BERNALD came on two successive Sundays; and the second time he lingered
till the Tuesday.
“Here he comes!” Wade had said, the first evening, as the two young men,
with Wade’s mother sat in the sultry dusk, with the Virginian creeper
drawing, between the verandah arches, its black arabesques against a
moon-lined sky.
In the darkness Bernald heard a step on the gravel, and saw the red flit
of a cigar through the shrubs. Then a loosely-moving figure obscured the
patch of sky between the creepers, and the red spark became the centre
of a dim bearded face, in which Bernald discerned only a broad white
gleam of forehead.
It was the young man’s subsequent impression that Winterman had not
spoken much that first evening; at any rate, Bernald himself remembered
chiefly what the Wades had said. And this was the more curious because
he had come for the purpose of studying their visitor, and because
there was nothing to divert him from that purpose in Wade’s halting
communications or his mother’s artless comments. He reflected afterward
that there must have been a mysteriously fertilizing quality in the
stranger’s silence: it had brooded over their talk like a large moist
cloud above a dry country.
Mrs. Wade, apparently apprehensive lest her son should have given
Bernald an exaggerated notion of their visitor’s importance, had
hastened to qualify it before the latter appeared.
“He’s not what you or Howland would call intellectual--“(Bernald writhed
at the coupling of the names)--“not in the least _literary;_ though he
told Bob he used to write. I don’t think, though, it could have been
what Howland would call writing.” Mrs. Wade always mentioned her younger
son with a reverential drop of the voice. She viewed literature much as
she did Providence, as an inscrutably mystery; and she spoke of Howland
as a dedicated being, set apart to perform secret rites within the veil
of the sanctuary.
“I shouldn’t say he had a quick mind,” she continued, reverting
apologetically to Winterman. “Sometimes he hardly seems to follow what
we’re saying. But he’s got such sound ideas--when he does speak he’s
never silly. And clever people sometimes _are_, don’t you think so?”
Bernald groaned an unqualified assent. “And he’s so capable. The other
day something went wrong with the kitchen range, just as I was expecting
some friends of Bob’s for dinner; and do you know, when Mr. Winterman
heard we were in trouble, he came and took a look, and knew at once what
to do? I told him it was a dreadful pity he wasn’t married!”
Close on midnight, when the session on the verandah ended, and the
two young men were strolling down to the bungalow at Winterman’s side,
Bernald’s mind reverted to the image of the fertilizing cloud. There was
something brooding, pregnant, in the silent presence beside him: he had,
in place of any circumscribing impression of the individual, a large
hovering sense of manifold latent meanings. And he felt a distinct
thrill of relief when, half-way down the lawn, Doctor Bob was checked by
a voice that called him back to the telephone.
“Now I’ll be with him alone!” thought Bernald, with a throb like a
lover’s.
In the low-ceilinged bungalow Winterman had to grope for the lamp on his
desk, and as its light struck up into his face Bernald’s sense of the
rareness of his opportunity increased. He couldn’t have said why, for
the face, with its ridged brows, its shabby greyish beard and blunt
Socratic nose, made no direct appeal to the eye. It seemed rather like
a stage on which remarkable things might be enacted, like some shaggy
moorland landscape dependent for form and expression on the clouds
rolling over it, and the bursts of light between; and one of these
flashed out in the smile with which Winterman, as if in answer to his
companion’s thought, said simply, as he turned to fill his pipe: “Now
we’ll talk.”
So he’d known all along that they hadn’t yet--and had guessed that, with
Bernald, one might!
The young man’s glow of pleasure was so intense that it left him for
a moment unable to meet the challenge; and in that moment he felt the
brush of something winged and summoning. His spirit rose to it with a
rush; but just as he felt himself poised between the ascending pinions,
the door opened and Bob Wade plunged in.
“Too bad! I’m so sorry! It was from Howland, to say he can’t come
to-morrow after all.” The doctor panted out his news with honest grief.
“I tried my best to pull it off for you; and my brother _wants_ to
come--he’s keen to talk to you and see what he can do. But you see he’s
so tremendously in demand. He’ll try for another Sunday later on.”
Winterman nodded with a whimsical gesture. “Oh, he’ll find me here. I
shall work my time out slowly.” He pointed to the scattered sheets on
the kitchen table which formed his writing desk.
“Not slowly enough to suit us,” Wade answered hospitably. “Only, if
Howland could have come he might have given you a tip or two--put you on
the right track--shown you how to get in touch with the public.”
Winterman, his hands in his sagging pockets, lounged against the bare
pine walls, twisting his pipe under his beard. “Does your brother enjoy
the privilege of that contact?” he questioned gravely.
Wade stared a little. “Oh, of course Howland’s not what you’d call a
_popular_ writer; he despises that kind of thing. But whatever he says
goes with--well, with the chaps that count; and every one tells me he’s
written _the_ book on Pellerin. You must read it when you get back your
eyes.” He paused, as if to let the name sink in, but Winterman drew
at his pipe with a blank face. “You must have heard of Pellerin, I
suppose?” the doctor continued. “I’ve never read a word of him myself:
he’s too big a proposition for _me_. But one can’t escape the talk about
him. I have him crammed down my throat even in hospital. The internes
read him at the clinics. He tumbles out of the nurses’ pockets. The
patients keep him under their pillows. Oh, with most of them, of
course, it’s just a craze, like the last new game or puzzle: they don’t
understand him in the least. Howland says that even now, twenty-five
years after his death, and with his books in everybody’s hands, there
are not twenty people who really understand Pellerin; and Howland ought
to know, if anybody does. He’s--what’s their great word?--_interpreted_
him. You must get Howland to put you through a course of Pellerin.”
And as the young men, having taken leave of Winterman, retraced
their way across the lawn, Wade continued to develop the theme of his
brother’s accomplishments.
“I wish I _could_ get Howland to take an interest in Winterman: this
is the third Sunday he’s chucked us. Of course he does get bored with
people consulting him about their writings--but I believe if he could
only talk to Winterman he’d see something in him, as we do. And it would
be such a god-send to the poor man to have some one to advise him about
his work. I’m going to make a desperate effort to get Howland here next
Sunday.”
It was then that Bernald vowed to himself that he would return the
next Sunday at all costs. He hardly knew whether he was prompted by the
impulse to shield Winterman from Howland Wade’s ineptitude, or by the
desire to see the latter abandon himself to the full shamelessness of
its display; but of one fact he was blissfully assured--and that was of
the existence in Winterman of some quality which would provoke Howland
to the amplest exercise of his fatuity. “How he’ll draw him--how he’ll
draw him!” Bernald chuckled, with a security the more unaccountable
that his one glimpse of Winterman had shown the latter only as a passive
subject for experimentation; and he felt himself avenged in advance for
the injury of Howland Wade’s existence.