Czytaj książkę: «The Key to Yesterday»

CHAPTER I

The palings of the grandstand inclosure creaked in protest under the pressure. The shadows of forward-surging men wavered far out across the track. A smother of ondriving dust broke, hurricane-like, around the last turn, sweeping before it into the straightaway a struggling mass of horse-flesh and a confusion of stable-colors. Back to the right, the grandstand came to its feet, bellowing in a madman’s chorus.

Out of the forefront of the struggle strained a blood-bay colt. The boy, crouched over the shoulders, was riding with hand and heel to the last ounce of his strength and the last subtle feather-weight of his craft and skill. At his saddleskirts pressed a pair of distended nostrils and a black, foam-flecked muzzle. Behind, with a gap of track and daylight between, trailed the laboring “ruck.”

A tall stranger, who had lost his companion and host in the maelstrom of the betting shed, had taken his stand near the angle where the paddock grating meets the track fence. A Derby crowd at Churchill Downs is a congestion of humanity, and in the obvious impossibility of finding his friend he could here at least give his friend the opportunity of finding him, since at this point were a few panels of fence almost clear. As the two colts fought out the final decisive furlongs, the black nose stealing inch by inch along the bay neck, the stranger’s face wore an interest not altogether that of the casual race-goer. His shoulders were thrown back, and his rather lean jaw angle swept into an uncompromising firmness of chin – just now uptilted.

The man stood something like six feet of clear-cut physical fitness. There was a declaration in his breadth of shoulder and depth of chest, in his slenderness of waist and thigh, of a life spent only partly within walls, while the free swing of torso might have intimated to the expert observer that some of it had been spent in the saddle.

Of the face itself, the eyes were the commanding features. They were gray eyes, set under level brows; keenly observant by token of their clear light, yet tinged by a half-wistful softness that dwells hauntingly in the eyes of dreamers.

Just now, the eyes saw not only the determination of a four-furlong dash for two-year-olds, but also, across the fresh turf of the infield, the radiant magic of May, under skies washed brilliant by April’s rains.

Then, as the colts came abreast and passed in a muffled roar of drumming hoofs, his eyes suddenly abandoned the race at the exact moment of its climax: as hundreds of heads craned toward the judges’ stand, his own gaze became a stare focused on a point near his elbow.

He stared because he had seen, as it seemed to him, a miracle, and the miracle was a girl. It was, at all events, nothing short of miraculous that such a girl should be discovered standing, apparently unaccompanied, down in this bricked area, a few yards from the paddock and the stools of the bookmakers.

Unlike his own, her eyes had remained constant to the outcome of the race, and now her face was averted, so that only the curve of one cheek, a small ear and a curling tendril of brown hair under the wide, soft brim of her Panama hat rewarded him for the surrender of the spectacle on the track.

Most ears, he found himself reflecting with, a sense of triumphant discovery, simply grow on the sides of heads, but this one might have been fashioned and set by a hand gifted with the exquisite perfection of the jeweler’s art.

A few moments before, the spot where she stood had been empty save for a few touts and trainers. It seemed inconceivable, in the abrupt revelation of her presence, that she could, like himself, have been simply cut off from companions and left for the interval waiting. He caught himself casting about for a less prosaic explanation. Magic would seem to suit her better than mere actuality. She was sinuously slender, and there was a splendid hint of gallantry in the unconscious sweep of her shoulders. He was conscious that the simplicity of her pongee gown loaned itself to an almost barbaric freedom of carriage with the same readiness as do the draperies of the Winged Victory. Yet, even the Winged Victory achieves her grace by a pose of triumphant action, while this woman stood in repose except for the delicate forward-bending excitement of watching the battle in the stretch.

The man was not, by nature, susceptible. Women as sex magnates had little part in his life cosmos. The interest he felt now with electrical force, was the challenge that beauty in any form made upon his enthusiasm. Perhaps, that was why he stood all unrealizing the discourtesy of his gaping scrutiny – a scrutiny that, even with her eyes turned away, she must have felt.

At all events, he must see her face. As the crescendo of the grandstand’s suspense graduated into the more positive note of climax and began to die, she turned toward him. Her lips were half-parted, and the sun struck her cheeks and mouth and chin into a delicate brilliance of color, while the hat-brim threw a band of shadow on forehead and eyes. The man’s impression was swift and definite. He had been waiting to see, and was prepared. The face, he decided, was not beautiful by the gauge of set standards. It was, however, beautiful in the better sense of its individuality; in the delicacy of the small, yet resolute, chin and the expressive depth of the eyes. Just now, they were shaded into dark pools of blue, but he knew they could brighten into limpid violet.

She straightened up as she turned and met his stare with a steadiness that should have disconcerted it, yet he found himself still studying her with the detached, though utterly engrossed, interest of the critic. She did not start or turn hurriedly away. Somehow, he caught the realization that flight had no part in her system of things.

The human tide began flowing back toward the betting shed, and left them alone in a cleared space by the palings. Then, the man saw a quick anger sweep into the girl’s face and deepen the color of her cheeks. Her chin went up a trifle, and her lips tightened.

He found himself all at once in deep confusion. He wanted to tell her that he had not realized the actuality of his staring impertinence, until she had, with a flush of unuttered wrath and embarrassment, revealed the depth of his felony … for he could no longer regard it as a misdemeanor.

There was a note of contempt in her eyes that stung him, and presently he found himself stammering an excuse.

“I beg your pardon – I didn’t realize it,” he began lamely. Then he added as though to explain it all with the frank outspokenness of a school-boy: “I was wishing that I could paint you – I couldn’t help gazing.”

For a few moments as she stood rigidly and indignantly silent, he had opportunity to reflect on the inadequacy of his explanation. At last, she spoke with the fine disdain of affronted royalty.

“Are you quite through looking at me? May I go now?”

He was contrite.

“I don’t know that I could explain – but it wasn’t meant to be – to be – ” He broke off, floundering.

“It’s a little strange,” she commented quietly as though talking to herself, “because you look like a gentleman.”

The man flushed.

“You are very kind and flattering,” he said, his face instantly hardening. “I sha’n’t tax you with explanation. I don’t suppose any woman could be induced to understand that a man may look at her – even stare at her – without disrespect, just as he might look at a sunset or a wonderful picture.” Then, he added half in apology, half in defiance: “I don’t know much about women anyway.”

For a moment, the girl stood with her face resolutely set, then she looked up again, meeting his eyes gravely, though he thought that she had stifled a mutinous impulse of her pupils to riffle into amusement.

“I must wait here for my uncle,” she told him. “Unless you have to stay, perhaps you had better go.”

The tall stranger swung off toward the betting shed without a backward glance, and engulfed himself in the mob where one had to fight and shoulder a difficult way in zigzag course.

Back of the forming lines of winners with tickets to cash, he caught sight of a young man almost as tall as himself and characterized by the wholesome attractiveness of one who has taken life with zest and decency. He wore also upon feature and bearing the stamp of an aristocracy that is not decadent. To the side of this man, the stranger shouldered his way.

“Since you abandoned me,” he accused, “I’ve been standing out there like a little boy who has lost his nurse.” After a pause, he added: “And I’ve seen a wonderful girl – the one woman in your town I want to meet.”

His host took him by the elbow, and began steering him toward the paddock gate.

“So, you have discovered a divinity, and are ready to be presented. And you are the scoffer who argues that women may be eliminated. You are – or were – the man who didn’t care to know them.”

The guest answered calmly and with brevity:

“I’m not talking about women. I’m talking about a woman – and she’s totally different.”

“Who is she, Bob?”

“How should I know?”

“I know a few of them – suppose you describe her.”

The stranger halted and looked at his friend and host with commiserating pity. When he deigned to speak, it was with infinite scorn.

“Describe her! Why, you fool, I’m no poet laureate, and, if I were, I couldn’t describe her!”

For reply, he received only the disconcerting mockery of ironical laughter.

“My interest,” the young man of the fence calmly deigned to explain, “is impersonal. I want to meet her, precisely as I’d get up early in the morning and climb a mountain to see the sun rise over a particularly lovely valley. It’s not as a woman, but as an object of art.”

On other and meaner days, the track at Churchill Downs may be in large part surrendered to its more rightful patrons, the chronics and apostles of the turf, and racing may be only racing as roulette is roulette. But on Derby Day it is as though the community paid tribute to the savor of the soil, and honored in memory the traditions of the ancient régime.

To-day, in the club-house inclosure, the roomy verandahs, the close-cropped lawn and even the roof-gallery were crowded; not indeed to the congestion of the grandstand’s perspiring swarm, for Fashion’s reservation still allowed some luxury of space, but beyond the numbers of less important times. In the burgeoning variety of new spring gowns and hats, the women made bouquets, as though living flowers had been brought to the shrine of the thoroughbred.

A table at the far end of the verandah seemed to be a little Mecca for strolling visitors. In the party surrounding it, one might almost have caught the impression that the prettiness of the feminine display had been here arranged, and that in scattering attractive types along the front of the white club-house, some landscape gardener had reserved the most appealing beauties for a sort of climacteric effect at the end.

Sarah and Anne Preston were there, and wherever the Preston sisters appeared there also were usually gathered together men, not to the number of two and three, but in full quorum. And, besides the Preston sisters, this group included Miss Buford and a fourth girl.

Indeed, it seemed to be this fourth who held, with entire unconsciousness, more than an equal share of attention. Duska Filson was no more cut to the pattern of the ordinary than the Russian name her romantic young mother had given her was an exponent of the life about her. She was different, and at every point of her divergence from a routine type it was the type that suffered by the contrast. Having preferred being a boy until she reached that age when it became necessary to bow to the dictate of Fate and accept her sex, she had retained an understanding for, and a comradeship with, men that made them hers in bondage. This quality she had combined with all that was subtly and deliciously feminine, and, though she loved men as she loved small boys, some of them had discovered that it was always as men, never as a man.

She had a delightfully refractory way of making her own laws to govern her own world – a system for which she offered no apology; and this found its vindication in the fact that her world was well-governed – though with absolutism.

The band was blaring something popular and reminiscent of the winter’s gayeties, but the brasses gave their notes to the May air, and the May air smoothed and melted them into softness. Duska’s eyes were fixed on the green turf of the infield where several sentinel trees pointed into the blue.

Mr. Walter Bellton, having accomplished the marvelous feat of escaping from the bookmaker’s maelstrom with the immaculateness of his personal appearance intact, sauntered up to drop somewhat languidly into a chair.

“When one returns in triumph,” he commented, “one should have chaplets of bay and arches to walk under. It looks to me as though the reception-committee has not been on the job.”

Sarah Preston raised a face shrouded in gravity. Her voice was velvety, but Bellton caught its undernote of ridicule.

“I render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar’s – but what is your latest triumph?” She put her question innocently. “Did you win a bet?”

If Mr. Bellton’s quick-flashing smile was an acknowledgment of the thrust at his somewhat notorious self-appraisement, his manner at least remained imperturbably complacent.

“I was not clamoring for my own just dues,” he explained, with modesty. “For myself, I shall be satisfied with an unostentatious tablet in bronze when I’m no longer with you in the flesh. In this instance I was speaking for another.”

He did not hasten to announce the name of the other. In even the little things of life, this gentleman calculated to a nicety dramatic values and effects. Just as a public speaker in nominating a candidate works up to a climax of eulogy, and pauses to let his hearers shout, “Name him! Name your man!” so Mr. Bellton paused, waiting for someone to ask of whom he spoke.

It was little Miss Buford who did so with the débutante’s legitimate interest in the possibility of fresh conquest.

“And who has returned in triumph?”

“George Steele.”

Sarah Preston arched her brows in mild interest.

“So, the wanderer is home! I had the idea he was painting masterpieces in the Quartier Latin, or wandering about with a sketching easel in southern Spain.”

“Nevertheless, he is back,” affirmed the man, “and he has brought with him an even greater celebrity than himself – a painter of international reputation, it would seem. I met them a few moments ago in the paddock, and Steele intimated that they would shortly arrive to lay their joint laurels at your feet.”

Louisville society was fond of George Steele, and, when on occasion he dropped back from “the happy roads that lead around the world,” it was to find a welcome in his home city only heightened by his long absence.

“Who is this greater celebrity?” demanded Miss Buford. She knew that Steele belonged to Duska Filson, or at least that whenever he returned it was to renew the proffer of himself, even though with the knowledge that the answer would be as it had always been: negative. Her interest was accordingly ready to consider in alternative the other man.

“Robert A. Saxon – the first disciple of Frederick Marston,” declared Mr. Bellton. If no one present had ever heard the name before, the consequential manner of its announcement would have brought a sense of deplorable unenlightenment.

Bellton’s eyes, despite the impression of weakness conveyed by the heavy lenses of his nose-glasses, missed little, and he saw that Duska Filson still looked off abstractedly across the bend of the homestretch, taking no note of his heralding.

“Doesn’t the news of new arrivals excite you, Miss Filson?” he inquired, with a touch of drawl in his voice.

The girl half-turned her head with a smile distinctly short of enthusiasm. She did not care for Bellton. She was herself an exponent of all things natural and unaffected, and she read between the impeccably regular lines of his personality, with a criticism that was adverse.

“You see,” she answered simply, “it’s not news. I’ve seen George since he came.”

“Tell us all about this celebrity,” prompted Miss Buford, eagerly. “What is he like?”

Duska shook her head.

“I haven’t seen him. He was to arrive this morning.”

“So, you see,” supplemented Mr. Bellton with a smile, “you will, after all, have to fall back on me – I have seen him.”

“You,” demurred the débutante with a disappointed frown, “are only a man. What does a man know about another man?”

“The celebrity,” went on Mr. Bellton, ignoring the charge of inefficiency, “avoids women.” He paused to laugh. “He was telling Steele that he had come to paint landscape, and I am afraid he will have to be brought lagging into your presence.”

“It seems rather brutal to drag him here,” suggested Anne Preston. “I, for one, am willing to spare him the ordeal.”

“However,” pursued Mr. Bellton with some zest of recital, “I have warned him. I told him what dangerous batteries of eyes he must encounter. It seemed to me unfair to let him charge into the lists of loveliness all unarmed – with his heart behind no shield.”

“And he … how did he take your warning?” demanded Miss Buford.

“I think it is his craven idea to avoid the danger and retreat at the first opportunity. He said that he was a painter, had even been a cow-puncher once, but that society was beyond his powers and his taste.”

The group had been neglecting the track. Now, from the grandstand came once more the noisy outburst that ushers the horses into the stretch, and conversation died as the party came to its feet.

None of its members noticed for the moment the two young men who had made their way between the chairs of the verandah until they stood just back of the group, awaiting their turn for recognition.

As the horses crossed the wire and the pandemonium of the stand fell away, George Steele stepped forward to present his guest.

“This is Mr. Robert Saxon,” he announced. “He will paint the portraits of you girls almost as beautiful as you really are… It’s as far as mere art can go.”

Saxon stood a trifle abashed at the form of presentation as the group turned to greet him. Something in the distance had caught Duska Filson’s imagination-brimming eyes. She was sitting with her back turned, and did not hear Steele’s approach nor turn with the others.

Saxon’s casually critical glance passed rapidly over the almost too flawless beauty of the Preston sisters and the flower-like charm of little Miss Buford, then fell on a slender girl in a simple pongee gown and a soft, wide-brimmed Panama hat. Under the hat-brim, he caught the glimpse of an ear that might have been fashioned by a jeweler and a curling tendril of brown hair. If Saxon had indeed been the timorous man Bellton intimated, the glimpse would have thrown him into panic. As it was, he showed no sign of alarm.

His presentation as a celebrity had focused attention upon him in a manner momentarily embarrassing. He found a subtle pleasure in the thought that it had not called this girl’s eyes from whatever occupied them out beyond the palings. Saxon disliked the ordinary. His canvases and his enthusiasms were alike those of the individualist.

“Duska,” laughed Miss Buford, “come back from your dreams, and be introduced to Mr. Saxon.”

The painter acknowledged a moment of suspense. What would be her attitude when she recognized the man who had stared at her down by the paddock fence?

The girl turned. Except himself, no one saw the momentary flash of amused surprise in her eyes, the quick change from grave blue to flashing violet and back again to grave blue. To the man, the swiftly shifting light of it seemed to say: “You are at my mercy; whatever liberality you receive is at the gift and pleasure of my generosity.”

“I beg your pardon,” she said simply, extending her hand. “I was just thinking – ” she paused to laugh frankly, and it was the music of the laugh that most impressed Saxon – “I hardly know what I was thinking.”

He dropped with a sense of privileged good-fortune into the vacant chair at her side.

With just a hint of mischief riffling her eyes, but utter artlessness in her voice, she regarded him questioningly.

“I wonder if we have not met somewhere before? It seems to me – ”

“Often,” he asserted. “I think it was in Babylon first, perhaps. And you were a girl in Macedon when I was a spearman in the army of Alexander.”

She sat as reflective and grave as though she were searching her recollections of Babylon and Macedon for a chance acquaintance, but under the gravity was a repressed sparkle of mischievous delight.

After a moment, he demanded brazenly:

“Would you mind telling me which colt won that first race?”