University of Virginia Library

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.