The Key to Yesterday

CHAPTER XVII

In the compartment of the railway carriage, Steele was gazing fixedly at the lace “tidy” on the cushioned back of the opposite seat. His brows were closely knit in thought. He was evolving a plan.

Duska sat with her elbow on the sill of the compartment window, her chin on her gloved hand, her eyes gazing out, vague and unseeing. Yet, she loved beauty, and just outside the panes there was beauty drawn to a scale of grandeur.

They were climbing, behind the double-header of engines, up where it seemed that one could reach out and touch the close-hanging clouds, into tunnels and out of tunnels, through St. Gothard’s Pass and on where the Swiss Alps reached up into the fog that veiled the summits. The mountain torrents came roaring down, to beat their green water into swirling foam, and dash over the lower rocks like frenzied mill-races. Her eyes did not wake to a sparkle at sight of the quaint châlets which seemed to stagger under huge roof slabs of rugged slate. She did not even notice how they perched high on seemingly unattainable crags like stranded arks on Helvetian Ararats.

Each tunnel was the darkness between changed tableaux, and the mouth of each offered a new and more wonderful picture. The car-windows framed glimpses of Lake Como, Lake Lugano, and valleys far beneath where villages were only a jumble of toy blocks; yet, all these things did not change the utter weariness of Duska’s eyes where enthusiasm usually dwelt, or tempt Steele’s fixity of gaze from the lace “tidy.”

At Lucerne, his thinking found expression in a lengthy telegram to Paris. The Milan exhibit had opened up a new channel for speculation. If Saxon’s pictures were being pirated and sold as Marston’s, there was no one upon whom suspicion would fall more naturally than the unscrupulous St. John, Marston’s factor in Paris. Steele vaguely remembered the Englishman with his petty pride for his stewardship, though his own art life had lain in circles that rarely intercepted that of the Marston cult even at its outer rim. If this fraud were being practiced, its author was probably swindling both artists, and the appearance of either of them in Paris might drive St. John to desperate means of self-protection.

The conversion of the rooms formerly occupied by Marston into a school had been St. John’s doing. This atelier was in the house where St. John himself lived, and the Kentuckian knew that, unless he had moved his lodgings, he could still be found there, as could the very minor “academy” of Marston-idolizers, with their none-too-exalted instructor, Jean Hautecoeur.

At all events, it was to this address that Steele directed his message. Its purport was to inform St. John that Americans, who had only a short stay in Paris, were anxious to procure a Marston of late date, and to summon him to the Hôtel Palais d’Orsay for the day of their arrival there.

When they reached the hotel, he told the girl of his plan, suggesting that it might be best for him to have this interview with the agent alone, but admitting that, if she insisted on being present, it was her right. She elected to hear the conversation, and, when St. John arrived, he was conducted to the sitting-room of Mrs. Horton’s suite.

Pleased with the prospect of remunerative sales, Marston’s agent made his entrance jauntily. The shabbiness of the old days had been put by. He was now sprucely clothed, and in his lapel he wore a bunch of violets.

His thin, dissipated face was adorned with a rakishly trimmed mustache and Vandyke of gray which still held a fading trace of its erstwhile sandy red. His eyes were pale and restless as he stood bowing at the door. The afternoon was waning, and the lights had not yet been turned on.

“Mr. Steele?” he inquired.

Steele nodded.

St. John looked expectantly toward the girl in the shadow, as though awaiting an introduction, which was not forthcoming. As he looked, he seemed to grow suddenly nervous and ill-at-ease.

“You are Mr. Marston’s agent, I believe?” Steele spoke crisply.

“I have had that honor since Mr. Marston left Paris some years ago. You know, doubtless, that the master spends his time in foreign travel.” The agent spoke with a touch of self-importance.

“I want you to deliver to me here the portrait and the landscape now on exhibition at Milan,” ordered the American.

“It will be difficult – perhaps expensive – but I think it may be possible.” St. John spoke dubiously.

Steele’s eyes narrowed.

“I am not requesting,” he announced, “I am ordering.”

“But those canvases, my dear sir, represent the highest note of a master’s work!” began St. John, almost indignantly. “They are the perfection of the art of the greatest living painter, and you direct me to procure them as though they were a grocer’s staple on a shelf! Already, they are as good as sold. One does not have to peddle Marston’s canvases!”

Steele walked over to the door, and, planting his back against its panels, folded his arms. His voice was deliberate and dangerous:

“It’s not worth while to bandy lies with you. We both know that those pictures are from the brush of Robert Saxon. We both know that you have bought them at the price of a pupil’s work, and mean to sell them at the price of the master’s. I shall be in a position to prove the swindle, and to hand you over to the courts.”

St. John had at the first words stiffened with a sudden flaring of British wrath under his gray brows. As he listened, the red flush of anger faded to the coward’s pallor.

“That is not all,” went on Steele. “We both know that Mr. Saxon came to Paris a short while ago. For him to learn the truth meant your unmasking. He disappeared. We both know whose interests were served by that disappearance. You will produce those canvases, and you will produce Mr. Saxon within twenty-four hours, or you will face not only exposure for art-piracy, but prosecution for what is more serious.”

As he listened, St. John’s face betrayed not only fear, but also a slowly dawning wonder that dilated his vague pupils. Steele, keenly reading the face, as he talked, knew that the surprise was genuine.

“As God is my witness,” avowed the Englishman, earnestly, “if Mr. Saxon is in Paris, or in Europe, I know nothing of it.”

“That,” observed Steele dryly, “will be a matter for you to prove.”

“No, no!” The Englishman’s voice was charged with genuine terror, and the hand that he raised in pleading protest trembled. His carefully counterfeited sprightliness of guise dropped away, and left him an old man, much broken.

“I will tell you the whole story,” he went on. “It’s a miserable enough tale without imputing such evil motives as you suggest. It’s a shameful confession, and I shall hold back nothing. The pictures you saw are Saxon’s pictures. Of course, I knew that. Of course, I bought them at what his canvases would bring with the intention of selling them at the greater price commanded by the greater painter. I knew that the copyist had surpassed the master, but the world did not know. I knew that Europe would never admit that possible. I knew that, if once I palmed off this imitation as genuine, all the art-world would laugh to scorn the man who announced the fraud. Mr. Saxon himself could not hope to persuade the critics that he had done those pictures, once they were accepted as Marston’s. The art-world is led like sheep. It believes there is one Marston, and that no other can counterfeit him. And I knew that Marston himself could not expose me, because I know that Marston is dead.” The man was ripping out his story in labored, detached sentences.

Steele looked up with astonished eyes. The girl sat listening, with her lips parted.

“You see – ” the Englishman’s voice was impassioned in its bitterness – “I am not shielding myself. I am giving you the unrelieved truth. When I determined the fact of his death, I devised a scheme. I did not at that time know that this American would be able to paint pictures that could be mistaken for Marston’s. Had I known it, I should have endeavored to ascertain if he would share the scheme with me. Collaborating in the fraud, we could have levied fortunes from the art world, whereas in his own name he must have painted a decade more to win the verdict of his true greatness. I was Marston’s agent. I am Marston’s father-in-law. When I speak, it is as his ambassador. Men believe me. My daughter – ” the man’s voice broke – “my daughter lies on her death-bed. For her, there are a few months, perhaps only a few weeks, left of life. I have provided for her by trading on the name and greatness of her husband. If you turn me over to the police, you will kill her. For myself, it would be just, but I am not guilty of harming Mr. Saxon, and she is guilty of nothing.” The narrator halted in his story, and covered his face with his talon-like fingers. St. John was not a strong man. The metal of his soul was soft and without temper. He dropped into a chair, and for a while, as his auditors waited in silence, gave way to his emotion.

“I tell you,” he groaned, “I have at least been true to one thing in life. I have loved my child. I don’t want her punished for my offenses.”

Suddenly, he rose and faced the girl.

“I don’t know you,” he said passionately, “but I am an old man. I am an outcast – a derelict! I was not held fit for an introduction, but I appeal to you. Life can drive a man to anything. Life has driven me to most things, but not to all. I knew that any day might bring my exposure. If it had come after my daughter’s death, I would have been satisfied. I have for months been watching her die – wanting her to live, yet knowing that her death and my disgrace were racing together.” He paused, then added in a quaking voice: “There were days when I might have been introduced to a woman like you, many years ago.”

Duska was not fitted by nature to officiate at “third degree” proceedings. As she looked back into the beseeching face, she saw only that it was the face of an old man, broken and terrified, and that even through its gray terror it showed the love of which he talked.

Her hand fell gently on his shoulder.

“I am sorry – about your daughter,” she said, softly.

St. John straightened, and spoke more steadily.

“The story is not ended. In those days, it was almost starvation. No one would buy my pictures. No one would buy her verse. The one source of revenue we might have had was what Marston sought to give us, but that she would not accept. She said she had not married him for alimony. He tried often and in many ways, but she refused. Then, he left. He had done that before. No one wondered. After his absence had run to two years, I was in Spain, and stumbled on a house, a sort of pension, near Granada, where he had been painting under an assumed name, as was his custom. Then, he had gone again – no one knew where. But he had left behind him a great stack of finished canvases. Mon dieu, how feverishly the man must have worked during those months – for he had then been away from the place almost a year. The woman who owned the house did not know the value of the pictures. She only knew that he had ordered his rooms reserved, and had not returned, and that rental and storage were due her. I paid the charges, and took the pictures. Then, I investigated. My investigations proved that my surmise as to his death was correct. I was cautious in disposing of the pictures. They were like the diamonds of Kimberley, too precious to throw upon the market in sufficient numbers to glut the art-appetite of the world. I hoarded them. I let them go one or two at a time, or in small consignments. He had always sold his pictures cheaply. I was afraid to raise the price too suddenly. From time to time, I pretended to receive letters from the painter. I had then no definite plan. When they had reached the highest point of fame and value, I would announce his death. But, meanwhile, I discovered the work young Saxon was doing in America. I followed his development, and I hesitated to announce the death of Marston. An idea began to dawn on me in a nebulous sort of way, that somehow this man’s work might be profitably utilized by substitution. At first, it was very foggy – my idea – but I felt that in it was a possibility, at all events enough to be thought over – and so I did not announce the death of Marston. Then, I realized that I could supplement the Marston supply with these canvases. I was timid. Such sales must be cautiously made, and solely to private individuals who would remove the pictures from public view. At last, I found these two which you saw at Milan. I felt that Mr. Saxon could never improve them. I would take the chance, even though I had to exhibit them publicly. The last of the Marstons, save a few, had been sold. I could realize enough from these to take my daughter to Cairo, where she might have a chance to live. I bought the canvases in New York in person. They have never been publicly shown save in Milan; they were there but for a day only, and were not to be photographed. When you sent for me, I thought it was an American Croesus, and that I had succeeded.” St. John had talked rapidly and with agitation. Now, as he paused, he wiped the moisture from his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief.

“I have planned the thing with the utmost care. I have had no confederates. I even collected a few of Mr. Saxon’s earlier and less effective pictures, and exhibited them beside Marston’s best, so the public might compare and be convinced in its idea that the boundary between the master and the follower was the boundary between the sublime and the merely meritorious. That is all. For a year I have hesitated. When I entered this room, I realized my danger. Even in the growing twilight, I recognized the lady as the original of the portrait.”

“But didn’t you know,” questioned the girl, “that sooner or later the facts must become known – that at any time Mr. Saxon might come to Europe, and see one of his own pictures as I saw the portrait of myself in Milan?”

St. John bowed his head.

“I was desperate enough to take that chance,” he answered, “though I safeguarded myself in many ways. My sales would invariably be to purchasers who would take their pictures to private galleries. I should only have to dispose of a few at a time. Mr. Saxon has sold many pictures in Paris under his own name, and does not know who bought them. Selling them as Marston’s, though somewhat more complicated, might go on for some time – and my daughter’s life can not last long. After that, nothing matters.”

“Have you actually sold any Saxons as Marstons heretofore?” demanded Steele.

St. John hesitated for a moment, and then nodded his head.

“Possibly, a half-dozen,” he acknowledged, “to private collectors, where I felt it was safe.”

“I have no wish to be severe,” Steele spoke quietly, “but those two pictures we must have. I will pay you a fair profit. For the time, at least, the matter shall go no further.”

St. John bowed with deep gratitude.

“They shall be delivered,” he said.

Steele stood watching St. John bow himself out, all the bravado turned to obsequiousness. Then, the Kentuckian shook his head.

“We have unearthed that conspiracy,” he said, “but we have learned nothing. To-morrow, I shall visit the studio where the Marston enthusiasts work, and see if there is anything to be learned there.”

“And I shall go with you,” the girl promptly declared.

CHAPTER XVIII

On an unimportant cross street which cuts at right angles the Boulevard St. Michel, that axis of art-student Paris, stands an old and somewhat dilapidated house, built, after the same fashion as all its neighbors, about a court, and entered by a door over which the concierge presides. This house has had other years in which it stood pretentious, with the pride of a mansion, among its peers. Now, its splendor is tarnished, its respectability is faded, and the face it presents to the street wears the gloom that comes of past glory, heightened, perhaps, by the dark-spiritedness of many tenants who have failed to enroll their names among the great.

Yet, for all its forbidding frown, its front bespeaks a certain consciousness of lingering dignity. A plate, set in the door-case, announces that the great Marston painted here a few scant years ago, and here still that more-or-less-distinguished instructor, Jean Hautecoeur, tells his pupils in the second-floor atelier how it was done.

He was telling them now. The model, who had been posed as, “Aphrodite Rising from the Foam,” was resting. She sat on the dilapidated throne amid a circle of easels. A blanket was thrown about her, from the folds of which protruded a bare and shapely arm, the hand holding lightly between two fingers the cigarette with which she beguiled her recess.

The master, looking about on the many industrious, if not intellectual, faces, was discoursing on Marston’s feeling for values.

“He did not learn it,” declared M. Hautecoeur: “he was born with it. He did not acquire it: he evolved it. A faulty value caused him pain as a false note causes pain to the true musician.” Then, realizing that this was dangerous doctrine from the lips of one who was endeavoring to instill the quality into others, born with less gifted natures, he hastened to amend. “Yet, other masters, less facile, have gained by study what they lacked by heritage.”

The room was bare except for its accessories of art. A few well-chosen casts hung about the walls. Many unmounted canvases were stacked in the corners, the floors were chalk-marked where easel-positions had been recorded; charcoal fragments crunched underfoot when one walked across the boards. From the sky-light – for the right of the building had only two floors – fell a flood of afternoon light, filtering through accumulated dust and soot. The door upon the outer hall was latched. The students, bizarre and unkempt in the bohemianism of their cult, mixed colors on their palettes as they listened. In their little world of narrow horizons, the discourse was like a prophet’s eulogy of a god.

As the master, his huge figure somewhat grotesque in its long, paint-smeared blouse and cap, stood delivering his lecture with much eloquence of gesture, he was interrupted by a rap on the door. Jacques du Bois, whose easel stood nearest the threshold, reluctantly took his pipe from his teeth, and turned the knob with a scowl for the interruption. For a moment, he stood talking through the slit with a gentleman in the hall-way, his eyes meanwhile studying with side-glances the lady who stood behind the gentleman. Then, he bowed and closed the door.

“Someone wishes a word with M. Hautecoeur,” he announced.

The master stepped importantly into the hall, and Steele introduced himself. M. Hautecoeur declared that he quite well remembered monsieur and his excellent painting. He bowed to mademoiselle with unwieldly gallantry.

“Mr. Robert Saxon,” began the American, “is, I believe, one of the most distinguished of the followers of Frederick Marston. Miss Filson and I are both friends of Mr. Saxon, and, while in Paris, we wished to visit the shrine of the Marston school. We have taken the liberty of coming here. Is it possible to admit us?”

The instructor looked cautiously into the atelier, satisfied himself that the model had not resumed her throne and nudity, then flung back the door with a ceremonious sweep. Steele, familiar with such surroundings, cast only a casual glance about the interior. It was like many of the smaller schools in which he had himself painted. To the girl, who had never seen a life-class at work, it was stepping into a new world. Her eyes wandered about the walls, and came back to the faces.

“I have never had the honor of meeting your friend, Monsieur Saxon,” declared the instructor in English. “But his reputation has crossed the sea! I have had the pleasure of seeing several of his canvases. There is none of us following in the footsteps of Marston who would not feel his life crowned with high success, had he come as close as Saxon to grasping the secret that made Marston Marston. Your great country should be proud of him.”

Steele smiled.

“Our country could also claim Marston. You forget that, monsieur.”

The instructor spread his hands in a deprecating gesture.

“Ah, mon ami, that is debatable. True, your country gave him birth, but it was France that gave him his art.”

“Did you know,” suggested Steele, “that some of the unsigned Saxon pictures have passed competent critics as the work of Marston?”

Hautecoeur lifted his heavy brows.

“Impossible, monsieur,” he protested; “quite impossible! It is the master’s boast that any man who can pass a painting as a Marston has his invitation to do so. He never signs a canvas – it is unnecessary – his stroke – his treatment – these are sufficient signature. I do not belittle the art of your friend,” he hastened to explain, “but there is a certain – what shall I say? – a certain individualism about the work of this greatest of moderns which is inimitable. One must indeed be much the novice to be misled. Yet, I grant you there was one quality the master himself did not formerly possess which the American grasped from the beginning.”

“His virility of touch?” inquired Steele.

“Just so! Your man’s art is broader, perhaps stronger. That difference is not merely one of feeling: it is more. The American’s style was the outgrowth of the bigness of your vast spaces – of the broad spirit of your great country – of the pride that comes to a man in the consciousness of physical power and currents of red blood! Marston was the creature of a confined life, bounded by walls. He was self-absorbed, morbid, anemic. To be the perfect artist, he needed only to be the perfect animal! He did not understand that. He disliked physical effort. He felt that something eluded him, and he fought for it with brush and mahlstick. He should have used the Alpinstock or the snow-shoe.” Hautecoeur was talking with an enthused fervor that swept him into metaphor.

“Yet – ” Steele was secretly sounding his way toward the end he sought – “yet, the latter pictures of Marston have that same quality.”

“Precisely. I would in a moment more have spoken of that. I have my theory. Since leaving Paris, I believe Marston has gone perhaps into the Alps, perhaps into other countries, and built into himself the thing we urged upon him – the robust vision.”

The girl spoke for the first time, putting, after the fashion of the uninitiated, the question which, the more learned hesitate to propound:

“What is this thing you call the secret? What is it that makes the difference?”

“Ah, mademoiselle, if I knew that!” The instructor sighed as he smiled. “How says the English Fitzgerald? ‘A hair perhaps divides the false and true.’ Had Marston had the making of the famous epigram, he would not have said he mixed his paints with brains. Rather would he have confessed, he mixed them with ideals.”

“But I fear we delay the posing,” suggested Steele, moving, with sudden apprehension, toward the door.

“I assure you, no!” prevaricated the teacher, with instant readiness. “It is a wearying pose. The model will require a longer rest than the usual. Will not mademoiselle permit me to show her those Marston canvases we are fortunate enough to have here? Perhaps, she will then understand why I find it impossible to answer her question.”

When Captain Paul Harris had set his course to France with a slow, long voyage ahead, his shanghaied passenger had gone from stunned unconsciousness into the longer and more complicated helplessness of brain-fever. There was a brushing of shoulders with death. There were fever and unconsciousness and delirium, and through each phase Dr. Cornish, late of the Foreign Legion, brought his patient with studious care – through all, that is, save the brain fog. Then, as the vessel drew to the end of the voyage, the physical illness appeared to be conquered, yet the awakening had been only that of nerves and bodily organs. The center of life, the mind, was as remote and incommunicable as though the thought nerves had been paralyzed. Saxon was like a country whose outer life is normal, but whose capital is cut off and whose government is supine. The physician, studying with absorbed interest, struggled to complete the awakening. Unless it should be complete, it were much better that the man had died, for, when the vessel dropped her anchor at Havre, the captain led ashore a man who in the parlance of the peasants was a poor “innocent,” a human blank-book in a binding once handsome, now worn, with nothing inscribed on its pages.