 | God and Mammon |  |
79
ACT IV
Scene:—A bedroom in the Royal Palace, Christianstadt. The window is open; the moon hangs over the sound; the noise of the surges on the beach is faintly heard. A shaded lamp is the only light in the room. Magnus and Guendolen are in bed.Guendolen.
Sin, Magnus, sin! No flesh shall touch my flesh!
[Leaves the bed.
The beasts do that—abominable beasts!
Magnus
[leaves the bed].
In the creator's name what did you dream of?
What, in the name of creaturehood?
Guendolen.
Of love.
Magnus.
Of married love that makes the couple one?
Guendolen.
Of human, Christian love; of love divine.
Magnus.
The mystery of a maiden's mind! Dear soul,
Did you not know that love, anatomized,
Is but an excrement in men; in women,
Receptacle and flux and monthly heat?
A letch, a deed more nauseous, gross, uncouth
Than even your daintiest horror can conceive?
Hence sacrament to cleanse it—God's device
To make of wantonness beatitude,
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When you avowed to-day you dared not yield
Your body to be ravished?
Guendolen.
I said my soul!
I said—I could not wed and give my soul
Unloving to be ravished. I remember:
That was my word, my meaning.
Magnus.
Give your soul?
But—Heaven and earth! ... Come back to bed! The air—
Guendolen
[at the window].
Stay where you are! I leap if you come nigh.
Be still; be silent. Give me breathing space
To make the toilet of my mind, undone
So ruthlessly.—The night will dress my thought
In dreams again—in beauty, like a stole
With stars embroidered:—tenderly, sweet moon,
Hide, hide my nakedness in snowy lawn:—
And let the wind with fragrant chrism anoint
My forehead and my eyes, and wipe my mouth
Of wanton kisses clean.
Magnus.
By the high God
Whom I adore as holily as you,
You fire my wrath and lure my passion on
To force my wife in every Christian name,
If all-becomingly she will not yield
A bridal welcome to an honest love.
Guendolen.
Oh, shame! Oh, shame! Hush! Hush! And listen!—Hush!
The murmur of the seaboard: surges beat
Their slow uncertain, softly-swelling fugue—
The brooding surges, fingering the shore.
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I'll not be so put off!
Guendolen.
Oh, rude! Put off!
The high and tender bridegroom of my soul—
Gone, gone, I know not where!
Magnus.
He never was!
The bridegroom of your soul is art and part,
The bridegroom of your blood: alloyed, they make
Enduring metal capable of all
That soul and body can of mundane love.
When death shall decompose us, God receives
The liberated soul, and mother earth—
Incredible! The lisping infants know!
I speak as if you were a visitant
From some far planet new to our estate.
Guendolen.
I am a visitant from further off
Than any planet, system, sun or star:
I come from God as you and all men do.
Oh, Magnus, soul and body never mix!
The soul is like a glittering weapon plunged
In mortal matter, as in baths of blood,
To flesh it for the armoury of Heaven.
Engendered as the beasts are, Magnus? I?
Oh, if I thought it!—No—My mother?—No!
My father and my mother never did
The loathsome thing you tried to do with me!
Magnus.
What did your father and your mother do?
Guendolen.
Their wedded souls in innocence matured
Consummate ecstasy; and I became
That ecstasy incarnate. Did you not know?
Magnus.
I doubt your candour now.
Guendolen.
You—doubt—my—
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No!
I swear it! Never! Pardon—on my knees!
But tell me this:—you spoke of sinful choice,
(Your morning talk keeps buzzing in my mind)
Of your resolve to live in sin with me,
And of a revelation to be made
At midnight in my arms:—Now, tell me true:
What was the sin you meant to sin with me?
Guendolen.
I gave my soul to Mammon: we were betrothed.
It is a sin to take my soul from him
And give it up to you.
Magnus.
Your soul? With mine?
In innocent ecstasy to—Ha! Ha-hah!
By the Divine Sophia, I must laugh!
Oh, Guendolen!—Ha-hoh! Ha-hoh-hoch! Hah!
Frown and be wild! I'll laugh myself to shreds,
Remembering this until my dying day!
Oh, child, child, child, there's not a way of love
Save that you shrink from!
Guendolen.
But there is, there is!
Oh, Magnus, I was happy in your love!
This was my revelation:—Some still night,
Together lying in each other's arms,
I thought my passive soul entwined with yours
Would once again conceive the Son of Man:
Without that hope I never should have married.
Not good enough, not pure enough am I
For God to let me have, as Mary had,
A great announcing angel with the Word
Of impregnation; but I thought that Christ,
Seeking a woman to be born of, found
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To be His mother: and it haunts my mind
That God perhaps intended Christ this time
To be conceived and born in sin, because
The awful failure of His sinless birth
Arises from its very sinlessness.
Magnus.
God! ... Guendolen, what do you mean by sin?
Guendolen.
To be a wife is sin, since God's own son
Was first conceived by tidings, not by marriage.
Marriage requires God's sanction: when God's message
Begot His Son immaculate, the Word
That blesses marriage was the husband: all
Begetting and conceiving else is sin.
Did you not know?
Magnus.
Marriage in your sense, sin?
To lie together in each other's arms
Sans passionate union of our bodies, sin?
Guendolen.
Oh, Magnus, surely! Gabriel never lay
With Mary: dressed and girt, not even in bed,
Madonna met the angel of her fate.
Magnus.
Madonna keep me sane! And men and women
Who do devoutly as the beasts do: what
Of them?
Guendolen.
They sin against the Holy Ghost!
They lose their souls; they die eternally:
They turn themselves to beasts.
Magnus.
Have beasts no souls?
Guendolen.
God made them soulless; they can never sin:
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Must join their bodies or become extinct:
The beasts fulfil the will of God that way.
But men and women? Images of God?
Oh, Magnus, the unpardonable sin!
Magnus.
And you believe this?
Guendolen.
In my heart and soul!
I know; I've thought it out; I understand.
It must be as I say; for where's the need
Of sacrament in marriage if men and women
Must do as beasts do to have offspring? None!
Magnus.
By Heaven, an argument! Nothing tonight
Disturbs your faith that psychic powers alone
Are joined in Christian marriage?
Guendolen.
Nothing! Nothing!
God's benediction with the brutish deed
Dispenses, Magnus: how could he be God
Without the constant miracle of life
From psychic wedding? Soul to soul
Is all that marriage wants: bastards are sprung
From foul adulterers who, forgetting God,
Commit that horrid, bestial act of shame;
But you and I, and all good Christian folk,
Are of the spirit born, remembering God
Who joins our souls in rapture while we sleep.
Satan joins bodies; and a spice of Hell
Goes with the chastest kiss; therefore we sin
Even in our Christian way—which God forgives
Beforehand in the sacrament of marriage:
But only Christ's nativity was pure.
Magnus.
And did you never feel the fire of Hell
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Guendolen.
For Mammon—yes.
Once when I swam the sound to reach his ship,
And twice again to-day:—first on the quay;
Then as he stood in sackcloth at the throne,
Like sin itself, so grave, so terrible,
Or racked with passion, by tempestuous sobs
O'ercast and storms of tears, a god rebuked—
Oh, not like God!—but like a deity
From Asgard or Olympus wandered far,
Astray in time and place.
Magnus.
How did it take you,
This passion for my brother?
Guendolen.
In every pulse,
In every nerve, a fount arose, a fire
Began: my body like a furnace burned
To melt him up and hoard him in my womb,
A molten treasure.
Magnus.
Guendolen!
Guendolen.
I felt
My soul evaporate, and tyrannous sin
Usurp me gloriously. But Christ stood by,
Awaiting to be born: He gave me strength
To cling to you—the husband of my soul.
And now?—Oh, now—I have no husband now!
Magnus.
You have no husband.—What a cheated fool
Am I! You love my brother with a love
I would surrender hope of Heaven to win.—
But hark you here:—my head chimes with your cry,
“Did you not know?”—May I demand of you
A question terrible as Hell?
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Demand
Your hellish riddle: I'll answer it.
Magnus.
Do you know
How mad you are?
Guendolen.
Mad? I? I wish I were!
I might forget this tragic night, or change
Catastrophe to triumph in my wildness.—
This is my room: you know your way to yours.—
A footstep!
Magnus.
No; a groaning joist, a door
Ajar, a mouse, a rat. Best go to bed.
I'll watch the night out in your dressing-room.
Guendolen.
Footsteps! I hear them!
Magnus.
Night-sounds of the house:
The silence gives them audience: in the day
They pass unnoted.
Guendolen.
In the corridor!
They come this way. Listen.
Magnus.
I hear them now.
Guendolen.
What can it mean?
Magnus.
Immoderate jesters sworn
To plague the bride and bridegroom.
Guendolen.
No; not that:
None know of us—unless the abbot told.
Magnus.
He would not.
Guendolen.
Stealthily they tread. No voice:
Only the thronging footsteps woven close.
They're at the door! They halt!
Magnus.
Should they intend—
Guendolen.
The door's unlocked!
Magnus.
Lock it—or open? Which?
Guendolen.
The handle turns! Look! Look! An angel sent
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Mammon enters.
Guendolen.
Ah-h-h!
Magnus.
You!
Back! Back, apostate! Oswald, who let him loose?
Oswald standing in the doorway, salutes.
Mammon.
You plotted to unsex me, Magnus; stole
My love; seduced her into marriage; culled
The sweetest rose of all my destiny.—
Guendolen.
Guendolen.
Prince!
Mammon
[pointing to the window].
Attend upon the moon—
Ten thousand times deflowered by wanton tides
That salt her silver image and waste her fire.
Guendolen turns slowly to the window and looks out.
Mammon
[whispering as he throttles Magnus].
You shall not live!
Magnus grapples with Mammon.
Mammon.
Contend with me!
Oswald
[to the guard as he steps aside].
Now, swordsmen!
Mammon undoes Magnus's grasp and flings him out.
Magnus
[falling on the swords of the Guard, who thrust their weapons home].
Oh, God! Oh, God!
[Dies.
Guendolen
[turning from the window].
Oh, Prince, what have you done?
Mammon.
Nothing at all. Look out upon the sea:
Lean from your window and behold the moon
Incrust the waves with buoyant shards of light.
Guendolen turns again to the window.
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The bodies you will place together, Oswald,
Upon the platform in St. Olaf's hall.
Tell Florimond the nature of their deaths:
The madness of the one, the accident
Whereby the other fell. Enlarge on nothing.
To-morrow I myself will state the truth
The world must understand. Bid Florimond
Send out to all the nobles in the city,
To all the magnates, all the peers of God,
(I mean the Abbot and his crew), to some
Of every sort besides, class, mass and mob,
To meet me in St. Olaf's Hall at dawn:
There I shall crown myself.
Oswald.
At dawn, King Mammon?
Mammon.
I shall do nothing as it has been done:
At dawn the world and time begin anew.—
The throne and the regalia, have them placed
Upon the platform. No sleep for you to-night!
Breakfast for me before the sun gets up.
Awake the servants: set the new world going.—
Soldiers, your noble captain, Duke now in Thule,
By whatsoever title pleases him,
Commands my armies henceforth. Each of you
Shall at your captain's eulogy and choice
Receive to-morrow great preferment.—Hush!
Good-night, lord Duke; captains and peers, good-night.
[Closes and locks the door.
Guendolen leaves the window when the door shuts and comes hesitatingly towards Mammon.
Mammon.
Oh, Guendolen! And I must kill you too!
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Why must you kill me, Mammon?
Mammon.
Fate: my fate,
Which is myself, pleads for your death. To kill
The offender is as natural to me
As to undo the offence: no brother's blood
Of mine shall spring in you; no sainted widow
Furnish the treachery of Christian sots
With sentimental worship.
Guendolen.
I will not die!
I cannot—must not!
Mammon.
You shall sleep and dream;
And in your dreams embalmed, be still alive,
Since you will never waken. Dread no pain,
No horror in your death.
Guendolen.
I'm going to live;
I wish to sleep and waken many times;
It's wonderful to fall asleep at night,
And waken in the morning! I'll not be killed!
Mammon.
Oh, Guendolen, you seem to me so much,
So wholly, woman that I sometimes think,
There was not and will never be another!
You are all fantasy, all hope and fear,
All tenderness, all intellect, all trust,
All beauty, all simplicity, delight,
The perfect half of being—the deep sweet west:
The orient, I, that should have made with you
A world of man and woman impossible
Before, because we were not; and I, it is,
Must kill you.
Guendolen.
You, it is, must not! The thing
You thought of, spoke of, dreaded, cannot be:
No need to kill me, Mammon, for fear of that
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For fear of what?
Guendolen.
Look out upon the moon—
The constant moon, that like a woman's love
Waxes and wanes and hides behind the night,
But ceases not attendance on the earth.—
Your brother's blood will never spring in me.
Mammon.
You cannot tell yet: and there's deadlier cause.
Were you to live I dare not trust myself;
For even here I might undo my deeds.
Mammon comes after no man: you must die.
Guendolen.
Comes after no man! Thought of that is all
The thought of men; its figure, all they see.
Mammon.
How often did he kiss you? How many turns—
Turns?—death!—How many petals of your rose
Have fallen?
Guendolen.
He kissed me many times. My rose?
Unplucked, unblown, no petal opened yet,
No spikenard shed.
Mammon.
These immaterial thoughts
I understand: the Christian double-dealing—
Unchastity that virtuously seduced
Instinctive passion so superb as yours.
Crushed in my brother's arms to him you gave
Your soul—oh, very sweetly, doubtless!—but
Your blood, your brain, your marrow, fibre, nerve,
And every organ of your body, swelling
In one full diapason of desire,
Throbbed with the music of your love for me.
By me and by my love, I have half a mind
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Garnished with nails like pork clove-stuck, or like—
Damnation!—images of horror haunt
The dungeons of my thought—and all
For love of you! Princess, your death will ease
A tension that might snap me, like a string
O'erstrung and chafed by too inspired a bow.
The future of the world which I prepare,
Like a new flower will spring from out your tomb,
And not a lady's name be sung but yours,
Of all the beauties, harlots, heroines,
From the beginning to the end of time.
Guendolen.
But Magnus would not take my soul. Oh strange!
You understand; you know the truth of love!
Mammon.
My father and my brother and Guendolen?
It fills my purpose out: the death of these
Inscribes the triple period of the past,
As with a pen dipped in the blood of kings.
Guendolen.
We speak athwart each other's minds like tongues
Storm-tossed that answer wild.—Where's Magnus? Why
That icy scream of his, that shuddering groan?
King Christian!—If he finds you here! And me!
But tell me quickly, Mammon:—Beauty of soul,
Its sanctity, are neither touched nor stained
By anything between in perfect marriage?
You know that, too? Oh, leave me! Mercy, Mammon!
Mammon.
I know that perfect love destroys the cup
Rather than drink dregs of another's draught.
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Another's draught!
Mammon.
You must lie down and sleep.
Guendolen.
Never to waken? No!—Dregs of a cup,
You said: but no one ever drank my cup;
None of my cups—my body or my soul.
Mammon
[seizes the lamp and holds it to Guendolen's face].
Neither your body nor your soul? Then what
Was Magnus chanting all the hour I strove
For manhood?
Guendolen.
Strove for manhood? What you mean
You know. And what I did I know:—I saved
My christened soul which Magnus sought to wound:
I am a virgin still.
Mammon.
Both out of bed;
The bed but little tumbled, when I broke in!
If this is true! It may be: hope of it
With rapture strangles me, as when the sun
Shone once upon a holiday that frowned
Throughout the morning. Guendolen! Light! Light!
[Sets down the lamp and switches on several lights; then taking Guendolen by the shoulders he searches her face again.]
I know how fear will turn and wind about,
And snatch the respite of a dexterous lie.
Guendolen.
I fear not death, although I wish to live.
You will not kill me now, I being a maid.
Mammon.
If you're a maid I'll kill you, but with love's
Luxurious martyrdom of passionate years.
So high this lifts me that belief delays,
Entranced on hovering wings in sun-steeped air
Above a banquet where a desert spread.
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Where's Magnus? And King Christian, where is he?
Mammon.
They are together: they ask not after us.
Guendolen.
Oh, Mammon, are they dead?
Mammon.
Both dead.
Guendolen.
Who killed them?
Mammon.
They killed themselves; they thwarted me and died.
To thwart me is to die. Forget them, love.
In Thule now there works no will but mine.
[Takes her hand.
How cold you are!—Get into bed. I say,
To bed!
Guendolen
[goes quickly into bed and wraps herself in the bedclothes].
Foredoomed, I wrestled with my fate:
It throws me here on corpses pillowed: blood
With terror spiced, my bridal cup; and death
The faded harvest of my honeymoon.
Mammon.
You make voluptuous phantom play with words,
Presuming all disaster in a deep
Despondence. Love like fire from Heaven new-drawn;
Life's heavy fruitage, and imperial nights
When naked darkness gluts the sky with stars;
Days of desire, maturing in the sun;
Begetting and conceiving, birth and death;
The joy, the greatness and the agony!—
Oh, Guendolen!
[Kisses her and lays his hand on her brow.]
Guendolen.
Your fingers burn me, Mammon—
And your mouth: you brand me for your own.
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Look at me: tell me:—what did Magnus do?
Guendolen.
Nothing. He offered to profane me, thinking
That Christian love, like lust, engaged in deeds
Unchaste, ungodly, direful. I arose,
And stood at bay debating till you came.
Mammon.
I have your secret now, high-hearted maid!
That mystic fancy blossomed in your blood,
Which was my faith in boyhood: haughty minds
And virginal put forth such flowers at first.
Guendolen.
I thought you wore it still.
Mammon.
Where? In my eyes?
Nor breaks that pale fantastic bloom in yours,
But sapphire buds and ardours of the sky.
Guendolen.
Something you said.
Mammon.
Of body and of soul?
Yes; but I cannot speak the thing I mean.
Words have a past significance: ghosts are
They, things of death that haunt the living thought:
I dream and guess, imagine, shape, invent,
What is, and has been, and will always be,
But never dawned before in consciousness.
Guendolen.
My soul begins to totter in its sphere;
My world on doomsday wakes.—Is it not true
That Christian children spring from Christian love
Of souls united by the power of God,
Without the bodies being joined like beasts?
Mammon.
Strange, I should have to tell you gravely:—No;
Not true.
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Then there's no God!
Mammon.
That follows, sure
As light at break of day.
Guendolen.
No God, no soul:
That follows too?
Mammon.
A sequence absolute!
Guendolen.
No Heaven, no Hell, and no hereafter?
Mammon.
None.
Guendolen.
But I believe in God and Heaven and Hell.
Mammon.
Not from to-night.
Guendolen.
What is there, then, if God
Is not?
Mammon.
That which we are.
Guendolen.
And what is that?
Mammon.
The Universe.
Guendolen.
Am I the Universe?
Mammon.
You and the beasts, and everything that is,
In every organ, function, grain and drop,
In every quivering ion, Universe.
This is the thing the world is waiting for,
This that I tell you.
Guendolen.
But to be a beast!
Mammon.
To be a beast?—it is to be a star!
Nothing is bestial, nothing mean or base;
For all is Universe, an infinite
Ethereal way and being of myriad-minded
Matter: substance and soul, all matter, wanton
As lightning, chaste as light, diverse as sin.
Guendolen.
Blackness of darkness, Mammon; that is all
You show me.
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Yes, because your Heaven, your Hell,
That lit a paltry space above, below,
Are now extinct, like feeble rushlights burnt
To nothing; and your quaint divinity,
Your botched atonement—clumsy, bloody work!—
Returned to their discarnate emptiness,
Wherein with it they perish. Gas was nobler
Than smoky dips and filthy rags in oil;
[Switches on all the remaining lights and the room is dazzlingly bright.]
But lo, the lightning!—matter bisexual
(Whence we, and all the elements whereof
We are, proceed) wired in our subtle snare,
Like some wild, wandering, shy hermaphrodite,
And taught to serve us bravely! Thus and thus,
Of Other World, of God, of Heaven and Hell,
I couch your eyes as of a cataract—
These crystal windows of the Universe.
From spirit, myth and immaterial dream
I bid all things be free; and at my word—
Watch, Guendolen!—like leprosy, the soul
With all its noisome blotches, ulcers, blains
Of evil conscience, penances, remorse,
Contrition, sloughs and crumbles into nought,
Leaving the proud sweet body, clean and pure,
The wholesome earth, the sun, the Universe,
Infinite loveliness, ethereal power.
Guendolen.
Oh, Mammon, what is love?
Mammon.
You love me, then?
Guendolen.
I love you, Mammon: all my soul has flown
As thrice before it fled—I know not where.
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To fill the void up of its secret place,
So deep a gulf of happiness remains.
My body says, “I will, I will, I will,”
Though endless Hell thereafter be the price.—
Not yet!—Oh, love, you must not take me yet!
Wait!—wait!—and tell me what it is we do!
Beautiful, holy somehow, it must be?
Mammon.
Most holy in itself, most beautiful!
Oh, love, we do as orbs that couple do,
By chance conjoined beneath eternal night,
Encountering swiftly from oppugnant poles
In some unconstellated tract of Heaven,
Some bridal precinct of ethereal space!
They smite against each other setting fire
To every vapour, metal, earth whereof
They are compounded; and their bodies fuse
Together into one ecstatic thought,
A new light in the firmament to be
A flower of glory and a well of stars.
Guendolen.
Oh, love! Oh, love! And since the coupled stars
Rejoice together, every living thing,
Much more than they, must share our ecstasy.
The beasts and birds—all sweet and pure as light!
Oh, how I love them in their happiness!
This is a great thing:—to believe that beasts
Are sweet and pure and happy just like us.
Mammon.
One half the breeding world is joyful now
Begetting and conceiving.
Guendolen.
I think of it!
Since psychic wedding may not, cannot be,
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Myriads of happy women, millions of them
In every country canopied by night,
Are yielding up their wombs in ecstasy
To be made mothers. Oh, the earth itself
Must feel the greatness and the joy of that!
Mammon.
With every heart-beat, every pulse of time,
Myriads of coupled orbs together melt,
Evolving light where pristine darkness reigned,
In spatial wildernesses far outflung
Beyond the farthest, filmy nebula;
And countless orders, throngs and drifts of being
In every clime and quarter of the earth,
In forests, jungles, hedgerows, heaths, ravines,
Morasses, mountains, rivers, oceans, lakes,
In huts and houses, inns and palaces,
In caves and camps, in tenements and slums,
Flowers, trees, beasts, birds and things invisible,
Fishes and grasses, mosses, worms and men,
Endure the passion and enjoy the lust
Of ripened seed that cannot but be sown,
Of love, of life that swells and buds and breaks,
And will be love and life and sex and sin,
Adorable, lascivious, sacrosanct,
For ever and for ever and for ever.
Guendolen.
Yes!—yes!—love, tell me—closer; in my ear:—
My dream was to conceive the Son of Man,
To be once more the mother of the Lord.
What will I bear now, Mammon? Antichrist?
Mammon.
Nor Christ, nor Antichrist, divinest maid:
Greater than either shall our children be;
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(We two, the first of women, the first of men,
To be self-consciously, what every pair,
Insect or mammoth—or field or forest—are
Unwittingly, the procreant Universe):
That which we make together is the whole
Illimitable Universe itself.
Nothing is greater anywhere than us:
We form the matter of the furthest star,
The matter of the earth, the sea, the sky:
We are the pregnant lightning and the light;
The vapours, metals, dusts that lightning bears:—
Lightning—the lightning, blood, ethereal seed,
The poles, the blossom of the Universe,
Sheer being, unembodied sex and womb;
And light, the rainbow soul of matter, pure
As rapt virginity, elaborate
As love that strains the essences of life;
We are the subtile ether, unperceived,
Omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent,
Eternal, formless, labyrinthine space
Wherein the suns are stelled, whereof they are.
Guendolen.
I know it now, I feel it in my heart—
The Universe is love, is ecstasy.
Mammon.
That's the great passion and the swoon of it,
This supersensual, writhing, drunken joy.
Rich galaxies of soul leap from my veins
To hide their fires in the sweet heaven of you.
| God and Mammon | |