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be blown away before the winter came.
ii
    Out in the stubbled field, the brewer’s boy scowled. The stoop-shouldered man crouching on the bare patch of ground glared right back. He gripped the piece of tree limb so hard, his knuckles turned white.
    The man’s sagging trousers were shiny with grease and daubed with paint. The sun lit a bald spot at the back of his head and the warm wind played with his jutting beard. Some four feet behind him, Matthew Kent knelt in the dirt. He was supposed to be catching for the game, but right now he was hurrying to finish his sketch. Asking his friend to come along on the regular Saturday excursion had been a disastrous idea. Paul was just not the sort who could function as a member of a team. The game was liable to end in a riot.
    “Come on, throw it, you piece of moldering bird shit!” the batter cried, thumping the tree limb on home base and raising dust. The brewer’s boy who was pitching bent over and spat on the ground with studied contempt.
    “We know you can curse, Paul,” he called. “We know you have a large vocabulary of filthy words, and are passionately fond of every one. You don’t need to spout them to make me dislike you, though. I already dislike you as much as I could possibly dislike anyone.”
    Ignoring the scarlet that rushed into Paul’s cheeks, the brewer’s boy turned his back on him and began tossing the ball up and catching it. One by one, he surveyed his four teammates. Two were in the outer field. One stood close to the rock serving as first base. The other had his pants open and was urinating on third. The three players on Paul’s team had returned to their watercolor easels and wine bottles. They had no interest in encouraging the bearded man, even though he was on their side.
    Frowning, Matt pushed a strand of sun-bleached brown hair away from his pale forehead. Dolly was returning from her holiday late this afternoon, and before meeting her, Matt wanted some advice from his friend. Paul was certainly the last man on earth to ask about personal relationships, but Matt did respect his opinion of artistic talent, bizarre though Paul’s own work sometimes was.
    Paul had come up from Aix-en-Provence in preparation for the wedding of his good friend Zola, a pugnacious little journalist who wrote everything from art criticism to melodramatic novels. On the spur of the moment, Matt had invited Paul to join the group of students, practicing artists and working-class boys who tramped out from Montmartre every Saturday for an American-style baseball game. He’d been surprised when Paul accepted the invitation. But then Paul was moody and given to impulses. Matt definitely felt his own impulse had been ill-advised. Paul was at bat for only the second time, and the other team was baiting him unmercifully. Of course Paul’s bad manners and utterly foul language begged for it.
    “Come on, come on!” he screamed.
    The brewer’s boy glanced over his shoulder. “When I’m good and ready.”
    Paul gritted his teeth, plainly wanting to rush out to the pitcher and throttle him.
    While the deliberate delay continued, Matt’s right hand kept moving, making slashing strokes with the lump of charcoal. At least the antagonism of the other team gave him a chance to finish his sketch. It was a recognizable likeness of the batter, but no one would have called it a faithful portrait. It was done in Matt’s usual style—a blend of a few graceful, flowing lines and sudden, interrupting angles which perfectly abstracted the essence of the subject and conveyed Matt’s highly personal impression of it.
    He had put Paul in profile, facing an invisible pitcher. He’d exaggerated the jutting beard so that it resembled a cluster of stiff horizontal wires. Shading heightened the dark quality of Paul’s face, and a highlight in the pupil of the eye glowed like a tiny fireball, suggestive of hostility or madness. As drawn, Paul resembled a furious Italian peasant more than