Immortal Youth Part 2

In the autumn he reappeared bronzed and husky from a summer on a Pennsylvania farm. That spring had been the overture. Now the curtain rose. How can my thin piano score reproduce that richly glowing orchestration?

Gradually the artist in him unfolded. It was like a process of nature--slow, silent, sure. In speech he was inarticulate. The spoken word was not his trade; he knew it, and the knowledge made him self-conscious. But give him a brush and he found tongue. His silences were formidable. "The better to eat you with, my dear!" Nothing escaped him. With a secret, fierce impetuosity he was storing away impressions: glances, gestures, lines of faces, colors, inflections of voices, landscapes, phrases, incidents, ideas: he soaked them in like a thirsty sponge. Everything was fish that came to his net. What sometimes looked like an intellectual torpor was the boa constrictor digesting the zebra whole. I doubt if he realized the tremendous vitality of his creative instinct. He went about it as a wild creature roams the forest for its food: it was a law of his being. On tramping trips he would stalk miles in silence; stopping stock still until he had taken in the scarlet-and-gold maple grove in a purple autumn mist; or a mossy wood pile under pines; or the rolling diversity of hill and woodland. No apologies; no explanations. Business.

It was soon clear that this young man knew exactly what he wanted and that he intended to get it. There was a kind of animal sagacity about his mind which told it what food to accept and what to reject.

"_Kunstler_," says Goethe, "_rede nicht. Bilde!_" (Artist, don't talk.

Create!) Fritz lived this precept. He would do first, and then let the doing speak for itself. When a young man is so determined to do something that he cannot be got to talk about it, you may consider the thing as good as done. Here was a hungry mind, seeking what it might devour and devouring it. All that provender was being a.s.similated. It could not evaporate in talk, for Fritz was no talker. It had to be expressed somehow and that somehow would have to be with a brush....

Oh, he came and went disguised in the business suit of a young man dedicated to the career of buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest: pleasant, friendly, a prodigious eater, a sound sleeper, invincibly healthy,--and with only that silent intentness of eye to betray the secret of the creative power he carried within him.

But that winter it was surprised out of him.

Fred Middleton, then twenty-seven years old, six years out of Harvard College, thoroughly conversant with the ethics of modern business, was preparing to _de_-cla.s.s himself and earn an honest living by manual labor on the land--a farmer, and not a "gentleman farmer." With mock solemnity Fritz was commissioned to do a portrait of Fred. The transaction was conducted on a basis of "free agreement" which would have satisfied even Peter Kropotkin. The painter was to do it any way he chose--absolute free speech. The sitter was to choose any clothes he liked, to sit till he was tired, and stretch when he pleased. The purchaser was to pay what he was able. So everybody was happy, being free.

In the third floor back on Pinckney Street (it had north light) decks were cleared for action: two rickety orange boxes covered with a steamer rug did duty as a dais. With paint box, easel and palette Fritz came down from Exeter where he had just finished a portrait of an old lady.

There was a glowing fire in the grate; a bl.u.s.ter of March winds in the brick court; the roar of blast through the antlers of the old linden; waning light of Sat.u.r.day and Sunday afternoons; pages of Nietzsche's epigrams and of _Jean-Christophe_ read aloud; pauses to rest and consult.

Fritz always noticed people's hands. He found almost as much character in them as in faces. He admired the hands in Rodin's work, especially that of the sculptor in his _Pygmalion_:--"the tenderness of that hand!" he said. Fred's large hands interested him. The right one he caught hot off the bat. The left caused him no end of trouble. Finally one day he threw down his brush and exclaimed:

"I've watched that left hand come down to rest on that leg a dozen times. I've tried everything else and now I'm going to paint it exactly as it is. After all, it _is_ a hand."

"_Thank_ you; _thank_ you!" replied Fred, bowing suavely. "People usually refer to it as a ham. A photographer once told me that I had a mitt like an elephant's hoof."

And Fritz painted. And the secret was out. It came out in two installments: the first, when he was spreading on canvas a life history of Fred Middleton compressed into terms of a rugged face and two large hands; the second came three years later. Fred had remarked, after one of his sittings, that it was all he could do to keep his face straight at some of the grimaces Fritz made while painting. The precaution was needless. If he had laughed outright it is doubtful if Fritz would have noticed it.

Most of the time while he was painting the portrait of me, three years later, I was absorbed in my own work and paid no attention to him. But one afternoon when my wheels refused to grind I took a holiday and watched him out of the tail of my eye....

It was as if some one you supposed you knew all about had removed a set of false whiskers and spoken in his natural voice. Was this our shy, silent Fritz? Why, the impudence of him! The shameless way he peered into the secret places of a face! "See here, young gentleman, who gave you permission to rummage through that trunkful of old letters?"

Here at last was Fritz, on his native heath, naked and unashamed, talking his own language and, confident of its not being understood, indulging in the most appalling candor.

What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. While he pried into my secrets I pried into his. I amused myself by painting a portrait of Fritz painting. Some day I meant to show it to him.... But here it is:

"He may not be able to talk with his tongue. But give him his brushes and his whole body talks. No gymnastics: but his whole being aquiver.

Silent, but his arms, fingers, head, shoulders make animated dumb show. He is conversing delightedly with himself over his work. He has forgotten time and place. Intense mental concentration, and nervous energy. He squints, grimaces, stoops and looks at his canvas wrong-side up. He sets his teeth, compresses lips, squares his shoulders,--lost in his work. He mixes colors with minute particularity. Sometimes he dabs with a tiny brush, a peek here, a peck there, like a dainty bird. Again he paints in sweeping flourishes, beating a kind of rapturous rhythm with his brush, gesturing with it between strokes, like an orchestral conductor hewing out the rhythms of a symphony.... He pauses; he hangs limp over his palette, considering.... Or he gives a joyous little bounce in his chair as the decision comes. His hands and forearms, strong and supple, talk in every sinew. Fingers mobile, infinitely expressive: they thumb the brush; turn its handle in a ruminating pause; reflect a sudden resolution in the stiffening of tendons....

"And above all this quiet animation and silent dexterity is the regnant, gallant head with dark eyes flas.h.i.+ng mastery; the mouth set with purpose; the thick ma.s.s of s.h.i.+ning black hair breaking into a wave as it falls away from the clear forehead--and all in complete self-forgetfulness, the oblivion of the artist rapt in the joy of creating."

It was quite simple. Here was a soul which dwelt in a prison of shyness. Painting unlocked the door. Out it rushed. Free. It could be itself at last. No fears; no concealments. Liberty!

That was all very well for Fritz, but how about his sitter? About the time the sitter sensed what was going on he felt moved to exclaim:

"Just a moment, Fritz. Don't you think you are getting a trifle familiar?"

I heard one of his painter friends, eyeing a canvas which Fritz had just finished, mutter,

"There is some marvelous subtlety about that mind."

Already his knack of guessing people was d.a.m.nable. He played no favorites. "I am going to paint what I see or I am not going to paint at all." If what he saw was fatuous, he told it with the disconcerting gusto of a child; if it was sad, he told it (as in that student portrait) so as to produce a burning pressure behind the eyelids; if it was strong and gentle, he told it (as in the portrait of the young farmer) so as to kindle respect and affection. Often all this was unconscious. Again he knew exactly what he was doing and took a wicked relish in it. Of some wealthies whom he was painting he confided with a grin:

"Of course they patronize me within an inch of my life, but I sometimes wonder what would happen if they knew...."

Perhaps he was not so unsophisticated as advertised in the catalogue.

He helped himself pretty generously out of the popular supposition that an artist is a mild form of lunatic. He made good use of his talent for silence. But what ears and eyes! n.o.body who had seen him paint could ever feel quite safe with him again.

V

It happened that Alexander James was studying at the Museum School.

That the son of "the psychologist who made psychology read like a novel" and the nephew of "the novelist who made a novel read like psychology" should have identified Fritz's talent the first crack out of the box was about the least surprising thing in the world. The two young painters proceeded to form an offensive and defensive alliance.

Where one was, there was the other also; on the baseball field, on painting expeditions, on pilgrimages in early spring into New Hamps.h.i.+re to climb Chocorua, and on occasional voyages into the land of pretty girls. It was good to see the pair together: two thoroughbreds. Both athletes, both artists, one dark, the other fair, both about the same height and build. People would turn to look after them as they pa.s.sed with an expression of "Wonder who they are.

Somebody out of the ordinary."

Alexander was wont to disguise his frank admiration of Fritz behind a smoke screen of banter. This Fritz would suffer with an amused grin and the ma.s.sive calm of a mastiff, for he had no such a.r.s.enal of repartee as this young gentleman from the household of a Harvard professor; but once in a while he would land a retort so neat as to set Alexander spinning. It did not take the Cambridge youth long to discover the use Fritz made of his talent for silence and it was his delight to give him away in his game of holding his tongue the better to use his eyes,--as Alexander said: "the wise old Bruin!"

In Ma.s.sachusetts the anniversary of the battle of Lexington, April 19, is a holiday. It was 1913. In the parlor of an inn whose windows look northward across the snug haven of Rockport to the surf-scoured ledges of Pigeon Cove I was seated at a piano, back to the door, painfully dissecting a score of _Tristan_.

The door opened and a voice exclaimed, "Good Lord!"

It was Fritz. With him was Alexander James. Both were half ossified with the chill of the mid-April afternoon, for they had been painting on the sh.o.r.e down towards Straitsmouth.

General astonishment. The two expeditions had originated quite independently. It was whimsically like those momentous chance encounters in picturesque spots which abound in the novels of Alexander's uncle Henry; but the novelist, be it noted, doesn't always save these coincidences from a slightly fishy sound which was totally wanting in this.

They thawed themselves out and exhibited their sketches. Fritz had, as usual, gone after it and got it--a spirited bit: druidical heaps of pink granite boulders against das.h.i.+ng surf: dazzling white of foam-crest on deep blue.

There was a jolly supper in the brown-walled dining room (it had been the kitchen of an eighteenth century farm house) which the last rays of the spring sun flooded with red golden light; the two painters comparing notes on the exhibitions of the Scandinavians and the Ten Americans.

They departed for a home-talent play at a local hall in a frame of mind which boded no good for the performance.... About eleven o'clock they breezed in with the announcement that there was a Northwest wind (the New England wind which sweeps the sky cloudless blue), a full moon and a das.h.i.+ng sea; and that to go to bed was a crime. Away, then, for Land's End, along sh.o.r.e paths at the edge of gra.s.sy cliffs, by bushy lanes, over meadows, moors, popple beaches and brooks, across the moon-blanched land beside the moon-burnished sea. Straitsmouth Light burned a yellow spark. The twin lights on Thatcher's Island shone weird blue in their tall towers. Low on the rim of sky and sea hung gigantic ma.s.ses of cloud whitened by the bluish pallor of the moon. In the marsh bottoms frogs cheeped their shrill sweet song of spring: the northwester bellowed through the willow twigs ... mournful pour of surf ... splendor of spring moon ... the lonely moor ... the steadfast light-house flames ... the white walls and gray roofs of the sleeping town....

At one in the morning, tip-toeing into the dining room, we devoured a plate of bread and b.u.t.ter left for late comers. Both of them were too genuine artists to comment on what we had seen.

It is a lovely afternoon of June, 1914, at the pier of the Allan Line steams.h.i.+ps in Charlestown. The s.h.i.+p is the old _Nubian_, safe and slow, saloon upholstered in plush of maple sugar brown, bra.s.s oil lamps swinging in gimbles as befitted a smart packet of the late 80's.

Boston to Glasgow. Scotland swarmed the wharf.

Mixed in was an artists' colony. For that was the great day. Fritz and Alexander were sailing for a year's study abroad: London, Paris, Munich. The gang which came to see them off were _dramatis personae_ of Act II of _La Boheme_: four painters, an interior decorator, an ill.u.s.trator a.s.sorted scribblers, and a Scottish chieftain (lord of an ancient clan, hero of a hundred skin-of-your-teeth escapes, veteran of Polish revolutionary escapades, uncrowned king of an African tribe: as _raconteur_ he had his rival, Robert Louis Stevenson, lashed to the bed). This day he strode resplendent in plaid knee socks, plaid kilt, a murderous Hieland dirk swung at his hip, short jacket the breast of which blazed with medals, and long black locks caught up under a cap.

As he crossed the wharf planking at a stride like deer-stalking over his native crags, the rest of us half expected the a.s.sembled Scots to prostrate themselves and knock foreheads on flooring in fealty. He did excite some attention. Sisson said--well, no matter what Sisson said.[1]

[1] After all, why not? Some one was explaining that the chief (who was a genuinely fine fellow) had come to America to raise funds for his clan. Sisson said: "He'll he lucky if he gets back to Scotland with his kilt."