The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

THE DISCIPLE

I.

Four o’clock struck in the church tower he was passing—the wide bronze rings of sound fell over him mingled with a fine powdery snow. He looked at his watch—how absurd!—and found that the church was quite right. This seemed the last straw in his boredom, and as if instigated by it, he turned out of the quiet square, beginning to be patched with white under dim lamps, with here and there a black wheel-track showing, and moved listlessly toward the shopping district. “Why didn’t I go?” he thought—without more than waving the vaguest of hands towards the imaginary destination or destiny. Then—“Middle age is a slow crucifixion.” And then again, knocking snow from his coat, “I can’t stand this damned solitude much longer.” However, here were the shop windows, a long gaudily jeweled row of them, pouring their colored lights across the snowy pavement and illuminating brilliantly the hordes of feverishly gesticulating pedestrians, the prowling taxis, the furtively creeping beetle-like limousines, the wet sides of horses. He went slowly, like a heavy moth, from window to window. He pulled his mustache, he stared, stamped his feet, devoured with dry eyes all that he saw—opal necklaces, gold cigarette cases, umbrellas with carved ivory handles, embroideries of Chinese scarlet, opera glasses, microscopes—good God! what a strange collection. He felt as if he were somehow incrusting his soul with these things—he seemed to himself to be like one of those singular boxes, known to his childhood, covered all over hard, rough and coruscating, with small sea-shells. Yes, exactly, and the box itself empty. Sea-shells—sea-shells. He thought of sea-shells with great pleasure, and then of the sea, the twilight valley floors of the sea, the strange soft trees that grow there, and himself as somehow a denizen—what precisely? A tortoise incrusted with barnacles, indistinguishable from his bed of shells, immemorially old and white. Yes, something like that.…

“I should like,” he said to the florid Jewish shopkeeper, “to look at some oddity in the way of a set of chessmen.”

“An oddity?—Yes.”

“A wedding gift, under peculiar circumstances. Something rather—” he waved a claw.

“—Rare?”

“—Old.”

A Chinese set with dragons, a Hindu set with elephants, a Japanese set of carved cherry-wood, daimyos, priests.… No, these weren’t quite the thing. The Jew looked at him intently under wrinkled lids like a parrot’s. Was his tongue, also, as hard and dry and old as a parrot’s?… The Jew hunched his shoulders almost up to his ears.

“Ah—I think I know what you want. But it can’t be had.”

“You mean—”

“You were thinking, no doubt, of the set of the ‘Twelve Disciples’?”

Astonishing! He had never heard of the set of “Twelve Disciples”; and yet there could be no question that it was what he was seeking.

“Exactly!”

“Ah! But it is lost.… And even if it were found, who could afford to buy it?”

“Oh! Afford!…”

“Ah—you are right—what does it matter?”

“And what is it like, this set of the Twelve Disciples?”

“Like? It is—but don’t you know?”

The Jew, leaning on the glass case, peered at him, he thought, somewhat peculiarly.

“How should I? I’ve never even heard of it.”

“But you said—!”

“Ah—forgive me—it is true that when you mentioned it—how shall I say—it seemed to me in some remote way—familiar. That was all.”

“Ah. I see—I see!… You thought you remembered it.… And if you think, if you concentrate upon it—if you turn, in your mind, a sudden light upon it—”

“I beg your pardon—?”

“—You don’t see it any more clearly?”

“Why, no—how should I?”

“Oh.… But the set really is quite ordinary—as carving. Nothing remarkable.”

“Then why is it so valuable?”

“Perhaps because it is generally considered mythical.”

“Mythical?… It doesn’t, after all, exist?…”

“So some would say. As for me—”

“You believe in it?”

“I believe in it.… I have even, in dreams, seen it.”

He found himself staring at the Jew, on this, as if at the revelation of some sort of obscure miracle. Yes, it appeared, the set of chessmen, in dreams; it came, in dreams, to this Jew. For a moment it seemed, in the oddest of ways, more tangible, it gave out a gleam and came nearer. Thirty-two pieces of ivory, close-clustered, one of them fallen over, and a candle lighting them. Had he dreamed this himself? It was vivid, and vivid was the hand he put out among them to right the fallen piece. But the fallen piece was stubborn, resisted, became massive.… He lifted his hand from the glass showcase, and stepped back. He had a sense of having resisted, barely resisted, and with an effort that left him trembling, a temptation not the less vast for having been incomprehensible. It was with a feeling of yielding to some obscure small issue of this temptation that he now said, with a conscious jocoseness that did not conceal excitement:

“And the piece that has fallen over—which piece is that?”

II.

The effect of this remark was extraordinary. The tempo of the adventure—for adventure it unquestionably and profoundly was—instantly quickened. It was as if the stream on which they were being swept had not only broadened and taken on a dizzying speed, but had, as suddenly, dived underground through a phantasmagoric darkness. Specifically, he found himself looking at a Jew who had somehow changed—he was less the shopkeeper, less, even, the human being, and more—something else. What, exactly? More imposing? That, certainly; and also, singularly, more luminous—he gave out a light, and his eyes, looking down, seemed in the kindliest of manners to indicate that this light must also be a guidance. What it was that the Jew said he didn’t catch. It was merely a short, vague exclamation, followed by a smile and a stare which were a little frightening in their suggestion of extraordinary intimacy. After that, it was as if every step taken was taken the more elaborately to insure for the ensuing talk the right seclusion and secrecy. The iron shutters outside the window were rattled harshly down and locked, the door was locked, the lights in the show window were switched off, leaving the heap of jewels, oddities, silks, and carvings in darkness. From outside in the night mingled with the subdued murmur of the street, came, even more subdued and tenuous, sounds of a bell, slowly struck, and as if blown down from a very great height.… When, having followed his host through a passage and up the stairs, an uplifted tall candle flinging cascades of banister shadows over the richly ornamented wall, he entered the room over the shop, it was with a vague sense of having come an incredible distance in space and time—the street seemed far away, remote seemed the snowy square where, surely only a quarter of an hour ago, the clock had struck four; remotest of all seemed his own poor lodgings where the fire probably needed replenishing. Had he not, even, come a long way from himself—was his name still Dace?…

“The piece that has fallen over!” said the Jew, and gave a short laugh. He had set the candle on the chimneypiece, where its light, duplicated in the dusty mirror, was sufficient to show a faded room crowded with odds and ends. “That’s shrewd—that’s shrewd. That goes, certainly, to the root of things.… So you knew, all the time!”

“Knew?…”

“You were merely drawing me out, leading me on! Well, well! That was clever.”

Dace met the Jew’s richly insinuating stare with bland and genial acquiescence.

“What makes you think I know?”

“My dear chap!… Are you joking?… Why, of course, it was your allusion to Judas.”

“Oh, I see—my allusion to Judas.…”

“—The piece that has fallen over, as you so nicely put it!”

“Oh—that!… So that is Judas?… But I didn’t, to tell the truth, know it at all. I knew nothing whatever!”

The Jew smiled at this with an excess of politeness, but the smile slowly faded.

“But—how extraordinary!… You really knew nothing?”

“As I say—nothing whatever.”

“But how on earth, then, did you come to speak of the piece that has fallen over?”

They exchanged a long look over this question, as if (absurd! Dace found time to say to himself) it was, somehow, of tremendous import. But decidedly, it was of tremendous import. Whether the man were mad or not—and for the first moment Dace clearly formulated to himself that possibility—or whether he himself was on the verge of madness, did not seem particularly to matter. What was remarkable, or uncanny, was the way in which their sanity, or madness, brought them, in every consciousness, together. That singular vision of the chessmen—how explain it? His mental eye reverted to it, and he saw it now more sharply than ever. He saw the criss-crossing of shadows among the pieces, he saw deeply carved on the crown of the king nearest him the letters “I.N.R.”—(and no doubt “I” was turned away from him); and there was Judas lying at the left-hand corner of the board, apparently on the point of rolling off. He put out his finger to it, tried to lift it—it was immovable, as if glued. But it must be moved! He felt the gathering within himself of a great wave of energy, all directed to a huge decuman crash against the implacable obstacle.… Then he removed his hand from the edge of the small taboret (which he had hardly noticed) and leaned back in his chair, once more with a sense of temptation undergone and partially resisted. But again, it was a yielding to some small faint beckoning, some fugitive far signal, that put the next words on his tongue.

“Well,” he said, and he laughed a little uneasily, “I’m sure I can’t explain it. But no sooner had you spoken of seeing the chessmen in dreams than I had, on the spot, a kind of waking dream myself. I’ve just had it again. I didn’t see all the pieces plainly—but plain enough was the piece which you say is Judas, and plain enough was the inscription on the crown of one of the kings.”

“You mean the letters—?”

“I. N. R. I.”

“Ah, yes. Exactly.… Rex Judæorum.… How extraordinary!”

“To put it very mildly!”

“What?… Oh, I don’t mean that.”

“I beg your pardon, then—but what do you mean?”

The Jew regarded him searchingly; Dace felt himself being slowly fathomed and gave himself agreeably to the experience, with a sense that he must keep still, let the plummet go straight.

“I mean”—the Jew was deliberate—“that while you see so much, without assistance—oh, certainly, quite without assistance—you nevertheless don’t see all.”

“All?”

“Yes—that’s what I find extraordinary.… When, downstairs in the shop, you suddenly asked me ‘And the piece that has fallen over—what piece is that?’—how could I but assume that your identification was complete?… I—as you saw—accepted you. And now, you say, you didn’t at all recognize the piece as Judas! Certainly, that is very peculiar. I must suppose, however, as all the circumstances urge, that you would, had you been given time, have named Judas yourself. Yes, undoubtedly that is the explanation.”

The look which the Jew turned on Dace shone with the most perfect innocence and trust, and he replied to it with a grave nod. The logic was reasonable—was it not? Yet something in what the Jew said perplexed and escaped him; he went over it slowly, aware that somewhere, in this small plausible structure of words, was one word which was not so much a “block” as a “window”—it let through a light which was disquietingly suggestive of a space beyond space, of a depth which yawned beneath the solid, a world that was, as he was at last to phrase it, “other.” He found this word quickly enough—it was “identification”—and looked hard through it. What on earth had he meant by it?… It was simply a depth, a gleam, and nothing more. Yet, for some reason, he decided not to challenge it—not, at any rate, immediately. Wouldn’t it be more fruitful simply to wait before it exactly as one would wait before a lighted window, to find out at last what it was precisely that moved on the other side? Was it not also essential that he should in everything take his cue from the Jew?

It was therefore with a sense of the imperative necessity of delaying, of somehow gaining time, that he rose from his chair as if merely to look about him. The room to which he had been brought was extraordinary—a museum in microcosm. The candle, placed on the white marble mantel precariously between a tall much-figured clock and a Han horse, lighted the chamber only sufficiently to show its richness and its confusion. The only cleared space was that immediately before the fire, where the two chairs faced each other obliquely on the worn Persian carpet: for the rest, narrow lanes led hither and thither among a chaos of furniture and oddments which, in the gloom, had amazingly the air of a jungle. Chairs stood on tables, ivories and pictures balanced on chairs, shields, swords, and suits of chain mail hung on the walls with tapestries and Chinese paintings. Half a dozen clocks were ticking confusedly, only one of them visible. And dust was everywhere, thick, gritty dust, deposit of decades—on the mantel, the clock, the floor, the tables, here and there finger-marked. Even the mirror was dusty. And Dace, feeling the eyes of the Jew upon his back, and looking into the glass above the candle flame, to examine the shopkeeper at his leisure, was able to see of him, in the veiled gloom, only the dimmest of outlines. He turned and faced his interlocutor.

“You have some fine things here,” he murmured. “That horse, for example.”

The Jew was inert. It was as if he knew Dace to be evading him. He stared a moment, then dropped his eyes.

“Ah—that little Han horse.”

He was not interested in the horse, that was clear; and did not intend talking of it. But as Dace again sank into his chair, sighing, the Jew leaned sharply toward him, and smiled. Dace was touched by something in this smile—it was singularly gentle and friendly, a little humble. Why was it, nevertheless, that it seemed so oddly belied by the eyes? For in the eyes, lidded like a parrot’s, something disquieting flickered.

“You do not yet altogether trust me—do you!” said the Jew, still smiling.

Dace laughed outright, but not entirely with conviction. He was still trying, as it were, to gain time.

“Trust you? But why on earth shouldn’t I? Is it any question—”

“Oh, not of business, no! Certainly not.… We are not concerned with business.… Isn’t it really,” he lowered his tone a little, “something very much more important?”

“Important?”

“Yes. Isn’t it at bottom simply the question of our trusting—completely trusting—one another?”

Dace looked hard into the little eyes, which, in intensity of meaning, seemed to blaze.

“Oh, that!” he exclaimed gently. He directed his unseeing stare at the fire in an effort to conceal his confusion. Where, where on earth, he cried to himself, am I going? He felt slightly dizzy, but managed to affect a calm. Whether the shopkeeper was a madman or a prophet seemed for the present a wholly irrelevant question.

“That’s of course taken for granted—isn’t it?” he went on. And then added, for all the world as if the words were not so much his own as somehow given him, “What I mean is—isn’t it sufficient guarantee of our mutual trust—or sympathy, at all events—that so far, for all the singularity of our intercourse, we so easily and with so little error, follow one another?” He was pleased with himself at this, and showed it by smiling a little more lightly than before, and also by relaxing slightly in his chair.

And the shopkeeper, too, was pleased. He again, in that curious way which Dace had noticed downstairs in the shop, seemed before his very eyes in the act of changing; it was as if he became more significant, as if all his colors became brighter and richer, as if a secret low light within had somehow been sharply turned up. The wrinkled lids lifted a little, and the face became luminous with words of which Dace felt that he could almost, in advance, see the shape.

“Ah,” came the pleased murmur. “Exactly. That’s a good deal better, isn’t it? We begin to know where we are. And isn’t it important that you should agree with me, since you use the word ‘follow,’ that I follow you quite as successfully as you follow me? I don’t mean to urge or press you—no—no. But that, I think, if you will permit my saying so, is—er—a point—”

“Of cardinal importance? Yes—I believe it is. You mean—”

“I mean that, in all the experience we are sharing, or are about to share, you are contributing—quite without any assistance from me—as much as I. Or, to put it in another way, that you have been as free to accept as complete my identification as I have been to accept or reject yours. The responsibility is divided.”

“Responsibility?”

The Jew’s face clouded.

“Perhaps that’s not the best word,” he explained a little painfully. “There’s of course no serious question of responsibility. Responsibility for what?” He laughed. “No. We can put that aside.… Though it might be as well, afterwards, to know that it had been said.”

It was clear to Dace the Jew meant, by responsibility, responsibility for their mutual delusion. And surely there could be no harm in appearing to admit a share in the creation of it?

“Well—I’m quite ready to grant it, if you are—why not?”

Dace’s friendly, and perhaps slightly paternal, grin was met by one as friendly. They remained so for a moment, smiling, smiling as over the exchange of something secret and precious. Then, firmly, Dace continued—

“But we’ve got rather far away, haven’t we, from the set of the Twelve Disciples. What about that?”

“Ah, my dear fellow! Are you so determined to make a joke of it?”

“A joke? Why no.”

“But surely you realize that it’s just that that we’ve been, all this time, talking about!”

“Oh! Oh! I see.”

“But my dear chap—do you see?…”

The shopkeeper’s voice, on this, had become rather surprisingly loud and agitated. “Do you see!… Or have I been, after all, so hideously mistaken?”

“But how could you have been?”

“Ah, yes—how could I have been? It’s ridiculous.… Tell me”—he went on slowly, as if he were feeling his way with the greatest of care. “When you think of this set, when you light it sharply for yourself—do you feel toward it, in any way, any sort of—impulse?”

Dace was startled. Impulse? Of course, he did. But was it wise, after all, to admit it? What was this singular shopkeeper up to?… The rapidity of events had confused him. But it was necessary, after all—it was even imperative—that in this other-world darkness some sort of outline should be made out, some purpose or design should be guessed. Certainly, it did not seem an extravagance to suppose that the Jew was mad; nor was it in any way an extravagance to perceive, as he was almost sure he perceived, a slow, methodical, careful effort on the Jew’s part, to weave strongly the illusion, and to weave into it, as a vital part of it, both himself, and, what was more important, Dace. More obscure was the question whether the Jew was conscious of doing this. When he had so emphatically caviled over the point of their divided, their cooperative responsibility for the delusion—if it was a delusion—it had certainly appeared that he was, even if mad, aware of what he was doing. He had seemed quite consciously fearful lest Dace should suspect something. This odd something which he had so zealously guarded—was it, at bottom, nothing but a dim kind of hypnosis? But, if so, what was it for?… Dace looked hard into this tangle. It had no beginning and no end, and there was no point at which he might, with any clearness of view, start to unravel it. Most disquieting of all was his inability to distinguish, in his own mind, that part of this growing, glimmering, mutual delusion which might, quite genuinely, and quite, as the Jew had said, “without any assistance,” be his own strange contribution. But was any of it his own?… To admit that was to admit either one of two possibilities, neither of them comforting. It was to admit either that he himself was on the border of a kind of madness, or else that he had suddenly, with a catastrophic crash, gone through some queer crust of the world into a dimension which he had not hitherto known to exist, but which was none the less grotesquely real. But surely this was absurd! The man must be mad. Mad, but with a madness of which some intrinsic and secret element was an extraordinary power to exert an influence. Could it be also that he, Dace, by some psychological freak, was in exactly the right state of mind to be easily influenced? Was he responsible?… His misgiving, however, was only momentary, and, hearing again, in that still, strange room, the ethereal far ringing of the half-hour bells of the church tower, in the world he had left outside, and in a sense so far behind, his feeling of adventure was once more deepened and renewed. Strange, strange, he said to himself, and found himself, for no reason, staring at his hands, which he had lifted. Old hands; old and scarred. He stared at them, hard, as if he desired to look into them, to discover there some curious and embedded revelation. It embarrassed him, presently, to find that the Jew was watching this action intently, and had lifted his own hands into the same position. His answer was thus, in a manner, startled out of him. Was the Jew, then, in the very act of hypnotizing him?…

“Impulse?” he said. “I thought I had told you. Yes—I have an impulse, a curious and very strong one. I think it must have been because of that impulse that I’ve just found myself, as you seem to have observed”—he laughed—“staring so idiotically at my old hands.… Each time that I have clearly visualized this set of chessmen, with its kings, and its fallen Judas, I have half-surrendered to the most unaccountable impulse to right the fallen piece. And each time, on coming to my senses, I’ve found myself pressing, very hard, against—well, the showcase downstairs, the taboret, here. That, I suppose, is what you mean?”

The Jew nodded.

“Exactly. And now—But first let me repeat that you are—how shall I put it—mentally quite free in this matter—isn’t that true?”

“But, of course—how could it not be?” Dace, saying this, felt a little disingenuous.

“Well. The interesting question then is—do you see any reason for this impulse?… Don’t let me hurry you—take your time. Try, if you like, lighting the board for yourself once more. Observe, if you can, when you feel this impulse, whether it is connected with any profound feeling of identification—or shall we say, rather, sympathy.… Perhaps I embarrass you. I’ll turn my back.”

The Jew walked to the mantel, and resting one foot on the brass fender, appeared to stare into the disintegrating coal fire. Identification! That word again. It was important—it meant that something, something very peculiar, was expected of him. Left thus to himself, Dace felt that at last a definite turning point had come, and felt also, quite clearly, that it was in his power to “go on” or not, just as he chose; not merely a power to refuse or acquiesce, but something much more singular—a power, if he liked, to acquiesce creatively. If the man was mad—and certainly the worn and shiny back, the high peaked shoulders, and comically bald head combined to produce an effect of decided queerness—his madness might be harmless, and was also, for Dace—and this struck him as remarkable—perfectly, potentially transparent. What Dace felt was indeed that if now he were to make the smallest effort (of a sort which he recognized brilliantly, but could scarcely analyze) he would not only be able to see the mechanism of the Jew as clearly as one sees the mechanism of a glass-cased clock, but also exactly what that mechanism, so driven and so eccentric, would demand of himself. Even this was not all. For was it not also true that, once he accepted this course, something of himself would have to be surrendered?… Would it not definitely involve his “descent,” or “ascent,” into that curious void, already glimpsed, of the “other” world?… Was he not quite clearly putting himself in the hands of this Jew?… Certainly the mere summoning up once more, before his mind’s eye, of the chessboard, the peculiar set of chessmen, was absurdly easy—he could do it without any effort whatever. It was, in fact, already there—he had only to look at it. If there was something just the least disquieting in this fact—in the fact that he might almost say that his mind was, in a manner, possessed—he at once waved the suggestion away. He looked, then, once again at the visionary board. It was closer, more pressingly vivid and alive, than ever. He could certainly, if he liked, put his hand out and touch it—he could certainly put his hand among the pieces, past the White King (whose crown showed the letters I. N. R.) and lift the fallen Knight, which was Judas. This was what he desired to do—he put out his hand, and as he did so, realized for the first time how extraordinarily important this action was for him. The fallen piece, however, resisted him as before, resisted his thought, would not be otherwise conceived than as fallen. But it must be lifted! He strained at the shadow, concentrating against it a whole world of shadows. He bent his life against it. It could not be seized, it would not budge. It was as if he were—yes—trying to lift a part of himself—a symbol—

The revelation was sudden enough to shock him. He broke into a cold sweat, and barely mastered an impulse to spring to his feet. There was still time to “go back”—he seemed to see it, however, as a long way, and involving, also, a sort of cowardice. It was to go back into—hadn’t he, in the snow-filled square, called it the slow crucifixion of middle age—boredom? This could hardly be worse; though he now knew, with a sense rather spacious and vast than precise, that it involved danger. Still, it was possible to go forward, with caution. He would keep some part of his wits about him—still free, and his own. He was a match, he felt, for—well, for that Jew. He needn’t be influenced, beyond a certain point?…

He opened his eyes, which during his waking dream he had shut, and rose. The Jew turned about. For a moment the two men regarded each other in silence, a silence broken only by the small feverish ticking of invisible clocks. The shopkeeper, when at last he spoke, spoke in a tone which had become, for no apparent reason, sardonic and slightly tyrannous. He leaned back, with his elbows behind him on the white marble mantel.

“Well?” he said.

Dace was cool—he allowed himself a slightly ironic smile.

“You were quite right,” he rang out. Then, measuring with the nicest accuracy the queer light in the other’s eyes, he went on, with a considered leisureliness, which he perhaps intended to be provocative—“I do identify myself with one of the pieces on the board—as you so perspicaciously suggested.… I identify myself with Judas.”

“I didn’t suggest it”—cried the Jew. “I didn’t suggest it! As God is my witness.… Don’t think it!”

Dace was amazed by the violence of this outburst. He was amazed also by the change in the Jew’s appearance. He stood rigid and tall, his fists clenched at his sides, his face white as the marble, his large mouth grotesquely opened in a fixed and tragic expression of suffering, like the mouth of the tragic mask. He was absurd—Dace had even a fleeting desire to “kick” him—but he was also portentous.

“I think you misunderstand me,” Dace pursued, endeavoring to speak without agitation. “You merely suggested that I might, during this waking dream, experience some feeling of sympathy—am I not right? Well, I now tell you that is true. God knows how you guessed it!” He laughed apologetically. “And I improve on your suggestion, quite clearly, when I tell you that in this dream Judas and I are one and the same person.… Isn’t it extraordinary!”

The Jew, at this, merely gasped. Then relaxing, and as if he had suddenly become faint, he sank into a chair, where he dropped his face into his hands and began absurdly rolling his great, dark curly head from side to side, as if in an ecstasy of pain. “Ah, my God,” he breathed through his hands, without looking up. “Ah, my God, my God!”

Dace, if he was surprised by the spectacle, did not show it. He merely watched, with the absorbed amusement of a child, this uncontrolled and unexplained behavior, and smiled. The top of the Jew’s head, with its bald spot ringed with curls, thus rolling heavily and serpentinely, with that sinuous unction peculiar to camels, simply struck him as funny.

III.

He was also, however, somewhat disgusted. And it was with some severity that he asked, after a moment:

“Are you feeling ill?”

The shopkeeper stopped rolling his head. His face remained hidden in his hands, nevertheless, and it was some time before he sat up, looking extraordinarily ravaged and pale, and with his large mouth still tragically relaxed. His voice, when at last he spoke, had changed, had become harsh, deep, tortured, uncertain—“Biblical”—Dace had time to say to himself.

“You persist in being flippant,” the voice cried. “You have no seriousness. You permit yourself merely to be amused by all this. And you have the impertinence to ask me if I am ill when as you might see, I am simply overcome by compassion. My God! Don’t you see that it is serious, that it is tragic—that we sound together the whole horror of the world?”

He glared at Dace with unexpected ferocity. Then, before Dace had time for anything but a turmoil of bewilderment, he sprang up, approached Dace’s chair menacingly, leaned over him, pointed at him with a white thick finger on which he wore three rings.

“You are Judas, and you admit it. Don’t pretend any longer that you don’t fully realize it. The time for such foolery is past. You are Judas. You knew it before you came in here—you came in to tell me. You knew the countersign—you asked for the set of Twelve Disciples. Ah! I know everything. You tried to fool me, but you couldn’t—I saw through your pretenses from the beginning—I knew you were coming today. And why shouldn’t I? It’s Easter Eve. You know as well as I do that we always meet on Easter Eve!…”

Dace sat as if hypnotized, his glassy eyes fixed on the thick withered eyelids of the Jew. He was frightened, and found it difficult to control his voice.

“Why, what do you mean?” he stammered.

“What do I mean! You ask me what do I mean! Ah, my God! Do I have to drag it all out of you like this? You have no honesty, no seriousness, no repentance? You are Judas. You were born in the Island of Kerioth. You murdered your father and married your mother. Pilate! Pilate! Do you hear? You kept books for Pilate. You cheated him. And then you went looking for Jesus, because you thought He could forgive you for incest. Ha! And you cheated Him too; you stole from Him. You kept back the moneys. Your passion came on you—you wanted gold and silver. You stole from the shepherds in the market place—you stole from the other Disciples. Finally, because your fingers itched, you sold Jesus. What’s the good of denying it? I can see that you remember it—you knew it all the time. It’s Easter Eve, and you’ve come back again. I knew you were coming—I know everything.”

The Jew stepped back with a gesture of triumph, dropping his hand. He squared his high peaked shoulders as if in a paroxysm of righteousness. His coarse face was radiant—transfigured.

“Well,” said Dace, in a small voice, but clearly, “suppose I am Judas—suppose I do admit it. Suppose I admit even that I knew it before I came here, and came here with the sole purpose of revealing myself to you. You know everything—so I suppose I’ll have to grant you that I even knew that the set of the Twelve Disciples was the password—which, I take it, we’re in the habit of exchanging, in this extraordinary fashion, every Easter Eve. Is this Easter Eve? I didn’t know it. I suppose I’m allowed a respite from Hell on Easter Eve—is that it?… But, supposing that all this is true—what about it?”

“Ah,” the Jew cried, “you’re incorrigible.… Why do you always make it so—difficult for me! If only once, once, you would admit it all—tell me everything from your heart—help me to sound the horror of the world, instead of leaving me to sound it alone! Only once!” He sank into his chair, flung his head back, and regarded Dace pityingly as from an immense moral distance.

“Listen!” said Dace. “I want you to believe me when I tell you that I’m not trying to deceive you or make it hard for you. I’m honestly trying to tell you everything I know. If there are some things I don’t know which you think I ought to know—well, it’s because there’s some barrier which I don’t understand, some barrier. Do you see?… For example, I suppose I ought to know—since I’ve met you so often—who you are. But I don’t!… Who are you?”

“I am Ahasver—the eternal Jew.”

“Oh! You are—I see. And we meet every Easter Eve.”

“Every Easter Eve.”

“You are eternal—of course, I’ve heard of you. As for me, I suppose I’m just, for the moment, reincarnated.”

“Reincarnated.”

“That, I suppose, is why you can remember me, but I can’t remember you.”

“You must remember!”

“I don’t. I remember nothing.”

“Try! Think of last year.”

“I don’t remember last year.”

“Salt Lake City! It was in Salt Lake City. Do you remember?”

“No, I’ve never been to Salt Lake City.”

“You have—you were there last year. My shop was in Myrtle Street. We met outside it, just as six o’clock struck. You were smoking a pipe. When I asked you who you were, you said your name was O’Grady.”

“Oh! Did I?”

“Yes. You said at first that you wanted to pawn something—your watch. You looked very different. You had a beard. Then, we were inside the shop, and the door was shut—”

“Ah! I asked for a peculiar set of chessmen!”

“You remember! You remember!… And the year before it was at Buenos Aires.… My shop was on the second floor, over a colonnade. I had a sign hanging outside—with my name on it, Juan Espera en Dios.… You were a little Portuguese Jew named Gomez—your skin was very yellow, you were suffering from the jaundice. Do you remember?”

“No—I’ve never been to Buenos Aires. Never.”

“Ah, you shameless liar!… Liar!… You lie merely to make me suffer. Don’t! Don’t! And the year before that—”

“My dear fellow, do you remember them all?”

“Every one. It was on the Ponte Vecchio—my name was over the door, Butta Deus. A very small shop, with bracelets and filigree necklaces. Ah, you were very droll that time—and very shabby, poor. A poor tailor, you said your name was Fantini. You had no thumb on your left hand, and said it didn’t interfere with your work—you showed me how flexible and cunning were your fingers. And ah, my God, how stubborn you were, how you denied it! But you always deny it, you always torture me.… It is my punishment.”

The Jew covered his eyes with one hand and sank into an absorbed silence. He looked as if he were praying. Dace examined him in astonishment—observed the tufts of grizzled hair in his ears, the gray sparse whorls of beard under the edges of the jaw, the greasy old-fashioned black stock under the lowered chin. Three heavy gold rings were on the fourth finger, one of them set with a coarse peach-agate.… Behind him in the tumbled room somewhere a clock struck seven in a small sweet voice, then another, nearer at hand, more briskly and loudly, then two others, simultaneously, their voices, one brazen and one treble, infelicitously mingling. Seven o’clock? But to Dace the world semed timeless; and he felt extraordinarily, with a bright translucence, that made him bodiless, that he was existing separately, at one and the same time, in Salt Lake City, Buenos Aires, Florence—and where else? He seemed to know himself perfectly as O’Grady—he was tall and bearded, smoked a pipe, walked, in the warm, clear dusk, into Myrtle Street, where, sure enough, the Jew awaited him. But what was the Jew’s name there? He had forgotten to say.… Certainly, as Gomez he had had the jaundice, as Fantini had lost his left thumb. Absurd! And this ghostly multiple career extended back, troubled, passionate, full of sinister echoes, for eighteen hundred and thirty-five years. And the unchanging secret in him, through all this harlequinade, was Judas! These hands were the hands of Judas—the hands of the parricide, the thief, the betrayer.… And what, in all this amazing nightmare, so profoundly actual, did the Jew want of him? Sympathy? An exchange of understanding?… He tried to remember what it was that the Jew had done, what offense it was that his eternal wanderings were a punishment for. Perhaps if he closed his eyes it would come back to him. For a moment he would submit a little, allow this extraordinary influence—Ah! It began to come back to him. It was something outrageous, something revolting—there was a crowd—Jesus was passing, carrying something—and the shopkeeper—Ahasver—what was it he did? He leaned forward out of the crowd and spat at Jesus and said something—that was it. Something hateful.

“What was it you said?” Dace asked.

“On the Ponte Vecchio?”

“No—on Golgotha.”

“Ah, I won’t repeat it—every time you ask me to repeat it! And you know as well as I do!”

“I know you said something—I don’t know what you said.”

The Jew leaped to his feet, his face flushed with fury. He made a gesture of curved hands towards Dace’s throat, as if he would like to strangle him.

“Hypocrite! You sit there and pretend you know nothing—you, my only friend! Well, I’ll tell you what I did—I spat in His face, that’s what I did! Yes! I leaned over and spat right in His face, and said in a loud ugly voice: ‘Go on quicker!’ And He stopped and looked at me—ah, you can see Him stopping—and answered—‘I go; but thou shalt wait till My return!’… That’s what happened, Judas!… And you, where were you? On Olivet, with an old bit of rope, the halter of an ass! But it did you no good. No. You were merely doing what you’d have to do over and over again. For you, too, were included in the words: ‘There be some of those that stand here which shall in no wise taste death till they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom!’”

“We are friends, then,” murmured Dace. “We are friends!”

“We are the oldest friends in the world. And yet you torture me.”

“I don’t mean to torture you. I am trying to understand.”

“I forgive you, my friend—I forgive you.” And suddenly the Jew leaned down and touched, with his white soft hand, the right hand of Dace, where it rested on the arm of the chair; a touch fawning and horrible. There were tears in his eyes. He patted Dace’s hand twice, with a grotesque and repulsive tenderness, and smiled; then, straightening:

“No one else forgives us—why shouldn’t we forgive each other? God has forgotten us—He only remembers to forget us. Ah, my old friend, let us not forget each other! Let us remember each other all we can, and forgive each other with all our hearts. You see why it is that I want so horribly, so horribly, to have you remember me! To be an outcast, eternal, hated by God and man, unforgiven, loved by none—to be used by God for His own inscrutable purpose, yet punished for it forever! Perhaps God means that we shall be a comfort to each other. Perhaps He means in that way to reward us—to grant us, as recompense, the greatest, deepest, oldest friendship ever known by men.”

“Yes,” said Dace faintly, “why not? Why not? Perhaps He does.”

“I am sure of it, my friend—Judas, I am sure of it! We have a bond, the greatest of bonds. Each of us committed a sin in its way unparalleled. No others have sounded the depths that we have sounded. At the very bottom of the world, most miserable Gehenna of Gehennas, we meet and embrace. Surely that is something! Yes, I believe it is a proof of the essential goodness and wisdom and mercifulness of God. I wrong Him by saying that He has forgotten us! He has not forgotten us. Isn’t it perhaps truer to say that we are a part of God, the part of Him that is evil and that suffers? What a vision! What pride we can legitimately take in being ourselves! In us is concentrated the most intense suffering, the deepest darkness, the most unmitigated horror, of the world.… Let us share it, old friend—on this one day in the year when we meet, for these few uncertain hours in an infinity of torment, let us share our grief and pride, and open our hearts.”

Dace was extraordinarily moved by this speech; but he could scarcely have said whether he was more impressed, or horrified, or amused. So this was where they were—at the bottom of the world, at the bottom of the bottomless pit. What a vision, indeed! And himself and this repulsive shopkeeper, sinister dual embodiment of the world’s evil, embracing passionately in the blown smoke of Gehenna. Treachery kissing obscenity! Laughter would have been a relief to him, but he felt, with a peculiar anxiety, that the moment was not propitious. Wasn’t there still, somewhere in all this, a danger? Something there was which the Jew had said which had alarmed him; but he could not now recall it. Decidedly he must keep his wits with him.

“Yes,” he answered slowly, with averted eyes, “we are old friends, our sympathies ought to be of the profoundest. We are, as you say, in the same boat—if it isn’t flippant to put it in so homely a fashion. We know each other, don’t we?”

“Ah,” said the Jew, “but do you know me as I know you? That is the question that curses me, that always curses me! You are so hesitant, so uncertain! You distress me so with your questions, and the blanks in your memory! If only we were exactly alike, and you remembered, each year, all that I remember!”

“It’s a pity—it’s a pity.”

“A tragedy, rather!… For me a tragedy.… Yet I mustn’t be selfish. That is the part assigned to me—to remember, to be the memory. I must remember your sorrows as well as my own. It is my privilege to remind you. Corfu, for example! Do you remember Corfu?”

“Corfu? No.”

“Tonight in Corfu they are stoning you. Listen!” The Jew lifted a peremptory finger, commanding silence. Dace listened intently, as if he really expected to hear something; but nothing disturbed the sequestered hush of the room save the ticking of clocks, their own breathing, and the sinking of coals in the grate. Why on earth Corfu? An island in the Adriatic, was it?

“I hear nothing,” he said.

“In Corfu, on every Easter Eve, they stone you. Every window is opened, and old crockery, stones, and sticks are flung violently into the streets. I can hear it. I can see the angry faces. I can hear the screams of hate and triumph. And ah, my God, I can feel the stones on my body, in my soul, wretched compassionate creature that I am.… Do you feel them? Do you hear them?”

“Nothing whatever—no.”

The Jew seemed hurt, bewildered. He stared at the floor.

“No—you hear nothing, feel nothing.… I suppose God intended it so.… And yet it seems as if you ought to be prepared. A warning would be an act of mercy. To remember nothing, to experience the tragedy afresh each time! Horrible.”

“A warning? What do you mean?”

The Jew fixed Dace’s eyes intently. What strange light was it that tried there, through the smoke of confused emotions, to flash out? Compassion? Cunning? But the eyelids lowered, the Jew looked away. Then he said tonelessly:

“I mean for your hanging.”

IV.

Dace, at this, felt that his heart had stopped beating altogether. His consciousness flew off like a vapor, he experienced, for a timeless instant, a perfect and horrible annihilation. Then his ears began ringing, his temples were hammered like cymbals, his arms violently trembled. The room came back to him, but smaller, more real and shabby in the candlelight; and the Jew before him, musing in his chair, seemed also unaccountably shabbier and smaller. He felt slightly sick.

“Oh,” with hardly a tremor, “I’m to hang myself?”

“Ah, my dear friend!” wailed the Jew, “my dear friend!” He wrung his hands.

“But here—in this room?”

“It is better so—is it not? That’s as it always is.”

“Oh, it’s always so, I see.… And O’Grady, what about O’Grady?”

“O’Grady? What do you mean?”

“He hanged himself, for you, in Salt Lake City?”

“Not for me—not for me! For God!”

“And Gomez—and the tailor, Fantini?”

“Yes—” the Jew whispered. “They, too. All of them. Every year.… My poor friend! I was afraid, afraid that you didn’t remember. I’ve done my best for you. I’ve tried to—”

“Break the news gently? Yes! So you have. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

The two men stared at each other. It was then Dace who went on.

“There’s the trivial, purely practical matter of the rope,” he said. “I suppose you have the rope.”

“Yes. I’ll get it for you. It’s the same one.”

“The halter of the ass?”

“Yes.”

The Jew rose, sighing, took the candle, and went to a high cupboard in the front corner of the room by the shuttered window. The lifted candle, when the door had been flung back, lighted a tall crucifix within, the figure of Christ carved of a pallid greenish stone. Below it, on the cupboard floor, stood an earthen bowl. It occurred to Dace that the bowl might bear the stains of sacrifice. The Jew lifted from a hook a small coil of rope, closed the cupboard, and returned to Dace.

“There!” he said. “Take it.”

Dace rose, but he did not take the rope. Instead he took up his hat from the taboret. At the Jew’s look of astonished incredulity he laughed.

“No,” he then said. “I shan’t take it—I must be going. It’s late.”

“Going?” stammered the Jew. Then he cried out again, horribly, in his Biblical prophetic voice: “Going, without—”

“Certainly. Going without hanging myself. Do you seriously expect me to hang myself for you?”

He laughed again. Then, as the shopkeeper, angrily flushed, took a step forward, he took a step forward to meet him.

“Listen,” he cried, “you’re insane! insane! and you know it.”

A look of desolation, of horror, relaxed the Jew’s face—the jaw sagged, the large mouth opened. He sat down, still holding the rope.

“That’s right—sit down. And don’t you dare to move till I’m out of this house—do you hear? Sit still! Or I’ll report you to the police.”

He took the candle, and walked slowly to the door through the aisle of dusty furniture. At the door, a thought suddenly struck him. He set down the candle, took out a card, wrote on it, and put it on a table.

“Here’s my name and address,” he said. “Send me, in the morning, the set of the Twelve Disciples!… Goodbye!”

The shopkeeper, whom he could only dimly make out in the now almost unlighted jungle of bric-a-brac, made no answer. Dace turned, went down the stairs, put the candle on the floor, and let himself out.

V.

When three days had passed, without his having had any signal from the Jew, Dace determined to go and see him. The adventure, he thought, must be an anticlimax; but there were one or two possibilities about which he was curious. Was it not conceivable, for example, that the wretched man, in some obscure sort of religious ecstasy, might have done himself a violence?… It was in bright sunlight that he passed this time through the square and turned into the shopping district; not yet noon. Missing, for a fraction of a minute, the shop, which was small, he had a renewal of his excitement—it seemed to him not too incredible that the shop, and its singular proprietor, might never have existed at all. But here it was.

What startled him was that the Jew did not recognize him; not in the slightest. He had uttered no greeting, on entering, had merely looked at the shopkeeper, expecting that the result would be an exclamation. But the Jew simply looked up from his glass case, which was opened at the back, and where he seemed to be arranging a small plush tray of jades and corals—looked up with a mild, polite interest. And as Dace, surprised, stared at him, it was the Jew who was the first to speak.

“Good morning!” he said. His tone was friendly—not intimate, not obsequious. “Is there something I can show you?”

Dace looked very hard at those green eyes under their sleepy lids.

“I am looking, as a matter of fact, for something odd in the way of a set of chessmen.”

The shopkeeper was suavely interested.

“Chessmen? Certainly.… Had you anything particular in mind?”

Dace’s heart gave a leap. The Jew was putting away his jades, unconcerned.

“Well—what I should really like to get hold of is a set I’ve heard called the set of the Twelve Disciples.… Do you happen to know anything about it?”

The shopkeeper tapped his fingers idly on the glass.

“No, I can’t say I do. Twelve Disciples! No.… Very curious.… Do you know where it was made?”

Dace leaned forward against the case.

“I don’t; no.…” He stared at the shopkeeper, who was very close to him. “Tell me—haven’t we met before?”

The Jew returned his stare perplexedly.

“I don’t think so—have we?… I have a good memory for faces—bad for names. Still, I may be at fault!”

“I think you are—I think you are!” Dace said—and laughed. “You’re wearing glasses today—you weren’t before.”

“Oh?” The Jew’s smile was friendly, but vague.

“Yes.… Don’t you remember taking me to your room upstairs? You showed me a crucifix in a cupboard.”

“Did I?” The shopkeeper smiled, wagged his ugly head, shrugged his shoulders. “Ah, then I am at fault. I take so many people up there, you see, to look at things—you must forgive me!”

“Oh, I forgive you!”

They chuckled together, amicably. Then Dace bought a Chinese set of carved ivory and bade the Jew good morning.