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 us! 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.
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