The Key to Yesterday. Charles Buck
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