What if she hated the book? What if she wrote, as a woman who had been twice a war bride, to say that a subject such as he had chosen was too sacred to put into print? What if she felt bound to reproach the author for treading brutally on holy ground?
If that was what the letter had to say to him, his message of peace had failed, and all his patched-up scheme of existence broke down in that one failure.
The thought that he was a coward shrinking from a blow nerved him to open the letter. He was on the point of tearing the envelope, but he could not be rough with a thing Barbara had touched, nor could he deface it. He took up the scissors and cut off one end of the envelope, then drew out a sheet of the familiar gray-blue paper. Unfolding it, his hands trembled. All the rest of his life, such as it was, he felt, hung on what he was about to read.
The letter began abruptly. “You must have many letters from strangers, but none will bring you more gratitude than this. If you are like your book, you are too generous to be bored by grateful words from people whose sore hearts you helped to heal, so I won’t apologize. You could not write as you do, I think, if you didn’t want to do good to others. Will you then help me, even more than you have helped me already, by answering a question I am going to ask? Will you tell me whether the wonderful things you say, to comfort those of us who are losing our dearest in battle, are just inspired thoughts, or whether you have yourself been very near death, so near that you caught a vision from the other side? If you answer me, and if you say that actual experience gave you this knowledge, your book—which has already been like a strong hand dragging me up from the depths—will become a beautiful message meant especially for me out of all the whole world, making all my future life bearable.
“Every night for months I’ve gone to bed unable to sleep, because I’ve felt exactly as if my brain were a battlefield, full of the agony and hopelessness of brave men dying violent and dreadful deaths, cut off in the midst of youth, with the stories of their lives tragically unfinished. But since I read in your book that marvelous scene with those suddenly released spirits—young men of both sides, friends and enemies, meeting and talking to each other, saying, ‘Is this all?’ ‘Is this the worst that death can do to us?’ why, I seem to pass beyond the battlefield! I go with those happy, surprised young men who are seeing for the first time the great ‘reality behind the thing’ and a feeling of rest and immense peace comes to me. I don’t keep it long at a time. I can’t, yet. But if you write and say you know, I think I may some day learn to keep it.
“I have the English edition of your book, but I have read in a newspaper an extract from the interview a journalist had with the publisher in New York. You see, everybody who has some one dear in the war, or has lost some one beloved, is reading and talking of the book. They all want to know things about you, but perhaps not all for as real a reason as mine. Some people have said that perhaps the author may be a woman, who chooses to write under a man’s name. I felt sure from the first it couldn’t be so, for only a man could say those things as you say them; but I was glad of your publisher’s assurance that you are a man, and that your home now is in the far West in America. Perhaps I shouldn’t have dared write you if you were in this country, because—but no, I needn’t explain.
“My name can be of no interest to you, yet I will sign it.
“Yours gratefully, Barbara Denin.”
“Barbara Denin.” ... She had kept his name!
Many a woman did (he was aware) after a second marriage continue to use the name of her first husband, in order to retain a title. But all he knew of the girl Barbara Fay made it amazing to him that she should hold to the name of a man she had never loved, after becoming the wife of a man she had loved since childhood.