Had you before this time asked Flecker if he wanted to become famous,
he might have replied that he pursued art for its own sake, but he
really thought he wanted fame very much.
In a favorite day dream he bought Kellogg's woods and the meadows
beyond and presented them to the town of Waterville as Flecker Park. He
made a modest speech of appreciation when the Mayor unveiled the statue
of the boy painter! Many an actual painting had waited while Flecker
dreamed of a canvas that would draw hordes to its corner in the _Salle
d'Autonne_.
Yes, he had dreamed often of fame. Now he could have it for the asking.
When he thought to turn the ring in the necessary ritual it seemed that
to wish for fame was to wish for nothing. He did not want it most.
Perhaps he did not want it at all.
What he wanted most was to paint tremendous, significant pictures that
would completely say what he saw standing in a sunny field, what he
saw while watching the day burn out behind trees, or walking in the
night past the blinded, hunch-backed houses, or looking from a dark
hallway into a room filled with people whose faces shone in lamplight.
He was aware of the feeling of life as if it were something by itself,
apart from things and events. It was like music, slow--not sad, but not
gay,--it beat with a somber joy. When he saw with a certain, peculiar
kind of clarity things or people--a tree, for instance, or a bowl, or
a fat woman sitting wearily, or, indeed, a pair of white under-drawers
on a line dancing in a clear wind, something came alive between him and
what he saw, and the feeling of life vibrated in him. Then he wanted to
paint so that his sense of well-being, of belonging, might be prolonged
in the painting, and intensified in the completion of a picture that
would make others feel what he had felt. When things were beautiful for
him he repaid them by painting them.
He almost knew what he wanted to say in paint but as yet the pictures
fell far short.... Here his queer mind permitted itself to leap upon
the idea of wishing for consummate talent, for the ability to paint
immediately the tremendous pictures.
"Thank Heaven!" Flecker said aloud, as if interrupting some one. "Thank
Heaven, I have settled it!"
The room became a solid triangle of silence.
Flecker's lips moved. He frowned. His expression of concern intensified
and faded. He sighed as a man who fails and starts at a puzzle from
a new tack. Silence. An auto horn, hoof-beats in the street. Flecker
turned on his side and, like an invalid, looked wistfully at the white
curtains.
There was no way of saying it! When he tried he said something else.
Here in his hands the power--here in his head and heart the desire, and
between a barrier that he could not surmount.
He could not wish to paint "beautiful" pictures because he meant his
own "beautiful" when he said the word, and he had not yet made it.
Plainly he could not wish for that which had not yet become. His
"beautiful" was growing inside of him. When achieved it would be the
sum of what he had thought and felt and could think and feel. He could
not wish it, nor did he _want_ to possess it now any more than he
could wish to spend next Sunday during this Friday, or to be his mature
self and his growing youthful self at once.
"I want to be a great artist." Spike made a wry face. The phrase meant
nothing. The wish must be expressed relatively.
He tried to think of an artist he wanted to be like. He thought of
the living men whose work he admired. His mind swooped back along the
centuries. He did not want to paint like any one.
The realization surprised him and he turned it over skeptically. He
tried saying that he wanted to paint like this one and that--Cimabue,
Cezanne, Michael Angelo, Matisse, and found by saying the words he did
not mean them. He wanted to paint his own stuff, in his own way. Not
that it would be better. (It might be!) For an imperative, mystic,
sacred reason. _Because he wanted to._ Because he was born Spike
Flecker and _was_ Spike Flecker and not someone else. He could not
betray the Spike Flecker of tomorrow--the Spike made of the unfulfilled
hopes of his father and mother, and the forefathers who followed the
plow on a Bavarian hillside and tended machinery in factories of dark
Scotch towns,--the forefathers who disappeared into the anonymous
mist of the past almost immediately after one went searching beyond
great-grand-fathers--he was their culmination, their explanation, their
immortality....
A bell rang deep in the house, joyful tidings that the women who had
been striving to prepare food for him all morning, while he explored
the world, had not failed.