University of Virginia Library

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.