“Because I’ve been destroying the man’s property,” he said.
“What man?” I asked.
“The man whom this place belongs to.”
“Be happy,” I advised him; “be happy and enjoy whatever the work is you have undertaken even if it’s the destruction of the other fellow’s property.” And so Dick went back, and the sounds of hammering were mingled with a love song he’d learned from the gramaphone and no man disturbed our peace.
Returning whence we came, after a time, we sauntered into the garden of Mr. and Mrs. Boardman Robinson, there on a slope, overlooking the tennis court and the wonderful distant view of the Hudson; a large party eventually foregathered. Quite apart from the fact that it was pleasant, conditions made it extremely attractive. It was as though Greenwich Village in summer array had been dumped down with almost deliberate pageantry upon the grass. There were men in open-necked shirts, and there was one in a green sweater, another in a butcher blouse shirt and corduroy trousers like a French ouvrier. Women in yellow, and orange, children in royal blue, or bare-armed and bare-legged in bathing suits; lovely splotches of color grouped among the tree stems. Boardman Robinson, looking like a primitive man, with his red unkempt beard, bushy eyebrows and hair standing on end, lay on his stomach in the grass listening intently to Walter Fuller’s little sister, who sang old English folk songs to us, and sang them gracefully without any self-consciousness. Floyd Dell, the author of “Moon-Calf,” was there, and a great many people I didn’t know. And all the children were good (by a strange coincidence there was not a girl-child among them...!) and all the people were happy. One or two mothers asked me (and I looked at them twice to see if they were serious) when in my opinion conditions in Russian would be sufficiently adjusted to enable them to take their children there for education.
That evening, about 8:15, the train disgorged us in New York, and Dick, looking truly proletarian, went triumphantly two hours late to bed.
Monday, May 30, 1921.
I spent all the afternoon sitting to Emil Fuchs. He painted me last 15 years ago. Since then much water has flowed under the bridge. He did me then in a big Gainsborough hat and a fashionable black dress. I had just emerged from the school-room and my ambition was to look like a widow. To-day he did me in my yellow working smock.
I have known him since I was twelve years old, in the days when he worked in London and Edward VII was his patron. Success leaves no imprint on Fuchs. He is one of those modest ever-dissatisfied-with-himself, over-sensitive beings. He has never grown the extra skin which is one’s armor in dealing with the world. Fuchs is almost too sensitive, too deep feeling to be able to live at all. All his thoughts are beautiful thoughts, and if the world is not as beautiful as he demands it should be he feels almost suicidal with depression. He is the most generous-souled, pure-visioned person I have ever known. He likes very few people, and makes few friends, but those he does make are more devoted to him than other people’s friends are to them!
The picture began awfully well, I have great hopes and he was wildly enthusiastic. It was one of the few occasions on which I have seen him happy.