When with repeated drinks the dimensions of the room became vast--when
the priestly face of Rosie and the equine face of Belash swam in and
out of his vision like big fish in a glass tank, Flecker told them
about the witch.
"That is not all!" he cried. "Now I find I am in love with her and must
go seeking her everywhere. Yet she is a witch. Were she my sweetheart
she might use black magic on me!"
"Oh, Gee!" softly said the boy from Memphis, Tenn., looking two ways at
once and hiccoughing behind his hand, "The _calvados_ has gone to his
head."
They went out from the brightness of the café. Belash said to Rosie as
if Spike were not there: "He is pretty bad. He must stop drinking. He
sees things. He hears noises in his head."
"Do you recognize me?" Rosie thrust his face before Flecker's. "It's
your old friend Rosie Rosenberg, 's all ri'. Everything's all ri'.
We'll get you right home, safe and sound, Spike, ol' boy."
They walked him the length of the Luxembourg. There was no light in
the sky. From the gardens came the perfume of wet flowers. His friends
patted his back and made sympathetic noises. He was not angry. He was
astounded, recognizing the impossibility of sharing his experience. It
were better to say no more, to let his story of the witch pass as a
drunken vagary.
"Goo' ni'," said Rosie, swaying forward and back, his hands in his
khaki breeches. "Goo' ni', ol' boy! See you firsh thing tomorrr. Forget
abou' witches, ol' boy. You been seein' things, see? You been _dring_.
You be'er _stop_ dring!"
"Hadn't we better stay with him all night, Rosie?" asked Belash.
"I'm all right," Flecker repeated. While they sadly looked at him, he
went in and closed the door.
The clock of the _concierge_ struck twelve as he made his way slowly up
the twisting stairs....
In bed he gazed at the ring. Its glow dimmed and brightened in a slow
rhythm of life.
One hundred fearless years?
What good would anything be if he were to die tomorrow? His mother had
died when she was twenty-two--less than a year older than he; and his
father at thirty-five! His belief that he would live for many years was
made of hope and willful ignorance. Perhaps even now he had in him the
germ that was to cause his death. Perhaps it would kill him in agony on
the eve of his day of triumph! How simple, then, to choose his wish!
Man alive, what do you wish?... I wish to live!... It was easy when one
could think straight. If the witch had doubted his ability to decide
quickly, _she_ was wrong!
He could not sleep.
"I wonder what date it is. Let's see.... Yesterday--no the day before
was.... It's May twentieth, nineteen hundred and twenty-three," he
whispered to the darkness.
MAY TWENTIETH, TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY-THREE!
On that day he was condemned to die! What matter that death be one
hundred years away, or ninety--it was certain. It would come upon a day
that would surely come, and upon that day, what matter that in the past
were one hundred years of living? Over that day, over the days, the
weeks, the months, aye, the years before that day, the shadow of the
expectance of death!
He cowered before the thoughts he had dared to awaken. Fearless years?
They would be utterly hopeless years. He only of all men would be
certain of death, for, he said to himself, even the man condemned to
hang did not believe in his death, hoping that reprieve would come
at the last moment. To the old man, no less than to the boy, life
spread on ahead endlessly. An insurance clerk of eighty must know his
chance of living another year was one in a thousand and prove it by
statistics, still his fears were soothed by knowledge that some men did
live to be one hundred! To remove Chance would make death master of all
the days of life!
He might wish for a long life, and so remain friends with Chance!...
But, alas, what was a long life?... Or he might wish to live forever!
Did he know what forever was? Was forever the name of something or of
nothing? But the thought of living without hope of death was a horror!
Without inevitable tragedy life was incomplete--it had no form! It had
lost its mystery, its significance....
In his imagination Spike found torture....
He sat in a rocker, an old man. His beard rested upon his breast, his
gnarled hands trembled on his lap, palm to palm. From his waist down
he was paralyzed, thanks to that motor-car accident back in 1942,
and frequent headaches prevented painting. His uncle and his aunt
hobbled by. She said: "It would be better if Spike could pass on ...
but the wish will keep him alive until May twentieth, two thousand
and twenty-three!" They went away and presently died. Waterville was
a strange town full of strangers. Spike was alone, a sick man in a
rocker, waiting for the interminable years to pass so that he might
die.... Supposing _that_!
"Belash is a fool!" thought Spike.
The decision which had seemed as definite as a pebble in his hand had
dissolved to nothing!
Spike remembered that a night and a day and part of another night were
gone. Already it was Wednesday!
There was dark all around him but the hollow of his mind was filled
with a clear light. It was like a house in the midst of darkened houses
having a party.
The party was too grotesque. The white light was too intense. The
guests ran madly from room to room. They did painful, ugly, illogical
things. Flecker turned out the lights, but his guests turned them on
again. He lay on his left side and on his right. He pulled his knees up
to his chin, stared into the dark. Once he coughed, sending a helpless,
lonely sound running down the passage.
To forget his thought of death Flecker thought of the witch. Her dark
face under the round hat of black feathers was as distinct in the
blazing light in the hollow of his mind as if she were outside him. He
mingled his tender thoughts of her with an impersonal wonder that he
could make so clear an image.
Spike knew the chemical analysis of the red he painted with. He even
knew its wave-length in the hierarchy of the spectrum. Seeing plainly
the red of the witch's lips he wondered how come he made it. With what?
But the image did not really exist. It was a thought, only. A thought
did not exist. Oh, didn't it? Could he, then, see red when there was no
red to be seen?
He closed his eyes to look inward at the witch's blue-black hair,
but her image had gone. Perhaps he did not see colors in his memory
but lived over the feeling aroused by them. Did he get anywhere by
changing the word for red from "red" to "feeling aroused by red?" What
was the feeling?
The thought that perhaps no one in the world could answer startled him.
If there were not somewhere quiet, dignified men who knew surely about
things, Spike was loose in space, helpless indeed. If men did not know
what thoughts and things were how could they bear to go on living?
There was something profoundly dishonest and ignoble about being
willing to live in ignorance--to go on working and walking and eating,
eyes carefully front lest one see, and by seeing confess the Mystery
always there at one's elbow, awaiting, demanding solution. If this were
an accurate picture of Man, Spike wondered what did people mean when
they talked of wise men and wiser men. A wise man was, perhaps, one who
concealed his bewilderment with impressive words, a wiser man one who
impressively described his bewilderment.
From a wondering thought at his clear image of the witch his thinking
had run on to a consideration of the Whole World. He saw it, a dimly
luminous globe, revolving slowly in darkness. He, Spike Flecker, stood
upright on it, his legs spread wide to keep his balance. The sun
looked into his face while yet his feet were hidden below the curve.
The sun beat upon his shoulders. He went down into the night. He saw
the stars in the endless dark; and underneath the turning world there
was nothing--a sheer drop down, forever! But the sensation of forever,
Spike remembered before his spirit went whimpering into the Abyss, the
sensation of forever was also within his own red head. Perhaps it was
not outside it!
He felt a relaxing weariness making its way slowly through him. His
mind had been a house giving a party to a ghastly company, but the
glaring white light had not penetrated to the cellar, and there through
it all, some one had sat holding four black hairs in his fingers,
pondering. The memory-thought of the witch's black hair did not run
down the cellar stair. But perhaps it waited at the door....
"... you turn the ring three times and say your wish aloud," said the
witch's deep voice in Spike's memory. He loved the sound of her voice.
Sinking toward sleep Flecker smiled in the darkness.
"Tomorrow," he told himself, "tomorrow I will turn the ring three times
and wish for happiness."
The word was a crisp refreshing sound, and left a feeling somehow of
bright water, sunlight ... a far clear ringing.
The three walls of the room listened to Spike's regular breathing. His
hands opened and lay relaxed. Carelessly, unquestioningly, as one would
like to know one could die, he let go consciousness, and the tension
of consciousness. The light of the magic ring went out. His thoughts
swooned obliquely and wavered like things under water too heavy to
rise--except only the memory-thought of the witch's long, black hair
and this now opened the door and ran down the cellar stair, and it and
the one that pondered made together a nightmare like a monstrous hairy
toad with the witch's face, and set it crawling through Spike's window.
Spike writhed under the covers and woke. It seemed to him there was a
sound outside his window as of some one crawling along the wall. It was
his awful dream, he told himself hopefully. He remembered he had found
no tenable explanation for the black hairs.
It was dawn before the fears that rose terribly in his imagination
permitted him to go to sleep, again.