CHAPTER I
Spike Flecker, who was going to be a great painter, walked slowly along the boulevards, his uncovered red head bowed to the cold drizzle that now succeeded several days of rain. There were puddles gray with looking at a morose sky and trees standing miserably in a row.
The terrace of the Café of the Lilacs was deserted. Flecker peered in the door and saw a fat man laughing. It was warm in there. Madame, sipping a glass of steaming coffee at her high desk, gave him a cheerful smile but Flecker returned only a sober nod. Because he was cold and sad he would not go in and be comfortable. He chose a chair here on the pavement at the café entrance.
The top of the iron table was like ice to his hands and a wet, penetrating breath blew against him from the trees.
The waiter, who was very tall and thin and quite bald, came out reluctantly, twisting his face in an expression that plainly said it was unpleasant to have his scalp drizzled on. What does m'sieu desire? he asked reproachfully, stroking a long black whisker.
"Vin blanc," Flecker said, shivering. "Vin blanc—with ice!"
For a minute the waiter looked at him, his mouth opening to exclaim a protest, but he only said, "Trés bien, m'sieu!"
Flecker looked between dripping trees at a procession of umbrellas and gleaming raincoats. The sting of his sour, cold drink added to his misery. He was filled with sympathy for himself as with sad music.
"I've got a cold already, and my feet are soaking wet," he brooded. "Nobody would care if I got influenza."
For more than a month Flecker had received no letter from his uncle in Waterville, Minn., and nobody would buy his pictures. It had rained for days; the soles of his shoes had worn through; the still life he had done yesterday proved once and for all that he had no talent whatever. The memory of this canvas standing undestroyed in his room where somebody might see it made him blush and rub his hands together in painful confusion.
Flecker was about twenty-one. He had long, thin arms and legs. His hair was not really red but of the shade of orange, generally called red. His eyes were a clear blue and the lashes were black. His hands were long, graceful artist's hands. The much worn corduroy of jacket and trousers lay loosely on his long body. His cravat was broad, reaching down to his belt and was apple green.
You would have rightly guessed him the kind of student who has too many ideas, drinks too much wine, talks too much, dreams too much, sleeps not enough, and with it all—works too hard.
Pressing his white chin down on his green tie, Flecker shuddered with the damp cold and hid his hands in his pockets. He could not even build an heroic dream under the suffering trees. His vivid and unusually obedient imagination refused to do it—instead it dwelt upon the mechanics of hanging.
He considered a stout, hempen rope—no mere clothes line would do!—about ten feet long, felt its disagreeable rasp around his throat. It might be difficult to get such a rope. One would go down to the shop of the Trois Quartiers and the clerk would say: "Ah, a good, strong rope, about three meters long, you said. Um-m-m-m." Then gayly: "I suppose you plan to hang yourself?"
"Never mind what I am going to do with it! You individu! You specimen of a black beetle!" ... Flecker felt a little cheered, cursing the impudent clerk. "Just you run along and find it."
The clerk disappeared and returned panting.
Voilà!—flexible and strong! He measured and cut.
"Dix francs, m'sieu!"
Flecker did not have ten francs! There he stood, stuttering and blushing like a fool while he pulled from his pocket four half-franc notes, very torn, and twenty copper sous!
The clerk opened his great mouth in a braying laugh....
Flecker squirmed with humiliation because the clerk he had conjured in his own brain was laughing at him!...
With an effort he destroyed the shop of the Trois Quartiers, the big-mouthed clerk and all other rope difficulties.... Now he had the rope. He tied it with three knots to the leg of his narrow iron bed. The other end he tied around his neck, placed the knot carefully under his right—left ear, opened his long window and leaped!
A pretty, dark-eyed girl in a tight-fitting black coat with a high collar and a round hat of black feathers, sat down at a near table, glancing with interest into Flecker's somber face. He did not see her....
It felt as if some one had hit him on the neck with a club. He was lying in the garden, the severed leg of his bed buried in the soft earth beside him. He untied the noose, and looked up to his window, gasping for breath. It had been smashed by the end of the bed which hung out over the sill. While he looked, out popped the scared and sympathetic face of Berthe, the fat chambermaid....
Flecker seemed to be watching the traffic of the boulevards but he was really busy with itemized bills of damages. There would be fifty francs for the window, one hundred for the bed, and doubtless Madame would tell everybody that the young American, jilted by Berthe (a statement in which there was no truth whatever) had tried in a bungling way to kill himself.... One couldn't even hang oneself decently. He sighed. There was nowhere any dignity for him.
Looking up his glance plunged directly into the dark eyes of the little girl in black. She was almost shabby. There was mud on her high-heeled slippers.
"Sitting out here in this draft," she said in a deep voice, "you'll catch a cold that'll kill you!"
"And much I'd care," replied Flecker.
"You might better hang yourself! It would be quicker."
Flecker regarded her darkly. Was she a mind reader?
Her black eyebrows arched above narrow, slanting eyes, and her mouth was wide, the lips thin and bright red. The bridge of her nose was high, the nostrils pointed down. Perhaps this does not sound like beauty, but she was beautiful. She rubbed her pointed chin with a forefinger and smiled uncertainly, a little humbly, waiting. When he did not ask her to sit at his table, she got up and came over anyway.
"What is the matter?" Her deep voice was sympathetic.
She sat down next him. "You seemed lonely sitting here all by yourself."
"Well, I wasn't. I was thinking."
She put her hands on the table to rise and leave him.
"No, don't go. Don't go!"
They were silent, waiting for the garçon, who was a long time coming.
Flecker moved in his chair and his foot found a puddle. The water ran in through the hole in his shoe. The chill shock of this made him think of four torn half-franc notes and the fact that there had been no letter from Minnesota for weeks. He groaned and rubbing his flaming hair said half to himself: "Oh, I wish ... I wish...."
"What?" cried the girl, gripping his arm with her two hands at once.
"I don't know," he confessed after a moment, looking into her face, fascinated. "You've got queer eyes," he said.
She widened her eyes. It seemed to Flecker that light rays came from them.
"I am a witch," she told him quietly.
"Tu parles!"
"No, I mean a real one."
Something vague and gray rose up in Flecker's mind and whirled round and sank down. His heart thumped loudly. Her palms were hot on his arm. He could no longer look into her eyes.
"I don't understand you," he said.