Ch. 3: The Wandering Jew

(1891)

'If you go once round the world in an easterly direction, you gain one
day,' said the men of science to John Hay. In after years John Hay went
east, west, north, and south, transacted business, made love, and begat
a family, as have done many men, and the scientific information above
recorded lay neglected in the deeps of his mind with a thousand other
matters of equal importance.

When a rich relative died, he found himself wealthy beyond any
reasonable expectation that he had entertained in his previous career,
which had been a chequered and evil one. Indeed, long before the legacy
came to him, there existed in the brain of John Hay a little cloud-a
momentary obscuration of thought that came and went almost before he
could realize that there was any solution of continuity. So do the bats
flit round the eaves of a house to show that the darkness is falling. He
entered upon great possessions, in money, land, and houses; but behind
his delight stood a ghost that cried out that his enjoyment of these
things should not be of long duration. It was the ghost of the rich
relative, who had been permitted to return to earth to torture his
nephew into the grave. Wherefore, under the spur of this constant
reminder, John Hay, always preserving the air of heavy business-like
stolidity that hid the shadow on his mind, turned investments, houses,
and lands into sovereigns---rich, round, red, English sovereigns, each
one worth twenty shillings. Lands may become valueless, and houses fly
heavenward on the wings of red flame, but till the Day of Judgment a
sovereign will always be a sovereign--that is to say, a king of
pleasures.

Possessed of his sovereigns, John Hay would fain have spent them one by
one on such coarse amusements as his soul loved; but he was haunted by
the instant fear of Death; for the ghost of his relative stood in the
hall of his house close to the hat-rack, shouting up the stairway that
life was short, that there was no hope of increase of days, and that the
undertakers were already roughing out his nephew's coffin. John Hay was
generally alone in the house, and even when he had company, his friends
could not hear the clamorous uncle. The shadow inside his brain grew
larger and blacker. His fear of death was driving John Hay mad.

Then, from the deeps of his mind, where he had stowed away all his
discarded information, rose to light the scientific fact of the Easterly
journey. On the next occasion that his uncle shouted up the stairway
urging him to make haste and live, a shriller voice cried, 'Who goes
round the world once easterly, gains one day.'

His growing diffidence and distrust of mankind made John Hay unwilling
to give this precious message of hope to his