Young Ofeg's Ditties/Ditty 25

​One day lately I sat myself on the King's highway in order to study the animal Lepus bipedes in its various species.

First came a middle-aged man of the lower classes. I enveloped him in darkness, for fear is like a snail that keeps in its shell by daylight, and only creeps out in the dark. The prescription worked immediately. Soon the wayfarer halted, listened breathlessly, and stared with wide open eyes into the gloom, then took to his heels again, panting and out of breath; he was frightened of himself, he groaned when a twig snapped under his feet, and he ducked down when a bird stirred in the branches over his head.

Afterwards, when I blew away the darkness, and the broad daylight suddenly surrounded him again, he looked about him with bewildered gaze, mopped the sweat off his brow and slunk shamefacedly along the wall.

​"That was the child afraid of the dark," said I to myself.

But from the same direction as came the vanished one, a host of Christian men and women drew near. They all looked as if they were paid criminals weighted by a bad conscience. If one of them laughed his laugh ended in a ghostly grimace, as if he had suddenly called to mind that man should never laugh. When one of the men cast a sly glance at a woman both squinted heavenwards as if to make sure that an illicit action were not being recorded. When a cock lured his hen into the bushes a look of dismay gathered upon their faces, and they crossed themselves hurriedly.

"Those were the sick ones," said I to myself, "whose souls are infected with ideas of sin. They have manufactured them into spectacles through which the world looks distorted and gloomy, until at length they have separated their maimed conscience from its being, placed it outside themselves, endowed it with body and name, made it into their table of the ​law, their master, calling it morals, God. They belong to the great category of the cowardly, for they dare not rely upon themselves, and the word self-esteem has a hollow sound or is a dangerously carnal idea; but they are cowards because their soul is diseased and their brain is narrow. Their cowardice is stupidity.

Then a third type of Lepus bipedes approached. He seemed to be one of those persons of whom an even twelve go to the dozen. He walked carefully along the wall, as if he were obliged to consider something at every step he took, something to be taken into consideration, an obligation to be fulfilled, a mistake to be avoided. He examined every stone carefully before he trod upon it, as if there was always a chance of getting a corn through it. He scattered smiles to the right and to the left, to every one and no one, as if he fancied it might serve him some way sooner or later. Constant little waves of fear trembled across his face, as if he suddenly remembered that he had by chance done ​something he ought not to have done; and when I made a row on purpose, he started and the first expression on his face was fear, and this first expression betrayed uncertainty as to how he should conduct himself: either cringe before a master, or bully a subordinate. Then I said to myself:—

"This is the Simon Pure of cowards. For his cowardice is not child-like want of judgment, neither is it disease, neither is it stupidity. He is the most cowardly of cowards, the scurviest of all, for he trades on his cowardice. He is cowardly from expediency. He is cowardly for sheer cowardice."