Nest Builder | Page 6

in action, leaping, flying, or running against the wind. Even
now Stefan could warm to the triumph he felt the day he discovered the
old barn where he could summon these shapes undetected. His triumph
was over the arch-enemy, his father--who had forbidden him paint and
brushes and confiscated the poor little fragments of his mother's work
that he had hoarded. His father destined him for a "fitting"
profession--the man smiled to remember it--and with an impressive air
of generosity gave him the choice of three--the Church, the Law, or
Medicine. Hate had given him too keen a comprehension of his father
to permit him the mistake of argument. He temporized. Let him be sent
to college, and there he would discover where his aptitude lay.
So at last it was decided. A trunk was found, a moth-eaten bag. His
cheap, ill-cut clothes were packed. On a day of late summer he stepped
for the first time upon a train--beautiful to him because it moved--and
was borne southward.
At Ann Arbor he found many new things, rules, and people, but he
brushed them aside like flies, hardly perceiving them; for there, for the
first time, he saw photographs and casts of the world's great art. The
first sight, even in a poor copy, of the two Discoboli--Diana with her
swinging knee-high tunic--the winged Victory of Samothrace--to see
them first at seventeen, without warning, without a glimmering
knowledge of their existence! And the pictures! Portfolios of Angelo,
of the voluptuous Titian, of the swaying forms of Botticelli's
maidens--trite enough now --but then!
How long he could have deceived his father as to the real nature of his
interests he did not know. Already there had been complaints of cut
lectures, reprimands, and letters from home. Evading mathematics,
science, and divinity, he read only the English and classic subjects
--because they contained beauty--and drew, copying and creating, in

every odd moment. The storm began to threaten, but it never broke; for
in his second year in college the unbelievable, the miracle,
happened--his father died. They said he had died of pneumonia,
contracted while visiting the sick in the winter blizzards, and they
praised him; but Stefan hardly listened.
One fact alone stood out amid the ugly affairs of death, so that he
regarded and remembered nothing else. He was free--and he had wings!
His father left insurance, and a couple of savings-bank accounts, but
through some fissure of vanity or carelessness in the granite of his
propriety, he left no will. The sums, amounting in all to something over
three thousand dollars, came to Stefan without conditions, guardians, or
other hindrances. The rapture of that discovery, he thought, almost
wiped out his father's debt to him.
He knew now that not Bohemia, but Paris, was his El Dorado. In wild
haste he made ready for his journey, leaving the rigid trappings of his
home to be sold after him. But his dead father was to give him one
more pang--the scales were to swing uneven at the last. For when he
would have packed the only possession, other than a few necessities, he
planned to carry with him, he found his mother's picture gone. Dying,
his father, it appeared, had wandered from his bed, detached the portrait,
and with his own hands burnt it in the stove. The motive of the act
Stefan could not comprehend. He only knew that this man had robbed
him of his mother twice. All that remained of her was her wedding ring,
which, drawn from his father's cash-box, he wore on his little finger.
With bitterness amid his joy he took the train once more, and saw the
lights of the town's shabby inn blink good-bye behind its frazzled
shades.

III
Byrd had lived for seven years in Paris, wandering on foot in summer
through much of France and Italy. His little patrimony, stretched to the
last sou, and supplemented in later years by the occasional sale of his
work to small dealers, had sufficed him so long. His headquarters were
in a high windowed attic facing north along the rue des Quatre Ermites.
His work had been much admired in the ateliers, but his personal
unpopularity with, the majority of the students had prevented their
admiration changing to a friendship whose demands would have

drained his small resources. "Ninety-nine per cent of the Quarter
dislikes Stefan Byrd," an Englishman had said, "but one per cent adores
him." Repeated to Byrd, this utterance was accepted by him with much
complacence, for, even more than the average man, he prided himself
upon his faults of character. His adoration of Paris had not prevented
him from criticizing its denizens; the habits of mental withdrawal and
reservation developed in his boyhood did not desert him in the city of
friendship,