eelings;
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,
age-long 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