THAT this hope was to be frustrated Bernald learned from Howland Wade’s
own lips, the day before the two young men were to meet at Portchester.
“I can’t really, my dear fellow,” the Interpreter lisped, passing a
polished hand over the faded smoothness of his face. “Oh, an authentic
engagement, I assure you: otherwise, to oblige old Bob I’d submit
cheerfully to looking over his foundling’s literature. But I’m pledged
this week to the Pellerin Society of Kenosha: I had a hand in founding
it, and for two years now they’ve been patiently waiting for a word from
me--the _Fiat Lux_, so to speak. You see it’s a ministry, Bernald--I
assure you, I look upon my calling quite religiously.”
As Bernald listened, his disappointment gradually changed to relief.
Howland, on trial, always turned out to be too insufferable, and the
pleasure of watching his antics was invariably lost in the impulse to
put a sanguinary end to them.
“If he’d only keep his beastly pink hands off Pellerin,” Bernald
groaned, thinking of the thick manuscript condemned to perpetual
incarceration in his own desk by the publication of Howland’s
“definitive” work on the great man. One couldn’t, _after _Howland
Wade, expose one’s self to the derision of writing about Pellerin: the
eagerness with which Wade’s book had been devoured proved, not that the
public had enough appetite for another, but simply that, for a stomach
so undiscriminating, anything better than Wade had given it would be too
good. And Bernald, in the confidence that his own work was open to
this objection, had stoically locked it up. Yet if he had resigned his
exasperated intelligence to the fact that Wade’s book existed, and was
already passing into the immortality of perpetual republication, he
could not, after repeated trials, adjust himself to the author’s talk
about Pellerin. When Wade wrote of the great dead he was egregious, but
in conversation he was familiar and fond. It might have been supposed
that one of the beauties of Pellerin’s hidden life and mysterious taking
off would have been to guard him from the fingering of anecdote; but
biographers like Howland Wade were born to rise above such obstacles. He
might be vague or inaccurate in dealing with the few recorded events of
his subject’s life; but when he left fact for conjecture no one had a
firmer footing. Whole chapters in his volume were constructed in the
conditional mood and packed with hypothetical detail; and in talk, by
the very law of the process, hypothesis became affirmation, and he was
ready to tell you confidentially the exact circumstances of Pellerin’s
death, and of the “distressing incident” leading up to it. Bernald
himself not only questioned the form under which this incident was
shaping itself before posterity, but the mere radical fact of its
occurrence: he had never been able to discover any break in the dense
cloud enveloping Pellerin’s later life and its mysterious termination.
He had gone away--that was all that any of them knew: he who had so
little, at any time, been with them or of them; and his going had so
slightly stirred the public consciousness that even the subsequent news
of his death, laconically imparted from afar, had dropped unheeded into
the universal scrap-basket, to be long afterward fished out, with all
its details missing, when some enquiring spirit first became aware, by
chance encounter with a two-penny volume in a London book-stall, not
only that such a man as John Pellerin had died, but that he had ever
lived, or written.
It need hardly be noted that Howland Wade had not been the pioneer in
question: his had been the wiser part of swelling the chorus when it
rose, and gradually drowning the other voices by his own insistent note.
He had pitched the note so screamingly, and held it so long, that he was
now the accepted authority on Pellerin, not only in the land which had
given birth to his genius but in the Europe which had first acclaimed
it; and it was the central point of pain in Bernald’s sense of the
situation that a man who had so yearned for silence as Pellerin should
have his grave piped over by such a voice as Wade’s.
Bernald’s talk with the Interpreter had revived this ache to the
momentary exclusion of other sensations; and he was still sore with
it when, the next afternoon, he arrived at Portchester for his second
Sunday with the Wades.
At the station he had the surprise of seeing Winterman’s face on the
platform, and of hearing from him that Doctor Bob had been called away
to assist at an operation in a distant town.
“Mrs. Wade wanted to put you off, but I believe the message came too
late; so she sent me down to break the news to you,” said Winterman,
holding out his hand.
Perhaps because they were the first conventional words that Bernald had
heard him speak, the young man was struck by the relief his intonation
gave them.
“She wanted to send a carriage,” Winterman added, “but I told her
we’d walk back through the woods.” He looked at Bernald with a sudden
kindness that flushed the young man with pleasure.
“Are you strong enough? It’s not too far?”
“Oh, no. I’m pulling myself together. Getting back to work is the
slowest part of the business: not on account of my eyes--I can use them
now, though not for reading; but some of the links between things are
missing. It’s a kind of broken spectrum ... here, that boy will look
after your bag.”
The walk through the woods remained in Bernald’s memory as an enchanted
hour. He used the word literally, as descriptive of the way in which
Winterman’s contact changed the face of things, or perhaps restored them
to their primitive meanings. And the scene they traversed--one of those
little untended woods that still, in America, fringe the tawdry skirts
of civilization--acquired, as a background to Winterman, the hush of
a spot aware of transcendent visitings. Did he talk, or did he make
Bernald talk? The young man never knew. He recalled only a sense of
lightness and liberation, as if the hard walls of individuality had
melted, and he were merged in the poet’s deeper interfusion, yet without
losing the least sharp edge of self. This general impression resolved
itself afterward into the sense of Winterman’s wide elemental range.
His thought encircled things like the horizon at sea. He didn’t, as it
happened, touch on lofty themes--Bernald was gleefully aware that,
to Howland Wade, their talk would hardly have been Talk at all--but
Winterman’s mind, applied to lowly topics, was like a powerful lens that
brought out microscopic delicacies and differences.
The lack of Sunday trains kept Doctor Bob for two days on the scene
of his surgical duties, and during those two days Bernald seized every
moment of communion with his friend’s guest. Winterman, as Wade had
said, was reticent as to his personal affairs, or rather as to the
practical and material conditions to which the term is generally
applied. But it was evident that, in Winterman’s case, the usual
classification must be reversed, and that the discussion of ideas
carried one much farther into his intimacy than any specific
acquaintance with the incidents of his life.
“That’s exactly what Howland Wade and his tribe have never understood
about Pellerin: that it’s much less important to know how, or even why,
he disapp--”
Bernald pulled himself up with a jerk, and turned to look full at his
companion. It was late on the Monday evening, and the two men, after an
hour’s chat on the verandah to the tune of Mrs. Wade’s knitting-needles,
had bidden their hostess good-night and strolled back to the bungalow
together.
“Come and have a pipe before you turn in,” Winterman had said; and they
had sat on together till midnight, with the door of the bungalow open on
a heaving moonlit bay, and summer insects bumping against the chimney of
the lamp. Winterman had just bent down to re-fill his pipe from the
jar on the table, and Bernald, jerking about to catch him in the yellow
circle of lamplight, sat speechless, staring at a fact that seemed
suddenly to have substituted itself for Winterman’s face, or rather to
have taken on its features.
“No, they never saw that Pellerin’s ideas _were_ Pellerin. ...” He
continued to stare at Winterman. “Just as this man’s ideas are--why,
_are_ Pellerin!”
The thought uttered itself in a kind of inner shout, and Bernald started
upright with the violent impact of his conclusion. Again and again in
the last forty-eight hours he had exclaimed to himself: “This is as good
as Pellerin.” Why hadn’t he said till now: “This _is_ Pellerin”? ...
Surprising as the answer was, he had no choice but to take it. He hadn’t
said so simply because Winterman was _better than Pellerin_--that there
was so much more of him, so to speak. Yes; but--it came to Bernald in
a flash--wouldn’t there by this time have been any amount more of
Pellerin? ... The young man felt actually dizzy with the thought. That
was it--there was the solution of the haunting problem! This man
was Pellerin, and more than Pellerin! It was so fantastic and yet so
unanswerable that he burst into a sudden startled laugh.
Winterman, at the same moment, brought his palm down with a sudden crash
on the pile of manuscript covering the desk.
“What’s the matter?” Bernald gasped.
“My match wasn’t out. In another minute the destruction of the library
of Alexandria would have been a trifle compared to what you’d have
seen.” Winterman, with his large deep laugh, shook out the smouldering
sheets. “And I should have been a pensioner on Doctor Bob the Lord knows
how much longer!”
Bernald pulled himself together. “You’ve really got going again? The
thing’s actually getting into shape?”
“This particular thing _is_ in shape. I drove at it hard all last week,
thinking our friend’s brother would be down on Sunday, and might look it
over.”
Bernald had to repress the tendency to another wild laugh.
“Howland--you meant to show _Howland_ what you’ve done?”
Winterman, looming against the moonlight, slowly turned a dusky shaggy
head toward him.
“Isn’t it a good thing to do?”
Bernald wavered, torn between loyalty to his friends and the
grotesqueness of answering in the affirmative. After all, it was none of
his business to furnish Winterman with an estimate of Howland Wade.
“Well, you see, you’ve never told me what your line _is_,” he answered,
temporizing.
“No, because nobody’s ever told _me_. It’s exactly what I want to find
out,” said the other genially.
“And you expect Wade--?”
“Why, I gathered from our good Doctor that it’s his trade. Doesn’t he
explain--interpret?”
“In his own domain--which is Pellerinism.”
Winterman gazed out musingly upon the moon-touched dusk of waters. “And
what _is_ Pellerinism?” he asked.
Bernald sprang to his feet with a cry. “Ah, I don’t know--but you’re
Pellerin!”
They stood for a minute facing each other, among the uncertain swaying
shadows of the room, with the sea breathing through it as something
immense and inarticulate breathed through young Bernald’s thoughts; then
Winterman threw up his arms with a humorous gesture.
“Don’t shoot!” he said.