Immortal Youth Part 1

Immortal Youth.

by Lucien Price.

Give me that man That is not pa.s.sion's slave, and I will wear him In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart, As I do thee.

--HAMLET

I

There was a humble restaurant on Charles Street where cabmen and chauffeurs could be induced to tell the story of their lives over a combination-supper of lamb chop and two fried eggs costing (that was in 1912), with coffee and rolls, twenty-five cents. Across the table one evening in the spring of that year sat a young man about twenty-four years old. Anyone would have taken a second look at him; also a third, a fourth, and as many more as good manners would permit.

What was there about him that attracted attention? It was hard to say.

The dark eyes with a somber light burning in them? The rugged features and swarthy complexion with a ruddy glow of health in each jowl? The hands; very large and finely muscled? (I have never seen a more beautiful pair of hands on a human being.) It was all of these things and none of them. Rather it was the look of one with immense forces in reserve, bound on an errand.

Impossible to guess anything from his clothes: dark suit, shirt of gray flannel, and black knitted tie. Chauffeur? Hardly. Well then, what? Who?

(This is no isolated personal impression. Wherever he went people felt the same intense curiosity about him. Sometimes they stared at him so that he asked me if his face was smudged.)

Was this stranger conversible? He was. Presently he was speaking of the colonial doorways on Chestnut Street with a discrimination which suggested the architect. No. It appeared that he was studying under Mr. Tarbell at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts. Next, that he came from Pittsburgh. Here was a bond in common. As two young Middle Westerners we resented the social cold storage which New England imposes as a probationary period of acquaintance. We condoled. We fraternized. We were as neighbors meeting in a foreign land. At last somebody with whom it was safe to sc.r.a.pe acquaintance in the good old-fashioned Middle Western way without incurring suspicion of designs on one another's souls, bodies, or estates.

He climbed Beacon Hill with me to the house where I lived, carrying a paper bag which, he explained modestly, contained his breakfast: two bananas and a shredded wheat biscuit.

The evening was mild. Windows stood open to the breeze which rumpled the leaves of an old linden where it spread its boughs in the brick-walled court.

He promptly took off his coat, displaying in the rays of a green-shaded student lamp a pair of forearms worthy of the hands which went with them. Summer and winter he wore his sleeves rolled above his elbows. His wrists resented cuffs as wild creatures resent cages. He stretched out his long legs on a cot which did duty by the fireplace as a sofa; pushed his hair off his forehead with both hands, fingers interlocked, a trick he had; and gave symptoms of feeling at home.

Was he talkative? Not much! Never did clam yield sh.e.l.l to knife edge more gingerly. He would and he would not. Shy, reserved, proud, devoured with ambition, savagely determined, a prey to some misgivings, genuinely modest, and anxious to talk it over with the right person, but by no means sure who the right person was.

On sped the ambrosial hours of the spring evening. Bit by bit he revealed himself. This was his third year in the Museum School. He admired the technique of Mr. Tarbell and Mr. Benson; he prized their instruction. But he distrusted their smoothness. He missed vigor. All round him he saw students neglecting their own creative bents to produce "little Bensons" and "little Tarbells." Already he had resolved to quit Boston as soon as his student days were over.

"I don't say I shall ever be able to paint as well as they can; but I must be myself,--not an imitation Tarbell."

There had been two years in Cornell before he came to Boston. He had rowed in his cla.s.s eight on Lake Cayuga. Hence that physical self-respect which betokens the young man accustomed unconcernedly to strip in a college boathouse or gymnasium. But to eyes grown impatient with the college athlete's all too customary intellectual torpor and social complacency it was a holiday to find this well-made body, tall, broad in the shoulder, narrow at hips, lean and muscular, housing also the brain of the thinker and the spirit of the pioneer.

For the astonishing thing was to find a young man of this type studying to be a portrait painter instead of a bond salesman. It didn't sound Yankee. I said so. That shot rang the bell. He began to open up.

He was, it appeared, of German extraction. His grandfather, who had wished to become an artist, had come to America in a period when artists were about as much in request among us as concert pianists on a cattle ranch. He had earned his living as an architectural sculptor.

The talent plunged, like a river, underground for a generation; then reappeared. What happened when this little fellow's fingers began to itch for the pencil was easy to guess. The father and grandfather put their heads together and resolved that he should have his chance.

It began to unravel. Now one understood the earnestness which seemed at first precocious--the seemingly cool indifference to the call of the world, the flesh and the devil which usually troubles youngsters of twenty-four. Here was something more than ambition. Loyalty, affection, grat.i.tude, and family pride. This boy had more than talent.

He had character.

With this we are in the heart of the conflict between the artist and the trader: between the will to create and the will to possess. It is the central conflict of any age; especially of this, and especially in America. The young man comes to the forks of the road where he must decide whether he shall acquire or create; whether he shall be a business man or a prophet. He finds himself in a society which offers princely rewards to the commercial career and little but pains and penalties to those who would create. This youngster was just learning his way around in the problem. He recited, with comical irony, the squalid plat.i.tudes which are chewed out at a youth bold enough to follow his creative bent:

"'Is there any _money_ in it?' 'Oh, of course, if you get to be a great painter. But how do you know you've got it in you to be a great painter? Think you have? Got a pretty good opinion of yourself, haven't you?' 'What if you fail? Suppose you wake up some morning and find yourself a middle-aged man and a fizzle? Guess you'll wish then that you'd stuck to plain everyday business and dropped all this highfalutin about art.' 'Yes. I suppose it's an easy life: sitting around and painting pictures. Pretty soft, eh? Give me a man's job!'

'Don't you think it's a little rash, my boy, to risk so much, when if you'd settle down to a good business you'd be sure of a decent living?

And what about marriage? If you marry you'll have to paint pot boilers, and then what becomes of your art? You might as well be a business man and be done with it. And if you don't, is it worth going without a wife and children in order to paint pictures, and so come at last to a lonely old age?'"

He knew all the old ones by heart. Later we used to recite them together in concert like school children in the geography cla.s.s.

If you took the roof off any Chamber of Commerce you would find half a dozen retired business men whose guilty secret it is that they dabble on the quiet with paint tubes, or modeling clay, or scenarios, or a violin--the poor, d.a.m.ned souls of artists. They have made their "pile." House and lot, wife and children, motor car and country club--all these they have; and yet, gnawing at their hearts is the secret knowledge that they have missed the big thing. They were born to beget children of the spirit; they were born to create in art, in music, in literature, in social experiment; and the ign.o.ble standards of the society in which they live have bludgeoned and ridiculed them into prost.i.tuting their highest powers in the market-place.

In such relationship did this young man stand to the life of his country and his time. With unflinching eye he listened to its taunt:

"Artist, create at your peril! You may starve, for all me, until you win a reputation that is a commercial a.s.set. After which, having despised you, I will do my best to corrupt you by rewards and flatteries gratifying to my intellectual sn.o.bbery."

Such were the terms. This youth, uncertain of his own powers, accepted them with quiet courage and imperturbable good humor. Such was the secret of that look of settled purpose so intriguing on a face so young, and such the secret of the fire which smouldered behind those dark eyes. He was prepared for a siege. He was ready to go to the mat.

It had taken three generations--son, sire, and grand-sire--to make this stand against the all-devouring maw of American commercialism: three generations to conquer and produce an artist. And mindful of his end I ask myself whether they did conquer. We shall see.

Midnight clanked from the city clocks.

"Gosh!" said he, "is it as late as that?" He stood up and knocked the ashes out of his pipe against the red bricks of the hearth. "By the way, I don't know your name."

I told him.

"Mine," said he, "is Fred Demmler."

Explaining that I already had a friend named Fred I asked if he had any objection to being called Fritz.

"None whatever."

"Fritz it is, then."

And Fritz it remained.

II

A once-aristocratic residential street now reduced to a teaming thoroughfare; pedestal to Beacon Hill; narrow, ill-paved, spattered with mud to the second story, double row of tall brick town houses, where Thackeray and d.i.c.kens were once guests, now placarding "rooms to let;" a.s.sorted antique shops and restaurants,--"the long, unlovely street" of _In Memoriam_, yet with a certain wistful charm in its decayed gentility: that is Charles Street.

Number 94 maintained its rubber plant on console-table in dark vestibule. There was a contraption, usually out of order, by which you pulled a bell five times to save yourself the climb if the art colony in the fifth-floor-back did not answer the ring. The young barbarians were usually out.

It was a colony of three: Ralph Heard, small, slender, fair, escaped from a western military academy of which he could tell tales that froze the blood; Irving Sisson, a tall, rangy Berkshire Yankee, dry and droll, an Artemus Ward turned art student (though known as "Siss"

it would never have occurred to anyone to call him "Sissie," and if anyone _had_ been so rash, Sisson's grim reply would have been, like the man in the yarn, "Smile when you say that"), and Fritz.

Their room was a first act stage-set for an American version of _La Boheme_. It was large, low-ceiled, and had one of those sepulchral white marble mantel-pieces of the black walnut period. There was an iron bed and a cot, a gaslight always out of kilter, a writing-table strewn with pipes, unanswered letters, tiny bottles of india ink, drawing pens, crayons, thumb tacks, jars holding bouquets of paint brushes, and scurrilous caricatures of one another scrawled on sc.r.a.ps of white cardboard. The place reeked with that heavenly odor of paint tubes. By the window was a drawing board and portfolios. Canvases were stacked in a dark corner, faces to the wall.