University of Virginia Library

ACT IV

Scene I:

—An underground room in the Royal Palace adjoining the torture-chamber. Oswald is moving about the room restlessly.
Mammon
[entering].
Is Gottlieb roped and ready?

Oswald nods.
Mammon.
Answer me.

Oswald.
He is.

Mammon.
I want a copious answer. Speak.

Oswald.
Can you not feel his tremor? The palace shakes.

Mammon.
The prospect daunts him?

Oswald.
When he saw the rack
A palsy took him; and his underjaw
Sprang like a rattle at the warders' touch.
They seized and stripped him rudely. Once he squealed,
Trebling his terror with the hideous sound
Anticipation wrung from him unhurt.
The keeper of the room, treading on air
Like one whose projects come about past hope,
Adjusted him expertly, and disposed
The handspikes in their sockets. With shining eyes
The warders wait, impatient to begin.
He with his carrion ribs and shrunken limbs
Froths at the mouth and sweats, all speech and thought
Beyond the utmost tension of his mind.

Mammon.
Strange that his courage should give out: a heart
More resolute is not in Christianstadt.

Oswald.
No modern man could face the rack, King Mammon:
Refinement strings us to the breaking pitch;
Our anodynes undo our hardihood.

Mammon.
And this is he whose Christian mind recalled
A savage law to shear my sex away!
I'll rack him till his toughest sinews snap,
And all his creaking limbs, unmortised, hang
Like broken stalks.

Oswald.
O, is it not enough?
King Mammon, for an hour my soul has drudged
In torment, waiting here. It was to test me?
Tell me it was to test me! Faithful in all,
Even to this vigil more terrible than death,
You find me, and acquit me of the doubt
That haunted you.

Mammon.
A famous Christian trick
Impossible to me.—Were I to die
I'd torture Gottlieb.

Oswald.
The damage to your soul—
O let me say it!—no triumph can repair.
That for your manhood and the chosen woman
In frantic rage you sinned, courage and love
Absolve you in your heart; and yet your mind
Is dogged with spectres. Now, bethink you, King;—
If necessary tragic deeds beset
Your path with bloody visions, what hideous sights
May madden you, what dreams infest your sleep,
If you exact this cold-drawn cruelty,
This monstrous, callous, needless wickedness.

Mammon.
Nothing is needless—nothing men can do.
I mean to tap the reservoir of pain;
I'll see this mystery through that once enthralled
Religion;—and I'll make a law that men
Who live too long shall die upon the rack!
Thus I'll dislodge the rookeries and unearth
The foul old lairs that nestle in the world's
Intelligence and burrow in its heart!

Oswald.
Make your own soul a nest of scorpions, King;
Your heart, a jug of asps! Bid me untie
The abbot!

Mammon.
Never, Oswald. Quell your fear.
Those visions that attend me, your remorse
That keeps you watchful are material things—
Adjustment of our nature to our deeds:
I told you in a planetary trope
To-day already.—Supercharged with power
To torture Gottlieb I am like a cloud
That must disgorge its lightning, or a thought
Artistic that ejaculates its load
Of loveliness, or strata of the earth
That change their posture suddenly and fling
Whole cities down.

Oswald.
God will do something yet!

Mammon.
The novelty perturbs us; nothing more.
We must be zealous; must devote ourselves;
Not palter with our deeds however strange.
Being the conscious universe at work
That which we do with all our might is just.
After the rack I mean to burn the abbey—

Oswald.
O King!

Mammon.
It can be done: a passage underground
Leads from the palace. You shall be Lucifer
And deftly set a light to Christendom.
I've filled the square with troops to guard the fire.

Oswald.
I suddenly grow old, King Mammon.

Mammon.
Thought
Unacted makes men old; deeds keep them young.

Oswald.
My soul, that was a weapon keen and bright,
Rusts in the scabbard now; my life with sin,
Like some poor beast that in its ordure rolls,
Is caked and clotted round.

Mammon.
But you must shun
The fallacy of sin. Living is rust,
Which if it smothers us in slothful doubt,
Irresolution, idleness, offends
Us as the stercoraceous stuff of sin,
The necessary ordure of the soul;
But by dynamic happiness of deeds
We scour the blade that nature damascened,
While brilliant alchemy of fantasy
Distils the scaled and barkened excrement
Into elixir of eternal youth.—
We have been tortured; let us torture. Come!
By torture men grow great, the prophet said!

[They go out.

Scene II:

—A street behind the Royal Palace. At the back is the entrance to the torture-chamber, on the closed door of which a notice hangs.
A Sentinel enters by the right and goes out by the left. A Tourist follows with a guide-book in his hand and reads the notice.
2nd Tourist
[enters].
That card was not there yesterday.

1st Tourist.
My luck—
A day behind the fair.

2nd Tourist.
And my luck, too.
I left this to the last.

1st Tourist
[consulting his guide-book].
They've gadges here,
And trip-hooks.

2nd Tourist.
Just the implements I wished
To see.

1st Tourist.
The most complete assortment stocked,
It seems.

2nd Tourist.
They should have given poor tourists notice.

1st Tourist.
His new satanic majesty, King Mammon,
Delights to do the unaccountable.

2nd Tourist.
Speak lower! Do you value liberty?
Good heavens! I'll leave you, sir!

1st Tourist.
Stay! I forgot;
I'm newer here than you.—Observe the porch;—
[Consulting his guide-book.
The bevelled voussoirs, very rare in Thule;
And archivolts so quaintly—

2nd Tourist.
What's that sound?

1st Tourist.
A cat, in pangs of hunger, or of love.

2nd Tourist.
Forgotten when they locked the place up.

1st Tourist.
Listen!
It's being hurt! Did you hear that?—I heard
A woman once in labour wailing high
With such a shrill persistence.—It's underground.

2nd Tourist.
A spaniel, vivisected:—in the Isles
It was, and at a famous college; I went,
Ashamed a little—my friend would have me go:—
A spaniel, vivisected, lifted up
A dreary sound like that. It's bitted jaws
Were fast; from either opened groin a wire
Explained in some electrical machine
The dog's ideas doubtless, till—

Sentinel
[re-enters].
Pass on.

The Tourists go out. The Sentinel halts at the door.

Scene III:

—A dressing-room in the Royal Palace. Guendolen is seated with a casket of jewels in her lap.
Guendolen
[sings].
Without a doubt this love is great;
It melts the world as in a fire,
And casts us in a mould of fate,
The very form of our desire.
Then kiss me, kiss me! Even so!
I have my bride-sark on.
O come love, come; and when you go,
Be but a moment gone!

Prounice knocks, enters, and begins to dress Guendolen's hair.
Guendolen.
Prounice.

Prounice.
Yes, Queen.

Guendolen.
What are you thinking of?

Prounice.
I, madam?—I?

Guendolen.
Yes, woman; you. I know
You've something on your mind. Your perfect touch—
Is not imperfect; but I feel your hands.

Prounice.
The soldiers in the square: I think of them.

Guendolen.
Of all the soldiers, Prounice, or of one?

Prounice.
O madam, you mistake me wilfully!

Guendolen.
What of the soldiers, Prounice?

Prounice.
So many, madam!
The square is full.

Guendolen
[rises and looks out of the window].
Why, Prounice, so it is!
The tents are gone, and horse and foot and guns
In order stand as if for instant war.

Prounice.
It terrifies me, madam.

Guendolen.
What should you fear?
The army is the King's; it does his will.— [Sits again].

Prounice.

Prounice.
Yes, Queen.

Guendolen.
Aurelian—has he left?

Prounice.
He sailed an hour ago.

Guendolen.
Then all are gone.

Prounice.
Thule's deserted, Queen.

Guendolen.
From Christendom
Cut off! A scion planted out to grow
Alone: the King and I will tend it, Prounice;
Yes, and make it beautiful!—But look at these!
I want you to believe in the one world,
And learn the doctrine out of jewellery.
If I were mortifying of stale chagrin
(And kings and queens have died of that disease)—
O, leave my hair!—if I were dying, Prounice—

Prounice kneels at Guendolen's feet.
Guendolen.
Forgotten, in a prison, underground,
A cup of jewels, with a beam of day
To stir them, from a lofty loophole thrust,
Could charm the darkness—O, and entertain
The sorrow-laden sight of old despair!
Within this golden brazier steep your eyes
As in a healing bath of diverse flame.
They rouse and soothe an elemental mind,
These wanton gems and tranquil: turquoise, blue
As studded margents of forget-me-not;
Brown topazes like crystal wallflowers; pearls
That seem about to be a thousand hues;
Pellucid amethysts and sapphires dark
As midnight; emeralds, clear as water, rimming
A golden shore where the green billow sleeps;
Diamonds, the lust of Judah; and rubies, red
As winter fires and more instinct with dreams:
Whence is their power? Why do we love them, Prounice?

Prounice.
We love them for their beauty, colour, fire;
Their power is rarity and costliness.

Guendolen.
Would men of lineage, rank, ancestral fame,
Courage, romantic daring, faith, commit
The meanest crimes for beauty, colour, fire,
For rarity and costliness, in stones,
Or nacre lustred over grains of sand?
Would honourable women for the same
Surrender to the touch of lewd old men
The treasures of their bodies?

Prounice.
They do so, Queen.

Guendolen.
Yes, but the reason! Why do all people love
To handle gems, to see them, to possess them?
And why do painters paint them proudly, poets
Adorn their poems with imagery of jewels,
And women wear them on their bosoms, hung
In wreaths above those fountains sacrosanct
That well with love and honeyed wine of life?

Prounice.
O Queen, we love them for their beauty!

Guendolen.
Yes;
And for a reason deeper than all beauty,
The very reason of eternity:—
These rubies, sapphires, diamonds, emeralds, pearls
Are we ourselves, embodied colour, light
Incarcerate, the most enduring things
Dynamic ether turns to, the loveliest
And the hardest; compactest forms of matter
That we ourselves are of.

Prounice.
How can that be?

Guendolen.
Because the universe is all the same,
One single substance in a hundred forms—
Fluid or earth, or metal; the breath of life,
The fibre of the mountains and the nerve
In water, is the essence of the gem,
A vapour, oxygen: another name
Would please me better—

Prounice.
Spirit, Princess? God?

Guendolen.
O never let me hear these words again!
Explanatory, deprecative words,
That make an end of mystery, palsy thought,
And shut imagination in a stye!
All, all is matter, all is miracle!
(This casket was my husband's wedding gift:
He told me everything I tell you, Prounice.)
The brilliant agent—artist in precious stones,
Except in one, men call him oxygen,
The virile sultan of the elements—
(You hear my husband's music and powerful phrase).
And what is the exception, think you, Prounice?

Prounice.
The diamond, Queen and Princess; crystal coal.

Guendolen.
Yes, coal: the staple, too, of organism,
The weft of flesh, the body of the blood,
The fertile Phœnix-ashes of the brain
That teem with phosphorescent amaranth;
The fuel and the fragrant fire of love.
All hearts adore the diamond, being flesh,
Imagination, passion, purpose, thought
In crystalline perfection.

Prounice.
But I adore
The violet, Queen.

Guendolen.
I choose a jewel. Flowers?
They wither, die and rot.

Prounice.
Ruby and pearl
Are scentless, while the violet smells of heaven.

Guendolen.
Yes; and my husband told me, too, of that;
A thing so wonderful. Scent is the ether,
The omnipresent, omnicontinent
Beginning, middle, end of everything.
We see it in the light, in music hear
Its rich contexture, and in perfume know
The inmost being of the universe.
Yet scent decays, and rancid odours tell
That even the imponderable ether rots.
Rubies and diamonds, emeralds, amethysts,
Though scentless, die not; and their stains endure
Like unavenged affronts—my husband's words;
Their secret fires, enshrined for ever, burn
Intense and still. I worship jewels, Prounice.

Prounice.
O Queen and dearest jewel of the world,
You that were God's best Christian, in seven days' time
To turn to utter unbelief and be
The voluntary paramour of hell.

Guendolen.
What, Prounice! Are you mad?

Prounice.
With fear for you!
Dismiss me, kill me, Queen: but hear me: hear
Your silent woman plead with desperate tongue.

Guendolen.
You foolish dreamer! Dress me quickly, Prounice.

Prounice.
Dress Mammon's mistress? No! I call you Queen,
Who are neither queen nor wife. Unchaste
And glorying in unchastity—

Guendolen.
Dull drudge!
I did superbly to discuss with you!
Finish and go.

Prounice.
O Princess, I must speak!
Heart of my heart and treasure of the world—

Guendolen.
Prounice—!

Prounice.
You'll listen when you hear me cry
The heinous truth:—you have become a whore,
Paid with a box of jewels for a night!
What loathsomeness it is for men and women
Knowing the thing they do (not like poor beasts
Driven unawares) to come together without
Religious sanction, sacramental awe,
The glory and terror that make marriage great!
O Princess, you are all disfigured now,
Your beauty and your loveliness undone;
And shame, the desolation of the world,
A barren burning waste environs you!

Guendolen.
Your most unhappy eloquence undoes
My good opinion, and your own repute.
How hateful Christians are! How utterly
Abominable in their evil thoughts!
Look at me, Prounice.

Prounice.
I unsay it all.
O Queen, O Princess, O divinest lady!
Cut out my tongue! It was not I who spoke.
Surely the devil took possession of me!

Guendolen.
How can I ever trust you, Prounice! You called me—

Prounice.
O, hush! You shall not hear me speak again,
Except to say my needful yes and no.

Guendolen.
I cannot keep you, Prounice. What you said—

Prounice.
It was the sole transgression of my life.
Shall I be still your silent woman, Queen?

Guendolen.
I must consider.—This great universe
I live in now with pardon overflows:
I scarcely know myself.

Prounice.
O spotless Queen!

Guendolen.
Finish your function: make me beautiful.

Prounice in silence completes Guendolen's toilet and goes out.
Mammon
[enters].
Come with me to the window, Guendolen.

Guendolen accompanies Mammon to the window.
Mammon.
I've lit the abbey: at dinner the Gothic blaze
Will shine upon our table and stain the room
With torches, cressets, groves of coloured fire.

Guendolen.
So bright as that! You have electric light
In the abbey, then?

Mammon.
Electric light in the abbey!

Guendolen.
I thought you meant you had lit the abbey lamps,
And that the sumptuous casements across the square
Would shine into the palace dining-room.

Mammon.
I've set the abbey on fire to burn it down.

Guendolen.
O Mammon! Burn the Abbey of Christianstadt,
The pride of Thule, the glory of the north!

Mammon.
It shall be dust and ashes before the morning.

Guendolen.
Impossible! Look! All the front of it
Surcharged with fantasy and shadows hid
In quaint imaginations, fast and thick
As multiplying dreams in moonlit woods!

Mammon.
It once was beautiful:—and still I love
The vaulted gate and leafy lattice wrought
In ancient stone whose blossoms have outlived
Millennial ivy; labyrinthine depths
Where light is lost in arboured windows rich
With hues of dawn and sunset—sea and sky,
Jewels and flowers, and mingled wine and blood;
Its majesty of high embattled towers,
And forest gloom of clustered pinnacles:
But it enshrines a lie, and down it comes.

Guendolen.
The adoration of a people built
In sculptured stone! You cannot burn it, Mammon.
O dearest, greatest, you must not burn the abbey!
O love, I have a pain here at my heart
As if an eager knuckle knocked upon it!

Mammon.
Therefore I may not burn the abbey:—the Queen
Has cut her finger and the world must stop.

Guendolen.
Why should you mock me? Let the abbey be:
Leave it to nature and the mouldering hours.

Mammon.
I cannot wait upon the mouldering hours,
The course of nature and the trend of things;
The movement and machinery of the world
Offend me with their incapacity.
I want each thought to be a deed at once;
Therefore I burn the abbey, having thought it.

Guendolen.
But how unthinkable! It will be known,
And Mammon called a base incendiary.

Mammon.
'Twill not be known; Oswald will never tell.
The passage from the palace underground
Admitted us and led us back unseen.

Guendolen.
To do a deed in the dark and run away?

Mammon.
Not great, you think?

Guendolen.
Meaner than any treason
Recorded—stealthy malice in a king!

Mammon.
The lightning sets the pantheon on fire;
An earthquake swallows fifty thousand men;
A tempest drowns a navy; glaciers, floods,
Dynamic ages wipe the races out,
And mould and carve and re-ordain the earth.
If lightning, earthquake, tempest, frost and flood
Are despicable, and the ages mean,
Then am I mean and despicable too.

Guendolen.
O love, you are a man like other men;
The ill you do will hurt and maim your mind.

Mammon.
I am not as men are; but a power that works
Incalculably, and like fate itself
Unsearchable. No one shall question me.

Guendolen.
So well I know you, love, the man you are
That I forget the sovereign dread, the awe
And domination that compel the world,
Thinking myself exempt from Mammon's rule,
The partner of his heart and of his thoughts.

Mammon.
But can the wisest share their thoughts? Can you
Divide your mind with me?

Guendolen.
Not my whole mind
At once; nor ever my whole mind, for thoughts
In revery rise that no discourse can touch.
But I can tell whatever can be told,
And still with subtle pressure of my hand
Partake with you the sense of mystery mute
As moonlight, and across your spirit throw
With looks of love and fathomless desire
Remembrance of unutterable things.

Mammon.
Remember why the abbey should be burned.

Guendolen.
O rather think why you should save it!

Mammon.
Not
A bracket, gargoyle, lilied capital!
There is on earth no consecrated stone
I would not grind to powder, however great
The art that carved and hung it in the air.

Guendolen.
But must the beauty that came with Christendom
Be all disfigured?

Mammon.
Annihilated all—
Books, buildings, pictures and the hearts of men.
I thought you had come out of Christendom.

Guendolen.
I have; indeed I have:—I will be strong.
The abbey must be burned:—possess my eyes
With yours; enchain me, Mammon:—must be burned:
The abbey and all the abbeys; every church;
And all the wayside crosses must come down;
And not a Christian shard be left on earth.
Then, Mammon, then, the world begins again!

Mammon.
To purge the world of Christianity
The sacrifice of every human life
That now enjoys or nauseates the sun,
Would not be too exorbitant a price.

Guendolen.
And you and I in Eden left alone!

Mammon.
We two to be the only thought in space,
The sole, clear conscience of the Universe.—
Look, love! A wreath of smoke begins to climb
The weather-wasted mullions; now it creeps
Among the tracery of the chancel-arch—

Guendolen.
Like a blue flower!

Mammon.
—That shall be scarlet soon,
With sable boughs and tendrils of a vine
Whose fruit is ashes.—The doting vergers scream,
And rush with flying cloaks like bat-winged ghouls
Evicted from their shrines and ancient nooks.
An outcry, increasing in volume to the end of the scene, is heard.
“Fire!”—shriek it:—“Fire!” You cannot shriek it out;
Nor shriek aside the doom of Christendom.—
Come down to dinner, Guendolen.

Guendolen.
I come.

Mammon.
I love to see you eat, to see you drink.
The foolish flesh, the herbs and grains and fruit
You take into your body, I love them too,
For they are you. In gardens, orchards, fields,
Vineyards and seas and rivers you grow all day;
All night your roots drain treasure from the earth;
And herds and shoals and harvests change in you
To beauty, passion and the world's desire.

Guendolen.
And these, the herds, the harvests, and the shoals
That turn to love and manhood in my lord,
Are of the very substance of the stars.

Mammon.
The stars are we; we live upon the stars;
We eat, and drink, and are the Universe.

[They go out.

Scene IV:

—The drawing-room in Ole Larum's house. Crawford and Tamberskelver enter together. Jelke follows them.
Crawford.
Before the others come can you and I
Agree? What have you ready for the world?

Tamberskelver.
The great idea, the greatest hitherto:—
That the Teutonic peoples should evolve
A god. I cannot of myself, with all
My sworn inceptors, in a night secrete
Divinity: the old, haphazard growth,
In hordes and savage minds, of heathen gods
Consumed uncounted years and high events
Legend itself forgets: therefore we know
The conscious evolution of a god,
How expedite soever, must yet await
A common bent, a universal will.
I and my compeers brood upon the germ
So boldly sown, the mystery so begun;
But we are few: we need the swarm of swarms,
The trance of myriad fantasies, the long
Refinement of inexorable time.

Crawford.
While outworn workers starve! And men and women,
By love's oppressive sequel terrorised
Refuse to wed; or wedding, bolt and bar
The portal where the generations crowd,
Turning the busy thoroughfare of life
To a blind alley at the wide world's end.

Jelke.
Disparage our palladium-method, guard
And mechanism of marriage, whereby we save
Society!

Crawford.
A mad catholicon,
A killing cure that antedates despair,
And strangles life and love to purchase both,
Upon a sordid altar offering up
The treasured fate and future of the world
In satisfaction of a callous lust.

Jelke.
You counselled it! 'Twas you who taught our women
To make the way of pleasure a cul-de-sac,
And close the secret door of life at will.

Crawford.
Only a respite for a race condemned
To automatic slavery.

Jelke.
Respite only!
Have you a pardon in your pocket then?

Crawford.
I have the absolution of the world.

Larum, Ribolt, Vibbe and Stromer enter together.
Crawford
[too preoccupied to pause, produces a handful of money].
Behold the unpardonable sin itself,
Poor poverty, is promptly cleansed by this—
Your only soap, your only miracle.
The more it's used, the more it multiplies;
And Neptune's barbarous blade of rusty hoop
Will fleece the stiffest upper lip as clean
As any patent razor, if this be plied
With systematic brush. This is the soap
That washes wrinkles out and beauty in,
Restores virginity and swindles death.
The bubbles of it, blown advisedly,
Become enchanted islands. With it, for it,
The fiercest wars are waged—

Larum.
Enough! We scold
Each other like the warring winds of heaven
In epics, and our purposes are wrecked.
Put up your money: some immortal end
Alone can join divergent minds like ours.

Crawford.
The scorn of money and material aid
Is still the ruin of immortal ends.
If you command not money, money chains
Immortal purpose to a mortal oar
In this old galley of a world where men
From century to century, age to age,
For ever disenchanted, ask of fate,
“What do we here, Elijah and the rest?”

Larum.
Here are we met to cancel differences,
And find a common measure of appeal
Against the full-blown tyranny of Mammon.

Ribolt.
Appeal to arms! Rebellion summons us.

Tamberskelver.
Yes, but the ground. What broader base than this:—
A new God for the Teutons? A battle-cry
To stir the calmest soul!

Jelke
[to Crowford].
We want the truth!
Have you renounced all mechanism in marriage?

Crawford.
It never was a corner-stone with me.

Vibbe
[to Crawford].
Do you deny our sacred human right
To sterilise the proletariate,
And bring the classes whining to their knees?

Jelke.
The only revolution since time began!

Vibbe.
Escape, salvation, and the way to heaven!

Crawford.
It cuts both ways: the classes also lock
The door of life at will; thus there remains
The same proportion: always rich and poor
In stable equilibrium, whatever change
May overtake the fashion of the thing.

Larum.
The triple cleavage widens, and we fall,
Irreparably sundered.

Tamberskelver.
Neo-pagans,
Inceptors and reformers, this juncture fails
To solder us; our triad cannot be.

Crawford.
I say it can; but not as neo-pagans,
Inceptors and reformers—three tall stools
That would be always down, as each in turn
Essayed to sit upon the other two.
Our titles and our tenets for a while
We must resign, and step by step pursue
Our common purpose, Mammon's overthrow.

Tamberskelver.
Yes, but the motive?

Crawford.
Let it be strong enough!
Success endorses motive, means and all.
And for the means:—We want the wealth of Thule.

Larum.
The wealth of Thule! Do you mean the money?

Crawford.
The money. To my comrades I would say,
The first and last word of our propaganda:—
Get money; all the money: then we can set
The world to work, sans class, sans mass. The world
At work; and all contented, leisured, rich!
The money of the world will run to that,
With ample annual reserve to be
A pill against all earthquakes. There's my cure
For mechanism in marriage: when all are rich—

Larum.
Or poor.

Crawford.
No, rich:—as all will be, when none
Is wealthier than his neighbour;—then womenfolk,
Relieved of every economic care,
Can revel boldly in maternity.
But that's beside my argument.—I want
The cash and bullion in the bank of Thule.

Larum.
The cash and bullion?

Jelke.
Break the bank of Thule!

Crawford.
One step without the wealth of Thule not
The strongest here can take—beyond the pace
That tedious movements trudge, and none of us
Intends; for we are all self-conscious fellows,
Pledged in our hearts to make the world sit up,
And toast the triumph of our principles
Before we die. With Thule's wealth in hand
We can destroy the ruthless reign of Mammon
That like a three-square barricade impedes
The outset where our roads converge.

Larum.
Destroy
The monarchy?

Crawford.
And o'er its ruins march
To place and power. We can accomplish this—

Larum.
What “we” is that?

Crawford.
We, forces of the age.

Larum.
And afterwards?

Ribolt.
Great war between us three,
Darraigned to fight for empire of the world!
Foreground and background, middle-distance,—all
The picture and perspective overjoy
The neo-pagan.

Larum.
We take no part in war.
The conflict of opinion and the swift
Emergence of a resolute inception
Engage our lofty hopes. Yet this finance
Disquiets us: to cut the sinews, grub
The roots of war, although we break the bank,
And break the brittle letter of the law,
Would sanction crime as harvest sanctions toil.

Crawford.
And so it would! Two things are possible:
To seize the wealth of Thule and depose
King Mammon. I see no further forward: there's
The open road, two furlongs in the light.

Larum.
Then darkness, and the future hiding hell.

Crawford.
But I would traverse this illumined way
Though worse than hell behind the darkness hid.

Ribolt.
And I, by all the gods!

Jelke.
And I!

Vibbe.
And I!

Tamberskelver.
For your first furlong, how do we advance?

Crawford.
By brutal means abused in every land,
The bomb.

Larum.
I'll hear no more of this: a haunt
For generous conspirators, my house
Affords no shelter to the evil thing
That kills and wounds at random.

Crawford.
Mistake me not.
No wanton anarchist am I who flings
A bomb, and flees, a terror-stricken fool
Hoping to terror-strike, knowing himself,
And thinking every man, a coward. I
Am he that never wasted word or deed;
So hold your tongues and listen with your brains.
The high explosive is the friend of man—
The one Messiah vouchsafed us hitherto.
Like all Messiahs crucified at first
(I mean in useless havoc thrown away)
By me it shall be honoured and employed
In splendid services. With fifty bombs
The people in an hour could overturn
All government in Europe; as we to-night
Intend in Thule.

Larum.
No, a thousand times!

Crawford.
Listen and understand.—Every third soldier
In Europe as in Thule, calls himself,
With some specific, a revolutionist.
A day's possession of a country's wealth,
And the most abject beggar in the land
Could buy a country's army, and straight upset
Established things. Now here in—

Rykke
[entering hurriedly].
Fire! The abbey!
King Mammon burns the abbey!

Larum.
Of Christianstadt?
The Abbey of Christianstandt?

Rykke.
On fire:—the square
By two battalions held; and Mammon, mad,
At a window, watching.

Larum.
Get back your breath.

Ribolt.
Is Mammon Surtur? Is Ragnarök begun?

Tamberskelver.
Fire's the bright seed of change! Mammon came down
To till the soil for my Teutonic myth.

Larum.
Now, Rykke, speak.

Rykke.
None fight the flames; the engines,
Picketed off, block up the streets, at hand
Should the fire travel: but the winds are dumb.
In every part the abbey burns.

Larum.
The abbey!
It must be saved! Who'll save it?

Rykke.
I, for one.

Stromer.
And I? Not for a new religion spick
And span, and I myself the God of it,
Would I exchange our abbey.

Larum.
Now we feel,
We think, we know: the very shrine of us!

Rykke.
The tombs and trophies of our ancestors!

[Goes out.
Stromer.
The mausoleum of our storied past!

[Goes out.
Larum.
A pier and sea-wall in the shifting sand
Against oblivion and the storm of time!

[Goes out.
Crawford.
The terror of the bomb, more than the fire,
A treacherous pretext, hails these fellows hence.

Tamberskelver.
Skin-deep, like beauty, are the souls of these.

Crawford.
But ours are in our entrails; anchored, stem
And stern, in flesh and blood; not to be driven
By gusts of sentiment.—Are you with us?

Tamberskelver.
I am with you to the overthrow of Mammon.
Thereafter for the Teuton and the God
We must evolve: to have conceived this great
Idea is to be sick with it until
It springs to life.

Crawford.
All great ideas help.
For me the world's an economic world:
Philosophy, morality, religion
Begin where I leave off,—that's in the clouds.

Ribolt.
We waste an opportunity. This fire
Engages Christianstadt. Your bomb to-night
Might catch the ear of Thule—a thunder peal
To shake us out of Mammon's tyranny.

Crawford.
Let it be tried to-night. I am tired of words;
Have reached that stage where, were I less than man,
I might go dropping bombs at random, just
To make a noise; but when I stake my life
I win or lose the world.—First to my house;
And there the means, the purpose and the plan
I'll lay before you all.

Ribolt.
Words never yet
Did anything: 'tis only deeds that do.

[They go out.