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.”