On the walls of the room were two paintings by Fritz; student works. One was a small landscape sketch—smouldering red of a sunset after rain, burning through ragged drab clouds over a hill country bathed in violet mists of twilight. It was modest, quiet. There was a strain of thoughtful poetry in it. But the striking part was its sincerity. There was none of that striving after effect, that ambitious rhetoric which youngsters usually mistake for eloquence: no attempt to make the scene anything more than what it was. The other was a portrait study of a workman naked to the waist. It was bold, vigorous, masculine, and overflowing with the joy of bodily health.
So far so good. But something else was in store.
Out of the canvases stacked against the wall he dug a study of a woman's head in profile. One looked; and then looked again. "Who was she?" She had come to the school as a model for one week: that was all they knew. But her secret was on this canvas. She must have been in her early thirties. Her face was quite serene. It was the serenity of a place reduced to ashes. Utter resignation. "Endure. Life has done its worst."
By what divination had this youngster of twenty-four guessed a secret like that? From that moment it was clear to me that he was a portrait painter.
"What," I asked, "is that little star in the lower corner of the canvas?"
"That? Oh," he explained diffidently, "that is put on pictures which the school saves for its exhibition."
III
That golden Spring! Clandestine dinners at an obscure French café in an obscure court, where one went because, though the food was something less than so-so, the sauces were exotic; "clandestine" because, behind closed shutters, they served vin ordinaire without a license. Our parties, to the disgust of Jacques, were teetotal, the real attraction being that the joint might be pinched any minute.