 | Canute the Great |  |
Scene IV.
Southampton.Enter Canute, Hardegon, English and Danes.
Canute.
Ye have proclaimed me king! 'Tis said at London
The citizens choose otherwise; no more
In terror of my girding troops, they give
Oaths to the untried son of Ethelred.
Where lies your loyalty? Has Ironsides
Your secret love? Or do you give your hearts
To me, receive me as your rightful lord,
Trust me to cleanse the country of all robbers,
Liars and cheats, and ever doom just dooms
Alike to rich and poor? Will ye exalt
My dignity, and follow my command,
As mindful all ye do in faithfulness
Is to your own behoof?
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We will maintain
Our choice, and with a strict fidelity
Cleave to our King Canute.
Canute.
Now ye are mine
I will re-knit your virtue, make your throne
A seat of glory. Think not whence I am;
Let Danes and Englishmen beneath my sway
Become a world-known race. Bear witness all
How I love England,—her enfolding seas,
Her woods, her valley-hayfields, river-sheds
Where cattle graze the meadows. I was born
In haunts of desolation; here abides
A sense of times gone by, of ancient law,
Religious benediction. My wild home
Seems but mere earth on which to breathe and eat;
This island has a human, blessèd bond
Between itself and men.
English.
'Tis yours to hold,
And govern as you will; we bow beneath
The dictates of your pleasure; there is nought
On earth that may resist you.
Canute
[aside].
Flattery!
They think me a dull savage.—Ye have spoken
Beyond the truth. I bid you turn and look
Upon those billows sweeping to the shore,
With augment, arch, depression. Do you tell me
That they would stay their muster, check their onslaught
And fury of defiance at my bidding?
If you would love me, give me faithful tongues
In all you say—I have no appetite
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An army meet to grapple with great Edmund:
For ye have chosen me, but your election
Hard fighting must confirm.
English.
Long live the king!
[Exeunt.]
Hardegon.
We gave these pretty Englishmen the
breath of flames and the smoke of homesteads. Now it
is all excellent England. Enemies, I take it, are as natural
to a man as babes to a woman. Ghosts of the Vikings!
Would our mothers know our voices?
Canute.
I am king now in a country where there is
corn-growing and the sound of bells. I must be a Christian.
Hardegon.
And you know not a word of the mystery.
You a Christian! Ay, stick your great hands in your hair
and redden. They'll have the laugh of you.
Canute.
I will learn, I must alter. I am not simply
the grand-child of Gorm. These battle-fields are just the
beginning. Afterwards. . . .
Hardegon.
The folly! Rob a man of his ancestors,
you take all. My best hope is to become an ancestor
—no hold on posterity, if you be not a god to it. Then
just think what a time it takes a bit of coast to vary!
When I sail up the fiords, the water-falls drop from the
same cliff, the walls of the white steeps have not budged.
And we reckon on these things. If they fail, there is no
stability. I ask you, are not the gods changeless, must
not divinity dwell among the old ways?
Canute.
O Hardegon, there are answers to these
questions; they are coming on the waves to me.
[Looking
out on the sea abstractedly.]
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Thororin.
Listen! my harp is tuned; it shivers to
praise you. I have had a great madness to sing as I saw the
warriors gather, and heard the blast take your name inland.
Canute
[unheeding].
No wisdom near me,—a dunce
and a ruler! Oh, this shame of ignorance, that will not
hide itself; that must come out, and suffer, and be
mocked! I sob all night for the misery. 'Tis a secret
that cannot be kept, yet the breaking it. . . If one
loved me!
[seeing Thororin.]
Oh, how horrible! More
praise of my big sinews. I'll be sullen.
[Turns away.]
Thororin.
Deaf to my exaltation, no ear for a poet!
Let me beg, Sire, you listen to my song; it is short.
Canute.
And I am the subject. The insolence of these
verse-makers! They would have all life a general ear for
their bit of piping breath, or they stare and begin to rail.
Off with you, minstrel! Thirty strophes more of your
theme, or you lose your head to-morrow.
Thororin.
Pshaw!—but the threat is nothing. The
wind, a sand-hill, and a cry for dreams, and I am full of
singing that instant.
Canute.
Thirty strophes, and stuffed with comparisons
and reverence.
[Exit Thororin.]
Hardegon.
How he twirls his finger round the flames
on his lip, all impatience for me to go. He has a sea-
bred face. 'Tis a shame for the true, old things to
lose him. I will bring one who can speak—with a voice
that is like the rush of water from amid the foam of her
hair—Gunhild, the prophetess.
Strange, you should have taken to
fretting, and all since the siege of London!
[Exit.]
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All, all since then. Ah, yes! Above me bent
A sweet, soft-shouldered woman, with supreme,
Abashing eyes, and such maturity—
The perfect flower of years—such June of face . . .
So ceremonious, and yet so fearless
In passionate grace, that I was struck with shame,
And knew not where I was, nor how to speak,
Confounded to the heart. She made me feel
That I was lawless and uncivilized,—
Barbarian! In all my brave array
I shrank from her, as she had caught me stripped
For some brute pastime. Is this womanhood?
There's more to see each time one looks at her,
There's music in her; she has listened much,
Pored o'er the lustrous missals, learnt how soft
One speaks to God, with silky filaments
Woven weird pictures of the fates of men.
Her smile is not a new-born thing, 'tis old,
And mellow as the uncut, timeless jewel.
Her forehead's runic,—it is just to-day
On other faces, but this lady's brows
Are full of fond tradition and romance.
I'll be her scholar, she shall teach me all,
And change—yea, as I love her, I am changed
In my ambition, in my appetites,
In my blood, and aspiration. [Turning to some parchments.]
For her sake
I wrestle with these laws. My eyes are dim,
Worn out with gazing, and my brain is slow
To take the import. Sometimes on my vessel
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I muse on this new wisdom, till its weight
Oppresses me with slumber, as it rises
In such great bulk before me.
[Reads the parchments, sitting.]
[Re-enter Hardegon with Gunhild.]
Hardegon.
At his learning!
Deal with him, spare him not.
Canute.
Whom hast thou brought?
A brooding face, with windy sea of hair,
And eyes whose ample vision ebbs no more
Than waters from a fiord. I conceive
A dread of things familiar as she breathes.
Gunhild.
O king.
Canute.
Ay, Scandinavia.
Gunhild.
He sees
How with a country's might I cross his door;
How in me all his youth was spent, in me
His ancestors are buried; on my brows
Inscribed in his religion; through my frame
Press the great, goading forces of the waves.
Canute.
Art thou a woman?
Gunhild.
Not to thee. I am
Thy past.
Canute.
Her arms are knotted in her bosom
Like ivy-stems. What does she here, so fixed
Before my seat?
Gunhild.
Hearken! I wandered out
Among the brake-fern, and the upright flags,
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And the west yellow underneath the night.
A fir-bough rolled its mass athwart my way,
With a black fowl thereon. All eve I stood
And gathered in your fate. You raise your hands
To other gods, you speak another tongue,
You learn strange things on which is Odin's seal
That men should know them not, you cast the billows
Behind your back, and leap upon the horse.
You love no more the North that fashioned you,
The ancestors whose blood is in your heart:—
These things you have forgotten.
Canute.
Yes.
Gunhild.
But they
Will have a longer memory. Alas,
The mournfulness that draws about my breasts!
Woe, Woe! There is a justice of the Norn,
Who sings about the cradle.
Canute.
Speak thy worst.
[Aside, rising and pacing apart.]
How different my queen! How liberal
The splendour of her smile! This woman's frown
Is tyrannous. So will my country look,
When I sail back next year; for I shall feel
A dread, a disappointment, and a love
I loathe, it comes up from so deep a well,
Where I am sod and darkness.
Gunhild.
At thy birth
Sang Urd of foregone things, of thy wild race,
Of rocks and fir-trees that for ages past
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That call thy countrymen to journey forth
Among strange people; and her song went on
As flesh was woven for thee in the womb;
It cannot be forgotten, for she sang
Beginnings.
Canute.
O grey-headed tyrannies
Of yore, I will escape you.
Gunhild.
Verily,
They have requital. Thou wilt get a child:
Will it not draw from the deep parts of life;
Will it not take of thee that disposition,
Old as the hills, and as the waterfall,
Whose foam alone was ever seen by man?
Thou wilt produce a being of thy past,
And all thy change avail not.
Hardegon.
How these women
Can sing foundations!
Canute.
If in those I breed
It work no blessing, to myself this new,
Unsettled energy within my brain
Is worth all odds. I cannot understand
Half that is meeting me. Go hence, your face
Is sheer confusion to me; it brings back
The load of ignorance, the brutishness,
The fetters of nativity.
Gunhild.
I go:
But wrathful leave behind me what was told
When the crow bent from the swirled plume of fir,
And held me like a statue.
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O my past,
I loved thine aspect once, but now my mind
Drives thee away. It seems to me that thought
Is as a moving on along the air—
I cannot yet find language. You oppress,
And hinder me; but when I brood alone,
Hope stirs, and there is tumult of a joy,
That flashes through my nature, like a sword,
Cutting the knots.
Gunhild.
Oh, indestructible
Are the first bonds of living. Fare thee well.
Thou wilt engender thine own ancestry;
Nature will have her permanence.
Canute.
And I
Will have my impulse.
Gunhild.
Oh, the blue fir-bough,
The bird, the fern, and iris at my feet!
The whole world talks of birth, it is the secret
That shudders through all sap.
[Exit.]
Canute.
She turns away
With rigid shoulders, and is vanishing
For ever. 'Tis in wrestles with her like
We are transformed.
[To Hardegon.]
Call Edric, do you hear!
And say no other word as you would live;
My temper will not bear it.
[Exit Hardegon]
Winsome queen,
Emma, great lady, could I reach thy feet,
Thou hadst ne'er known such homage. It is youth,
Youth in its awful kindling; it is love,
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Of what it would be worthy of;—such youth,
Such love I give thee. Deeper than my race,
Deeper than all my past thy sway is set;
So able are thy brows, such strength is thine,
Thou art beneath all other elements,
They are no more the same. Oh, wonderful!
For I have clipped a woman in my arms,
The silent Elfgifu, my Danish wife;
And I have known the pleasures, but they passed;
I was not altered; in my head no light,
No current through my faculties, no whirl
Of giddy charm.
[Enter Edric.]
Edric, you are the man;
You have the opportunity that chance
Withholds from me.
Edric.
[aside].
He tramps about and catches
His garment's hem, a burning in his eyes.—
Speak out, and plainly.
Canute.
Ha!—The troops come in?
Do they not muster? I am thinking, Edric,
'Tis time now for my tactics, for the plan
Of conquest and repulse. You'll find me keen,
And ready as a captain.
Edric.
I could swear
You have resource. You are a soldier's son,
And know how valid is the right of craft
Toward foemen.
Canute.
Yes, to take them unawares
By artifice and ambush. Look you, thane,
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To actions of vast consequence, and need
Space for great laws, the power to mould a nation
To flawless homage. What the means you choose
I care not; anything I hold as just
That will establish justice.
Edric.
So I think.
Canute
[aside].
My breath draws back her name from off my tongue;
I cannot utter it.
Edric.
The army grows,
The Raven flaps for victory, my pate
Teems with its stratagems. Soon will you be
A single ruler; though perchance you'll ask
Another for her company. [Aside.]
He's red,
As if the northern light leapt through his face;
Ho, ho! Can't keep his counsel.—Is your mind
Set on the empire of a bachelor?
You own too hot a pulse.
Canute.
I have no doubt
But I shall marry.
Edric.
Where's the wife to match
An eagle of your plumage?
Canute.
All the world
Is full of stately women.
Edric.
I have seen
But one, the late king's widow. She is prime
Among all dames.
Canute.
You think that you have seen her,
Because you know she has a radiant skin,
And strange, proud eyes!
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Ah, you are touched, young man!
But she is twice your age.
Canute.
She is beloved
Past any other woman, who was dear
In former times. She holds her century's
Most choice attainments.
Edric.
Will it flatter you
To learn that she would throw away her veil,
Her husband being buried but a week,
To kiss that lip of yours?
Canute.
Impossible!
A brute like me, a child in all but strength,
A Christian but in name, her enemy,
A spoiler, temple-burner, pirate,—she,
Wise, excellent in grace.
Edric.
Yet she is yours,
With all a woman's haste; you are the theme
On which she spends her wisdom.
Canute.
Such a moment—
My future—
Edric.
He is deaf to what I say.
All fire and trembling, ho!
Canute.
My fate is turned
Like a great river from its primal bed
Round by new thorpes and fields. My thankfulness
Is this: she stoops to love me, but a man
Grows up within me she may proudly call
Her lover. Edric, I will never ask
The honour of her fairest hand, will never
Take from her lips the glory of a kiss,
Till I am firmly king.
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I'll drop some words
To keep her merry, she will bide her time;
Women can wait by nature.
Canute.
Scheme, have ready
Arms and provision. I will go elsewhere,
And study. Read this passage from the scroll;
The language puzzles me. It runs—
Edric.
Like this—
If a man be slain, we estimate all equally dear at forty
talents of pure gold.
Canute.
These laws will I remodel, when I read
The meanings plainly. They shall be enforced
Through the land's length and breadth; and he who kills
Pay the due sum. [Aside.]
I must out to the air,
And splash of the full tide. My joy as yet
Is lightning, thunder in my sense, a storm
Knit up to break in fury.—Give me this,
That parchment, and let no one follow me.
Edric.
A word of dalliance, a sugared speech
To carry to the widow, come!
Canute
[aside].
The fool!
I cannot speak.—Take her my silence, thane.
[Exeunt severally.]
| Canute the Great | |