It was the day he finished re-plastering the house-wall, that the celebrity was “discovered” by Santa Barbara.
Denin stood half way up a ladder with a trowel in his hand, when a young man in a Panama hat and a natty suit of gray flannels came swinging jauntily along the path: altogether, a “natty” looking young man. He would probably have chosen the adjective himself.
“Good morning!” he confidently addressed the lanky, shirt-sleeved figure on the ladder. “Do you happen to know if Mr. John Sanbourne is at home?”
“I am John Sanbourne,” said Denin, making no move to descend the ladder. He wanted to get on with his work, and expected the newcomer’s errand, whatever it might be, would be over and done with in a minute. He thought that the young man had probably come to sell him an encyclopedia or a sewing machine, because the only other visitors he had had—except the postman, and the boy from the grocer—had pertinaciously urged that the Mirador was incomplete without these objects.
The young man looked horrified for an instant, but being a journalist and used to rude shocks, he was able hastily to marshal his features and bring them stiffly to attention. He had already learned that the Mirador’s new owner was “peculiar,” a sort of hermit whom nobody called on, because he did his own work, wore shabby clothes, and made no pretense of having social eminence. Indeed, it had never occurred to any one (until the idea jumped into the reporter’s brilliant brain) that a person who could buy and inhabit that half ruined “doll’s house” could be of importance in the outside world. The journalist it was who, happening to meet the postman near the Drake place that morning, saw a huge envelope addressed to “John Sanbourne.” He flashed out an eager question: “Is there a John Sanbourne living near here?” He was answered: “Yes, a fellow by that name’s bought the Mirador”; quickly elicited a few further details, and, abandoning another project, arrived when the postman was out of the way, at the Mirador gate. It was a blow—severe if not fatal—to romance to find John Sanbourne splashed with whitewash and looking as a self-respecting mason would be ashamed to look. But perhaps he was a socialist. That would at least make an interesting paragraph.
“Are you the John Sanbourne, the man who wrote ‘The War Wedding’?” the visitor persisted.
Denin was surprised and disconcerted. “Why do you ask?” he sharply answered one question with another; then added, still more sharply, “And who are you?”
“My name’s Reid. I work for a San Francisco paper, and I’m correspondent for one in New York. If you wrote the book that’s made such a wonderful boom, my papers want to get a story about you.”
“Thank you. That’s very kind of you and of them,” said Denin coolly. “But I haven’t a ‘story’ worth any newspaper’s getting. I’m sorry you should give yourself trouble in vain. Yet so it must be.”