Tales of Men and Ghosts

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.

“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.