The Witch of Prague Part 41

"Then comes the whole question of an inquiry into his sanity," objected Keyork. "We come back to the starting-point. We must settle all this before we go to him. A lunatic asylum is not a club in this country.

There is a great deal of formality connected with getting into it, and a great deal more connected with getting out. Now, I could not get a keeper for Kafka without going to the physician in charge and making a statement, and demanding an examination, and all the rest of it. And Israel Kafka is a person of importance among his own people. He comes of great Jews in Moravia, and we should have the whole Jews' quarter--which means nearly the whole of Prague, in a broad sense--about our ears in twenty-four hours. No, no, my friend. To avoid an enormous scandal things must be done very quietly indeed."

"I cannot see anything to be done, then, unless we bring him here," said the Wanderer, falling into the trap from sheer perplexity. Everything that Keyork had said was undeniably true.

"He would be a nuisance in the house," answered the sage, not wis.h.i.+ng, for reasons of his own, to appear to accept the proposition too eagerly.

"Not but that the Individual would make a capital keeper. He is as gentle as he is strong, and as quick as a tiger-cat."

"So far as that is concerned," said the Wanderer coolly, "I could take charge of him myself, if you did not object to my presence."

"You do not trust me," said the other, with a sharp glance.

"My dear Keyork, we are old acquaintances, and I trust you implicitly to do whatever you have predetermined to do for the advantage of your studies, unless some one interferes with you. You have no more respect for human life or sympathy for human suffering than you have belief in the importance of anything not conducive to your researches. I am perfectly well aware that if you thought you could learn something by making experiments upon the body of Israel Kafka, you would not scruple to make a living mummy of him, you would do it without the least hesitation. I should expect to find him with his head cut off, living by means of a gla.s.s heart and thinking through a rabbit's brain. That is the reason why I do not trust you. Before I could deliver him into your hands, I would require of you a contract to give him back unhurt--and a contract of the kind you would consider binding."

Keyork Arabian wondered whether Unorna, in the recklessness of her pa.s.sion, had betrayed the nature of the experiment they had been making together, but a moment's reflection told him that he need have no anxiety on this score. He understood the Wanderer's nature too well to suspect him of wis.h.i.+ng to convey a covert hint instead of saying openly what was in his mind.

"Taste one of these oranges," he said, by way of avoiding an answer.

"they have just come from Smyrna." The Wanderer smiled as he took the proffered fruit.

"So that unless you have a serious objection to my presence," he said, continuing his former speech, "you will have me as a guest so long as Israel Kafka is here."

Keyork Arabian saw no immediate escape.

"My dear friend!" he exclaimed with alacrity. "If you are really in earnest, I am as really delighted. So far from taking your distrust ill, I regard it as a providentially fortunate bias of your mind, since it will keep us together for a time. You will be the only loser. You see how simply I live."

"There is a simplicity which is the extremest development of refined sybarism," the Wanderer said, smiling again. "I know your simplicity of old. It consists of getting precisely what you want, and in producing local earthquakes and revolutions when you cannot get it. Moreover you want what is good--to the taste, at least."

"There is something in that," answered Keyork with a merry twinkle in his eye. "Happiness is a matter of speculation. Comfort is a matter of fact. Most men are uncomfortable, because they do not know what they want. If you have tastes, study them. If you have intelligence, apply it to the question of gratifying your tastes. Consult yourself first--and n.o.body second. Consider this orange--I am fond of oranges and they suit my const.i.tution admirably. Consider the difficulty I have had in procuring it at this time of year--not in the wretched condition in which they are sold in the market, plucked half green in Spain or Italy and ripened on the voyage in the fermenting heat of the decay of those which are already rotten--but ripe from the tree and brought to me directly by the shortest and quickest means possible. Consider this orange, I say. Do you vainly imagine that if I had but two or three like it I would offer you one?"

"I would not be so rash as to imagine anything of the kind, my dear Keyork. I know you very well. If you offer me one it is because you have a week's supply at least."

"Exactly," said Keyork. "And a few to spare, because they will only keep a week as I like them, and because I would no more run the risk of missing my orange a week hence for your sake, than I would deprive myself of it to-day."

"And that is your simplicity."

"That is my simplicity. It is indeed a perfectly simple matter, for there is only one idea in it, and in all things I carry that one idea out to its ultimate expression. That one idea, as you very well put it, is to have exactly what I want in this world."

"And will you be getting what you want in having me quartered upon you as poor Israel Kafka's keeper?" asked the Wanderer, with an expression of amus.e.m.e.nt. But Keyork did not wince.

"Precisely," he answered without hesitation. "In the first place you will relieve me of much trouble and responsibility, and the Individual will not be so often called away from his manifold and important household duties. In the second place I shall have a most agreeable and intelligent companion with whom I can talk as long as I like. In the third place I shall undoubtedly satisfy my curiosity."

"In what respect, if you please?"

"I shall discover the secret of your wonderful interest in Israel Kafka's welfare. I always like to follow the workings of a brain essentially different from my own, philanthropic, of course. How could it be anything else? Philanthropy deals with a cla.s.s of ideas wholly unfamiliar to me. I shall learn much in your society."

"And possibly I shall learn something from you," the Wanderer answered.

"There is certainly much to be learnt. I wonder whether your ideas upon all subjects are as simple as those you hold about oranges."

"Absolutely. I make no secret of my principles. Everything I do is for my own advantage."

"Then," observed the Wanderer, "the advantage of Unorna's life must be an enormous one to you, to judge by your satisfaction at her safety."

Keyork stared at him a moment and then laughed, but less heartily and loudly than usual his companion fancied.

"Very good!" he exclaimed. "Excellent! I fell into the trap like a rat into a basin of water. You are indeed an interesting companion, my dear friend--so interesting that I hope we shall never part again." There was a rather savage intonation in the last words.

They looked at each other intently, neither wincing nor lowering his gaze. The Wanderer saw that he had touched upon Keyork's greatest and most important secret, and Keyork fancied that his companion knew more than he actually did. But nothing further was said, for Keyork was far too wise to enter into explanation, and the Wanderer knew well enough that if he was to learn anything it must be by observation and not by questioning. Keyork filled both gla.s.ses in silence and both men drank before speaking again.

"And now that we have refreshed ourselves," he said, returning naturally to his former manner, "we will go and find Israel Kafka. It is as well that we should have given him a little time to himself. He may have returned to his senses without any trouble on our part. Shall we take the Individual?"

"As you please," the Wanderer answered indifferently as he rose from his place.

"It is very well for you not to care," observed Keyork. "You are big and strong and young, whereas I am a little man and very old at that.

I shall take him for my own protection. I confess that I value my life very highly. It is a part of that simplicity which you despise. That devil of a Jew is armed, you say?"

"I saw something like a knife in his hand, as we shut him in," said the Wanderer with the same indifference as before.

"Then I will take the Individual," Keyork answered promptly. "A man's bare hands must be strong and clever to take a man's life in a scuffle, and few men can use a pistol to any purpose. But a knife is a weapon of precision. I will take the Individual, decidedly."

He made a few rapid signs, and the Individual disappeared, coming back a moment later attired in a long coat not unlike his master's except that the fur of the great collar was of common fox instead of being of sable.

Keyork drew his peaked cape comfortably down over the tips of his ears.

"The ether!" he exclaimed. "How forgetful I am growing! Your charming conversation had almost made me forget the object of our visit!"

He went back and took the various things he needed. Then the three men went out together.

CHAPTER XXII

More than an hour had elapsed since the Wanderer and Unorna had finally turned the key upon Israel Kafka, leaving him to his own reflections.

During the first moments he made desperate efforts to get out of the conservatory, throwing himself with all his weight and strength against the doors and thrusting the point of his long knife into the small apertures of the locks. Then, seeing that every attempt was fruitless, he desisted and sat down, in a state of complete exhaustion. A reaction began to set in after the furious excitement of the afternoon, and he felt all at once that it would be impossible for him to make another step or raise his arm to strike. A man less sound originally in bodily const.i.tution would have broken down sooner, and it was a proof of Israel Kafka's extraordinary vigour and energy that he did not lose his senses in a delirious fever at the moment when he felt that his strength could bear no further strain.

But his thoughts, such as they were, did not lack clearness. He saw that his opportunity was gone, and he began to think of the future, wondering what would take place next. a.s.suredly when he had come to Unorna's house with the fixed determination to take her life, the last thing that he had expected had been to be taken prisoner and left to his own meditations. It was clear that the Wanderer's warning had been conveyed without loss of time and had saved Unorna from her immediate fate.

Nevertheless, he did not regret having given her the opportunity of defending herself. He had not meant that there should be any secret about the deed, for he was ready to sacrifice his own life in executing it.

Yet he was not altogether brave. He had neither Unorna's innate indifference to physical danger, nor the Wanderer's calm superiority to fear. He would not have made a good soldier, and he could not have faced another man's pistol at fifteen paces without experiencing a mental and bodily commotion not unlike terror, which he might or might not have concealed from others, but which would in any case have been painfully apparent to himself.

It is a noticeable fact in human nature that a man of even ordinary courage will at any time, when under excitement, risk his life rather than his happiness. Moreover, an immense number of individuals, naturally far from brave, destroy their own lives yearly in the moment when all chances of happiness are temporarily eclipsed. The inference seems to be that mankind, on the whole, values happiness more highly than life. The proportion of suicides from so-called "honourable motives" is small as compared with the many committed out of despair.

Israel Kafka's case was by no means a rare one. The fact of having been made to play a part which to him seemed at once blasphemous and ign.o.ble had indeed turned the scale, but was not the motive. In all things, the final touch which destroys the balance is commonly mistaken for the force which has originally produced a state of unstable equilibrium, whereas there is very often no connection between the one and the other.

The Moravian himself believed that the sacrifice of Unorna, and of himself afterwards, was to be an expiation of the outrage Unorna had put upon his faith in his own person. He had merely seized upon the first excuse which presented itself for ending all, because he was in reality past hope.

We have, as yet, no absolute test of sanity, as we have of fever in the body and of many other unnatural conditions of the human organism.

The only approximately accurate judgments in the patient's favour are obtained from examinations into the relative consecutiveness and consistency of thought in the individual examined, when the whole tendency of that thought is towards an end conceivably approvable by a majority of men. A great many philosophers and thinkers have accordingly been p.r.o.nounced insane at one period of history and have been held up as models of sanity at another. The most immediately destructive consequences of individual reasoning on a limited scale, murder and suicide, have been successively regarded as heroic acts, as criminal deeds, and as the deplorable but explicable actions of irresponsible beings in consecutive ages of violence, strict law and humanitarianism.

It seems to be believed that the combination of murder and suicide is more commonly observed under the last of the three reigns than it was under the first; it was undoubtedly least common under the second. In other words it appears probable that the practice of considering certain crimes as the result of insanity has a tendency to make those crimes increase in number, as they undoubtedly increase in barbarity, from year to year. Meanwhile, however, no definite conclusion has been reached as to the state of mind of a man who murders the woman he loves and then ends his own life.

Israel Kafka may therefore be regarded as mad or sane. In favour of the theory of his madness the total uselessness of the deed he contemplated may be adduced; on the other hand the extremely consecutive and consistent nature of his thoughts and actions gives evidence of his sanity.