Immortal Youth Part 3

It was a great occasion. Fritz, his black eyes snapping with excitement, came up the gang plank from deck to wharf to be pounced on by a jolly crew. He was outwardly cool, but his engines were racing.

After him came Alexander James. Pounce number two. Showers of rice clattered on a bridal pair close by, but their festival was tame compared to this. To meet Henry James and John Sargent in London: to study in Paris and Munich: to see the great galleries. They were embarking on greater seas than the Atlantic. This was the great day, the great hour, and with a troop of friends rejoicing in their good fortune to sweeten it.... Away to the land of heart's desire....

Romance.... Bohemia.... Europe.

"O Youth, and the days that were!"

From the caplog at the pier head as the _Nubian_ swung into midstream of the Charles, the band of pariahs bawled ribald farewells and wrung out handkerchiefs in mock tears. Alexander James, the Clive Newcome of the adventure, leaned on the teakwood rail, waving his straw hat; and Fritz, the "J.J." of the story, sat on the lowest ratline of the shrouds, feet on rail, pretending to weep into his hat and then emptying the brine into the brine.

The s.h.i.+p's side, black hull and white upperworks, took a burnis.h.i.+ng from the late afternoon sun. Under the gaiety there was a queer feeling. There, divided from us by a hundred yards of harbor water, were the two friends with whom we had just shaken hands, and the strip between was widening, would widen to an ocean. They stood out amid the throng of pa.s.sengers as distinct as though they had been the only souls aboard. They waved: we waved. As the vessel straightened away in her course they imitated our several gestures to signify personal farewells: it was thought and done impromptu. And long after their figures grew indistinct as the s.h.i.+p lessened down the harbor lane between elbowing wharves and the piled ma.s.ses of city towers and spires, there were gleams of two white straw hats which we knew....

All the same, it was a trifle too much like a dress rehearsal for death.

Then, in less than six weeks, a world in tumult. Continental ateliers were emptying their students on the battlefield. Fritz, who was in England, prudently kept out of the rush homeward and made the most of his few weeks.

He was in Downing Street in front of that dingy Georgian facade the night the British Cabinet sat waiting for Germany's reply to their ultimatum.

"It gave one an odd feeling," said he, "to realize that behind those drawn shades sat men who were settling the question of life or death for hundreds of thousands of their fellow creatures. The crowd cheered. I did not."

Of Henry James he saw comparatively little, for the novelist was in poor health, but he was immensely stimulated by the little he did see, for beginning with _Roderick Hudson_ he had been quick to discover how much this master of style had to teach a painter of what he had himself learned from painters.

There was a memorable session with Mr. Sargent in his London studio.

Mr. Sargent happened just then to be doing a portrait of Lord Curzon, and Fritz related with wicked glee (imitating Mr. Sargent as he backed away from his easel) how the painter had remarked:

"I have not made up my mind how to finish it. If I can't get enough interest out of the face, I'll put a scarlet coat on him."

It was late in October before he sailed for home, as one of a handful of pa.s.sengers on a freighter. The voyage was one of continuous foul weather which, to the mystification of the others, was vastly to the delight of Fritz. He lived on deck, begrudging time to sleep. He fraternized with the crew. One day of thin drizzle and greasy swells, getting into old togs, he helped the deck-hands greatly to their satisfaction and somewhat to the scandal of the other pa.s.sengers, shovel coal down a hatch.

"They didn't think I'd stick it through," said he.

After that he was one of them.

VI

He had chosen to live in Pittsburgh, partly because it was his home and partly because it promised him more elbow room.

"I want to paint," said he, "and I do not want to have to play social politics in order to get commissions, as I am afraid I would have to do in Boston. Besides, in Pittsburgh, there are fewer painters to influence me. I stand more chance of being myself."

Alexander James said it was brutal of Fritz to go away to Pittsburgh.

The rest of the colony agreed. But it became Fritz's delight to swoop down on us in Boston unannounced.

... It is late in a wild night of mid-winter, a furious gale of wind and snow whipping across the gables and chimney stacks of Beacon Hill: a night for tucking oneself up in a wing chair beside a fire with a book and reading lamp, roar of storm in ears....

A rap sounds on the door.

"Come!"

The rap is repeated.

"Come in!"

The door opens and framed in its blackness stands Fritz.

With him is Ralph Heard in a state of jubilation.

"You remember," says he, "I told you only two days ago that I sort of had a hunch that Fritz might be dropping in on us most any time now?

Well, to-night I was sitting at my writing-table, when the door opened with a bang. I thought, without looking around, 'That is the way Fritz opens a door.' And there was Fritz."

His one emotional luxury was this enjoyment of watching his friends fall all over their own feet in the glad surprise of seeing him.

He was on his way to paint some portraits of Exeter schoolmasters. It was slowly wormed out of him that romance had visited his sh.o.r.es. A St. Louis woman was motoring to New York. In a street of Pittsburgh a tire blew out. As it was raining, she got out of the car and went into an art store in front of which it had stopped, to wait for repairs.

Her errand in New York was to choose a portrait painter. In the art store a portrait by Fritz was on exhibition. She decided that there was no need of going on to New York. That evening Fritz was called to her hotel. It ended by his going on to St. Louis and painting portraits of the whole family.

What his bread-and-b.u.t.ter problems were I never fully knew. I think they were more in what he faced than in what he had to encounter.

Within two or three years after he left the Museum School, he was paying his own way. He lived with the utmost frugality. His studio was a workshop: four walls and a north light.

"I keep it bare on purpose," he confided, "to frighten away loafers."

It appeared that certain amiable slayers of their own and others'

time, envisaging a studio of divans, Russian cigarettes, tea and twaddle, paid one visit, and only one.

His att.i.tude toward money was an island of sanity in a lunatic ocean.

It was no time before he sensed the absurdity of attempting to measure creative work by commercial values, and that is, of course, the avenue by which the artist-thinker divines the idiotic husbandry of organizing society to batten those who distribute and those who own by penalizing those who produce and those who create. Money he viewed as an article neither to be spent nor to be h.o.a.rded, but rather to be reinvested where it would draw intellectual dividends. His one extravagance was to buy his mind the food it needed if he had the wherewithal to pay for it. "And," as Erasmus remarks, "after that, some clothes." The same independence which had fortified him against those who had once pointed him out as a crack-brained youngster with the presumption to suppose he could be a great artist sustained him now when he was pointed out as a promising portrait painter who was already "getting good money for his work."

Finding himself, as he did, endowed with a creative purpose considerably at odds with the structure of the society around him; put to it, as he was, to protect that fledgling from the well-intentioned but fatal meddlings of the mediocre, not a shadow of ill-humor did he allow to cross his average human intercourse. He made me think of a wise old cat who, having carefully hidden her kittens in the hayloft, presents a tolerant frame to the cuffs and caresses of the children.

By the beginning of 1916 it was clear to anyone who knew him that all he needed to reach the summit was to keep climbing, and this he appeared abundantly able and determined to do.

VII

He was growing up. Shy he would always be, but in place of his boyish self-distrust had come a quiet confidence in his own powers. His mind was on the watch for its food, like an eagle ready to pounce. There was an eager, vigilant look in his eyes when one spoke of certain books unknown to him: he was questioning whether they would be what he wanted. He would pump me about the content of certain authors. I could see him accepting and rejecting. He read the poets as one quarrying marble for architectural designs of his own. His hungry reading was as different from that of the perfunctory college student as the oarsmans.h.i.+p of a dory fisherman on the Grand Banks is from that of an eight-oared crew on the placid Charles: the producer as contrasted with the consumer.

George Meredith and Walt Whitman became two of his great companions.

Once he told me that he was reading everything of Thomas Hardy he could lay his hands on.

"Why?" I asked.

"He knows how to set the human figure against vast backgrounds of Nature: figures outlined half against a heath and half against sky."