Trying to explain why he couldn't decide, Spike told a little of what
had happened during the five days. As the girl listened her dark eyes
did not leave his face. She seemed to lose herself in his story,
frowning when it was painful, laughing as quickly as he when it was
comic. In his words they lived the days over together.
When he came to tell of his decision to wish for happiness her interest
became more intense....
"What did he mean, it was not an onion?"
Spike sipped his wine. "Oh, he meant you couldn't take happiness and
boil it and eat it. Or put it in a cupboard for a rainy day. Or plant
it. He meant it was not a something.... It was not to be managed and
used.... You know."
"The old woman told me theories about that." The waiter put before her
a second glass, the _crème de menthe_ bottle, a bowl of ice, a carafe
of water. She daintily made her drink, under Spike's admiring eyes,
and for a minute of silence gazed at the clear green color. Her pointed
tongue, shining, moved along her lower lip in a gesture of reflection.
"The old woman said in all the annals of black magic happiness has
never been wished for. Happiness, complete and permanent, is something
people wish for when they know they won't get it. When an authentic
witch comes asking them what they will, they ask for something more
like your friend's onion.
"The old woman said nobody knows what would happen should some one
turn the ring three times and wish for happiness. They would get it of
course! But how would it affect the rest of the world? It might end it,
you know!"
And now Spike listened with his whole attention, looking from her eyes
to her moving lips, leaning near to her....
"End it?" he echoed in amazement.
"She said if you were happy you would be balanced. If you walk from
here to the _Avenue de l'Opera_ it is because you would rather be there
than here, or because if you didn't go you would lose your job and
so have no money and so be unhappily hungry, or because you want the
exercise and would be less happy without it but when you got there, or
even before, there would be something else you would feel you had to
do. She says if you think about it you will see that every thing you
do, every movement you make, is a reaching for happiness, for a balance
of desire and realization."
"But what has the world got to do with it?"
"Well," she went on, as if saying something she had learned by heart,
"if you were happy you wouldn't want anything, would you? If you did
you wouldn't be completely happy! You are made up of a great number
of constantly moving things--organs, atoms that make the organs,
mathematical theories that make the atoms (the relation of all these
things to each other)--thoughts and desires and memories--and if this
bunch of things that make you were perfectly happy, they could just
_be_, couldn't they?--and not have to move!
"Well, the old woman says everything moves, every blessed thing in the
world moves constantly. How could the things of which you are made be
balanced--motionless--in happiness without the things that make the
surrounding world being balanced, too? On every side the moving outer
things would bump into the motionless inner things. But the motionless
inner things, being held by absolute Magic, would not budge. Suppose
you had a close file of cardboard soldiers a million miles long!
Suppose you knocked the first one down so it struck down the next and
the next, wouldn't it knock down all the soldiers clear to the end?
Suppose they began to slide downhill and the first stopped dead--the
whole file would stop, wouldn't it? If everything moves and everything
touches, and your wish brought you absolute happiness so the need for
aspiration was removed from you, and from all of you, and therefore the
whirlpool of things that are you suddenly stopped, what would happen?"
"I don't know," said Spike. "Do you? I thought if I could be happy it
would be nobody's business but my own!"
"Perhaps it would be everybody's. First of all, the atoms near to
you would begin to slow down. That is to say the atoms in the shape
of taxis would come to a stop, gradually. The whirling atoms in the
drivers would begin to get congested. The drivers would fiddle with
spark and gas, wondering; but the movements of their fingers and their
wondering thoughts would be slow, and slower. The rhythm of their
hearts would lengthen even as their engines died. The underground
trains would go gradually slower as if they were driving into drifts.
The steps of pedestrians would drag; those nearest you would soon find
they couldn't move. The air would stand still. In gradually widening
circles all things would get caught in the jam around your completed
desires, and cease to move!
"The Seine would stop flowing to the sea, the tides of the sea would
diminish until they ceased. Wheels and atoms, and the turning world
would slow down. The sun would stop dead in the heavens.
"There's no telling how far the effects might be felt. If you had
wished for happiness you might now be sitting with a blissful smile
at the center of the universe, radiating into infinity a creeping
paralysis of perfect balance, of happiness, of death!"
Spike sat back as she finished and closed his mouth, which had
been opened as wide as his eyes. She kicked the pavement with her
heels--_clickety-click_--and laughed.
"The old woman said maybe it would be quicker. Maybe you would get your
happiness in a blaze like an explosion and the next second what was
left of the world would be smoke drifting across the face of the moon.
She said the explosion might go rolling like a terrible storm through
the universe, wrecking whole systems of worlds in its vast undulation,
rolling on and on forever! But, being happy, where would you be?
"You see even she doesn't know. She can only make theories, and wonder.
She has not been able to sleep she has been so excited hoping that
through you, she could put over some supreme change.... She's sick of
the world!"
The girl looked lovingly at Spike.
"Oh," she said, wagging her head. "She hoped for a lot from you! You
looked so reckless and proud."
Spike covered his face, reliving the terrible moment in his room when
he almost made the wish. He remembered a great stillness as if the
world waited in fear.
"The point is," the girl remarked reassuringly, "you couldn't persuade
yourself to make the wish!"