The Key to Yesterday
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“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.”
CHAPTER III
Perhaps, the same futile vanity that led Mr. Bellton to import the latest sartorial novelties from the Rue de la Paix for the adornment of his person made him fond of providing foreign notables to give color to his entertainments.
Mr. Bellton was at heart the poseur, but he was also the fighter. Even when he carried the war of political reform into sections of the town where the lawless elements had marked him for violence, he went stubbornly in the conspicuousness of ultra-tailoring. Though he loved to address the proletariat in the name of brotherhood, he loved with a deeper passion the exclusiveness of presiding as host at a board where his guests included the “best people.”
Señor Ribero, who at home used the more ear-filling entitlement of Señor Don Ricardo de Ribero y Pierola, was hardly a notable, yet he was a new type, and, even before the ladies had emerged from their cloak-room and while the men were apart in the grill, the host felt that he had secured a successful ingredient for his mixture of personal elements.
After the fashion of Latin-American diplomacy, educated in Paris and polished by great latitude of travel, the attaché had the art of small talk and the charm of story-telling. To these recommendations, he added a slender, almost military carriage, and the distinction of Castilian features.
A punctured tire had interrupted the homeward journey of Steele and Saxon, who had telephoned to beg that the dinner go on, without permitting their tardiness to delay the more punctual.
The table was spread in a front room with a balcony that gave an outlook across the broad lawn and the ancient trees which bordered the sidewalk. At the open windows, the May air that stirred the curtains was warm enough to suggest summer, and new enough after the lately banished winter to seem wonderful – as though the rebirth of nature had wrought its miracle for the first time.
Ribero was the only guest who needed presentation, and, as he bowed over the hand of each woman, it was with an almost ornate ceremoniousness of manner.
Duska Filson, after the spontaneous system of her opinions and prejudices, disliked the South American. To her imaginative mind, there was something in his jetlike darkness and his quick, almost tigerish movements that suggested the satanic. But, if the impression she received was not flattering to the guest, the impression she made was evidently profound. Ribero glanced at her with an expression of extreme admiration, and dropped his dark lashes as though he would veil eyes from which he could not hope to banish flattery too fulsome for new acquaintanceship.
The girl found herself seated with the diplomat at her right, and a vacant chair at her left. The second vacant seat was across the round table, and she found herself sensible of a feeling of quarantine with an uncongenial companion, and wondering who would fill the empty space at her left. The name on the place card was hidden. She rather hoped it would be Saxon. She meant to ask him why he did not break away from the Marston influence that handicapped his career, and she believed he would entertain her. Of course, George Steele was an old friend and a very dear one, but this was just the point: he was not satisfied with that, and in the guise of lovers only did she ever find men uninteresting. It would, however, be better to have George make love than to be forced to talk to this somewhat pompous foreigner.
“I just met and made obeisance to the new Mrs. Billie Bedford,” declared Mr. Bellton, starting the conversational ball rolling along the well-worn groove of gossip. “And, if she needs a witness, she may call on me to testify that she’s as radiant in the part of Mrs. Billie as she was in her former rôle of Mrs. Jack.”
Miss Buford raised her large eyes. With a winter’s popularity behind her, she felt aggrieved to hear mentioned names that she did not know. Surely, she had met everybody.
“Who is Mrs. Bedford?” she demanded. “I don’t think I have ever met her. Is she a widow?”
Bellton laughed across his consommé cup. “Of the modern school,” he enlightened. “There were ‘no funeral baked meats to furnish forth the marriage feast.’ Matrimonially speaking, this charming lady plays in repertoire.”
“What has become of Jack Spotswood?” The older Miss Preston glanced up inquiringly. “He used to be everywhere, and I haven’t heard of him for ages.”
“He’s still everywhere,” responded Mr. Bellton, with energy; “everywhere but here. You see, the papers were so busy with Jack’s affairs that they crowded Jack out of his own life.” Mr. Bellton smiled as he added: “And so he went away.”
“I wonder where he is now. He wasn’t such a bad sort,” testified Mr. Cleaver, solemnly. “Jack’s worse portion was his better half.”
“Last heard,” informed Mr. Bellton, “he was seen in some town in South America – the name of which I forget.”
Señor Ribero had no passport of familiarity into local personalities, and he occupied the moment of his own conversational disengagement in a covert study of the face and figure beside him. Just now, the girl was looking away at the indolently stirring curtains with an expression of detachment. Flippant gossip was distasteful to her, and, when the current set that way, she drew aside, and became the non-participant.
Ribero read rightly the bored expression, and resolved that the topic must be diverted, if Miss Filson so wished.
“One meets so many of your countrymen in South America,” he suggested, “that one might reasonably expect them to lose interest as types, yet each of them seems to be the center of some gripping interest. I remember in particular one episode – ”
The recital was cut short by the entrance of Steele and Saxon. Ribero, the only person present requiring introduction, rose to shake hands.
The attaché was trained in diplomacy, and the rudiments of diplomacy should teach the face to become a mask when need be, yet, as his eyes met those of Saxon, he suddenly and involuntarily stiffened. For just a moment, his outstretched hand hesitated with the impulse to draw back. The lips that had parted in a casual smile hardened rigidly, and the eyes that rested on the face of Steele’s celebrity were so intently focused that they almost stared. The byplay occupied only a moment, and, as Ribero had half-turned from the table to greet those entering at his back, it escaped the notice of everyone except Saxon himself. The newcomer felt the momentary bar of hostility that had been thrown between them and as quickly withdrawn. The next moment, he was shaking the extended hand, and hearing the commonplace:
“Much pleased, señor.”
Ribero felt a momentary flash of shame for the betrayal of such undiplomatic surprise, and made amends with added courtesy when he spoke.
The artist, dropping into his seat at the side of Miss Filson, felt a flush of pleasure at his position. For the instant, the other man’s conduct became a matter of negligible importance, and, when she turned to him with a friendly nod and smile, he forgot Ribero’s existence.
“Mr. Ribero,” announced Mr. Bellton, “was just about to tell us an interesting story when you two delinquents came in. I’m sure he still has the floor.”
The diplomat had forgotten what he had been saying. He was covertly studying the features of the man just beyond Miss Filson. The face was turned toward the girl, giving him a full view, and it was a steady, imperturbable face. Now, introduced as raconteur, he realized that he must say something, and at the moment, with a flash of inspiration, he determined to relate a bit of history that would be of interest at least to the narrator. It was not at all the story he might have told had he been uninterrupted, but it was a story that appealed to his diplomatic taste, because he could watch the other face as he told it and see what the other face might betray. This newcomer had jarred him from his usual poise. Now, he fancied it was the other’s turn to be startled.
“It was,” he said casually, “the narrowest escape from death that I have seen – and the man who escaped was an American.”
As Saxon raised his eyes, with polite interest, to those of the speaker, he became aware that they held for him a message of almost sardonic challenge. He felt that the story-teller was only ostensibly addressing the table; that the man was talking at him, as a prosecutor talks at the defendant though he may direct himself to the jury. The sense that brought this realization was perhaps telepathic. To the other eyes and ears, there were only the manner of the raconteur and the impersonal tone of generality.
“It occurred in Puerto Frio,” said the South American, reminiscently. He paused for a moment, and smiled at Saxon, as though expecting a sign of confusion upon the mention of the name, but he read only courteous interest and impenetrability.
“This countryman of yours,” he went on smoothly, his English touched and softened by the accent of the foreigner, “had indulged in the dangerous, though it would seem alluring, pastime of promoting a revolution. Despite his unscrupulous character, he was possessed of an engaging personality, and, on brief acquaintance, I, for one, liked him. His skill and luck held good so long that it was only when the insurgents were at the gates of the capital that a summary court-martial gave him the verdict of death. I have no doubt that by the laws of war it was a just award, yet so many men are guilty of peddling revolutions, and the demand for such wares is so great in some quarters, that he had my sympathy.” The speaker bowed slightly, as though conceding a point to a gallant adversary. It chanced that he was looking directly at Saxon as he bowed.
The painter became suddenly conscious that he was according an engrossed attention, and that the story-teller was narrowly watching his fingers as they twisted the stem of his sauterne glass. The fingers became at once motionless.
“He bore himself so undeniably well when he went out to his place against a blank wall in the plaza, escorted by the firing squad,” proceeded Señor Ribero evenly, “that one could not withhold admiration. The picture remains with me. The sun on the yellow cathedral wall … a vine heavy with scarlet blossoms like splashes of blood … and twenty paces away the firing squad with their Mausers.”
Once more, the speaker broke off, as though lost in retrospection of something well-remembered. Beyond the girl’s absorbed gaze, he saw that of the painter, and his dark eyes for an instant glittered with something like direct accusation.
“As they arranged the final details, he must have reflected somewhat grimly on the irony of things, for at that very moment he could hear the staccato popping of the guns he had smuggled past the vigilance of the customs. The sound was coming nearer – telling him that in a half-hour his friends would be victorious – too late to save him.”
As Ribero paused, little Miss Buford, leaning forward across the table, gave a sort of gasp.
“He was tall, athletic, gray-eyed,” announced the attaché irrelevantly; “in his eyes dwelt something of the spirit of the dreamer. He never faltered.”
The speaker lifted his sauterne glass to his lips, and sipped the wine deliberately.
“The teniente in command inquired if he wished to pray,” Ribero added then, “but he shook his head almost savagely. ‘No, damn you!’ he snapped out, as though he were in a hurry about it all, ‘Go on with your rat-killing. Let’s have it over with.’”
The raconteur halted in his narrative.
“Please go on,” begged Duska, in a low voice. “What happened?”
The foreigner smiled.
“They fired.” Then, as he saw the slight shudder of Duska’s white shoulder, he supplemented: “But each soldier had left the task for the others… Possibly, they sympathized with him; possibly, they sympathized with the revolution; possibly, each of the six secretly calculated that the other five would be sufficient. Quien sabe? At all events, he fell only slightly wounded. One bullet – ” he spoke thoughtfully, letting his eyes drop from Saxon’s face to the table-cloth where Saxon’s right hand lay – “one bullet pierced his right hand from back to front.”
Then, a half-whimsical smile crossed Ribero’s somewhat saturnine features, for Miss Filson had dropped her napkin on Saxon’s side, and, when the painter had stooped to recover it, he did not again replace the hand on the table.
“Before he could be fired on a second time,” concluded the diplomat with a shrug, “a new presidente was on his way to the palace. Your countryman was saved.”
If the hero of Ribero’s narrative was a malefactor, at least he was a malefactor with the sympathy of Mr. Bellton’s dinner-party, as was attested by a distinctly audible sigh of relief at the end of the story. But Señor Ribero was not quite through.
“It is not, after all, the story that discredits your countryman,” he explained, “but the sequel. Of course, he became powerful in the new régime. It was when he was lauded as a national hero that his high fortunes intoxicated him, and success rotted his moral fiber. Eventually, he embezzled a fortune from the government which he had assisted to establish. There was also a matter of – how shall I say? – of a lady. Then, a duel which was really an assassination. He escaped with blood on his conscience, presumably to enjoy his stolen wealth in his own land.”
“I have often wondered,” pursued Ribero, “whether, if that man and I should ever be thrown together again, he would know me … and I have often wished I could remember him only as the brave adventurer – not also as the criminal.”
As he finished, the speaker was holding Saxon with his eyes, and had a question in his glance that seemed to call for some expression from the other. Saxon bowed with a smile.