THE MOON MAN
To
Samuel Langford
SOUR and always a little miserable, Vuk Karadjitch worked all day in the fields, feeling that life had brought him nothing. Life was as tasteless as water, as unmusical as the chink of money on a counter. He could not conceive why he had been born; existence was a casually organized series of accidents. Every thing that happened was accidental. Death was the only event that the gods had deliberately and elaborately planned: one saw death coming almost from the very moment that one was born.
Karadjitch had the lithe body of an aristocrat: the features also, and the poise of head. His neck had proud muscles, and his throat was shapely. But though he had the appearance and carriage of one highly born, his birth was lowly, and the education he had snatched, almost stolen, from life was not of the kind to increase his money-earning capacity.
His mind, a little marred at birth, had been almost ruined by knowledge. His brain fastened itself on the past—on mythology—the sweet legend of Hylas, and on the golden story of Helen of Troy. It is so easy to make the past more real than the present: it is so pleasant to do this, so fruitful of happiness. So Vuk Karadjitch lived in the days that were long before his birth.
And as he worked in the orchards that lie above Kirekoj—working at night to keep robbers away—he stared continually at the moon, the moon that was to him the oldest and most tired thing in all God’s universe. Ever since he had been a boy this wayward planet had excited him, and the coming of manhood had not lessened the strange sympathy, even longing, that he felt for the great globe of light wandering with such self-conscious pride among the stars....
His mother, a harassed, reserved woman, used years ago to put little Vuk to bed with fear whenever the moon shone through the high, shutterless window. She would cover his head so that he should not see the blue light on the wall.