The Key to Yesterday. Charles Buck

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СКАЧАТЬ You know the picture?” She nodded assent. “Well, when I saw it, I wanted to go out to the Metropolitan entrance, and shout Eureka up and down Fifth Avenue. It told me what I’d been reaching through the darkness of my novitiate to grasp. It seemed to me that art had been revealed to me. Somehow,” the man added, his voice falling suddenly from its enthused pitch to a dead, low one, “everything that comes to me seems to come by revelation!”

      Into Duska’s eyes came quick light of sympathy. He had halted before her, and now she arose impulsively, and laid a light hand for a moment on his arm.

      “I understand,” she agreed. “I think that for most artists to come as close as you have come would be triumph enough, but you – ” she looked at him a moment with a warmth of confidence – “you can do a great deal more.” So ended her first lesson in the independence of art, leaving the pupil’s heart beating more quickly than at its commencement.

      In the days that followed, as May gave way to June and the dogwood blossoms dropped and withered to be supplanted by flowering locust trees, Saxon confessed to himself that he had lost the first battle of his campaign. He had resolved that this close companionship should be platonically hedged about; that he would never allow himself to cross the frontier that divided the realm of friendship from the hazardous territory of love. Then, as the cool, unperfumed beauty of the dogwood was forgotten for the sense-steeping fragrance of the locust, he knew that he was only trying to deceive himself. He had really crossed this forbidden frontier when he passed through the gate that separated the grandstand at Churchill Downs from the club-house inclosure. With the realization came the resolution of silence. He was a man whose life might at any moment renew itself in untoward developments. Until he could drag the truth from the sphinx that guarded his secret, his love must be as inarticulate as was his sphinx. He spent harrowing afternoons alone, and swore with many solemn oaths that he would never divulge his feelings, and, when he sought about for the most sacred and binding of vows, he swore by his love for Duska.

      Because of these things, he sometimes shocked and startled her with sporadic demonstrations of the brusquerie into which he withdrew when he felt too potential an impulse urging him to the other extreme. And she, not understanding it, yet felt that there was some riddle behind it all. It pained and puzzled her, but she accepted it without resentment – belying her customary autocracy. While she had never gone into the confessional of her heart as he had done, these matters sometimes had the power of making her very miserable.

      His happiest achievements resulted from sketching trips taken to points she knew in the hills. He had called her a dryad when she first appeared in the woods, and he had been right, for she knew all the twisting paths in the tangle of the knobs, unbroken and virgin save where the orchards of peach-growers had reclaimed bits of sloping soil. One morning at the end of June, they started out together on horseback, armed with painting paraphernalia, luncheon and rubber ponchos in the event of rain. For this occasion, she had saved a coign of vantage she knew, where his artist’s eye might swing out from a shelving cliff over miles of checkered valley and flat, and league upon league of cloud and sky. She led the way by zigzag hill roads where they caught stinging blows from back-lashing branches and up steep, slippery acclivities. It was one of the times when Saxon was drinking the pleasant nectar of to-day, refusing to think of to-morrow. She sang as she rode in advance, and he followed with the pleasure of a man to whom being unmounted brings a sense of incompleteness. He knew that he rode no better than she – and he knew that he could ride. In his ears was the exuberance of the birds saluting the morning, and in his nostrils the loamy aroma stirred by their horses’ hoofs from the steeping fragrance of last year’s leaves. At the end was a view that brought his breath in deep draughts of delight.

      For two hours, he worked, and only once his eyes left the front. On that occasion, he glanced back to see her slim figure stretched with childlike and unconscious grace in the long grass, her eyes gazing unblinkingly and thoughtfully up to the fleece that drifted across the blue of the sky. Clover heads waved fragrantly about her, and one long-stemmed blossom brushed her cheek. She did not see him, and the man turned his gaze back to the canvas with a leap in his pulses. After that, he painted feverishly. Finally, he turned to find her at his elbow.

      “What is the verdict?” he demanded.

      She looked with almost tense eyes. Her voice was low and thrilled with wondering delight.

      “There is something,” she said slowly, “that you never caught before; something wonderful, almost magical. I don’t know what it is.”

      With a swift, uncontrollable gesture, he bent a little toward her. His face was the face of a man whose heart is in insurrection. His voice was impassioned.

      “I know what it is,” he cried. Then, as she read his look, her cheeks crimsoned, and it would have been superfluous for him to have added, “Love.” He drew back almost with a start, and began to scrape the paint smears from his palette. He had quelled the insurrection. At least in words, he had not broken his vow.

      For a moment, the girl stood silent. She felt herself trembling; then, taking refuge in childlike inconsequence, she peered over the edge of the cliff.

      “Oh!” she exclaimed as though the last few moments had not been lived through, “there is the most wonderfulest flower!” Her voice was disappointment-laden. “And it’s just out of reach.”

      Saxon had regained control of himself. He answered with a composure too calm to be genuine and an almost flippant note that rang false.

      “Of course. The most wonderfulest things are always just out of reach. The edelweiss grows only among the glaciers, and the excelsior crop must be harvested on inaccessible pinnacles.”

      He came and looked over the edge, stopping close to her shoulder. He wanted to demonstrate his regained command of himself. A delicate purple flower hung on the cliff below as though it had been placed there to lure men over the edge.

      He looked down the sheer drop, appraised with his eye the frail support of a jutting root, then slipped quietly over, resting by his arms on the ledge of rock and groping for the root with his toe.

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