Nest Builder | Page 2

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 caf��s, 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 balls 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 bass 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