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. Assuredly 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 ignoble 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.