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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.
"And you expect Wade ?" "Why, I gathered from our good Doctor that it's his trade. Doesn't he explain interpret?" "In his own domain which is Pellerinism." Winterman gazed out musingly upon the moon-touched dusk of waters. "And what is Pellerinism?" he asked. Bernald sprang to his feet with a cry. "Ah, I don't know but you're Pellerin!"
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.
"Well, then, look through two or three treatises on numismatics, the 'Thesaurus Morellianus', or the 'Praestantiora Numismata', of Valliant, or Banduri, or Pembrock, or Pellerin. You may chance upon a scent." "Thank you, thank you, sir!" He saw me to the door. As I turned to go I noticed that his daughter was standing motionless still, with the face of an angry Diana.
He guessed Pellerin to be unconscious of visual detail, but sensitive to the happy blending of sensuous impressions: to the intimate spell of lamplight on books, and of a deep chair placed where one could watch the fire. The chair was there, and Bernald, facing it across the hearth, already saw it filled by Pellerin's lounging figure.
"Between ourselves, he found it was of no account at all. Queer, isn't it, when the man ... but of course literature's another proposition. Howland says it's one of the cases where an idea might seem original and striking if one didn't happen to be able to trace its descent. And this is straight out of bosh by Pellerin. ... Yes: Pellerin.
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?"
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.
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!"
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.
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