ONCE upon a time there was a man who above all other things desired to accumulate wealth. Day and night he thought of nothing else. Fortune favored him, and as time went on he acquired more and more property until he became very rich. Now that he had so much to lose he thought it would be a terrible thing to die and leave all his possessions behind. So he made up his mind to seek a land where there was no death.
He got ready for the journey, took leave of his wife, and started. Whenever he came to a new country the first question he asked was whether people died in that land. If he was told that they did, he continued on his quest. However, he at last reached a country where they said the people did not even know the meaning of the word death. The traveler was delighted to hear this. “But surely,” said he, “there must be great numbers of inhabitants in your land if no one ever dies.”
“No more than in most lands,” they responded; “for we would have you know that from time to time a voice is heard calling to this one or that, and whoever is called always goes away and never comes back.”
The man was amazed that the people should be so stupid as to follow the voice when they knew that if they obeyed its summons they would never return. He journeyed back to his home, got all his possessions together, and went with his wealth and his wife and children to dwell in the country where the people did not die. To be sure they disappeared one after the other in response to the call of that mysterious voice; but he made up his mind that when he or any of his family heard the voice they would pay no heed to it, however loud its appeal.
After they were settled in their new home and had put everything in order, he warned his wife and children that they must on no account listen to or obey a strange voice they might some day hear calling them.
For several years everything went well with them and they lived happily in their new home. But one day when they were all sitting together around the dining-table the man’s wife suddenly started up, exclaiming: “I am coming! I am coming!”
She looked around the room for her fur coat, and she had picked it up and was putting it on, when her husband took firm hold of her hand and restrained her, saying: “Don’t you remember what I told you? If you have heard a voice calling to you, stay where you are unless you wish never to return.”
“But I am merely going to see why I am wanted,” she said. “I shall soon come back.”
She struggled to get away and to go where the voice summoned, but he would not release her, and he ordered the servants to shut and bolt all the doors. Then she sank into a chair and said: “I see you will not let me go.”
So her husband thought she was resigned to staying, and that she had gotten over her mad impulse to obey the voice. But no sooner did he loose his hold on her hand and turn away than she sprang to her feet, made a sudden dash to a door, unbolted and opened it, and darted out. He followed her and contrived to grasp her fur coat. Thus he was able to restrain her while he implored her not to go, and told her she certainly would never return. She made no reply, but let her arms fall backward, and suddenly slipped out of the coat and left it in her husband’s hands. The poor man seemed turned to stone, without power to move, as he gazed after her hurrying away from him, and listened to her calling as she ran: “I am coming! I am coming!”
When she was quite out of sight he went into the house, saying: “If she is so foolish as to wish to leave us forever, I cannot help it. I warned and implored her to pay no heed to that voice, however loudly it might call.”
The rest of the family lived peacefully after this for a number of years. But at last the man was one day at the barber’s being shaved. The shop was full of people, and his chin had been covered with lather. Suddenly he started up from his chair and called out in a loud voice: “I won’t come! Do you hear? I won’t come!”
The barber and the other people in the shop listened to him with astonishment. Again he looked toward the door, and exclaimed, “I tell you once for all that I do not mean to come; so go away!”
A few minutes later he shouted: “Go away or it will be the worse for you. You may call as much as you like, but you will not get me to come.”
He grew as angry as if some one was actually standing at the door tormenting him. Finally he got up and said to the barber: “Give me the razor you are using. I’ll teach that fellow to leave people alone for the future.”
He snatched the razor out of the barber’s hand and rushed forth from the shop as if he were running after some one. The barber did not wish to lose his razor, and he pursued the man to rescue it. They both continued at full speed out of the town until they came to the edge of a precipice. Down this the man plunged head foremost, and he never was seen again. So he, too, like the others, had been forced, against his will, to follow the voice that called him.
The barber went home congratulating himself that he had escaped the fate of the man he had pursued. He told what had happened, and it was noised abroad that the people who had gone away and never returned had all fallen down that precipice. Hitherto it had not been known where they went, when they heard the voice and obeyed its call. Crowds of people came to examine the fateful precipice where such numbers had disappeared. Yet they could discover no clue as to what had finally become of the missing ones, for they could see nothing beyond the declivity but a vast plain that looked as if it had been there from the beginning of the world.
