It happened that Alexander James was studying at the Museum School. That the son of "the psychologist who made psychology read like a novel" and the nephew of "the novelist who made a novel read like psychology" should have identified Fritz's talent the first crack out of the box was about the least surprising thing in the world. The two young painters proceeded to form an offensive and defensive alliance. Where one was, there was the other also; on the baseball field, on painting expeditions, on pilgrimages in early spring into New Hampshire to climb Chocorua, and on occasional voyages into the land of pretty girls. It was good to see the pair together: two thoroughbreds. Both athletes, both artists, one dark, the other fair, both about the same height and build. People would turn to look after them as they passed with an expression of "Wonder who they are. Somebody out of the ordinary."
Alexander was wont to disguise his frank admiration of Fritz behind a smoke screen of banter. This Fritz would suffer with an amused grin and the massive calm of a mastiff, for he had no such arsenal of repartee as this young gentleman from the household of a Harvard professor; but once in a while he would land a retort so neat as to set Alexander spinning. It did not take the Cambridge youth long to discover the use Fritz made of his talent for silence and it was his delight to give him away in his game of holding his tongue the better to use his eyes,—as Alexander said: "the wise old Bruin!"
In Massachusetts the anniversary of the battle of Lexington, April 19, is a holiday. It was 1913. In the parlor of an inn whose windows look northward across the snug haven of Rockport to the surf-scoured ledges of Pigeon Cove I was seated at a piano, back to the door, painfully dissecting a score of Tristan.
The door opened and a voice exclaimed, "Good Lord!"
It was Fritz. With him was Alexander James. Both were half ossified with the chill of the mid-April afternoon, for they had been painting on the shore down towards Straitsmouth.
General astonishment. The two expeditions had originated quite independently. It was whimsically like those momentous chance encounters in picturesque spots which abound in the novels of Alexander's uncle Henry; but the novelist, be it noted, doesn't always save these coincidences from a slightly fishy sound which was totally wanting in this.
They thawed themselves out and exhibited their sketches. Fritz had, as usual, gone after it and got it—a spirited bit: druidical heaps of pink granite boulders against dashing surf: dazzling white of foam-crest on deep blue.
There was a jolly supper in the brown-walled dining room (it had been the kitchen of an eighteenth century farm house) which the last rays of the spring sun flooded with red golden light; the two painters comparing notes on the exhibitions of the Scandinavians and the Ten Americans.
They departed for a home-talent play at a local hall in a frame of mind which boded no good for the performance.... About eleven o'clock they breezed in with the announcement that there was a Northwest wind (the New England wind which sweeps the sky cloudless blue), a full moon and a dashing sea; and that to go to bed was a crime. Away, then, for Land's End, along shore paths at the edge of grassy cliffs, by bushy lanes, over meadows, moors, popple beaches and brooks, across the moon-blanched land beside the moon-burnished sea. Straitsmouth Light burned a yellow spark. The twin lights on Thatcher's Island shone weird blue in their tall towers. Low on the rim of sky and sea hung gigantic masses of cloud whitened by the bluish pallor of the moon. In the marsh bottoms frogs cheeped their shrill sweet song of spring: the northwester bellowed through the willow twigs ... mournful pour of surf ... splendor of spring moon ... the lonely moor ... the steadfast light-house flames ... the white walls and gray roofs of the sleeping town....
At one in the morning, tip-toeing into the dining room, we devoured a plate of bread and butter left for late comers. Both of them were too genuine artists to comment on what we had seen.