University of Virginia Library

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.