"Count now that you have rendered plain enough
What single-eyed, straightforward stubbornness
Can, and cannot, effect in this behalf;
So much is gained; now be our conscience clear
To cast about and find some other means,
Than mere main strength in public controversy,
Of dealing with these raw recalcitrants.
They lacked the grace to be discomfited
In honorable combat fairly joined,
Let them now look to it how much their gross
Effrontery in overthrowing you
Shall profit them at last. I have a scheme"—
"Your scheme,"—so, from the depths of his chagrin
And anguish at the contact of the man,
Spoke Saul, unwilling longer to endure
The friction and abrasion of his words—
"Your scheme, whatever it may be, cannot
Concern my knowing; nothing you should plan
Were likely to conciliate in me
Either my judgment, or my taste, or please
My sense of what becoming is and right.
I pray you spare yourself the pains to unfold
Further to me your thought; your work were waste."
But Shimei, naught abashed, nay, rather more
Set on, imagining that he touched in Saul
The quick of suffering sensibility
Replied:
"Yea, brother Saul, I did not fail
In our late session to observe what you
Hinted of your unreadiness to accord
Your valuable support to my advice,
Advanced on that occasion loyally
However far outrunning what the most
Were then prepared frankly to act upon.
We weaker, Saul, who may not hope to be
Athletes like you, whose sole resource must lie
In studying more profoundly than the rest,
Are liable to be misunderstood
Not seldom, when, through meditation deep
And painful, we arrive to see somewhat
Beyond the common, and propound advice
Startling, because some stages in advance
Of the conclusions less laborious minds
Reach and stop at contented—for a while,
But which mere halting-places on the road
Prove in the end, and not the final goal.
You probably remember, when I told
The council that some good judicious guile
Was what was needed, not one voice spoke up
To second my suggestion. Very well,
The lagging rear of wisdom has since then
Moved bravely up to step with me, and now
We walk along abreast harmoniously
Upon the very road I pointed out;
'Guile' is the word with all the Sanhedrim.
"But stay, you may perhaps not be apprised
Exactly of the current state of things—
You have kept yourself, you know, a bit retired
These few days past, a natural thing to do,
Under the circumstances, all admit—
Well, we have made some progress; I myself,
To imitate your lack of modesty
And don the egotistic, I myself
Have not been idle; all in fact is now
Adjusted on a plan of compromise,
My own invention, everybody pleased.
We shall dispose of Stephen for you, Saul:
Council; Stephen arrested and arraigned;
Production of effective testimony;
A hearing of the accused; commotion raised,
While he is speaking, to help on his zeal;
Then, at the proper point, some heated phrase
Of his let slip, a sudden rush of all
Upon him with a cry of 'Blasphemy!'—
Impulse of passionate enthusiasm,
You know, premeditated with much care—
And he is stoned; which makes an end of him.
Such is the outline; not precisely what
I could have wished, a little too much noise,
The Mattathias tinge in it too strong—
Still, everything considered, fairly good.
The moment favors; for the very fume
And fury of the popular caprice
Has put it out of breath; nay, for the nonce,
The wind sits, such at least my hope is, veered
And shifted points enough about to bear
A touch of generous violence from us;
Then, as for those our rulers, they connive.
"You see I have been open to admit
Ideas the very opposite of my own.
I am not one to haggle for a point
Simply because it happened to be mine.
The end, the end, is what we seek; the means
Signifies nothing to the wise. 'Let us
Be wise,' as our friend Nicodemus said,
That day, with so much gnomic wisdom couched
In affable cohortative, as who
Should say encouragingly, 'Go to, good friends,
Let us be gods'; wisdom and godship come,
As everybody knows, with equal ease
Indifferently, through simple conative,
'Let us,' and so forth, and the thing is done."
This voluble and festive cynicism,
Taking fresh head again and yet again,
At intervals, to flow an endless stream,
From Shimei's mouth, of bitter pleasantry;
His vulgarly-presumed familiar airs
And leer of mutual understanding, felt
Rather than seen, upon his countenance;
The gurgling glee of self-complacency
That purred, one long susurrus, through his talk;
The insufferable assumption tacitly
Implied that human virtue was a jest
At which the wise between themselves might grin
Nor hide their grin with a decorous veil;
These things in his unwelcome guest, traits all
Inseparably adhering to the man,
Or fibre of his nature, Saul recoiled
From, and revolted at, habitually:
They rendered Shimei's very neighborhood
An insupportable disgust to him.
Still did some fascination Shimei owned,
Perhaps a show of wit in mockery,
Playing upon a momentary mood
Of uncharacteristic helplessness in Saul
(A humor too of wilfulness and spite
Against himself displacent with himself
That made him hold his sore and quivering pride
Hard to the goad that hurt it) keep him mute,
If listless, while thus Shimei streamed on:
"Well, as I said, friend Saul, I had no pride
To carry an opinion of my own;
The scheme I brooded was a compromise.
I plume myself upon a certain skill
I have, knack I should call it, in this line.
I like a pretty piece of joinery
In plot, such match of motley odds and ends
As tickles you with sense of happy hit,
And here you have it. See, I take a bit
Of magisterial statesmanship to start
With—go to Rome, as Caiaphas advised,
Though not quite on his errand; Rome agrees
To wink, while we indulge ourselves in what
To us will be self-rule resumed, to her,
A spasm of our Judæan savagery.
Thus is the way made eligibly clear
For brother Mattathias with those stones
He raves about on all occasions—rubbed
Smooth, they must be, as David's from the brook,
With constant wear in Mattathias' hands!
Was it not grim to hear him talk that day?
His dream of Maccabæan blood aboil
Within his veins has been too much for him,
Made him a monomaniac on this point;
He sees before him visionary stones,
Imponderable stones torment his hands;
Give him his chance, have him at last let fly
A real stone, a hard one, at somebody,
Who knows? it might bring Mattathias round.
Stephen at any rate shall be his man,
His corpus vile, as our masters say—
Fair game of turn and turn about for him,
Dog, to have handled you so roughly, Saul!
Trick of Beelzebub, no manner of doubt.
"But here I loiter, while you burn of course
To hear what figure you yourself may cut
In my brave patchwork scheme of compromise.
I modestly adjoin myself to Saul,
And so we two go in together, paired—
A little of your logic let into
A little of my guile, and a fine fit."
Shimei had counted for a master stroke
Of disagreeable humor sure to tell
On Saul, the piecing of himself on him
In plan, conscious of Saul's antipathy.
But Shimei still misapprehended Saul,
Lacking the standard in himself wherewith
To measure or assay the sentiment
Of such as Saul for such as Shimei.
Saul simply and serenely so despised
Shimei, that nothing he should do or say
Could change Saul's sentiment to more, or less,
Or other, than it constantly abode,
The absolute zero of indifference.
Half absently, through fits of alien thought,
And half with unconfessed concern to know
What passed among his fellow-councillors
Abroad, a little curious too withal
Wondering how any artifice of fraud
Could Saul with Shimei combine, to make
Such twain seem partners of one policy—
So minded, Saul gave ear, while Shimei thus
The acrid juices of his humor spilled:
"Here is the method of the joinery.
You know you put it strongly that the end
Of that pretended gospel which they preach,
Would be to overturn the Jewish state,
Abolishing Moses, and extinguishing
The glory of the temple, and all that—
Really sonorous rhetoric it was,
That passage, Saul, and it deserved to win;
But who can win against Beelzebub?
Logic turned rhetoric is my idea
Of eloquence, and my idea you
Realized; but Stephen, without eloquence,
Bore off from you the fruit of eloquence:
Never mind, Saul, it was Beelzebub.
Let rhetoric now go back to logic; you
Demonstrated so inexpugnably
The necessary inference contained
In Stephen's doctrine, hardly were it guile—
Though doubtless you will call it such, you have
Your sublimated notions on these points—
To say outright that Stephen taught the things
You proved implicit in the things he taught;
At all events, guile or no guile—in fact,
Guile and no guile it is, if closely scanned—
Here is the scheme:—We find some blunderheads,
Who, primed with method for their blundering,
Will misremember and transfer from you
To Stephen what you stated on this point.
These worthies then shall roundly testify
Before our honorable body met
To give the fellow his fair hearing ere
His sentence—said fair hearing not of course
Eventually to affect said sentence due—
Shall, I say, swear that they distinctly heard
Stephen set forth that Jesus Nazarene
Was going to destroy this place and change
The customs Moses gave us; bring about
In brief precisely what, with so much force,
You showed would surely happen"—
"Shimei"—
Saul interrupted Shimei again,
Surprised into expression by the shock
To hear himself mixed up in any way,
Of indirection even, in fraud like this—
"Shimei, I thought that nothing you could say
Would further tempt me into speech to you;
But you have broken my bond of self-restraint.
Suborning perjury! That well accords
With what you slanted at in council once,
And what I trusted I had then and there
Made clear my scorn of. Shimei, hear—I set
My heel upon this thing and once for all
Grind it into the dust."
"In figure, of course,"
Promptly leered Shimei, interrupting Saul;
"The thing goes forward just the same; you set
It under foot—in your rhetorical way;
I, in my practical way, set it on foot;
No mutual interference, each well pleased.