He began to paint the pear tree and a woman in a yellow dress sitting
on a bench. Thin sunlight poured over leaves and blossoms and fabric.
The intense color set going a complication of feelings. He felt a
scratchy, prickly sensation on his back, a stretching under his skin
right down to his finger tips and his toes; he felt warm inside, and
strong, and healthy in his bowels. He wanted to spit. He did, raising
his chin, aiming at a sparrow in the path. Then he kicked the gravel
with his heavy shoes, and scratched his nose, and set to work.
There is no telling what he thought while painting. He did not know
himself. The words got out of the way so he might see. But after an
hour, for no thought-out reason, he stopped and printed the word
happiness in neat green letters in one corner of his canvas. He looked
at this with something like surprise.
Should Flecker become famous and a collector find the unfinished
sketch of the Luxembourg pear tree and the woman in yellow, he must
not suppose the word to be the picture's title. Flecker put it there,
outside his head, so he might look at it a moment, thus obeying an
obscure impulse. Perhaps he wondered if happiness might not be a name
for something that cannot be confined in a name....
The sketch was never finished because Flecker looked up and saw the
witch walking toward the _rue d'Assas_. He flung down his brushes and
ran after. The path turns sharply just before it reaches the tall
gate and the witch was cut off from his vision for a moment--but he
was close behind and it was only for a moment. Still she was gone
when, quite breathless, he reached the gate. He looked all around him,
surveyed the _rue d'Assas_ and _rue Vavin_ and even looked in back
of the placarded _kiosk_ that stands just beyond the gate. She had
disappeared as completely as if she had leaped into the blue sky.
He went slowly back to his easel. He was sure it was the witch he had
seen. There could be no mistake--the face he glimpsed was hers. She had
magically disappeared on him. Spike shuddered. This magic was unlovely.
She must have known he was there. Why did she show herself only to
disappear? Doubtless to remind him his time was dwindling. The sketch
had gone dead. He could work no more.
On the _rue d'Assas_ a poet he knew, a young man in a black shirt and
baggy trousers, was chaining a bow-legged armchair to an iron hitching
post. The post was in front of an antique shop, in which the poet was
employed, and the bow-legged chair was, with proper precaution, being
displayed for sale. That was all. But it looked, standing there at the
extreme end of its tether, as if it were trying to run into the gardens
across the street.
"Hello, Marius," said Flecker. "Mind its hind legs!"
"Hello, Spike." The poet snapped the padlock and stood up.
"I have been thinking about a certain thing," Spike began without
preface. "And I want to know, are you happy?"
"No, I am not happy," the poet answered, after looking inside of
himself. "Once I was happy, I think. Tomorrow I expect to be happy. Now
I am not." He thrust his hands inside his belt and looked gratefully
at Spike for having asked such a serious, meaty question.
"In the center of the sensation of living there is pain. When I smell
the pear blossoms over there I have joy in them, _tu comprends_, and I
do not feel this pain; but it is there, and it deepens the color of the
joy."
He went on, seeing that Flecker still listened: "When I look down on
the river at dusk I want to weep. But I love the river then. I was in
love once, and that was when I was happy. But I have forgotten. There
was such a flare of agony at the end that I cannot remember back of it."
"Will you have a drink?" asked the poet, a light in his eye for more
talk.
"I will not," said Flecker. "I have work that must be done this
afternoon."
Nevertheless they went straight into the _bistro_ there on the corner
of the _rue Vavin_ and drank _bordeaux blanc_ out of round, thin-glass
goblets.
"Once back in America," Flecker remembered, "I wrote down things in a
note-book. I wrote, 'This week I have been almost happy.' A few months
later I read this over and remembered that I had not been happy at all.
"Again I wrote: 'How sad and lonely I am,' and when I read this long
afterward I remembered clearly that I was not sad. That was strange."
The poet's face was lean and pale; his eyes the color of dark
mahogany. Eagerness widened his eyes and vibrated in his gesture. Such
conversation as this was sustenance to him.
"_Alors_," he exclaimed before the first drink was quite gone, "the
next one is for me to pay."
"So is this one," Flecker said, gently as he could. "Unless you could
loan me something. I haven't got a _sou_!"
The poet waved away this sad news. They drank.
"It is perfect balance, and maybe there is no such thing." Marius was
thinking aloud. "_Attends_, I had a gray book, a red and yellow apple
and a white bowl with black figures on it. They were all on my table.
But it bothered me. It made something dead in the room. From being
balanced and dead in the center the room became dead all over.
"I took the apple and put it closer to the book, and the spirit of the
room flowed again. Now that they were off balance they pulled at each
other, striving, do you see? The relation between them lived. It was
beautiful.... But not happy."
The glasses were refilled and they drank.
"Sounds silly," said Marius.
"Oh, no!" Spike was emphatic. He was thinking he would borrow the
book, the bowl and the apple and paint them. Arranging them in his
mind, the red of the apple burned as a light, and he had a momentary
impulse to get away home and paint an apple of such color and of such
a down-pressing, significant _weight_, of such an inner, mysterious
vitality as had never been painted before ... an apple and a bowl and a
book that would sit in a square picture, alive forever!
He raised his goblet to the fading light in the window. ("It is already
dusk. My time is dwindling!") The wine in the glasses was golden.
Closing one eye Flecker quite unnecessarily looked for sediment in its
clear perfection.
They raised their glasses together, and drank, their eyes wandering
thoughtfully over the edges.
Spike turned round the painting of the pear tree and the woman in
yellow. He was warm with courage concocted by sun and grape vine two
summers before and dared to find his picture good.
"Damn it!" he exclaimed, hitting the bar with his fist so hard the
fat black-moustached woman behind it jumped and put her hand on her
extraordinary bosom. "Damn it! I can _see_!"
Marius looked.
"_Mais oui, c'est bein fait ça!_" Holding to the edge of the bar, he
searched the ceiling for words. "With a clarity, _mon ami_----You take
me before mystery of the tree blossoming in the sun and say look! and
blow from between us the mist. There is nothing between me and the
tree," said the poet.
"Nothing but me!" Spike put in with a strange grin.
"There is joy of life in that picture," added Marius.
Flecker laughed an abrupt, realizing laugh. Well, there was!