CHAPTER IV
The salle à manger had once been used as a shop and its street wall was a broad window and a glass door, both curtained thinly with ruffled white. There was a dark triangle where the curtains fell apart in the middle. Here appeared now and again the peering face of a passerby. Flecker took his place at the corner of a long table. Opposite him a priest in a dirty cassock, a thin priest with many red lines in his cheeks, and silver spectacles on his long red nose, wished him good evening.
"If you could have the one thing you most wanted," Flecker asked him presently, "what would it be?"
The Priest looked up from Le Courier de Tulle. "M'sieu," biting noisily into a radish, "if I knew what I wanted I'd not be what I am."
With both hands he made a magnificent gesture to offer himself as an example. "I don't know. Who does? A starving man. A man born a poet. A crazy man. Not Clemenceau. Men are busy all their lives because if they stopped and wondered what they wanted they wouldn't know."
He held Spike with a glare from under bushy eyebrows. "You ought to know—you are an American!"
Flecker was startled but he nodded. "I would have to think about it carefully for a time," he conceded, politely modest.
The Priest smiled sarcastically. Plainly he held another opinion; but at this moment Berthe came through the kitchen door bearing a tray so high that no one could see what was today's pièce de resistance, and the Priest's curiosity about this, as well as the disappointment at what his curiosity discovered, changed the course of his thoughts.
At one corner of the table sat two Polish students in identical suits of gray. Their faces were smooth, monotoned, uninteresting. They talked sotto voce in their own language. Next to them the fat boy from Luxembourg, just arrived to seek his fortune in the great city, read picture postcards from his brother in Toledo, Ohio. Opposite him the other American looked dreamily at nothing through black rimmed spectacles and exchanged an occasional word of German with the enormous Swedish painter next him. The Swede, whose heavy face and close-cropped hair were of the same buff color, kept his eyes on his plate. Yesterday his mistress had taken arsenic and he seemed to feel the others were shocked at his early return to meals.
There were radishes and butter; a clear golden soup in which slivers of ruddy carrot floated, calves' liver with an aromatic sauce (it was the liver disappointed the Priest)—pommes frits and spinach. Flecker stoked himself absently, insulated from his surroundings, thinking.
That night he lay awake in his bed for an eternity. The witch's dark beauty was alight in his memory. She looked at him, finger on pointed chin, smiling uncertainly. The ring glowed on his hand. He covered it with the palm of the other hand, and the white radiance went through and made a round spot on the ceiling. Deep down, controlled, there was a sensation of fear in him. It was close in the room and ominously silent. Something was going to happen.
He imagined having wine with the witch in a certain village inn. He remembered that she was a witch, a queer, dangerous creature. Well, was he in love with a monster? And what then? There was no answer on the dark ceiling.
A cautious, scraping noise startled him. He listened, staring toward the dimness of his window. Now it was repeated, a dragging sound as if some one were crawling toward that window.
Silence, heavy and complete. Nobody could crawl toward the window. It was up three flights from the street. The wind had been blowing a shutter, perhaps. But he would not for anything leave his bed to look out the window. That would confess his terror and it would be stronger than he. He waited under the heavy silence. The light of the magic ring flitted about the room as he moved, now on the ceiling, now finding a picture on the wall, or the square leg of the old table.
From outside came a noise of vast whispering. The street was filled with a multitude of people wearing bedroom slippers, advancing step by step, trying to make no noise, whispering, whispering.
It was rain coming across the city in the dead, hot night. Now it was dancing with tiny feet on the roof above his head. Far in the rear, someone grumbled an order, then was suddenly nearer, his voice raised.
Boom! said the thunder.
The breath of the rain came through the window, cool and clean. Flecker hunched his shoulders, his hands clinched under his chin. The all-surrounding swish of the rain and the thunder made him smile. For a flash the window was a square white flame. Thunder crashed nearby, and nearer, striking down into roofs with its fist.
Though he smiled, Flecker was afraid. His thoughts were racing—don't, don't strike here! but this was fear belonging to his world, and left no sediment of horror in his spirit as the rain and the thunder ran on, and away.... The beating radiance of the magic ring, against the memory of the lightning, seemed weak and unreal.
There were footsteps of several people in the passage. A knock at his door.
"Entrez donc!" At the clear, unrestrained tone of his own voice, the last clinging shadow of the supernatural sank out of the room. The boy from Luxembourg thrust his round baby face through the partly opened door.
"Oh, Jesus, what a storm!" said he. "You are all right?"
"We have much worse in Minnesota," Spike rose on his elbow, glad to talk. "Hailstones big as oranges, and such a fierce wind you hide down in the cellar. Sometimes while you're hiding in the cellar the wind picks the house up and there you are standing in the rain! Sure, I am all right."
"It struck the School. Madame says it smashed the front windows. That's all. Close enough!... But—tell me, what is that strange light?"
"Oh, nothing," said Spike, guiltily. "Reflection from the window or something. Queer, isn't it? Yes. Well, I want to get to sleep."
When Spike woke next morning the sun slanted through two of his three windows. His whistling ceased only when he splashed water into his face. As he stood, stark naked, scrubbing his red hair with the towel, he thought of something and went to the window. He looked out. It was true there was no ledge, no possible foothold, and the street was a sheer drop three stories down. That strange noise must have been a shutter. A terra cotta pipe ran up past the window. It was fastened to the wall by metal bands. Something was caught on one of these. He leaned his naked body out the window.
Spike stood straight, the sun shining golden on his white skin, one arm raised, his eyes fixed in fearful curiosity on four long black hairs!
"They're Berthe's," he said to himself. "She was shaking rugs or something and leaned way out the window...."
But Berthe's hair was brown, not black.