He went out from the _pension_ and walked down narrow streets, a
feeling of nightmare touching him all over. At corners women stepped
out of shadows and greeted him, calling him dear as if he were their
expected lover, asking him to come with them for a little price. A girl
in a white dress and white shoes walked toward him, smiling. She saw he
meant not to slacken his stride, and let her smile go and went on by.
There was a crescent moon above tall buildings that leaned into the
street. A drunken man clutched the railing of a subway entrance,
muttering. He raised his face and howled. The little part of life that
abode in him, awakened by drink, seemed to struggle for release. He
vomited down the subway stairs and hung on the rail, groaning.
A tugboat passed under the bridge. Sparks sprayed up from its stack.
Shining black limousines moved smoothly, swiftly across the glaring
expanse of the _Place de la Concorde_. Spike worked his way through the
dense crowd near the Madeleine, past the Opera and so into the hubbub
of the boulevards out between the _Porte St. Denis_ and _Porte St.
Martin_.
He stood in the crowd surrounding a man whose gaunt face was made
demoniac by the harsh light of a kerosene flare. He was bawling the
virtues of an "American" dentifrice. When he paused for breath he
grinned to show the whiteness of his own teeth.
A young man with rouge on his cheeks smiled at Flecker. At a corner
café a pretty woman looked up from her table, made a gesture of
delighted surprise, and pretended to warm her hands in the radiance of
his hair.
Flecker walked alone and sad in the multitude, thinking,--the pictures
flashing endlessly in his mind. Tomorrow was Saturday. Saturday noon
his time was up.
He went underground at the station _Chateau d'Eau_. The cement steps
gleamed with a myriad little points of reflected light. Rails of steel,
doors of steel--streaks of light lay on the rails, swerving into the
tunnel. There was a smell of cellar. Against the curved wall hung a
newspaper poster, a woman opening a red curtain to "_L'Avenir!_" The
future! One meant that now life was a certain thing, that the curtain
into the shining future would be drawn and life would be quite another
thing. _Oh no, it won't_, thought Flecker. It will be steel ...
speed ... slaves underground. He had a sense of knowing something new,
but had no words for it. The voice of tragedy thundered in him for a
moment. He walked with conscious dignity to the ticket window....
The ticket woman heard him muttering. "A million! I'll wish for a
sacred million--American!"
Fame he had already rejected. Happiness he could not say. Genius he
felt was potentially his and he would not barter this promise for a
genius that would not be his.
A beautiful woman opened a vista of complications. He had thought,
first, of course, of her _carte d'identité_.
She was tall. Her hair was golden, coiled round and round her head, and
her face was so bright with beauty that people stopped in the street
to stare. Every clerk in the passport office abandoned work when they
entered the door.
The Commissar asked: "What nationality is the lady?"
She looked at Flecker. Flecker said: "I don't know. I wished for her,
and there she was, and the first thing I did was to bring her down here
for her papers so that everything would be regular."
The Commissar ran the back of his hand under his square black beard.
"Yes. Yes," patiently. "But at what port did she enter France?"
"I don't know. There was a kind of light in the sky, and then she was
here."
"How old is she?"
"I don't know. You see, a witch I met in the _Café de Lilas_ said I
could have the one thing I wanted most, and I wished for beauty. Here
she is. I don't know her age, what her name is, or where she came from,
and neither does she. Nobody knows...."
Flecker hastened away from there. He could never acceptably word an
explanation. Police papers, moreover, would likely be one of the
smaller complications.... In the midst of the dialogue with the
Commissar his thoughts went flying to the dark face of the witch of the
café.
Well, then, the simplest of all, the most specific, the easiest to
say, the eternally necessary--Gold! He saw a perspective of zeros in
columns, three abreast.
"I'll wish for a million!"