The Maccabaean

(Translated by Horace M. Kallen.)

I AM weary. It was a labor beyond my strength, and I toss upon my bed, my mind a monstrous, dully-clacking treadmill, grinding tortuously out the events of the barren day. How did it all happen? . . . I had been to the Society, had spoken there. My speech was flame; arrows flew from my mouth; I menaced my audience as with a sword, a razor-sharp glittering sword. Yes, I had stood there, ranting like Lear, storming like the whirlwind; and I heard my own words, and I found them good, good exceedingly.

Yes, indeed. For am I not something of a hero? Do I not give battle for the Beautiful, the Excellent, and the True? Am I not the devoted knight of Liberty and all those fine sweet somethings which await us in the remote future—that glorious time which we are destined presently to possess? And there, on the rostrum, I tear from the face of Falsehood her mask, and expose her in the pillory; I rend the meretricious robes which begaud her foul body, and show you her in her shameful nakedness, leprous and sin-flecked.—

Suddenly I am dumb. My heroic passion is spent, my fire in ashes, my tongue becomes leaden. What has befallen me? . . . Ah, nothing much—only while I was talking I had involuntarily raised my eyes and my glance had fallen upon a mirror opposite me. And I saw in the mirror that the light of my eyes was evil—a queer, foul light which glowed about my lashes. Those eyes did not all seem my own.

Once I had seen such eyes. But when?

Ah, now I recall it. I had seen them once, when a private at the barracks was being knouted. His brethren, the fellow-soldiers who whipped him, had just such eyes; eyes which said: Today we knout thee, thou will knout us tomorrow. Here, then, is payment also for the morrow. Yes; not the image of a champion of the Ideal was mine in the mirror; it was an image of a downright butcher of men. And, therefore, I was struck dumb. And my silence was to the audience as the lifting from their hearts of a heavy weight. They felt like cattle after a hailstorm; like children who, sitting in the dark, catch the flare of the coming candle; like cripples who lean against a wall, unable to move, and suddenly receive again their crutches and their sticks, and find they can travel where they choose. One of them, a young man, nears a lady, catches her arm, and asks: "Now is it permitted?" and she shakes her pretty head, but answers gently, smiling: "Yes, yes, it is permitted."

Then I ran from the club as if I had a fiend for driver. And now, here I lie upon my bed, tired and broken. The moon, whose slow, slow gliding over the face of the heavens I had noticed as I ran, glances at this moment in through my window. Is it from dreamland that the rumor creeps how moonlight is mankind's soothing, his redemption from self-torment, his soul's quittance for the bitter reck-