Flecker had listened to the amazing tale silent but for an occasional
exclamation. The music of her deep clear voice, no less than the tale,
filled him with wonder. When she had told an incident she closed her
red lips tightly, and looked down, thinking what came next. Her long
lashes made line shadows on the whites of her eyes. She was profoundly
interested in her story. She was alert, and brave, aware that the
present was life. He forgot himself, listening, watching her.
But now he brought the telling to a full stop by reaching across the
table and catching her wrist. He looked boldly into her eyes. She
looked down, suddenly uncertain, fearful that she had said too much, or
said something wrong. She wanted to be as modest as he expected her to
be.
"You are not a witch!" cried Spike.
She shook her head.
"I am so glad!" Spike tightened his grip on her wrist, laughing.
"You hurt!" she tried to loosen his taut fingers. Her face was serious
and dark. "Don't hurt me!" she said, resentfully. He let go quickly.
For a moment he did not know whether his sudden sense of strength was
to dissolve into painful confusion or not. She smiled.
"You are nice!" he said, inadequately, and they both laughed.
"Ever since the first day," he told her, humbly, "I have thought about
you and wanted you. Every time I went into the street I looked for
you--I would imagine meeting you--what you would say and what I would
say; and always right in the middle of it I would remember you were a
witch and that would spoil everything." A memory made him chuckle. "You
didn't disappear into the sky that Tuesday in the Luxembourg because
you _couldn't_!"
"You are strange!" she looked at him doubtfully. "Wouldn't it have been
beautiful--my flying up into a clear summer sky? Haven't you any poetic
feeling?"
"I think it's because I _am_ a sort of poet that it seemed hideous! I
tried so hard not to remember you were a witch!"
Marie put her hands to her face as if she were ashamed of her smile.
"What if I _were_ a witch?" she asked.
"If one loved a witch one would be so in her power. No, that isn't
the reason. I did not want you to be a monster. The old woman is a
_monster_. I want you to be natural. You know what I mean. Like other
people. I don't mean that, either," he rubbed his nose. "I want you to
be Marie, different from everybody, but in a way like everybody. It is
hard to put in words. I mean I want you to be here on the earth in the
same fix I am in.... Do you see?"
Spike's thought rayed out from the point of the moment into the
infinite, into chaos that he saw in his mind as black night, hideous
with aimlessly moving sparks. "And we are marooned here on the world
together," said Spike. "Life is short."
"It is not!" declared Marie. "Short compared to what? I've lived so
long already that I have _forgotten_ the beginning. Life is long!" She
smiled to make him smile. "And let's not be marooned; let's just be
here!
"What are you thinking about now?" she asked when Spike did not answer.
"I was trying to have your kind of face and be looking in the mirror. I
wonder what it would feel like to have beautiful dark eyes like yours
and a great lot of glossy black hair. It is very black, isn't it?" She
thrust a strand under her hat, with an expression of mild surprise. "I
was thinking," Spike went on, "suppose I had a soft white throat like
yours, and was looking in the mirror ... what sort of things would I
be thinking? There's something soft and unprotected about you. You are
surrounded by sharp dangers, and have no armor against them.... You
hold up your head and go sailing down the street.... I am much stronger
than you but you are not afraid of me! I was thinking about being like
you, with your lack of weapons, and wondering what I would be like; and
it seemed to me I would be very different. There is a great distance
between us. What do you think?"
"I don't know!" Marie wondered what was under his words. Nothing but a
search for wisdom was under them. "Why, I suppose so. I am hungry," she
added, without a pause between ideas.
Spike called the waiter.
Could they eat there at the little iron table? "We serve _dejeuner_
inside!" said the waiter sadly. They pleaded. He would ask madame.
Obviously there was no hope.
"It is expensive to eat here," Marie whispered when the waiter had gone
inside.
"I have money." The way Spike said "money" suggested a great deal more
than twenty-eight dollars!
Behold; for them madame broke the rules and they had lunch there
under the dusty trees--an excellent lunch beginning with--but there's
no point in describing the lunch. They ate little of it, and did
not taste it at all. They were not only too excited, but they felt,
when food was placed before them, that eating together was somehow
immodest. Spike blushed to insert a spoonful of creamed spinach into
his mouth. He refused even a taste of the _brie_ cheese though usually
the perfume of a good _brie_--and this one was very good!--ran through
him pleasantly like a mild electric shock, making him sit up straight,
tense and eager. When man's imagination--striving always to imprison
(and kill) because it will not and perhaps cannot realize that the
sensation of chaos, imperfection, the inappropriate and unexpected,
is inevitably the perfume of life itself--has, in a measure at least,
accepted the characteristic imperfection of the loved one as a beloved
characteristic, or at least as a fact--when, in a word, the dream
begins to dissolve into the reality, then (and before the thrust of the
racial will-to-life, this is of course normally not long delayed)--then
comes the new pleasure of openly, immodestly sharing the bestial joys
of the dining room!--as Spike Flecker could not!
In the melody of that bright hour food was discord. When the last
plate was removed he was relieved of a burdening constraint. They lit
cigarettes. These were not so inappropriate. Marie blew two triangular
clouds like snorts of Pegasus from her nose.
"I am sitting here, looking at you, thinking that I love you," he told
her, calmly. Suddenly he could not look at her. "I do, you know."
"Do you?" she asked, solemnly.
The waiter brought _chartreuse_. There was a distant look in his sad
eyes, as he waited, his tray poised high, until Spike's red head, bowed
over Marie's hand, raised up.
"_Voilà! m'sieu et 'dame!_" the waiter said gently and poured the
_liqueur_. He sighed. Before re-entering the café, he stood at the
entrance, looking up to the trees--or the sky----The sunlight gleamed
on his bald head for a moment, then he slapped a table with his napkin,
and hurried in.