And the speaker’s voice broke suddenly, with
the stress of his feelings; he stood with his arms
stretched out above him, and the power of his vision
seemed to lift him from the floor. The audience
came to its feet with a yell; men waved their arms,
laughing aloud in their excitement. And Jurgis
was with them, he was shouting to tear his throat;
shouting because he could not help it, because the
stress of his feeling was more than he could bear.
It was not merely the man’s words, the torrent
of his eloquence. It was his presence, it was
his voice: a voice with strange intonations that
rang through the chambers of the soul like the clanging
of a bell—that gripped the listener like
a mighty hand about his body, that shook him and startled
him with sudden fright, with a sense of things not
of earth, of mysteries never spoken before, of presences
of awe and terror! There was an unfolding of vistas
before him, a breaking of the ground beneath him,
an upheaving, a stirring, a trembling; he felt himself
suddenly a mere man no longer—there were
powers within him undreamed of, there were demon forces
contending, agelong wonders struggling to be born;
and he sat oppressed with pain and joy, while a tingling
stole down into his finger tips, and his breath came
hard and fast. The sentences of this man were
to Jurgis like the crashing of thunder in his soul;
a flood of emotions surged up in him—all
his old hopes and longings, his old griefs and rages
and despairs. All that he had ever felt in his
whole life seemed to come back to him at once, and
with one new emotion, hardly to be described.
That he should have suffered such oppressions and such
horrors was bad enough; but that he should have been
crushed and beaten by them, that he should have submitted,
and forgotten, and lived in peace—ah, truly
that was a thing not to be put into words, a thing
not to be borne by a human creature, a thing of terror
and madness! “What,” asks the prophet,
“is the murder of them that kill the body, to
the murder of them that kill the soul?” And
Jurgis was a man whose soul had been murdered, who
had ceased to hope and to struggle—who
had made terms with degradation and despair; and now,
suddenly, in one awful convulsion, the black and hideous
fact was made plain to him! There was a falling
in of all the pillars of his soul, the sky seemed
to split above him—he stood there, with
his clenched hands upraised, his eyes bloodshot, and
the veins standing out purple in his face, roaring
in the voice of a wild beast, frantic, incoherent,
maniacal. And when he could shout no more he still
stood there, gasping, and whispering hoarsely to himself:
“By God! By God! By God!”
