Chapter 11

“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.

III

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.

IV

DAWN found them there, and the risen sun laid its beams on the rough floor of the bungalow, before either of the men was conscious of the passage of time. Bernald, vaguely trying to define his own state in retrospect, could only phrase it: “I floated ... floated. ...”

The gist of fact at the core of the extraordinary experience was simply that John Pellerin, twenty-five years earlier, had voluntarily disappeared, causing the rumour of his death to be reported to an inattentive world; and that now he had come back to see what that world had made of him.

“You’ll hardly believe it of me; I hardly believe it of myself; but I went away in a rage of disappointment, of wounded pride--no, vanity! I don’t know which cut deepest--the sneers or the silence--but between them, there wasn’t an inch of me that wasn’t raw. I had just the one thing in me: the message, the cry, the revelation. But nobody saw and nobody listened. Nobody wanted what I had to give. I was like a poor devil of a tramp looking for shelter on a bitter night, in a town with every door bolted and all the windows dark. And suddenly I felt that the easiest thing would be to lie down and go to sleep in the snow. Perhaps I’d a vague notion that if they found me there at daylight, frozen stiff, the pathetic spectacle might produce a reaction, a feeling of remorse. ... So I took care to be found! Well, a good many thousand people die every day on the face of the globe; and I soon discovered that I was simply one of the thousands; and when I made that discovery I really died--and stayed dead a year or two. ... When I came to life again I was off on the under side of the world, in regions unaware of what we know as ‘the public.’ Have you any notion how it shifts the point of view to wake under new constellations? I advise any who’s been in love with a woman under Cassiopeia to go and think about her under the Southern Cross. ... It’s the only way to tell the pivotal truths from the others. ... I didn’t believe in my theory any less--there was my triumph and my vindication! It held out, resisted, measured itself with the stars. But I didn’t care a snap of my finger whether anybody else believed in it, or even knew it had been formulated. It escaped out of my books--my poor still-born books--like Psyche from the chrysalis and soared away into the blue, and lived there. I knew then how it frees an idea to be ignored; how apprehension circumscribes and deforms it. ... Once I’d learned that, it was easy enough to turn to and shift for myself. I was sure now that my idea would live: the good ones are self-supporting. I had to learn to be so; and I tried my hand at a number of things ... adventurous, menial, commercial. ... It’s not a bad thing for a man to have to live his life--and we nearly all manage to dodge it. Our first round with the Sphinx may strike something out of us--a book or a picture or a symphony; and we’re amazed at our feat, and go on letting that first work breed others, as some animal forms reproduce each other without renewed fertilization. So there we are, committed to our first guess at the riddle; and our works look as like as successive impressions of the same plate, each with the lines a little fainter; whereas they ought to be--if we touch earth between times--as different from each other as those other creatures--jellyfish, aren’t they, of a kind?--where successive generations produce new forms, and it takes a zoologist to see the hidden likeness. ...

“Well, I proved my first guess, off there in the wilds, and it lived, and grew, and took care of itself. And I said ‘Some day it will make itself heard; but by that time my atoms will have waltzed into a new pattern.’ Then, in Cashmere one day, I met a fellow in a caravan, with a dog-eared book in his pocket. He said he never stirred without it--wanted to know where I’d been, never to have heard of it. It was _my guess_--in its twentieth edition! ... The globe spun round at that, and all of a sudden I was under the old stars. That’s the way it happens when the ballast of vanity shifts! I’d lived a third of a life out there, unconscious of human opinion--because I supposed it was unconscious of _me_. But now--now! Oh, it was different. I wanted to know what they said. ... Not exactly that, either: I wanted to know _what I’d made them say_. There’s a difference. ... And here I am,” said John Pellerin, with a pull at his pipe.

So much Bernald retained of his companion’s actual narrative; the rest was swept away under the tide of wonder that rose and submerged him as Pellerin--at some indefinitely later stage of their talk--picked up his manuscript and began to read. Bernald sat opposite, his elbows propped on the table, his eyes fixed on the swaying waters outside, from which the moon gradually faded, leaving them to make a denser blackness in the night. As Pellerin read, this density of blackness--which never for a moment seemed inert or unalive--was attenuated by imperceptible degrees, till a greyish pallour replaced it; then the pallour breathed and brightened, and suddenly dawn was on the sea.

Something of the same nature went on in the young man’s mind while he watched and listened. He was conscious of a gradually withdrawing light, of an interval of obscurity full of the stir of invisible forces, and then of the victorious flush of day. And as the light rose, he saw how far he had travelled and what wonders the night had prepared. Pellerin had been right in saying that his first idea had survived, had borne the test of time; but he had given his hearer no hint of the extent to which it had been enlarged and modified, of the fresh implications it now unfolded. In a brief flash of retrospection Bernald saw the earlier books dwindle and fall into their place as mere precursors of this fuller revelation; then, with a leap of helpless rage, he pictured Howland Wade’s pink hands on the new treasure, and his prophetic feet upon the lecture platform.

V

“IT won’t do--oh, he let him down as gently as possible; but it appears it simply won’t do.”

Doctor Bob imparted the ineluctable fact to Bernald while the two men, accidentally meeting at their club a few nights later, sat together over the dinner they had immediately agreed to consume in company.