Tales of Men and Ghosts

“Decayed? Not much!” cried the doctor with his accustomed literalness. “I only mentioned that side of Winterman—his name’s Winterman—because it was the side my mother noticed first. I suppose women generally do. But it’s only a part—a small part. The man’s the big thing.”

“Really big?”

“Well—there again. … When I took him down to the country, looking rather like a tramp from a ‘Shelter,’ with an untrimmed beard, and a suit of reachme-downs he’d slept round the Park in for a week, I felt sure my mother’d carry the silver up to her room, and send for the gardener’s dog to sleep in the hall the first night. But she didn’t.”

“I see. ‘Women and children love him.’ Oh, Wade!” Bernald groaned.

“Not a bit of it! You’re out again. We don’t love him, either of us. But we feel him— the air’s charged with him. You’ll see.”

And Bernald agreed that he would see, the following Sunday. Wade’s inarticulate attempts to characterize the stranger had struck his friend. The human revelation had for Bernald a poignant and ever-renewed interest, which his trade, as the dramatic critic of a daily paper, had hitherto failed to discourage. And he knew that Bob Wade, simple and undefiled by literature—Bernald’s specific affliction—had a free and personal way of judging men, and the diviner’s knack of reaching their hidden springs. During the days that followed, the young doctor gave Bernald farther details about John Winterman: details not of fact—for in that respect his visitor’s reticence was baffling—but of impression. It appeared that Winterman, while lying insensible in the Park, had been robbed of the few dollars he possessed; and on leaving the hospital, still weak and half-blind, he had quite simply and unprotestingly accepted the Wades’ offer to give him shelter till such time as he should be strong enough to go to work.

“But what’s his work?” Bernald interjected. “Hasn’t he at least told you that?”

“Well, writing. Some kind of writing.” Doctor Bob always became vague and clumsy when he approached the confines of literature. “He means to take it up again as soon as his eyes get right.”

Bernald groaned. “Oh, Lord—that finishes him; and me! He’s looking for a publisher, of course—he wants a ‘favourable notice.’ I won’t come!”

“He hasn’t written a line for twenty years.”

“A line of what? What kind of literature can one keep corked up for twenty years?”

Wade surprised him. “The real kind, I should say. But I don’t know Winterman’s line,” the doctor added. “He speaks of the things he used to write merely as ‘stuff that wouldn’t sell.’ He has a wonderfully confidential way of not telling one things. But he says he’ll have to do something for his living as soon as his eyes are patched up, and that writing is the only trade he knows. The queer thing is that he seems pretty sure of selling now. He even talked of buying the bungalow of us, with an acre or two about it.”

“The bungalow? What’s that?”

“The studio down by the shore that we built for Howland when he thought he meant to paint.” (Howland Wade, as Bernald knew, had experienced various “calls.”) “Since he’s taken to writing nobody’s been near it. I offered it to Winterman, and he camps there—cooks his meals, does his own house-keeping, and never comes up to the house except in the evenings, when he joins us on the verandah, in the dark, and smokes while my mother knits.”

“A discreet visitor, eh?”

“More than he need be. My mother actually wanted him to stay on in the house—in her pink chintz room. Think of it! But he says houses smother him. I take it he’s lived for years in the open.”

“In the open where?”

“I can’t make out, except that it was somewhere in the East. ‘East of everything—beyond the day-spring. In places not on the map.’ That’s the way he put it; and when I said: ‘You’ve been an explorer, then?’ he smiled in his beard, and answered: ‘Yes; that’s it—an explorer.’ Yet he doesn’t strike me as a man of action: hasn’t the hands or the eyes.”

“What sort of hands and eyes has he?”

Wade reflected. His range of observation was not large, but within its limits it was exact and could give an account of itself.

“He’s worked a lot with his hands, but that’s not what they were made for. I should say they were extraordinarily delicate conductors of sensation. And his eye—his eye too. He hasn’t used it to dominate people: he didn’t care to. He simply looks through ‘em all like windows. Makes me feel like the fellows who think they’re made of glass. The mitigating circumstance is that he seems to see such a glorious landscape through me.” Wade grinned at the thought of serving such a purpose.

“I see. I’ll come on Sunday and be looked through!” Bernald cried.

II

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