Chapter 19

Gilbert, complacent and affable, returned to Washington accompanied by David. A month later the newly made consul sailed from New York for South America. He landed at a South American seaport that had a fine harbor snugly guarded by jutting cliffs skirting the base of a hill barren and severe in aspect.

As he walked down the narrow, foreign streets thronged with a strange people, and saw the structures with their meaningless signs, he began to feel a wave of homesickness. Then, looking up, he felt that little inner thrill that comes from seeing one's flag in a foreign land.

"And that is why I am here," he thought, "to keep that flag flying."

He resolutely started out on the first day to keep the flag flying in the manner befitting the kind of a consul he meant to be. He maintained a strict watch over the commercial conditions, and his reports of consular news were promptly rendered in concise and instructive form. His native tact and inherent courtesy won him favor with the government, his hospitality and kindly intent conciliated the natives, and he was soon also accorded social privileges. He began to enjoy life. His duties were interesting, and his leisure was devoted to the pursuit of novel pleasures.

Fletcher Wilder, the son of the president of an American mining company, was down there ostensibly to look after his father's interests, but in reality to take out pleasure parties in his trim little yacht, and David soon came to be the most welcome guest that set foot on its deck.

At the end of a year, when his duties had become a matter of routine and his life had lost the charm of novelty, David's ambitions started from their slumbers, though not this time in a political way. Wilder had cruised away, and the young consul was conscious of a sense of aloneness. He spent his evenings on his spacious veranda, from where he could see the moonlight making a rippling road of silver across the black water. The sensuous beauty of the tropical nights brought him back to his early Land of Dreams, and the pastime that he had been forced to relinquish for action now appealed to him with overwhelming force and fascination. But the dreams were a man's dreams, not the fleeting fancies of a boy. They continued to possess and absorb him until one night, when he was looking above the mountains at one lone star that shone brighter than the rest, he was moved for the first time to give material shape and form to his conceptions. The impulse led to execution.

"I must get it out of my system," he explained half apologetically to himself as he began the writing of a novel. To this task, as to everything else he had undertaken, he brought the entire concentration of his mind and energy, until the book soon began to seem real to him--more real than anything he had done. As he was copying the last page for the last time, Fletcher sailed into the harbor for a week of farewell before returning to New York.

"What have you been doing for amusement these last six months, Dunne?" he asked as he dropped into David's house.

"You'd never guess," said David, "what your absence drove me to. I've written a book--a novel."

"Let me take it back to the hotel with me to-night. I haven't been sleeping well lately, and it may--"

"If it serves as a soporific," said David gravely, as he handed him the bulky package, "my labor will not have been in vain."

The next morning Wilder came again into David's office.

"I fear you didn't sleep well, after all," observed David, looking at his visitor's heavy-lidded eyes.

"No, darn you, Dunne. I took up your manuscript and I never laid it down until the first streaks of dawn. Then when I went to bed I lay awake thinking it all over. Why, Dunne, it's the best book I ever read!"

"I wish," David replied with a whimsical smile, "that you were a publisher."

"Speaking of publishers, that's why I didn't bring the manuscript back. I sail in a week, and I want you to let me take it to a publisher I know in New York. He will give it a prompt reading."

"If it wouldn't bother you too much, I wish you would. You see, it would take so long for it to come back here and be sent out again each time it is rejected."

"Rejected!" scoffed Wilder. "You wait and see! Aren't you going to dedicate it?"

David hesitated, his eyes stealing dreamily out across the bay to the horizon line.

"I wonder," he said meditatively, "if the person to whom it is dedicated--every word of it--wouldn't know without the inscription."

"No," objected Fletcher, "you should have it appear out of compliment."

He smiled as he wrote on a piece of paper: "To T. L. P."

"The initials of your sweetheart?" quizzed Fletcher.

"No; when I was a little chap I used to spin yarns. These are the initials of one who was my most absorbed listener."

Wilder raised anchor and sailed back to the states. At the expiration of two months he wrote David that his book had been accepted. In time ten bound copies of his novel, his allotment from the publishers, brought him a thrill of indescribable pleasure. The next mail brought papers with glowing reviews and letters of commendation and congratulations. Next came a good-sized check, and the information that his book was a "best seller."

The night that this information was received he went up to the top of the hill that jutted over the harbor and listened to the song of the waves. Two years in this land of liquid light--a land of burning days and silent, sapphired nights, a land of palms and olives--two years of quiet, dreamy bliss, an idle and unsubstantial time! How evanescent it seemed, by the light of the days at home, when something had always pressed him to action.

"Two years of drifting," he thought. "It is time I, too, raised anchor and sailed home."

The next mail brought a letter that made his heart beat faster than it had yet been able to do in this exotic, lazy land. It was a recall from Barnabas.

"DEAR DAVE:

"Nothing but a lazy life in a foreign land would have drove a man like you to write a book. The Jedge and M'ri are pleased, but I know you are cut out for something different. I want you to come home in time to run for legislature again. There's goin' to be something doin'. It is time for another senator, and who do you suppose is plugging for it, and opening hogsheads of money? Wilksley. I want for you to come back and head him off. If you've got one speck of your old spirit, and you care anything about your state, you'll do it. I am still running politics for this county at the old stand. Your book has started folks to talking about you agen, so come home while the picking is good. You've dreamt long enough. It is time to get up. Don't write no more books till you git too old to work.

"Yours if you come, "B. B."

The letter brought to David's eyes something that no one in this balmy land had ever seen there. With the look of a fighter belted for battle he went to the telegraph office and cabled Barnabas, "Coming."