Читать книгу The Key to Yesterday - Charles Buck - Страница 2

“His career has been pretty much a march of successive triumphs through the world of art, and he has left the critics only one peg on which to hang their carping.”

Steele spoke with the warmth of enthusiasm. He had succeeded in capturing Duska for a few minutes of monopoly in the semi-solitude of the verandah at the back of the club-house. Though he had a hopeless cause of his own to plead, it was characteristic of him that his first opportunity should go to the praise of his friend.

“What is that?” The girl found herself unaccountably interested and ready to assume this stranger’s defense even before she knew with what his critics charged him.

“That he is a copyist,” explained the man; “that he is so enamored of the style of Frederick Marston that his pictures can’t shake off the influence. He is great enough to blaze his own trail – to create his own school, rather than to follow in the tracks of another. Of course,” he hastened to defend, “that is hardly a valid indictment. Every master is, at the beginning of his career, strongly affected by the genius of some greater master. The only mistake lies in following in the footsteps of one not yet dead. To play follow-the-leader with a man of a past century is permissible and laudable, but to give the same allegiance to a contemporary is, in the narrow view of the critics, to accept a secondary place.”

The Kentuckian sketched with ardor the dashing brilliance of the other’s achievement: how five years had brought him from lethal obscurity to international fame; how, though a strictly American product who had not studied abroad, his Salon pictures had electrified Paris. And the girl listened with attentive interest.

When the last race was ended and the thousands were crowding out through the gates, Saxon heard his host accepting a dinner invitation for the evening.

“I shall have a friend stopping in town on his way East, whom I want you all to meet,” explained Mr. Bellton, the prospective host. “He is one Señor Ribero, an attaché of a South American legation, and he may prove interesting.”

Saxon caught himself almost frowning. He did not care for society’s offerings, but the engagement was made, and he had now no alternative to adding his declaration of pleasure to that of his host. He was, however, silent to taciturnity as Steele’s runabout chugged its way along in the parade of motors and carriages through the gates of the race-track inclosure. In his pupils, the note of melancholy unrest was decided, where ordinarily there was only the hint.

“There is time,” suggested the host, “for a run out the Boulevard; I’d like to show you a view or two.”

The suggestion of looking at a promising landscape ordinarily challenged Saxon’s interest to the degree of enthusiasm. Now, he only nodded.

It was not until Steele, who drove his own car, stopped at the top of the Iroquois Park hill that Saxon spoke. They had halted at the southerly brow of the ridge from which the eye sweeps a radius of twenty miles over purpled hills and polychromatic valleys, to yet other hills melting into a sky of melting turquois. Looking across the colorful reaches, Saxon gave voice to his enthusiasm.

They left the car, and stood on the rocks that jut out of the clay at the road’s edge. Beneath them, the wooded hillside fell away, three hundred feet of precipitous slope and tangle. For a time, Saxon’s eyes were busy with the avid drinking in of so much beauty, then once more they darkened as he wheeled toward his companion.

“George,” he said slowly, “you told me that we were to go to a cabin of yours tucked away somewhere in the hills, and paint landscape. I caught the idea that we were to lead a sort of camp-life – that we were to be hermits except for the companionship of our palettes and nature and each other – and the few neighbors that one finds in the country, and – ” The speaker broke off awkwardly.

Steele laughed.

“‘It is so nominated in the bond.’ The cabin is over there – some twenty miles.” He pointed off across the farthest dim ridge to the south. “It is among hills where – but to-morrow you shall see for yourself!”

“To-morrow?” There was a touch of anxious haste in the inquiry.

“Are you so impatient?” smiled Steele.

Saxon wheeled on his host, and on his forehead were beads of perspiration though the breeze across the hilltops was fresh with the coming of evening. His answer broke from his lips with the abruptness of an exclamation.

“My God, man, I’m in panic!”

The Kentuckian looked up in surprise, and his bantering smile vanished. Evidently, he was talking with a man who was suffering some stress of emotion, and that man was his friend.

For a moment, Saxon stood rigidly, looking away with drawn brow, then he began with a short laugh in which there was no vestige of mirth:

“When two men meet and find themselves congenial companions,” he said slowly, “there need be no questions asked. We met in a Mexican hut.”

Steele nodded.

“Then,” went on Saxon, “we discovered a common love of painting. That was enough, wasn’t it?”

Steele again bowed his assent.

“Very well.” The greater painter spoke with the painfully slow control of one who has taken himself in hand, selecting tone and words to safeguard against any betrayal into sudden outburst. “As long as it’s merely you and I, George, we know enough of each other. When it becomes a matter of meeting your friends, your own people, you force me to tell you something more.”

“Why?” Steele demanded; almost hotly. “I don’t ask my friends for references or bonds!”

Saxon smiled, but persistently repeated:

“You met me in Mexico, seven months ago. What, in God’s name, do you know about me?”

The other looked up, surprised.

“Why, I know,” he said, “I know – ” Then, suddenly wondering what he did know, he stopped, and added lamely: “I know that you are a landscape-painter of national reputation and a damned good fellow.”

“And, aside from that, nothing,” came the quick response. “What I am on the side, preacher, porch-climber, bank-robber – whatever else, you don’t know.” The speaker’s voice was hard.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that, before you present me to your friends, to such people for example – well such people as I met to-day – you have the right to ask; and the unfortunate part of it is that, when you ask, I can’t answer.”

“You mean – ” the Kentuckian halted in perplexed silence.

“I mean,” said Saxon, forcing his words, “that God Almighty only knows who I am, or where I came from. I don’t.”

Of all the men Steele had ever known, Saxon had struck him, through months of intimacy, as the most normal, sane and cleanly constituted. Eccentricity was alien to him. In the same measure that all his physical bents were straight and clean-cut, so he had been mentally a contradiction of the morbid and irrational. The Kentuckian waited in open-eyed astonishment, gazing at the man whose own words had just convicted him of the wildest insanity.

Saxon went on, and even now, in the face of self-conviction of lunacy, his words fell coldly logical:

“I have talked to you of my work and my travels during the past five or six years. I have told you that I was a cow-puncher on a Western range; that I drifted East, and took up art. Did I ever tell you one word of my life prior to that? Do you know of a single episode or instance preceding these few fragmentary chapters? Do you know who, or what I was seven years ago?”

Steele was dazed. His eyes were studiously fixed on the gnarled roots and twisted hole of a scrub oak that hung out over the edge of things with stubborn and distorted tenacity.

“No,” he heard the other say, “you don’t, and I don’t.”

Again, there was a pause. The sun was setting at their backs, but off to the east the hills were bright in the reflection that the western sky threw across the circle of the horizon. Already, somewhere below them, a prematurely tuneful whippoorwill was sending out its night call.

Steele looked up, and saw the throat of the other work convulsively, though the lips grimly held the set, contradictory smile.

“The very name I wear is the name, not of my family, but of my race. R. A. Saxon, Robert Anglo Saxon or Robert Anonymous Saxon – take your choice. I took that because I felt that I was not stealing it.”

“Go on,” prompted Steele.

“You have heard of those strange practical jokes which Nature sometimes – not often, only when she is preternaturally cruel – plays on men. They have pathological names for it, I believe – loss of memory?”

Steele only nodded.

“I told you that I rode the range on the Anchor-cross outfit. I did not tell you why. It was because the Anchor-cross took me in when I was a man without identity. I don’t know why I was in the Rocky Mountains. I don’t know what occurred there, but I do know that I was picked up in a pass with a fractured skull. I had been stripped almost naked. Nothing was left as a clew to identity, except this – ”

Saxon handed the other a rusty key, evidently fitting an old-fashioned lock.

“I always carry that with me. I don’t know where it will fit a door, or what lies behind that door. I only know that it is in a fashion the key that can open my past; that the lock which it fits bars me off from all my life except a fragment.”

Steele mechanically returned the thing, and Saxon mechanically slipped it back into his pocket.

“I know, too, that a scar I wear on my right hand was not fresh when those many others were. That, also, belongs to the veiled years.

“Some cell of memory was pressed upon by a splinter of bone, some microscopic atom of brain-tissue was disturbed – and life was erased. I was an interesting medical subject, and was taken to specialists who tried methods of suggestion. Men talked to me of various things: sought in a hundred ways to stimulate memory, but the reminder never came. Sometimes, it would seem that I was standing on the verge of great recollections – recollections just back of consciousness – as a forgotten name will sometimes tease the brain by almost presenting itself yet remaining elusive.”

Steele was leaning forward, listening while the narrator talked on with nervous haste.

“I have never told this before,” Saxon said. “Slowly, the things I had known seemed to come back. For example, I did not have to relearn to read and write. All the purely impersonal things gradually retrieved themselves, but, wherever a fact might have a tentacle which could grasp the personal – the ego – that fact eluded me.”

“How did you drift into art?” demanded Steele.

“That is it: I drifted into it. I had to drift. I had no compass, no port of departure or destination. I was a derelict without a flag or name.”

“At the Cincinnati Academy, where I first studied, one of the instructors gave me a hint. He felt that I was struggling for something which did not lie the way of his teaching. By that time, I had acquired some little efficiency and local reputation. He told me that Marston was the master for me to study, and he advised me to go further East where I could see and understand his work. I came, and saw, ‘The Sunset in Winter.’ You know the rest.”

“But, now,” Steele found himself speaking with a sense of relief, “now, you are Robert A. Saxon. You have made yourself from unknown material, but you have made yourself a great painter. Why not be satisfied to abandon this unknown past as the past has abandoned you?”

“Wait,” the other objected, with the cold emphasis of a man who will not evade, or seek refuge in specious alternatives.

“Forget to-night who I am, and to-morrow I shall have no assurance that the police are not searching for me. Why, man, I may have been a criminal. I have no way of knowing. I am hand-tied. Possibly, I have a wife and family waiting for me somewhere – needing me!”

His breath came in agitated gasps.

“I am two men, and one of them does not know the other. Sometimes, it threatens me with madness – sometimes, for a happy interval, I almost forget it. At first, it was insupportable, but the vastness of the prairie and the calm of the mountain seemed to soothe me into sanity, and give me a grip on myself. The starlight in my face during nights spent in the saddle – that was soothing; it was medicine for my sick brain. These things at least made me physically perfect. But, since yesterday is sealed, I must remain to some extent the recluse. The sort of intercourse we call society I have barred. That is why I am anxious for your cabin, rather than your clubs and your entertainments.”

“You didn’t have to tell me,” said Steele slowly, “but I’m glad you did. I and my friends are willing to gauge your past by your present. But I’m glad of your confidence.”

Saxon raised his face, and his eyes wore an expression of gratification.

“Yes, I’m glad I told you. If I should go out before I solve it, and you should ever chance on the answer, I’d like my own name over me – and both dates, birth as well as death. My work is, of course, to learn it all – if I can; and I hope – ” he forced a laugh – “when I meet the other man, he will be fit to shake hands with.”

“Listen,” Steele spoke eagerly. “How long has it been?”

“Over six years.”

“Then, why not go on and round out the seven? Seven years of absolute disappearance gives a man legal death. Let the old problem lie, and go forward as Robert Saxon. That is the simplest way.”

The other shook his head.

“That would be an evasion. It would prove nothing. If I discover responsibilities surviving from the past, I must take them up.”

“What did the physicians say?”

“They didn’t know.” Saxon shook his head. “Perhaps, some strong reminder may at some unwarned moment open the volume where it was closed; perhaps, it will never open. To-morrow morning, I may awaken Robert Saxon – or the other man.” He paused, then added quietly: “Such an unplaced personality had best touch other lives as lightly as it can.”

Steele went silently over, and cranked the machine. As he straightened up, he asked abruptly:

“Would you prefer calling off this dinner?”

“No.” The artist laughed. “We will take a chance on my remaining myself until after dinner, but as soon as convenient – ”

“To-morrow,” promised Steele, “we go to the cabin.”