“Take him home and get a keeper from the lunatic asylum,” the Wanderer suggested.
“Then comes the whole question of an inquiry into his sanity,” objected Keyork. “We come back to the starting-point. We must settle all this before we go to him. A lunatic asylum is not a club in this country. There is a great deal of formality connected with getting into it, and a great deal more connected with getting out. Now, I could not get a keeper for Kafka without going to the physician in charge and making a statement, and demanding an examination, and all the rest of it. And Israel Kafka is a person of importance among his own people. He comes of great Jews in Moravia, and we should have the whole Jews’ quarter--which means nearly the whole of Prague, in a broad sense--about our ears in twenty-four hours. No, no, my friend. To avoid an enormous scandal things must be done very quietly indeed.”
“I cannot see anything to be done, then, unless we bring him here,” said the Wanderer, falling into the trap from sheer perplexity. Everything that Keyork had said was undeniably true.
“He would be a nuisance in the house,” answered the sage, not wishing, for reasons of his own, to appear to accept the proposition too eagerly. “Not but that the Individual would make a capital keeper. He is as gentle as he is strong, and as quick as a tiger-cat.”
“So far as that is concerned,” said the Wanderer coolly, “I could take charge of him myself, if you did not object to my presence.”
“You do not trust me,” said the other, with a sharp glance.
“My dear Keyork, we are old acquaintances, and I trust you implicitly to do whatever you have predetermined to do for the advantage of your studies, unless some one interferes with you. You have no more respect for human life or sympathy for human suffering than you have belief in the importance of anything not conducive to your researches. I am perfectly well aware that if you thought you could learn something by making experiments upon the body of Israel Kafka, you would not scruple to make a living mummy of him, you would do it without the least hesitation. I should expect to find him with his head cut off, living by means of a glass heart and thinking through a rabbit’s brain. That is the reason why I do not trust you. Before I could deliver him into your hands, I would require of you a contract to give him back unhurt--and a contract of the kind you would consider binding.”