“When I say ‘a story,’ I mean an article—an interview,” Reid explained to the amateur intelligence. “I think,” he went on, beginning to find possibilities in the hermit and his surroundings (voice with charm in it: fine eyes: striking height: peculiar fad for solitude, etc.)—“I think I see my way to something pretty good.”
“I’m afraid,” Denin insisted, speaking with great civility, because he had suffered too much to inflict the smallest pin-prick of pain upon any living thing if it could be avoided. “I’m afraid I must ask you not to rout me out of my burrow with any searchlight. You can see for yourself I’m no figure for a newspaper paragraph. If the public really takes the slightest interest in me, for Heaven’s sake leave them to their illusions. Please write nothing about me at all. But I can’t let you go without asking you to rest and drink a glass of lemonade. I’m ashamed to confess”—and he laughed—“that I’ve nothing stronger to offer you. I lead the simple life here!”
As he spoke he came down from the ladder, trying not to show inhospitable reluctance, and invited the reporter to sit in the shade of the veranda. Reid, seeing that the man was in earnest, not merely “playing to the gallery,” showed his shrewd journalistic qualities by acquiescence. He accepted the situation and the lemonade, and kept his eyes open. He did not abuse the hermit’s kindness by outstaying his welcome, but took leave at the end of fifteen or twenty minutes. At the gate, he held out his hand and Sanbourne had to shake it with a good grace. Noticing for future reference, that the author of “The War Wedding” had a hand as attractive as his scarred face was plain, Reid said resignedly, “Well, Mr. Sanbourne, thank you for entertaining me. But I’m sorry you don’t want me to write about you. Sure you won’t change your mind?”
“Sure,” echoed Sanbourne, and went thankfully back to put the last touches on the house-wall. About half an hour later the work was finished, and he had time to remember that several letters and papers, brought by the postman, were lying unopened. Standing on his ladder, he had asked to have the budget left on the balcony table. Then he had forgotten it, for he dreaded rather than looked forward to the letters of his unknown correspondents; and even if Barbara acknowledged his answer (which seemed to him unlikely) it would be many days before he could expect to hear from her.
This time there was the usual fat envelope, stuffed with smaller ones, forwarded by Eversedge Sibley; also there was a letter from Sibley himself. Denin put off delving into the big envelope, and opened Sibley’s. Quite a friendship had developed between them, and he liked hearing from the publisher, who wrote about the great events of the world or advised the reading of certain new books, which he generally sent in a separate package. Sometimes he sent newspapers, too, fancying that Sanbourne saw only the local ones. They were having a discussion through the post, the American trying to instruct the Englishman in the intricacies of home politics; but the letter which Denin now opened did not refer to that subject, nor did it finish with the usual appeal: “When will the call to work get hold of you again, or when will the spirit move you to think of writing me another book?”
“Dear Sanbourne,” Sibley began. “This is an interlude, to the air of ‘Money Musk’! Our custom, as you may vaguely have noticed in the contract I forced you to sign, is to make royalty payments to our authors twice a year. But you have bought a house and land, and Heaven knows what all, out of your advance, you tell me. Seems to me you can’t have left yourself much margin. You mentioned the first day we met that you were a poor man; so I have unpleasant visions of what our latest star author may have reduced himself to, while the men whose job it is to sell his masterpiece are piling up dollars for his publishers. The check I lay between these pages (so as to break it to you gently) is only a small part of what we know the ‘Wedding’ to have made up to date. Never in all my experience has a book advertised itself as yours seems to have done. One reader tells a dozen others to buy it. Each one of that dozen spreads the glad tidings among his or her own dozen. So it goes! The ‘Wedding’ has now been out three months and is in its tenth edition, the last six whacking big ones. It won’t stop short of at least a million, I bet, with Canada, England, and the Colonies as well as our immense public here. With this assurance, you can afford to use the present check as pin money. Yours ever, E. S.”
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.