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 ci............