With the joy of knowing that in my immortal soul I possessed a capital which could not be lost in play or distrained upon for debt, I carried on a dissipated life and squandered like a prince both what was mine and what was not mine.
But one evening I found myself with some of my cronies in a large hall, which glittered with gilt and electric light, while from its flooring rose a smell of decay. Two young girls with painted faces and an old woman whose wrinkles were filled with plaster were dancing there on a platform, accompanied by the wail of the orchestra, cries of applause, and the clink of broken glass. We watched the women, drank a great deal, and conversed on the immortality of the soul.
“It’s foolish,” said one of my comrades who was older than I, “it’s foolish to believe that it would be a blessing to have an immortal soul. Look at that old harridan dancing there, whose head and hands tremble if she stays still a moment. One sees directly that she is wicked and ugly and entirely worthless, and that she’s getting more and more so every day. How ridiculous it would be to imagine that she had an immortal soul! But the case is just the same with you and me and all of us. What a mean joke it would be to give us immortality!”
“The thing that I dislike most in what you say,” I answered, “isn’t that you deny the immortality of the soul, but the fact that you find a pleasure in denying it. Human beings are like children that play in a garden surrounded by a high wall. Time and again a door is opened in the wall, and one of the children disappears through the door. People then tell them that it is taken to another garden bigger and more beautiful than this, whereupon they listen a moment in silence and afterwards continue to play among the flowers. Assume now that one of the boys is more inquisitive than the others and climbs up on the wall so as to see where his comrades go, and when he comes down again tells the rest what he has seen; namely, that outside the gate sits a giant who devours the children when they are taken out. And they all have to be taken out through the gate in due turn! You are that boy, Martin, and I find it unspeakably ridiculous that you tell what you think you’ve seen, not in a spirit of despair, but as if you were proud and glad of knowing more than the rest.”
“The younger of those girls is very pretty,” replied Martin.
“It’s dreadful to be annihilated, and it’s also dreadful not to be able to be annihilated,” remarked another of my friends.
Martin continued this line of argument.
“Yes,” he said, “one should be able to find a middle course. Gird up your loins and go out to look for a midway degree between time and eternity. He who finds it may found a new religion, for he’ll then have the most enticing bait that a fisher of men ever possessed.”
The orchestra stopped with a clash. The gold of the hall glittered more faintly through the tobacco smoke and through the floor boards pressed continuously a smell of decay.
The party broke up and we separated, each in his own direction. I wandered a long while back and forth on the streets; I came upon streets which I did not recognize and which I have never seen since, remarkably desolate and empty streets, where the houses seemed to open their lines to give me space whithersoever I turned my steps, and then to close up again behind my back. I did not know where I had got to, before all of a sudden I stood in front of my own door. It stood wide open. I went in through the door and up the stairs. At one of the stair windows I stopped and looked at the moon: I had not previously noticed that there was moonlight that evening.
But I have never either before or after seen the moon look so. One could not say that it shone. It was ashen-gray and pallid and unnaturally big. I stood a long while and stared at yonder moon, despite the fact that I was dreadfully tired and longed to get to sleep.
I lived in the third story. When I had gone up two flights I thanked God there was only one left. But as I came up this flight, it struck me that the corridor was not dark, as it had always used to be, but faintly lighted like the other corridors where the moon glimmered in through the stair windows. But there were only three flights of stairs in the house besides the attic stairs; for that reason the uppermost corridor was always dark.
“The door of the attic is open,” I said to myself. “The light is coming from the attic stairway. It’s unexcusable of the servants to leave the door of the attic open, for thieves might get up into the attic.”
But there was no attic door. There was only an ordinary stairway like the others.
I had counted wrong, then; I had still a flight to go up.
But when I had mounted this flight and stood in the corridor, I had to control myself so as not to shriek aloud. For this corridor, too, was light, neither was there any attic door open, but a new stairway led up just as before. Through the stair window the moon glimmered in, and it was ashen-gray and lustreless and unnaturally big.
I rushed up the stairway. I could no longer think. I tottered up another, and yet another; I did not count them any longer.
I wanted to cry out, I wanted to wake that accursed house
