University of Virginia Library

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.