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, or Medicine. Hate had given him too keen a comprehension of his father to permit him the mistake of argument. He temporized. Let him be sent to college, and there he would discover where his aptitude lay.
So at last it was decided. A trunk was found, a moth-eaten bag. His cheap, ill-cut clothes were packed. On a day of late summer he stepped for the first time upon a train—beautiful to him because it moved—and was borne southward.
At Ann Arbor he found many new things, rules, and people, but he brushed them aside like flies, hardly perceiving them; for there, for the first time, he saw photographs and casts of the world's great art. The first sight, even in a poor copy, of the two Discoboli—Diana with her swinging knee-high tunic—the winged Victory of Samothrace—to see them first at seventeen, without warning, without a glimmering knowledge of their existence! And the pictures! Portfolios of Angelo, of the voluptuous Titian, of the swaying forms of Botticelli's maidens—trite enough now—but then!
How long he could have deceived his father as to the real nature of his interests he did not know. Already there had been complaints of cut lectures, reprimands, and letters from home. Evading mathematics, science, and divinity, he read only the English and classic subjects—because they contained beauty—and drew, copying and creating, in every odd moment. The storm began to threaten, but it never broke; for in his second year in college the unbelievable, the miracle, happened—his father died. They said he had died of pneumonia, contracted while visiting the sick in the winter blizzards, and they praised him; but Stefan hardly listened.
One fact alone stood out amid the ugly affairs of death, so that he regarded and remembered nothing else. He was free—and he had wings! His father left insurance, and a couple of savings-bank accounts, but through some fissure of vanity or carelessness in the granite of his propriety, he left no will. The sums, amounting in all to something over three thousand dollars, came to Stefan without conditions, guardians, or other hindrances. The rapture of that discovery, he thought, almost wiped out his father's debt to him.
He knew now that not Bohemia, but Paris, was his El Dorado. In wild haste he made ready for his journey, leaving the rigid trappings of his home to be sold after him. But his dead father was to give him one more pang—the scales were to swing uneven at the last. For when he would have packed the only possession, other than a few necessities, he planned to carry with him, he found his mother's picture gone. Dying, his father, it appeared, had wandered from his bed, detached the portrait, and with his own hands burnt it in the stove. The motive of the act Stefan could not comprehend. He only knew that this man had robbed him of his mother twice. All that remained of her was her wedding ring, which, drawn from his father's cash-box, he wore on his little finger. With bitterness amid his joy he took the train once more, and saw the lights of the town's shabby inn blink good-bye behind its frazzled shades.