Chapter XII

The Witch of Prague

by F. Marion Crawford

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.