XII

So year was added to year, and the new buried the old, while Martin was slowly initiated into the twofold art of life, to learn and to forget. For as the gambler in order to keep on till the last coin has run through his trembling fingers must forget his losses in the hope of future gains, so humanity, the gambler by compulsion, finds that the greatest art is to forget and that upon this depends everything.

Martin forgot. The Red Turk, who had long since wearied of jumping, was as much forgotten as if he had never been. And Uncle Abraham, who had given him to Martin and who had hanged himself with a stove-cord one rainy day, when he didn’t find it worth the trouble to live any more, was soon forgotten as well, though he now and again came up in Martin’s dreams as a dark and disturbing riddle. But while the boy was forgetting, he learned. A third of the truth was transmitted by the teachers, and another third was given by his comrades, who soon helped him to lift the veil under which was hidden the Sixth Commandment and everything pertaining to it. They made free use of the Scriptures in their researches. They explained precisely what it was that Absolom did with his father’s concubines on the roof of the palace before all the people, and they reveled with Ezekiel over the abysmal sin of Ahala and Ahaliba. But although both of these thirds were given him with an admixture of errors and lies, and although the final third⁠—which was perhaps the most important and which it was his task to search out for himself sometime⁠—had not yet begun to occupy him; yet nevertheless every day widened the chinks experience tore through the spiderweb tissue of legend and dream with which friendly hands had fenced in his childhood, and more and more often through the cracks gaped the great empty void which is called the world.