The possession was one he did not mean to part with lightly; and the dread of its being torn from him constrained him to extraordinary precautions.
“You’ve told Winterman, I suppose? How did he take it?”
“Why, unexpectedly, as he does most things. You can never tell which way he’ll jump. I thought he’d take a high tone, or else laugh it off; but he did neither. He seemed awfully cast down. I wished myself well out of the job when I saw how cut up he was.” Bernald thrilled at the words. Pellerin had shared his pang, then—the “old woe of the world” at the perpetuity of human dulness!
“But what did he say to the charge of plagiarism—if you made it?”
“Oh, I told him straight out what Howland said. I thought it fairer. And his answer to that was the rummest part of all.”
“What was it?” Bernald questioned, with a tremor.
“He said: ‘That’s queer, for I’ve never read Pellerin.’”
Bernald drew a deep breath of ecstasy. “Well—and I suppose you believed him?”
“I believed him, because I know him. But the public won’t—the critics won’t. And if it’s a pure coincidence it’s just as bad for him as if it were a straight steal—isn’t it?”
Bernald sighed his acquiescence.
“It bothers me awfully,” Wade continued, knitting his kindly brows, “because I could see what a blow it was to him. He’s got to earn his living, and I don’t suppose he knows how to do anything else. At his age it’s hard to start fresh. I put that to Howland—asked him if there wasn’t a chance he might do better if he only had a little encouragement. I can’t help feeling he’s got the essential thing in him. But of course I’m no judge when it comes to books. And Howland says it would be cruel to give him any hope.” Wade paused, turned his wineglass about under a meditative stare, and then leaned across the table toward Bernald. “Look here—do you know what I’ve proposed to Winterman? That he should come to town with me tomorrow and go in the evening to hear Howland lecture to the Uplift Club. They’re to meet at Mrs. Beecher Bain’s, and Howland is to repeat the lecture that he gave the other day before the Pellerin Society at Kenosha. It will give Winterman a chance to get some notion of what Pellerin was: he’ll get it much straighter from Howland than if he tried to plough through Pellerin’s books. And then afterward—as if accidentally—I thought I might bring him and Howland together. If Howland could only see him and hear him talk, there’s no knowing what might come of it. He couldn’t help feeling the man’s force, as we do; and he might give him a pointer—tell him what line to take. Anyhow, it would please Winterman, and take the edge off his disappointment. I saw that as soon as I proposed it.”
“Some one who’s never heard of Pellerin?”
Mrs. Beecher Bain, large, smiling, diffuse, reached out parenthetically from the incoming throng on her threshold to waylay Bernald with the question as he was about to move past her in the wake of his companion.
“Oh, keep straight on, Mr. Winterman!” she interrupted herself to call after the latter. “Into the back drawing-room, please! And remember, you’re to sit next to me—in the corner on the left, close under the platform.”
She renewed her interrogative clutch on Bernald’s sleeve. “Most curious! Doctor Wade has been telling me all about him—how remarkable you all think him. And it’s actually true that he’s never heard of Pellerin? Of course as soon as Doctor Wade told me that, I said ‘Bring him!’ It will be so extraordinarily interesting to watch the first impression.—Yes, do follow him, dear Mr. Bernald, and be sure that you and he secure the seats next to me. Of course Alice Fosdick insists on being with us. She was wild with excitement when I told her she was to meet some one who’d never heard of Pellerin!”
On the indulgent lips of Mrs. Beecher Bain conjecture speedily passed into affirmation; and as Bernald’s companion, broad and shaggy in his visibly new evening clothes, moved down the length of the crowded rooms, he was already, to the ladies drawing aside their skirts to let him pass, the interesting Huron of the fable.
How far he was aware of the character ascribed to him it was impossible for Bernald to discover. He was as unconscious as a tree or a cloud, and his observer had never known any one so alive to human contacts and yet so secure from them. But the scene was playing such a lively tune on Bernald’s own sensibilities that for the moment he could not adjust himself to the probable effect it produced on his companion. The young man, of late, had made but rare appearances in the group of which Mrs. Beecher Bain was one of the most indefatigable hostesses, and the Uplift Club the chief medium of expression. To a critic, obliged by his trade to cultivate convictions, it was the essence of luxury to leave them at home in his hours of ease; and Bernald gave his preference to circles in which less finality of judgment prevailed, and it was consequently less embarrassing to be caught without an opinion.
But in his fresher days he had known the spell of the Uplift Club and the thrill of moving among the Emancipated; and he felt an odd sense of rejuvenation as he looked at the rows of faces packed about the embowered platform from which Howland Wade was presently to hand down the eternal verities. Many of these countenances belonged to the old days, when the gospel of Pellerin was unknown, and it required considerable intellectual courage to avow one’s acceptance of the very doctrines he had since demolished. The latter moral revolution seemed to have been accepted as submissively as a change in hair-dressing; and it even struck Bernald that, in the case of many of the assembled ladies, their convictions were rather newer than their clothes.
One of the most interesting examples of this facility of adaptation was actually, in the person of Miss Alice Fosdick, brushing his elbow with exotic amulets, and enveloping him in Arabian odours, as she leaned forward to murmur her sympathetic sense of the situation. Miss Fosdick, who was one of the most advanced exponents of Pellerinism, had large eyes and a plaintive mouth, and Bernald had always fancied that she might have been pretty if she had not been perpetually explaining things.
“Yes, I know—Isabella Bain told me all about him. (He can’t hear us, can he?) And I wonder if you realize how remarkably interesting it is that we should have such an opportunity now—I mean the opportunity to see the impression of Pellerinism on a perfectly fresh mind. (You must introduce him as soon as the lecture’s over.) I explained that to Isabella as soon as she showed me Doctor Wade’s note. Of course you see why, don’t you?” Bernald made a faint motion of acquiescence, which she instantly swept aside. “At least I think I can make you see why. (If you’re sure he can’t hear?) Why, it’s just this—Pellerinism is in danger of becoming a truism. Oh, it’s an awful thing to say! But then I’m not afraid of saying awful things! I rather believe it’s my mission. What I mean is, that we’re getting into the way of taking Pellerin for granted—as we do the air we breathe. We don’t sufficiently lead our conscious life in him—we’re gradually letting him become subliminal.” She swayed closer to the young man, and he saw that she was making a graceful attempt to throw her explanatory net over his companion, who, evading Mrs. Bain’s hospitable signal, had cautiously wedged himself into a seat between Bernald and the wall.
“Did you hear what I was saying, Mr. Winterman? (Yes, I know who you are, of course!) Oh, well, I don’t really mind if you did. I was talking about you—about you and Pellerin. I was explaining to Mr. Bernald that what we need at this very minute is a Pellerin revival; and we need some one like you—to whom his message comes as a wonderful new interpretation of life—to lead the revival, and rouse us out of our apathy. …
“You see,” she went on winningly, “it’s not only the big public that needs it (of course their Pellerin isn’t ours!) It’s we, his disciples, his interpreters, who discovered him and gave him to the world—we, the Chosen People, the Custodians of the Sacred Books, as Howland Wade calls us—it’s we, who are in perpetual danger of sinking back into the old stagnant ideals, and practising the Seven Deadly Virtues; it’s we who need to count our mercies, and r
ealize anew what he’s done for us, and what we ought to do for him! And it’s for that reason that I urged Mr. Wade to speak here, in the very inner sanctuary of Pellerinism, exactly as he would speak to the uninitiated—to repeat, simply, his Kenosha lecture, ‘What Pellerinism means’; and we ought all, I think, to listen to him with the hearts of little children—just as you will, Mr. Winterman—as if he were telling us new things, and we—”
“Alice, dear—” Mrs. Bain murmured with a deprecating gesture; and Howland Wade, emerging between the palms, took the centre of the platform.
A pang of commiseration shot through Bernald as he saw him there, so innocent and so exposed. His plump pulpy body, which made his evening dress fall into intimate and wrapper-like folds, was like a wide surface spread to the shafts of irony; and the mild ripples of his voice seemed to enlarge the vulnerable area as he leaned forward, poised on confidential finger-tips, to say persuasively: “Let me try to tell you what Pellerinism means.”
Bernald moved restlessly in his seat. He had the obscure sense of being a party to something not wholly honourable. He ought not to have come; he ought not to have let his companion come. Yet how could he have done otherwise? John Pellerin’s secret was his own. As long as he chose to remain John Winterman it was no one’s business to gainsay him; and Bernald’s scruples were really justifiable only in respect of his own presence on the scene. But even in this connection he ceased to feel them as soon as Howland Wade began to speak.
VI
IT had been arranged that Pellerin, after the meeting of the Uplift Club, should join Bernald at his rooms and spend the night there, instead of returning to Portchester. The plan had been eagerly elaborated by the young man, but he had been unprepared for the alacrity with which his wonderful friend accepted it. He was beginning to see that it was a part of Pellerin’s wonderfulness to fall in, quite simply and naturally, with any arrangements made for his convenience, or tending to promote the convenience of others. Bernald felt that his extreme docility in such matters was proportioned to the force of resistance which, for nearly half a life-time, had kept him, with his back to the wall, fighting alone against the powers of darkness. In such a scale of values how little the small daily alternatives must weigh!
At the close of Howland Wade’s discourse, Bernald, charged with his prodigious secret, had felt the need to escape for an instant from the liberated rush of talk. The interest of watching Pellerin was so perilously great that the watcher felt it might, at any moment, betray him. He lingered in the crowded drawing-room long enough to see his friend enclosed in a mounting tide, above which Mrs. Beecher Bain and Miss Fosdick actively waved their conversational tridents; then he took refuge, at the back of the house, in a small dim library where, in his younger days, he had discussed personal immortality and the problem of consciousness with beautiful girls whose names he could not remember.
In this retreat he surprised Mr. Beecher Bain, a quiet man with a mild brow, who was smoking a surreptitious cigar over the last number of the Strand. Mr. Bain, at Bernald’s approach, dissembled the Strand under a copy of the Hibbert Journal, but tendered his cigar-case with the remark that stocks were heavy again; and Bernald blissfully abandoned himself to this unexpected contact with reality.
On his return to the drawing-room he found that the tide had set toward the supper-table, and when it finally carried him thither it was to land him in the welcoming arms of Bob Wade.
“Hullo, old man! Where have you been all this time?—Winterman? Oh, he’s talking to Howland: yes, I managed it finally. I believe Mrs. Bain has steered them into the library, so that they shan’t be disturbed. I gave her an idea of the situation, and she was awfully kind. We’d better leave them alone, don’t you think? I’m trying to get a croquette for Miss Fosdick.”
Bernald’s secret leapt in his bosom, and he devoted himself to the task of distributing sandwiches and champagne while his pulses danced to the tune of the cosmic laughter. The vision of Pellerin and his Interpreter, face to face at last, had a Cyclopean grandeur that dwarfed all other comedy. “And I shall hear of it presently; in an hour or two he’ll be telling me about it. And that hour will be all mine—mine and his!” The dizziness of the thought made it difficult for Bernald to preserve the balance of the supper-plates he was distributing. Life had for him at that moment the completeness which seems to defy disintegration.
The throng in the dining-room was thickening, and Bernald’s efforts as purveyor were interrupted by frequent appeals, from ladies who had reached repleteness, that he should sit down a moment and tell them all about his interesting friend. Winterman’s fame, trumpeted abroad by Miss Fosdick, had reached the four corners of the Uplift Club, and Bernald found himself fabricating de toutes pieces a Winterman legend which should in some degree respond to the Club’s demand for the human document. When at length he had acquitted himself of this obligation, and was free to work his way back through the lessening groups into the drawing-room, he was at last rewarded by a glimpse of his friend, who, still densely encompassed, towered in the centre of the room in all his sovran ugliness.
Their eyes met across the crowd; but Bernald gathered only perplexity from the encounter. What were Pellerin’s eyes saying to him? What orders, what confidences, what indefinable apprehension did their long look impart? The young man was still trying to decipher their complex message when he felt a tap on the arm, and turned to encounter the rueful gaze of Bob Wade, whose meaning lay clearly enough on the surface of his good blue stare.
“Well, it won’t work—it won’t work,” the doctor groaned.
“What won’t?”
“I mean with Howland. Winterman won’t. Howland doesn’t take to him. Says he’s crude—frightfully crude. And you know how Howland hates crudeness.”
“Oh, I know,” Bernald exulted. It was the word he had waited for—he saw it now! Once more he was lost in wonder at Howland’s miraculous faculty for always, as the naturalists said, being true to type.
“So I’m afraid it’s all up with his chance of writing. At least I can do no more,” said Wade, discouraged.
Bernald pressed him for farther details. “Does Winterman seem to mind much? Did you hear his version?”
“His version?”
“I mean what he said to Howland.”
“Why no. What the deuce was there for him to say?”
“What indeed? I think I’ll take him home,” said Bernald gaily.
He turned away to join the circle from which, a few minutes before, Pellerin’s eyes had vainly and enigmatically signalled to him; but the circle had dispersed, and Pellerin himself was not in sight.
Bernald, looking about him, saw that during his brief aside with Wade the party had passed into the final phase of dissolution. People still delayed, in diminishing groups, but the current had set toward the doors, and every moment or two it bore away a few more lingerers. Bernald, from his post, commanded the clearing perspective of the two drawing-rooms, and a rapid survey of their length sufficed to assure him that Pellerin was not in either. Taking leave of Wade, the young man made his way back to the drawing-room, where only a few hardened feasters remained, and then passed on to the library which had been the scene of the late momentous colloquy. But the library too was empty, and drifting back uncertainly to the inner drawing-room Bernald found Mrs. Beecher Bain domestically putting out the wax candles on the mantel-piece.
“Dear Mr. Bernald! Do sit down and have a little chat. What a wonderful privilege it has been! I don’t know when I’ve had such an intense impression.”
She made way for him, hospitably, in a corner of the sofa to which she had sunk; and he echoed her vaguely: “You were impressed, then?”
“I can’t express to you how it affected me! As Alice said, it was a resurrection—it was as if John Pellerin were actually here in the room with us!”
Bernald turned on her with a half-audible gasp. “You felt that, dear Mrs. Bain?”
“We all felt it—every one of u
s! I don’t wonder the Greeks—it was the Greeks?—regarded eloquence as a supernatural power. As Alice says, when one looked at Howland Wade one understood what they meant by the Afflatus.”
Bernald rose and held out his hand. “Oh, I see—it was Howland who made you feel as if Pellerin were in the room? And he made Miss Fosdick feel so too?”
“Why, of course. But why are you rushing off?”
“Because I must hunt up my friend, who’s not used to such late hours.”
“Your friend?” Mrs. Bain had to collect her thoughts. “Oh, Mr. Winterman, you mean? But he’s gone already.”
“Gone?” Bernald exclaimed, with an odd twinge of foreboding. Remembering Pellerin’s signal across the crowd, he reproached himself for not having answered it more promptly. Yet it was certainly strange that his friend should have left the house without him.
“Are you quite sure?” he asked, with a startled glance at the clock.
“Oh, perfectly. He went half an hour ago. But you needn’t hurry home on his account, for Alice Fosdick carried him off with her. I saw them leave together.”
“Carried him off? She took him home with her, you mean?”
“Yes. You know what strange hours she keeps. She told me she was going to give him a Welsh rabbit, and explain Pellerinism to him.”
“Oh, if she’s going to explain—” Bernald murmured. But his amazement at the news struggled with a confused impatience to reach his rooms in time to be there for his friend’s arrival. There could be no stranger spectacle beneath the stars than that of John Pellerin carried off by Miss Fosdick, and listening, in the small hours, to her elucidation of his doctrines; but Bernald knew enough of his sex to be aware that such an experiment may present a less humorous side to its subject than to an impartial observer. Even the Uplift Club and its connotations might benefit by the attraction of the unknown; and it was conceivable that to a traveller from Mesopotamia Miss Fosdick might present elements of interest which she had lost for the frequenters of Fifth Avenue. There was, at any rate, no denying that the affair had become unexpectedly complex, and that its farther development promised to be rich in comedy.
Tales of Men and Ghosts Page 16
