Nest Builder | Page 4

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 called him back, pleadingly. "Please don't be angry with me, I'm doing the best I can, Henry--the very best I can." There was a sweet foreign blur in her speech, Stefan remembered.
His father paused at the door. "I have shown you your duty, my dear. I am a minister, and you cannot expect me to condone in my wife habits of frivolity and idleness which I should be the first to reprimand in my flock. I expect you to set