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The Nest Builder

B >> Beatrice Forbes Robertson Hale >> The Nest Builder




Stefan paid the cab, carried in their suitcase, and wandered, cold and
lonely, to the sitting room. For him their home-coming offered no
alleviating thrill. Already, he felt, Mary's bright wings were folding
again above her nest.




VIII


Refreshed, in spite of his natural reaction of spirits, by the week's
holiday, Stefan turned to his work with greater content in it than he had
felt for some time. His content was, to his own surprise, rather
increased than lessened by the discovery that Felicity Berber had left
New York for the South. Arriving at his studio the day after their return
from Vermont, he found one of her characteristic notes, in crimson ink
this time, upon snowy paper.

"Stefan," it read, "the winter has found his strength at last in storms.
But our friendship dallies with the various moods of spring. It leaves me
restless. The snow chills without calming me. My designing is beauty
wasted on the blindness of the city's overfed. A need of warmth and
stillness is upon me--the south claims me. The time of my return is
unrevealed as yet. Felicity."

Stefan read this epistle twice, the first time with irritation, the
second with relief. "Affected creature," he said to himself, "it's a good
job she's gone. I've frittered away too much time with her as it is."

At home that evening he told Mary. His devotion during their holiday had
already obscured her memory of the autumn's unhappiness, and his carefree
manner of imparting his tidings laid any ghost of doubt that still
remained with her. Secure once more in his love, she was as uncloudedly
happy as she had ever been.

In his newly acquired mood of sanity, Stefan faced the fact that he had
less work to show for the last nine months than in any similar period of
his career, and that he was still living on his last winter's success.
What had these months brought him? An expensive and inconclusive
flirtation at the cost of his wife's happiness, a few disturbing
memories, and two unfinished pictures. Out of patience with himself, he
plunged into his work. In two weeks of concentrated effort he had
finished the Nixie, and had arranged with Constantine to exhibit it and
the Demeter immediately. This last the dealer appeared to admire,
pronouncing it a fine canvas, though inferior to the Danaë. About the
Nixie he seemed in two minds.

"We shall have a newspaper story with that one, Mr. Byrd, the lady being
so well known, and the subject so dramatic, but if you ask me will it
sell--" he shrugged his fat shoulders--"that's another thing."

Stefan stared at him. "I could sell that picture in France five times
over."

Constantine waved his pudgy fingers.

"Ah, France! V'là c' qui est autre chose,'s pas? But if we fail in New
York for this one I think we try Chicago."

The reception of the pictures proved Constantine a shrewd prophet. The
academic Demeter was applauded by the average critic as a piece of
decorative work in the grand manner, and a fit rebuke to all Cubists,
Futurists, and other anarchists. It was bought by a committee from a
western agricultural college, which had come east with a check from the
state's leading politician to purchase suitable mural enrichments for the
college's new building. Constantine persuaded these worthies that one
suitable painting by a distinguished artist would enrich their
institution more than the half dozen canvases "to fit the auditorium"
which they had been inclined to order. Moreover, he mulcted them of two
thousand dollars for Demeter, which, in his private estimation, was more
than she was worth. He achieved the sale more readily because of the
newspaper controversy aroused by the Nixie. Was this picture a satire on
life, or on the celebrated Miss Berber? Was it great art, or merely
melodrama? Were Byrd's effects of river-light obtained in the old
impressionist manner, or by a subtler method of his own? Was he a master
or a poseur?

These and other questions brought his name into fresh prominence, but
failed to sell their object. Just, however, as Constantine was
considering a journey for the Nixie to Chicago, a purchaser appeared in
the shape of a certain Mr. Einsbacher. Stefan happened to be in the
gallery when this gentleman, piloted by Constantine himself, came in, and
recognized him as the elderly satyr of the pouched eyes who had been so
attentive to Felicity on the night of Constance's reception. When, later,
the dealer informed him that this individual had bought the Nixie for
three thousand, Stefan made no attempt to conceal his disgust.

"Thousand devils, Constantine, I don't paint for swine of that type,"
said he, scowling.

The dealer's hands wagged. "His check is good," he replied, "and who
knows, he may die soon and leave the picture to the Metropolitan."

But Stefan was not to be mollified, and went home that afternoon in a
state of high rebellion against all commercialism. Mary tried to console
him by pointing out that even with the dealer's commission deducted, he
had made more than a year's income from the two sales, and could now work
again free from all anxiety.

"What's the good," he exclaimed, "of producing beauty for sheep to bleat
and monkeys to leer at! What's the good of producing it in America at
all? Who wants, or understands it!"

"Oh, Stefan, heaps of people. Doesn't Mr. Farraday understand art, for
instance?"

"Farraday," he snorted, "yes!--landscapes and women with children. What
does he know of the radiance of beauty, its mystery, the hot soul of it?
Oh, Mary," he flung himself down beside her, and clutched her hand
eagerly, "don't be wise; don't be sensible, darling. It's March, spring
is beginning in Europe. It's a year and a half since I became an exile.
Let's go, beloved. You say yourself we have plenty of money; let's take
ship for the land where beauty is understood, where it is put first,
above all things. Let's go back to France, Mary!"

His face was fired with eagerness; he almost trembled with the passion to
be gone. Mary flushed, and then grew pale with apprehension. "Do you mean
break up our home, Stefan, for good?"

"Yes, darling. You know I've counted the days of bondage. We couldn't
travel last spring, and since then we've been too poor. What have these
last months brought us? Only disharmony. We are free now, there is
nothing to hold us back. We can leave Elliston in Paris, and follow the
spring south to the vineyards. A progress a-foot through France, each day
finding colors richer, the sun nearer--think of it, Beautiful!" He kissed
her joyously.

Her hands were quite cold now, "But, Stefan," she temporized, "our little
house, our friends, my work, the--the _place_ we've been making?"

"Dearest, all these we can find far better there."

She shook her head. "I can't. I don't speak French properly, I don't
understand French people. I couldn't sell my stories there or--or
anything," she finished weakly.

He jumped up, his eyes blank, hands thrust in his pockets.

"I don't get you, Mary. You don't mean--you surely can't mean, that you
don't want to go to France _at all_? That you want to _live_
here?"

She floundered. "I don't know, Stefan. Of course you've always talked
about France, and I should love to go there and see it, and so on, but
somehow I've come to think of the Byrdsnest as home--we've been so happy
here--"

"Happy?" he interrupted her. "You say we've been happy?" His tone was
utterly confounded.

"Yes, dear, except--except when you were so--so busy last autumn--"

He dropped down by the table, squaring himself as if to get to the bottom
of a riddle.

"What is your idea of happiness, Mary, of _life_ in fact?" he asked,
in an unusually quiet voice. She felt glad that he seemed so willing to
talk things over, and to concede her a point of view of her own.

"Well," she began, feeling for her words, "my idea of life is to have a
person and work that you love, and then to build--both of you--a place, a
position; to have friends--be part of the community--so that your
children--the immortal part of you--may grow up in a more and more
enriching atmosphere." She paused, while he watched her, motionless. "I
can't imagine," she went on, "greater happiness for two people than to
see their children growing up strong and useful--tall sons and daughters
to be proud of, such as all the generations before us have had. Something
to hand our life on to--as it was in the beginning--you know, Stefan--"
She flushed with the effort to express.

"Then,"--his voice was quieter still; she did not see that his hands were
clenched under the flap of the table--"in this scheme of life of yours,
how many children--how many servants, rooms, all that sort of thing
--should you consider necessary?"

She smiled. "As for houses, servants and things, that just depends on
one's income. I hate ostentation, but I do like a beautifully run house,
and I adore horses and dogs and things. But the children--" she flushed
again--"why, dearest, I think any couple ought to be simply too thankful
for all the children they can have. Unless, perhaps," she added naïvely,
"they're frightfully poor."

"Where should people live to be happy in this way?" he asked, still in
those carefully quiet tones.

She was looking out of the window, trying to formulate her thoughts. "I
don't think it matters very much _where_ one lives," she said in her
soft, clear tones, "as long as one has friends, and is not too much in
the city. But to own one's house, and the ground under one, to be able to
leave it to one's son, to think of _his_ son being born in it--that
I think would add enormously to one's happiness. To belong to the place
one lives in, whether it's an old country, or one of the colonies, or
anywhere."

"I see," said Stefan slowly, in a voice low and almost harsh. Startled,
she looked at him. His face was knotted in a white mask; it was like the
face of some creature upon which an iron door has been shut. "Stefan,"
she exclaimed, "what--?"

"Wait a minute," he said, still slowly. "I suppose it's time we talked
this thing out. I've been a fool, and judged, like a fool, by myself.
It's time we knew each other, Mary. All that you have said is horrible to
me--it's like a trap." She gave an exclamation. "Wait, let me do
something I've never done, let me _think_ about it." He was silent,
his face still a hard, knotted mask. Mary waited, her heart trembling.

"You, Mary, told me something about families in England who live as you
describe--you said your mother belonged to one of them. I remember that
now." He nodded shortly, as if conceding her a point. "My father was a
New Englander. He was narrow and self-righteous, and I hated him, but he
came of people who had faced a hundred forms of death to live
primitively, in a strange land."

"I'm willing to live in a strange country, Stefan," she almost cried to
him.

"Don't, Mary--I'm still trying to understand. I'm not my father's son,
I'm my mother's. I don't know what she was, but she was beautiful and
passionate--she came of a mixed race, she may have had gipsy blood--I
don't know--but I do know she had genius. She loved only color and
movement. Mary--" he looked straight at her for the first time, his eyes
were tortured--"I loved you because you were beautiful and free. When
your child bound you, and you began to collect so many things and people
about you, I loved you less. I met some one else who had the beauty of
color and movement, and I almost loved her. She told me the name Berber
wasn't her own, that she had taken it because it belonged to a tribe of
wanderers--Arabs. I almost loved her for that alone. But, Mary, you still
held me. I was faithful to you because of your beauty and the love that
had been between us. Then you rose from your petty little surroundings"
--he cast a look of contempt at the pretty furnishings of the room--"I saw
you like a storm-spirit, I saw you moving among other women like a
goddess, adored of men. I felt your beautiful body yield to me in the joy
of wild movement, in the rhythm of the dance. You were my bride, alive,
gloriously free--once more, you were the Desired. I loved you, Mary." He
rose and put his hands on her shoulders. Her face was as white as his
now. His hands dropped, he almost leapt away from her, the muscles of his
face writhed. "My God, Mary, I've never wanted to _think_ about you,
only to feel and see you! Now I must think. This--this existence that you
have described! Is that all you ask of life? Are you sure?"

"What more could one ask!" she uttered, dazed.

"What _more?_" he cried out, throwing up his arms. "What
_more,_ Mary! Why, it isn't life at all, this deadly, petty
intricate day by day, surrounded by things, and more things. The
hopeless, unalterable tameness of it!" He began to pace the room.

"But, my dear, I don't understand you. We have love, and work, and if
some part of our life is petty, why, every one's always has been, hasn't
it?"

She was deeply moved by his distress, afraid again for their happiness,
longing to comfort him. Yet, under and apart from all these emotions,
some cool little faculty of criticism wondered if he was not making
rather a theatrical scene. "Daily life must be a little monotonous,
mustn't it?" she urged again, trying to help him.

"No!" he almost shouted, with a gesture of fierce repudiation. "Was
Angelo's life petty? Was da Vinci's? Did Columbus live monotonously, did
Scott or Peary? Does any explorer or traveler? Did Thoreau surround
himself with _things_--to hamper--did George Borrow, or Whitman, or
Stevenson? Do you suppose Rodin, or de Musset, or Rousseau, or Millet, or
any one else who has ever _lived_, cared whether they had a
position, a house, horses, old furniture? All the world's wanderers, from
Ulysses down to the last tramp who knocked at this door, have known more
of life than all your generations of staid conventional county families!
Oh, Mary"--he leant across the table toward her, and his voice pleaded--
"think of what life _should_ be. Think of the peasants in France
treading out the wine. Think of ships, and rivers, and all the beauty of
the forests. Think of dancing, of music, of that old viking who first
found America. Think of those tribes who wander with their tents over the
desert and pitch them under stars as big as lamps--all the things we've
never seen, Mary, the songs we've never heard. The colors, the scents,
and the cruel tang of life! All these I want to see and feel, and
translate into pictures. I want you with me, Mary--beautiful and free--I
want us to drink life eagerly together, as if it were heady wine." He
took her hand across the table. "You'll come, Beloved, you'll give all
the little things up, and come?"

She rose, her face pitifully white. They stood with hands clasped, the
table between them.

"The boy, Stefan?"

He laughed, thinking he had won her. "Bring him, too, as the Arab women
carry theirs, in a shawl. We'll leave him here and there, and have him
with us whenever we stay long in one place."

She pulled her hand away, her eyes filled with tears. "I love you,
Stefan, but I can't bring my child up like a gipsy. I'll live in France,
or anywhere you say, but I must have a home--I can't be a wanderer."

"You shall have a home, sweetheart, to keep coming back to." His face was
brightening to eagerness.

"Oh, you don't understand. I can't leave my child; I can't be with him
only sometimes. I want him always. And it isn't only him. Oh, Stefan,
dear"--her voice in its turn was pleading--"I don't believe I can come to
France just now. I think, I'm almost sure, we're going to have another
baby."

He straightened, they faced each other in silence. After a moment she
spoke again, looking down, her hands tremblingly picking at her
handkerchief.

"I was so happy about it. It was the sign of your renewed love. I thought
we could build a little wing on the cottage, and have a nurse." Her voice
fell to a whisper. "I thought it might be a little girl, and that you
would love her better than the boy. I'll come later, dear, if you say so,
but I can't come now." She sank into her chair, her head drooping. He,
too, sat down, too dazed by this new development to find his way for a
minute through its implications.

"I'm sorry, Mary," he said at last, dully. "I don't want a little girl.
If she could be put away somewhere till she were grown, I should not
mind. But to live like this all through one's youth, with a house, and
servants, and people calling, and the place cluttered up with babies--I
don't think I can do that, possibly."

She was frankly crying now. "But, dear one, can't we compromise? After
this baby is born, I'll give up the house. We'll live in France--I'll
travel with you a little. That will help, won't it?"

He sighed. "I suppose so. We shall have to think out some scheme. But the
ghastly part is that we shall both have to be content with half measures.
You want one thing of life, Mary, I another. No amount of self-sacrifice
on either side alters that fact. We married, strangers, and it's taken us
a year and a half to find it out. My fault, of course. I wanted love and
beauty, and I got it--I didn't think of the cost, and I didn't think of
_you_. I was just a damned egotistical male, I suppose." He laughed
bitterly. "My father wanted a wife, and he got the burning heart of a
rose. I--I never wanted a wife, I see that now, I wanted to snare the
very spirit of life and make it my own--you looked a vessel fit to carry
it. But you were just a woman like the rest. We've failed each other,
that's all."

"Oh, Stefan," she cried through her tears, "I've tried so hard. But I was
always the same--just a woman. Only--" her tears broke out afresh--"when
you married me, I thought you loved me as I was."

He looked at her, transfixed. "My God," he whispered, "that's what I
heard my mother say more than twenty years ago. What a mockery--each
generation a scorn and plaything for the high Gods! Well, we'll do the
best we can, Mary. I'm utterly a pagan, so I'm not quite the inhuman
granite my Christian father was. Don't cry, dear." He stooped and kissed
her, and she heard his light, wild steps pass through the room and out
into the night. She sat silent, amid the ruins of her nest.




IX


For a month Stefan brooded. He hung about the house, dabbled at a little
work, and returned, all without signs of life or interest. He was kind to
Mary, more considerate than he used to be, but she would have given all
his inanimate, painstaking politeness for an hour of his old, gay
thoughtlessness. They had reached the stage of marriage in which, all
being explained and understood, there seems nothing to hope for. Alone
together they were silent, for there was nothing to say. Each condoned
but could not comfort the other. Stefan felt that his marriage had been a
mistake, that he, a living thing, had tied about his neck a dead mass of
institutions, customs and obligations which would slowly crush his life
out. "I am twenty-seven," he said to himself, "and my life is over." He
did not blame Mary, but himself.

She, on the other hand, felt she had married a man outside the pale of
ordinary humanity, and that though she still loved him, she could no
longer expect happiness through him. "I am twenty-five," she thought,
"and my personal life is over. I can be happy now only in my children."
As those were assured her, she never thought of regretting her marriage,
but only deplored the loss of her dream. Nor did she judge Stefan. She
understood the wild risk she had run in marrying a man of whom she knew
nothing. "He is as he is," she thought; "neither of us is to blame."
Lonely and grieved, she turned for companionship to her writing, and
began a series of fairy tales which she had long planned for very young
children. The first instalment of her serial was out, charmingly
illustrated; she had felt rather proud on seeing her name, for the first
time, on the cover of a magazine. She engaged a young girl from the
village to take Elliston for his daily outings, and settled down to a
routine of work, small social relaxations, and morning and evening care
of the baby. The daily facts of life were pleasant to Mary; if some hurt
or disappointed, her balanced nature swung readily to assuage itself with
others. She honestly believed she felt more deeply than her husband, and
perhaps she did, but she was not of the kind whom life can break. Stefan
might dash himself to exhaustion against a rock round which Mary would
find a smooth channel.

While her work progressed, Stefan's remained at a standstill.
Disillusioned with his marriage and with his whole way of life he fretted
himself from his old sure confidence to a mood of despair. Their friends
bored him, his studio like his house became a cage. New York appeared in
her old guise of mammoth materialist, but now he had no heart to satirize
her dishonor. He wanted only to be gone, but told himself that in common
decency he must remain with Mary till her child was born. He longed for
even the superficial thrill of Felicity's presence, but she still
lingered in the South. So fretting, he tossed himself against the bars
through the long snows of an unusually severe March, until April broke
the frost, and the road to the Byrdsnest became a morass of running mud.

In the last two weeks Stefan had begun a portrait of Constance, but
without enthusiasm. She was a fidgety sitter, and was moreover so busy
with her suffrage work that she could never be relied on for more than an
hour at a time. After a few of these fragmentary sittings his ragged
nerves gave out completely.

"It's utterly useless, Constance!" he exclaimed, throwing down his
pallette and brushes, as the telephone interrupted them for the third
time in less than an hour. "I can't paint in a suffrage office. This is a
studio, not the Club's headquarters. If you can't shut these people off
and sit rationally, please don't trouble to come again."

"I know, my dear boy, it's abominable, but what can I do? Our bill has
passed the Legislature; until it is submitted next year I can't be my own
or Theodore's, much less yours. As for you, you look a rag. This winter
has about made me hate my country. I don't wonder you long for France."

Her eyes narrowed at him, she dangled her beads reflectively, and perched
on the throne again without attempting to resume her pose. "My dear boy,"
she said suddenly, "why stay here and be eaten by devils--why not fly
from them?"

"I wish to God I could," he groaned.

"You can. Mary was in to see our shop yesterday; she looked dragged. You
are both nervous. Do what I have always done--take a holiday from each
other. There's nothing like it as a tonic for love."

"Do you really think she wouldn't mind?" he exclaimed eagerly. "You know
she--she isn't very well."

"Chtt," shrugged Constance, "_that's_ only being more than usually
well. You don't think Mary needs coddling, do you? She's worried because
you are bored. If you aren't there, she won't worry. I shall take your
advice--I shan't come here again--" and she settled her hat briskly--"and
you take mine. Go away--" Constance threw on her coat-- "go anywhere you
like, my dear Stefan--" she was at the door--"except south," she added
with a mischievous twinkle, closing it.

Stefan, grinning appreciatively at this parting shot, unscrewed his
sketch of Constance from the easel, set it face to the wall in a corner,
cleaned his brushes, with the meticulous care he always gave to his
tools, and ran for the elevated, just in time to catch the next train for
Crab's Bay. At the station he jumped into a hack, and, splashing home as
quickly as the liquid road bed would allow, burst into the house to find
Mary still lingering over her lunch.

"What has happened, Stefan?" she exclaimed, startled at his excited face.

"Nothing. I've got an idea, that's all. Let me have something to eat and
I'll tell you about it."

She rang for Lily, and he made a hasty meal, asking her unwonted
questions meantime about her work, her amusements, whether many of the
neighbors were down yet, and if she felt lonely.

"No, I'm not lonely, dear. There are only a few people here, but they are
awfully decent to me, and I'm very busy at home."

"You are sure you are not lonely?" he asked anxiously, drinking his
coffee, and lighting a cigarette.

"Yes, quite sure. I'm not exactly gay--" and she smiled a little sadly--
"but I'm really never lonely."

"Then," he asked nervously, "what would you say if I suggested going off
by myself for two or three months, to Paris." He watched her intently,
fearful of the effect of his words. To his unbounded relief, she appeared
neither surprised nor hurt, but, after twisting her coffee cup
thoughtfully for a minute, looked up with a frank smile.

"I think it would be an awfully good thing, Stefan dear. I've been
thinking so for a month, but I didn't like to say anything in case you
might feel--after our talk--" her voice faltered for a moment--"that I
was trying to--that I didn't care for you so much. It isn't that, dear--"
she looked honestly at him--"but I know you're not happy, and it doesn't
help me to feel I am holding you back from something you want. I think we
shall be happier afterwards if you go now."

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