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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.
"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!
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.
"Well, what did you do with him?" he retorted. She laughed her appreciation of his humour. "Just what I told you, of course. I said good-bye to him on Isabella's door-step." Bernald looked at her. "It's really true, then, that he didn't go home with you?" She bantered back: "Have you suspected me, all this time, of hiding his remains in the cellar?"
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.
"Yes; the very day Howland got back from Kenosha I brought the manuscript to town, and got him to read it. And yesterday evening I nailed him, and dragged an answer out of him." "Then Howland hasn't seen Winterman yet?" "No. He said: 'Before you let him loose on me I'll go over the stuff, and see if it's at all worth while." Bernald drew a freer breath. "And he found it wasn't?"
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.
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.
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.
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."
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