CHAPTER VIII
He began to paint the pear tree and a woman in a yellow dress sitting on a bench. Thin sunlight poured over leaves and blossoms and fabric. The intense color set going a complication of feelings. He felt a scratchy, prickly sensation on his back, a stretching under his skin right down to his finger tips and his toes; he felt warm inside, and strong, and healthy in his bowels. He wanted to spit. He did, raising his chin, aiming at a sparrow in the path. Then he kicked the gravel with his heavy shoes, and scratched his nose, and set to work.
There is no telling what he thought while painting. He did not know himself. The words got out of the way so he might see. But after an hour, for no thought-out reason, he stopped and printed the word happiness in neat green letters in one corner of his canvas. He looked at this with something like surprise.
Should Flecker become famous and a collector find the unfinished sketch of the Luxembourg pear tree and the woman in yellow, he must not suppose the word to be the picture's title. Flecker put it there, outside his head, so he might look at it a moment, thus obeying an obscure impulse. Perhaps he wondered if happiness might not be a name for something that cannot be confined in a name....
The sketch was never finished because Flecker looked up and saw the witch walking toward the rue d'Assas. He flung down his brushes and ran after. The path turns sharply just before it reaches the tall gate and the witch was cut off from his vision for a moment—but he was close behind and it was only for a moment. Still she was gone when, quite breathless, he reached the gate. He looked all around him, surveyed the rue d'Assas and rue Vavin and even looked in back of the placarded kiosk that stands just beyond the gate. She had disappeared as completely as if she had leaped into the blue sky.
He went slowly back to his easel. He was sure it was the witch he had seen. There could be no mistake—the face he glimpsed was hers. She had magically disappeared on him. Spike shuddered. This magic was unlovely.
She must have known he was there. Why did she show herself only to disappear? Doubtless to remind him his time was dwindling. The sketch had gone dead. He could work no more.
On the rue d'Assas a poet he knew, a young man in a black shirt and baggy trousers, was chaining a bow-legged armchair to an iron hitching post. The post was in front of an antique shop, in which the poet was employed, and the bow-legged chair was, with proper precaution, being displayed for sale. That was all. But it looked, standing there at the extreme end of its tether, as if it were trying to run into the gardens across the street.
"Hello, Marius," said Flecker. "Mind its hind legs!"
"Hello, Spike." The poet snapped the padlock and stood up.
"I have been thinking about a certain thing," Spike began without preface. "And I want to know, are you happy?"
"No, I am not happy," the poet answered, after looking inside of himself. "Once I was happy, I think. Tomorrow I expect to be happy. Now I am not." He thrust his hands inside his belt and looked gratefully at Spike for having asked such a serious, meaty question.
"In the center of the sensation of living there is pain. When I smell the pear blossoms over there I have joy in them, tu comprends, and I do not feel this pain; but it is there, and it deepens the color of the joy."
He went on, seeing that Flecker still listened: "When I look down on the river at dusk I want to weep. But I love the river then. I was in love once, and that was when I was happy. But I have forgotten. There was such a flare of agony at the end that I cannot remember back of it."
"Will you have a drink?" asked the poet, a light in his eye for more talk.
"I will not," said Flecker. "I have work that must be done this afternoon."
Nevertheless they went straight into the bistro there on the corner of the rue Vavin and drank bordeaux blanc out of round, thin-glass goblets.
"Once back in America," Flecker remembered, "I wrote down things in a note-book. I wrote, 'This week I have been almost happy.' A few months later I read this over and remembered that I had not been happy at all.
"Again I wrote: 'How sad and lonely I am,' and when I read this long afterward I remembered clearly that I was not sad. That was strange."
The poet's face was lean and pale; his eyes the color of dark mahogany. Eagerness widened his eyes and vibrated in his gesture. Such conversation as this was sustenance to him.
"Alors," he exclaimed before the first drink was quite gone, "the next one is for me to pay."
"So is this one," Flecker said, gently as he could. "Unless you could loan me something. I haven't got a sou!"
The poet waved away this sad news. They drank.
"It is perfect balance, and maybe there is no such thing." Marius was thinking aloud. "Attends, I had a gray book, a red and yellow apple and a white bowl with black figures on it. They were all on my table. But it bothered me. It made something dead in the room. From being balanced and dead in the center the room became dead all over.
"I took the apple and put it closer to the book, and the spirit of the room flowed again. Now that they were off balance they pulled at each other, striving, do you see? The relation between them lived. It was beautiful.... But not happy."
The glasses were refilled and they drank.
"Sounds silly," said Marius.
"Oh, no!" Spike was emphatic. He was thinking he would borrow the book, the bowl and the apple and paint them. Arranging them in his mind, the red of the apple burned as a light, and he had a momentary impulse to get away home and paint an apple of such color and of such a down-pressing, significant weight, of such an inner, mysterious vitality as had never been painted before ... an apple and a bowl and a book that would sit in a square picture, alive forever!
He raised his goblet to the fading light in the window. ("It is already dusk. My time is dwindling!") The wine in the glasses was golden. Closing one eye Flecker quite unnecessarily looked for sediment in its clear perfection.
They raised their glasses together, and drank, their eyes wandering thoughtfully over the edges.
Spike turned round the painting of the pear tree and the woman in yellow. He was warm with courage concocted by sun and grape vine two summers before and dared to find his picture good.
"Damn it!" he exclaimed, hitting the bar with his fist so hard the fat black-moustached woman behind it jumped and put her hand on her extraordinary bosom. "Damn it! I can see!"
Marius looked.
"Mais oui, c'est bein fait ça!" Holding to the edge of the bar, he searched the ceiling for words. "With a clarity, mon ami——You take me before mystery of the tree blossoming in the sun and say look! and blow from between us the mist. There is nothing between me and the tree," said the poet.
"Nothing but me!" Spike put in with a strange grin.
"There is joy of life in that picture," added Marius.
Flecker laughed an abrupt, realizing laugh. Well, there was!