Читать книгу Black Beetles in Amber - Ambrose Bierce - Страница 6

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[The Chronicle did a great public service in whipping —— and his fellow-rascals out of office.—M.H. de Young's Newspaper.]

What! you whip rascals?—you, whose gutter blood Bears, in its dark, dishonorable flood, Enough of prison-birds' prolific germs To serve a whole eternity of terms? You, for whose back the rods and cudgels strove Ere yet the ax had hewn them from the grove? You, the De Young whose splendor bright and brave Is phosphorescence from another's grave— Till now unknown, by any chance or luck, Even to the hearts at which you, feebly struck? You whip a rascal out of office?—you Whose leadless weapon once ignobly blew Its smoke in six directions to assert Your lack of appetite for others' dirt? Practice makes perfect: when for fame you thirst, Then whip a rascal. Whip a cripple first. Or, if for action you're less free than bold— Your palms both brimming with dishonest gold— Entrust the castigation that you've planned, As once before, to woman's idle hand. So in your spirit shall two pleasures join To slake the sacred thirst for blood and coin. Blood? Souls have blood, even as the body hath, And, spilled, 'twill fertilize the field of wrath. Lo! in a purple gorge of yonder hills, Where o'er a grave a bird its day-song stills, A woman's blood, through roses ever red, Mutely appeals for vengeance on your head. Slandered to death to serve a sordid end, She called you murderer and called me friend. Now, mark you, libeler, this course if you Dare to maintain, or rather to renew; If one short year's immunity has made You blink again the perils of your trade— The ghastly sequence of the maddened "knave," The hot encounter and the colder grave; If the grim, dismal lesson you ignore While yet the stains are fresh upon your floor, And calmly march upon the fatal brink With eyes averted to your trail of ink, Counting unkind the services of those Who pull, to hold you back, your stupid nose, The day for you to die is not so far, Or, at the least, to live the thing you are! Pregnant with possibilities of crime, And full of felons for all coming time, Your blood's too precious to be lightly spilt In testimony to a venial guilt. Live to get whelpage and preserve a name No praise can sweeten and no lie unshame. Live to fulfill the vision that I see Down the dim vistas of the time to be: A dream of clattering beaks and burning eyes Of hungry ravens glooming all the skies; A dream of gleaming teeth and foetid breath Of jackals wrangling at the feast of death; A dream of broken necks and swollen tongues— The whole world's gibbets loaded with De Youngs! 1881.