Nest Builder | Page 3

lay the open country, level, blindingly hot, half-
cultivated, with the scorched foliage of young trees showing in the
ruins of what had been forest land. Across it the roads ran straight as
rulers. In the winter wolves were not unknown there; in the summer
there were tramps of many strange nationalities, farm hands and men
bound for the copper mines. For the most part they walked the railroad
ties, or rode the freight cars; winter or summer, the roads were never
wholly safe, and children played only in the town.
There, on the outskirts, was a shallow, stony river, but deep enough at
one point for gingerly swimming. Stefan seemed never to have been
cool through the summer except when he was squatting or paddling in
this hole. He remembered only indistinctly the boys with whom he
bathed; he had no friends among them. But there had been a little girl
with starched white skirts, huge blue bows over blue eyes, and yellow
hair, whom he had admired to adoration. She wanted desperately to
bathe in the hole, and he demanded of her mother that this be permitted.

Stefan smiled grimly as he recalled the horror of that lady, who had
boxed his ears for trying to lead her girl into ungodliness, and to
scandalize the neighbors. The friendship had been kept up
surreptitiously after this, with interchange of pencils and candy, until
the little girl--he had forgotten her name --put her tongue out at him
over a matter of chewing-gum which he had insisted she should not use.
Revolted, he played alone again.
The Presbyterian Church Stefan remembered as a whitewashed praying
box, resounding to his father's high-pitched voice. It was filled with
heat and flies from without in summer, and heat and steam from within
in winter. The school, whitewashed again, he recalled as a succession
of banging desks, flying paper pellets, and the drone of undigested
lessons. Here the water bucket loomed as the alleviation in summer, or
the red hot oblong of the open stove in winter time. Through all these
scenes, by an egotistical trick of the brain, he saw himself moving, a
small brown- haired boy, with olive skin and queer, greenish eyes,
entirely alien, absolutely lonely, completely critical. He saw himself in
too large, ill-chosen clothes, the butt of his playfellows. He saw the
sidelong, interested glances of little girls change to curled lips and
tossed heads at the grinning nudge of their boy companions. He saw the
harassed eyes of an anaemic teacher stare uncomprehendingly at him
over the pages of an exercise book filled with colored drawings of
George III and the British flag, instead of a description of the battle of
Bunker Hill. He remembered the hatred he had felt even then for the
narrowness of the local patriotism which had prompted him to this
revenge. As a result, he saw himself backed against the schoolhouse
wall, facing with contempt a yelling, jumping tangle of boys who, from
a safe distance, called upon the "traitor" and the "Dago" to come and be
licked. He felt the rage mount in his head like a burning wave, saw a
change in the eyes and faces of his foes, felt himself spring with a
catlike leap, his lips tight above his teeth and his arms moving like
clawed wheels, saw boys run yelling and himself darting between them
down the road, to fall at last, a trembling, sobbing bundle of reaction,
into the grassy ditch.
In memory Stefan followed himself home. The word was used to
denote the house in which he and his father lived. A portrait of his
mother hung over the parlor stove. It was a chalk drawing from a

photograph, crudely done, but beautiful by reason of the subject. The
face was young and very round, the forehead beautifully low and broad
under black waves of hair. The nose was short and proud, the chin
small but square, the mouth gaily curving around little, even teeth. But
the eyes were deep and somber; there was passion in them, and
romance. Stefan had not seen that face for years, he barely remembered
the original, but he could have drawn it now in every detail. If the
house in which it hung could be called home at all, it was by virtue of
that picture, the only thing of beauty in it.
Behind the portrait lay a few memories of joy and heartache, and one
final one of horror. Stefan probed them, still with his nervous hand
across his eyes. He listened while his mother sang gay or mournful
little songs with haunting tunes in a tongue only a word or two of
which he understood. He watched while she drew from her bureau
drawer a box of paints and some paper.