“Some one who’s never heard of Pellerin?”
Mrs. Beecher Bain, large, smiling, diffuse, reached out parenthetically from the incoming throng on her threshold to waylay Bernald with the question as he was about to move past her in the wake of his companion.
“Oh, keep straight on, Mr. Winterman!” she interrupted herself to call after the latter. “Into the back drawing-room, please! And remember, you’re to sit next to me—in the corner on the left, close under the platform.”
She renewed her interrogative clutch on Bernald’s sleeve. “Most curious! Doctor Wade has been telling me all about him—how remarkable you all think him. And it’s actually true that he’s never heard of Pellerin? 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!”
On the indulgent lips of Mrs. Beecher Bain conjecture speedily passed into affirmation; and as Bernald’s companion, broad and shaggy in his visibly new evening clothes, moved down the length of the crowded rooms, he was already, to the ladies drawing aside their skirts to let him pass, the interesting Huron of the fable.
How far he was aware of the character ascribed to him it was impossible for Bernald to discover. He was as unconscious as a tree or a cloud, and his observer had never known any one so alive to human contacts and yet so secure from them. But the scene was playing such a lively tune on Bernald’s own sensibilities that for the moment he could not adjust himself to the probable effect it produced on his companion. The young man, of late, had made but rare appearances in the group of which Mrs. Beecher Bain was one of the most indefatigable hostesses, and the Uplift Club the chief medium of expression. To a critic, obliged by his trade to cultivate convictions, it was the essence of luxury to leave them at home in his hours of ease; and Bernald gave his preference to circles in which less finality of judgment prevailed, and it was consequently less embarrassing to be caught without an opinion.
But in his fresher days he had known the spell of the Uplift Club and the thrill of moving among the Emancipated; and he felt an odd sense of rejuvenation as he looked at the rows of faces packed about the embowered platform from which Howland Wade was presently to hand down the eternal verities. 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. The latter moral revolution seemed to have been accepted as submissively as a change in hair-dressing; and it even struck Bernald that, in the case of many of the assembled ladies, their convictions were rather newer than their clothes.
One of the most interesting examples of this facility of adaptation was actually, in the person of Miss Alice Fosdick, brushing his elbow with exotic amulets, and enveloping him in Arabian odours, as she leaned forward to murmur her sympathetic sense of the situation. Miss Fosdick, who was one of the most advanced exponents of Pellerinism, had large eyes and a plaintive mouth, and Bernald had always fancied that she might have been pretty if she had not been perpetually explaining things.
“Yes, I know—Isabella Bain told me all about him. (He can’t hear us, can he?) And I wonder if you realize how remarkably interesting it is that we should have such an opportunity now—I mean the opportunity to see the impression of Pellerinism on a perfectly fresh mind. (You must introduce him as soon as the lecture’s over.) I explained that to Isabella as soon as she showed me Doctor Wade’s note. Of course you see why, don’t you?” Bernald made a faint motion of acquiescence, which she instantly swept aside. “At least I think I can make you see why. (If you’re sure he can’t hear?) Why, it’s just this—Pellerinism is in danger of becoming a truism. Oh, it’s an awful thing to say! But then I’m not afraid of saying awful things! I rather believe it’s my mission. What I mean is, that we’re getting into the way of taking Pellerin for granted—as we do the air we breathe. We don’t sufficiently lead our conscious life in him—we’re gradually letting him become subliminal.” She swayed closer to the young man, and he saw that she was making a graceful attempt to throw her explanatory net over his companion, who, evading Mrs. Bain’s hospitable signal, had cautiously wedged himself into a seat between Bernald and the wall.
“Did you hear what I was saying, Mr. Winterman? (Yes, I know who you are, of course!) Oh, well, I don’t really mind if you did. I was talking about you—about you and Pellerin. I was explaining to Mr. Bernald that what we need at this very minute is a Pellerin revival; and we need some one like you—to whom his message comes as a wonderful new interpretation of life—to lead the revival, and rouse us out of our apathy. ...