The Witch of Prague Part 22

"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 suns.h.i.+ne. 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 a.s.sured in his sleeping state. They would const.i.tute 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 fas.h.i.+on. 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 a.s.suredly 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, a.s.suming his individual right to live in spite of G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sail 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 const.i.tution, 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 refres.h.i.+ng?"

"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 pa.s.sion which he fancies he feels for you."