CHAPTER XXII
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!"