A Scene From the First Act

A drama of the awakening of the nearer Orient. In this scene Nasrulla appears as the royal lover of the fig merchant\'s daughter, Nourmahal. She has learned something of the ways of the West, where even kings have but one acknowledged consort, and she is not willing to be merely one of a number of queens.

Before the wall and gate enclosing Nourmahal\'s Garden. It is early morning, just before dawn. Above the gleaming white of the wall\'s sun-baked clay there is the deep green of the trees—the plane, the poplar, the acacia, and, beyond the garden, mountains are visible through the purple mist of the hour that waits for dawn, slowly turning to rose as the rising sun warms their snowy heights. At the left the wall extends out of sight behind a clump of trees, but at the right it ends in a tower topped by a turret with a rounded dome passing into a point. The space under the dome is open, except for a railing, and is large enough for one or more persons. It may be entered from the broad top of the wall through a break in the railing. At the left, out from the trees and in front of the wall, there is a well marked out with roughly piled stones.

At the right, out of sight behind the trees that come almost to the tower at the corner of the wall, a man\'s voice is heard singing Shelley\'s "Indian Serenade."

"I arise from dreams of thee

In the first sweet sleep of night,

When the winds are breathing low,

And the stars are shining bright;

I arise from dreams of thee,

And a something in my feet

Hath led me—who knows how?

To thy chamber window, Sweet!

"The wandering airs they faint

On the dark, the silent stream—

The Champak odors fail

Like sweet thoughts in a dream;

The nightingale\'s complaint,

It dies upon her heart;—

As I must die on thine,

O! beloved as thou art!

"Oh lift me from the grass!

I die! I faint! I fail!

Let thy love in kisses rain

On my lips and eyelids pale.

My cheek is cold and white, alas!

My heart beats loud and fast;—

Oh! press it to thine own again,

Where it will break at last."

During the singing Nourmahal has come slowly out from the left, walking along the broad top of the wall until, coming to the tower, she drops down on the floor by the railing of the turret and listens, her veil falling from before her face. When the song has ended, Nasrulla comes forward and approaches the little tower. He leads a horse, a white horse with its tail dyed red in the Persian fashion.

Nourmahal. You turn the gray of the poplars in the darkness into the silver of running water.

King Nasrulla. The dawn is waiting under your veil. I see now only the morning star.

Nourmahal. I am but the moon, and I must not be seen when My Lord the Sun comes.

King Nasrulla. The Lord of the Sky rises to look on the gardens where the nightingales have been singing.

Nourmahal. But when he finds that the nightingales are silent, he passes to other gardens.

King Nasrulla. Following the song, as I follow the lisp of spring in your voice, the flutter of the wings of birds in the branches when buds are swelling.

Nourmahal. It is the flutter of wings and the song that you care for; it is not the bird.

King Nasrulla. It is the song of the bird that tells me where I shall find the bird herself. It is the oasis lifted up into the sky that guides the thirsty traveler across the desert.

Nourmahal (rising in agitation). When I am your queen, will you follow the voices of other nightingales?

King Nasrulla. You will be my first queen.

Nourmahal. I must be your only queen.

King Nasrulla. Always my first queen, and in your garden the fountains shall murmur day and night with a fuller flow of water than any others. The flowers there shall be more beautiful than anywhere else in all the world, and a hundred maidens shall serve you.

Nourmahal. And I shall not be your only queen?

King Nasrulla. It is not the way of the world.

Nourmahal. I have heard stories of places where the king has only one queen.

King Nasrulla. It has never been so in Saranazett.

Nourmahal. It has not been so in Saranazett, but does nothing change?

King Nasrulla. I must be king in the way of my ancestors.

Nourmahal (dropping down by the railing again). And we must live in the way of our ancestors, over and over again, sunrise and noon-glare and star-shine, as it was before our stars rose in the heavens, as it always will be?

King Nasrulla. Our ancestors have taught us that a king should not live too meanly.

Nourmahal. We cannot appeal to our ancestors. We cannot appeal to anything, and nothing can be undone. As the Persian poet says, "The moving finger writes," and what is written must be.

King Nasrulla. And if what is written is beautiful, and if you are to be a king\'s throne-mate, if all the treasures of all the world are to be sought out for you——

Nourmahal. It is nothing, nothing, if you must have another wife, if you must have two other wives, three.

King Nasrulla. My prime minister will choose the others. I choose you.

Nourmahal (passionately). But what shall we ever choose again—and get what we choose? Have not the hours been counted out for us from the beginning of the world? Can we stop the grains of sand in the hour-glass?

King Nasrulla. Each one will make a new pleasure as it falls.

Nourmahal. Yes, but it falls. We do not gather it up. It falls out of the heavens as the rain comes. We cannot make it rain.

King Nasrulla. But the drops are always pleasant.

Nourmahal. Yes, like a cup of water to a prisoner who dies of thirst and cannot know when his jailer comes. If we could bring the clouds up over the sun when the hot dust is flying, it would be really pleasant, but

"That inverted Bowl we call the Sky,

Whereunder crawling coop\'d we live and die,

Lift not your hands to It for help—for It

As impotently moves as you or I."

You are my sky, and the old poet is right, if you must have four wives because your father had four wives, and his father.

King Nasrulla. They are but symbols of kingliness, and they shall bow in the dust before you, whom my heart chooses, as weeds by the roadside bow when you pass in your tahktiravan and the air follows its flying curtains.

Nourmahal. Why should anyone bow to me? Why should I care for bowing? It would make me a slave to the custom of bowing. Are you a king and must you be a slave too? Impotence is the name of such kingship, and why should I care to be a queen when my king cannot make me queenly?

King Nasrulla (advancing to the tower and leaving his horse standing). Come! The stars are paling, and there is only the light of your eyes to lift me out of the dust. Come!

In the side of the wall by the tower a sloping series of stout pegs has been driven, descending to the ground at short intervals. Nourmahal comes out of the tower, puts her foot on the highest of these pegs, takes Nasrulla\'s hand, and, with his help, comes slowly down the pegs, as if they were a flight of stairs, to the ground.

Nourmahal. How I love a horse! It is Samarcand and Delhi and Bokhara and Paris, even Paris.

King Nasrulla. Paris! What is Paris?

Nourmahal (standing in front of the horse and caressing its head). I don\'t know. I have never been there, but a horse makes me think of Paris. I don\'t know London, but a horse makes me think of London too. A horse could take me there. I could ride and ride, and every day there would be something new and something wonderful. There are cities beyond the water, too, marvelous cities, full of things more than we dream of here. A horse is swift, and the tapping of his feet on the stones is distance. When he lifts his head, when he curves his neck, already in his heart he is going on and on.

King Nasrulla. And these are the stories that you have heard, stories about Paris and London and the cities across the water?

Nourmahal. Stories? Perhaps not stories. Dreams, I think, imaginings dropped from the wings of falcons flying out of the west.

King Nasrulla. You shall sit on the horse, and you can seem to be riding. Then as your dreams come true, you can tell them to me. Let the horse be Paris in my fancies too, and London and the cities across the water.

The horse is still standing where he stopped when Nasrulla led him out from behind the trees with him. He faces toward the left, and Nasrulla is back of him. Nourmahal puts her foot into Nasrulla\'s hand, and he lifts her into the saddle. When she is comfortably seated, he stands beside her and in front of her, back of the horse, leaning against the horse\'s neck and caressing his shoulder.

King Nasrulla. Now we are on the road, and all the world is moving across the horizon. If it is all a dream, let me be in the dream.

Nourmahal (looking out and away from him and pausing a moment). Stories! Dreams!—What I have heard is only a whisper, but it seems so true and so beautiful. Somewhere a man loves one woman always and no other. Somewhere a king is not a manikin stalking through ceremonies. Somewhere he lives humanly as other men. Somewhere to-day is not like yesterday, and man has learned to break the cycle of what has been forever, of what seems dead and yet out of death comes back again and again. I have not seen it, but I know it. Somewhere you and I could be happy without being king or queen. Somewhere a woman thinks her own thoughts, and not the thoughts of her lord only. Somewhere men are not bound to a king, and somewhere kings are not bound to the words of their fathers\' fathers.

King Nasrulla (slowly, after a pause). It is the way of the world, Nourmahal. What the world is, it is, and that is forever and ever, unless it should be the will of God to make a new world.

Nourmahal. A new world! (She pauses dreamily.) Yes, that is what I want, a new world. That is what men are making somewhere, I know it. That is what is in my heart, and the same thing must be in the hearts of other men and women. A new world! What would it be to wake up every morning with a fresh wonder, not knowing what the day would bring? What would it be every morning to take the saddle and follow a new road ahead of the sun?

King Nasrulla. If I could go with you——

Nourmahal. You have horses.

King Nasrulla. It is not so decreed. My place is here.

Nourmahal. Your place is here, and it is your place to have three or four queens as your ministers decide for you. One queen is to keep peace with the King of the South, another is to keep peace with the King of the West, and the third is to keep peace with the King of the East. The fourth queen you may choose for yourself from your own people—if you choose before some other king offers a daughter. You may make s............