Now on the fourth day--Friday--he could not even pretend to continue
the normal routine of meals and friendly talk and painting. At some
moment in the next forty-eight hours, he must say crucial words and
turn the ring. His life, in a very real sense, was in his own hands.
Tomorrow noon his time was up.
It seemed an inspiration when he thought to seek guidance in the old
tales of magic. He found several volumes of them in Madame's meager
library in the chilly, unused room beyond the _pension salon_. But in a
whole morning of reading he could find no instance of hesitation! The
lucky one always wished some simple thing immediately.
A man in long hose and leather jacket sat under a tree pondering the
wish granted him by a magician, and decided for a bag of gold pieces
and a black horse. The road which led to a tavern, a day's ride away,
was muddy. There were wolves in the dark forest. Flecker made a sunset
like a great fire behind bare trees and set his man upon the horse,
watched him gallop away westward, splashing through puddles that blazed
with reflections,--listened to his exultant shout without envy, but
with contempt for his little, difficult, unrealized world....
Perhaps Flecker was the first modern man to find himself in his
predicament? The people of the old world had so little they knew surely
what they wanted. They knew about Almighty God, who wore a beard and
sat in an armchair about a mile above the fields, and life was very
short and very long, too, for the days were so full of unthinking
effort.
The people of the recorded olden times wished for a beautiful castle
on a high hill and lived therein until death. But the hill was not so
high one might see from the windows back along thirty centuries,--as
one may from a bungalow,--nor forward even one. In the castle there
were no great volumes filled with words and pictures of things dug
up by man's relentless curiosity from sand and soil in all corners
of the world; there was a sentimental half-belief in dragons, but
no knowledge that once upon a time only dragons had lived on the
earth,--that man's grandfather and grandmother were dragons; there
were no movies flickering like thoughts against a white wall, no
phonograph, no machinery with which to achieve the sensation of speed;
no diagrams of the fourth dimension, no contrasts to life like that
of Waterville, Minn., and Paris, France. In the castle the light was
weak and flickering, hallways were dark, rooms deeply shadowed. The
little outside world was full of shadow, and on the very top of the
mind of him who lived in the castle played a dim light--underneath
were shadows, fear, ignorance, will-to-ignorance. Most of all there
was not in the castle on the hill the breathless sense of imminent
revelation--that today or surely tomorrow Man would at a stroke double
his power and change the world again.
The ancient tales of magic were the mumbling thoughts of a distant,
shabby little world--so thought Flecker, offended. The tales gave him
no guidance. There was too much difference between his world and theirs.
He lay fully dressed upon his green bed. Sunlight poured into the
triangular room through two windows. His head throbbed with the effort
of making a truth.
He wondered if he hadn't dismissed the wish for happiness rather
heedlessly? He seemed to get nowhere thinking about it. He was not
wise enough. In the old tales a wish for happiness was never made! He
wondered why.
He might chance it--just to see what would happen. The thought made him
tremble. He leaped from his bed and paced the red-tiled floor, rubbing
his hands together.
Yes. _No._ NO! He flung himself prone again, feeling as if he had been
saved from the edge of an abyss. It was strange that he should feel so
apprehensive. His room seemed deadly quiet, waiting. Everything waited,
breathless.
"I want to be 'happy forever,'" he whispered, to hear the words,
careful not to touch the ring. "_Happy ... forever_"--the two syllables
of the first word, like little hard pebbles, struck musically against
the bell of his imagination, but the second was a sigh. _Forever_--his
spirit sank under the soft, heavy impact of it. Held in his thought the
word made a dreary music, fading. "_Happy ... forever_"--NO!!
Spike twisted as if a hand had clutched into his stomach. He dragged
his pillow from under his head and threw it across the narrow room,
striking a white bowl from the bureau to the floor where it smashed
with a sharp, pleasing sound.