Flecker's Magic by Norman H. Matson

Author:Norman H. Matson [Norman H. Matson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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 creme 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 someone 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

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