The Nest Builder.

by Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale.

PART I

MATE-SONG

I

Outbound from Liverpool, the Lusitania bucked down the Irish Sea against a September gale. Aft in her second-cla.s.s quarters each shouldering from the waves brought a sickening vibration as one or another of the ship's great propellers raced out of water. The gong had sounded for the second sitting, and trails of hungry and weary travelers, trooping down the companionway, met files of still more uneasy diners emerging from the saloon. The grinding jar of the vessel, the heavy smell of food, and the pound of ragtime combined to produce an effect as of some sordid and demoniac orgy--an effect derided by the smug respectability of the saloon's furnishings.

Stefan Byrd, taking in the scene as he balanced a precarious way to his seat, felt every hypercritical sense rising in revolt. Even the prosaic but admirably efficient table utensils repelled him. "They are so useful, so abominably enduring," he thought. The mahogany tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs of doors and columns seemed to announce from every overpolished surface a pompous self-sufficiency. Each table proclaimed the aesthetic level of the second cla.s.s through the lifeless leaves of a rubber plant and two imitation cut-gla.s.s dishes of tough fruit. The stewards, casually hovering, lacked the democracy which might have humanized the steerage as much as the civility which would have oiled the workings of the first cabin. Byrd resented their ministrations as he did the heavy English dishes of the bill of fare. There were no Continental pa.s.sengers near him. He had left the dear French tongue behind, and his ears, homesick already, shrank equally from the see-saw Lancashire of the stewards and the monotonous rasp of returning Americans.

Byrd's left hand neighbor, a clergyman of uncertain denomination, had tried vainly for several minutes to attract his attention by clearing his throat, pa.s.sing the salt, and making measured requests for water, bread, and the like.

"I presume, sir," he at last inquired loudly, "that you are an American, and as glad as I am to be returning to our country?"

"No, sir," retorted Byrd, favoring his questioner with a withering stare, "I am a Bohemian, and d.a.m.nably sorry that I ever have to see America again."

The man of G.o.d turned away, pale to the temples with offense--a high-bosomed matron opposite emitted a shocked "Oh!"--the faces of the surrounding listeners a.s.sumed expressions either dismayed or deprecating. Budding conversationalists were temporarily frost-bitten, and the watery helpings of fish were eaten in a constrained silence. But with the inevitable roast beef a Scot of unshakeable manner, decorated with a yellow forehead-lock as erect as a striking cobra, turned to follow up what he apparently conceived to be an opportunity for discussion.

"I'm not so strongly partial to the States mysel', ye ken, but I'll confess it's a grand place to mak' money. Ye would be going there, perhaps, to improve your fortunes?"

Byrd was silent.

"Also," continued the Scot, quite unrebuffed, "it would be interesting to know what exactly ye mean when ye call yoursel' a Bohemian. Would ye be referring to your tastes, now, or to your nationality?"

His hand trembling with nervous temper, Byrd laid down his napkin, and rose with an attempt at dignity somewhat marred by the viselike clutch of the swivel chair upon his emerging legs.

"My mother was a Bohemian, my father an American. Neither, happily, was Scotch," said he, almost stammering in his attempt to control his extreme distaste of his surroundings--and hurried out of the saloon, leaving a table of dropped jaws behind him.

"The young man is nairvous," contentedly boomed the Scot. "I'm thinking he'll be feeling the sea already. What kind of a place would Bohemia, be, d'ye think, to have a mother from?" turning to the clergyman.

"A place of evil life, seemingly," answered that worthy in his high-pitched, carrying voice. "I shall certainly ask to have my seat changed. I cannot subject myself for the voyage to the neighborhood of a man of profane speech."

The table nodded approval.

"A traitor to his country, too," said a pursy little man opposite, snapping his jaws shut like a turtle.

A bony New England spinster turned deprecating eyes to him. "My," she whispered shrilly, "he was just terrible, wasn't he? But so handsome!

I can't help but think it was more seasickness with him than an evil nature."

Meanwhile the subject of discussion, who would have writhed far more at the spinster's palliation of his offense than at the men's disdain, lay in his tiny cabin, a prey to an attack of that nervous misery which overtakes an artist out of his element as surely and speedily as air suffocates a fish.

Stefan Byrd's table companions were guilty in his eyes of the one unforgivable sin--they were ugly. Ugly alike in feature, dress, and bearing, they had for him absolutely no excuse for existence. He felt no bond of common humanity with them. In his lexicon what was not beautiful was not human, and he recognized no more obligation of good fellowship toward them than he would have done toward a company of ground-hogs.

He lay back, one fine and nervous hand across his eyes, trying to obliterate the image of the saloon and all its inmates by conjuring up a vision of the world he had left, the winsome young cosmopolitan Paris of the art student. The streets, the cafes, the studios; his few men, his many women, friends--Adolph Jensen, the kindly Swede who loved him; Louise, Nanette, the little Polish Yanina, who had said they loved him; the slanting-glanced Turkish students, the grave Syrians, the democratic un-British Londoners--the smell, the glamour of Paris, returned to him with the nostalgia of despair.

These he had left. To what did he go?

II

In his shivering, creaking little cabin, suspended, as it were, by the uncertain waters between two lives, Byrd forced himself to remember the America he had known before his Paris days. He recalled his birthplace--a village in upper Michigan--and his mental eyes bored across the pictures that came with the running speed of a cinematograph to his memory.

The place was a village, but it called itself a city. The last he had seen of it was the "depot," a wooden shed surrounded by a waste of rutted snow, and backed by grimy coal yards. He could see the broken shades of the town's one hotel, which faced the tracks, drooping across their dirty windows, and the lopsided sign which proclaimed from the porch roof in faded gilt on black the name of "C. E. Trench, Prop." He could see the swing-doors of the bar, and hear the click of b.a.l.l.s from the poolroom advertising the second of the town's distractions. He could smell the composite odor of varnish, stale air, and boots, which made the overheated station waiting-room hideous. Heavy farmers in ear-mitts, peaked caps, and fur collars spat upon the hissing stove round which their great hide boots sprawled. They were his last memory of his fellow citizens.

Looking farther back Stefan saw the town in summer. There were trees in the street where he lived, but they were all upon the sidewalk-public property. In their yards (the word garden, he recalled, was never used) the neighbors kept, with unanimity, in the back, washing, and in the front, a porch. Over these porches parched vines crept--the town's enthusiasm for horticulture went as far as that--and upon them concentrated the feminine social life of the place. Of this intercourse the high tones seemed to be giggles, and the ba.s.s the wooden thuds of rockers. Street after street he could recall, from the square about the "depot" to the outskirts, and through them all the dusty heat, the rockers, gigglers, the rustle of a shirt-sleeved father's newspaper, and the shrill coo-ees of the younger children. Finally, the piano--for he looked back farther than the all-conquering phonograph. He heard "Nita, Juanita;" he heard "Sweet Genevieve."

Beyond the village lay the open country, level, blindingly hot, half-cultivated, with the scorched foliage of young trees showing in the ruins of what had been forest land. Across it the roads ran straight as rulers. In the winter wolves were not unknown there; in the summer there were tramps of many strange nationalities, farm hands and men bound for the copper mines. For the most part they walked the railroad ties, or rode the freight cars; winter or summer, the roads were never wholly safe, and children played only in the town.

There, on the outskirts, was a shallow, stony river, but deep enough at one point for gingerly swimming. Stefan seemed never to have been cool through the summer except when he was squatting or paddling in this hole. He remembered only indistinctly the boys with whom he bathed; he had no friends among them. But there had been a little girl with starched white skirts, huge blue bows over blue eyes, and yellow hair, whom he had admired to adoration. She wanted desperately to bathe in the hole, and he demanded of her mother that this be permitted. Stefan smiled grimly as he recalled the horror of that lady, who had boxed his ears for trying to lead her girl into unG.o.dliness, and to scandalize the neighbors. The friendship had been kept up surrept.i.tiously after this, with interchange of pencils and candy, until the little girl--he had forgotten her name--put her tongue out at him over a matter of chewing-gum which he had insisted she should not use. Revolted, he played alone again.

The Presbyterian Church Stefan remembered as a whitewashed praying box, resounding to his father's high-pitched voice. It was filled with heat and flies from without in summer, and heat and steam from within in winter. The school, whitewashed again, he recalled as a succession of banging desks, flying paper pellets, and the drone of undigested lessons. Here the water bucket loomed as the alleviation in summer, or the red hot oblong of the open stove in winter time. Through all these scenes, by an egotistical trick of the brain, he saw himself moving, a small brown-haired boy, with olive skin and queer, greenish eyes, entirely alien, absolutely lonely, completely critical. He saw himself in too large, ill-chosen clothes, the b.u.t.t of his playfellows. He saw the sidelong, interested glances of little girls change to curled lips and tossed heads at the grinning nudge of their boy companions. He saw the hara.s.sed eyes of an anaemic teacher stare uncomprehendingly at him over the pages of an exercise book filled with colored drawings of George III and the British flag, instead of a description of the battle of Bunker Hill. He remembered the hatred he had felt even then for the narrowness of the local patriotism which had prompted him to this revenge. As a result, he saw himself backed against the schoolhouse wall, facing with contempt a yelling, jumping tangle of boys who, from a safe distance, called upon the "traitor" and the "Dago" to come and be licked. He felt the rage mount in his head like a burning wave, saw a change in the eyes and faces of his foes, felt himself spring with a catlike leap, his lips tight above his teeth and his arms moving like clawed wheels, saw boys run yelling and himself darting between them down the road, to fall at last, a trembling, sobbing bundle of reaction, into the gra.s.sy ditch.

In memory Stefan followed himself home. The word was used to denote the house in which he and his father lived. A portrait of his mother hung over the parlor stove. It was a chalk drawing from a photograph, crudely done, but beautiful by reason of the subject. The face was young and very round, the forehead beautifully low and broad under black waves of hair. The nose was short and proud, the chin small but square, the mouth gaily curving around little, even teeth. But the eyes were deep and somber; there was pa.s.sion in them, and romance. Stefan had not seen that face for years, he barely remembered the original, but he could have drawn it now in every detail. If the house in which it hung could be called home at all, it was by virtue of that picture, the only thing of beauty in it.

Behind the portrait lay a few memories of joy and heartache, and one final one of horror. Stefan probed them, still with his nervous hand across his eyes. He listened while his mother sang gay or mournful little songs with haunting tunes in a tongue only a word or two of which he understood. He watched while she drew from her bureau drawer a box of paints and some paper. She painted for long hours, day after day through the winter, while he played beside her with longing eyes on her brushes.

She painted always one thing--flowers--using no pencil, drawing their shapes with the brush. Her flowers were of many kinds, nearly all strange to him, but most were roses--pink, yellow, crimson, almost black. Sometimes their petals flared like wings; sometimes they were close-furled. Of these paintings he remembered much, but of her speech little, for she was silent as she worked.

One day his mother put a brush into his hand. The rapture of it was as sharp and near as to-day's misery. He sat beside her after that for many days and painted. First he tried to paint a rose, but he had never seen such roses as her brush drew, and he tired quickly. Then he drew a bird.

His mother nodded and smiled--it was good. After that his memory showed him the two sitting side by side for weeks, or was it months?--while the snow lay piled beyond the window--she with her flowers, he with his birds.

First he drew birds singly, hopping on a branch, or simply standing, claws and beaks defined. Then he began to make them fly, alone, and again in groups. Their wings spread across the paper, wider and more sweepingly. They pointed upward sharply, or lay flat across the page.

Flights of tiny birds careened from corner to corner. They were blue, gold, scarlet, and white. He left off drawing birds on branches and drew them only in flight, smudging in a blue background for the sky.

One day by accident he made a dark smudge in the lower left-hand corner of his page.

"What is that?" asked his mother.

The little boy looked at it doubtfully for a moment, unwilling to admit it a blot. Then he laughed.

"Mother, Mother, that is America." (Stefan heard himself.) "Look!" And rapidly he drew a bird flying high above the blot, with its head pointed to the right, away from it.

His mother laughed and hugged him quickly. "Yes, eastward," she said.

After that all his birds flew one way, and in the left-hand lower corner there was usually a blob of dark brown or black. Once it was a square, red, white, and blue.

On her table his mother had a little globe which revolved above a bra.s.s base. Because of this he knew the relative position of two places--America and Bohemia. Of this country he thought his mother was unwilling to speak, but its name fell from her lips with sighs, with--as it now seemed to him--a wild longing. Knowing nothing of it, he had pictured it a paradise, a land of roses. He seemed to have no knowledge of why she had left it; but years later his father spoke of finding her in Boston in the days when he preached there, penniless, searching for work as a teacher of singing. How she became jettisoned in that--to her--cold and inhospitable port, Stefan did not know, nor how soon after their marriage the two moved to the still more alien peninsula of Michigan.

Into his memories of the room where they painted a shadow constantly intruded, chilling them, such a shadow, deep and cold, as is cast by an iceberg. The door would open, and his father's face, high and white with ice-blue eyes, would hang above them. Instantly, the man remembered, the boy would cower like a fledgling beneath the sparrow-hawk, but with as much distaste as fear in his cringing. The words that followed always seemed the same--he could reconstruct the scene clearly, but whether it had occurred once or many times he could not tell. His father's voice would snap across the silence like a high, tight-drawn string--

"Still wasting time? Have you nothing better to do? Where is your sewing? And the boy--why is he not outside playing?"

"This helps me, Henry," his mother answered, hesitating and low. "Surely it does no harm. I cannot sew all the time."