Part 5 (1/2)

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 s.h.i.+ny 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,