He went to the _Café de Lilas_ and again sat at a table out in front.
He wanted to see the witch approach, walking quickly on her clicking
heels like a little white goat. She did not come.
The waiter, unobtrusively sympathetic, told him Madame had paid the
check the day before.
"Who is she? Does she come here often?"
The waiter shook his head slowly.
"I never even saw her before," he said. "She said to me that in the
_Café Tout Va Mieux_--what a name, m'sieu, for a café!--one pays one
franc and not one franc twenty-five for a large _vin blanc_!" He pulled
down the corners of his mouth and hunched his shoulders--Had he aught
to do with the fixing of prices? Perhaps Madame might be found at the
_Tout Va Mieux_! "Tell me," said the waiter, almost with impatience,
"where the devil is your hat?"
Flecker put his hand on his hair. "I lost it. I had a good hat and I
left it I forget where."
"You forget in which boudoir!" An astonishingly wide smile split the
waiter's pallid head, and he wagged a forefinger in mock rebuke.
Flecker said nothing to this worldly fooling but it did not offend him.
On the contrary as he made his way toward the Boulevard Raspail he
swaggered a little and smiled a knowing smile at himself.
In his life class in the _Rue de la Grande Chaumiere_ Flecker neglected
his study of the male model to sketch his memory of the witch's face.
The sketch was very like her. He looked at it and a pleasant pain
touched him and faded.
A little silver-blonde English girl whose eyes were as blue as the
pigment she now laid on with a palette knife next a blare of the usual
orange, exclaimed in a high, sweet voice: "Hello, Yank!"
"Hello." Flecker barely turned his head. The day before yesterday he
had been interested, but now his imagination was filled with the dark
beauty of the witch of the _Café de Lilas_.
"What's the _Tout Va Mieux_?" he asked.
"A chauffeurs' _bistro_. Good onion soup!" the girl told him. "We'll go
there this afternoon."
Flecker studied his sketch, one eye closed, for a minute before he
looked around. "Sorry," he said. "There's _quelque_ other _chose_ I
must do."
He put up his easel and went to the _Tout Va Mieux_. The afternoon
waned as he sat in this miserable little café. The witch did not come.
When he asked, the _patron_, a hairy old fellow who walked around
behind the bar in his undershirt, said he had never seen such a girl.
After dinner Flecker went to a café where the walls were covered with
paintings of its customers. An American named Rosenberg, from Memphis,
Tenn., and Belash, an English-speaking student from Budapesth, joined
him. Rosenberg was growing a curly black beard. He wore a velvet jacket
and khaki breeches stuffed into patent leather puttees, and never
explained why he chose so horsey a costume for a life lived exclusively
in cafés and studios. Nobody ever asked him to explain. Belash, who was
short and broad shouldered, had sad eyes and long teeth. A wild bang of
black hair fringed over his eyes. He looked like a pony.
When three small glasses of _calvados_ had been placed before them,
Belash talked of the comical, brown-eyed bitch pup he had with him
in the Carpathians. Day after day the Russian artillery rumbled and
pounded beyond the hill; and if it changed the slightest in rhythm or
tone, the pup ran into the dugout whimpering with excitement. She would
note the change before he did.
"We lost her in retreat," Belash told them. "There was a lot of
confusion. I wonder what happened to her. I wish she would come running
along the _trottoir_ now." He yawned and looked sad.
They had more drinks.
"Rosie," said Flecker, "what do you want most in the world?"
Rosenberg thought. "A schooner yacht, all fitted up, with a studio, and
a good north light.... I'd go cruising in the Mediterranean. Then I'd
be far away from people and could work."
"Who ever heard of a north light on a yacht," Belash scoffed. "If you
wanted a north light you'd just turn the boat around." He and Flecker
laughed immoderately. They didn't believe Rosenberg would do much work
on his yacht.
"What's your wish?" Flecker asked Belash.
"I don't know," said the Hungarian. "Maybe to forget the war.... No,
not if I had only one wish. To live a hundred years, I think." He was
six or seven years older than his companions.
Flecker looked his surprise.
"Oh, I wouldn't," he exclaimed. "I want to stay young for a long time,
but when I am old I won't want to live any more.
"Look, I ought to have about forty more years of activity--maybe fifty.
Even if I did no more than fifty pictures a year--less than one a
week--at the end of forty years I would have two thousand heaped up....
Enough to fill the whole ground floor of the Louvre." He suddenly heard
himself filling the Louvre with his own work, and laughed. "Well, of
course, nobody works so steadily; but gosh! forty years seems plenty
long enough--they stretch on and on ahead of me, room enough to do what
I came for. Anyway, if you wished for a hundred years--there's an end
to a hundred years, too; and when they had ended they'd be ended."
Belash scraped his feet and looked away. Rosie nodded. Spike felt he
had almost said something, but that it had not been understood.
"You may not have forty, or even one, for that matter," said Belash,
yawning again. "It would be something to be sure! Life is a little too
much like sitting under artillery fire.... You may live through the day
and you may not. One manages to forget.... But it's exhausting!...
Ho ... hum!" He stretched and wiped tears of weariness from his eyes.
"Another drink! _Garçon!_"
"I'll say this is a gay party!" offered the disheartened Rosie.
"Just one hundred years more! That's all I'd ask for," added Belash.
"One hundred fearless years!"
Spike did not reply. He was thinking.