The Key to Yesterday

by Charles Neville Buck

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.

For a time, the physician and skipper were puzzled as to the next step. The physician was confident that the eyes, which gazed blankly out from a face now bearded and emaciated, would eventually regain their former light of intelligence. He did not believe that this helpless creature—who had been, when he first saw him in Puerto Frio, despite blood-discolored face and limp unconsciousness, so perfect a figure of a man—had passed into permanent darkness. The light would again dawn, possibly at first in fitful waverings and flashes through the fog. If only there could be some familiar scene or thing to suggest the past! But, unfortunately, all that lay across the world. So, they decided to take him to Paris, and ensconce him in Captain Harris’ modest lodgings in the Rue St. Jacques, and, inasmuch as the captain’s lodgings were shared by no one, and his landlady was a kindly soul, Dr. Cornish also resolved to go there. For a few weeks, the sailor was to be home from the sea, and meant to spend his holiday in the capital. As for the physician, he was just now unattached. He had hoped to be in charge of a government’s work of health and sanitation. Instead, he was idle, and could afford to remain and study an unusual condition. He certainly could not abandon this anonymous creature whom fate had thrust upon his keeping. Now, six weeks after his accident, Saxon sat alone in the modest apartment of the lodgings in the Rue St. Jacques. Since his arrival in Paris, the walls of that room and the court in the center of the house had been the boundaries of his world. He had not seen beyond them. He had been physically weak and languid, mentally void. They had attempted to persuade him to move about, but his apathy had been insuperable. Sometimes, he wandered about the court like a small child. He had no speech. Often, he fingered a rusty key as a baby fingers a rattle. On the day that Steele and Duska had gone to the academy of M. Hautecoeur, Dr. Cornish and Paul Harris had left the lodgings for a time, and Saxon sat as usual at a window, looking absently out on the court.

In its center stood a stone jardinière, now empty. About it was the flagged area, also empty. In front was the street-door—closed. Saxon looked out with the opaque stare of pupils that admit no images to the brain. They were as empty as the stone jar. Possibly, the sun, borrowing some of the warmth of the spent summer, made a vague appeal to animal instinct; possibly, the first ray of mental dawn was breaking. At all events, Saxon rose heavily, and made his way into the area.

At last, he wandered to the street-door. It happened to be closed, but the concierge stood near.

“Cordon?” inquired the porter, with a smile. It is the universal word with which lodgers in such abodes summon the guardian of the gate to let them in or out.