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The Nest Builder

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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, but he became more deeply
aware of the loneliness which they involved. He searched eagerly for the
few whose qualities of mind or person lifted them beyond reach of his
demon of disparagement, and he found them, especially among women.

To a minority of that sex he was unusually attractive, and he became a
lover of women, but as subjects for enthusiasm rather than desire. In
passion he was curious but capricious, seldom rapidly roused, nor long
held. In his relations with women emotion came second to mental
stimulation, so that he never sought one whose mere sex was her main
attraction. This saved him from much--he was experienced, but not
degraded. Of love, however, in the fused sense of body, mind, and spirit,
he knew nothing. Perhaps his work claimed too much from him; at any rate
he was too egotistical, too critical and self-sufficient to give easily.
Whether he had received such love he did not ask himself--it is probable
that he had, without knowing it, or understanding that he had not himself
given full measure in return. The heart of France is practical; with all
her ardor Paris had given Byrd desire and friendship, but not romance.

In his last year, with only a few francs of his inheritance remaining,
Stefan had three pictures in the Beaux Arts. One of these was sold, but
the other two importuned vainly from their hanging places. Enormous
numbers of pictures had been exhibited that year. Every gallery, public
and private, was crowded; Paris was glutted with works of art. Stefan
faced the prospect of speedy starvation if he could not dispose of
another canvas. He had enough for a summer in Brittany, after which, if
the dealers could do nothing for him, he was stranded. Nevertheless, he
enjoyed his holiday light-heartedly, confident that his two large
pictures could not long fail to be appreciated. Returning to Paris in
September, however, he was dismayed to find his favorite dealers
uninterested in his canvases, and disinclined to harbor them longer.
Portraits and landscapes, they told him, were in much demand, but
fantasies, no. His sweeping groups of running, flying figures against
stormy skies, or shoals of mermaids hurrying down lanes of the deep sea,
did not appeal to the fashionable taste of the year. Something more
languorous, more subdued, or, on the other hand, more "chic," was
demanded.

In a high rage of disgust, Stefan hired a fiacre, and bore his children
defiantly home to their birthplace. Sitting in his studio like a ruffled
bird upon a spoiled hatching, he reviewed the fact that he had 325 francs
in the world, that the rent of his attic was overdue, and that his
pictures had never been so unmarketable as now.

At this point his one intimate man friend, Adolph Jensen, a Swede,
appeared as the deus ex machine. He had, he declared, an elder brother in
New York, an art dealer. This brother had just written him, describing
the millionaires who bought his pictures and bric-a-brac. His shop was
crowded with them. Adolph's brother was shrewd and hard to please, but
let his cher Stefan go himself to New York with his canvases, impress the
brother with his brilliance and the beauty of his work, and, undoubtedly,
his fortune would at once be made. The season in New York was in the
winter. Let Stefan go at once, by the fastest boat, and be first in the
field--he, Adolph, who had a little laid by, would lend him the
necessary money, and would write his brother in advance of the great
opportunity he was sending him.

Ultimately, with a very ill grace on Stefan's part--who could hardly be
persuaded that even a temporary return to America was preferable to
starvation--it was so arranged. The second-class passage money was 250
francs; for this and incidentals, he had enough, and Adolph lent him
another 250 to tide him over his arrival. He felt unable to afford
adequate crating, so his canvases were unstretched and made into a roll
which he determined should never leave his hands. His clothing was packed
in two bags, one contributed by Adolph. Armed with his roll, and followed
by his enthusiastic friend carrying the bags, Stefan departed from the
Gare Saint-Lazare for Dieppe, Liverpool, and the Lusitania.

Reacting to his friend's optimism, Stefan had felt confident enough on
leaving Paris, but the discomforts of the journey had soon flattened his
spirits, and now, limp in his berth, he saw the whole adventure mistaken,
unreal, and menacing. In leaving the country of his adoption for that of
his birth, he now felt that he had put himself again in the clutches of a
chimera which had power to wither with its breath all that was rare and
beautiful in his life. Nursing a grievance against himself and fate, he
at last fell asleep, clothed as he was, and forgot himself for a time in
such uneasy slumber as the storm allowed.




IV


The second-class deck was rapidly filling. Chairs, running in a double
row about the deck-house were receiving bundles of women, rugs, and
babies. Energetic youths, in surprising ulsters and sweaters, tramped in
broken file between these chairs and the bulwarks. Older men, in woolen
waistcoats and checked caps, or in the aging black of the small clergy
and professional class, obstructed, with a rooted constancy, the few
clear corners of the deck. Elderly women, with the parchment skin and dun
tailored suit of the "personally conducted" tourist, tied their heads in
veils and ventured into sheltered corners. On the boat-deck a game of
shuffleboard was in progress. Above the main companion-way the ship's
bands condescended to a little dance music on behalf of the second class.
The Scotchman, clad in inch-thick heather mixture, was already discussing
with all whom he could buttonhole the possibilities of a ship's concert.
In a word, it was the third day out, the storm was over, and the
passengers were cognizant of life, and of each other.

The Scot had gravitated to a group of men near the smoking-room door, and
having received from his turtle-jawed neighbor of the dinner table, who
was among them, the gift of a cigar, interrogated him as to musical
gifts. "I shall recite mesel'," he explained complacently, sucking in his
smoke. "Might we hope for a song, now, from you? I've asked yon artist
chap, but he says he doesna' sing."

His neighbor also disclaimed talents. "Sorry I can't oblige you. Who
wants to hear a man sing, anyway? Where are your girls?"

"There seems to be a singular absence of bonny girrls on board," replied
the Scot, twisting his erect forelock reflectively.

"Have you asked the English girl?" suggested a tall, rawboned New
Englander.

"Which English girrl?" demanded the Scot.

"Listen to him--which! Why, that one over there, you owl."

The Scotchman's eyes followed the gesture toward a group of children
surrounding a tall girl who stood by the rail on the leeward side. She
was facing into the wind toward the smoking-room door.

"Eh, mon," said the Scot, "till now I'd only seen the back of yon young
woman," and he promptly strode down the deck to ask, and receive, the
promise of a song.

Stefan Byrd, after a silent breakfast eaten late to avoid his table
companions, had just come on deck. It had been misty earlier, but now the
sun was beginning to break through in sudden glints of brightness. The
deck was still damp, however, and the whole prospect seemed to the
emerging Stefan cheerless in the extreme. His eyes swept the gray,
huddled shapes upon the chairs, the knots of gossiping men, the clumsy,
tramping youths, with the same loathing that the whole voyage had
hitherto inspired in him. The forelocked Scot, tweed cap in hand, was
crossing the deck. "There goes the brute, busy with his infernal
concert," he thought, watching balefully. Then he actually seemed to
point, like a dog, limbs fixed, eyes set, his face, with its salient
nose, thrust forward.

The Scot was speaking to a tall, bareheaded girl, about whom half a dozen
nondescript children crowded. She was holding herself against the wind,
and from her long, clean limbs her woolen dress was whipped, rippling.
The sun had gleamed suddenly, and under the shaft of brightness her hair
shone back a golden answer. Her eyes, hardly raised to those of the tall
Scotchman, were wide, gray, and level--the eyes of Pallas Athene; her
features, too, were goddess-like. One hand upon the bulwarks, she seemed,
even as she listened, to be poised for flight, balancing to the sway of
the ship.

Stefan exhaled a great breath of joy. There was something beautiful upon
the ship, after all. He found and lit a cigarette, and squaring his
shoulders to the deckhouse wall, leaned back the more comfortably to
indulge what he took to be his chief mission--the art of perceiving
beauty.

The girl listened in silence till the Scotchman had finished speaking,
and replied briefly and quietly, inclining her head. The Scot, jotting
something in a pocket notebook, left her with an air of elation, and she
turned again to the children. One, a toddler, was picking at her skirt.
She bent toward him a smile which gave Stefan almost a stab of
satisfaction, it was so gravely sweet, so fitted to her person. She
stooped lower to speak to the baby, and the artist saw the free, rhythmic
motion which meant developed, and untrammeled muscles. Presently the
children, wriggling with joy, squatted in a circle, and the girl sank to
the deck in their midst with one quick and easy movement, curling her
feet under her. There proceeded an absurd game, involving a slipper and
much squealing, whose intricacies she directed with unruffled ease.

Suddenly the wind puffed the hat of one of the small boys from his head,
carrying it high above their reach. In an instant the girl was up,
springing to her feet unaided by hand or knee. Reaching out, she caught
the hat as it descended slantingly over the bulwarks, and was down again
before the child's clutching hands had left his head.

A mother, none other than the prominently busted lady of Stefan's table,
blew forward with admiring cries of gratitude. Other matrons, vocative,
surrounded the circle, momentarily cutting off his view. He changed his
position to the bulwarks beside the group. There, a yard or two from the
gleaming head, he perched on the rail, feet laced into its supports, and
continued his concentrated observation.

"See yon chap," remarked the Scot from the smoking-room door to which his
talent-seeking round of the deck had again brought him. "He's fair
staring the eyes oot o'his head!"

"Exceedingly annoying to the young lady, I should imagine," returned his
table neighbor, the prim minister, who had joined the group.

"Hoots, she willna' mind the likes of him," scoffed the other, with his
booming laugh.

And indeed she did not. Oblivious equally of Byrd and of her more distant
watchers, the English girl passed from "Hunt the Slipper" to "A Cold and
Frosty Morning," and from that to story-telling, as absorbed as her small
companions, or as her watcher-in-chief.

Gradually the sun broke out, the water danced, huddled shapes began to
rise in their chairs, disclosing unexpected spots of color--a bright tie
or a patterned blouse--animation increased on all sides, and the ring
about the storyteller became three deep.

After a time a couple of perky young stewards appeared with huge iron
trays, containing thick white cups half full of chicken broth, and piles
of biscuits. Upon this, the pouter-pigeon lady bore off her small son to
be fed, other mothers did the same, and the remaining children, at the
lure of food, sidled off of their own accord, or sped wildly, whooping
out promises to return. For the moment, the story-teller was alone.
Stefan, seeing the Scot bearing down upon her with two cups of broth in
his hand and purpose in his eye, wakened to the danger just in time.
Throwing his cigarette overboard, he sprang lightly between her and the
approaching menace.

"Won't you be perfectly kind, and come for a walk?" he asked, stooping to
where she sat. The girl looked up into a pair of green-gold eyes set in a
brown, eager face. The face was lighted with a smile of dazzling
friendliness, and surmounted by an uncovered head of thick, brown-black
hair. Slowly her own eyes showed an answering smile.

"Thank you, I should love to," she said, and rising, swung off beside
him, just in time--as Stefan maneuvered it--to avoid seeing the Scot and
his carefully balanced offering. Discomfited, that individual consoled
himself with both cups of broth, and bided his time.

"My name is Stefan Byrd. I am a painter, going to America to sell some
pictures. I'm twenty-six. What is your name?" said Stefan, who never
wasted time in preliminaries and abhorred small talk--turning his
brilliant happy smile upon her.

"To answer by the book," she replied, smiling too, "my name is Mary
Elliston. I'm twenty-five. I do odd jobs, and am going to America to try
to find one to live on."

"What fun!" cried Stefan, with a faunlike skip of pleasure, as they
turned onto the emptier windward deck. "Then we're both seeking our
fortunes."

"Living, rather than fortune, in my case, I'm afraid."

"Well, of course you don't need a fortune, you carry so much gold with
you," and he glanced at her shining hair.

"Not negotiable, unluckily," she replied, taking his compliment as he had
paid it, without a trace of self-consciousness.

"Like the sunlight," he answered. "In fact,"--confidentially--"I'm afraid
you're a thief; you've imprisoned a piece of the sun, which should belong
to us all. However, I'm not going to complain to the authorities, I like
the result too much. You don't mind my saying that, do you?" he
continued, sure that she did not. "You see, I'm a painter. Color means
everything to me--that and form."

"One never minds hearing nice things, I think," she replied, with a frank
smile. They were swinging up and down the windward deck, and as he talked
he was acutely aware of her free movements beside him, and of the blow of
her skirts to leeward. Her hair, too closely pinned to fly loose, yet
seemed to spring from her forehead with the urge of pinioned wings. Life
radiated from her, he thought, with a steady, upward flame--not fitfully,
as with most people.

"And one doesn't mind questions, does one--from real people?" he
continued. "I'm going to ask you lots more, and you may ask me as many as
you like. I never talk to people unless they are worth talking to, and
then I talk hard. Will you begin, or shall I? I have at least two hundred
things to ask."

"It is my turn, though, I think." She accepted him on his own ground,
with an open and natural friendliness.

"I have only one at the moment, which is, 'Why haven't we talked
before?'" and she glanced with a quiet humorousness at the few
unpromising samples of the second cabin who obstructed the windward deck.

"Oh, good for you!" he applauded, "aren't they loathly!"

"Oh, no, all right, only not stimulating--"

"And we are," he finished for her, "so that, obviously, your question has
only one answer. We haven't talked before because I haven't seen you
before, and I haven't seen you because I have been growling in my cabin
--voilà tout!"

"Oh, never growl--it's such a waste of time," she answered. "You'll see,
the second cabin isn't bad."

"It certainly isn't, _now_," rejoiced Stefan. "My turn for a
question. Have you relatives, or are you, like myself, alone in the
world?"

"Quite alone," said Mary, "except for a married sister, who hardly
counts, as she's years older than I, and fearfully preoccupied with
husband, houses, and things." She paused, then added, "She hasn't any
babies, or I might have stayed to look after them, but she has lots of
money and 'position to keep up,' and so forth."

"I see her," said Stefan. "Obviously, she takes after the _other_
parent. You are alone then. Next question--"

"Oh, isn't it my turn again?" Mary interposed, smilingly.

"It is, but I ask you to waive it. You see, questions about _me_ are
so comparatively trivial. What sort of work do you do?"

"Well, I write a little," she replied, "and I've been a governess and a
companion. But I'm really a victim of the English method of educating
girls. That's my chief profession--being a monument to its inefficiency,"
and she laughed, low and bell-like.

"Tell me about that--I've never lived in England," he questioned, with
eager interest. ("And oh, Pan and Apollo, her voice!" he thought.)

"Well," she continued, "they bring us up so nicely that we can't do
anything--except _be_ nice. I was brought up in a cathedral town,
right in the Close, and my dear old Dad, who was a doctor, attended the
Bishop, the Dean, and all the Chapter. Mother would not let us go to
boarding-school, for fear of 'influences'--so we had governesses at home,
who taught us nothing we didn't choose to learn. My sister Isobel married
'well,' as they say, while I was still in the schoolroom. Her husband
belongs to the county--"

"What's that?" interrupted Stefan.

"Don't you know what the county is? How delightful! The 'county' is the
county families--landed gentry--very ancient and swagger and all that
--much more so than the titled people often. It was very great promotion
for the daughter of one of the town to marry into the county--or would
have been except that Mother was county also." She spoke with mock
solemnity.

"How delightfully picturesque and medieval!" exclaimed Stefan. "The
Guelphs and Ghibellines, eh?"

"Yes," Mary replied, "only there is no feud, and it doesn't seem so
romantic when you're in it. The man my sister married I thought was
frightfully boring except for his family place, and being in the army,
which is rather decent. He talks," she smiled, "like a phonograph with
only one set of records."

"Wondrous Being--Winged Goddess--" chanted Stefan, stopping before her
and apostrophizing the sky or the boat-deck--"a goddess with a sense of
humor!" And he positively glowed upon her.

"About the first point I know nothing," she laughed, walking on again
beside him, "but for the second," and her face became a little grave,
"you have to have some humor if you are a girl in Lindum, or you go
under."

"Tell me, tell me all about it," he urged. "I've never met an English
girl before, _nor_ a goddess, and I'm so interested!"

They rested for a time against the bulwarks. The wind was dropping, and
the spume seethed against the black side of the ship without force from
the waves to throw it up to them in spray. They looked down into deep
blue and green water glassing a sky warm now, and friendly, in which high
white cumuli sailed slowly, like full-rigged ships all but becalmed.

"It is a very commonplace story with us," Mary began. "Mother died a
little time after Isobel married, and Dad kept my governess on. I begged
to go to Girton, or any other college he liked, but he wouldn't hear of
it. Said he wanted a womanly daughter." She smiled rather ruefully. "Dad
was doing well with his practice, for a small-town doctor, and had a good
deal saved, and a little of mother's money. He wanted to have more, so he
put it all into rubber. You've heard about rubber, haven't you?" she
asked, turning to Stefan.

"Not a thing," he smiled.

"Well, every one in England was putting money into rubber last year, and
lots of people did well, but lots--didn't. Poor old Dad didn't--he lost
everything. It wouldn't have really mattered--he had his profession--but
the shock killed him, I think; that and being lonely without Mother." She
paused a moment, looking into the water. "Anyhow, he died, and there was
nothing for me to do except to begin earning my living without any of the
necessary equipment."

"What about the brother-in-law?" asked Stefan.

"Oh, yes, I could have gone to them--I wasn't in danger of starvation.
But," she shook her head emphatically, "a poor relation! I couldn't have
stood that."

"Well," he turned squarely toward her, his elbow on the rail, "I can't
help asking this, you know; where were the bachelors of Lindum?"

She smiled, still in her friendly, unembarrassed way.

"I know what you mean, of course. The older men say it quite openly in
England.--'Why don't a nice gel like you get married?'--It's rather a
long story." ("Has she been in love?" Stefan wondered.) "First of all,
there are very few young men of one's own sort in Lindum; most of them
are in the Colonies. Those there are--one or two lawyers, doctors, and
squires' sons--are frightfully sought after." She made a wry face. "Too
much competition for them, altogether, and--" she seemed to take a plunge
before adding--"I've never been successful at bargain counters."

He turned that over for a moment. "I see," he said. "At least I should
do, if it weren't for it being you. Look here, Miss Elliston, honestly
now, fair and square--" he smiled confidingly at her--"you're not asking
me to believe that the competition in your ease didn't appear in the
other sex?"

"Mr. Byrd," she answered straightly, "in my world girls have to have more
than a good appearance." She shrugged her shoulders rather disdainfully.
"I had no money, and I had opinions."

("She's been in love--slightly," he decided.) "Opinions," he echoed,
"what kind? Mustn't one have any in Lindum?"

"Young girls mustn't--only those they are taught," she replied. "I read a
good deal, I sympathized with the Liberals. I was even--" her voice
dropped to mock horror--"a Suffragist!"

"I've heard about that," he interposed eagerly, "though the French women
don't seem to care much. You wanted to vote? Well, why ever not?"

She gave him the brightest smile he had yet received.

"Oh, how nice of you!" she cried. "You really mean that?"

"Couldn't see it any other way. I've always liked and believed in women
more than men. I learnt that in childhood," he added, frowning.

"Splendid! I'm so glad," she responded. "You see, with our men it's
usually the other way round. My ideas were a great handicap at home."

"So you decided to leave?"

"Yes; I went to London and got a job teaching some children sums and
history--two hours every morning. In the afternoons I worked at stories
for the magazines, and placed a few, but they pay an unknown writer
horribly badly. I lived with an old lady as companion for two months, but
that was being a poor relation minus the relationship--I couldn't stand
it. I joined the Suffragists in London--not the Militants--I don't quite
see their point of view--and marched in a parade. Brother-in-law heard of
it, and wrote me I could not expect anything from them unless I stopped
it." She laughed quietly.

Stefan flushed. He pronounced something--conclusively--in French. Then
--"Don't ask me to apologize, Miss Elliston."

"I won't," reassuringly. "I felt rather like that, too. I wrote that I
didn't expect anything as it was. Then I sat down and thought about the
whole question of women in England and their chances. I had a hundred
pounds and a few ornaments of Mother's. I love children, but I didn't
want to be a governess. I wanted to stand alone in some place where my
head wouldn't be pushed down every time I tried to raise it. I believed
in America people wouldn't say so often, 'Why doesn't a nice girl like
you get married?' so I came, and here I am. That's the whole story--a
very humdrum one."

"Yes, here you are, thank God!" proclaimed Stefan devoutly. "What
magnificent pluck, and how divine of you to tell me it all! You've saved
me from suicide, almost. These people immolate me."

"How delightfully he exaggerates!" she thought.

"What thousands of things we can talk about," he went on in a burst of
enthusiasm. "What a perfectly splendid time we are going to have!" He all
but warbled.

"I hope so," she answered, smilingly, "but there goes the gong, and I'm
ravenous."

"Dinner!" he cried scornfully; "suet pudding, all those horrible people
--you want to leave this--?" He swept his arm over the glittering water.

"I don't, but I want my dinner," she maintained.

This checked his spirits for a moment; then enlightenment seemed to burst
upon him.

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