University of Virginia Library

ACT I

Scene I:

—A corridor in the Royal Palace. Prounice and Aurelian whispering together at a window.
Prounice.
What can I do? She loves this antichrist.

Aurelian.
But is not married yet?

Prounice.
Not married?—No.

Aurelian.
Not married! No!—Is it a thing in doubt?

Prounice.
It is as certain she is not a wife,
As undeniably she should be one.

Aurelian.
She should be one! Will you speak plainly, Prounice?

Prounice.
For these seven nights the king has slept with her.

Aurelian.
King Mammon—with the princess! I am recalled,
And on my scrupulous oath adjured to bring
The princess with me. Prounice, you are known
A woman of great counsel: help me here.

Prounice.
I cannot; for she loves; her own delight
Intoxicates her.

Aurelian.
Let me speak with her.

Prounice.
You never will persuade her.

Aurelian.
Let me try.

Prounice.
O, you may try! She passes presently.

Aurelian.
I'll take her home; for she was ravished, Prounice:
Unwed, the princess never had consented.

Prounice.
O, she was ravished! She is ravished now:
You never saw a being so wonderful
With happiness. She has conceived, she thinks.

Aurelian.
Conceived! and happy! Has God forgotten her?

Prounice.
Has she forgotten God!

Aurelian.
What? and the Isles?

Prounice.
Her past is past: the censorship of love
Obliterates memory.

Aurelian.
Is she crazed?

Prounice.
O, no!
But suddenly the dark distrustful bud
Has thrown its petals wide and bared its breast.
The princess is as like the maid she was
As a spread passion-flower, that bursts at once
With purple hue and honey fragrance, seems
The covert urn that held such pageantry.
I talk and talk who never talked before,
So absolute is love, so strong its spell
On all who come within its radiant power.

Guendolen enters.
Aurelian.
Not as ambassador, I come: as man
To woman. Hear me!

Guendolen.
Why so passionate,
Aurelian?—I listen since I meet you.—
Prounice!

Aurelian.
Not by her means; I bought a way.

Guendolen.
Say what you have to say, then.

Aurelian.
Circumstance
Dismantles state and all ostent of things,
The bare fact standing only. Shall I show
Your father suddenly the ugly truth,
And say, when he demands his daughter, “Sir,
The princess is an atheist's concubine;
She has forgotten—”

Guendolen.
Atheist and concubine!

Aurelian.
The judgment of religion and the world.—
Now that I see you, Princess, I am dumb.
I thought to overwhelm you, melt your heart
With memories of the Isles, your sea-girt home,
Your childhood, and your father's portrait drawn
In tears and heart's blood. Vanity of mine!—
An old man from the top of honour's stair
Flung headlong, hoping to remount in one
Compendious step. When I without you, Princess,
Before your father stand, the most disgraced
In presence of the saddest man on earth,
What can be said, what clement language tell—

Guendolen.
That I am Mammon's wife and Queen of Thule?
Not that sweet epithet of concubine
That came so unctuously: my heart and brain
Are in that swarthy sound dyed deep like fair
And wholesome flesh in wounded blood, all black
With bruises and with stripes; and in the name
You throw at him, the most contemptuous word
In Christian censure, atheist. But as I speak,
The menace and the stain, phantasmal both,
Undone and faded, cease their dull abuse:
I have come out of Christendom; no scorn
Can hurt me. To my dearest father say
I love him with a new ethereal love;
And when we meet I hope to take his hand,
And lead him with me through the Universe.

Aurelian.
Come out of Christendom! It maddens me:
Considerate, old, a courtier as I am,
This maddens me. Come out of Christendom?
Come out of day and night, come out of thought,
Come out of speech, come out of flesh and blood.
The western world is Christian; and Christendom
In God's good time will comprehend the earth.
Your very atheist is a Christian, since
Denial warrants that which is denied.
No Christian can come out of Christendom!

Guendolen.
Indeed it seems, and is, a miracle:
One step in utter darkness, utter fear,
And Christendom is not. It never was,
But as an aberration or a dream.
We can be neither Christian nor Antichristian,
Theist nor atheist, nor any name,
Mohammedan or Buddhist: we are earth
And air, carbon and phosphorus and sulphur,
The lightning, and the ether—like the stars.
We are the whole great universe itself
Become intelligent and capable.
The Universe in love!—that's what I am:
And you, poor Christian friend!—what did you say?—
An atheist's concubine. No need have I
To talk forgiveness: while you live and move
In Christendom you must impute all evil,
Being nothing till you come among the stars.
Then will you see all that was ever meant
By God and spirit, heaven, hell and other world
Drop off the Universe like a little scab
From a healed scratch upon a baby's cheek.
Good-bye, Aurelian. Add that I am happy,
When my great father asks you how I take
The tossing world.

Aurelian.
Good-bye. I shall report
Your happiness.

Guendolen
[gives Aurelian a ring].
And keep this to remind you
That Guendolen loves her friends however true.

Aurelian.
The barb is honeyed. Though I spoke what seemed
The truth, I wonder now, and doubt and muse,
And think there must be more than theory lodged
Within the husk of your material world.

Guendolen.
Come out of Christendom! One little step!

Aurelian.
A leap to me who am no athlete now.—
Good-bye again, Princess, and Queen of Thule.

Guendolen.
Good-bye, Aurelian.—Prounice, I want you now.

[They go out, Aurelian one way, and Guendolen and Prounice another.

Scene II:

—The drawing-room in the house of Ole Larum, the Mayor of Christianstadt. A joint committee of Inceptors of the Teutonic Religion, Reformers, and Neo-pagans. Present: Ole Larum, Tamberskelver, Ribolt, Crawford and others. Ole Larum presides; but the discussion is informal.
Tamberskelver.
The past is past, and Christendom dissolved;
The pious degradation of mankind
For ever ended. Therefore we begin
The cerebral secretion of a God,
And, uncreated, consciously create
Divinity in likeness of ourselves.
For me, I join with none who contravene
Inception of a new Teutonic myth.

Ribolt.
Inception of impossibility!
A myth becomes. Who now can crack a skull
That's kernelled with a goddess adult and armed,
Or integrate a man by synthesis
From elements whereof he is composed?
A mare's nest in a church with wind-eggs stored
Might tempt a brooding mind to incubate;
But he who stoutly sat to hatch a myth
Would doze till doomsday on the addled clutch.
A myth evolves, spontaneously preferred
As species are; matures, decays and dies.
The Christian myth, of senile gangrene sick,
Outlives its fame; Teutonic verity,
Though dispossessed in Thule, never died.
By fraud, by massacre, by torment, Heaven
Obscured our Asgard; Hell, our Nifelheim;
While Christ a-mumming came in Baldur's weeds.
But every day of that usurpature
Somewhere in Thule opposite the sun
A rainbow spanned the gulf, with lambent bridge
And seven-stringed arc of beauty diverse-hued,
The token of a covenant set up
Between the earth and Asgard, the shining way
To high Valhalla and the golden grove.
Vision and vigil in a night of dreams,
The turbulent centuries of Heaven and Hell,
Christ and his cross, are as they had not been.
Behind the phantom veil of Christendom
Unhappy ghosts of gods, the mournful Wanes
That were the deities of beaten men,
Frequented barren shores and stormy isles
In precincts and in purlieus of the sea
Beyond the reach of tidings; but at home,
In Thule, though we worshipped not, nor knew,
The thunder and the lightning kept their court;
Daily the Valkyrs galloped; Woden sat
Eternal and serene upon his throne
Watching the ages; Baldur slept in death
Heedless of him from Jewry who played his part;
The goddess of the mountains, Hulda, shone
With moonflowers wreathed; celestial Freya turned
Her golden spindle in the midnight sky;
And the earth-tree Igdrasil, watered well
By fateful ministrants, above the fount
Of Urd spread forth its branches evergreen
Where the high Regin sit and judge the world.

Tamberskelver.
I cannot listen longer! What state, what court
Does lightning keep? The meanest slave of man,
Compelled to prattle on a million dials
From post to post, and underneath the sea
Confined in cables; to whisper fact and fiction
Through wired and wireless winds, and gravely wear
In every land newspaper for a livery.

Ribolt.
Loki, the old-betrayer of the gods—

Tamberskelver.
Antique distraction! And your women-waves,
Your ladies of the lake, your river sprites;
Your water-music and your gurgling songs
That none could hear and unenchanted live?
Tortured in tubular boilers Neckan cries,
And Lorelei evaporates in steam.

Ribolt.
This servitude of gods in every age—

Tamberskelver.
You hear them in the tunnel and the fog:
The engine's whistle and the siren's shriek—
The Neckan and the Lorelei in pain.

Ribolt.
It may be that the gods—

Tamberskelver.
Delight in hell!

Ribolt.
I mean that Loki—

Tamberskelver.
And I swear by heaven,
And all your heavens, the time foretold has come—

Ribolt.
Though I must roar you down I will be heard!

Tamberskelver.
The bull out-bellowed Baldwin at the fair!

Ribolt.
And thunder silences the lion! Listen:—
Think you persistent fate, as sedulous
As virgin love, that, steeped in poverty,
Works double tides to furnish bridal gear,
Forbearing our tradition, would abdicate
Eternal power in Thule only; leave
The Aesir and the brood of Bergelmir
To stagnate in a dream because mankind
Had ceased to think of them? No, by the Norns,
That visit me with whispers ominous!
What error, what unworthiness befell
The water-wraiths and ladies of the lake
That they, imprisoned in the toil of men,
Should undergo intolerable pangs
(A recent penalty, remember) still
Remains unguessed, unpenetrated, unrevealed;
But that the swift and dazzling god of flame,
Loki, the lightning, should be bound once more
For new divine iniquity requires
No revelation to interpret. Foe
Of gods and men, his former blasphemies,
For which he lay strung on a pinnacled cliff
As on a giant rack with spikes engrailed,
While venom splashed upon his working brow
From the old serpent's jaws and furrowed fangs:
I say, his former expiated guilt
Was innocence and sanctity beside
The self-abandonment and utter sin
Atoned for now in execrable bonds.

Tamberskelver.
What hideous sin was that?

Larum.
Why here's a man
As passionate for things that never were
As we concerning those that are to be!

Tamberskelver.
This sin of Loki's, new, original,
Unparagoned?

Ribolt.
Betrayal, more obscene
Than any legend tells of Ahriman,
Of Satan, or the sons of Ouranos;
For Loki's golden lightning enchanted men,
Possessing science with the thought of him
As all in all; substance and force and life
In multitudinous forms, and sifted out,
By micrometric thought that can divide
The invisible, in nests of polar orbs,
Electrons, building up the atomic stuff
Whereof the universe consists: the gods,
The dwarfs, the giants, the very Regin trace
Descent, forsooth, from Loki, and live in him!
For which unhallowed treason Woden sent
The felon god to penitential toil
In mundane transit, fabric and lantern-work;
But chiefly in the labour of the net
He was the first to weave: now the strong mesh
Is metal and the draught sweeps land and sea,
A mammoth spider-web beaded with towns;
While Loki in the wires a thousand ways
At every moment torn, obeys a touch,
A whisper, carrying news, the slave of slaves,
The lackey of the liars of the world.

Crawford.
I marvel—and I marvel! All the gods,
By time devoured, are with the draff of things.
Cull from the evening air the rose's scent
In stoppered crystals for the market-place;
From earthshine and the dusk condense a star
To rival day with shadows of itself;
Invent alembics, menstruums, furnaces
That shall distil the light of yesterday
And brim with dewy rainbows cups of gold;
But never think to re-establish God,
Revive decayed mythology, or gloze
With renderings of the hour an ancient creed.

Tamberskelver.
Attempt instead to scribble on the sky
A prophecy with last year's thunderbolt!
But that new racial myth which we incept,
Uncatholic and Teutonic, alone amid
Opinions, nostrums, ologies and isms
That work the world with internecine thought,
Keeps promise, pregnant with futurity.

Ribolt.
Pregnant with maggots and the sepulchre!—

Larum.
I stop this quarrel—and the meeting. Come
Again at night; and in the interim think
A tortuous passage out of personal aims
To the high sea of common cause against
Gigantic tyranny.—Let no one speak.

[The meeting breaks up in silence.]

Scene III:

—A room in the Royal Palace. Florimond is seated at a table with papers, etc. Oswald stands moodily at the fire-place with his elbow on the mantel-piece. Mammon is at the window.
Mammon.
The parks and squares of Christianstadt thickset
With shining tents! From east to west one camp
Wherever nature, elbowing brick and stone,
Throughout the city lights her urban haunts
With lilac and the chestnut's lamp of pearl!

Florimond.
The powers have all withdrawn their embassies.

Mammon.
I know.— [Leaves the window]
I thought it, willed it, and I took
My army in my fist to batter down
The churches, scourge the Christians hence and carve
The world in my own image; but my grasp
Was empty; time and space withheld the huge
Briarean implement an army is,
Scattered abroad in barracks and in forts
To trick me out of prompt omnipotence.
That was an agony:—seven useless days
With Christendom to war upon, and one
Brief life wherein to work its overthrow.
If I could live a thousand thousand years,
Or crush a million into every day!

Florimond.
Aurelian, desperate, hangs about the court,
Unwilling to return without the princess.

Mammon.
What princess, sir?

Florimond.
Without the queen, I mean.

Mammon.
Say what you mean.—Aurelian shall return
Without my wife.

Florimond.
The well-born and the rich
With flights of humbler folk depart the land.

Mammon.
They would; but I restrain them. None can quit
The realm without my signature and seal:
The laxity that marred my father's reign
I've medicine for.

Florimond.
Why was this hidden, King?
Unless your faithful counsellors understand
The whole executive they cannot aid.

Mammon.
I have no counsellors: only obedient friends
Who love me and whom I cherish; and the rest—
My instruments, my music and musicians,
The clay, the wheel, the pots I break and make.

Florimond.
I must be faithful:—you are deluded, King;
Your people mock you.

Mammon.
Mock my speech? I know:
My great deliverance in St. Olaf's Hall
Is travestied by every café-wit,
While greasy waiters behind their napkins grin.
Therefore my army camps in Christianstadt
That deeds may thrive where oratory fails.
Yet will I speak:—speak?—speak again, and match
My universe with every type and grade.—
What day is this?

Florimond.
Of the week?—Friday, King Mammon.

Mammon
[consulting a diary].
Friday:—To-day a herd of harlots come,
With outcasts from the pauper refuges.
I have determined how to deal with these.
I'll see them now.—Is Sigtrig Harpur there?

Florimond.
Not yet, King Mammon.

Mammon.
Send for him, Florimond.
I want him and his harlots and his scroyles.
I long to face the offscourings of the world,
And to confront them with the Universe.

Florimond goes out.
Mammon.
Among the showrooms of the palace, Oswald,
Is one I mean to close.

Oswald.
Which room, King Mammon?

Mammon.
Perdition's antepast and hell on earth,
The torture-chamber.

Oswald.
And the gentle world
Will thank you. Shows of horror should be shut;
They vex the feeble, vitiate the strong.

Mammon.
You think so.—All the thumbscrews, headscrews, grills,
The rack, strappado—these are as they were
Three years ago; demonstrable and ready?

Oswald.
The keeper triumphs in his occupation;
The turnstile goes all day.

Mammon.
The keeper's joy
Will soon transcend a dilettant delight,
And the locked turnstile on its bearings rust.
Have we a draught, or cowardice of men
For torture adequate and capable?
I mean,—to use the levers of the rack
With living bones and sinews, flesh and blood
To pull upon?

Oswald.
There are such men, no doubt.

Mammon.
Where are they to be found, such warty souls?

Oswald.
In prison and in Bedlam.

Mammon.
Criminals
And madmen?—Ah, you mean the warders! Yes;
They'd have the heart to turn a thumbscrew still:
I had forgotten. I want some six to-day—
Six prison-warders in the torture-room.

Oswald.
You mean to torture some one? O, King Mammon,
Consider and consider! Men may heap
Enormities upon their consciences
And lightly carry everything, as brides
Their customary wreaths of blossom wear!
But with the very pressure—

Mammon.
Of the bridegroom
There comes in time a string of chubby brats.
You misconceive again. I in myself
Will show mankind how dead are all the lies
The other-worldings forged and foisted in
Amidst the immaculate material truth
Like false decretals in the canon law.
Men may do what they list without a thought:
Matter of brain and blood, good food, good drink,
Employment of the muscles, of the nerves,
With high imaginings, superb designs,
Superb exploits, sound sleep and pleasant dreams.

Oswald.
But when the stagnant blood rots in the brain
Imprisoned fancy dies; when food and drink
Are routine only, not a joyful art,
Compunction sours the wine and in the dish
A rancid horror crawls; when sleep rebels,
And dreams turn traitor, like a homeless cat
Remorse keeps up a mewing in the night,
And all the silken fabric of the nerves
Becomes a cobweb, tangled in the coils
Whereof the conscience like a flesh-fly sings
A thin and aguish note of agony.

Mammon.
You speak of what you know! Have you no sleep?

Oswald.
No wink of sleep. There's blood upon my soul—
Not for its cleansing.

Mammon.
To shed blood is to cleanse:
The world is cleaner since my father died,
And sweeter by my brother's life outpoured,
Like fragrance from a vessel richly chased
That bursts asunder with its weight of balm.—
You sleep alone?

Oswald.
I lie alone: you know
I am not married.

Mammon.
Married! What of that?
You should have some sweet woman: wantonly
I do not mean, but needfully and highly:—
'Tis new to me and wonderful:—stop up
The body anywhere, at once the soul,
Which is the body, sickens and torments
With questionings and qualms and quodlibets
The grey rind of the brain—uneasiness
Supposed of old the Holy Spirit's work.

Oswald.
O king, you scorn my misery!

Mammon.
Not so;
I mean to help you. O, I undertake
The cure of all distress, however deep
The mortifying wound, however foul
The immaterial gangrene! Let me know:
Physicians must be told the hateful things
Men fear to tell themselves.

Oswald.
I underlie
A heaped, downbearing, brooding heaviness
No fantasy can shift, no thought explode.
Far as the farthest in our prodigal
And boyish hardihood of mind I sped,
Stripped to the marrow in the exodus
From Christendom and zeal to try a fall
Naked against the Universe. All that
Was holiday and playground! In the world's
Reverberating fire my adamant
Buckles like parchment, and my unarmed soul
Cries out for respite and the hearth I left;
To feel that right is right and wrong is wrong;
To choose the better part, and repossess
My own approval and the world's goodwill.

Mammon.
The world's goodwill no man should hanker for;
You have your own approval at command!

Oswald.
Not at command—not now at my command!
Since I consented in the prince's death,
Conspired to make the world believe a lie,
And broached the blood of Thule I am sunk
In sin up to the lips: upon its wash
I choke; its fume and spray nauseate and blind me:
Palsied, inhibited, accursed, forbid,
I shall go mad unless I can repent.

Mammon.
Sin, Oswald? Sin's a costive habit chiefly;
And doubtless prayer promotes catharsis: prayer,
And cascara sagrada; clysters, pills:
To purge is to repent. Love, too, is sin:
A vent plugged up and sealed with celibacy
To keep contrition at the boiling-point.
You cannot laugh? Matter of mirth mankind
Should make all sin henceforth—inviting still
The lofty mood that deems our daily deeds
Eternally momentous.

Oswald.
Can I live
Beneath the intolerable weight of care
That crushes me!

Mammon.
Cast it on me! I need
You, Oswald: conscience such as yours,
With ardent power; such scruple with such daring,
A rare alloy I have assayed, provide
The very mettle of a minister.
The strength and fineness of your nature claim
My interest, my affection, and my faith.

Oswald.
But every nerve is quick with sense of sin.

Mammon.
A sense of sin is rust: go on to sin,
And make the sense of it a constant joy:
The sin's the man; keep your soul bright with sin;
For oxidation of the blood and brain,
Unused in psychic function or physical,
Corrodes the mind and stains with iron-mould
The dazzling web of thought even in the loom.—
Have you a handsome lady that you love?

Oswald.
I am betrothed to—

Mammon.
Marry her to-day,
And in your true love's arms be purged of sin!
O marry, marry, marry! By three great vents
The conscious universe renews itself:—
By that most honourable alvine vent
(Considered shameful once, but now by me
Exalted) that discards triumphantly
Fermented refuse; by that exquisite
Secernent carrying off exhausted blood,
Muscle and wear and tear of body and brain—
The Ganges of the soul, the sacred stream
That floats our dead away, dead thought, dead power,
The substance of the stars; and that third vent
The first among its peers, the vent of love,
Not like the other issues, desolate
Escapes of death, but, being the fount of life,
A secret ecstasy that two may share,
Dissolving out the universe to be
The seed and substance of posterity:
A vent of love, a thoroughfare of life
Whose admirable presence in the midst
Could graciously ennoble all the rest
Were every function not itself a lord
In its demesne. So, marry, marry, marry!
Amassed maturity that clogs the mind
Is sin essential: set your life abroach;
Have all the fountains playing, the lanterns lit;
Give matter scope; let the whole tide of things
Throng through you; be the channel and the bridge,
The vein, the artery and the rhythmic heart
The rapid current of the ether loves—
A man with every fibre strained to do
And every faculty in exercise.

Oswald.
I have the king's command to marry?

Mammon.
Now!
Choose out the warders first: I mean to torture
Gottlieb—

Oswald.
O king and friend, you will not do it!

Mammon.
Will I not! And you shall share the adventure;
Thereafter in your bride's embrace become
A sinless virgin. Love's the greatest thing!
Have you not wondered sometimes how men live
Disgraced, dishonoured, shamed, uncharactered?
It is by love: in the world's sight they seem
Unhappiest recrement, but every night
Their faithful women take them in their arms,
And all the past and each day's infamy,
Being evicted in the vent of love,
The door stands open for the universe
To enter and renew them body and soul.
O men are great! The meanest man is great!
How great might men not be! How great I'll make them!
Marry the lady, Oswald, and at night,
After the barbarous festival of the rack,
Unlock the floodgate of the Universe
That thunders for deliverance form and power
In all the sex of plants and beasts and men.

Oswald.
O King, you overwhelm me!

Mammon.
Do my will:
And lay your sins on me if courage fails:
It is the right of kings to bear the brunt.—
My hand:—No; clasp it: we are friends:
Who does my will is mine, a piece of me.