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 shores. 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-butter 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 attitude 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 hoarded, 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.