The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays by Gordon Bottomley et al. (free ebooks romance novels .txt) 📖

(Mingled cries of women are heard.)

      GUNNAR (outside)
  Samm, it is well: be still.
  Women, be quiet; loose me; get from my feet,
  Or I will have the hound to wipe me clear.

      STEINVOR (recovering herself)
  Women are sent to spy.

(The sound of a door being opened is heard. GUNNAR enters from the left, followed by three beggar-women, BIARTEY, JOFRID, and GUDFINN. They hobble and limp, and are swathed in shapeless, nameless rags which trail about their feet; BIARTEY'S left sleeve is torn completely away, leaving her arm bare and mud-smeared; the others' skirts are torn, and JOFRID'S gown at the neck; GUDFINN wears a felt hood buttoned under her chin; the others' faces are almost hid in falling tangles of grey hair. Their faces are shriveled and weather-beaten, and BIARTEY'S mouth is distorted by two front teeth that project like tusks.)

                        GUNNAR
  Get in to the light.
  Yea, has he mouthed ye?… What men send ye here?
  Who are ye? Whence come ye? What do ye seek?
  I think no mother ever suckled you:
  You must have dragged your roots up in waste places
  One foot at once, or heaved a shoulder up—

      BIARTEY (interrupting him)
  Out of the bosoms of cairns and standing stones.
  I am Biartey: she is Jofrid: she is Gudfinn:
  We are lone women known to no man now.
  We are not sent: we come.

                        GUNNAR
  Well, you come.
  You appear by night, rising under my eyes
  Like marshy breath or shadows on the wall;
  Yet the hound scented you like any evil
  That feels upon the night for a way out.
  And do you, then, indeed wend alone?
  Came you from the West or the sky-covering North
  Yet saw no thin steel moving in the dark?

                        BIARTEY
  Not West, not North: we slept upon the East,
  Arising in the East where no men dwell.
  We have abided in the mountain places,
  Chanted our woes among the black rocks crouching.

  (GUDFINN joins her in a sing-song utterance.)
  From the East, from the East we drove and the wind waved us,
  Over the heaths, over the barren ashes.
  We are old, our eyes are old, and the light hurts us,
  We have skins on our eyes that part alone to the star-light.
  We stumble about the night, the rocks tremble
  Beneath our trembling feet; black sky thickens,
  Breaks into clots, and lets the moon upon us.

  (JOFRID joins her voice to the voices of the other two.)
  Far from the men who fear us, men who stone us,
  Hiding, hiding, flying whene'er they slumber,
  High on the crags we pause, over the moon-gulfs;
  Black clouds fall and leave us up in the moon-depths
  Where wind flaps our hair and cloaks like fin-webs,
  Ay, and our sleeves that toss with our arms and the cadence
  Of quavering crying among the threatening echoes.
  Then we spread our cloaks and leap down the rock-stairs,
  Sweeping the heaths with our skirts, greying the dew-bloom,
  Until we feel a pool on the wide dew stretches
  Stilled by the moon or ruffling like breast-feathers,
  And, with grey sleeves cheating the sleepy herons,
  Squat among them, pillow us there and sleep.
  But in the harder wastes we stand upright,
  Like splintered rain-worn boulders set to the wind
  In old confederacy, and rest and sleep.

(HALLGERD'S women are huddled together and clasping each other.)

                        ODDNY
  What can these women be who sleep like horses,
  Standing up in the darkness? What will they do?

                        GUNNAR
  Ye wail like ravens and have no human thoughts.
  What do ye seek? What will ye here with us?

      BIARTEY (as all three cower suddenly)
   Succour upon this terrible journeying.
  We have a message for a man in the West,
  Sent by an old man sitting in the East.
  We are spent, our feet are moving wounds, our bodies
  Dream of themselves and seem to trail behind us
  Because we went unfed down in the mountains.
  Feed us and shelter us beneath your roof,
  And put us over the Markfleet, over the channels.
  We are weak old women: we are beseeching you.

                        GUNNAR
  You may bide here this night, but on the morrow
  You shall go over, for tramping shameless women
  Carry too many tales from stead to stead—
  And sometimes heavier gear than breath and lies.
  These women will tell the mistress all I grant you;
  Get to the fire until she shall return.

                        BIARTEY
  Thou art a merciful man and we shall thank thee.

  (GUNNAR goes out again to the left. The old women approach the
  young ones gradually.)
  Little ones, do not doubt us. Could we hurt you?
  Because we are ugly must we be bewitched?

                        STEINVOR
  Nay, but bewitch us.

                        BIARTEY
  Not in a litten house:
  Not ere the hour when night turns on itself
  And shakes the silence: not while ye wake together.
  Sweet voice, tell us, was that verily Gunnar?

                        STEINVOR
  Arrh—do not touch me, unclean flyer-by-night:
  Have ye birds' feet to match such bat-webbed fingers?

                        BIARTEY
  I am only a cowed curst woman who walks with death;
  I will crouch here. Tell us, was it Gunnar?

                        ODDNY
  Yea, Gunnar surely. Is he not big enough
  To fit the songs about him?

                        BIARTEY
                              He is a man.
  Why will his manhood urge him to be dead?
  We walk about the whole old land at night,
  We enter many dales and many halls:
  And everywhere is talk of Gunnar's greatness,
  His slayings and his fate outside the law.
  The last ship has not gone: why will he tarry?

                        ODDNY
  He chose a ship, but men who rode with him
  Say that his horse threw him upon the shore,
  His face toward the Lithe and his own fields;
  As he arose he trembled at what he gazed on
  (Although those men saw nothing pass or meet them)
  And said … What said he, girls?

                        ASTRID
                                   "Fair is the Lithe:
  I never thought it was so far, so fair.
  Its corn is white, its meadows green after mowing.
  I will ride home again and never leave it."

                        ODDNY
  'Tis an unlikely tale: he never said it.
  No one could mind such things in such an hour.
  Plainly he saw his fetch come down the sands,
  And knew he need not seek another country
  And take that with him to walk upon the deck
  In night and storm.

                        GUDFINN
                    He, he, he! No man speaks thus.

                        JOFRID
  No man, no man: he must be doomed somewhere.

                        BIARTEY
  Doomed and fey, my sisters…. We are too old,
  Yet I'd not marvel if we outlasted him.
  Sisters, that is a fair fierce girl who spins….
  My fair fierce girl, you could fight—but can you ride?
  Would you not shout to be riding in a storm?
  Ah—h, girls learnt riding well when I was a girl,
  And foam rides on the breakers as I was taught….
  My fair fierce girl, tell me your noble name.

                        ODDNY
  My name is Oddny.

                        BIARTEY
  Oddny, when you are old
  Would you not be proud to be no man's purse-string,
  But wild and wandering and friends with the earth?
  Wander with us and learn to be old yet living.
  We'd win fine food with you to beg for us.

                        STEINVOR
  Despised, cast out, unclean, and loose men's night-bird.

                        ODDNY
  When I am old I shall be some man's friend,
  And hold him when the darkness comes….

                        BIARTEY
  And mumble by the fire and blink….
  Good Oddny, let me spin for you awhile,
  That Gunnar's house may profit by his guesting:
  Come, trust me with your distaff….

                        ODDNY
                                     Are there spells
  Wrought on a distaff?

                        STEINVOR
                             Only by the Norns,
  And they'll not sit with human folk to-night.

                        ODDNY
  Then you may spin all night for what I care;
  But let the yarn run clean from knots and snarls,
  Or I shall have the blame when you are gone.

      BIARTEY (taking the distaff)
  Trust well the aged knowledge of my hands;
  Thin and thin do I spin, and the thread draws finer.

(She sings as she spins.)

          They go by three.
          And the moon shivers;
          The tired waves flee,
          The hidden rivers
          Also flee.

          I take three strands;
          There is one for her,
          One for my hands,
          And one to stir
          For another's hands.

          I twine them thinner,
          The dead wool doubts;
          The outer is inner,
          The core slips out….

(HALLGERD reënters by the dais door, holding a pair of shears.)

                        HALLGERD
  What are these women, Oddny? Who let them in?

      BIARTEY (who spins through all that follows)
  Lady, the man of fame who is your man
  Gave us his peace to-night, and that of his house.
  We are blown beggars tramping about the land,
  Denied a home for our evil and vagrant hearts;
  We sought this shelter when the first dew soaked us,
  And should have perished by the giant hound
  But Gunnar fought it with his eyes and saved us.
  That is a strange hound, with a man's mind in it.

      HALLGERD (seating herself in the high-seat)
  It is an Irish hound, from that strange soil
  Where men by day walk with unearthly eyes
  And cross the veils of the air, and are not men
  But fierce abstractions eating their own hearts
  Impatiently and seeing too much to be joyful.
  If Gunnar welcomed ye, ye may remain.

                        BIARTEY
  She is a fair free lady, is she not?
  But that was to be looked for in a high one
  Who counts among her fathers the bright Sigurd,
  The bane of Fafnir the Worm, the end of the god-kings;
  Among her mothers Brynhild, the lass of Odin,
  The maddener of swords, the night-clouds' rider.
  She has kept sweet that father's lore of bird-speech,
  She wears that mother's power to cheat a god.
  Sisters, she does well to be proud.

                        JOFRID and GUDFINN
                                           Ay, well.

      HALLGERD (shaping the tissue with her shears)
  I need no witch to tell I am of rare seed,
  Nor measure my pride nor praise it. Do I not know?
  Old women, ye are welcomed: sit with us,
  And while we stitch tell us what gossip runs—
  But if strife might be warmed by spreading it.

                        BIARTEY
  Lady, we are hungered; we were lost
  All night among the mountains of the East;
  Clouds of the cliffs come down my eyes again.
  I pray you let some thrall bring us to food.

                        HALLGERD
  Ye get nought here. The supper is long over;
  The women shall not let ye know the food-house,
  Or ye'll be thieving in the night. Ye are idle,
  Ye suck a man's house bare and seek another.
  'Tis bed-time; get to sleep—that stills much hunger.

                        BIARTEY
  Now it is easy to be seeing what spoils you.
  You were not grasping or ought but over warm
  When Sigmund, Gunnar's kinsman, guested here.
  You followed him, you were too kind with him,
  You lavished Gunnar's treasure and gear on him
  To draw him on, and did not call that thieving.
  Ay, Sigmund took your feuds on him and died
  As Gunnar shall. Men have much harm by you.

                        HALLGERD
  Now have I gashed the golden cloth awry:
  'Tis ended—a ruin of clouts—the worth of the gift—
  Bridal dish-clouts—nay, a bundle of flame
  I'll burn it to a breath of its old queen's ashes:
  Fire, O fire, drink up.

  (She throws the shreds of the veil on the glowing embers: they
  waft to ashes with a brief high flare. She goes to JOFRID.)

                          There's one of you
  That holds her head in a bird's sideways fashion:
  I know that reach o' the chin.—What's under thy hair?—

(She fixes JOFRID with her knee, and lifts her hair.)

  Pfui,'tis not hair, but sopped and rotting moss—
  A thief, a thief indeed.—And twice a thief.
  She has no ears. Keep thy hooked fingers still
  While thou art here, for if I miss a mouthful
  Thou shalt miss all thy nose. Get up, get up;
  I'll lodge ye with the mares.

      JOFRID (starting up)
                                Three men, three men,
  Three men have wived you, and for all you gave them
  Paid with three blows upon a cheek once kissed—
  To every man a blow—and the last blow
  All the land knows was won by thieving food….
  Yea, Gunnar is ended by the theft and the thief.
  Is it not told that when you first grew tall,
  A false rare girl, Hrut your own kinsman said,
  "I know not whence thief's eyes entered our blood."
  You have more ears, yet are you not my sister?
  Our evil vagrant heart is deeper in you.

      HALLGERD (snatching the distaff from BIARTEY)
  Out and be gone, be gone. Lie with the mountains,
  Smother among the thunder; stale dew mould you.
  Outstrip the hound, or he shall so embrace you….

                        BIARTEY
  Now is all done … all done … and all your deed.
  She broke the thread, and it shall not join again.
  Spindle, spindle, the coiling weft shall dwindle;
  Leap on the fire and burn, for all is done.

  (She casts the spindle upon the fire, and stretches her hands
  toward it.)

      HALLGERD (attacking them with the distaff)
  Into the night…. Dissolve….

      BIARTEY (as the three rush toward the door)
                                      Sisters, away:
  Leave the woman