University of Virginia Library

SCENE III.

NOEMA.
Welcome, my spouse and lord!

ARAN.
Is the meal drest?

NOEMA.
It is, and waits within.

ARAN.
Then let us to't at once. I crave for food,
And drink, and rest, and truce to weariness.

NOEMA.
My lord is spent with toil.

ARAN.
Who would not be?
But there be toils shall have an end, and mar
The stern Taskmaster's trade for whom we slave,
Son after sire, age after age, unpaid
Save with the pittance of life's menial wage.
No longer will we bear the daily dole
Of food and sleep, ending in famished death.
If there be God or Gods, Gods will we be,
Not slowly-dying drudges. Soon the Tower
Will mount in surging spirals to the sky,
And from its tall intrepid battlements
Will we storm Heaven, its tyranny dislodge,
Or with it strike a compact that shall yield
Its secrets to our knowledge, and secure
Wealth without sweat, and life unplagued by death.
Ay, we have done a good day's work this day,
Though none have paid us for it.

NOEMA.
Oh, my lord!
Thy words wing shafts of terror to my heart.
Hear me a moment, even though I be
But a weak woman, and thy subject wife.
Assailing Heaven, thou dost but build for Hell,
And the foundations of your Tower will sink
Where Lucifer and all his rebels lie,
Further from hope than worst mortality.

ARAN.
Then let us sink, if sink in sooth we must,
But not till after exercise of strength
That shall torment His anger, and at least
Ruffle the surface of His proud neglect:
Not die, like camels, silent, 'neath the load
We to the journey's end submissive bore,
Because our hearts were steeped in sufferance.
'Tis something to be whelmed in endless Hell,
And nourish hate, not Hell itself can quench;
No, nor yet Heaven! But still to be a thing
To moil and die 'neath Heaven's indifference—
This is a doom weak women well may bear.
We were no longer men, did we endure it!

NOEMA.
And yet it is a doom which, Aran, thou,
And thine, and all mankind must bear. Dost think
That to suit mortal passion Heaven will make
Mortals immortal, even for woe and wrath?
Spirits have immortality of joy,
And demons immortality of pain.
But we, a lesser and a lower race,
An adumbration of the two and set
Betwixt the upper and the nether world,
In this frail compound even mixtures own
Of joy that passes and of pain that dies.
This is man's lot: nothing will alter it.

ARAN.
Nothing can leave it worse. So will we strive
To make it better. For we can but die,
Or still live baffled, as we are baffled now.
And what is it we ask? Pale dreamers may
Demand the eternal secrets: I, for one,
Claim food, and drink, and raiment, and the joys
Which come of fulness, ease, and certainty;
A life of even pleasure, edged with death,
When these can please no more. 'Tis all I seek.

NOEMA.
That were a sordid craving. Is't for these
Thou dost arraign the Lord Omnipotent,—
That, having made thee man, He did not make
Thee wholly beastlike? Oh, sir! pardon me
If I do fail in duty! But thine aims,
Thus carnally contained, revolt me more
Than if thou blasphemously shouldst aspire
To be nor beast nor man, but very God!

ARAN.
Ay, ay, I pardon thee: I pity rather.
These are the morbid phantasies which find
An empty chamber in thy woman's brain,
And therein scamper idly. . . . Carnal aims!
Be very God! Who builds a Tower, now?
Thou hast the same disease as we in sooth,
But, us unlike, know'st not its name nor cure.
Fine words are women's drapery for facts.
We call it misery; ye call it woe.
We curse our wrongs and pain, whilst ye drop tears,
Bootless as dew, over the canker, grief.

NOEMA.
Nay, call not grief a canker! Canker kills,
But grief doth make us cruelly alive,
And our most torpid pulses sensitive;
Doubles the day by banishing the night,
And chokes us with each mouthful; whilst Time sits,
Droning his weary minutes in our ears,
Till every second seemeth infinite,
Ay, longer than whole centuries of joy.
If grief would murder, 'twere no longer grief;
But he prefers to torture, and to keep
His victim still alive, and quivering;
And, with him paragoned, why canker is
An angel of compassion! Yet against grief
What boots it to rebel? It is the shadow
Which still accompanies our sun of joy;
And when the shadow blots out all the shine,
I fall not unto railing, but, forlorn,
I steep my soul in silence, and I pray.

ARAN.
Pray! I am weary of the word. Why pray,
When ne'er an answer cometh to our prayers?
Have we not prayed, we, and our sires, and, back,
Their sires, for lives on miserable lives,
Burning the flesh of goats, the fat of kine,
Ay, sacrificing yeanlings when their dams
Were smit with barrenness; yielding our last
In the vain hope still to propitiate
The Power that took our first? I am sick of prayer!
When did prayer keep the murrain from our herds,
Or once avert the vultures? Have our flocks
More teeming wombs, thicker or softer fleece?
Or doth the sprouting soil no longer crack
For lack of moisture, stubbornly denied,
That in untimely torrents it may swoop
On the slow-ripening grain, and beat it flat?
These are the fruits of prayer! We pray, whilst He
Hideth aloft in churlish majesty,
Rolling His wanton thunder o'er our heads,
And splitting with His lightning, flashed for sport,
The trunk that gave us shelter. No! the hour
For prayer is past; the hour for deeds is here,
Whose stroke shall render prayer superfluous!

NOEMA.
Alas! thou dost not heed me. But one boon,
One last, one only boon, I yet would urge.
Oh! leave at least to piety and me
The tender, dark-eyed darling of my womb.
Leave me my Irad! Him thou canst not need,
Nor the promote thy direful strategy.
He is so young, so helpless, and so dear.
How couldst thou bare to ears thus innocent
That bold immodest purpose? Think, sir, think,
Though 'twas the seed of thy rebellious loins,
'Twas my long-suffering womb that fostered him;
Sheltered his yet sheathed senses from all hurt,
And fed him with the rain of my life's blood.
Who was it communed with him, while as yet
His life was dim and shapeless as a dream?
Who opened to the light his pretty cheeks,
And kissed his eyelids into consciousness?
Taught him thy name? moulded his little lips
Into a filial welcome? Who but I?
And when enlarging thought could apprehend
The august sense of father, I it was
Who did project thine image into Heaven,
And told him of another Father there.
Oh! how wouldst thou be patient if one came
'Twixt thee and him, and spurred him to rebel
Against thy sceptre and authority?
Nay, make him not a rebel,—for my sake,
If not for thine! I bore, I suckled him,
Tended and shaped. Oh, he is very me!
I have lain nights awake to give him sleep;
And better hadst thou wrenched him from my breast,
And ta'en the nipple with it, than that now
Thou shouldst him tear from Heaven and my poor heart!

ARAN.
Well, be it as thou wilt. He is a child,
And thou a woman: ye are fairly yoked.
And both will reap the harvest of our act,
Who would not sow the seed. Now, to our meal.

NOEMA.
Hadst thou come timelier to-night, we might
Have entertained an unaccustomed guest.
A Spirit from I know not where, but clad
In garb of airy beauty, settled here,
Just after sunset.

ARAN.
Spake he of the Tower?

NOEMA.
No syllable. But he discoursed so sweetly
Of Earth, and stars, and all that moves between,—
I would that thou hadst heard him.

ARAN.
Not so I:
I have no stomach for such windy food.
I feared perchance he hither came to balk,
Celestial marplot, our terrestrial plans,
Sent by the Arch-designer of our doom.
But if he only fooled thee with fresh dreams,
Foibles, and follies of thy female breast,
It touches me but little; and I yield
Monopoly of such a guest to thee,
Who art a fitting hostess. Food, now, food!

[Aran ]goes in. Noema lingers awhile without.
NOEMA.
(sol.)
Because I am a woman! Is it then
So small a thing? Just large enough for man
To see and step aside from, lest he crush!
Yet what can crush worse than indifference,
Or that misplaced compassion which denies
All common kinship? Yon superior Spirit
Disowned me not, but wished that he were man,
Because I am a woman. That was a note
Showed him attuned to heavenly harmony.
Oh! with what nectared yet decorous words
Did he extol me,—almost as though he loved!
Yet 'twas not love which made that Spirit deem
My plain defects perfection, but, perchance,
That spiritual insight which perceives
Imperfect nought, leaving to lower man
To find things faulty through his faultiness.
This very Earth which we so oft reproach,
He lauded likewise, though his tenderest tones,
I own, were kept for me. Yet, yet, 'tis sure
It was not love. 'Twere as impossible
Spirit should be enamoured of the flesh,
As that forked bolts should flash from stormful waves,
Or the fresh clouds pelt briny torrents down.
And it may be that Spirits are seduced
By the false tricks of specious novelty,
Like creatures of a weaker source and end,
And in the glamour of some newer world,
He will forget me, and will come no more.
That were a loss indeed to leave life blank,
And make to-morrow dead as yesterday.
Oh! he will come. He said he would; and I
Bade not adieu, but welcome, when he went.
To want a Spirit, surely were not sin!
Can it be wrong to love—wings and a voice?
And were I with him now, what could befall,
Or fare between us there, to derogate
From carnal homage still exacted here,
And given, if all unwillingly? Ay, there it is!
True love makes false love loathing, and one hour
Of spiritual intercourse bequeathes
A life of shrinking from terrestrial lips.
And I must sleep in Aran's arms to-night!
Oh, horrible!

[She goes in.