The doctor seemed to be repeating something about nerves and hysteria. "Exactly," his father replied, "and for that, self-control is needed, and not a drug that reverses the dispensation of the Almighty."
Both men left the room. Presently the boy heard shrieks. Lying, a grown man, in his berth, Stefan trembled at the memory of them. He fled in spirit as he had fled then--out of the window, down the roaring, swimming street, where he knew not, pursued by a writhing horror. Hours later, as it seemed, he returned. The shades were pulled down across the windows of his house. His mother was dead.
Looking back, the man hardly knew how the conviction had come to the child that his father had killed his mother. A vague comprehension perhaps of the doctor's urgings and his father's denials--a head-shaking mutter from the nurse--the memory of all his mother's tears. He was hardly more than a baby, but he had always feared and disliked his father--now he hated him, blindly and intensely. He saw him as the cause not only of his mother's tears and death, but of all the ugliness in the life about him. "Bohemia," he thought, would have been theirs but for this man. He even blamed him, in a sullen way, for the presence in their house of a tiny little red and wizened object, singularly ugly, which the gray-haired woman referred to as his "brother." Obviously, the thing was not a brother, and his father must be at the bottom of a conspiracy to deceive him. The creature made a great deal of noise, and when, by and by, it went away, and they told him his brother too was dead, he felt nothing but relief.
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.