Israel Kafka found himself seated in the corner of a comfortable
carriage with Keyork Arabian at his side. He opened his eyes quite
naturally, and after looking out of the window stretched himself as
far as the limits of the space would allow. He felt very weak and very
tired. The bright colour had left his olive cheeks, his lips were pale
and his eyes heavy.
“Travelling is very tiring,” he said, glancing at Keyork’s face.
The old man rubbed his hands briskly and laughed.
“I am as fresh as ever,” he answered. “It is true that I have the
happy faculty of sleeping when I get a chance and that no preoccupation
disturbs my appetite.”
Keyork Arabian was in a very cheerful frame of mind. He was conscious
of having made a great stride towards the successful realisation of his
dream. Israel Kafka’s ignorance, too, amused him, and gave him a fresh
and encouraging proof of Unorna’s amazing powers.
By a mere exercise of superior will this man, in the very prime of youth
and strength, had been deprived of a month of his life. Thirty days were
gone, as in the flash of a second, and with them was gone also something
less easily replaced, or at least more certainly missed. In Kafka’s mind
the passage of time was accounted for in a way which would have
seemed supernatural twenty years ago, but which at the present day is
understood in practice if not in theory. For thirty days he had been
stationary in one place, almost motionless, an instrument in Keyork’s
skilful hands, a mere reservoir of vitality upon which the sage had
ruthlessly drawn to the fullest extent of its capacities. He had been
fed and tended in his unconsciousness, he had, unknown to himself,
opened his eyes at regular intervals, and had absorbed through his ears
a series of vivid impressions destined to disarm his suspicions, when
he was at last allowed to wake and move about the world again. With
unfailing forethought Keyork had planned the details of a whole series
of artificial reminiscences, and at the moment when Kafka came to
himself in the carriage the machinery of memory began to work as Keyork
had intended that it should.
Israel Kafka leaned back against the cushions and reviewed his life
during the past month. He remembered very well the afternoon when,
after a stormy interview with Unorna, he had been persuaded by Keyork to
accompany the latter upon a rapid southward journey. He remembered how
he had hastily packed together a few necessaries for the expedition,
while Keyork stood at his elbow advising him what to take and what to
leave, with the sound good sense of an experienced traveller, and he
could almost repeat the words of the message he had scrawled on a sheet
of paper at the last minute to explain his sudden absence from his
lodging--for the people of the house had all been away when he was
packing his belongings. Then the hurry of the departure recalled itself
to him, the crowds of people at the Franz Josef station, the sense
of rest in finding himself alone with Keyork in a compartment of the
express train; after that he had slept during most of the journey,
waking to find himself in a city of the snow-driven Tyrol. With
tolerable distinctness he remembered the sights he had seen, and
fragments of conversation--then another departure, still southward,
the crossing of the Alps, Italy, Venice--a dream of water and sun and
beautiful buildings, in which the varied conversational powers of his
companion found constant material. As a matter of fact the conversation
was what was most clearly impressed upon Kafka’s mind, as he recalled
the rapid passage from one city to another, and realised how many
places he had visited in one short month. From Venice southwards,
again, Florence, Rome, Naples, Sicily, by sea to Athens and on to
Constantinople, familiar to him already from former visits--up the
Bosphorus, by the Black Sea to Varna, and then, again, a long period of
restful sleep during the endless railway journey--Pesth, Vienna, rapidly
revisited and back at last to Prague, to the cold and the gray snow and
the black sky. It was not strange, he thought, that his recollections
of so many cities should be a little confused. A man would need a fine
memory to catalogue the myriad sights which such a trip offers to the
eye, the innumerable sounds, familiar and unfamiliar, which strike
the ear, the countless sensations of comfort, discomfort, pleasure,
annoyance and admiration, which occupy the nerves without intermission.
There was something not wholly disagreeable in the hazy character of the
retrospect, especially to a nature such as Kafka’s, full of undeveloped
artistic instincts and of a passionate love of all sensuous beauty,
animate and inanimate. The gorgeous pictures rose one after the other
in his imagination, and satisfied a longing of which he felt that he had
been vaguely aware before beginning the journey. None of these lacked
reality, any more than Keyork himself, thought it seemed strange to the
young man that he should actually have seen so much in so short a time.
But Keyork and Unorna understood their art and knew how much more easy
it is to produce a fiction of continuity where an element of confusion
is introduced by the multitude and variety of the quickly succeeding
impressions and almost destitute of incident. One occurrence, indeed,
he remembered with extraordinary distinctness, and could have affirmed
under oath in all its details. It had taken place in Palermo. The heat
had seemed intense by contrast with the bitter north he had left behind.
Keyork had gone out and he had been alone in a strange hotel. His head
swam in the stifling scirocco. He had sent for a local physician, and
the old-fashioned doctor had then and there taken blood from his arm.
He had lost so much that he had fainted. The doctor had been gone when
Keyork returned, and the sage had been very angry, abusing in most
violent terms the ignorance which could still apply such methods. Israel
Kafka knew that the lancet had left a wound on his arm and that the
scar was still visible. He remembered, too, that he had often felt tired
since, and that Keyork had invariably reminded him of the circumstances,
attributing to it the weariness from which he suffered, and indulging
each time in fresh abuse of the benighted doctor.
Very skilfully had the whole story been put together in all its minutest
details, carefully thought out and written down in the form of a
journal before it had been impressed upon his sleeping mind with all
the tyrannic force of Unorna’s strong will. And there was but little
probability that Israel Kafka would ever learn what had actually been
happening to him while he fancied that he had been travelling swiftly
from place to place. He could still wonder, indeed, that he should
have yielded so easily to Keyork’s pressing invitation to accompany the
latter upon such an extraordinary flight, but he remembered then his
last interview with Unorna and it seemed almost natural that in his
despair he should have chosen to go away. Not that his passion for
the woman was dead. Intentionally, or by an oversight, Unorna had not
touched upon the question of his love for her, in the course of her
otherwise well-considered suggestions. Possibly she had believed that
the statement she had forced from his lips was enough and that he would
forget her without any further action on her part. Possibly, too, Unorna
was indifferent and was content to let him suffer, believing that his
devotion might still be turned to some practical use. However that may
be, when Israel Kafka opened his eyes in the carriage he still loved
her, though he was conscious that in his manner of loving a change had
taken place, of which he was destined to realise the consequences before
another day had passed.
When Keyork answered his first remark, he turned and looked at the old
man.
“I suppose you are tougher than I,” he said, languidly. “You will hardly
believe it, but I have been dozing already, here, in the carriage, since
we left the station.”
“No harm in that. Sleep is a great restorative,” laughed Keyork.
“Are you so glad to be in Prague again?” asked Kafka. “It is a
melancholy place. But you laugh as though you actually liked the sight
of the black houses and the gray snow and the silent people.”
“How can a place be melancholy? The seat of melancholy is the liver.
Imagine a city with a liver--of brick and mortar, or stone and cement,
a huge mass of masonry buried in its centre, like an enormous fetish,
exercising a mysterious influence over the city’s health--then you may
imagine a city as suffering from melancholy.”
“How absurd!”
“My dear boy, I rarely say absurd things,” answered Keyork
imperturbably. “Besides, as a matter of fact, there is nothing absurd.
But you suggested rather a fantastic idea to my imagination. The brick
liver is not a bad conception. Far down in the bowels of the earth, in
a black cavern hollowed beneath the lowest foundations of the oldest
church, the brick liver was built by the cunning magicians of old, to
last for ever, to purify the city’s blood, to regulate the city’s life,
and in a measure to control its destinies by means of its passions. A
few wise men have handed down the knowledge of the brick liver to each
other from generation to generation, but the rest of the inhabitants are
ignorant of its existence. They alone know that every vicissitude of
the city’s condition is traceable to that source--its sadness, its
merriment, its carnivals and its lents, its health and its disease, its
prosperity and the hideous plagues which at distant intervals kill one
in ten of the population. Is it not a pretty thought?”
“I do not understand you,” said Kafka, wearily.
“It is a very practical idea,” continued Keyork, amused with his own
fancies, “and it will yet be carried out. The great cities of the
next century will each have a liver of brick and mortar and iron and
machinery, a huge mechanical purifier. You smile! Ah, my dear boy, truth
and phantasm are very much the same to you! You are too young. How
can you be expected to care for the great problem of problems, for the
mighty question of prolonging life?”
Keyork laughed again, with a meaning in his laughter which escaped his
companion altogether.
“How can you be expected to care?” he repeated. “And yet men used to say
that it was the duty of strong youth to support the trembling weakness
of feeble old age.”
His eyes twinkled with a diabolical mirth.
“No,” said Kafka. “I do not care. Life is meant to be short. Life is
meant to be storm, broken with gleams of love’s sunshine. Why prolong
it? If it is unhappy you would only draw out the unhappiness to greater
lengths, and such joy as it has is joy only because it is quick, sudden,
violent. I would concentrate a lifetime into an instant, if I could,
and then die content in having suffered everything, enjoyed everything,
dared everything in the flash of a great lightning between two total
darknesses. But to drag on through slow sorrows, or to crawl through a
century of contentment--never! Better be mad, or asleep, and unconscious
of the time.”
“You are a very desperate person!” exclaimed Keyork. “If you had the
management of this unstable world you would make it a very convulsive
and nervous place. We should all turn into flaming ephemerides,
fluttering about the crater of a perpetually active volcano. I prefer
the system of the brick liver. There is more durability in it.”
The carriage stopped before the door of Kafka’s dwelling. Keyork got out
with him and stood upon the pavement while the porter took the slender
luggage into the house. He smiled as he glanced at the leathern
portmanteau which was supposed to have made such a long journey while
it had in reality lain a whole month in a corner of Keyork’s great room
behind a group of specimens. He had opened it once or twice in that
time, had disturbed the contents and had thrown in a few objects from
his heterogeneous collection, as reminiscences of the places visited
in imagination by Kafka, and of the acquisition of which the latter was
only assured in his sleeping state. They would constitute a tangible
proof of the journey’s reality in case the suggestion proved less
thoroughly successful than was hoped, and Keyork prided himself upon
this supreme touch.
“And now,” he said, taking Kafka’s hand, “I would advise you to rest as
long as you can. I suppose that it must have been a fatiguing trip for
you, though I myself am as fresh as a May morning. There is nothing
wrong with you, but you are tired. Repose, my dear boy, repose, and
plenty of it. That infernal Sicilian doctor! I shall never forgive him
for bleeding you as he did. There is nothing so weakening. Good-bye--I
shall hardly see you again to-day, I fancy.”
“I cannot tell,” answered the young man absently. “But let me thank
you,” he added, with a sudden consciousness of obligation, “for your
pleasant company, and for making me go with you. I daresay it has done
me good, though I feel unaccountably tired--I feel almost old.”
His tired eyes and haggard face showed that this at least was no
illusion. The fancied journey had added ten years to his age in thirty
days, and those who knew him best would have found it hard to recognise
the brilliantly vital personality of Israel Kafka in the pale and
exhausted youth who painfully climbed the stairs with unsteady steps,
panting for breath and clutching at the hand-rail for support.
“He will not die this time,” remarked Keyork Arabian to himself, as he
sent the carriage away and began to walk towards his own home. “Not
this time. But it was a sharp strain, and it would not be safe to try it
again.”
He thrust his gloved hands into the pockets of his fur coat, so that the
stick he held stood upright against his shoulder in a rather military
fashion. The fur cap sat a little to one side on his strange head, his
eyes twinkled, his long white beard waved in the cold wind, and his
whole appearance was that of a jaunty gnome-king, well satisfied with
the inspection of his treasure chamber.
And he had cause for satisfaction, as he knew well enough when he
thought of the decided progress made in the great experiment. The cost
at which that progress had been obtained was nothing. Had Israel Kafka
perished altogether under the treatment he had received, Keyork Arabian
would have bestowed no more attention upon the catastrophe than would
have been barely necessary in order to conceal it and to protect himself
and Unorna from the consequences of the crime. In the duel with death,
the life of one man was of small consequence, and Keyork would have
sacrificed thousands to his purposes with equal indifference to their
intrinsic value and with a proportionately greater interest in the
result to be attained. There was a terrible logic in his mental process.
Life was a treasure literally inestimable in value. Death was the
destroyer of this treasure, devised by the Supreme Power as a sure means
of limiting man’s activity and intelligence. To conquer Death on his own
ground was to win the great victory over that Power, and to drive back
to an indefinite distance the boundaries of human supremacy.
It was assuredly not for the sake of benefiting mankind at large that
he pursued his researches at all sacrifices and at all costs. The
prime object of all his consideration was himself, as he unhesitatingly
admitted on all occasions, conceiving perhaps that it was easier to
defend such a position than to disclaim it. There could be no doubt
that in the man’s enormous self-estimation, the Supreme Power occupied a
place secondary to Keyork Arabian’s personality, and hostile to it. And
he had taken up arms, as Lucifer, assuming his individual right to live
in spite of God, Man and Nature, convinced that the secret could be
discovered and determined to find it and to use it, no matter at what
price. In him there was neither ambition, nor pride, nor vanity in the
ordinary meaning of these words. For passion ceases with the cessation
of comparison between man and his fellows, and Keyork Arabian
acknowledged no ground for such a comparison in his own case. He had
matched himself in a struggle with the Supreme Power, and, directly,
with that Power’s only active representative on earth, with death.
It was well said of him that he had no beliefs, for he knew of no
intermediate position between total suspension of judgment, and the
certainty of direct knowledge. And it was equally true that he was no
atheist, as he had sanctimoniously declared of himself. He admitted
the existence of the Power; he claimed the right to assail it, and he
grappled with the greatest, the most terrible, the most universal and
the most stupendous of Facts, which is the Fact that all men die. Unless
he conquered, he must die also. He was past theories, as he was beyond
most other human weaknesses, and facts had for him the enormous value
they acquire in the minds of men cut off from all that is ideal.
In Unorna he had found the instrument he had sought throughout half a
lifetime. With her he had tried the great experiment and pushed it to
the very end; and when he conducted Israel Kafka to his home, he already
knew that the experiment had succeeded. His plan was a simple one. He
would wait a few months longer for the final result, he would select his
victim, and with Unorna’s help he would himself grow young again.
“And who can tell,” he asked himself, “whether the life restored by such
means may not be more resisting and stronger against deathly influences
than before? Is it not true that the older we grow the more slowly
we grow old? Is not the gulf which divides the infant from the man of
twenty years far wider than that which lies between the twentieth and
the fortieth years, and that again more full of rapid change than the
third score? Take, too, the wisdom of my old age as against the folly
of a scarce grown boy, shall not my knowledge and care and forethought
avail to make the same material last longer on the second trial than on
the first?”
No doubt of that, he thought, as he walked briskly along the pavement
and entered his own house. In his great room he sat down by the table
and fell into a long meditation upon the most immediate consequences of
his success in the difficult undertaking he had so skilfully brought
to a conclusion. His eyes wandered about the room from one specimen to
another, and from time to time a short, scornful laugh made his white
beard quiver. As he had said once to Unorna, the dead things reminded
him of many failures; but he had never before been able to laugh at
them and at the unsuccessful efforts they represented. It was different
to-day. Without lifting his head he turned up his bright eyes, under the
thick, finely-wrinkled lids, as though looking upward toward that Power
against which he strove. The glance was malignant and defiant, human and
yet half-devilish. Then he looked down again, and again fell into deep
thought.
“And if it is to be so,” he said at last, rising suddenly and letting
his open hand fall upon the table, “even then, I am provided. She cannot
free herself from that bargain, at all events.”
Then he wrapped his furs around him and went out again. Scarce a hundred
paces from Unorna’s door he met the Wanderer. He looked up into the
cold, calm face, and put out his hand, with a greeting.
“You look as though you were in a very peaceful frame of mind,” observed
Keyork.
“Why should I be anything but peaceful?” asked the other, “I have
nothing to disturb me.”
“True, true. You possess a very fine organisation. I envy you your
magnificent constitution, my dear friend. I would like to have some of
it, and grow young again.”
“On your principle of embalming the living, I suppose.”
“Exactly,” answered the sage with a deep, rolling laugh. “By the bye,
have you been with our friend Unorna? I suppose that is a legitimate
question, though you always tell me I am tactless.”
“Perfectly legitimate, my dear Keyork. Yes, I have just left her. It is
like a breath of spring morning to go there in these days.”
“You find it refreshing?”
“Yes. There is something about her that I could describe as soothing, if
I were aware of ever being irritable, which I am not.”
Keyork smiled and looked down, trying to dislodge a bit of ice from the
pavement with the point of his stick.
“Soothing--yes. That is just the expression. Not exactly the quality
most young and beautiful women covet, eh? But a good quality in its way,
and at the right time. How is she to-day?”
“She seemed to have a headache--or she was oppressed by the heat.
Nothing serious, I fancy, but I came away, as I fancied I was tiring
her.”
“Not likely,” observed Keyork. “Do you know Israel Kafka?” he asked
suddenly.
“Israel Kafka,” repeated the Wanderer thoughtfully, as though searching
in his memory.
“Then you do not,” said Keyork. “You could only have seen him since you
have been here. He is one of Unorna’s most interesting patients, and
mine as well. He is a little odd.”
Keyork tapped his ivory forehead significantly with one finger.
“Mad,” suggested the Wanderer.
“Mad, if you prefer the term. He has fixed ideas. In the first place,
he imagines that he has just been travelling with me in Italy, and is
always talking of our experiences. Humour him, if you meet him. He is in
danger of being worse if contradicted.”
“Am I likely to meet him?”
“Yes. He is often here. His other fixed idea is that he loves Unorna to
distraction. He has been dangerously ill during the last few weeks but
is better now, and he may appear at any moment. Humour him a little if
he wearies you with his stories. That is all I ask. Both Unorna and I
are interested in the case.”
“And does not Unorna care for him at all?” inquired the other
indifferently.
“No, indeed. On the contrary, she is annoyed at his insistance, but sees
that it is a phase of insanity and hopes to cure it before long.”
“I see. What is he like? I suppose he is an Israelite.”
“From Moravia--yes. The wreck of a handsome boy,” said Keyork
carelessly. “This insanity is an enemy of good looks. The nerves give
way--then the vitality--the complexion goes--men of five and twenty
years look old under it. But you will see for yourself before long.
Good-bye. I will go in and see what is the matter with Unorna.”
They parted, the Wanderer continuing on his way along the street with
the same calm, cold, peaceful expression which had elicited Keyork’s
admiration, and Keyork himself going forward to Unorna’s door. His face
was very grave. He entered the house by a small side door and ascended
by a winding staircase directly to the room from which, an hour or two
earlier, he had carried the still unconscious Israel Kafka. Everything
was as he had left it, and he was glad to be certified that Unorna had
not disturbed the aged sleeper in his absence. Instead of going to her
at once he busied himself in making a few observations and in putting
in order certain of his instruments and appliances. Then at last he went
and found Unorna. She was walking up and down among the plants and he
saw at a glance that something had happened. Indeed the few words spoken
by the Wanderer had suggested to him the possibility of a crisis, and he
had purposely lingered in the inner apartment, in order to give her time
to recover her self-possession. She started slightly when he entered,
and her brows contracted, but she immediately guessed from his
expression that he was not in one of his aggressive moods.
“I have just rectified a mistake which might have had rather serious
consequences,” he said, stopping before her and speaking earnestly and
quietly.
“A mistake?”
“We remembered everything, except that our wandering friend and Kafka
were very likely to meet, and that Kafka would in all probability refer
to his delightful journey to the south in my company.”
“That is true!” exclaimed Unorna with an anxious glance. “Well? What
have you done?”
“I met the Wanderer in the street. What could I do? I told him that
Israel Kafka was a little mad, and that his harmless delusions referred
to a journey he was supposed to have made with me, and to an equally
imaginary passion which he fancies he feels for you.”
“That was wise,” said Unorna, still pale. “How came we to be so
imprudent! One word, and he might have suspected--”
“He could not have suspected all,” answered Keyork. “No man could
suspect that.”
“Nevertheless, I suppose what we have done is not exactly--justifiable.”
“Hardly. It is true that criminal law has not yet adjusted itself to
meet questions of suggestion and psychic influence, but it draws
the line, most certainly, somewhere between these questions and the
extremity to which we have gone. Happily the law is at an immeasurable
distance from science, and here, as usual in such experiments, no one
could prove anything, owing to the complete unconsciousness of the
principal witnesses.”
“I do not like to think that we have been near to such trouble,” said
Unorna.
“Nor I. It was fortunate that I met the Wanderer when I did.”
“And the other? Did he wake as I ordered him to do? Is all right? Is
there no danger of his suspecting anything?”
It seemed as though Unorna had momentarily forgotten that such a
contingency might be possible, and her anxiety returned with the
recollection. Keyork’s rolling laughter reverberated among the plants
and filled the whole wide hall with echoes.
“No danger there,” he answered. “Your witchcraft is above criticism.
Nothing of that kind that you have ever undertaken has failed.”
“Except against you,” said Unorna, thoughtfully.
“Except against me, of course. How could you ever expect anything of the
kind to succeed against me, my dear lady?”
“And why not? After all, in spite of our jesting, you are not a
supernatural being.”
“That depends entirely on the interpretation you give to the word
supernatural. But, my dear friend and colleague, let us not deceive
each other, though we are able between us to deceive other people into
believing almost anything. There is nothing in all this witchcraft of
yours but a very powerful moral influence at work--I mean apart from the
mere faculty of clairvoyance which is possessed by hundreds of common
somnambulists, and which, in you, is a mere accident. The rest, this
hypnotism, this suggestion, this direction of others’ wills, is a
moral affair, a matter of direct impression produced by words. Mental
suggestion may in rare cases succeed, when the person to be influenced
is himself a natural clairvoyant. But these cases are not worth taking
into consideration. Your influence is a direct one, chiefly exercised by
means of your words and through the impression of power which you
know how to convey in them. It is marvellous, I admit. But the very
definition puts me beyond your power.”
“Why?”
“Because there is not a human being alive, and I do not believe that a
human being ever lived, who had the sense of independent individuality
which I have. Let a man have the very smallest doubt concerning his own
independence--let that doubt be ever so transitory and produced by any
accident whatsoever--and he is at your mercy.”
“And you are sure that no accident could shake your faith in yourself?”
“My consciousness of myself, you mean. No. I am not sure. But, my dear
Unorna, I am very careful in guarding against accidents of all sorts,
for I have attempted to resuscitate a great many dead people and I have
never succeeded, and I know that a false step on a slippery staircase
may be quite as fatal as a teaspoonful of prussic acid--or an unrequited
passion. I avoid all these things and many others. If I did not, and if
you had any object in getting me under your influence, you would
succeed sooner or later. Perhaps the day is not far distant when I will
voluntarily sleep under your hand.”
Unorna glanced quickly at him.
“And in that case,” he added, “I am sure you could make me believe
anything you pleased.”
“What are you trying to make me understand?” she asked, suspiciously,
for he had never before spoken of such a possibility.
“You look anxious and weary,” he said in a tone of sympathy in which
Unorna could not detect the least false modulation, though she fancied
from his fixed gaze that he meant her to understand something which he
could not say. “You look tired,” he continued, “though it is becoming
to your beauty to be pale--I always said so. I will not weary you. I was
only going to say that if I were under your influence--you might easily
make me believe that you were not yourself, but another woman--for the
rest of my life.”
They stood looking at each other in silence during several seconds. Then
Unorna seemed to understand what he meant.
“Do you really believe that is possible?” she asked earnestly.
“I know it. I know of a case in which it succeeded very well.”
“Perhaps,” she said, thoughtfully. “Let us go and look at him.”
She moved in the direction of the aged sleeper’s room and they both left
the hall together.