Immortal Youth Part 5

Conscription impended. Under his composure the struggle was going on.

Tolstoy had converted him. What was he to do?

"If there were no one but myself to consider...," said he, "But the suffering which you would have no hesitation in imposing on yourself you hesitate to impose on those dearer to you than yourself."

He was thrilled by the nonresistance of the still-young Russian revolution:

"Wonderful people, liberated by their refusal to kill! They fold their arms and say 'Shoot!' The Cossacks refuse to shoot them. And a despotism, centuries old, comes tumbling down. It proves everything that Tolstoy has said."

For three days, tramping about the scrubby countryside, rambling along the banks of the Ohio, rowing up the swift, muddy current of the Kanawah, the dilemma of a man born to create and commandeered to destroy was threshed out. Never before had he spoken so freely. The economic causes of the trouble he understood fairly well, but it was startling with what a seeing eye he pierced the illusions which beset that time. By that faculty of divination peculiar to the artist's mind he reached, at one leap, conclusions which the thinker only arrives at after laborious effort. And he was a young man without an illusion left, steadfastly looking the ugliest facts of our social order in the face.

On the last evening of his stay we were standing on the steel spider web of a suspension bridge which spans the Ohio, watching a sunset unfurl its banners of blood and fire.

All day there had been thunder and rain, and eastward behind the towers and spires of the city skyline still hung the retreating clouds, sullen and dark. Fritz pointed to where, against that gloomy cloud bank, high above the city and gilded red from the setting sun, rose two symbols: one on the tip of a spire, the other on the staff atop a tower: cross and flag.

"Church," said he grimly, "and State."

The next day he returned to Pittsburgh to register for the draft.

July found me back in New England at a farm on the banks of the Merrimac in West Newbury. Returning one noon from an errand up the hills to the village I was hailed by the children with a shout:

"A friend of yours is here."

"Who is he?"

"He told us his name but we've forgotten it."

"What does he look like?"

Descriptions varied:

"He's awfully strong," said the boy.

"He has shiny black hair and black eyes," said the littlest girl.

"He wears his coat off and his sleeves rolled up," said the biggest little girl, and she added, with the spontaneous poetry of childhood, "And his hands are beeootiful!"

"Where is he?"

"Down by the river."

Under the maples, lying in the tall gra.s.s at the foot of a steep bank which sloped to the stream, with children clambering all over him, was Fritz. He scrambled to his feet and came forward putting out his hand with that awkwardness of meeting after an absence which he never quite outgrew, but his eyes snapped with enjoyment at my astonishment.

It appeared that he had been painting some one in a Ma.s.sachusetts mill city and had dashed up here between-whiles.

There is a tiny hut perched like a brown owl on a knoll in a grove of hickories beside the river. To this hermitage we retired and he related the news of the intellectual underworld in Pittsburgh. Roger Baldwin had been there, much to his comfort. A friend whose portrait he had been painting, aware that the mildest radicalism had now become high treason, had remarked by way of chaffing him,

"I hope they give you a cell with a north light."

He unburdened with a tone of sheer physical relief:

"This frantic enthusiasm for 'democracy,'" said he, "on the part of people who have spent their whole lives combating it!"

He sat relaxed in a deep chair, hands hanging limp on its arms--hands large, strongly muscled, marked with heavy veins, the fingers full-fleshed at their tips, the skin bronzed by the sun.

Tatters of sunlight, reflected from the wavelets of the river obliquely up underneath the hickory boughs, flickered on the ceiling and walls of the hut.

Disillusioned he was, but not cynical. His humor was a bath to a sore spirit. He kindled, in the moral solitude of that hour, a little fire of faith and hope. It struck me anew, eyeing him as he sat there, what a beautiful creature he was, inside and out.

There was in him, too, an odd streak of stoicism. Keen as he was for "the eats," he delighted in little acts of self-discipline. That afternoon, it being necessary for me to try for a nap, he cleared out to gather views of river and woods. An hour later I discovered this young Spartan, hands clasped behind head, spine stretched along the plank flooring of the narrow ledge in front of the hut, sleeping quietly....

The next day he made himself everlastingly solid with the people at the farm by spending the whole morning fitting screens to the mult.i.tudinous doors and windows of their ark of a house. Everyone wanted Fritz to stay a month.

At nine that evening he left. As we trudged over the road in the warm darkness of the summer night, he talked soberly of the dubious future.

He was not called until the following April, 1918. Twice that winter he came to Boston. Number 94 Charles Street had been dismantled. But the third-floor-back on Pinckney Street received him with an extra cot for bivouac.

... This should have been the longest chapter of all, and the best. I find that I cannot write it.

Only a postscript. I asked him for a picture of himself.

"What do you want," he inquired, "a painting?"

My ideas had been far more modest:

"Beggars should not be choosers. I will take what I can get: painting, photograph, snap-shot: and be thankful."

"What size would you like?"

"Small enough so that it can go wherever I go."

He made no promises. His way was to wait until the time came and then let the performance speak.

Not three weeks later it came: a sketch in oils, head and shoulders, ten inches by twelve, not at all the cold greenish grays I had antic.i.p.ated from his habitual att.i.tude of self-effacement, but on the contrary a scheme of rich golden browns. He has painted his own portrait with the same reticence which looks out of its eyes.

Strangers seeing it remark,

"What a striking face!"

His friends view it and say,

"He was much finer looking than that."