University of Virginia Library

ACT V

Scene I:

—A morning room in the Royal Palace, Christianstadt. It is lit with electric light and a fire burns in the grate. Through the open window a faint glow preceding the dawn is visible in the sky. Oswald and Florimond, who carries a portfolio, stand at the fire, regarding each other moodily, while servants set breakfast.
Mammon
[entering quickly].
Good morning, Oswald. Good morning, Florimond.
[Sits down to breakfast.
Oswald, you've thought of that?

Oswald.
Of what, King Mammon?

Mammon.
Your dukedom, man! What else should you remember?
Your dukedom, and your friends who shall become
Your generals and mine:—have you arranged
Their order?

Prounice enters, and the servants and she set Guendolen's breakfast upon a salver.
Mammon.
The Queen will breakfast in her room.
That's not enough: food's the great fount of passion.
[Places various dishes on the salver.
Say to the Queen by the nine stars of love
To think of me with every bite she eats.

Prounice goes out with the salver; and the servants also leave the room.
Mammon.
How many generals, Oswald?

Oswald.
Only two
Are fit for high command of last night's guard.

Mammon.
The others shall be captains. Their titles, Oswald?
Earls? Viscounts?

Florimond.
Such advancement suddenly
Announced, and of so many names unknown
To the world, would rouse intense suspicion, King.

Mammon.
Suspicion, Florimond! What should folk suspect?

Florimond.
Imaginary things: the public dreams,
The press expounds its dream, and ere we know
A fate is fashioned.

Mammon.
While I live and rule
The public will have little time to dream;
For every day a new deed shall be done,
Beyond the reach of public dreams or private.

Florimond.
These are untested men, King Mammon—soldiers
On approval. Your father's veterans, war-worn
To an edge and lustre, keen as frosty light,
(Pardon an old man's eulogy of age)
Were worthier of promotion.

Mammon.
Loyal worth
Shall not be overlooked in any service;
But, bringing something new into the world,
I must have youth to shape to my design.
I trust myself, my fortune, and my fate:
Oswald and I were friends; his comrades, too,
Were mine: therefore they cannot be unfit.
It is the constant luck of greatest men
To have at hand their proper implements;
In everything the universal will
Deflects the world to their meridian.—
Oswald, you shall be Duke of Christianstadt.

Oswald.
Most loyally I thank you, gracious King;
And being gracious, grant me one request;—
Let me remove the bodies to the chapel.

Mammon.
Why, Oswald?

Oswald.
Rumour in the city rings
Insane alarms already, and turbulent priests,
Instructed by the Abbot, urge the people
Against the murderers.

Mammon.
Murderers! Who's been murdered?

Oswald.
Those that lie dead in Olaf's Hall, they say.

Mammon.
And you would hide the bodies! Set them high
Upon the platform that the world may see.
I'll hear no question. Do it; do it now.

Oswald goes out.
Mammon
[continuing his breakfast].
Well, Florimond; you want me?

Florimond
[opening his portfolio].
I have here
Requests for audience of Prince Mammon: all
Our sects and parties build themselves on you;
And delegates who sought you yesterday,
Moved by your zealous summons for the dawn,
Are in attendance now, to see the King.

Mammon.
So; this may help. Who are they, Florimond?

Florimond
[reading from a paper].
“The Will-to-Power Men of the Nietzsche Guild.”

Mammon.
Ah! that insane belov'd philosopher!
Some say he is the spirit of the age.
What think you, Florimond?

Florimond.
I cannot tell:
My mind was set before his boom began.

Mammon.
He posed as Zoroaster, and led us back
To Dionysos: not our mark at all;
The past is past. And, for his prophecy?—
Why, Florimond, this Nietzsche was a Christian;
And that transvaluation of all values
Was neither more nor less than transmutation
Of transubstantiation:—grin, but grasp it:—
His Antichrist is Christ, whose body and blood
And doctrine of miraculous rebirth,
Became the Overman: Back-of-beyond,
Or—what's the phrase?—Outside good-and-evil:
That's his millennium, and we'll none of it.
I want the world to be much more the world;
Men to be men; and women, women—all
Adventure, courage, instinct, passion, power.—
Who next?

Florimond
[reading from a paper].
“Staff-captain Hakonsson.”

Mammon.
Salvation Army!
The old saint-soldier of the Isles I know,
Nietzsche the brave I know—world-people both,
And wonderful; but not their followers.

Florimond
[exhibiting several papers].
Pressmen.

Mammon.
Give them the King's regards, and bid them note
My speech to-day in every syllable.

Florimond.
[turning over a sheaf of papers].
Denominations, guildries, unions, clubs.

Mammon.
Let them have places in the hall.

Florimond
[handing Mammon a paper].


Mammon.
What's this?
[Reading.]
“A Root-and-branch Reformer from the Isles:”—
I'll see him, Florimond, and his company:
The Queen's compatriot.—None of all the rest.

Florimond
[handing Mammon a paper].
The Mayor of Christianstadt, and citizens
Conjoined with him, desire—

Mammon.
Admit them now.
What!—more?

Florimond
[handing Mammon a paper].
Strange men have come this morning, clad
In ancient armour: from the western coast
They hail: they worship Woden and profess
A Neo-paganism.

Mammon.
I'll see them, too.
The Mayor; this Island Revolutionist;
The Neo-pagans; and in that order. These
Are their papers? Very well. I'll broach
The heart and soul of Thule, and pick its brains,
That I may shape my speech to Thule's need:
These chosen three will sample everything.

Florimond goes out.
Mammon
[having finished breakfast leaves the table and stands at the fire.]
Napoleon lost his head in the Orangery—
Bewildered in the labyrinth of fate:
His brother saved him: I ... I have no brother.
Christ, when he might have driven his message straight
To the heart of Rome, stood silent, in a stupor,
Stunned like the prophet's sheep before the shearers:
Soul of the Universe, what a chance he missed!
Cæsar himself, thrice proven, wise as time,
Flung all away, declining royal honour,
In whose effulgence traitors and treachery,
Like darkness and the shadows of the night,
Disperse and cease to be: he lost the world
Through fear to lose it: had he crowned himself,
Conspiracy could scarce have breathed an hour
In presence of the courage and the deep
Resource betokened in the lofty act;
Or if the Ides of March had seen the end,
He then had done the thing for which he died.
Am I like these men? Will the human clot,
That palsies genius in the nick of time,
Upon the turning point of destiny
Occlude my brain, and stand me swooning there,
A monument of dumb distress before
The bodies of my father and my brother?

Florimond re-enters with Ole Larum, Tamberskelver, Vibbe, and the other Inceptors of the Teutonic Religion.
Mammon.
Thrice welcome, Master Mayor.—Now let me see:
[Sits and consults the Mayor's petition.
“Inceptors of a new religion”:—come!
Your businesses, municipal affairs,
Your families, prospects, pleasures, sickness, health—
Are not these all you need?

Larum.
Oh, no, King Mammon!
In times and tides of happiness and woe
We must give thanks, we must solicit strength:
The soul of man subsists in prayer and praise.

Mammon.
Now, I remember: you are nonconformist,
Proud of a purer creed, a broader mind.

Larum.
Loathing a dead creed and a narrow mind.

Mammon.
All creeds must die: why have a creed at all?

Larum.
King, we must worship something. Furthermore,
Eternity in front of us extorts
The world-cry of the spirit, “whither? whither?”
We are religious, and immortal soul
Turns to a fount immortal as itself.

Mammon.
But I deny your immortality:
Immortal mayors, immortal aldermen!
Think of the being you despise the most—
Some jack-in-office, parasite or pimp:
Would you have him immortal?—except in Hell:
You see!—But you are earnest men: expound
This new religion briefly.

Larum.
Tamberskelver,
Our Head-inceptor, is our spokesman.

Mammon.
Speak,
Head-inceptor Tamberskelver.

Tamberskelver.
King Mammon,
Our confident appeal is dashed at once
If you deny man's immortality.
Our aspiration and our travail soar
Aloft, and toil towards everlasting life
For every individual soul of man.

Mammon.
And whence arose this confidence in me?

Tamberskelver.
You walked, deliberate, out of Christendom,
The first of princes to disown the past.

Mammon.
That's the whole past, man's immortality:
'Twas out of that I came.

Tamberskelver.
Have you not studied
My treatises on soul?

Mammon.
I've never seen them.

Tamberskelver.
I sent them.—And my letters? Were they not read?

Mammon.
I never had your letters.

Tamberskelver.
They went unsigned.
You would not know them mine.

Mammon.
A vagrant mass
Of anonymity from every land
Followed me round the world.—You, Master Mayor,
Speak you. Your Tamberskelver misses fire.

Larum.
But all I know I learnt from Tamberskelver.

Mammon.
That matters nothing: a foolish husbandman
May sow a fertile plot; a bird, a wind
Impregnate homely soil with brilliant flowers.
Come, Master Mayor.

Larum.
My statement will be crude.

Mammon.
The better! I love all crudeness: truth is crude.

Larum.
It's difficult.—On both sides of the Atlantic
Teutonic folk, and in the southern seas
And lands afar, are ripe to have a god
Of their own race: pubescence of the soul—
That's our great phrase:—

Mammon.
Ah! Tamberskelver's?

Larum.
Yes.
This spiritual puberty of ours
Will sow the Universe with God: it must
Beget a God, or waste the seed of soul
In worshipping dead gods—which is a sort
Of psychic sodomy. We of the north
From age to age, since Olaf set the cross up,
Continued this unnatural vice (like all
The rest of Christendom), protesting still
Against the lusciousness of incense; art
In the church—immoral music, coloured glass;
The prurience of confession; virgin-worship,
Saints, transubstantiation, and the pomp
Whereby the wretched Latin races make
A mistress of religion: (although I change
The metaphor I keep within the sphere
Of sex, for that's illuminative in things
Religious). A decent, necessary wife
Our worship was; but now she's dead, and we,
A few determined burghers of Christianstadt,
Refuse to bake our bread in a cold oven.

Mammon.
Audacious!—What killed her, Master Mayor?

Larum.
Her womb
Prolapsed: that is to say—out of the Christian
Theory of creation the bottom fell;
And when your theory of creation goes
Your God goes.

Mammon.
Certain! I like you, Master Mayor.

Larum.
A foreign God, too, at the best, was ours—
Jehovah, one and single once, but one
And triple since, a kind of Cerberus.
We're tired of that—all that: we're tired of it.
And the long gestant Teuton vengeance, cognate
With puberty of soul that swells our thought,
Dethrones the decadent neo-Hebraism
Which Christianity is, and with its new
Cosmogony of uncreated worlds
Begins to shape a non-creating God.

Mammon.
All this intrigues me. And this God of yours?

Larum.
That's Tamberskelver's great discovery. Gods
Are racial; and as long as races are,
We cannot have a world-god. Languages
Are races: that's understood; blood's little; words
Are most when gods are canvassed or incept.

Mammon.
Incept?—Begetters of a God may risk
Neologisms.—Proceed!

Larum.
The gods of old
Evolved unconsciously in racial speech,
And are, in every cult, naive, human monsters,
Of incoherent and incongruous parts
Miraculously knit. For the first time
In the world's record, we of Christianstadt,
Unworthy but resolved inceptors, start
A God whose evolution shall be conscious:
No world-god, but a god Teutonic, foe
Of Latin races, Slavs and yellow men,
Of negroes, Hebrews, every other folk
A god whom we can worship, being ours,
And only ours. We did our best to like
The God converted negroes pray to, Celts,
Italians, Spaniards—people we despise:
But none of us could stomach it: a God
Common to all the world is too debased,
Too vulgar, too adulterous for us.
In days and nights of prayer we steeped our souls,
And blanched them clear of preconception—

Mammon.
Yes, Master Mayor. I know enough now. Gods
Are at a discount: Tamberskelver's plan
Is proof and pudding of it. A machine-made God?
A fattened god—a pâté de fois gras
For overnice religious epicures!
An end of divination! If any sign
Were wanting that the day of gods is done,
'Tis just this scheme to grow one locally
Under a forcing-frame. What the world needs
Is change: it's tired—as tired as you and I
Of all the past. But he who speaks to you
Is change incarnate, operant and crowned;
And you shall hear to-day when I address
The states the word you wait for. I approve
Your earnestness, your courage, your direct
Intelligence, authentic characters.—
Our revolutionists now.

Tamberskelver.
There must be God!
Teuton, we call him: Teuton, God of us!
Pubescent soul in every age and clime
Produces God—

Mammon.
You think so since you must.
But who would worship Tamberskelver's God?
Try and unthink that, friend.

Larum, Tamberskelver, and the other Inceptors go out.
Mammon.
My rebels now,
My worthy enemies.

Florimond.
They call themselves
Reformers. Worthy? No reform is worth
A king's applause.

Crawford, Vibbe, Jelke and the other Reformers enter.
Mammon.
He from the Isles—which is he?

Crawford.
I, King Mammon.

Mammon.
Why did you leave your country?

Crawford.
Because reform is automatic there:
Nothing can drive it on, nothing delay:
The caucuses between them grind it out;
Upper or nether stone alternately,
According as the surly islanders
Abuse their power and change the thing at will.
In Thule we expect catastrophe.

Mammon.
And you're the man for that?

Crawford.
For action, King.

Mammon.
What do you want?

Crawford.
In our memorial, all
Is well set out.

Mammon.
I haven't read it yet;
Nor shall I.—Speak: what do you want, you five?

Crawford.
We want the Revolution.

Mammon.
State it, then.
An end of kings, of course. And afterwards?

Crawford.
More than an end of kings. We want an end
Of lordship, titles, all gentility;
We want an end of punishment, of crime;
We want an end of service and respect;
Of property and poverty; of war—

Mammon.
Yes, yes; an end of everything: I know;
For when the king goes all goes at the last.
What do you want begun?

Crawford.
We want the world
Begun anew.

Mammon.
And so do I, and so
Does every man. Having the world in hand,
What follows?

Crawford.
Comfort follows first of all:
Food, shelter, clothes for every being born,
Insane or criminal, unfit or fit,
Idle or diligent—a corporate duty
That undertakes responsibility
In all relations: happiness itself,
For every human being as he is.

Mammon.
What right have rascals to be happy?

Crawford.
Right
And wrong are nothing: there they are, alive—
Desirous, envious, hungry, lustful men—
By no choice of their own.

Mammon.
That I deny,
For men beget themselves; they are the passion
Of their parentage.—Well, after happiness
For every blessed body, what ensues?

Crawford.
The breeding of a higher type of man.

Mammon.
By what device?

Crawford.
Unnatural selection:
I mean to say, by mating men and women
As horses are and cattle, poultry, dogs,
Instead of that old natural selection
By passionate love. Then, sterilizing fools,
Degenerates, weaklings, all who should not breed.

Mammon.
And what of happiness?

Crawford.
Oh, folk may pair
And have the satisfaction of their senses
In barren beds by means well known to all!

Mammon.
Most loathsome! What a hideous tyranny
Your world would be!—Why have you come to me?

Crawford.
We thought you were an anarch.

Mammon.
An anarch? I?
The stark unchristened foe of anarchy!

Jelke.
I take you for an evolutionist.
In our memorial you will find it said,
“The Christian times being past, there now begins
The new Darwinian era.” We desire—

Mammon.
'Tis I shall give a title to the age.
An evolutionist? No more than he
Who makes religion serve him in the world
May be pronounced a saint. This evolution,
The errantry of nature, is known, is caught:
Soon, tamed, apprenticed, disciplined and drilled,
'Twill be our most obedient minister.

Vibbe.
But has our King no passion for the poor;
No settled mind to dower disabled age;
To ease the burden on the back of labour
That every decade doubles; to provide
An equal chance for every man; to draw
The poison-fangs of bloated capital,
That python gorged with proletary prey?

Mammon.
That python gorged with proletary prey!
Park-eloquence, good friend. The world of men
Is as an organism:—a python?—true;
It sheds an annual slough of idlers, sots,
Incompetents, degenerates, criminals;
Or since the tissue of the macrocosm
You call society is knit of men,
As men are knit of divers plasmic cells,
I take the failures for the excrement,
The defecation of the commonwealth.
In antique times such human garbage strewed
With other ordure populous streets, but now,
Express as drainage in our more alert,
More wholesome, more elaborate period, hides
Our household refuse out of sight and mind,
The hospital, asylum, poorhouse, jail,
Sewers and cesspools of the social world,
Relieve our towns of waste humanity,
And keep the urban air as fresh as fresh.

Crawford.
But there must be no waste humanity!

Mammon.
No life then; only constipated death,
A world by its own feculence undone.

Crawford.
Are we the feculence—

Mammon.
Dispose of waste
Becomingly—ever more decently
As knowledge grows; but have it out, and hence.

Crawford.
Are we the feculence of the world, Sir King?

Mammon.
You dabble in it. A traveller of the Isles,
Your famous Gulliver, in Laputa found
A yellow-faced projector up to the eyes
In merd, pursuing the most ancient study
Of all Laputan science, how to reduce
The excrement of men to food again:
A symbol of your socialists, who smear
The proud and wealthy world with nastiness,
Still fumbling at the emunctories of the state
(I mean its economic processes)
And churning up the stuff of the latrines
(The broken men, the skilless and unskilled,
The unemployed, the unemployable)
In quest of menstruums to decoct from dung
The sweetness of the rose, spindles to twist
A silken fibre from putrescence, art
And a cunning culture, a magic spell
To rear in filth the unsown staff of life,
To raise the dead and make perdition pay.

Crawford.
You slander men, King Mammon; the rich, the poor,
The wise, the foolish, all are equal.

Mammon.
Yes?
All men are equal. ... You were going to say?

Crawford.
I was about to say, in the sight of God.

Mammon.
But not in yours?

Crawford.
No, not in any man's;
Therefore we say, in God's.

Mammon.
Therefore you say
In God's: that is, in Fairyland, in Heaven,
In limbo, in Utopia—anywhere
Save in this actual world of life and power!
There is no other thing to say. I love
Your honesty, and hope to make you mine;
But not as Socialists—or Isocrats
Of any breed. Isocracy: a rule
Of all for all? Impossible while men
Like Cæsar, like Napoleon, like myself,
Are born into the world.

Crawford.
But we would have
Us all Napoleon, King.

Mammon.
And if you had,
Forthwith would come a greater than Napoleon.
The world's magnificent; and plot by plot
To turn it into routine on behalf
Of weaker folk, incapable beyond
A jog-trot use-and-wont, evaporates
In presence of a monarch. Kill a whale
With pin-pricks; whistle on a lion; catch
A golden eagle in a spider's web!
This socialism is mere misanthropy
Erected to a creed; the evil smell
Of Christendom, long dead and rotten, kept
In salts and sponges to resuscitate
The hopes of hungry malice; the fishy glow
Upon the putrid carcass of religion—

Crawford.
Oh, King, oh, King, I cry red shame upon you!

Mammon.
Bold, and I need such comrades! None the less,
The children of revulsion, of revolution—
Communist, anarchist, nihilist—all these
Are wriggling maggots in the fetid corpse
Of Christendom: their sayings Jesus said—
A futile message to a beaten race
Under the heel of Rome; but not for us,
The master people of the earth—nor yet
For them, instinctive Jews that killed Him. I—
You hear that word—I, Mammon, mean to make
This mighty world a hundredfold itself.
There shall be deeper depths of poverty,
A more distressing toil, more warlike war,
An agony of spirit deadlier
Than that which drenched Gethsemane in blood;
A rapture of dominion hitherto
Unfelt by conquerors, kings or priests; a power,
A beauty and a glory of the world
Emerged from Christendom, like love's belov'd
With April from the wrinkled womb of death,
Delivered fresh to Aphrodite's arms.
The omnisolvent ether melt that image
For ever from my mind! My meaning hides
Behind the past like truth behind the veil
In Isis' temple.—I thank you, gentlemen,—
Or men, or fellow-men; you make me know
What I must say. Soon in St. Olaf's Hall
I shall announce to Thule and the world
The very secret and the soul of me.
Await me there.—Our Neo-pagans now.

Crawford, Vibbe, Jelke and the other Reformers go out.
Ribolt, Rolf and the Neo-Pagans enter, and prostrate themselves before Mammon.
Mammon.
What mummery is this? Rise; rise, I say!
No man must kneel to me. Though I am king
And absolute, the grosser adulation
Angers me.—Will you stand up, sirs! Florimond,
Are these men deaf?

Florimond.
Not deaf, but mad, I think.

Ribolt, Rolf and the others raise their heads, but remain upon their knees.
Mammon.
A powerful face! Yes; you that look so strong,
Why do you kneel? You also are a man,
Of the same matter as the stars and me.

Ribolt.
Hail, Baldur, Woden's son, and god of light.

Mammon.
Fantastic man!

Ribolt
[to Rolf and the others].
Did I not talk of this?

Rolf.
You told how Baldur would not know himself.

Ribolt.
I said it; and you see.—Unconscious God,
The fatal Norns who nightly haunt my pillow,
Command me to reveal to you your godhead,
Baldur, the winsomest, the most belov'd
Among immortals and the sons of men.
Behold the dreary twilight of the gods,
The twenty centuries of Christendom,
Expiring now, the golden age returns,
With you, our fairest god, to reign on earth
A thousand years. First of the Neo-pagans,
We kneel before you, desiring for ourselves
To be your priests, your guards, your ministers.

Mammon.
How did your sect arise among the many
That gnaw the rotten bones of Christendom?

Ribolt.
A fisherman, religious, old and wistful,
Bent on eternity far-seeing eyes
Of healthy age, and no asylum found,
No house, no harbour for a soul like his,
Salt as the sea and rough with storm and toil,
In any petty chapel-and-drawing-room
Apocalyptic Heaven of mother-church.
The saga of the north, in fragments known,
Beset his quickened mind: Hymir he loved
That splintered granite columns with his glance;
Woden and Thor, and Surtur of Muspelheim
Whose fervent sword set fire to the Universe,
When gods and giants met at Ragnarök.
But chief in fancy's aftermath there grew
A great uplifted vision of war-worn heroes
Winning Valhalla by a fiery death
When battle failed them.

Mammon.
And did he? Did he?

Ribolt.
What,
Oh, Baldur, god of light?

Mammon.
This moves me, grips
Me firmly! Did he die like the old vikings,
Upon his funeral pyre sailing the sea?

Ribolt.
He died even so.

Mammon.
When was this greatness wrought?

Ribolt.
Last night, oh sinless one!

Mammon.
So men should die!
It shall become again a shameful thing
To wait in debile age, a pap-fed dotard,
Shunning disdainful death. Men enter life
Unconscious, but the power accrues to leave it,
Hale, sane and self-possessed; therefore they should.
My pagans, you are welcomest to me
Of all my folk. I feel how you became:
Such dreams I had in boyhood. I understand
Your thought of me as Baldur, and love you well
For bringing me such beauty from the past,
Such elemental strength of the old time—
Which never yet was old, nor will be old!
But I am I, not Baldur: I am the king,
Greater than Baldur, greater than all the gods,
The first of men to be self-conscious. Man
Has come! The former cry was, or the hope,
The gods arrive, the heroes at their heels;
But I announce, at last, self-conscious man,
Greater than devil, angel, hero, god.

Ribolt
[to Rolf and the others].
Baldur, or Mammon? King or God?

Rolf.
We want
A god again!

The Others.
We want a god! a god!

Mammon.
You shall have me. Await me in the hall.
Give them a special place that I may see them.

Ribolt, Rolf and the others rise and go out, accompanied by Florimond.
Mammon.
Why did I set them out? The madness! Need
There is to be foolhardy in the things
That hap without inventing ambuscades
To trip and throttle us! I've made a morgue
Of Olaf's Hall! It seemed so great last night:—
And great it is; and I am fit for it.
If they should bleed! An ancient fallacy,
A Christian thing:—but they were Christians!—therefore
They'll bleed? Let them! And let them point at me,
And wink with sluggish lids and sightless eyes
As murdered folk were wont to do—in books!
I would be tested every way to learn
What limits shackle my material soul—
If there be limits to the power of one.
Who knows himself unhuman.—Where am I now?
What mincemeat do I make? To argue out
A question like a Christian casuist doomed
For ever to eschew instinctive deeds!
I shame myself when not the utter shame
Of being ashamed should shame me. May it be
That I'm too young, and not adjusted yet
In mood and mind to my polarity?
'Twas in his thirtieth year the Son of Man
Began to turn the water into wine—
Napoleon's age when first he challenged fate
And leapt into the saddle of the world;
Mohammed knew the gauge of forty years
Before he set himself against mankind;
And Cæsar, when he crossed the Rubicon,
Was old—an old, old man compared with me,
Who am not twenty-five. The Macedon?—
Yes, young and seminal, but sowing seed
At second-hand, a cultured person. I
Alone, since time began, bring with me news.
No mate I find among the mighty dead;
The greatest man of all the ages, youth
Commends me to my happy destiny:
No doubt perturbs me; prosperously I shall
Adjust the world's polarity to mine.

[Goes out.

Scene II:

—St. Olaf's Hall, Christianstadt. Upon a catafalque, a little lower than the platform and in front of it, the bodies of King Christian and Magnus are displayed. A continuous stream of people passes slowly before the catafalque to view the bodies. A throne stands near the centre of the platform, and on a table at hand a cushion lies with the regalia of Thule. The area of the hall is occupied by the nobles, the clergy, and the wealthy people of Thule, the galleries are filled with the representatives of the middle and working classes. The Mayor with Tamberskelver and the other Inceptors of the Teutonic Religion are seated in the area near the front. Ribolt and the Neo-Pagans, Crawford and the Reformers sit upon the steps on either side of the platform. Soldiers keep the gangways. A noise of conversation and discussion fills the hall. There are three doors: two entering upon the platform, and one into the hall.
When the scene begins Gottlieb, Anselm and several of the clergy near the centre of the area, having risen, whisper together earnestly. They then leave their places and press forward to the catafalque.
Gottlieb
[uncovering the bodies].
You see—three savage blows; and the young Prince
Hacked like a butcher's block!

A Priest.
A madman's work!

Anselm.
Some one must act, some one must warn the world,
Or ere we know these overwhelming deeds,
Interpreted by Mammon's subtle tongue,
Will clothe him with romance, and horror pass
Unnoted in a cloak of darkness woven
By magic eloquence.

A Priest.
All's so monstrous, so
Unheard-of!

Anselm.
Speak, lord Abbot!

A Priest.
Ay, and speak out!

Gottlieb.
I must;—I must;—God's proxy, I must speak.
[There is a crush about the catafalque and the gangways are blocked. People stand up on the seats; expressions of grief and horror are heard on all sides. The soldiers look at each other in perplexity, until at last one of them ascends the platform and goes out by the door on the right.
Ladies and Lords of Thule, brethren in Christ,
My people and the children of my soul,
I supplicate no favour; I demand
A patient hearing in the name of God.
I bid you all be silent while I speak:
Be seated there; and you that press to view
These murderous wounds, stand still: let every one
Lay hold upon his mind, and ponder well
The dreadful meaning of the things I say.
[The noise dies down; those who had risen resume their seats, and the pressure ceases about the catafalque.
Nothing in Thule's history or the world's,
Nor in the process of the newest states,
Exhibits any precedent or guide:
The doings of the night, our meeting here
Defy conception and astound our hearts,
As if some giant power of fabulous times,
Delivered from a sealed and sunken urn,
Had come, transcending law, to exercise
An unaccountable, remorseless will.

Mammon, attended by Florimond and other ministers and courtiers, enters at the back of the platform.
Oswald, with the officers of his staff, enters on the right.
Anselm.
Lord Abbot—

Gottlieb.
Hush! not now!

Anselm.
But look behind!

Gottlieb
[turns to Mammon].
O monster, come to gloat upon your work!
[To the audience.]
This is that will, that soulless, godless thing,
Let loose in Thule to raven and destroy!

[Shouts, cries and groans break from the overwrought audience.
Mammon
[whispering with Oswald].
You fall in my regard.

Oswald.
What have I done?

Mammon.
Why are the bodies placed beneath? I said,
Upon the platform.

Oswald.
I thought—

Mammon.
You never thought!
Humanity, the nightmare of the bold,
Plebeian pathos, overrode your mind.
Beside the throne the bodies should have lain:
So did I see this scene; so order it.

Oswald.
I feared for you: by many treacherous signs
Murder itself betrays the murderer.
His bosom bled—the Prince's bosom bled.

Mammon.
At your approach?

Oswald.
I helped the mutes to dress
The bodies:—twenty things at once were doing;
I saw to all:—these in their stereoed craft
Would ne'er be done: I urged them; lent a hand;
And at my touch ('twas half to prove my courage)
His wounds, they seemed to mutter, and his paps
Were seethed in blood.

Mammon.
The motion of the dressing:
This fable bleeds to death; your hand was guiltless.

Oswald.
But I consented in the Prince's—

Mammon.
You!
Consented! Pious bridles, bits and curbs
Wherewith your mystagogues and psychopomps
Lead people by the nose: the soul's the nose,
(So; you can laugh!) a thing that dullards follow.

Oswald.
What must I do?

Mammon.
My will! We work by force:
Too swift, too violent you cannot be;
Nor too successful: make the means suffice.

Oswald.
Must I remove the bodies, their wounds exposed?

Mammon.
No; let them be. But build our triumph sure.
You are new to power: use it and learn that men
Who do and never doubt accomplish all
They undertake. I'll hold the hall here. Fill
The square with arms and guard the doors, the ways.
Remember our achievement: we uplift
The christened world from out that sepulchre
Where for two thousand years, inhumed alive,
Shrouded it lay, tormented and tormenting.—
Send me a message when the guards are set,
The hall surrounded, and a squadron flung
Within the lofty bezel of the square—
The signet of my heart, the arms of Thule,
To print my crimson seal upon the age.

Oswald, with the officers of his staff, goes out.
Mammon
[raises his hand, and the hall becomes quiet].
Lord Abbot, make an end of your discourse.

[Sits upon the throne.
Gottlieb.
God give me inspiration, give me power!
Murder:—murder:—murder! My voice is theirs,
King Christian's and his son's. Late in the night,
A mournful cry arose, “King Christian's dead!”
So gentle with his people, so august
Before the world, so great against his foes,
So humble in the presence of his God,
Our good Christian dead! It smote our hearts
As if they had been worn upon our sleeves,
And struck at ruthlessly by passers-by.
Next came a loathsome voice, a mumbling tongue,
That whispered in the dark, “He killed himself.”
I say, a lie, gigantic as the crime
That laid King Christian low—the triple crime,
For thrice the murderer drove determined death
Deep in his father's heart.

Ribolt
[to Rolf].
Superb! A god!
All gods are parricides—the Christian God
Excepted, he who killed his son instead.

Gottlieb.
No man could deal himself three deadly wounds:
There sits the thing that took King Christian's life.—
Stifle your groans, and let your leaping hearts
Grow great with agony till all is known:
Then rend these walls with outcry, blast his soul
Who thought himself immune, but trembles now
Dazzled and dumb with fear.

Mammon.
I tremble not.
I marvel at the noxious fantasies
Malignant piety can forge so well.
Proceed, Lord Abbot.

Gottlieb.
You shall be broken yet;
Passed underneath the harrow of your deeds,
And in reverberant flames of conscious guilt
A seven times heated penance suffer long.
People of Thule, watch him while I speak;
Fix on him potent looks, and set your hearts
To bend his stubborn will and break his pride.—
This other mangled corpse:—the noblest Prince
That ever heired a crown, his bosom trenched
And furrowed like a carrion clawed by beasts;
His innocent life dug out with eager blades,
That fought each other in his heart to win
The horrible distinction of his death:—
What was the cry of this? “An accident:
He fell upon some swords.” Where were the swords?
Do clusters grow of naked scimitars
On palace-floors from rugs and carpets sprung?
Will ghostly weapons, firmly clamped in air,
Upon some astral swivel turn about
Their tempered points for men to crash against?
No, by the furnace and the anvil, no!
The swords Prince Magnus stumbled on were held
In hands suborned by him that sits behind me,
Pallid and terrible and terrified,
The murderer of his father and his brother.
But speech is wasted: time it is to act.
More treacherous than murder, on our hands—

Mammon.
I gave you leave to speak, but not to act.
I wish to talk now.

Gottlieb.
I have not finished yet.

Mammon.
Get to your place, lord Abbot.

Larum.
Obey the King!

Gottlieb.
Give him no hearing! From the jaws of Hell
Expect the scent of roses, hope for songs
From cannon-mouths, and wine on icebergs grown,
Rather than truth from him! You sit there silent,
His hideous handiwork beholding! Up,
And tear him limb-meal! This is he who says
God is not, he who would destroy the law.
If deeds are wanting now, he with his army,
His puissant person and his kingly power
Will set up irreligion, and decree
The righteousness of sin. At such a crisis
We cannot choose the means. In God's great name
Come after me!

Larum.
Down with the Abbot! down!

Crawford.
The enemy of men!

Ribolt.
And of the gods!
Seize him and silence him!

Larum.
Stand by the King.

Gottlieb, attempting with Anselm and several of the clergy to ascend the platform, is intercepted by Ribolt and Crawford with their followers. Many in the audience seem prepared for action, but the majority are overcome with amazement. Florimond and those on the platform are too perplexed to do or say anything.
Mammon.
Trusty reformers, splendid pagans, hold
The rabid priest!

Gottlieb.
While I have voice and breath
I shall cry out against this godless man!

Ribolt and Crawford silence Gottlieb.
Mammon.
His senile frenzy incommodes our meeting.
Remove him quickly and keep him under guard.

Ribolt and Crawford hand Gottlieb to several soldiers, who take him out.
Larum.
I hope I speak for all assembled here.
We disbelieve the Abbot's accusation:
That catafalque confutes it. Who would hang
The corpses of his victims round his neck,
A felon's trophies, and confront a crowd
By choice and uncompelled? No man—nor king.

Mammon.
I thank you, Master Mayor.—I choose my people
For friend and confidant from this time forth.
The world begins to-day, and what has been
Shall be no longer:—theist nor atheist,
Christian nor antichristian, sinner nor saint;
But men and women—they shall be, at last.
I speak to men and women. I hear your hearts
In generous bosoms thunder, overcharged
With swelling sympathy and molten ire
In this tempestuous time of tragic deeds;
I see the rapid lightning in your minds
Illumine changeful vision, motive, cause,
Gilding with wonder these unknown events:
And not one heart that beats, one brain that thinks
In concord with humanity, believes
The frantic charge against me. If suspicion
Survives in any vacillating mind,
Then let the scrupulous doubter state his doubt,
Inviolably privileged to speak
Against his King for this one time and end.

A Lady.
That man is innocent!

Ribolt.
I doubt—I, Ribolt!
And my doubt is this:—Who on the stepping-stones
Of these dead men ascends the height of power?
Not I; not he; but you, the murderer. Tell
The truth.

Many Voices.
The truth! the truth! We want the truth!

Ribolt.
We want the truth! Reluctant to be God,
This is no man, but Baldur come again.
The gods supreme have often killed their sires.
Baldur, the son of Woden, reincarnate,
Murders his father in the flesh. While he,
King Christian, typifies the Christian God,
Prince Magnus stands for Christ: Father and Son
O'erthrown together by the pagan power
Returned to earth once more! A myth begun!
Confess your godhead, King!

Mammon.
If I had killed
The King, my father, and my brother Magnus,
Would I declare it, think you? The hearts of men
Are fitter to condone a parricide
Than mine to be the author of a deed
The world could never sanction.

Ribolt.
But we do!
We sanction; we condone!

Mammon.
Silence, good pagan.—
My father slew himself. Something is guessed
By all of you concerning my belief.
I ventured out of Christendom—for which,
My enemy, the Church, contrived my downfall;
And when I boarded Thule yesterday
To stop the marriage of my own betrothed
(Compelled to falsehood in the name of Christ!)
My father, wholly mad—it must be said!—
(Some eating lesion of the intellect
Or carnal perturbation) goaded on
By the remorseless Abbot, undertook
To kill me at the altar where I hung
Tied like a carcass to the crucifix.
I, being about to die, as I believed,
Began to utter in a trance the things
I mean to tell you. With spontaneous power,
Instinctive in the ecstasy of death,
I broke the fateful burden of my mind,
And so essentially revealed its thought,
That like a cloud between him and the sun
The phantom world of spirit passed away.
My father's madness, mounting in his brain,
Like heavy vapours of the vaulted earth
Instilled of old in chosen oracles,
Upon the sudden sight of the Universe
(All that immensity of power and beauty)
Transported him entirely: he cut my cords,
Imploring pardon; with convulsive strength
That madness gives the weakest, stabbed himself
Thrice in the breast before my torpid limbs,
Inured to bonds, could sense their liberty,
And, banning God and Christ and Christendom
With maniac curses, at my feet fell dead.

Ribolt.
Truth evident! How could a likelihood
Pass for a moment in the Abbot's lie!
King Christian's suicide, like some predicted
Planet, appears at last to fill the mythic
Order: we had a god who slew his father;
The Church adores a God who slew his Son;
And now we have a god who slays himself!

Mammon.
Forbear these heathen fancies, and be still.

Ribolt.
The legend creams, fermenting in the tun:
Fancy's a brewer, and a ripened head
Rises upon the malt.

Mammon.
No legend this:
Alas, I would it were! My brother, Magnus,
Loving and loved, for we were friends as well,
Snared in the mesh of this conspiracy,
Was last night married, against his choice and hers,
To my betrothed, the Princess of the Isles.
The Abbot's doing; yet, my father's will
Went with it; and I cannot, dare not doubt,
When the stained windows and the censer smoke
Hiding the Universe were burst and blown
By my apocalypse, that the despair,
In which he seized so validly on death,
Became then only irresistible
As the recoil of ours, whom he had doomed
By holy rites to most unholy lives,
Enringed his conscience with a burning lash.
Had he but known!—Impulsively I sought
The room where Magnus and the Princess lodged.
There went along with me the royal guard;
For corridors should ne'er be unpatrolled
At midnight in a hostile, treacherous court,
Where scarcely sons escape their father's knives.
Finding the door unlocked I entered: there,
Still unatoned, the bride and bridegroom stood,
Lamenting the decree that made them one.
My brother, most averse though winning victim
In the state-lottery of this base cabal,
O'erwhelmed with shame and horror to be caught
By the imagined loser banking the proceeds,
(Which yet he feared to put to usury)
Rushed headlong from the room, and spilt his life
Against the ready swords the sentinels
Held in the half-light for my enemies.
Thus died these two to my eternal grief;
And thus am I your King in weal and woe.

Florimond.
Long live the King!

A Few Voices.
Long live the King!

Mammon.
You doubt?
You disbelieve?

Tamberskelver.
In this assembly, King,
Unhappy thoughts prevail. Were you to touch
The bodies, many an undecided mind,
Devout and honest, might accept the test.

Mammon.
But by that test merely the murderer's presence
Suffices for the bleeding of the corpse.
Their wounds are naked, and they have not bled.

Tamberskelver.
The test is incomplete unless the accused
Handles the body.

Many Voices.
Let him touch the bodies!

Mammon.
Bodies will bleed although no murderer—

Many Voices.
The test! the test!

Mammon
[to himself].
Through with it tightly, coward!
[To Tamberskelver.]
So be it, then. Select your witnesses.
[To himself.]
This has me by the throat! What's Oswald doing?

[Descends to the catafalque.
Larum, urged by Tamberskelver, steps upon the catafalque, while Tamberskelver and the other Inceptors of the Teutonic Religion stand about it. Ribolt and the Neo-pagans, Crawford and the Reformers come close also.
Mammon.
My father killed himself; my brother died
By accident: I had no hand at all
In either death.

[As he is about to touch his father's body, he staggers and falls against the catafalque. The crown drops from his head.
Ribolt picks up the crown.
Larum
[supporting Mammon].
You faint, King Mammon!

Tamberskelver.
They bleed!
The bodies bleed!

Jan Rykke
[to Tamberskelver].
I see no blood.

Tamberskelver
[to Rykke].
Nor I:
But others will.

Larum.
Why, so they do! King Mammon?
I put no faith in this:—to pacify
The simpler souls we meant it:—but they bleed!

Mammon.
I stumbled, and I shook the catafalque.

Larum.
Would innocence have stumbled? The bodies bleed;
The murderer is here!

Florimond
[having descended to the catafalque with other ministers, to Larum].
Go down, my lord.

Larum
[surrendering Mammon, who is almost unconscious, to Florimond].
Murder:—murder:—murder:—the Abbot's cry!
We have a godless murderer for king!

[Leaves the catafalque.]
The hall is now filled with noise.
Mammon.
Something to drink before my tongue takes fire!

Florimond
[to an Attendant who goes out].
Bring wine and water quickly.

Ribolt
[whispering as he crowns Mammon].
Murderer!

Mammon.
I am no murderer.

Ribolt.
Will you be our God?

Mammon.
There is no God.

Ribolt.
Or God or murderer: choose.

Florimond and others assist Mammon to regain the platform.
An Aide-de-Camp enters upon the platform.
Mammon.
From Oswald? from the Duke? Speak in my ear.

Aide-de-Camp.
The Duke of Christianstadt commanded me
To tell the King the bezel of his ring
Is jewelled and ready for the crimson seal.

Mammon.
The Duke's discreet and strong. Attend me closely.

The Attendant re-enters with wine and water.
Mammon.
My mouth is like a desert.

The Attendant offers wine.
Mammon.
Give me. ... Red?
A murderer's draught! Pour out some water—slowly.

The Attendant fills a glass with water.
Mammon.
Yes:—yes:—my soul's as clean as that: I swear it!
[Drinks; then looks down upon the bodies.
The wounds are as they were! They do not bleed!
Now, I remember; the knave who pressed the thing
Took umbrage in the morning at my rebuke!
Look, Florimond!

Florimond.
Too far for my old sight.

Mammon.
Jugglery of the senses.

Florimond.
A crowd will see
By instigation things that are not.

Mammon.
Yes;
And folk will stare and stare, beholding still
No true appearance unless an interest wake
Discernment. Wounds, like that, look so;
And seem, with scrutiny, more murderous,
Bloodier and deadlier. I'll speak of this.
But first, to tell the news I came to tell,
And cleave the world in two.—People of Thule—

[The uproar in the hall which had gradually decreased breaks out again upon Mammon's attempt to speak. Meanwhile Anselm, having consulted with Larum and others, ascends the catafalque and secures silence.
Mammon
[to himself].
Machine guns on our platforms to take the chair!
I'll have one in and turn the crank myself!

Many Voices.
Anselm! Anselm!

Mammon.
Another orator!

Anselm.
I take the Abbot's place. I stand for God.
What shall become of Thule and of us
Disturbs no longer righteous-hearted men;
The issue lies with Heaven: God's will be done!
Yet prayer is not the whole: the Church can act.
[To Mammon.]
By the authority of Almighty God,
The Three in One, and of the undefiled
Mother and patroness of our Saviour Christ,
The Virgin Mary; by the authority
Of all celestial virtues, angels, thrones,
And of the innocents who behold the Lamb
Singing the new song heard in Heaven only;
By the authority of all the saints,
Of all the holy and elect of God,
I excommunicate the King of Thule,
You, Christian, Mammon, to whichever name
You answer. From the threshold of the Church
Sequestered, you are now delivered up,
Unless it shall repent you, to be quenched
As fire is quenched in water, and your light
To be put out for ever with those who cry,
“Depart from us, O Lord; we scorn thy ways!”
May God the Father curse you, God the Son,
The Holy Spirit, the eternal Virgin,
And all the host of Heaven, in all your thoughts,
In all your deeds, in body, mind and soul,
Unless you do repent. Amen.

Many Voices.
Amen.

Anselm.
All those who stand for God will leave this place,
And shake the dust of it from off their feet.

[Descends from the catafalque.
Larum.
I join the legate!

Ribolt.
I also! Any God
Rather than godless worlds and soulless men!

Crawford.
And I come too! This is the broil I want!
The Church, which is the workman and the slave—
The Power against the Kingdom and the Glory.

Mammon
[to the Aide-de-Camp].
Tell Christianstadt to seize this treasonous legate.
And for my signet ring:—Say to the Duke
I love him; say, the wax is in the flame;
Say, when the molten moment comes my seal
Must delve into the bosom of the age.

Aide-de-Camp.
Will the Duke know this cypher message, King?

Mammon.
He'll pluck the meaning from the seething words.
Go, and return not till the stamp's affixed.

The Aide-de-Camp goes out.
Anselm, as he leaves the hall, begins to chant the hundred and fortieth psalm, “Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man.” The clergy, the bulk of the people in the galleries, and many of those in the area join in the psalm, and go out after the legate.
Mammon
[to Florimond].
Let no unedited report get wing.
Be rigorous with our journals.
[Tears a curtain from one of the doors of the platform and gives it to an attendant.
Cover the bodies.
[While the attendant spreads the curtain over the catafalque, the chant uninterrupted hitherto, and still heard faintly from the square, ceases suddenly and a noise of tumult breaks out.
I meant so differently! The Abbot thrust
A precipice athwart my tidal wave;
And now the voyage leaps it—headlong down
As deep as the unfathomable grave!
[The shattering repercussive fire of a machine-gun is heard, accompanied by a great outcry, and succeeded by profound silence.
The crash of blood! a cataract of blood
Upon the pavement plunging! Secular change
At every period is sprinkled so;
Nor could the portal of the world I make
Escape the crimson baptism.—Still as death:—
The pressure and the imprint of my seal
Reaches the heart of Thule:—like a cloud
At break of day the ruddy mangled mass
Begins to smoulder: soon its golden light
Will wreathe my brow with chaplets of the dawn,
So potently does psychic alchemy
Transmute barbaric deeds in great careers
To destined matter of eternal fame!

Oswald, with the Aide-de-Camp and a company of soldiers, enters the area of the hall. Soldiers appear also in the galleries; class, mass and mob pour into all parts of the hall.
Mamm.
You look like one who from some deed of doom,
As ineluctable as death itself,
Comes conquering horror with a steadfast mind.

Oswald.
Oh, King, though I discourage in myself
Revolted nature, I would sooner die
Than do again what I have done to-day!

Mammon.
If this that you lament was done for me,
The burden's mine. Did you, as I desired,
Detain the legate?

Oswald.
Not without slaughter, King.

Mammon.
Is Anselm dead?

Oswald.
Oh, no! the legate waits
Your pleasure, with the Abbot, under guard.

Mammon.
Let them be parted and securely kept.—
I heard the peal of the organ-pipes of war.
What struck the keynote of a fugue of death?

Oswald.
Those westland men that worship Woden hung
About the legate like a retinue,
And blindly thrust and smote with ancient swords.
Weapons appeared in other hands besides
When the delirious crowd assailed the troops—
Who beat them off like playmates, unused to fight
Their countrymen. A rabble, then, flung up
Like apparitions, or unearthly things,
From urban nether worlds, savage and lewd,
Began a hoarse incendiary cry
That lit the lawless impulse of the rest.
Against the crown, against the King they yelled:
Some towards the palace turned to tear it down;
Others against the hall here madly surged.
No one obeyed me, soldier or citizen;
Wherefore upon rebellion swithe I loosed
With my own hand the reservoir of death.

Mammon.
Most resolute, most noble, most my friend!

Oswald.
The soldiers knew their duty then; the mob
Dispersed like huddled shadows; and loyal folk
Returned with us to hail our rightful king.
Long live the King!

All the Soldiers.
Long live the King!

Mammon.
That shout
Undoes the treachery that marred the day!
I am indeed your king, and greater: I
(Until the world, transmuted, understands
That men—that you, and she—are more than God,
As much as substance more than shadow is)
Shall be in Thule like a deity,
Inspiring, making, moulding greatness: greatness,
Which all your creeds have taught you to ascribe
To something not yourselves. Oh flesh and blood,
Oh gallant sex of men, sweet sex of women,
High hearts and brains of power, not anywhere
Is there a breath, a mote, that is not you!
I would I stood upon Mount Everest
And could be heard by every son of man!
The parasites that in our bodies burrow;
The lily and the rose whose passionate breath
Perfumes our love-thoughts with the scent of love;
The tawny brutes whose anguished roar appals
The desert and the jungle—they that suck
The steaming blood and tear the shuddering flesh
Of timid, browsing beasts; the timid beasts
Themselves; the birds that lace the summer winds
With music; houses, harvests, merchandise;
The woodland and the mountain and the sea;
The myriad suns that pave the Milky Way;
The furthest star, and all the stars of Heaven;
The vapours, metals, earths; their energies;
The lightning and the light; ethereal space:
All these—all that, is us, is you and me,
The conscience of the infinite Universe.
No supernatural thought must cloud your minds:
You have been told for twenty centuries
That that which is behind the Universe,
Its maker, God, or some obscurant will,
Transcends substantial things; and psychic powers,
Imagination, thought—the essences
Material of matter—have squandered craft
Enough to make another Universe
In building up nonentity, miscalled
The world of spirit! There is no such world:—
I speak to minds of every calibre,
And would be understood:—no spirit world;
No world but this, which is the Universe,
The whole, great, everlasting Universe.
And you are it—you, there, that sweep the streets,
You that make music, you that make the laws,
You that bear children, you that fade unloved.
Oh, if there be one here despised and mean,
Oppressed with self-contempt and cursed with fear,
I say to him:—Not anywhere at all
Is there a greater being than you—just you:
You are the lustre of a million suns—
The fuel of their fires, your flesh and blood;
And all the orbs that strew ethereal space
Are less than you, for you can feel, can know,
Can think, can comprehend the sum of things:
You are the infinite Universe itself
Become intelligent and capable.
Grasp it and hold it in your heart of hearts,
That nothing lies behind, nothing at all,
Except the ether woven from bourne to bourne—
If there be spatial bournes—continually
Evolving lightning, chrysosperm of space,
Electric lust for ever unconsumed,
Twisexed fertility that begets and breeds
The divers elements whereof we are,
And all the suns and all the galaxies:
Nothing of thought or oversoul behind,
About, above; but you and I in front,
The intellect, the passion and the dream,
The flower and perfume of the Universe.
You have been told for twenty centuries
That man upon a transient isthmus stands
Between the oceans of eternity;
And that the earth is but an academe
Where the poor human acolyte prepares
For joy in Heaven or penal fires of Hell,
Or here begins consecutive rebirths
That shall in other worlds perfection gain.
I say the earth itself is Heaven and Hell,
That every heart-beat is the crack of doom,
And every passing moment the judgment-day;
That here and now we have eternity.
Time is not; never was: a juggling trick,
A very simple one, of three tossed balls,
The sun, the moon, the earth, to cheat our sense
With day and night and seasons of the year.
This is eternity: here once in space
The Universe is conscious in you and me;
And if the earth and all that is therein
Were now to end, the task, the pain, the woe,
The travail of the long millennial tides
Since life began, would like a pleasant fancy
Fade in the thoughtless memory of matter;
Because in me the infinite Universe
Achieves at last entire self-consciousness,
And could be well content to sleep again
For ever, still evolving in its sleep
Systems and constellations and tracts of suns.
But I would have you all even as I am!
I want you to begin a world with me,
Not for posterity, but for ourselves.
Prophets have told that there has seized on us
An agony of labour and design
For those that shall come after such as no age
Endured before. I, Mammon, tell you, No!
We have come after! We are posterity!
And time it is we had another world
Than this in which mankind excreted soul,
Sexless and used and immaterial,
Upon the very threshold of the sun,
To wonder why the earth should stink so! Men
Belov'd, women adored, my people, come,
Devise with me a world worth living in—
Not for our children and our children's children,
But for our own renown, our own delight!
All lofty minds, all pride, all arrogance,
All passion, all excess, all craft, all power,
All measureless imagination, come!
I am your King; come, make the world with me!

[The older people regard each other dubiously; but the soldiers and the young folk raise a great shout as the curtain falls.

Scene III:

—A room in the Royal Palace, Christianstadt. Windows at the back overlook the palace yard. On the left is a piano at which Guendolen sits.
As the curtain rises, Prounice enters and, sitting at an open window, takes up some sewing.
Guendolen.
What was the hurrying prattle in the air?

Prounice.
Machine-guns, madam.

Guendolen.
Oh, I feared it, Prounice!
Not half a nihilist was hurt I hope?

Prounice.
People were hurt; and some, they say, are dead.

Guendolen.
How mournful, Prounice, and how terrible!
Why should our happiness be dyed in blood?
Dear Heaven ... No Heaven to call on? No; no Heaven:
Only my own delight. The power of it!
The imperial conceit of the one world
Usurps me, and uplifts my womanhood,
With the new-birth and blossom of my love.—
[Improvises on the keyboard, searching for a theme.
How did it happen, Prounice?

Prounice.
I cannot say.
The King may tell you: he will soon be here.

Guendolen.
Unless he speaks of it, I shall not ask.—
Prounice, what noise is that?

Prounice.
The sentry's horse,
Shaking his headstall.

Guendolen.
Music is passion, Prounice;
All their music: speechless, but eloquent.
I sometimes think that speech can utter nothing,
And only music means.—Is that the King?

Prounice.
I heard no sound outside.

Guendolen.
'Twas in my heart—
A trampling cavalcade.—Listen to this.
[Having found a theme that pleases her she elaborates it.
You like it, Prounice?

Prounice.
Buoyant, martial music.
Your composition, madam?

Guendolen.

Prounice.
Will you rest a while?
Will you lie down?

Guendolen.
You know I never rest.

Prounice.
If you rend music from your heart-strings thus,
Soul of my soul, you'll break the instrument!

Guendolen.
No, Prounice. Dearest woman ... listen!

[Faint shouting is heard from the street, and shortly the sound of the royal entry in the palace yard.
Prounice.
The King.

[Goes out.
Guendolen leaves the piano and looks out. Returning to the piano, she plays a series of triumphant chords, then rises and waits in the centre of the room.
Mammon
[entering].
Oh, stately Queen of Thule! Sweet queen of me!

Guendolen.
I have conceived! I have conceived a son!

Mammon.
How can you tell?

Guendolen.
How can we tell when light
Appears in Heaven and darkness dies?

Mammon.
We know!
The winepress of the morning overflows;
And crimson fountains in the swarthy east,
That well with dawn and vintage of the day,
Replenish earth again.

Guendolen.
Even so I know
A day has dawned in me: within, without,
My wedded, fertile body blushes still,
And morning in my swelling bosom breaks.

Mammon.
Oh love, we two are of such eager heart,
So pregnant with the future, such devout
Desirers of the world, of birth, of life,
That all our thoughts anticipate events,
And like a hound that courses thrice the road,
Before his master gambolling sprightfully,
Our minds are there and back and forth again
In front of fate and time's expedient march.
Last night the moon, her chin upon the sea,
Watched like a woman at her window: wait
Until next synod on another wave
She reassumes her vigil: tell me then
Your ship is freighted for a nine months' voyage,
For now you cannot know.

Guendolen.
Oh, but I do!
With the ninth star of love, in love's ninth swoon,
Most poignant, most intolerably sweet
Of all the ecstasies that made of me
A paradise indeed, your inmost being—
I cannot speak it!—Life took root in life:
My body seemed to be eternity;
I felt a new beginning of the world
Deep in my womb as in the heart of Heaven.

Mammon.
Infinite beauty of a woman's mind
Set free! I doubt no longer, Guendolen:
The budding jewel of our lives is clasped
Already in the richest casket wrought
Of the elements, the body and soul of you.
Nothing can stop me now! The fates obey
My will! Unchristened, disinherited,
A prisoner bound and doomed to living death,
I said I should be king in Thule and you
The happy mother of my son. Behold,
Although they married you and thrust their God
Between us, while the labour of their minds
Still racked them with the wrongs they failed to do,
As if my destiny were pulped and fed
To vast machinery filling in an hour
The travail of the years, death found them out,
You are my consort, pregnant with my love,
And I the hated outcast, King in Thule!
My thought becomes the fashion of the world
Before I know!