 | The Soldier of Fortune |  |
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SCENE II.
The Audience Chamber. Sigismund; Conrad.SIGISMUND
Room for the victor. Lord of Arnheim, hail!
CONRAD
I kneel before my monarch, and salute
Humbly the hand that gave my hand its sword.
SIGISMUND
I greet thee, prince of captains, and accord,
With much fair love, the audience thou hast craved.
We thank the saviour of our frontier town.
Our royal lips, unused to such a sound,
Do not disdain to say, we owe thee much.
The thanks of kings are given reluctantly
Once in a hundred years; like aloe flowers,
They sit upon the rock, which is their throne,
Nor care to show the light their inmost heart,
And nurse in thorny foldings their reserve—
But rise, my captain; rise, and kneel no more.
I augur some petition by thine eyes:
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We great kings of the earth are never served
For simple loyalty and hearty faith,
Who do the right with no eye on reward
To follow. So it was in the old days.
Now the crown buys obedience: that's no news.
We traffic in our kindness; love by scale,
And borrow duty at high interest.
Nothing in that: the trader's heavy shoe
Treads on the royal buskin; merchandise
Elbows religion to the ditch; our peers
Shoulder the packs of pedlars, and appraise
Allegiance as the buttons on a coat—
And now thou comest: ask and have, and go!
CONRAD
Now, by thy sceptre, King, thou hast misread
The fashion of my asking. If my prayer
Were ducats and more ducats, I could phrase
Glibly enough petition for a sack
Of such and such dimensions. Any fool
Can ask for bread or money; else ere this
Half of thy land were dead of hunger pangs.
But this my suit is halt, and lame of tongue,
Heavily trips, and will not come in words,
And on thy doors knocks with a clumsy hand,
And cannot tell its name.
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You want reward;
And kings reward men in a hundred ways.
Choose from this century your recompense.
Why should your preface, like a blushful girl,
Stand craning at its wish?
CONRAD
If it be well
That royal masters measure recompense,
Bringing the good we do them into poise
With the reward demanded, set the scale,
And toss this Arnheim on, thy kingdom's key,
Weigh in the risk, the weather, many dead,
And estimate the deed.
SIGISMUND
You have done well
For a young soldier well, and well again.
I do not blame your valour, but your youth,
That in your random onset I discern
No settled system and no battle plan,
And miss all tincture of stragetic lore.
Yet you did well; for in you stoutly rode
With a wild flash and crash of deafening drums;
Out came your swords: ‘Charge,’ said the trumpet peal.
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Hip to haunch, beard to chin, steel crossing steel,
Until they yielded, more surprised than hurt.
O, you did well—a thought too rashly, indeed,
If I must fix my finger on a flaw;—
But the event atoned empiric war.
Fortune, who loves beginners, smiled you on.
Well, I disparage nothing; win by rule
First, if you can, but win at any cost.
And we have won, with all deductions made,
A pretty victory enough, except—
But never mind exceptions; they can keep:
And you deserve a festival to-night,
And in the morning you shall have reward—
Proportionate reward.
CONRAD
If I should say,
King, I had set my heart to ask of thee
Coined bullion, bars of treasure, silver cups,
Nobles, and marks, and angels, and bezants—
Why—you would give me some, send me away
With both arms full, and finish with my suit.
But of such dross, I answer, give me none;
But certain gold, more golden than our mines
Possess; some treasure of such priceless gleam,
That never yet the storehouse of our kings
Its equal held!
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An eloquent demand!
My captain is become an orator:
The great mute Memnon of our puny wars
Hath seen some rosy-silver Dawn in heaven
To which his hand would reach, his heart would climb,
And through the silence of his stony lips
Pours unaccustomed music, chord on chord.
CONRAD
Sir, you are right: the Dawn, the Dawn it is
That I desire. For never in his waste
Did that old Æthiop idol watch the grey
Cloud galleries grow fiery from behind
With her rich rising that is Queen of dews,
Who wraps her glittering shoulders in a robe
More amber than the cowslip's;—never did
That tawny giant-child of sunrise yearn
With hungrier eyes upon his mother's star
Than I await her coming, who to me
Is morning-beam and music. O my King,
Her beauty smooths these rugged soldier lips:
On such a theme the blunt mouth of a fool
Could cope with those old mighty lords of language,
Who strove with Philip and with Catiline.
Perfection needs no preface of my praise
To seat the highest in the world up higher;
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Loves me again—
SIGISMUND
You rave to tell me so!
Fury and storm light on my palace roofs,
Crack them and let the wild rain batter in!
Insolent boy—lest your blood stain this hall,
Out and begone: my sworded arm on high
Wavers; creep out beyond its reach and run.
CONRAD
Smite, King, my breast is ready, and smite sure,
Lest laurel of thine Arnheim turn the edge.
SIGISMUND
I have heard wrong; unsay this quickly and go;
Sounds are uncertain in my aged ears—
Some echo in the rafters, God knows how,
Carried to me such daring syllables,
That I beheld a madman with a chain
Among the tombs as speaker—no, no, no!
Conrad forget his duty and speak thus?
I tell you nay. He never dared!
CONRAD
He did,
O Sire; and once again, ready for fate,
He must repeat the perilous sweet words:
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Swaying its head, a leaf on either side.
I speak it clear, and I can merely die
With these three words laid sweetly on my tongue;
And no king's hand or frown can hinder me.
In this all rulers are most impotent,
To make men love at order or desist
From love by proclamation. Love obeys
The edict of no mortal emperor.
Love and his saints all worship; she is one,
My Adelheid, and I to her may bend
Uncensured; and none aureoled in love's choir
Is purer with more whiteness; save that she,
This adoration, still abides on earth,
And being with us is more pitiful,
And nearer to the worship of our lips,
Than her sky sisters—nearer, not less fair.
Hence, in her ruth she hath not yet dissolved
Her hair into a garland of crips stars,
Hath not withdrawn her beauty into cold air
Beyond where planets take their pastime, still
Is here and draws all love into those eyes
Bluer than wells where round rosed angels sit
Under a wood of roses!
SIGISMUND
Braggart hound,
Be dumb. You push presumption to its hilt.
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Better my girl were gone and in her grave
Than I should sit in abject greyness still,
And hear thy coarse lips praise and catalogue
Her pure perfections. Can I keep her name
Clean, if all knaves may mouth it as they will?
Who gave this mean apprentice of the drum
License to judge my daisy? Once I saw
A scavenger pick up a fallen rose;
He turned its faint leaves over with foul hands,
Examined, ruined, soiled, and tore it half,
So flung it from him with a shoulder-shrug,
And went on carting carrion and rank sludge;
And this he understood, but not the rose.
Wherefore, my master, you who tell me straight
That you will chirp this princess at my ears,
Whether I will or will not, all the same,—
Listen—I give you but a little word
And then much silence. You remind me well
That no king's sceptre ever quelled or broke
The salt imaginations of a man.
Worms creep inside the temple doors of God,
And lay their slime along the holy cups
And burrow in the bread. Then comes the priest
And smears them to the pavement with his heel.
Vengeance is done, but still pollution cleaves
Around the altar; their enduring harm
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So might I—
CONRAD
Ay, so might you, King, and once
Again so may you never. Words are idle,
And I have done. When men are full of bread
The sower of the harvest is forgot.
SIGISMUND
Have I not hired you, man, to tread my field
And shed the seed of war? Then dare you come
And prate and haggle when the ear is full,
And sell the very harvest off my roods
To me its master? And it comes to this—
To-day you ask my daughter, and to-morrow
My crown as aftermath of benefits;
And so I pay for one lean victory
Denuded to a stalk of all my leaves
Of honour. Down, all kings, upon your knees
And pray to be defeated. What poor king
Can keep a decent mantle round his hips
Under the clutch and importunity
Of such victorious captains? God, my God,
Let me be very patient with this knave!
I will disdain to spend one fiery pulse
Of anger on his slavish head. Go forth,
Chafe me with no reply.
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I leave thy face,
And ponder on the gratitude of kings
In silence; and hereafter as my wage
Shall be my service.
SIGISMUND
Hear this sword-monger,
Who sells his valour, bargain! He will bleed
So much on such a quarrel and no more.
A ducat's hero and a stiver's dastard,
As he is paid. O hear him! this is Mars,
Who measures valour with a huckster's ell,
And honour on the inches of a stave.
And, since I underpay this son of fame—
Good—he will budge no more, but let my towns
Tumble and crash, while he sits lolling near
And smiles, ‘I told you so.’ Am I then grown
So feeble, demi-dead, irresolute,
So crazy in my chair, so out of gear,
That you must vent your ironies on me,
Sneer at my silver and anointed hairs,
And mock me to my face, my bondsman, you,
My slave, whom I have clothed and fed to wage
The battles of my house? As certain dogs
Are fed to turn my spits or guard my doors,
Do these come when my joint is roasted well,
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But young Sir Valour cannot save a town—
Which succour is his duty, nothing grander—
But he must rate with princes for the deed,
And mate with grand princesses purple-born!
Mad with the pride of winning one small field,
The wide earth and its increase must be his,
By right of that large impudence, which likens
A blind mole pushing up a little earth
In a wide plain gazed over with great hills;
While, in its own conceited estimate,
This thing, which sees two inches past its nose,
Is Titan piling mountains up at heaven,
To get among the gods and wrench their thrones—
And you shall never climb into my seat,
Whose ancestry bores but with shallow fang
Beneath the deep-earthed past, wherein the autumns
Of many rotting generations mingle,
And whose successions mock immeasurable
The newly-gilded leaf, that swings to-day
Brave in its little summer. And you dare
To this great hall, where kings on kings have sat
In the dim years, my fathers, judging men,
Push in and vapour out your paltry claims,
Who are of nothing, whose ephemeral race
Became ennobled somehow yester-year—
A mushroom house, rank from the rotten ground,
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Found orifice to hang with leathern gills,
And fester fly-blown ere two evenings old!
You, lineaged with a scanty train of sires,
Two counts and then a warehouse, and beyond
Kith at the wheel and kinsmen at the loom,
For all God knows! You, neither more nor less,
Must come in roundly, hitch me by the sleeve,
Nod and begin, ‘I want your daughter, sire,
Here, now, to-day; so you may ring the bells
And bid the bishop gird his cassock on:
The maid is royal, but who now counts that?
These rules of caste are growing obsolete.
In fine, I like the princess—that's enough,
Who am Achilles, Rowland, Amadis,
Stour Hercules and Lancelot in one—
And, if I need a thing, who dare say no?
Not one old king, whom we shall shovel soon
Under the flags of the cathedral floor;—
Whom, dead and done with not a sand too soon,
I shall succeed, by merit of my own
And in the right of this pale rose-leaf thing,
His daughter; whom, indeed, I tolerate
And greaten with bestowal of my hand;
Since such a consort planes my upward road,
And snuffs out certain cousins of the blood,
Who might become pretenders in my path
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When I with gracious ease, robed out a king,
Lead Adelheid in one hand to divide
The dais awning; bow me left and right,
Adjust a certain unaccustomed cap,
And nod the signal to a well-packed hall
To roar “God save King Conrad!” Shallow fool,
I will rip out your thoughts for men to read,
And teach the laughing nations how Conceit
Postures itself in fancied diadems,
And trails along in purple robes of air.
My hours may be as brief as you desire,
Yet in that briefness I have time enough
To chide presumption. Never shall you set
A burgher scion in our royal boughs;
Therefore, begone; yet with free limbs depart,
Because our wrath is mild and merciful.
Worthy of many fetters, chainless go.
Out of my sight at once: in case I change
My clemency, let that rebellious brow
Keep exile from our audience, lest I shear
Its head, which only Arnheim saves to-day!
[The King goes out.
CONRAD
Upon the board of fate the die has rung,
And I rise up a beggar from the game:
I who came in full-handed with the coin
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With pouch and pocket empty as the blind
Heart of a fool; wherein, if one store kindness,
And at a pinch reclaim deposit thence,
He finds mere broken benches and an echo
Of selfish laughter. Yesterday's rich man,
I sit to-morrow ragged in the ditch,
And see some new and paltry god of the hour
Ride by with roaring throats and streaming flags
As I did. Why the market-wives pressed in
To pat the very charger I bestrode,
And grandams wrestled madly for a niche
Whence to discern the feather in my helm.
Then all the town, as some vast swarming hive,
Buzzed in my wake. Such praiseful echo clashed
Around me, that the casements shook like reeds
Beside my path of triumph, each of them
A bunch of faces craning out, all eyes,
To see the victor pass—the man of men—
The marvel of the minute. Then night dips
The scene in greyness: home the pageant hies:
The faded daylight thickens into rain.
The wind goes down the empty street and leaves
A few great drops in going: the last boys
Pull collars up at ears and skelter home.
Some folks at windows hitch their carpets in,
And rip their pasteboard allegories down;
Unfasten limp festoons, roll up long flags,
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In the genista wickers; yawning, chain
The doors and close the shutters; and so dies
My day of glory. For the bravest show
Ends, as the dullest of thy days of life,
In sleep and supper.
Enter Raban.
RABAN
Is my Conrad here?
The King is gone?
CONRAD
Raban, I am alone
Communing with my anger.
RABAN
Then indeed
Your company is bad. I thought as much;
Your eyes caught on my face so lofty-earnest
As I came in.
CONRAD
How goes the court?
RABAN
Why, well;
In a calm mood of sleepy shepherd lads
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About some honour-nymph, who kissed them once
And will not kiss again. 'Tis very pretty!
And you?
CONRAD
I fare as one whose wounded feet
Rest in a viper's nest, whose clotted curls
Are crawled about with scorpions.
RABAN
Here's a contrast!
Are you in earnest?—Let me search your face:
O captain of the thunder-cloud, what cheer,
What outlook on the breakers of the world,
Can steep your visage in such folds of night
That I forget my friend?
CONRAD
Is this an hour
To simper and look sweet, to duck and cringe?
When here he stood—the echo of his feet
Scarce faded as you entered—here he spake
Tricked out in kingly robes a seeming king,
And for a season kingly in his phrase,
Till, roughened by a stormy petulance,
His soul began a rocking like the sea's,
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And all his mien changed to a parish fool's,
Whose vacant forehead wears instead of gold
The madman's grasses.
RABAN
Rain, my masters, rain:
These clouds rove out of such a weeping west,
I cannot keep the sky-roof's hoarded tears
From wetting nature, if this growling god
Push his ripe drift about in this fierce way;
The air will drench with deluge, as if ocean
Fell through its flooring into Satan's house
And slaked his half-baked inmates.
CONRAD
Leave your gibes,
And listen: Sigismund, our argument—
This ancient sleeper, like a white-faced owl,
Drops off to dose at daybreak, snores at noon,
And blinks at sunset with half-open eyes;
But, if a searching glory of brave deeds
Flare, like a fervid sunflake out of heaven,
Across his nest and somnolent repose,—
Hooting, he raises out white flapping arms,
And with a scream is gone.
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So let him go,
Man, and be merry; you are green at court
To turn your mouth down for a few hard names.
CONRAD
Bitter his face should be whose soul has found
Gall of reproof and wormwood of disdain;
Who came from doing well for his reward,
And found a phantom thing cursing his deeds
And mumbling maledictions.
RABAN
Did he so?
Then we must fawn and nurse right humble eyes,
And, when his goad bites, scrape and bow our best
And look quite cheerful. That's the road to fame.
Cringe to this idol—to this puppet kneel—
King he must be, though stuffed inside with straw,
God he must be, though all his blood is bran.
If not within he is just outside heaven—
I heard a friar preach so some days since,
Who taught the gaping hen-wives all a-row
How God and King were cousins: think of that!
CONRAD
I have no heart for laughter, Raban, none:
I am faint with hatred; earth is sick and leer
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Only a lame, pale sun grating along
Above me in an awful mirk of clouds.
The grassy valleys of the landscape seem
Red with the knots of interlacing worms,
Plum-coloured coils with yellow humpy bands;
The garden leaves are drilled away to ribs
By the palmer and the locust. There were meadows,
But they seem poisoned as with furnace scum.
Here went a grass-green mountain rivulet,
And now the filthy mother of the stye
Would hardly snuff at those polluted waves,
Where the green ribbon crusts the stinking ooze.
O Raban, wash my fancy, cleanse mine eyes:
Extinguish from mine ears this terrible
Hiss of a giant furnace: my mouth sweeten
Raw with a sick salt taste like mine own blood
Welling away, which leaves me faint and fainter.
And all my being like a limp dry leaf,
Seeks something sweeter than the rainy spring
To perished grasses. O my sickness needs
One anodyne—Hush! vengeance. Did you hear
Vengeance, my comrade? Fancy, how the flower
Drains fever-lipped the ardent drench of God,
When the cloud cracks at last, so will I slake
To the red dregs the hatred of my soul.
RABAN
You ended in a whisper.
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I was wise.
RABAN
O wise enough, since any curtain here
May harbour in its fold a palace cat.
And we have many: well they watch—for birds.
CONRAD
You heard my almost silence?
RABAN
The word's flash
More than its sound I caught. Methought, I heard
A knife drawn cleanly through a mellow pear,
And so I guessed your drift.
CONRAD
A brave word, clear,
And keen, and ringing as a glove of steel
Flung down against the flags. We muffle it
Just now and thrust it back into our pouch
Quietly, lest it tinkle; but some day
Down it shall sing, a knell to him who hears.
RABAN
Said like a soldier, purposed like a king. (Half aside)
Did he but know what royal makings lay
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And fibre of a king; did he but know—
Did he but know!
CONRAD
(appearing not to hear him)
Well! What sour mutter'd purpose
Curdles your lips? Speak out: wilt dip an oar
Behind my rowlock in these rolling vales
Of a huge, hoarse, unnavigable sea?
'Tis a black broth to launch our shallop in.
Dare you push out among this seething scum,
Where the flake whitens up against the wind,
And sighs in wild crests at a few great stars?
RABAN
My fortunes and thy danger have one helm.
CONRAD
Then watch my anger's signal to spread sail:
Watch! Need I roll my further purpose out?
RABAN
My soul is as a mirror to my friend,
Reflecting clear the double of his will.
CONRAD
The strong hand to the subtle brain says—done.
He who can comrade these may quell the earth.
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Our functions in this peril—you agree?
RABAN
Perfectly; yes. I penman, drudge of peace,
Unwarlike chattel, lump of twisted limbs,
Weak as a mouse, reared on a king's sour crumbs,
Bring the great lion of the forest heart,
And whisper, ‘I am with him.’ He can rend
And I can nibble.
CONRAD
Ay, the file is good,
When the axe falters blunted.
RABAN
Thou shalt win,
My champion; lo, my prophet wishes tinge
Thine onward path with tingling glories. Leave
The unwarlike dregs to me of thy great task;
Leave me the mean, have thou the valorous half
Of this our enterprise. If aid I can
By spurting innocent ink, this court shall roll
In sepia clouds fuliginous; within
Whose canopy, do thou thy will, feel out
Wide, ambient arms, soft sinuous rings as iron;
My Briareus of the sea, touch, tighten, fold
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Till thou reject again into stained waves
A pale mass, done with, blurred, a formless pulp,
A skin, a bloodless shadow, to be rolled
By random waters on to casual shores,
Rocked by the aimless and irreverent tides;
The rollers' plaything and the breakers' pastime,
Till the last sinew rot!
CONRAD
Thine emphasis
Comes like the sudden sea-rush, warm and wild,
Salt, windy, bitter-sweet, and full of sun,
And sings like the storm water on the beach,
Whose petrel at mine ear trills—‘Vengeance!’
RABAN
Right!
O sweet bird, Vengeance! dove of tender plume;
Step gently: she is timid, and sings least
At moulting time, red are her wing-feathers,
Else is she dusky as a nightingale,
Yet stays a household robin all the year,
By the window twigs at watch. If anyone
Could whistle her to glide down quietly
And peck her meal off even from his palm,
I think that one were Conrad.
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And his sword
Is not a reed, my friend; and wears a hand
Not easily unlocked, when round the hilt
Are riveted red fingers, that slip least
Because they are red. The moister hand-grip holds.
RABAN
There sang a vulture floating o'er the slain.
Why, man, learn milder music. Here at court
The fashion is to lisp out silken lines,
And tinker sighing ballads to a rose.
Suppose some pretty wench of honour heard
This gruff broad-chested fury. Here all spring
We sit on velvet, simper, and tease lutes,
Pretend we are in love, say ‘well-a-day,’
And stretch our limbs and gape. O blare not in,
With noises of the camp and kettledrums,
Hoarse as the wind and stained with battle-drops.
You will flutter all our rose-girls and their fools
Who play at kissing blindfold.
CONRAD
O most right!
A secret, by the stars, a secret, Raban—
All, to the King himself, play hoodman here,
And he plays best. For dotage oft resumes
Its childish pranks; so up he binds his brows,
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On post and column, and the courtiers fawn—
Did ever King dispense so well with sight,
Was ever Lord so clever without eyes?
So witless stumbles he o'er resting lions,
And hair-brained kicks dog-dragons in their gills,
And sets his shoe on some doe-hydra's tail.
So, darkened, he doth curse at those who see,
And fallen he will rail at those who stand,
Until a dark hand sudden in his hair
Tears off the bandage and he sees—a grave.
RABAN
The voice of one that crieth in the waste,
I too will rail at princes: how they doze,
How some are half and others quite asleep,
All carry golden rings above their ears;
And one has crept up to the brink of time,
As a lean caterpillar nosing space
On the leaf's utmost tip. Suppose he fell
Plumb down the gulf. I wonder, who would weep?
Would one dog leave his bone, one child stop play
In the gutter, one clown in his alehouse sigh?
So men lament their gods who have attained
Their final consecration.
CONRAD
Let it come
Swiftly: let this grey creature soon resume
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It may be kind to put this moldwarp down
Where he can scoop himself a sleepy ledge.
RABAN
Now or next year?
CONRAD
The famine of my hate
Watches the leaden hours and will not feed.
RABAN
Faith! Is it come to hours? Then wary men
Had better carry cloaks or bide indoors:
An evil night begins for hoodless brows.
There is a singing in the air of rain.
And the dogs creep away beneath the chairs
Snuffing the thunder ere it sound. I think,
God thunders better than our toothless King:
Who minds this mumbler, who?
CONRAD
His injuries
Are mightier than himself. This crumbling ruin,
Roofless with broken sides and bulging bricks,
Is overgrown with deadly weed, and green
With ramping stems whose fat and acrid gum
Is in the taster's mouth hot death and fire.
And at their root the adder litters young,
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The newt craves harbour. So this king ere death
Seems to be storehouse and supreme resort
Of all corrosive thoughts and wrathful whims;
And these things make the old man terrible,
And terrible he is. O Raban, Raban,
There he stood blinking, there he spake and quavered,
The meanest living man I think on ground—
O, but he gave me foul reproof, my Raban,
Being most helpless; it was hard to bear
From one so feeble yet so venomous,
Worse in a hundred ways. Had twenty men
Young, strong, and noble hounded me with lies,
I had borne it with a less tumultuous ire.
RABAN
What said he then?
CONRAD
All things which wound and grieve,
All shameful things, wild lies, and furious words,
From a full urn and cask of bitter sides
He shed out bravely.
RABAN
Let a bed of worms
Silence his violent lips; let grass and gravel
Choak up his eyes for this; most shallow fool,
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And call the night in on his naked side:
Let him feel after darkness with his hands,
And draw a shroud of shards across his feet,
Immeasurable dotard?
CONRAD
Hear me, friend;
I asked, and I was worthy, and he sneered.
Raging he would have pelted me away
Out of his hall with words like any dog.
RABAN
How grew this husk of discord, on what kernel?
CONRAD
You mock me, for you know.
RABAN
I have cracked many
A nut of human sorrow, and have found
The same white maggot there.
CONRAD
You mock me more.
RABAN
I have seen armies meet in thunder-clouds,
And such thick darkness masked their congress, none
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We will see why: so, wading through the fume,
We sought into the midmost vapour, passed
Through each successive envelope of darkness,
Till at the very core of tumult, lo!
We came upon a pretty rose-red thing,
Weeping her amethyst eyes out, innocent:
O, she knew nothing how the turmoil grew!
CONRAD
Scorn me not, Raban, in my hour of tears;—
I loved her very much and told him so,
I made my suit right humbly at his knee;
His kingdom and his capital he owed me,
The very roof over his head he owed me,
And I forbore to tell him—
RABAN
How ere this
He might have had for palace some damp rock,
A brace of ravens as his seneschals,
Square bats for courtiers, who should squeak to him
How great he was, king of wild glen and grass,
With daffodils for honour-maids, a lily
Instead of our adorable, his daughter!
CONRAD
Were there no lilies in his realm but one?
One I demanded: I had saved them all
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Trembling divine, in orchard avenues
Of his great land, on many a woodland floor
Nurtured in honour, damsels among flowers,
Pale, moist mid shining dew, and folded round
With wide hoods sheathing them to the white chins up,
Shrinking and holy. God himself had wept,
If some rank fox had come with bestial snout,
And laid them bare and broken and defiled.
RABAN
Is this about a lily or a maid?
CONRAD
Either, or both, or neither at thy will!
Wilt hear another image?
RABAN
Faith, I must:
'Tis penalty for knowing one in love.
CONRAD
The birds of blood came round my little lamb,
As she lay sleeping in her fold. I heard
The beating of their feathers in the storm,
The grinding of their wings against the hail;
I rose and smote the swooping harpies dead,
Dead with their talons fastening on their prey;
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And cursed me for my deed, and laid his staff
About my shoulders.
RABAN
Allegory still!
In fine, to strip all feathers off your phrase,
You want a wife. Our father Sigismund
Hath such a wifely daughter, good at need,
And clear as custard. Having done this king
Brave service, you demand her, he denies,
Adds evil names, and so the quarrel hangs.
CONRAD
You take my heart like an anatomist
And carve it into pieces. Frigidly
You reason on its fibres. O my friend,
Have you no fairer comfort?
RABAN
By the mass,
I'd rather wish you joy than wrinkle brows
Into condolement here. Go to: there is much
In such a loss to mitigate despair.
It may be, that, denying you a bride,
The gods are wholly gracious after all.
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You are merry.
RABAN
And with reason I rejoice,
Who never came off lighter by one tear
In Cupid's service. Who would play as soon
With a rope-end as a girl's finger tips;
Who keeps his lips for wine and flesh of beeves,
And never cared how kisses tasted yet—
I Raban, hunched and bunched, the crippled scribe,
A wart of nature, not a natural man,
Thwart spine and twisted limbs and bulging brows—
Viler than offal of her sacrifice
To lady Venus, eyesore to the herd
Of smirking maidens round the queen of fools,
The mother of sweet lies and cankered roses.
O Aphroditè, in thy prurient fanes,
By thy tainted reek, the whispers, and the worms,
By the dim candles, and the draggled robes,
Thy shameful altars and polluted floors—
I cannot find thee god. I rather find thee
A leper queen, whose bright unwholesome breast,
Sweet at a distance only, is marvellous
With the whiteness of her curse; and in whose limbs
The poisoned fire of many shameful days
Eats on for ever. Horrible thou art;
98
Are these thy worshippers, love's veterans,
Who come with the flat skull-like face of lust
To clasp thy knees, vast harlot, spurious queen!
Lo! I abhor thee, I whom God has made
Ridiculous, for any wayside fool
To grin and gape upon, a limping toad
Among the lithe and beautiful young men;
How the clear brain perfectly formed, intense,
Pines in the bestial vesture of such flesh
As my untended mother in her throes
Pushed me into the light with. O good brain,
Be to me for strong hands and graceful feet,
Be thou instead of speed and supple sinews;
Though locked to lie obscured in such a husk,
Yet art thou fair in thy omnipotence,
Despised, deformed, rejected. Thou art I,
Not these enfoldings, which are only meant
To do thy pastime, Love. These crutch-like limbs
Will do to move my brain on: more I need not;
And as for Love, I will write upon his altar,
‘Let Love be cursed in the lowest!’
CONRAD
Friend, my friend,
I'd rather bite a finger off my hand,
Than jeer at thee, in whom Dame Nature wrought
So well within, that careless of the crust,
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Would I exchange thee for a regiment
Of idiots faced as Phœbus, limbed as Mars?
Mere Force doth idly beat the unwounded air,
But at his elbow Craft sees where and when,
And, nodding, with her furtive index shows
The rift-place in the armour. I thank God,
We are together in this matter, friend;
For I should blench, nay by the mass, I should
Though retinued with armies, if I saw
Thy small unwarlike knuckles wield their pen
Against my train approaching.
RABAN
We are one,
One sword of purpose in the hand of doom,
I am the hilt and you the blade. My brother,
How can we break asunder? In your wrong
I see a brother scorned: at your rebuke
I feel myself degraded; at your lash
I wince, in your disgrace I hide my head.
O see, the long day of our patience flags
In tired sunset. See, all hands are limp,
All hearts are weary. On his palace wall
Discord hath ripened as an apple long.
The time is heavy with this dotard's reign;
And we must mend it, leaving truce to fools
And compromise to caitiffs; not as boys
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Or breaking idle reeds against his coat;
No, but as soldiers, driving arrows home
Up to the feather in his iron heart.
We have endured this palsy for a king
Through many watches of obedience, now
Thy star arises, Conrad, and its name
To him is wormwood. One, who saw him, told me
That, as thy triumph clashed in music past,
He never went to the window; each acclaim
That pierced his deafness, huddled at the fire,
Stung him like eager pain. Each ringing cheer
Lengthened his parchment face in envious seams.
Be not amazed, if after such repast
On a young rival's praises, when you met
He gave you peevish curses. Kings regard
Their kingdoms as their wives, in whose meek mouths
A husband's commendation may be heard,
But no man's else. Look up, my prince of spears;
What remedy in hanging down the head,
What help in sighing is there? He may die
To-morrow, or the next day, or the next!
CONRAD
I think his tedious briefness will wear out
Some wagon-load of moons. His saying good-bye
Will last a cycle. Till I see the mould
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I shall believe him here. The spice of power
Keeps him from rotting; till the latest last
Will this bald bully clutch his bauble rule,
And prove himself alive by teasing us,
Until the coffin plate is on his heart.
Death has forgotten him. He will not die.
The spectral hunter on his hackney Time,
Whose game-bag is the grave, has seen him often,
And finds him as familiar to the sight
As those grey dogs, disease and war, who follow
And lick the phantom's heels. As soon would he
Draw arrow upon Sigismund as these.
RABAN
For Death and he have lived in one small house
So long together, that, as cat and dog
Both in one narrow cottage born and fed,
They lick each other lovingly, and share
The hearth in perfect friendship.
CONRAD
You are right;
Death in his memory does not bear the name
Of Sigismund.
RABAN
Then Death must be reminded;
And we might gently nudge his shadowy wrist,
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Playing with straws and mowing at the moon,
An insult to the purple and the light.
CONRAD
Meaning—O friend, my very anger pales,
When in thy words I see my thought take form,
Vestured as one at midnight, who returns
With red hands and wild eyes and silent feet
Out of a sleeping chamber: as he glides,
He leaves a track behind him, like a man
Who has bathed; the lamps are low, but in the morn
Will these be drops of water?
RABAN
Is my captain
Become a girl? Then, Sigismund, retain
Thy throne, for they, who questioned on thy claim,
Are turned such babies, that they fear to enter
The dark room of rebellion; quickly quell them.
CONRAD
I am no weakling, yet my nature quails;
As at the portal of some hideous cave
We take slow farewell of the upper air,
Creep in, and feel on downwards to our deed.
As we descend the wide and awful deeps
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Are giant rocks and a vast midnight sea,
Whose lengths of spume are rocking terribly
Against the brinks of blue-black terraced cliffs;
And in their nooks and ledges, sheer in air,
Are built huge kilns, which redden and grow pale
Alternately, making their flame beat time
To the pulse of the waters under them; as if
Within the cliff walls unseen channels fused
Water with fire, and wave with lambent flame.
So to the mountain furnaces that sea
Rocks up in time its dreadful tidal wave
And roars and draws and soughs— (a pause)
—horrible vision!
RABAN
The nightmare of a day-dream, bred on thoughts
Which are distempered; air, and smoke, and megrims
Of no validity to scare a sparrow.
These visions are as vapour in the eye;
Whistle them off. If dreams can blanch thy brow,
'Tis time to sheathe the sword and take the distaff.
CONRAD
Raban, I may be rebel but no butcher.
Pure is my palm, my thought alone is red.
Let him alone: Death's hand is on his heart.
104
At such a creature? Let him crawl away
Into a crack of earth.
RABAN
A pretty change!
We leap into smooth weather; Boreas
Transformed to smirking silvery Zephyrus
In the moulding of a moment, at one clap;
O, let the birds upon the vanes beware,
And shift their iron tails in season round.
CONRAD
I will not turn assassin at thy sneer
For a few weeks of patience; I am human
And in my anger placable—But thou—
RABAN
Let me conclude—am something in my spirit
Not humbler than a worm, not wholly cowed;
Something which carries purpose in its teeth
To close upon and rend the insolent heel
That spurns it in the face.
CONRAD
Thou hast no Love:
He is at least her father.
105
A most fair
Remorseful afterthought. Our talk began,
Whether to use a pillow or a poniard.
We questioned on the fashion of his exit;
That we must dress him somehow for his grave,
Methought, was most abundantly conceded,
Ere we began to clatter teeth and tongue
On this conspiracy. Now through my Lion
Peeps out the lover Lamb! You are but dough
Moulded by this girl's knuckles any way!
CONRAD
My mood is ended: I am patient now.
RABAN
This patience is an estimable mule;
Load her as Atlas she will not repine.
The lash by day is music in her ears,
A bag of rye at nightfall her reward.
Her livelong toil brings money to his pouch,
Who scores his thanks in wheals upon her hide;
And, when her joints are stiff and eyes are scaled,
She rests among the thistles, and attains
That paradise of donkeys, pasture grass.
CONRAD
Goad me not, Raban—
106
Nay, there is no need.
Thou hast a neck that draws the collar well.
CONRAD
Be mute!
RABAN
As thou art patient.
CONRAD
I have seen
The red drops gather on my naked sword,
As the fight clashed and lightened at my side:
I heeded them no more than dew or rain.
But here at home, in the awful hush of peace—
An old grey bloodless man—
RABAN
Must die at once,
Who, left alone, would die some early day
In a most brief hereafter. Is that stuff
To wet an eye-lash on, or stint a smile?
Weep not, my friend, the tyrant; but bewail
His tyrannies. They are the enduring part
Of this old snake soon to be charmed asleep,
107
Dust and oblivion. Then, you want this girl,
Or fancy that you want her, which is one;—
I cannot find much wisdom in her need;
But let that pass;—If I were in your clothes,
Pining for such a smooth white piece of plague,
Which some old peevish fool in spite withheld,
Feebly audacious, shouting to prevent
The pathway of the lion to his mate,—
When one most gentle push would clear the pass,
And let me through the gate to fairy-land,
Where my most silver maiden sits and weeps,—
Think you, that I,—the hunchback, half a man,
Most unheroic, whose lame feet have craft
To avoid the nets of passion plainly spread,
Which mow the swift ones down and tear their wings,—
Think you, that I would pocket up such wrong?
Nay, I would have at grey-beard in the pass,
And either roll him flatling to the ditch,
Or crush him on the flints that fringe the wall,
Leaving compassion to more martial souls.
CONRAD
I will consider.
RABAN
Meaning you relent.
108
It shall be, as he uses me to-night
At the great banquet. If I there be shamed
Among my soldiers, ere this moon shall wane,
Strange sound shall come at midnight in these doors,
Fear and a cry. Then moaning shall arise
A weeping phantom in a yellow crown,
Leaving its royal couch for larger rest;
And, where it lay, shall trembling hands disclose
A heap of limp robes and white ruined limbs.
| The Soldier of Fortune | |