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.