CENTAURS

CENTAURS

The usual chattering audience of our theaters is waiting for the curtains to part on a performance of Ibsen’s The Master Builder. Presently the lights are lowered to a colored darkness, and the warm glow of the footlights begins again the ancient magic. The orchestra draws its bows soothingly to a gradual close and files out gropingly into the rabbit-hutch prepared for it, leaving perhaps a sentimental viola-player staring upward into the darkness. Suddenly the curtains are parted by an earnest young man, who stares into the shadowy audience and starts, with some difficulty, to address it.

SHELLEY

My name is Shelley. I ... I am told that some of you may have heard of me, may even know my poems,—or some of my poems. I cannot imagine what they may seem like to you who live in this world that ... that is, I have just seen your streets for the first time,—your machines, your buildings, and especially the machines with which you talk to one another. My poems must seem very strange in a world of such things.

[Awkward pause.]

Well, I wanted to say something about this play, but I don’t know how to put it into words for you. You see, I feel that, in part, I wrote this play.

[With sudden relief calling back through the curtains.]

Hilda! Will you help me a moment?

HILDA WANGEL’S VOICE

Yes, I’m coming.

SHELLEY

[Constrainedly, to the audience.]

A friend of mine.

HILDA

[Appears in her mountaineering costume of the First Act, carrying an alpenstock. Vigorously, to the audience.]

He promised to do this by himself, but he has gotten into difficulties. Have you told them that you wrote it?

SHELLEY

I tried to. It didn’t sound reasonable.

HILDA

Well, you were able to explain it to me. Help me to persuade Papa to come out here.

[She disappears.]

SHELLEY

Hendrick, for my sake.

HILDA’S VOICE

There, did you hear that? For his sake, he said. Miss Fosli, will you kindly push forward the wicker settee from the last act? Thank you.

[A wicker settee suddenly appears.]

Now, Papa.

[Hilda reappears leading the dramatist. Ibsen is smiling sternly through his spectacles and through his fringe of up-curling white whiskers.]

Now sit down and Shelley will begin again.

IBSEN

Hurry, young man. My beautiful play is ready to begin. The kingdom is on the table, the nurseries are empty, and this house is full of unconverted people.

HILDA

[Touching his shoe with the tip of her alpenstock.]

Hush, Papa. Let him go about it in his own way. Have you told them about the poem you were about to write when you died?

SHELLEY

No.

[To the audience.]

Ladies and Gentlemen, on the day I died,—drowned in the Mediterranean,—I was full of a poem to be called The Death of a Centaur, that I did not have time to put on paper.

HILDA

You forgot to say that it was a very good poem.

SHELLEY

I couldn’t say that.

HILDA

You said it to me.

[Turning to the audience.]

You should know that this young man had come to a time when everything he wrote was valuable. He was as sure to write great poems as a good apple tree is to give good apples.

SHELLEY

Perhaps it would have been one of the better ones. At all events, it was never written....

IBSEN

[Rising excitedly and stamping his feet as though they had snow on them.]

And I claim that I wrote it. The poem hung for a while above the Mediterranean, and then drifted up toward the Tyrol and I caught it and wrote it down. And it is The Master Builder.

HILDA

Now you must sit down, Papa, and keep calm. We must reason this out calmly. In the first place, both are certainly about centaurs. What do you say, Shelley?

SHELLEY

Well, it is not a strange idea, or a new one, that the stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed with words. It is a truth that Plato would have understood that the mere language, the words of a masterpiece are the least of its offerings. Nay, in the world we have come into now, the languages of the planet have no value; but the impulse, the idea of “Comus” is a miracle, even in heaven. Let you remember this when you regret the work that has been lost through this war that has been laid upon your treasurable young men. The work they might have done is still with you, and will yet find its way into your lives and into your children’s lives.

IBSEN

Enough, enough! You will be revealing all the mysteries soon. Enough has been said to prove that The Death of a Centaur and The Master Builder are the same poem. Get in with you, children. The play is ready to start. Solness sits with his head in his hands and the harps are in the air.

[He goes behind the curtains. Shelley lingers a moment; a shadow has fallen across his face.]

HILDA

[Laying her hand on his arm.]

What is the matter?

SHELLEY

That reminded me ... of another poem ... I did not write down.