In May, 1917, he came to Boston from Pittsburgh. I was in Parkersburg,
West Virginia. He came there.
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 grass 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 Massachusetts 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
multitudinous 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
anticipated from his habitual attitude 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."