Nest Builder | Page 5

an example."
"Oh," the woman wailed, "when you married me you loved me as I was--"
With a look of controlled annoyance her husband closed the door. Whether the memory of his father's words was exact or not, Stefan knew their effect by heart. The door shut, his mother would begin to cry, quietly at first, then with deep, catching sobs that seemed to stifle her, so that she rose and paced the room breathlessly. Then she would hold the boy to her breast, and slowly the storm would change again to gentle tears. That day there would be no more painting.
These, his earliest memories, culminated in tragedy. A spring day of driving rain witnessed the arrival of a gray, plain-faced woman, who mounted to his mother's room. The house seemed full of mysterious bustle. Presently he heard moans, and rushed upstairs thinking his mother was crying and needed him. The gray-haired woman thrust him from the bedroom door, but he returned again and again, calling his mother, until his father emerged from the study downstairs, and, seizing him in his cold grip, pushed him into the sanctum and turned the key upon him.
Much later, a man whom Stefan knew as their doctor entered the room with his father. A strange new word passed between them, and, in his high- strung state, impressed the boy's memory. It was "chloroform." The doctor used the word several times, and his father shook his head.
"No, doctor," he heard him saying, "we neither of us approve of it. It is contrary to the intention of God. Besides, you say the case is normal."
The doctor seemed to be repeating something about nerves and hysteria. "Exactly," his father replied, "and for that, self-control is needed, and not a drug that reverses the dispensation of the Almighty."
Both men left the room. Presently the boy heard shrieks. Lying, a grown man, in his berth, Stefan trembled at the memory of them. He fled in spirit as he had fled then--out of the window, down the roaring, swimming street, where he knew not, pursued by a writhing horror. Hours later, as it seemed, he returned. The shades were pulled down across the windows of his house. His mother was dead.
Looking back, the man hardly knew how the conviction had come to the child that his father had killed his mother. A vague comprehension perhaps of the doctor's urgings and his father's denials--a head-shaking mutter from the nurse--the memory of all his mother's tears. He was hardly more than a baby, but he had always feared and disliked his father--now he hated him, blindly and intensely. He saw him as the cause not only of his mother's tears and death, but of all the ugliness in the life about him. "Bohemia," he thought, would have been theirs but for this man. He even blamed him, in a sullen way, for the presence in their house of a tiny little red and wizened object, singularly ugly, which the gray-haired woman referred to as his "brother." Obviously, the thing was not a brother, and his father must be at the bottom of a conspiracy to deceive him. The creature made a great deal of noise, and when, by and by, it went away, and they told him his brother too was dead, he felt nothing but relief.
So darkened the one bright room in his childhood's mansion. Obscured, it left the other chambers dingier than before, and filled with the ache of loss. Slowly he forgot his mother's companionship, but not her beauty, nor her roses, nor "Bohemia," nor his hatred of the "America" which was his father's. To get away from his native town, to leave America, became the steadfast purpose of his otherwise unstable nature.
The man watched himself through high school. He saw himself still hating his surroundings and ignoring his schoolfellows--save for an occasional girl whose face or hair showed beauty. At this time the first step in his plan of escape shaped itself--he must work hard enough to get to college, to Ann Arbor, where he had heard there was an art course. For the boy painted now, in all his spare time, not merely birds, but dogs and horses, boys and girls, all creatures that had speed, that he could draw 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,