ADAM.  Cease your boasting and bullying, and tell the truth.  Does not the Voice tell you that as no man dare slay you for murdering your brother, you ought to slay yourself?

CAIN.  No.

ADAM.  Then there is no such thing as divine justice, unless you are lying.

CAIN.  I am not lying:  I dare all truths.  There is divine justice.  For the Voice tells me that I must offer myself to every man to be killed if he can kill me.  Without danger I cannot be great.  That is how I pay for Abel’s blood.  Danger and fear follow my steps everywhere.  Without them courage would have no sense.  And it is courage, courage, courage, that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor.

ADAM [picking up his spade and preparing to dig again] Take yourself off then.  This splendid life of yours does not last for a thousand years; and I must last for a thousand years.  When you fighters do not get killed in fighting one another or fighting the beasts, you die from mere evil in yourselves.  Your flesh ceases to grow like man’s flesh:  it grows like a fungus on a tree.  Instead of breathing you sneeze, or cough up your insides, and wither and perish.  Your bowels become rotten; your hair falls from you; your teeth blacken and drop out; and you die before your time, not because you will, but because you must.  I will dig, and live.

CAIN.  And pray, what use is this thousand years of life to you, you old vegetable?  Do you dig any better because you have been digging for hundreds of years?  I have not lived as long as you; but I know all there is to be known of the craft of digging.  By quitting it I have set myself free to learn nobler crafts of which you know nothing.  I know the craft of fighting and of hunting:  in a word, the craft of killing.  What certainty have you of your thousand years?  I could kill both of you; and you could no more defend yourselves than a couple of sheep.  I spare you; but others may kill you.  Why not live bravely, and die early and make room for others?  Why, I—­I! that know many more crafts than either of you, am tired of myself when I am not fighting or hunting.  Sooner than face a thousand years of it I should kill myself, as the Voice sometimes tempts me to do already.

ADAM.  Liar:  you denied just now that it called on you to pay for Abel’s life with your own.

CAIN.  The Voice does not speak to me as it does to you.  I am a man:  you are only a grown-up child.  One does not speak to a child as to a man.  And a man does not listen and tremble in silence.  He replies:  he makes the Voice respect him:  in the end he dictates what the Voice shall say.

ADAM.  May your tongue be accurst for such blasphemy!