The Nest Builder Part 39

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 friends.h.i.+p 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, p.r.o.nouncing it a fine canvas, though inferior to the Danae. 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'la 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 inst.i.tution 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 s.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sion 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 navely, "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 pa.s.sionate--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 furnis.h.i.+ngs of the room--"I saw you like a storm-spirit, I saw you moving among other women like a G.o.ddess, 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 G.o.d, 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?"