brick liver to each other from generation to generation, but the rest of the inhabitants are ignorant of its existence.  They alone know that every vicissitude of the city’s condition is traceable to that source—­its sadness, its merriment, its carnivals and its lents, its health and its disease, its prosperity and the hideous plagues which at distant intervals kill one in ten of the population.  Is it not a pretty thought?”

“I do not understand you,” said Kafka, wearily.

“It is a very practical idea,” continued Keyork, amused with his own fancies, “and it will yet be carried out.  The great cities of the next century will each have a liver of brick and mortar and iron and machinery, a huge mechanical purifier.  You smile!  Ah, my dear boy, truth and phantasm are very much the same to you!  You are too young.  How can you be expected to care for the great problem of problems, for the mighty question of prolonging life?”

Keyork laughed again, with a meaning in his laughter which escaped his companion altogether.

“How can you be expected to care?” he repeated.  “And yet men used to say that it was the duty of strong youth to support the trembling weakness of feeble old age.”

His eyes twinkled with a diabolical mirth.

“No,” said Kafka.  “I do not care.  Life is meant to be short.  Life is meant to be storm, broken with gleams of love’s sunshine.  Why prolong it?  If it is unhappy you would only draw out the unhappiness to greater lengths, and such joy as it has is joy only because it is quick, sudden, violent.  I would concentrate a lifetime into an instant, if I could, and then die content in having suffered everything, enjoyed everything, dared everything in the flash of a great lightning between two total darknesses.  But to drag on through slow sorrows, or to crawl through a century of contentment—­never!  Better be mad, or asleep, and unconscious of the time.”

“You are a very desperate person!” exclaimed Keyork.  “If you had the management of this unstable world you would make it a very convulsive and nervous place.  We should all turn into flaming ephemerides, fluttering about the crater of a perpetually active volcano.  I prefer the system of the brick liver.  There is more durability in it.”

The carriage stopped before the door of Kafka’s dwelling.  Keyork got out with him and stood upon the pavement while the porter took the slender luggage into the house.  He smiled as he glanced at the leathern portmanteau which was supposed to have made such a long journey while it had in reality lain a whole month in a corner of Keyork’s great room behind a group of specimens.  He had opened it once or twice in that time, had disturbed the contents and had thrown in a few objects from his heterogeneous collection, as reminiscences of the places visited in imagination by Kafka, and of the acquisition of which the latter was only assured in his sleeping state.  They would constitute a tangible proof of the journey’s reality in case the suggestion proved less thoroughly successful than was hoped, and Keyork prided himself upon this supreme touch.