Home > Authors Index > August Strindberg > Road to Damascus: A Trilogy > This page
The Road to Damascus: A Trilogy, a play by August Strindberg |
||
Part 3 - Act 3 - Scene 2. Rocky Landscape On The Mountain |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ PART III ACT III SCENE II. ROCKY LANDSCAPE ON THE MOUNTAIN [Higher up the mountain; among the clouds a rocky landscape with a bog round it. The MOTHER on a rock, climbing until she disappears into the cloud. The STRANGER stops, bewildered.] STRANGER. Oh, Mother, Mother! Why are you leaving me? At the very moment when my loveliest dream was on the point of fulfilment! TEMPTER (coming forward). What have you been dreaming? Tell me! STRANGER. My dearest hope, most secret desire and last prayer! Reconciliation with mankind, through a woman. TEMPTER. Through a woman who taught you to hate. STRANGER. Yes, because she bound me to earth--like the round shot a slave drags on his foot, so that he can't escape. TEMPTER. You talk of woman. Always woman. STRANGER. Yes. Woman. The beginning and the end--for us men anyhow. In relationship to one another they are nothing. TEMPTER. So that's it; nothing in themselves; but everything for us, through us! Our honour and our shame; our greatest joy, our deepest pain; our redemption and our fall; our wages and our punishment; our strength and our weakness. STRANGER. Our shame! You've said so. Explain this riddle to me, you who're wise. Whenever I appeared in public arm in arm with a woman, my wife, who was beautiful and whom I adored, I felt ashamed of my own weakness. Explain that riddle to me. TEMPTER. You felt ashamed? I don't know why. STRANGER. Can't you answer? You, of all men? TEMPTER. No, I can't. But I too always suffered when I was with my wife in company, because I felt she was being soiled by men's glances, and I through her. STRANGER. And when she did the shameful deed, you were dishonoured. Why? TEMPTER. The Eve of the Greeks was called Pandora, and Zeus created her out of wickedness, in order to torture men and master them. As a wedding gift she received a box, containing all the unhappiness of the world. Perhaps the riddle of this sphinx can more easily be guessed, if it's seen from. Olympus, rather than from the pleasure garden of Paradise. Its full meaning will never be known to us. Though I'm as able as you. (Pause.) And, by the way, I can still enjoy the greatest pleasure creation ever offered! Go you and do likewise! STRANGER. You mean Satan's greatest illusion! For the woman who seems most beautiful to me, can seem horrible to others! Even for me, when she's angry, she can be uglier than any other woman. Then what is beauty? TEMPTER. A semblance, a reflection of your own goodness! (He puts his hand over his mouth.) Curses on it! I let it out that time. And now the devil's loose.... STRANGER. Devil? Yes. But if she's a devil, how can a devil make me desire virtue and goodness? For that's what happened to me when I first saw her beauty; I was seized with a longing to be like her, and so to be worthy of her. To begin with I tried to be by taking exercise, having baths, using cosmetics and wearing good clothes; but I only made myself ridiculous. Then I began from within; I accustomed myself to thinking good thoughts, speaking well of people and acting nobly! And one day, when my outward form had moulded itself on the soul within, I became her likeness, as she said. And it was she who first uttered those wonderful words: I love you! How can a devil ennoble us; how can a spirit of hell fill us with goodness; how...? No, she was an angel! A fallen angel, of course, and her love a broken ray of that great light--that great eternal light--that warms and loves.... That loves.... TEMPTER. What, old friend, must we stand here like two youths and spell out the riddles of love? CONFESSOR (coming in). What's this chatterer saying? He's talked away his whole life; and never done anything. TEMPTER. I wanted to be a priest, but had no vocation. CONFESSOR. Whilst you're waiting for it, help me to find a drunkard who's drowned himself in the bog. It must be near here, because I've been following his tracks till now. TEMPTER. Then it's the man lying beneath that brushwood there. CONFESSOR (picking up some twigs, and disclosing a fully clothed corpse, with a white, young face.) Yes, it is! (He grows pensive as he looks at the dead man.) TEMPTER. Who was he? CONFESSOR. It's extraordinary! TEMPTER. He must have been a good-looking man. And quite young. CONFESSOR. Oh no. He was fifty-four. And when I saw him a week ago, he looked like sixty-four. His eyes were as yellow as the slime of a garden snail and bloodshot from drunkenness; but also because he'd shed tears of blood over his vices and misery. His face was brown and swollen like a piece of liver on a butcher's table, and he hid himself from men's eyes out of shame--up to the end he seems to have been ashamed of the broken mirror of his soul, for he covered his face with brushwood. I saw him fighting his vices; I saw him praying to God on his knees for deliverance, after he'd been dismissed from his post as a teacher.... But... Well, now he's been delivered. And look, now the evil's been taken from him, the good and beautiful that was in him has again become apparent; that's what he looked like when he was nineteen! (Pause.) This is sin--imposed as a punishment. Why? That we don't know. 'He who hateth the righteous, shall himself be guilty!' So it is written, as an indication. I knew him when he was young! And now I remember... he was always very angry with those who never drank. He criticised and condemned, and always set his cult of the grape on the altar of earthly joys! Now he's been set free. Free from sin, from shame, from ugliness. Yes, in death he looks beautiful. Death is the deliverer! (To the STRANGER.) Do you hear that, Deliverer, you who couldn't even free a drunkard from his evil passions!
CONFESSOR. So I think. You'll have new matter for argument. TEMPTER. Now I'll leave you gentlemen for a while. But soon we'll meet again. (He goes out.) CONFESSOR. I saw you just now with a woman! So there are still temptations? STRANGER. Not the kind you mean. CONFESSOR. Then what kind? STRANGER. I could still imagine a reconciliation between mankind and woman--through woman herself! And indeed, through that woman who was my wife and has now become what I once held her to be having been purified and lifted up by sorrow and need. But... CONFESSOR. But what? STRANGER. Experience teaches; the nearer, the further off: the further from one another, the nearer one can be. CONFESSOR. I've always known that--it was known by Dante, who all his life possessed the soul of Beatrice; and Beethoven, who was united from afar with Therese von Brunswick, knew it, though she was the wife of another! STRANGER. And yet! Happiness is only to be found in her company. CONFESSOR. Then stay with her. STRANGER. You're forgetting one thing: we're divorced. CONFESSOR. Good! Then you can begin a new marriage. And it'll promise all the more, because both of you are new people. STRANGER. Do you think anyone would marry us? CONFESSOR. I, for instance? That's asking too much. STRANGER. Yes. I'd forgotten! But I daresay someone could be found. It's another thing to get a home together.... CONFESSOR. You're sometimes lucky, even if you won't see it. There's a small house down there by the river; it's quite new and the owner's never even seen it. He was an Englishman who wanted to marry; but at the last moment _she_ broke off the engagement. It was built by his secretary, and neither of the engaged couple ever set eyes on it. It's quite intact, you see! STRANGER. IS it to let? CONFESSOR. Yes. STRANGER. Then I'll risk it. And I'll try to begin life all over again. CONFESSOR. Then you'll go down? STRANGER. Out of the clouds. Below the sun's shining, and up here the air's a little thin. CONFESSOR. Good! Then we must part--for a time. STRANGER. Where are you going? CONFESSOR. Up. STRANGER. And I down; to the earth, the mother with the soft bosom and warm lap.... CONFESSOR. Until you long once more for what's hard as stone, as cold and as white... Farewell! Greetings to those below! (Each of them goes of in the direction he has chosen.) [Curtain.] _ |
||