'The Ghost,' murmured a dozen voices.
'Ah, yes—now, how can a ghost affect a modern audience which no longer believes in ghosts?'
'That is true.' The table was visibly stimulated, as though the chocolate had turned into champagne. The word 'modern' stirred the souls of these refugees from the old Ghettos like a trumpet; unbelief, if only in ghosts, was oxygen to the prisoners of a tradition of three thousand years. The poet perceived his moment. He laid a black-nailed finger impressively on the right side of his nose.
'I translated Shakespeare—yes, but into modern terms. The Ghost vanished—Hamlet's tragedy remained only the internal incapacity of the thinker for the lower activity of action.'
The men of action pricked up their ears.
'The higher activity, you mean,' corrected Ostrovsky.
'Thought,' said Benjamin Tuch, 'has no value till it is translated into action.'
'Exactly; you've got to work it up,' said Colonel Klopsky, who had large ranching and mining interests out West, and, with his florid personality, looked entirely out of place in these old haunts of his.
'Schtuss (nonsense)!' said the poet disrespectfully. 'Acts are only soldiers. Thought is the general.'
Witberg demurred. 'It isn't much use thinking about playing the violin, Pinchas.'