CHAPTER VII
Berthe woke him bringing a great bowl of chocolate, two golden croissants and a brioche. She pulled out the little cupboard in which the pot au chambre lived, placed the tray on its top, smiled at him, her red cheeks bulging, and could not help glancing at the brioche.
Had he slept well?
Very well, thank you. And he had dreamed.
Berthe leaned over the foot of his narrow green bed. She put her two hands over her breasts swelling out roundly under her white waist and took a deep breath.
One dreamed of one's girl friend, doubtless?
Flecker broke a croissant in two and plunged one blunt end into the chocolate. He took a hungry bite, scratching among his wild red locks.
"I dreamed of you." When he smiled one corner of his mouth went up higher than the other, and his eyes became black slits. "I couldn't tell you what it was I dreamed," he added, looking in his bowl.
The radiance on Berthe's round face suggested that he did not need to tell her. She squeezed his foot, which stuck up naked from the edge of the covers.
"Be still!" she rebuked him, "you are crazy!"
Even after she had gone Flecker felt her eyes on him, it had been such a tropic glance.... He came leisurely to the brioche.
Now a croissant is something like a crescent of rolled pie crust, but a brioche is brown on the outside and yellow inside. It is not a cake, though the French act as if it were, but a very nice bun. It has a toppled over appearance.
When one is living in the Quartier on the ten-dollar bills occasionally sent by one's uncle in Waterville, Minn., one may have croissants for breakfast and sometimes brioches but never both at once.
Flecker broke his brioche and ate, refilled his cup from the chocolate pitcher. He felt lazy and warm and almost full. When he had finished the second half of the brioche he was full. He sighed. What was his nightmare about? Something ugly and familiar crawling through his window.... He had forgotten the face was that of the witch!
As he pulled on his corduroy pants he decided the lie he had told Berthe was white enough. It made her happy, gave her something to think about—it would fill him another time with brioches, and his virtue, such as it was, remained, corporeally, at least, none the worse....
Here was Wednesday going fast. There were only Thursday, Friday and Saturday forenoon left!
The morning he spent at the atelier next the skinny little English girl who looked too often at him with her blue eyes; lunched alone, dismally, expensively, at the Café de Lilas, hoping there to see the witch; in the afternoon played pool with a Peruvian wood engraver and made a sketch in the gardens; dined at his pension, opposite the red-nosed priest,—in the evening spent two borrowed francs to see a Hollywood comedy in a theater near the Gare de Montparnasse.
He saw Rosie in the café and Belash in the life class. Both were cordial, both obviously abstained from mention of the witch story. They looked at Flecker with a sad, doubtful expression that profoundly irritated him.
In between and during the apparent activities of the day he thought about the witch, and about wanting to be happy forever....
Happiness, he decided, did not mean content, or glee, or merriment, or satisfaction. It did not mean joy. It might include any or all of these, but it meant more than each and more than all....
Flecker played pool with the Peruvian. Red ball into the corner pocket. Click. Roll on. Roll ON. If it had hit the cushion just a bit harder, he said to himself, it would have gone pop into the pocket and then the blue ball over there, and the yellow, and—well, sweep the table, everybody in the Café du Dome clustered around looking, mouths open, eyebrows up in unanimous awe.
Play another game? There, he won the break. He moved around the table with stiff, short steps, pulling his chin up from his collar, yawning. Click. Click. Click!! While the Peruvian nervously watched, passing his palm over and over his shining black hair, Flecker went on without a miss.
The last was a long shot. Flecker drove his cue ball hard. It hopped the cushion, shot through the air and struck the patron (whom Flecker owed thirty francs) on the head. He fell without genuflexion like a tree, or a tower. Around him formed a crowd, from the dark mass of which white faces turned to stare at Flecker. A gendarme shouldered his way through the door....
Having scored six the Peruvian grounded his cue. It was Flecker's turn again. He did not notice but stood staring into space, his blue eyes wide open, fixed.
"Assassin!" shouted the imaginary gendarme.
"Jouez!" shouted the real Peruvian.
Flecker started awake and played and missed. The game bored him suddenly.
Lighting a limp cigarette, salvaged from a corner of his pocket, he puffed a cloud and asked: "What would you do if you were happy all the time?"
"Smile," said the Peruvian. "But," he added cleverly, after a moment, "a persistent smile is a grin."
"What would you say happiness is?"
"Comment? I haven't even had my lunch and already you start talk like that? How should I know?" He shot and missed. "I'll tell you what it isn't! It isn't an onion!"
The game was on Flecker. When he smiled at the patron for still another extension of credit, and got it, he remembered how he had imaginatively killed the generous fellow with the cue ball, and was ashamed.
The sun was too bright. The noise of motor traffic in the boulevard was deafening. They stopped at the curb under a young tree with leaves like emeralds.
"Happiness," shouted the Peruvian wood engraver, as if the question had just been put, "is having hope, and no pain, and hardly any——"
A taxi hooted in front of them and Flecker lost the word.
"What?" he yelled, "hardly any what?"
"Fear!"
Happiness is more than that, thought Flecker, walking away toward the Gardens.
Setting his easel near a blossoming pear tree which stood crucified fanwise against a lattice, Flecker's mind found and turned over a strange idea.
Was he happy?
With all his unfulfilled desires?
With holes in his shoes?
No hat?
No letter from Waterville?
Of course he was not. And yet there was something about his feeling of being in, being a part of this high, wide, golden day.... He bent his flaming head over his color-box, holding his breath, trying to be and to realize in the same moment.
It would be strange if one wished for happiness and so remained as one was! That would be a curious sort of disappointment!