Flecker's magic

When with repeated drinks the dimensions of the room became vast—when the priestly face of Rosie and the equine face of Belash swam in and out of his vision like big fish in a glass tank, Flecker told them about the witch.

"That is not all!" he cried. "Now I find I am in love with her and must go seeking her everywhere. Yet she is a witch. Were she my sweetheart she might use black magic on me!"

"Oh, Gee!" softly said the boy from Memphis, Tenn., looking two ways at once and hiccoughing behind his hand, "The calvados has gone to his head."

They went out from the brightness of the café. Belash said to Rosie as if Spike were not there: "He is pretty bad. He must stop drinking. He sees things. He hears noises in his head."

"Do you recognize me?" Rosie thrust his face before Flecker's. "It's your old friend Rosie Rosenberg, 's all ri'. Everything's all ri'. We'll get you right home, safe and sound, Spike, ol' boy."

They walked him the length of the Luxembourg. There was no light in the sky. From the gardens came the perfume of wet flowers. His friends patted his back and made sympathetic noises. He was not angry. He was astounded, recognizing the impossibility of sharing his experience. It were better to say no more, to let his story of the witch pass as a drunken vagary.

"Goo' ni'," said Rosie, swaying forward and back, his hands in his khaki breeches. "Goo' ni', ol' boy! See you firsh thing tomorrr. Forget abou' witches, ol' boy. You been seein' things, see? You been dring. You be'er stop dring!"

"Hadn't we better stay with him all night, Rosie?" asked Belash.

"I'm all right," Flecker repeated. While they sadly looked at him, he went in and closed the door.

The clock of the concierge struck twelve as he made his way slowly up the twisting stairs....

In bed he gazed at the ring. Its glow dimmed and brightened in a slow rhythm of life.

One hundred fearless years?

What good would anything be if he were to die tomorrow? His mother had died when she was twenty-two—less than a year older than he; and his father at thirty-five! His belief that he would live for many years was made of hope and willful ignorance. Perhaps even now he had in him the germ that was to cause his death. Perhaps it would kill him in agony on the eve of his day of triumph! How simple, then, to choose his wish! Man alive, what do you wish?... I wish to live!... It was easy when one could think straight. If the witch had doubted his ability to decide quickly, she was wrong!

He could not sleep.

"I wonder what date it is. Let's see.... Yesterday—no the day before was.... It's May twentieth, nineteen hundred and twenty-three," he whispered to the darkness.

MAY TWENTIETH, TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY-THREE!

On that day he was condemned to die! What matter that death be one hundred years away, or ninety—it was certain. It would come upon a day that would surely come, and upon that day, what matter that in the past were one hundred years of living? Over that day, over the days, the weeks, the months, aye, the years before that day, the shadow of the expectance of death!

He cowered before the thoughts he had dared to awaken. Fearless years? They would be utterly hopeless years. He only of all men would be certain of death, for, he said to himself, even the man condemned to hang did not believe in his death, hoping that reprieve would come at the last moment. To the old man, no less than to the boy, life spread on ahead endlessly. An insurance clerk of eighty must know his chance of living another year was one in a thousand and prove it by statistics, still his fears were soothed by knowledge that some men did live to be one hundred! To remove Chance would make death master of all the days of life!

He might wish for a long life, and so remain friends with Chance!... But, alas, what was a long life?... Or he might wish to live forever! Did he know what forever was? Was forever the name of something or of nothing? But the thought of living without hope of death was a horror! Without inevitable tragedy life was incomplete—it had no form! It had lost its mystery, its significance....

In his imagination Spike found torture....

He sat in a rocker, an old man. His beard rested upon his breast, his gnarled hands trembled on his lap, palm to palm. From his waist down he was paralyzed, thanks to that motor-car accident back in 1942, and frequent headaches prevented painting. His uncle and his aunt hobbled by. She said: "It would be better if Spike could pass on ... but the wish will keep him alive until May twentieth, two thousand and twenty-three!" They went away and presently died. Waterville was a strange town full of strangers. Spike was alone, a sick man in a rocker, waiting for the interminable years to pass so that he might die.... Supposing that!

"Belash is a fool!" thought Spike.

The decision which had seemed as definite as a pebble in his hand had dissolved to nothing!

Spike remembered that a night and a day and part of another night were gone. Already it was Wednesday!

There was dark all around him but the hollow of his mind was filled with a clear light. It was like a house in the midst of darkened houses having a party.

The party was too grotesque. The white light was too intense. The guests ran madly from room to room. They did painful, ugly, illogical things. Flecker turned out the lights, but his guests turned them on again. He lay on his left side and on his right. He pulled his knees up to his chin, stared into the dark. Once he coughed, sending a helpless, lonely sound running down the passage.

To forget his thought of death Flecker thought of the witch. Her dark face under the round hat of black feathers was as distinct in the blazing light in the hollow of his mind as if she were outside him. He mingled his tender thoughts of her with an impersonal wonder that he could make so clear an image.

Spike knew the chemical analysis of the red he painted with. He even knew its wave-length in the hierarchy of the spectrum. Seeing plainly the red of the witch's lips he wondered how come he made it. With what? But the image did not really exist. It was a thought, only. A thought did not exist. Oh, didn't it? Could he, then, see red when there was no red to be seen?

He closed his eyes to look inward at the witch's blue-black hair, but her image had gone. Perhaps he did not see colors in his memory but lived over the feeling aroused by them. Did he get anywhere by changing the word for red from "red" to "feeling aroused by red?" What was the feeling?

The thought that perhaps no one in the world could answer startled him. If there were not somewhere quiet, dignified men who knew surely about things, Spike was loose in space, helpless indeed. If men did not know what thoughts and things were how could they bear to go on living? There was something profoundly dishonest and ignoble about being willing to live in ignorance—to go on working and walking and eating, eyes carefully front lest one see, and by seeing confess the Mystery always there at one's elbow, awaiting, demanding solution. If this were an accurate picture of Man, Spike wondered what did people mean when they talked of wise men and wiser men. A wise man was, perhaps, one who concealed his bewilderment with impressive words, a wiser man one who impressively described his bewilderment.

From a wondering thought at his clear image of the witch his thinking had run on to a consideration of the Whole World. He saw it, a dimly luminous globe, revolving slowly in darkness. He, Spike Flecker, stood upright on it, his legs spread wide to keep his balance. The sun looked into his face while yet his feet were hidden below the curve. The sun beat upon his shoulders. He went down into the night. He saw the stars in the endless dark; and underneath the turning world there was nothing—a sheer drop down, forever! But the sensation of forever, Spike remembered before his spirit went whimpering into the Abyss, the sensation of forever was also within his own red head. Perhaps it was not outside it!

He felt a relaxing weariness making its way slowly through him. His mind had been a house giving a party to a ghastly company, but the glaring white light had not penetrated to the cellar, and there through it all, some one had sat holding four black hairs in his fingers, pondering. The memory-thought of the witch's black hair did not run down the cellar stair. But perhaps it waited at the door....

"... you turn the ring three times and say your wish aloud," said the witch's deep voice in Spike's memory. He loved the sound of her voice. Sinking toward sleep Flecker smiled in the darkness.

"Tomorrow," he told himself, "tomorrow I will turn the ring three times and wish for happiness."

The word was a crisp refreshing sound, and left a feeling somehow of bright water, sunlight ... a far clear ringing.

The three walls of the room listened to Spike's regular breathing. His hands opened and lay relaxed. Carelessly, unquestioningly, as one would like to know one could die, he let go consciousness, and the tension of consciousness. The light of the magic ring went out. His thoughts swooned obliquely and wavered like things under water too heavy to rise—except only the memory-thought of the witch's long, black hair and this now opened the door and ran down the cellar stair, and it and the one that pondered made together a nightmare like a monstrous hairy toad with the witch's face, and set it crawling through Spike's window.

Spike writhed under the covers and woke. It seemed to him there was a sound outside his window as of some one crawling along the wall. It was his awful dream, he told himself hopefully. He remembered he had found no tenable explanation for the black hairs.

It was dawn before the fears that rose terribly in his imagination permitted him to go to sleep, again.