G.W. -- March 18th, 1925.

# A MAN, A WRITER, A PAINTER

## A DRAWING

There was the one whose mind was gentle and whose warmth was as clear as ice and who seemed in his reticence to be naming very softly what he wanted, and there was the one whose thought was so dry and strong and whose passions were so obvious that he was scarcely ever loved, save always by the one whose mind was gentle.

And there was Eugene. The beauty of his head lay in its soft sharpness and in the suggestion of liberal gifts in its economy; his eyes brooded upon a meadow and a sleeper and the Italian air; and his mouth was like a kiss in mid-air of two small scimitars. The one who wanted to see everything had never seen his body which was always mobile inside his clothes, infinitely mobile as a taut bow-string during the moment before its motion.

He spoke without seeming to use words and surely without emphasizing or putting his confidence in any of the words, so that he told only a little but the little that he did tell was very pure and true. The one whose mind was always working thought it strange that he could discover such fine words without suffering from their magic or feeling toward them any fear or fascination, for to him words were very sweetly terrible whether true or untrue, spoken or unspoken, and he was a little lonely in the formidable heart of the glitter his words made because they were public thoughts which every one had to understand. But the painter's words came not from his brain but very

2.

intimately as if they were whispers from his lips, while his thoughts were all pictures.

In his mind, as in one picture, two young men lay on a
stone-white wrinkled cloth and on short strong grass. Green,
white, and brown; gray, tan, an empty colour; gun-metal, and a
sinking rose, and handfuls of snow that was not snow but linen.
A season after spring and neither summer not autumn, immobile
as winter and having summer's sad tone, in which the trees were
not separate and an invisible clock had just struck the hour
and the trees, having ceased to wave branches of hard, heavy
leaves, had not yet begun to wave them again. A serene hand
of each young man rested on a knee and on a thigh, and the
head of each was upheld by a wrist or by a palm. The light
which poured there gently and in silence (for one heard no
tinkle of sunbeams and no plaintive wet echoes) was the light
one had always lacked to see what one loved by, a light like
a touch moving evenly, slowly... The picture was unsigned and
no hand seemed to have touched it, as if the light itself had
drawn and coloured it -- the light, (that clear, able courtesy)
being his essential nature. And the two young men's faces
differed from his own face in as much as [in them] there was
only the languid melancholy which remains when every cry has
been contented and when, in the cool stillness, every desire
has been poured out.
Eternal afternoon