Immortal Youth: A Study in the Will to Create
By Lucien Price
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Immortal Youth - Lucien Price
Lucien Price
Immortal Youth: A Study in the Will to Create
EAN 8596547139706
DigiCat, 2022
Contact: [email protected]
Table of Contents
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I
Table of Contents
THERE was a humble restaurant on Charles Street where cabmen and chauffeurs could be induced to tell the story of their lives over a combination-supper of lamb chop and two fried eggs costing (that was in 1912), with coffee and rolls, twenty-five cents. Across the table one evening in the spring of that year sat a young man about twenty-four years old. Anyone would have taken a second look at him; also a third, a fourth, and as many more as good manners would permit. What was there about him that attracted attention? It was hard to say. The dark eyes with a somber light burning in them? The rugged features and swarthy complexion with a ruddy glow of health in each jowl? The hands; very large and finely muscled? (I have never seen a more beautiful pair of hands on a human being.) It was all of these things and none of them. Rather it was the look of one with immense forces in reserve, bound on an errand.
Impossible to guess anything from his clothes: dark suit, shirt of gray flannel, and black knitted tie. Chauffeur? Hardly. Well then, what? Who?
(This is no isolated personal impression. Wherever he went people felt the same intense curiosity about him. Sometimes they stared at him so that he asked me if his face was smudged.)
Was this stranger conversible? He was. Presently he was speaking of the colonial doorways on Chestnut Street with a discrimination which suggested the architect. No. It appeared that he was studying under Mr. Tarbell at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts. Next, that he came from Pittsburgh. Here was a bond in common. As two young Middle Westerners we resented the social cold storage which New England imposes as a probationary period of acquaintance. We condoled. We fraternized. We were as neighbors meeting in a foreign land. At last somebody with whom it was safe to scrape acquaintance in the good old-fashioned Middle Western way without incurring suspicion of designs on one another's souls, bodies, or estates.
He climbed Beacon Hill with me to the house where I lived, carrying a paper bag which, he explained modestly, contained his breakfast: two bananas and a shredded wheat biscuit.
The evening was mild. Windows stood open to the breeze which rumpled the leaves of an old linden where it spread its boughs in the brick-walled court.
He promptly took off his coat, displaying in the rays of a green-shaded student lamp a pair of forearms worthy of the hands which went with them. Summer and winter he wore his sleeves rolled above his elbows. His wrists resented cuffs as wild creatures resent cages. He stretched out his long legs on a cot which did duty by the fireplace as a sofa; pushed his hair off his forehead with both hands, fingers interlocked, a trick he had; and gave symptoms of feeling at home.
Was he talkative? Not much! Never did clam yield shell to knife edge more gingerly. He would and he would not. Shy, reserved, proud, devoured with ambition, savagely determined, a prey to some misgivings, genuinely modest, and anxious to talk it over with the right person, but by no means sure who the right person was.
On sped the ambrosial hours of the spring evening. Bit by bit he revealed himself. This was his third year in the Museum School. He admired the technique of Mr. Tarbell and Mr. Benson; he prized their instruction. But he distrusted their smoothness. He missed vigor. All round him he saw students neglecting their own creative bents to produce little Bensons
and little Tarbells.
Already he had resolved to quit Boston as soon as his student days were over.
I don't say I shall ever be able to paint as well as they can; but I must be myself,—not an imitation Tarbell.
There had been two years in Cornell before he came to Boston. He had rowed in his class eight