Thus pondering and oscillating between the poles of Life and Death, he slowly came back to life, to find in its suffering and in its joys a shield against the darkness of the void and the horror of the Infinite.

“No, thou hast not murdered me, Lazarus,” said he firmly, “but I will take thy life.  Be gone.”

That evening the deified Augustus partook of his meats and drinks with particular joy.  Now and then his lifted hand remained suspended in the air, and a dull glimmer replaced the bright sheen of his fiery eye.  It was the cold wave of Horror that surged at his feet.  Defeated, but not undone, ever awaiting its hour, that Horror stood at the emperor’s bedside, like a black shadow all through his life; it swayed his nights, but yielded the days to the sorrows and joys of life.

The following day, the hangman with a hot iron burned out Lazarus’ eyes.  Then he was sent home.  The deified Augustus dared not kill him.

* * * * *

Lazarus returned to the desert, and the wilderness met him with hissing gusts of wind and the heat of the blazing sun.  Again he was sitting on a stone, his rough, bushy beard lifted up; and the two black holes in place of his eyes looked at the sky with an expression of dull terror.  Afar-off the holy city stirred noisily and restlessly, but around him everything was deserted and dumb.  No one approached the place where lived he who had miraculously risen from the dead, and long since his neighbors had forsaken their houses.  Driven by the hot iron into the depth of his skull, his cursed knowledge hid there in an ambush.  As though leaping out from an ambush it plunged its thousand invisible eyes into the man,—­and no one dared look at Lazarus.

And in the evening, when the sun, reddening and growing wider, would come nearer and nearer the western horizon, the blind Lazarus would slowly follow it.  He would stumble against stones and fall, stout and weak as he was; would rise heavily to his feet and walk on again; and on the red screen of the sunset his black body and outspread hands would form a monstrous likeness of a cross.

And it came to pass that once he went out and did not come back.  Thus seemingly ended the second life of him who for three days had been under the enigmatical sway of death, and rose miraculously from the dead.

The Beast with Five Fingers

BY W.F.  HARVEY

     From The New Decameron, by Various Hands.  Copyright, 1919, by
     Robert M. McBride and Company.  By permission of the publishers.

When I was a little boy I once went with my father to call on Adrian Borlsover.  I played on the floor with a black spaniel while my father appealed for a subscription.  Just before we left my father said, “Mr. Borlsover, may my son here shake hands with you?  It will be a thing to look back upon with pride when he grows to be a man.”