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 Dickens were once guests, now placarding "rooms to
let;" assorted 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 scraps
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.
Their windows looked into a deep courtyard formed by a triangle of
tall brick houses,--the rears of houses on Charles and Brimmer
Streets, the fronts of three quaint Italianate red-brick
dwellings,--all enclosing a tiny greensward on which slender poplars
rustled their glossy leaves. In the farthest corner of this court rise
the walls and mullioned windows of the Church of the Advent, and on
mild evenings when casements were open, the thrush-like voices of the
choir boys over the melodious thunder of great organ floated up to
these windows. But I was never able to observe that it produced any
pietistic tone in number 94. On the contrary they affected to take a
lively interest in the upper windows of the houses opposite and
threatened to keep a pair of field glasses on their window sill.
As you go down Pinckney Street to the river you pass a break in the
solid row of house fronts through which you can look up and see the
two windows of that fifth-floor-back. One always did look, and if they
were lighted, it was impossible not to go up; for in that room there
was always some form of what is technically known as "trouble." I
never pass the spot now without looking up to see if there is a light
in those windows.... They are dark.
* * * * *
On the walls of the room were two paintings by Fritz; student works.
One was a small landscape sketch--smouldering red of a sunset after
rain, burning through ragged drab clouds over a hill country bathed in
violet mists of twilight. It was modest, quiet. There was a strain of
thoughtful poetry in it. But the striking part was its sincerity.
There was none of that striving after effect, that ambitious rhetoric
which youngsters usually mistake for eloquence: no attempt to make the
scene anything more than what it was. The other was a portrait study
of a workman naked to the waist. It was bold, vigorous, masculine,
and overflowing with the joy of bodily health.
So far so good. But something else was in store.
Out of the canvases stacked against the wall he dug a study of a
woman's head in profile. One looked; and then looked again. "Who was
she?" She had come to the school as a model for one week: that was all
they knew. But her secret was on this canvas. She must have been in
her early thirties. Her face was quite serene. It was the serenity of
a place reduced to ashes. Utter resignation. "Endure. Life has done
its worst."
By what divination had this youngster of twenty-four guessed a secret
like that? From that moment it was clear to me that he was a portrait
painter.
"What," I asked, "is that little star in the lower corner of the
canvas?"
"That? Oh," he explained diffidently, "that is put on pictures which
the school saves for its exhibition."