Chapter 10

Vyse started back with one of his anaemic blushes. “I was hoping you’d be in. I wanted to speak to you. There’ve been no letters the last day or two,” he explained.

Betton drew a quick breath of relief. The man had some sense of decency, then! He meant to dismiss himself.

“I told you so, my dear fellow; the book’s a flat failure,” he said, almost gaily.

Vyse made a deprecating gesture. “I don’t know that I should regard the absence of letters as the ultimate test. But I wanted to ask you if there isn’t something else I can do on the days when there’s no writing.” He turned his glance toward the book-lined walls. “Don’t you want your library catalogued?” he asked insidiously.

“Had it done last year, thanks.” Betton glanced away from Vyse’s face. It was piteous, how he needed the job!

“I see. ... Of course this is just a temporary lull in the letters. They’ll begin again--as they did before. The people who read carefully read slowly--you haven’t heard yet what _they_ think.”

Betton felt a rush of puerile joy at the suggestion. Actually, he hadn’t thought of that!

“There _was_ a big second crop after ‘Diadems and Faggots,’” he mused aloud.

“Of course. Wait and see,” said Vyse confidently.

The letters in fact began again--more gradually and in smaller numbers. But their quality was different, as Vyse had predicted. And in two cases Betton’s correspondents, not content to compress into one rapid communication the thoughts inspired by his work, developed their views in a succession of really remarkable letters. One of the writers was a professor in a Western college; the other was a girl in Florida. In their language, their point of view, their reasons for appreciating “Abundance,” they differed almost diametrically; but this only made the unanimity of their approval the more striking. The rush of correspondence evoked by Betton’s earlier novel had produced nothing so personal, so exceptional as these communications. He had gulped the praise of “Diadems and Faggots” as undiscriminatingly as it was offered; now he knew for the first time the subtler pleasures of the palate. He tried to feign indifference, even to himself; and to Vyse he made no sign. But gradually he felt a desire to know what his secretary thought of the letters, and, above all, what he was saying in reply to them. And he resented acutely the possibility of Vyse’s starting one of his clandestine correspondences with the girl in Florida. Vyse’s notorious lack of delicacy had never been more vividly present to Betton’s imagination; and he made up his mind to answer the letters himself.

He would keep Vyse on, of course: there were other communications that the secretary could attend to. And, if necessary, Betton would invent an occupation: he cursed his stupidity in having betrayed the fact that his books were already catalogued.

Vyse showed no surprise when Betton announced his intention of dealing personally with the two correspondents who showed so flattering a reluctance to take their leave. But Betton immediately read a criticism in his lack of comment, and put forth, on a note of challenge: “After all, one must be decent!”

Vyse looked at him with an evanescent smile. “You’ll have to explain that you didn’t write the first answers.”

Betton halted. “Well--I--I more or less dictated them, didn’t I?”

“Oh, virtually, they’re yours, of course.”

“You think I can put it that way?”

“Why not?” The secretary absently drew an arabesque on the blotting-pad. “Of course they’ll keep it up longer if you write yourself,” he suggested.

Betton blushed, but faced the issue. “Hang it all, I sha’n’t be sorry. They interest me. They’re remarkable letters.” And Vyse, without observation, returned to his writings.

The spring, that year, was delicious to Betton. His college professor continued to address him tersely but cogently at fixed intervals, and twice a week eight serried pages came from Florida. There were other letters, too; he had the solace of feeling that at last “Abundance” was making its way, was reaching the people who, as Vyse said, read slowly because they read intelligently. But welcome as were all these proofs of his restored authority they were but the background of his happiness. His life revolved for the moment about the personality of his two chief correspondents. The professor’s letters satisfied his craving for intellectual recognition, and the satisfaction he felt in them proved how completely he had lost faith in himself. He blushed to think that his opinion of his work had been swayed by the shallow judgments of a public whose taste he despised. Was it possible that he had allowed himself to think less well of “Abundance” because it was not to the taste of the average novel-reader? Such false humility was less excusable than the crudest appetite for praise: it was ridiculous to try to do conscientious work if one’s self-esteem were at the mercy of popular judgments. All this the professor’s letters delicately and indirectly conveyed to Betton, with the result that the author of “Abundance” began to recognize in it the ripest flower of his genius.

But if the professor understood his book, the girl in Florida understood _him;_ and Betton was fully alive to the superior qualities of discernment which this process implied. For his lovely correspondent his novel was but the starting-point, the pretext of her discourse: he himself was her real object, and he had the delicious sense, as their exchange of thoughts proceeded, that she was interested in “Abundance” because of its author, rather than in the author because of his book. Of course she laid stress on the fact that his ideas were the object of her contemplation; but Betton’s agreeable person had permitted him some insight into the incorrigible subjectiveness of female judgments, and he was pleasantly aware, from the lady’s tone, that she guessed him to be neither old nor ridiculous. And suddenly he wrote to ask if he might see her. ...

The answer was long in coming. Betton fumed at the delay, watched, wondered, fretted; then he received the one word “Impossible.”

He wrote back more urgently, and awaited the reply with increasing eagerness. A certain shyness had kept him from once more modifying the instructions regarding his mail, and Strett still carried the letters directly to Vyse. The hour when he knew they were passing under the latter’s eyes was now becoming intolerable to Betton, and it was a profound relief when the secretary, suddenly advised of his father’s illness, asked permission to absent himself for a fortnight.

Vyse departed just after Betton had despatched to Florida his second missive of entreaty, and for ten days he tasted the furtive joy of a first perusal of his letters. The answer from Florida was not among them; but Betton said to himself “She’s thinking it over,” and delay, in that light, seemed favourable. So charming, in fact, was this phase of sentimental suspense that he felt a start of resentment when a telegram apprised him one morning that Vyse would return to his post that day.

Betton had slept later than usual, and, springing out of bed with the telegram in his hand, he learned from the clock that his secretary was due in half an hour. He reflected that the morning’s mail must long since be in; and, too impatient to wait for its appearance with his breakfast-tray, he threw on a dressing-gown and went to the library. There lay the letters, half a dozen of them: but his eye flew to one envelope, and as he tore it open a warm wave rocked his heart.

The letter was dated a few days after its writer must have received his own: it had all the qualities of grace and insight to which his unknown friend had accustomed him, but it contained no allusion, however indirect, to the special purport of his appeal. Even a vanity less ingenious than Betton’s might have read in the lady’s silence one of the most familiar motions of consent; but the smile provoked by this inference faded as he turned to his other letters. For the uppermost bore the superscription “Dead Letter Office,” and the document that fell from it was his own last letter from Florida.

Betton studied the ironic “Unknown” for an appreciable space of time; then he broke into a laugh. He had suddenly recalled Vyse’s similar experience with “Hester Macklin,” and the light he was able to throw on that obscure episode was searching enough to penetrate all the dark corners of his own adventure. He felt a rush of heat to the ears; catching sight of himself in the glass, he saw a red ridiculous congested countenance, and dropped into a chair to hide it between flushed fists. He was roused by the opening of the door, and Vyse appeared on the threshold.

“Oh, I beg pardon--you’re ill?” said the secretary.

Betton’s only answer was an inarticulate murmur of derision; then he pushed forward the letter with the imprint of the Dead Letter Office.

“Look at that,” he jeered.

Vyse peered at the envelope, and turned it over slowly in his hands. Betton’s eyes, fixed on him, saw his face decompose like a substance touched by some powerful acid. He clung to the envelope as if to gain time.

“It’s from the young lady you’ve been writing to at Swazee Springs?” he asked at length.

“It’s from the young lady I’ve been writing to at Swazee Springs.”

“Well--I suppose she’s gone away,” continued Vyse, rebuilding his countenance rapidly.

“Yes; and in a community numbering perhaps a hundred and seventy-five souls, including the dogs and chickens, the local post-office is so ignorant of her movements that my letter has to be sent to the Dead Letter Office.”

Vyse meditated on this; then he laughed in turn. “After all, the same thing happened to me--with ‘Hester Macklin,’ I mean,” he recalled sheepishly.

“Just so,” said Betton, bringing down his clenched fist on the table. “_ Just so_,” he repeated, in italics.

He caught his secretary’s glance, and held it with his own for a moment. Then he dropped it as, in pity, one releases something scared and squirming.

“The very day my letter was returned from Swazee Springs she wrote me this from there,” he said, holding up the last Florida missive.

“Ha! That’s funny,” said Vyse, with a damp forehead.

“Yes, it’s funny; it’s funny,” said Betton. He leaned back, his hands in his pockets, staring up at the ceiling, and noticing a crack in the cornice. Vyse, at the corner of the writing-table, waited.

“Shall I get to work?” he began, after a silence measurable by minutes. Betton’s gaze descended from the cornice.

“I’ve got your seat, haven’t I?” he said, rising and moving away from the table.

Vyse, with a quick gleam of relief, slipped into the vacant chair, and began to stir about vaguely among the papers.

“How’s your father?” Betton asked from the hearth.

“Oh, better--better, thank you. He’ll pull out of it.”

“But you had a sharp scare for a day or two?”

“Yes--it was touch and go when I got there.”

Another pause, while Vyse began to classify the letters.

“And I suppose,” Betton continued in a steady tone, “your anxiety made you forget your usual precautions--whatever they were--about this Florida correspondence, and before you’d had time to prevent it the Swazee post-office blundered?”

Vyse lifted his head with a quick movement. “What do you mean?” he asked, pushing his chair back.

“I mean that you saw I couldn’t live without flattery, and that you’ve been ladling it out to me to earn your keep.”

Vyse sat motionless and shrunken, digging the blotting-pad with his pen. “What on earth are you driving at?” he repeated.

“Though why the deuce,” Betton continued in the same steady tone, “you should need to do this kind of work when you’ve got such faculties at your service--those letters were magnificent, my dear fellow! Why in the world don’t you write novels, instead of writing to other people about them?”

Vyse straightened himself with an effort. “What are you talking about, Betton? Why the devil do you think _I_ wrote those letters?”

Betton held back his answer, with a brooding face. “Because I wrote ‘Hester Macklin’s’--to myself!”

Vyse sat stock-still, without the least outcry of wonder. “Well--?” he finally said, in a low tone.

“And because you found me out (you see, you can’t even feign surprise!)--because you saw through it at a glance, knew at once that the letters were faked. And when you’d foolishly put me on my guard by pointing out to me that they were a clumsy forgery, and had then suddenly guessed that _I_ was the forger, you drew the natural inference that I had to have popular approval, or at least had to make _you_ think I had it. You saw that, to me, the worst thing about the failure of the book was having _you_ know it was a failure. And so you applied your superior--your immeasurably superior--abilities to carrying on the humbug, and deceiving me as I’d tried to deceive you. And you did it so successfully that I don’t see why the devil you haven’t made your fortune writing novels!”

Vyse remained silent, his head slightly bent under the mounting tide of Betton’s denunciation.

“The way you differentiated your people--characterised them--avoided my stupid mistake of making the women’s letters too short and logical, of letting my different correspondents use the same expressions: the amount of ingenuity and art you wasted on it! I swear, Vyse, I’m sorry that damned post-office went back on you,” Betton went on, piling up the waves of his irony.

But at this height they suddenly paused, drew back on themselves, and began to recede before the spectacle of Vyse’s pale distress. Something warm and emotional in Betton’s nature--a lurking kindliness, perhaps, for any one who tried to soothe and smooth his writhing ego--softened his eye as it rested on the drooping figure of his secretary.

“Look here, Vyse--I’m not sorry--not altogether sorry this has happened!” He moved slowly across the room, and laid a friendly palm on Vyse’s shoulder. “In a queer illogical way it evens up things, as it were. I did you a shabby turn once, years ago--oh, out of sheer carelessness, of course--about that novel of yours I promised to give to Apthorn. If I _had_ given it, it might not have made any difference--I’m not sure it wasn’t too good for success--but anyhow, I dare say you thought my personal influence might have helped you, might at least have got you a quicker hearing. Perhaps you thought it was because the thing _was_ so good that I kept it back, that I felt some nasty jealousy of your superiority. I swear to you it wasn’t that--I clean forgot it. And one day when I came home it was gone: you’d sent and taken it. And I’ve always thought since you might have owed me a grudge--and not unjustly; so this ... this business of the letters ... the sympathy you’ve shown ... for I suppose it _is_ sympathy ... ?”

Vyse startled and checked him by a queer crackling laugh.

“It’s _not_ sympathy?” broke in Betton, the moisture drying out of his voice. He withdrew his hand from Vyse’s shoulder. “What is it, then? The joy of uncovering my nakedness? An eye for an eye? Is it _that?_”

Vyse rose from his seat, and with a mechanical gesture swept into a heap all the letters he had sorted.

“I’m stone broke, and wanted to keep my job--that’s what it is,” he said wearily ...

THE LEGEND

I

ARTHUR BERNALD could never afterward recall just when the first conjecture flashed on him: oddly enough, there was no record of it in the agitated jottings of his diary. But, as it seemed to him in retrospect, he had always felt that the queer man at the Wades’ must be John Pellerin, if only for the negative reason that he couldn’t imaginably be any one else. It was impossible, in the confused pattern of the century’s intellectual life, to fit the stranger in anywhere, save in the big gap which, some five and twenty years earlier, had been left by Pellerin’s unaccountable disappearance; and conversely, such a man as the Wades’ visitor couldn’t have lived for sixty years without filling, somewhere in space, a nearly equivalent void.

At all events, it was certainly not to Doctor Wade or to his mother that Bernald owed the hint: the good unconscious Wades, one of whose chief charms in the young man’s eyes was that they remained so robustly untainted by Pellerinism, in spite of the fact that Doctor Wade’s younger brother, Howland, was among its most impudently flourishing high-priests.

The incident had begun by Bernald’s running across Doctor Robert Wade one hot summer night at the University Club, and by Wade’s saying, in the tone of unprofessional laxity which the shadowy stillness of the place invited: “I got hold of a queer fish at St. Martin’s the other day--case of heat-prostration picked up in Central Park. When we’d patched him up I found he had nowhere to go, and not a dollar in his pocket, and I sent him down to our place at Portchester to re-build.”

The opening roused his hearer’s attention. Bob Wade had an odd unformulated sense of values that Bernald had learned to trust.

“What sort of chap? Young or old?”

“Oh, every age--full of years, and yet with a lot left. He called himself sixty on the books.”

“Sixty’s a good age for some kinds of living. And age is of course purely subjective. How has he used his sixty years?”

“Well--part of them in educating himself, apparently. He’s a scholar--humanities, languages, and so forth.”

“Oh--decayed gentleman,” Bernald murmured, disappointed.

“Decayed? Not much!” cried the doctor with his accustomed literalness. “I only mentioned that side of Winterman--his name’s Winterman--because it was the side my mother noticed first. I suppose women generally do. But it’s only a part--a small part. The man’s the big thing.”

“Really big?”

“Well--there again. ... When I took him down to the country, looking rather like a tramp from a ‘Shelter,’ with an untrimmed beard, and a suit of reach-me-downs he’d slept round the Park in for a week, I felt sure my mother’d carry the silver up to her room, and send for the gardener’s dog to sleep in the hall the first night. But she didn’t.”

“I see. ‘Women and children love him.’ Oh, Wade!” Bernald groaned.

“Not a bit of it! You’re out again. We don’t love him, either of us. But we _feel_ him--the air’s charged with him. You’ll see.”

And Bernald agreed that he _would_ see, the following Sunday. Wade’s inarticulate attempts to characterize the stranger had struck his friend. The human revelation had for Bernald a poignant and ever-renewed interest, which his trade, as the dramatic critic of a daily paper, had hitherto failed to discourage. And he knew that Bob Wade, simple and undefiled by literature--Bernald’s specific affliction--had a free and personal way of judging men, and the diviner’s knack of reaching their hidden springs. During the days that followed, the young doctor gave Bernald farther details about John Winterman: details not of fact--for in that respect his visitor’s reticence was baffling--but of impression. It appeared that Winterman, while lying insensible in the Park, had been robbed of the few dollars he possessed; and on leaving the hospital, still weak and half-blind, he had quite simply and unprotestingly accepted the Wades’ offer to give him shelter till such time as he should be strong enough to go to work.

“But what’s his work?” Bernald interjected. “Hasn’t he at least told you that?”

“Well, writing. Some kind of writing.” Doctor Bob always became vague and clumsy when he approached the confines of literature. “He means to take it up again as soon as his eyes get right.”

Bernald groaned. “Oh, Lord--that finishes him; and _me!_ He’s looking for a publisher, of course--he wants a ‘favourable notice.’ I won’t come!”

“He hasn’t written a line for twenty years.”

“A line of _what?_ What kind of literature can one keep corked up for twenty years?”

Wade surprised him. “The real kind, I should say. But I don’t know Winterman’s line,” the doctor added. “He speaks of the things he used to write merely as ‘stuff that wouldn’t sell.’ He has a wonderfully confidential way of _not_ telling one things. But he says he’ll have to do something for his living as soon as his eyes are patched up, and that writing is the only trade he knows. The queer thing is that he seems pretty sure of selling _now_. He even talked of buying the bungalow of us, with an acre or two about it.”

“The bungalow? What’s that?”

“The studio down by the shore that we built for Howland when he thought he meant to paint.” (Howland Wade, as Bernald knew, had experienced various “calls.”) “Since he’s taken to writing nobody’s been near it. I offered it to Winterman, and he camps there--cooks his meals, does his own house-keeping, and never comes up to the house except in the evenings, when he joins us on the verandah, in the dark, and smokes while my mother knits.”

“A discreet visitor, eh?”

“More than he need be. My mother actually wanted him to stay on in the house--in her pink chintz room. Think of it! But he says houses smother him. I take it he’s lived for years in the open.”

“In the open where?”

“I can’t make out, except that it was somewhere in the East. ‘East of everything--beyond the day-spring. In places not on the map.’ That’s the way he put it; and when I said: ‘You’ve been an explorer, then?’ he smiled in his beard, and answered: ‘Yes; that’s it--an explorer.’ Yet he doesn’t strike me as a man of action: hasn’t the hands or the eyes.”

“What sort of hands and eyes has he?”

Wade reflected. His range of observation was not large, but within its limits it was exact and could give an account of itself.

“He’s worked a lot with his hands, but that’s not what they were made for. I should say they were extraordinarily delicate conductors of sensation. And his eye--his eye too. He hasn’t used it to dominate people: he didn’t care to. He simply looks through ‘em all like windows. Makes me feel like the fellows who think they’re made of glass. The mitigating circumstance is that he seems to see such a glorious landscape through me.” Wade grinned at the thought of serving such a purpose.

“I see. I’ll come on Sunday and be looked through!” Bernald cried.

II

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.