University of Virginia Library

ACT III

Scene I:

—A room in the Royal Palace. Mammon and Oswald enter together.
Mammon.
You are not married, then?

Oswald.
Not yet, King Mammon.

Mammon.
It disappoints me, Oswald. Who is the lady?

Oswald.
Inga the Volsung, King.

Mammon.
The Volsung, Oswald!
I had forgotten her.—Older than you.

Oswald.
Ten years. I loved her when I was at school.

Mammon.
We all did.—Is she now in Christianstadt?

Oswald.
I saw her.

Mammon.
True; but resident, I mean?
Has she unshuttered the old Volsung house?

Oswald.
The house is open; she intends some stay.

Mammon.
And shall I see her? In my father's time
She kept apart.

Oswald.
In latter days, she did:
She could not breathe the sick-room air, the dense,
The rheumy pietism of Christian's court.

Mammon.
Has she her tawny hair and glorious eyes?

Oswald.
The years have made the amazon a goddess.

Mammon.
How long are you betrothed?

Oswald.
Six months, King Mammon.

Mammon.
Useless to ask you why she will not marry.
Save Guendolen no woman speaks the truth:
They cannot, dare not, would not if they could.

Oswald.
She gave no answer; she stopped my prayers with this,
“My mind is changed; I will not marry now.”

Mammon.
What if she thinks to give you love unwed?
I said to marry, but 'twas love I meant.
I have not married Guendolen, nor shall I.
As for the law I'll let it stand awhile.
Perhaps there always will be simple folk
Who need to sanction or to legalise
A moral obligation, manifest
As food and drink, a universal duty,
The one necessity and source of life;
Which has, besides, the abandoned grace to be
Delightful, and an all-engrossing joy.
To me the matter's apathetical
On what conditions people conjugate
So they provide a breed of fellows fit
To finish Christendom and clear the road.—
Inga may shy at marriage, and yet love love.

Oswald.
I cannot tell you, King.

Mammon.
You used my name?

Oswald.
I said you had commanded me to wed
The lady of my choice without delay.

Mammon.
The suddenness may gall her: man's conceit
Of woman's appetite.

Oswald.
No, King: it was—
“I will not marry now.”

Mammon.
She loved you once?

Oswald.
I thought so, King.

Mammon.
You love her?

Oswald.
As my life.

Mammon.
Then you shall have her; and to-day. The fool!—
Pardon me, Oswald:—sympathy I've none
With women who refuse to love their lovers.
I'll send for her, and drill her into marriage.
Could I persuade her, think you?

Oswald.
You might persuade
Diana for yourself: I think no man
Can do another's wooing.

Mammon.
A challenge, Oswald!
I'll make the Volsung yours. Another's wooing?
Why, for another any man can plead
With power most manifold: would men entrust
Their businesses, their causes and their lives
To purchased advocates were it not so?

[Sits down to write a letter.
Oswald.
Often it is the advocate who wins,
And not the cause; and in the plea of love
The victory with the actual winner rests:
It has been found; the thing is known and told.

Mammon.
Too subtle and too trite: a vigorous mind
Disproves and falsifies the known and told.
I'd blacken and malign the universe
To make the lady yours.—Inga the Volsung.
[The letter being finished, Mammon summons an attendant.]
You know the Volsung House?

Attendant.
In Watling Street.
It has been closed for many a day, King Mammon.

Mammon.
'Tis open now. Deliver this at once.

Oswald.
I think you need not send.

Mammon.
Not send! And why?

Oswald.
She meant—she means to visit you to-day.

Mammon.
To visit me! [Dismisses the attendant and destroys the letter.]
Why did you hide this, Oswald?

Oswald.
I did not hide it: how could it be hidden?
But I am sick with misery and know
Myself no more; nor what to think or do.

Mammon.
Yet you withheld the news of Inga's visit.
She has a purpose, and you know and fear it.

Oswald.
Except to visit you I know no purpose.

Mammon.
Yes, but you do: it beats behind your brow,
Shrinks in your eyes, and trembles on your tongue.
Out of your love and fealty tell me, Oswald.

Oswald.
O King, you have fallen into this woman's dreams.

Mammon.
I fallen, I? You have a begging style
Sometimes. Your meaning, Oswald, net and gross?

Oswald.
The Volsung loves you, King.

Mammon.
Impossible!—
Most honest, most romantic Oswald! If
She does, I'll make her marry you to please me.—
She told you, I suppose.

Oswald.
O no, King Mammon!

Mammon.
How did you plumb her secret passion, then?

Oswald.
Her talk was still of you, your looks, your age.
With curtest courtesy she killed my hopes;
Then questioned me as of a public thing,
But with a personal zeal that would not hide.
Your speech, your thoughts, your purposes, your deeds,
She canvassed, judged, commended and condemned.
She wondered if at last the dusty stage
And drudging theatre of the times would see
A great heroic part: and hoped to live
Through years of turbulence, of world-events,
To watch the travail of the demiurge—
For so she called you:—and I call that love.
But you'll not heed her, King: she is a dreamer.

Mammon.
Now, this is rare! I like you for it, Oswald.
That's the true passion:—to distrust your friend,
Mistake the clearest truth; be sick, be sore,
And madly jealous of a woman's dreams.
By me and by my love, my only oaths,
The Volsung's heart will chime with yours to-night!
She comes to visit fate when she comes here;
The spindle stops; her virgin thread is wound.
No, not a word! All this is destiny,
Ethereal doom, and matter of the stars.—
Now for that heinous business of the abyss,
My purpose in the dungeon of my mind—
And in the palace-dungeon. Is all prepared?
Have you the wicked warders ready? Six
Perversions, six callosities, six—things?

Oswald.
I have them ready, six aborted souls.

Mammon.
Then let them rope the Abbot in the rack
And wait my coming. Remember, not a turn
Till I am there.

Oswald.
O King! O King! O King!

Mammon.
You of all men require this discipline:
You are too soft, too sweet, too human, too
Like Christ—the mythic Christ. To do the thing
One fears to do is the first law of greatness.

Oswald.
If there were any reason in it, King.

Mammon.
I have a million reasons—and unreasons.
First, I must torture some one ere I die:
The thing possesses me; and once for all
I'll have it done and out of me. Then I
Myself was tortured—on his urgency
I mean to rack:—three years of torment, pitched
About the seaboards and the idle seas
With Christendom still towering there unstruck.
Then that unmatched, untellable distress,
Lashed to the crucifix, a scalding hell
I conquered, to confront without a pause
Intolerable terror and win again.
You know I killed my father?

Oswald.
Unsay it, King!

Mammon.
You disbelieved it?

Oswald.
I tore it from my heart.
I triumphed there. Against conviction—my own
And all men's—in the silent dark I fought
For you, and snatched a victory in the war
I nightly wage and uttermost defeat
That whelms my battle. Though I knew myself
A murderer, remorseful and undone,
I held you guiltless of your father's blood;
Believed your story—made myself believe it;
And built a chamber for my ruined soul
Within the rampart of your innocence.

Mammon.
Grafted your soul on mine?—like mistletoe?
Then let it grow there.—But you wrong yourself:
You knew I caused my brother to be killed.
In that I am guiltier—if guiltiness
Must occupy us.

Oswald.
No, Mammon; no!
You had him killed because he stole your love.
The heart exonerates that: you found them bedded.

Mammon.
And had your father come with wolfish eyes
Breathing the desert and a whetted knife
To cut your sex away, you pinioned—what?
A hundred deaths! A hundred thousand deaths!

Oswald.
Did he intend—

Mammon.
Did he intend! the knife
Was in my flesh, when superhuman wit
Deceived his God and him and laid him low. ...
[Softly; staring at the floor.]
Low ... laid him low.

Oswald.
There's nothing there.—By heaven,
Whate'er that nothing is, he sees it! White
To the teeth!—King Mammon, speak! It is your friend.

Mammon.
I saw them in the morning: their wriggled breasts,
That sucked the air in silence with bloody mouths,
Have now a whistling and a sighing sound;
And underneath their half-uplifted lids
Their dead eyes glitter smiling icily.
They lie as still as effigies insculped
Upon a tomb, although their confluent wounds
Writhe to get at me like a clutch of snakes.
The sunlight whitens them and blazes red
Among the ruddy coils—O hide them! hide!
[Tears the curtains from a window and throws them out upon the floor.
Thus did I cover them on their catafalque,
Thus when they lay beside the legate's corpse.—
They're gone! You see; no figures mould the pall.
They came again too soon; my strong resolve
To study them and stare them hence escaped
My memory.

Oswald.
King and friend, repent! I say,
Repent! This is your conscience, this is God,
The necromantic sorcery of the spirit
Convincing you of sin. Let us repent:
I shall stand up with you in Olaf's Hall
While you confess our murders; and we two
Will expiate together the blood we shed,
And die at peace with God and with the world.

Mammon.
There is no God; conscience is but a crude
Moralic name for the most wonderful,
Most liberal commerce matter manages.
To do an unaccustomed thing perturbs
The microcosm of man. When solar space—
One modest atom of the universe,
Five thousand millions of our useless miles
Diametrally measured:—when this was still
A-hatching, every time a split-new planet
Burst from the teeming and the spiral sun,
A pang of terror rent the elder orbs,
And every asteroid and comet swerved
Unconsciously dismayed; and so in us
When virginal, momentous deeds are done,
And sudden, awful thoughts in action sphered,
A perturbation palsies intellect,
Maddens the fancy, dislocates the soul,
Imperilling the assembled powers that form
Our being; but when the naked deed has reached
Its orbit, and begun to circle, free
In the all-containing ether, our realm in space
Is richer, greater by the new-born star,
Our rank and system in the universe
Of stabler equipoise, superior note,
And thought and fancy, sense and soul renewed
As in the dawn and freshness of our day.

Oswald.
I have no orbit in your universe;
I fall—down; down.

Mammon.
But my attraction grips,
Uplifts you, swings you steady, as the sun
Retains the planets in his tether:—there,
Like Jupiter, the most majestic orb
That on the golden leash of solar light
Wheels in celestial state, you hang again,
My comrade in the skies!

Oswald.
O gracious King,
Grant me but this:—No rack, no torture; let
Your universe have peace.

Mammon.
My universe
Is in the rough. O, many a heinous deed
Goes to the making of a universe!
We two will torture Gottlieb ... because we can.
But I have reason for it in my heart,
As elemental as the source of things.—
Do as I told you, and await my coming.
You must be great; you must transcend yourself.

Oswald goes out.
Mammon.
It will be by my tongue if I am ruined,
And by my truthfulness. Speech is a power
That serves us best unused: yet must be used.
Telepathy, exalted and applied,
Might help me here—or else betray me more.
How my mind wanders, idly, at a loss!
I must be swift; I must bring all about
Within a time; for if my brain gives way ...
I'd have the wit to hide it.—But here's a thing:—
In company I can control myself,
And can control my company:—alone,
All's in the crucible again:—I'll thaw
It out at leisure.—Oswald will leave me now:
He saw me shaken; and the haltering doubt,
That tied him to me, of my father's death,
Being cut by my—(my what?—by my confession;
Wrung from me also in a careless heat)—
He feels himself entitled to rebel,
My Oswald does, aware of what I did.
'Twas instinct to conceal the truth: a son
Might kill his mother and be pardoned; never
His father, for the world is full of fathers—
Whom their sons must spare.—Pass from me, phantom thoughts;
Your home's the Christendom I mean to quell.
And for my henchman, I'll not let him go,
But flesh his soul in every mortal sin,
Until the weapon's tempered to my mind.

Attendant enters.
Mammon.
What is it?

Attendant.
A famous lady at your door,
Inga the Volsung, asks to see you, King.

Mammon.
Thrice welcome shall the famous lady be.
Say I await her now.

Attendant.
In this room, King?

Mammon.
In this room: certainly. Why do you ask?
What do you look askance at? Nothing's here
To frighten folk. Your questioning eyes—The curtains!
I tore them down; there's cotton in the web,
And hempen stuff, and jute: I want all silk.
This was my father's false economy;
Besides, the pattern's stiff: a suave design
In drapery follows best the pliant folds.
I give you charge; have them exchanged to-day.—
And bring the Volsung to my study. Go
Before me.

[They go out.

Scene II:

—An underground room in the Royal Palace. Gottlieb is seated at a table with a breviary open before him, reading by the light of a shaded lamp.
Oswald
[entering].
Most reverend father, you must leave this room.

Gottlieb.
I know the voice. Who is it?—Mammon's Duke—
Come to release me by some secret means.

Oswald.
To do my master's bidding. Follow me.

Gottlieb.
But whither, Oswald? To the light of day?

Oswald.
Ask nothing. Quickly come; what we intend,
And you must undergo, shrieks for dispatch.

Gottlieb.
I am an old man, Oswald; imprisonment
Afflicts me:—old and anxious; active; keen
To be about again. But you are sullen;—
[Rises and holds the lamp to Oswald's face.]
No freedom in your looks, nor in your mind.

Oswald.
Of all men at this hour whom terror daunts
You have the worst in prospect. Be afraid—
Most miserably concerned; then gather up
Your soul in God as in a carapace.

Gottlieb replaces the lamp and sinks into the chair.
Oswald.
'Tis well for you that you believe in God:
I tell you this in kindness.

Gottlieb.
Am I to die?

Oswald.
Not yet.

Gottlieb.
For two events my soul's prepared,
My freedom or my death; but for no third.

Oswald.
Have I not told you to put on the whole
Armour of God? O father, steep your sense
In that celestial anodyne and famed
Specific of the martyrs, perfect trust!

Gottlieb.
You are earnest, you are moved; and yet a faint
Ironic light gleams in your adjuration.
How must I take you, Oswald?

Oswald.
At my word.
Be lost in prayer; and do as I command—
And am commanded. Follow me at once.

Gottlieb.
My mind is set on death or liberty;
And thence I will not stir on any vague
Assurance, nor for any artful threat.

Oswald.
Then you'll be stirred.

[Opens the door and admits six warders.
Gottlieb.
What are these ruffians for?

Oswald.
Come after me and learn.—Assist the Abbot.

The warders seize Gottlieb and are about to carry him out.
Gottlieb.
Release me. I submit.—God keep my soul!

[Goes out followed by the warders.

Scene III:

—The King's room in the Royal Palace. Inga Volsung is standing at a window looking out.
Mammon
[entering].
You honour my poor palace; I am glad
Indeed to see you.

Inga.
I come in anger, King.

Mammon.
Who has offended you?

Inga.
I wish to know—

Mammon.
What! Has the insolence of public spirit
(Most private malice by a virtuous name)
Attacked your spotless honour, Inga?

Inga.
No,
King Mammon.

Mammon.
In my father's time the press
Took liberties; but while I reign in Thule,
Pens shall be drilled, tongues tied, thought disallowed.
Not two men in a century can think;
Not two men in an age: I mean to do
The thinking for a thousand years to come.—
But what has troubled you? You frown again.

Inga.
Why do you talk to me like this, King Mammon?

Mammon.
To you? Why not to you?

Inga.
Even from the King
The Volsung looks for worship!

Mammon.
And I speak
As if to one beneath me?

Inga.
That you do!
I ask my right consideration, King.—
I mean—

Mammon.
To quarrel. But I can tell you this:—
My great conception every hour augments.
I thought of Thule only when I came,
An outcast, to confound my enemies,
Perceiving then no wider, loftier life
Than to reign here and make my country great;
But that design was embryonic only:
I now intend with Thule's manhood armed
To conquer and demolish Christendom.

Inga.
You say all this through fear of me, King Mammon.

Mammon.
Why should I fear you, Inga?

Inga.
A woman's tongue,
Tempered with scorn, can pierce the toughest heart.
You know why I am here, and try to stem
My malice with audacity.

Mammon.
You thrust
On me your own procedure. Women fail
Eternally in sexual strife by just
That imputation:—they think men like themselves.

Inga.
Do they, indeed! I am not entered here
For sexual strife, whatever that may mean.

Mammon.
O, but you are! With men and women all
Communion's sexual strife.

Inga.
And I say, no.
What I, as woman, require of you, King Mammon,
Is that you bend your royal knee to me
And beg my pardon.

Mammon.
So easy for a king!

Inga.
Why should you scorn me thus?

Mammon.
You bring me scorn.
Now, had you been a man I cared to please,
I might have soothed uneasy vanity;
But being a haughty woman whom I like,
I rake into a blaze the rancorous fire.

Inga.
A woman whom you like! I might have known
That he who sent his callow Duke foothot
To marry me at sight was scarcely man
Though crowned: a boyish king!

Mammon.
They tell in books
How hazardous it is for women-folk
When they begin to think of men as boys.—
You are betrothed to Oswald, are you not?

Inga.
I was betrothed.—But did you send your Duke
To marry me directly?

Mammon.
Yes and no.

Inga.
O now you mock me past my patience, King!
You have forgotten who I am.

Mammon.
Not so!
You are the Volsung, last of that great line,
The richest blood, the proudest in the world.
I bade my friend, the Duke of Christianstadt,
Go marry her he loved, being unaware
To whom he would lay claim.

Inga.
Then I must ask
For pardon, King:—forgive the petulance
I misapplied, and let me touch your hand.

Mammon
[takes Inga's hand and leads her to a couch].
Had it been as you thought, the loftiest flight
Your scorn can mount would scarce have soared too high
Even to descend upon a kingly head.

Inga.
You never would have shot your Duke at me
If you had known I was the unseen butt?

Mammon.
Beneath a royal house you must not wed.

Inga.
I shall not marry now.

Mammon.
In what strange mood
Did the high Volsung think to marry Oswald?

Inga.
In what strange mood do men and women marry?
Why did you doom your Duke to sudden wedlock?

Mammon.
Because virginity corrupts the blood,
Distorts imagination, troubles thought;
The ether stagnates in a virgin's mind.

Inga.
Your new modality that came to town
A week ago, your assertorial style
That breaks the windows of philosophy!
I've heard about your ether.

Mammon.
How old are you?

Inga.
I shall be twenty-nine upon my birthday.

Mammon.
The standard age of women of the world.

Inga.
Why did you ask my age?

Mammon.
To gag your folly.

Inga.
Am I too old to jest?

Mammon.
Why are you single?

Inga.
I am a culprit, then, to be examined?

Mammon.
An enemy of mine, to suffer much,
Who laughs at my great news.

Inga.
What! Not a pose?
O Mammon, King of Thule, a man foredoomed!

Mammon.
And why foredoomed?

Inga.
You have a mission, King?

Mammon.
I hate the word: call it a message. Must
The messenger be doomed?

Inga.
There's no escape.
The triumph for a man who has a message
Is to stop having it.

Mammon.
When I've uttered it—
With cannon on a hundred battlefields;
And spoken it—to you, among the rest.

Inga.
I hope not, King; my mind's made up.

Mammon.
I'm here
To make it down again.

Inga.
You cannot, King.
It's clad, and locked—in armour.

Mammon.
I know that well:
In centuries of thought entangled; choked
With ancient pity; mailed in worn romance
That rusts into the flesh and festers there;
Shrouded in creed and sepulchred in time,
A living corpse.

Inga.
Am I so horrible?

Mammon.
More horrible: a woman of the world,
Who never loved, and has no child to show.

Inga.
How can you tell—

Mammon.
Where are your children? Shred
Away in lewdness—

Inga.
Intolerable!

[About to go out.
Mammon
[locking the door].
No!
I try my message on you nakedly.
To-day I met the harlots of the town,
The poor professionals: they understood—
As the primeval deserts understand
The verdure of the isles! The amateur,
The woman of the world, will she conceive
By my creative discipline that left
The demi-mondaines barren?

Inga stops her ears.
Mammon.
You must attend.

Inga.
I will, King Mammon: I know a man in earnest.
But you must speak to me; not to a type:
To me, the Volsung.

Mammon.
A woman of the world.

Inga.
A woman in the world; but moving there
As Hulda moved among the dwarfs, their queen
And goddess: worship I must have from you,
From all men; or in solitude decay,
Unknown but self-adored.

Mammon.
I worship not;
All worship I destroy: I make men great.
Call it self-worship—to be understood
A little; but discourse can never reach
My message, every over-burdened word
Being so bent with meaning long imposed.
Yet must I tell it till my tongue drops out.—
You say you are not a woman of the world.
What would you have me know about yourself?

Inga.
What do you mean by woman of the world?

Mammon.
So; let me think:—I mean a man of the world;
They are the same; and this, the mark of both:—
Whatever either sex ignores one knows
The other: not one woman and one man:—
That's to know less than nothing of the world,
Rather, indeed, to unknow;—but women, men;
Men, women; bodies, intellects and souls.

Inga.
Then I am not a woman of the world.
The bodies, intellects and souls of men
Are all unknown to me.

Mammon.
Not of one man?

Inga.
Not the ninth part of one. Like walking trees
They stir my wonder and a vague unrest;
But could I find a hero—

Mammon.
Well, what then?
Your intellect, your body and your soul
Would pave his path?—Did Oswald seem
A hero that you plighted troth with him?

Inga.
O no, King Mammon!

Mammon.
Then why, in every name?

Inga.
And I could tell you, too; but should I, King?

Mammon.
You need not, for I know, remembering now
That nothing men and women think or do
Is hidden from me, when once I hold the key.

Inga.
Have you my key?

Mammon.
I have, and I can tell
Your story.

Inga.
King, your arrogance offends.

Mammon.
Greatness is arrogant.

Inga.
But without offence.

Mammon.
I am by nature tolerant and mild,
Gracious, affectionate, noble—like a king;
But on me and within me weighs and works
The terrible commission to undo
The world that is.

Inga.
Tell me my story, then:
Our talk has burst all bounds.—But show me first
The golden key of me.

Mammon.
The casket too.
You are a woman in your thirtieth year,
As rich in beauty as the tree of life
With blossoms lighted up and fragrance filled;
Desirable as luxury to toil,
As mountain air to captives, slumbering death
To restless agony; as sex to sex:
Yet have you known no man.

Inga.
Had I not told
You that?

Mammon.
Then could I not have told you this:—
A little while ago the Universe,
Sublimed in you to all that's exquisite,
Revolted from the virgin life you lead—
I mean the treasure of your body bathed
In tides of passion like the fabled wealth
And fabulous that clusters, jewelled thick,
In ocean's caves, on fire to see the sun,
Solicited the treasure-seeker, man,
Who brings to light the riches of the womb—

Inga.
But I—

Mammon.
—in offspring that shall be again
Treasure and treasure-seeker. Contemned desire
Almost avenged itself in mating you
With one the most unfit of men to broach
Your pent-up passion long matured. You felt,—
“I have no choice; the hero never comes;
Why should I wait? My summer will be past;
This man may serve my turn—”

Inga.
I never—

Mammon.
Not
In words, nor even in thought; but deeply felt.—
Then was there news of me; and, from the past,
Imagination summoned names renowned,
Siegmund and Sigurd, and the mighty deeds
And Saga of the Volsungs. Like the dread
Expectant tumult that perturbed the stars
When sentience in the earth awoke at last,
A doubtful hope possessed you day and night;
And hither are you come in pain to know,—
“Is this a hero worthy of my blood,
A king who does at once the thing he thinks?”

[He embraces Inga.
Inga.
O King, I cannot!

Mammon.
You can, because you will;
You will it.

Inga.
To be carried off my feet
Like a bewildered girl! I will not, King!

Mammon.
What! Would you have me woo you? Are you not great?

Inga.
O King, I wonder ... I imagined love
To be so tender and so exquisite.

Mammon.
Most tender and most exquisite.

Inga.
I did
Consider as you said; you know my heart.
Indeed, you know it all; for even I
Am in my womanhood so dutiful
That I desire a little homage, King;
And to be courted and to seem to yield;
To leave you with a promise and come again.

Mammon.
But these are Christian courtesies; their root
Is self-denial and postponed delight
In heaven—that mirror of enchantment men
Beheld such appetizing glories in,
That with a canine craft they dropped the world
To gain a spectral nothing in the skies.

Inga.
The dog was happier, King.

Mammon.
What do you mean?

Inga.
Seeking the shadow where he lost the bone
He might retrieve the substance in the brook;
But for the solid joy by man let go,
He dropped it irretrievably in hell,
Whilst high in heaven the phantom beckoned him.

Mammon.
Wit cannot serve you; you would lure me on
With reasons and with fancies to wander love
In labyrinths, and put my blood to sleep.
I'll stop all wit; I'll make it criminal!
With wit and humour, forms of cowardice,
Like subtle reptiles we are scaled about.
Stark, unshamed, heroic, only truth
Itself is courage; and only greatness, great.

Inga.
Your message, King; you have forgotten that.

Mammon.
My message is a deed, always a deed.
This is eternity in which we live,
And that predicted heaven of endless joy
This very present moment as I kiss
Your breathing mouth, and make you wholly mine.
We are the mutable and restless force
That forms the universal substance, strained
To knowledge, feeling, thought and fantasy;
And that the universe may never cease
To feel and to imagine, to think and know,
Women are beautiful, and men, entranced
By beauty, win them, though they quail,
To inexpressible delight; and that
Is to be great.

Inga.
O King!

Mammon.
Before we grow
One moment older let the universe,
Defeated of its will by your prolonged
Virginity, be satisfied at last.
O, as I hold you in my arms and feel
Your bosom beat, I think that everything
Came into being solely that you and I
Might share together the ecstasy of love.