Page:The Best Continental Short Stories of 1923–1924.djvu/60

 “Let us suppose some one were to make a young girl to rise from the dead, here before your eyes. You would kneel down and worship. But before the snow on your knees had melted you would be saying to yourself: nonsense, it was a feigned death. Here, however, there is nothing feigned. Let us admit a miracle has taken place under simplified conditions, like some physical experiment.”

“I may not believe in the kind of resurrection you speak of. But I, too, want to be saved. I, too, am waiting for a miracle, for something that will happen along and change the course of my life. It is not an imprint like this that could save and convert me; it will not solve my doubts. It does nothing but puzzle me. It is fixed there, in my brain. I cannot get rid of it. And yet I do not believe in it. A miracle might satisfy me, but this imprint merely marks a first step towards uncertainty. It would have been much better had I not noticed it at all.”

For a long time the two men were silent. Snow began to fall again, with increasing force.

Boura started speaking once more: “I remember reading in Hume a passage relating to an isolated footprint in the sand. So this is not the first of its kind. There may be thousands of them, and we merely pass them by without noticing them because of our way of living by rule. Another man would have passed by this one without seeing it, never thinking that here was a kind of solitary oddity, that there are some things in this world that bear no relation to any other. Our footprints are all about alike, but you see this solitary footprint is larger and deeper than ours When I get thinking about my own life, it seems to me that I recognise in it tracks that come from nowhere and lead to nowhere. It happens to one to learn or to feel of a sudden something which never had its like before, which never could have its like again. There are human things that are related to nothing, that always and in all places do nothing but prove their own isolation. I know of happenings that had no sequence nor consequence, that achieved nothing and helped nobody and that yet There are incidents that never recurred, that helped no one to live and yet were perhaps the most important events in one’s