Edith Wharton
The Legend
About the print version
The Legend
Edith Wharton
New York
1910
Scribner's Magazine
Note: March 1910, pp. 278-291
Published: March 1910
TALES OF MEN
THE LEGEND
I
ARTHUR BERNALD could never afterward recall just when the first conjecture
flashed on him: oddly enough, there was no record of it in the agitated jottings
of his diary. But, as it seemed to him in retrospect, he had always felt that
the queer man at the Wades' must be John Pellerin, if only for the negative
reason that he couldn't imaginably be any one else. It was impossible, in the
confused pattern of the century's intellectual life, to fit the stranger in
anywhere, save in the big gap which, some five and twenty years earlier, had
been left by Pellerin's unaccountable disappearance; and conversely, such a man
as the Wades' visitor couldn't have lived for sixty years without filling,
somewhere in space, a nearly equivalent void.
At all events, it was certainly not to Doctor Wade or to his mother that
Bernald owed the hint: the good unconscious Wades, one of whose chief charms in
the young man's eyes was that they remained so robustly untainted by
Pellerinism, in spite of the fact that Doctor Wade's younger brother, Howland,
was among its most impudently flourishing high-priests.
The incident had begun by Bernald's running across Doctor Robert Wade one hot
summer night at the University Club, and by Wade's saying, in the tone of
unprofessional laxity which the shadowy stillness of the place invited: "I got
hold of a queer fish at St. Martin's the other day -- case of heat-prostration
picked up in Central Park. When we'd patched him up I found he had nowhere to
go, and not a dollar in his pocket, and I sent him down to our place at
Portchester to re-build."
The opening roused his hearer's attention. Bob Wade had an odd unformulated
sense of values that Bernald had learned to trust.
"What sort of chap? Young or old?"
"Oh, every age -- full of years, and yet with a lot left. He called himself
sixty on the books."
"Sixty's a good age for some kinds of living. And age is of course purely
subjective. How has he used his sixty years?"
"Well -- part of them in educating himself, apparently. He's a scholar --
humanities, languages, and so forth."
"Oh -- decayed gentleman," Bernald murmured, disappointed.
"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
reach-me-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'...
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