The Jew and Other Stories eBook

feeling—­I cannot forget it till the hour I die!  How delicious were those few strangers passing us with brief greetings and kind faces, and the great quiet boats floating by (in one—­dost thou remember?—­stood a horse pensively gazing at the gliding water), the baby prattle of the tiny ripples by the bank, and the very bark of the distant dogs across the water, the very shouts of the fat officer drilling the red-faced recruits yonder, with outspread arms and knees crooked like grasshoppers!...  We both felt that better than those moments nothing in the world had been or would be for us, that all else...  But why compare?  Enough... enough...  Alas! yes:  enough.

XII

For the last time I give myself up to those memories and bid them farewell for ever.  So a miser gloating over his hoard, his gold, his bright treasure, covers it over in the damp, grey earth; so the wick of a smouldering lamp flickers up in a last bright flare and sinks into cold ash.  The wild creature has peeped out from its hole for the last time at the velvet grass, the sweet sun, the blue, kindly waters, and has huddled back into the depths, curled up, and gone to sleep.  Will he have glimpses even in sleep of the sweet sun and the grass and the blue kindly water?...

XIII

Sternly, remorselessly, fate leads each of us, and only at the first, absorbed in details of all sorts, in trifles, in ourselves, we are not aware of her harsh hand.  While one can be deceived and has no shame in lying, one can live and there is no shame in hoping.  Truth, not the full truth, of that, indeed, we cannot speak, but even that little we can reach locks up our lips at once, ties our hands, leads us to ‘the No.’  Then one way is left a man to keep his feet, not to fall to pieces, not to sink into the mire of self-forgetfulness... of self-contempt,—­calmly to turn away from all, to say ‘enough!’ and folding impotent arms upon the empty breast, to save the last, the sole honour he can attain to, the dignity of knowing his own nothingness; that dignity at which Pascal hints when calling man a thinking reed he says that if the whole universe crushed him, he, that reed, would be higher than the universe, because he would know it was crushing him, and it would know it not.  A poor dignity!  A sorry consolation!  Try your utmost to be penetrated by it, to have faith in it, you, whoever you may be, my poor brother, and there’s no refuting those words of menace: 

  ’Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
   That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
   And then is heard no more:  it is a tale
   Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
   Signifying nothing.’