Young Ofeg's Ditties/Ditty 1

​Scandinavia was hushed in the greatness and silence of a winter's night. The sky was thickly studded with stars and the countries slept.

The moon rose. It gleamed upon Sulitelma's crest and up from the white farms in Skåne. The shadows lay in long slants, gliding toward the East softly and imperceptibly, as thoughts that have never found words; and the stars glimmered so vividly, that if a living being had been there he might have heard how they trembled through the silence.

But no living thing appeared in the night, for all things slept: in field and wood, on sea and cabin, in village and town.

Suddenly a form rose up by Kolmården's woods, taller than the tallest pine tree, broad in the shoulders as Kölen's ridge. He cast a shadow across the land like a Titan's pall, and it was so long that it enveloped all ​Stockholm, and dropped its other end into the Gulf of Bothnia.

And his eyes had the sinister, furtive look of a criminal's; and when he lifted his face upwards, so that the moonlight fell upon it, it revealed such depths of disquiet and tortured conscience that the shadows paused and the stars ceased to tremble. And the form groaned—groaned with a despair so unspeakable, so unfathomable, that children shrank in their cradles and grown-up folk had bad dreams. And the night stood silently as if waiting to hear something; but no living thing seemed to exist except the solitary figure on Kolmården.

Yet there was another awake: the great Spirit, he who is so great that he can never be seen by mortal eye—by some called Time, by others Fate, by others again Justice or the Judge.

He was reposing in space, Orion's Belt girding his loins, his armpits resting on the wagon pole of Charles' Wain, his hair of grizzled eld streaming out betwixt the hemispheres—​called by men the Milky Way,—and his eye gleamed in his forehead, and the light of it fell through the Northern Night over the solitary figure on Kolmården. "Judas!"—the word echoed through the night with a sound as when stones fall upon ice. Then the figure cowered as under the grip of a giant's hand, and his eyes stared wildly about him, and a look as of millions of stifled screams of terror gathered upon his face. But the night stood silently around him, and no living being seemed to exist.

"Judas!" it echoed a second time. And he knew not whence the voice came, for the great Spirit is so infinitely great that he can never be seen by mortal eye; and when he looked at the stars that shivered, he thought it was they who had spoken; and when he watched the slanting shadows he thought it was they; and when he noticed the silence and the solitude around him, he made sure that it was their voice and nought else that he had heard.

"Judas!" it echoed for the third time, and ​everything spoke, and nothing spoke, and it was outside him, and it was inside him. And then he laughed,—laughed as a man laughs in the madness of terror; and it echoed through the night, and he listened to his own laugh; and when a while had passed, it still sounded as if a hundred thousand people were laughing far off in the midst of the sleeping towns.

And again the voice sounded: "What sin have you committed to-day?"

"I have not sinned to-day," answered the figure.

"Then why is your conscience troubled?"

"My conscience is not troubled."

"Then why did you shrink when you heard my voice? and why did you groan? I will tear the bandages off the wounds in your conscience, so you may see that they still bleed; I will conjure forth all your sins, and they will grip your soul like bloodhounds. So set your heels against the side of the cliff, and wind your arm about the wood, for your legs will sink under you at what you are about to hear."

Then the figure shivered from the crown of ​his head to the soles of his feet, so that Kolmården's woods bent as if the storm had whirled through them. And he sank upon his knees, and he dashed his head upon the rocks and cried:—

"I am not Judas! I am not Judas!"

"You are the corpse-blood of life, the corruption of humanity. Your soul is leprous, your heart's blood black, your brain filth. Amongst the children of men there is not one to be found who is such a shame to the race as you. Were one to ransack all prisons and all the dwelling-places of vice—never would one find your equal. For you are the silent consenter, you have kept silent; kept silent all your life, kept silent when you ought to have spoken, bartered your soul for silence' sake, lost your peace of conscience. 'Tis true you never jeered at him who stood in the pillory, but kept silent; you never held the pincers whilst others tore the heart out of the body of the witness to the truth, but you kept silent; you were not amongst those who harnessed pregnant women to your chariot, but ​you used them and kept silent; you never lashed your labourers to greater exertion until the blood spurted from the poor broken down wretches, but you looked on while others did it, and you kept silent. You would have kept silent if your own father had been dragged by his grey hairs, your own mother violated in your presence.

"But mark now my words, when the day of judgment comes, the great day of doom, when all the races of the earth shall be judged, and all the worlds will be empty, and eternity stand waiting in silence and trembling—then I will cause the portals of my mansion to be closed: and I will arise and say: Ye all, no matter what sins ye have committed, they are forgiven ye—ye weak ones who could never resist the tempter, and ye leaders who tempted, I forgive ye. Purge your hands from impurity and blood, and clothe ye in festive garments, and enter ye into the everlasting joys! I forgive ye, all! All except one!

"And then I will point to you, you silent consenter, and I will cause the doors of my ​mansions to be thrown open, and I will shew you the desolate, empty worlds, and say:—You who let injustice be, well knowing it was injustice; you who looked on coldly, although you had hands to help; you who betrayed your brethren by silent consent, when you might have saved them by a word; you who possessed the truth and spake it not; who walked in silence past the interminable row of witnesses crucified for the sake of truth;—you cowardly man of silence, whose name is Judas—forgiveness will never be yours, never in eternity. You shall wander through the desolate spheres, and you will never be able to pause, and you will never find death, and the spheres will never cease to be, and they will be always a little desolate; and the silence will drive you mad, and you shall howl like dogs at midnight, and you shall scream like a man possessed, and shriek with laughter in the madness of terror as you laughed a while ago, but no one will hear you, no one answer you, nought but the echo of your own voice, rolling on through ​the dead infinities, the one sound, the one living thing to be found."

The figure sprang up and his shadow fell across the moonlit land like the grotesquely magnified shadow of a human head upon a white wall; and he stretched his hands heavenwards, and his eyes darted out of their sockets, and he fell on his face, crashing like a giant tree. And the dawn flamed, and the cocks crew the land around, and men woke in their beds bathed in a nightmare of sweat.