. Of course it interests me immensely to know that you once lived here.”
The last sentence Denin added after a long moment of hesitation. It seemed brutal not to protest against that humble supposition of Barbara’s that her past ownership of the Mirador would be unimportant to him. But what he burned to say was so much more, that the few conventional words he dared to dole out looked churlish in black and white. Still, he had to let them stand.
After these letters, which crossed, the woman in England and the man in California caught the habit of writing to one another oftener than before – and differently. They did not wait for something definite to answer, for their thoughts so rushed to meet each other that it seemed as if they knew by wireless what was best to say each time. Often what they said might have read commonplacely to an outsider, for now they told each other the little things of every-day life. After her first outburst of confidence and confession, Barbara did not again for many weeks refer directly to Trevor d’Arcy. But Denin thought that he understood, and felt his veins fill full with a sudden jerk, as do those of a man electrocuted, when he read, “I am rather desperate to-day:” or, “To keep myself from going all to pieces, just now, I turned my thoughts off my own life, as you turn a tap, and sent them to your garden – my old garden of the Mirador. I strolled there with you, and you consoled me. It was evening. We were in the pergola (Father’s old head gardener used to call it the ‘paragolla’), and I forgot the iron grayness here that weighs down my spirit. Over you and me, as we talked, glittered my old, loved stars of California. And the pergola with its velvet drapery of leaves and flowers, and the three dark cypresses barring the sea view at one end, was like a corridor hung with illuminated tapestry ‘come alive.’ You can’t think how real it was for a few minutes, walking there and hearing your generous words of comfort, like magic balm on a wound that only magic balm could heal. I’ve decided that when things are very bad with me here, I’ll try that way of escape again. I will send my thoughts to the Mirador garden, and the comfort that nobody but you – who understand so marvelously – can even be asked to give. Do you mind my flying to you? Will you ‘pretend’ too, sometimes in those starlit nights, that I have come to ask your advice and help? Will you feel as if I were actually there, and will you put the advice into words? Maybe they’ll reach me so. I do believe they will. And I am needing such words more than ever lately. I can hardly wait for them to come in letters. Though I have the ‘invisible wall of love’ to lean against, that you told me of (and I do lean hard!), there is an influence which tries always to drag me away from that dear support, making it seem not to belong to me after all. There’s a voice which tells me I was never really loved by the one whose memory I worship; that he asked me to marry him only because mother practically forced him to do so. This isn’t an inner voice. It’s the voice of a person whose jealousy and cruelty I must forgive, or be as cruel myself. The voice says it has reason to be sure that all it tells me is true; that it’s useless for me to ask mother, because she would deny it; besides, she is too ill to be troubled or reproached about anything. You know, I have two invalids now, so I can’t do much for any one outside, except send money —his money, to the poor and the wounded.
“The terrible voice hammers constantly on my heart, and is breaking it to pieces, in spite of your help. For even you can’t help me there. How could you, when about that one thing – that principal thing of all, it seems now – you have no knowledge? You can’t know whether he ever loved me as a man loves one woman, or whether he was simply willing to spread his generous protection round me for the future, when he was going away to risk his life. It would have been like him to do that, I have to admit in some moods. And I hate the moods, and hate the voice for putting the idea – which mercifully hadn’t struck me before – into my head. I oughtn’t to hate the voice, because it may be that its wickedness – almost fiendish at times – is caused only by hopeless suffering. I strive to say to myself, as I think you would wish me to say, ‘Could a bird who had been blinded and thrown into a cage where it never saw sunshine, do better than croak, or peck the hand that tried to feed it?’
“I need to walk with you in your garden, you see! Send me kind thoughts from there, without waiting to write. Then, if I send you questions in the same way, I shall feel that you hear and answer. I shall listen for the answers. Tell me, first of all, do you, as a man, think another man would ask a girl to marry him just because she was poor and without prospects, and he was going away to face death? Of course it’s true that you can’t know, but what do you think? Remember, I’m not speaking of an ordinary man, but one almost too generous and chivalrous for these days. Do you think such an one might have done that?”
Denin wrote back, “I think no man would have done that. You need have no fear that you were married for any motive but love. A man – even such a man as you describe – must have argued that a young, attractive girl would have plenty of chances in life, at least as good as that which he could offer. She would have no need of his protection, and he would have no right to press it upon her, unless he gave all his love as well.”
This assurance Denin tried to send Barbara in the way she asked, as well as by the letter which would take weeks to reach its destination. He made of his ardent thought for her a carrier pigeon with golden wings, which could travel swiftly as the light. Thus he rushed to her the answers to many questions, – questions which seemed to come to him from far off, as he walked in the garden. He could hear her voice calling, when the wind came over the sea, from the east where England lay.
Denin had bought the Mirador and begun his life there, with some echo of Ernest Dowson’s words in his mind:
Now will I take me to a place of peace:
Forget my heart’s desire,
In solitude and prayer work out my soul’s release.
But his heart’s desire was with him, as it could have been nowhere else, so vividly, flamingly with him, that there could be no thought of finding peace. He no longer even wished for peace. He would not have exchanged a peace pure as the crystal stillness of a mountain lake, for the dear torture of seeing Barbara’s soul laid bare. He was never in a state calm enough to analyze his feelings. He could only feel. Yet the strangeness of his position and hers swept over him sometimes, as with a hot gust from the tropics. John Denin had had to die, in order to learn that his wife adored him. The price would not have been too big, if he alone had to pay, but she was paying too. He could not take the payment all upon himself; yet he could help to make it less of a strain for her, and all his life was poured into the giving of this help. Every thought, every heart-beat was for Barbara. He lived to give himself to her, and to take what she had for him in return. With each day that passed he realized how much more they were to each other at this vast distance – these two, parted forever – than most men and women living side by side in legal union. He knew that John Sanbourne was absolutely necessary to Barbara Denin, as she was to him; and all the incidents of their daily lives, big and small, though lived separately, drew them together when recounted, as pearls are drawn together on a lengthening string.
Now that the secret was out, and Lady Denin knew where John Sanbourne had made his home, without suspecting any hidden mystery in the coincidence, he was thankful that she had learned the truth. A barrier was down, and they seemed to gaze straight into each other’s eyes, across the space where it had been. In return for his snapshots of the Mirador and its garden, Barbara sent photographs taken by herself of Gorston Old Hall. One of these showed the lake, with a bow-windowed corner of the black and white house mirrored in it – the very spot where Sir John Denin had asked Barbara Fay to be his wife. “The place I love best,” she said. Though she did not say why, it thrilled him to guess. And in the same letter she sent faintly fragrant specimens from the “Shakespeare border.”
How the sweetness of the dear old-fashioned things, whose very names distilled a perfume, floated back to Denin from the garden he had given to his love!
“My husband had the border planted,” Barbara explained. “Don’t you think it a delicious idea? Not a single flower or herb mentioned by Shakespeare has been forgotten, and you can hardly imagine what a noble company has been brought together. Once we walked in the garden, he and I, on a moonlight night, when a breeze came up and drove the evening mists slowly, slowly along the paths and borders like a procession of spirits in silver cloaks. We played that it had driven away the ghosts of Shakespeare’s people, kings and queens and knights and ladies called back to earth by the perfume – which, you say, is the voice – of those well-remembered flowers. That’s one of the memories I cherish now, when I walk past the Shakespeare borders in the moony dusk. And thanks to you – who have helped me literally to move into my dreams and live there– I don’t seem to walk alone. For a few moments then, I am neither lonely nor sad. The moonlight still drips into my heart, like water into a fountain, as it dripped on that night I remember: and my thoughts lead me along a beautiful, mysterious road that nobody else can see – a road to wonderful things I’ve never known, but have always longed for, such a road as certain music seems to open out before you.”