Nest Builder | Page 4

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 brass
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."
"It is a childish and vain occupation, however, and I disapprove of the
boy being encouraged in it. This of course you know perfectly well.
Under ordinary circumstances I should absolutely forbid it; as it is, I
condemn it."
"Henry," his mother's voice trembled, "don't ask me to give up his
companionship. It is too cold for me to be outdoors, and perhaps after
the spring I might not be with him."
This sentence terrified Stefan, who did not know the meaning of it. He
was glad, for once, of his father's ridicule.
"That is perfectly absurd, the shallow excuse women always make their
husbands for self-indulgence," said the man, turning to go. "You are a
healthy woman, and would be more so but for idleness."
His wife