Chapter 24

These are strange words for Tristan the knight to hear. Applied to himself, such words as perfidy, treason.... He brushes his arm wildly across his eyes: "Phantoms of the Day! Morning-dreams! empty and lying,--vanish, disperse!" The heart-broken King, with a gentleness more effectual in punishing than the angriest objurgations, goes on to sear the false friend's conscience by holding up before him, simply, what he has done; comparing the image of him as he has in fact proved with the image of him which Mark had cherished. The reproach is intolerable in view of what Mark himself is: noble, gentle, great-hearted, and toward Tristan so full of affection! "To me--this? This, Tristan, to me? Where now shall one look for truth, since Tristan has deceived me? Where look for honour and uprightness, since the pattern of all honour, Tristan, has lost them? Whither has virtue fled, since she is gone from Tristan, who had made her into his shield and defence, yet has now betrayed me?"

Tristan's eyes, which had been fixed steadily upon Mark, slowly sink to the ground; a wondering sadness overspreads his countenance, heavier and heavier as the royal master proceeds with his arraignment. Why Tristan's innumerable services, the greatness he had won for his King, if they were to be paid with the receiver's dishonour? Was it too small a reward that the King had made him his heir? So dearly he had loved him that, having lost his wife, and being childless, he had resolved for his sake not to wed again. He had been obdurate to the prayers of his people, to Tristan's own entreaties, until Tristan had threatened to leave the kingdom unless he were himself despatched to bring home a bride for the King. And his courage had won for Mark this woman, lovely to a wonder, whom who could know, who behold, who proudly call his own, without accounting himself blessed? This one, to whom he, Mark, would never have presumed to aspire, Tristan, braving enemies and danger, had brought home to him. And now that through such a possession his heart had become more vulnerable to pain than before, wherefore wound him in the very spot where it was tenderest?--destroy his faith in his friend, fill his frank heart with distrust, bring him to the degradation of dogging his friend by night and listening covertly? "Wherefore to me this hell which no heaven can deliver me from? Wherefore to me this indignity which no suffering can wash out? The dreadful, deep, undiscoverable, thrice-mysterious reason,--who will reveal it to the world?"

Tristan's eyes, as, thus questioned, he lifts them at last again to Mark's, express boundless compassion. "Oh! King, I cannot answer; and that which you ask you never can learn!" No, for it is as strange, as full of black mystery, to Tristan as to Mark. It is the very impossible which has happened, the never to be accounted for. Tristan, the soul of honour, has betrayed his friend, and with all those circumstances of aggravation which the friend has just counted off. Nothing can explain it. It is surely like a dream, a curious dream, the worst of the Day's lies. But in a dream also, as we remarked before, there is a right thing to do, for a man of heart. Tristan is not long deciding upon his course. But before acting he turns to Isolde, where she sits with eyes of undiminished love raised toward the companion in shame and agony. In following the call of honour he has no mind to forsake her. "Whither Tristan now departs, will you, Isolde, follow him? The country Tristan means no beam of the sun illumines. It is the dim nocturnal land from which my mother sent me forth, when dying she gave to the light a dead man's child. The refuge to which, having borne me, she carried her love, the wonder-kingdom of the night from which of old I woke. That is what Tristan offers. Thither he goes before. If she will follow, kind and true, let now Isolde say!" With touching more-than-readiness Isolde, trustful and unashamed, declares: "When once before the friend bade her to a strange land, Isolde, kind and true, must follow the unkind one. But now you lead to your own dominions, to show me your heritage. How should I avoid the realm which lies about the whole world? Where Tristan's house and home, there let Isolde take her abode. That she may follow, kind and true, let him now show Isolde the way!" Again for a moment so lost in her that it is no else than as if they were alone in all the world, he slowly bends over her and kisses her forehead. A cry of indignation breaks from Melot. "Traitor! Ha, King, revenge! Shall you endure this outrage?" But Tristan has suddenly cast off the inertia of dreams, bared his sword, and turned about. "Who will match his life against mine?" He gazes full into Melot's face. "He was my friend. He loved me, he held me high. He, more than any, was concerned for my honour, my fame. He made proud my heart to arrogance. He headed the band of those who urged me on to augment my glory and renown by wedding you to the King. Your eye, Isolde, has dazzled him too. From envy he betrayed me to the King--whom I betrayed!" With a feint of attack he springs toward Melot. "Defend yourself, Melot!" Melot quickly thrusts with his sword. Tristan who has not parried, who has let the sword drop from his hand, sinks back wounded in Kurwenal's arms. Isolde casts herself upon his breast. The music makes a brief sorrowful comment--and the curtain falls.

III

The introduction to the third act not only presents the emotions belonging to what shall follow, heaving deep heart-groans and expending itself in pity over the stricken hero; it paints with strange clearness a scene: the sea stretching to the horizon, under leaden sunshine, empty of every sail--the sea which lies in fact before us when the curtain rises, fading off into the sky beyond low battlements which enclose on the outer-side a neglected castle-garden.

Tristan lies with closed eyes upon a couch, in the shadow of a tree. Kurwenal, sitting at his head, bends a careworn face to listen for his breathing. A shepherd's pipe is heard playing a little wavering tune, melancholy in its simplicity to heartbreak. The tune grieves itself out. A shepherd looks over the wall and, after a moment watching, calls to Kurwenal, asking if _he_ does not yet awake? Kurwenal sadly shakes his head. "Even if he should awake, it would only be to take his leave forever, unless the Physician, the only one who can help us, should first arrive...." Has he seen nothing, he inquires, no ship on the sea? "In that case you should hear a different tune," the shepherd answers, "as merry a one as I can play! But tell me the truth, old friend, what has happened to our master?"--"Let be that question!" Kurwenal heavily turns from it: "not for any asking can you learn! Keep diligent look-out; go, and when you see a ship pipe loud and merrily." The shepherd shades his eyes and looks off over the endless blue waste of the waters. "Barren and empty the sea!" He sets his pipe to his lips again and plays over, withdrawing, the hauntingly melancholy tune of before.

Without premonitory sign of returning consciousness, Tristan's lips move. His voice comes very faint: "The ancient tune.... what does it wake me?" He opens his hollow eyes. "Where am I?" Kurwenal starts up with a shout of joy: "Ha, that voice! His voice! Tristan, my master! my hero! my Tristan!" Tristan by a great effort brings his mind to consider these sounds, and with great effort speaks: "Who... calls me?"--"At last! At last!" Kurwenal's heart overflows. "Life! Oh, life! Sweet life, given back to my Tristan!" Tristan knows him now. "Kurwenal... is it you? Where have I been?... Where am I?" Kurwenal on the spot assumes that ultra-joyous tone of persons about a sick-bed when their faces are turned toward the patient whom they are determined to infect with hope. "Where you are? In peace, in safety, in freedom! At Kareol, master! Do you not recognise the castle of your fathers.?"--"Of my fathers?" Tristan murmurs stupidly. "Just look about you!"--"What--" the sick man asks after a vague glance, "what was the sound I heard?"--"The shepherd's pipe you heard again, after so many days! On the hillside he keeps your flocks."--"My flocks?..."--"Master, that is what I said! This is your house, your court and castle. Your people, loyal to the beloved lord, saved for you, as well as they could, the patrimony which my hero once made over to them outright, when he forsook all to travel to a distant land."--"To what land?"--"Cornwall, to be sure!" And the anxious grey-bearded nurse, to rouse in the patient some gleam of joy in being, of pride in past prowess, breaks enthusiastically forth: "Oh, what good fortune Tristan, brave and bonny, met with there! What splendour of glory, what honors he won in the teeth of his enemies!"--"Am I in Cornwall?" Tristan asks discouragingly. "No, no, I have told you! At Kareol."--"How did I get here?" Kurwenal almost laughs, and in the pride of the unhoped-for hour cracks a joke. "How you got here? Not on horseback! A little ship brought you, but to the ship I carried you on these shoulders of mine. They are broad, they bore you to the shore. And now you are safe at home, on your own land, the right land, the native land, where amid familiar pastures and homely joys, under the rays of the old sun, from death and wounds you blessedly shall recover!" The rough fellow presses his cheek to his master's breast, like a woman. There is silence. Tristan stares vacantly ahead, vaguely pondering the servant's last words, of which the echo has lingered teasingly in his ear. "Do you believe so?" he says at last. "I know a different thing--but the manner of it I cannot tell you! This where I have awakened is not the place where I have been,--but where I have been--I cannot tell you! I did not see the sun, I saw no earthly scene, nor any people, but what I saw--I cannot tell you! I found myself--where from everlasting I was, whither to everlasting I go: in the boundless realm of the night which girds the world. One knowledge alone belongs to us there,--divine eternal perfection of oblivion! How"--he faintly wails, with a beginning of restlessness--"how have I lost the sense of it? Is it you again, unforgotten longing, driving me back to the light of the day? All that still survives in me, a pitiless torturing love, impels me forth to gaze upon the light which, deceivingly bright and golden, shines, Isolde, upon you!" With the memory of Isolde becoming clear-defined again, as he emerges more completely from the deathlike stupor which had chained him, agitation seizes upon him, greater from moment to moment. Isolde still in the region of the sunshine! Still in the light of the day, Isolde! Unendurable longing to see her repossesses him. For that it is he has turned back from the portals of death, come back from among the shadows, to seek for her, to behold her, to find her, in whom alone it is granted to Tristan to lose himself and cease to be! His old hatred of the day is upon him, and one's sympathy feels, well enough, the distress to his fever of being thus drawn from the dark of unconsciousness and thrust into this glare of summer. By a natural confusion of ideas, as his agitation turns to delirium, this day torturing him, this day upon which he calls a malediction, becomes his old enemy, the Day which used to keep him from her,--and shifts from that into the signal-light which even at night used to warn him off. His delusion complete, he calls imploringly to Isolde, Sweetest, Loveliest, "When, oh, finally, when, will you quench the torch, that it may announce to me my happiness? The light... when will it go out?... When will the house be wrapped in rest?" He falls back exhausted. Kurwenal, whose joy of a little while before has dropped at the contemplation of this torment, takes heart again from his hope in the good news he has to impart. "The one whom of old I braved, from devotion to you, how am I brought to longing for her now! Rely upon my word, you shall see her, here, and this very day, if only she be still among the living!"

The meaning of his words has not penetrated. Tristan is far away among old scenes. "The torch has not yet gone out! Not yet is the house wrapped in darkness!... Isolde lives and keeps watch.... She called to me out of the night!"--"If then she lives," Kurwenal eagerly, seizes the cue, "let hope comfort you. Dullard as you must esteem Kurwenal, this time you shall not chide him. Ever since the day when Melot, the infamous, dealt you the wound, you lay like one dead. The evil wound, how to heal it? Then I, thick-witted fellow, reflected that the one who closed the wound made by Morold could find easy remedy to the injury from Melot's sword. Not long was I deciding upon the best physician! I have sent to Cornwall,--a trusty fellow. It cannot be but that he will bring Isolde over the sea here to you!"

He has understood, Tristan has understood, and started up ablaze, so beside himself with joy that after the great incredulous cry: "Isolde is coming! Isolde is near!" he struggles vainly for breath and words. Then his overflowing gratitude finds an immediate, a pertinent thing to do, and Kurwenal has all in a moment the reward of his long passionately-devoted service. The master in his madness of joy throws his arms around the servant to whom he owes the hope which in a moment has made him strong and well again. "My Kurwenal, you faithful friend, whose loyalty knows no wavering, how shall Tristan ever thank you? My shield and defence in battle and warfare, in pleasure and pain equally prompt at command,--whom I have hated, you have hated, whom I have cherished, you have cherished; when in all truth I served the good Mark, how were you true to him as gold! When I must betray the noble King, how willingly did you deceive him! Not your own, but wholly mine, you suffer with me when I suffer, but what I suffer--that you cannot suffer!" As before the excitement of his pain, now the excitement of his joy is gradually turning to delirium. "This dreadful longing which consumes me, this languishing fire which devours me, if I could describe it, if you could comprehend it, not here would you loiter but would haste to the watch-tower, with every sense astrain longingly would you reach out and spy toward the point where her sail shall appear, where, blown by the wind and urged on by the fire of love, Isolde comes steering to me!... There it comes!..." he points wildly, "There it comes, with brave speed!... See it wave, see it wave, the pennant at the mast!... The ship! The ship! It streaks along the reef! Do you not see it?... Kurwenal, do you not see it?" With watchful intensity he scans Kurwenal's face. Kurwenal hesitates, between the wish to humour him by going to the watch-tower, and the fear of leaving him, when the shepherd's pipe is heard again in the same plaintive tune, and Kurwenal has no heart to pretend. "No ship as yet on the sea!" he announces heavily. Tristan's excitement, as the notes spin out their thin music, whose message he seems to divine, gradually dies; the happy delusion fades; a deeper sadness than ever, of reaction, closes down upon him. The minor strains which now for a moment hold his flickering attention are full of associations for him, all sorrowful. The sound of them came wafted to him upon the breath of evening when as a child he was told the manner of his father's death; it came again, plaintive and more deeply plaintive, in the morning grey, when he learned his mother's fate. And in their day, he wanderingly reflects, "when leaving an unborn son he died; when she in dying gave me birth, the ancient air, full of yearning and foreboding, no doubt pierced its sorrowful way to them too,--the ancient air, which has asked me before this, and asks me again in this hour, to what possible end, what destiny, I was born into the world?... To what destiny?... The ancient song tells me over again: To spend myself in longing and to die!...

"No! No!" he in a moment corrects himself, and his misery surges back upon him in all its violence, "That is not what it says! Longing! Longing! To spend myself in longing, not in longing to find death! This longing which cannot die to the distant physician calls out for the peace of death!" Confused images crowd upon him of the beginning of this affliction. The voyage to Ireland, the wound of which he was dying, her healing of his wound--only to open it again; her offering him the poisoned cup which when he drank, hoping to be cured of ills forever, a fiery charm was upon him, dooming him never to die, but exist eternally in torture! We remember how in the fragrant summer night and the balmy presence of Isolde he blessed the magic draught which opened the region of all enchantment; but in this hour, parted from her, it seems, forever, the draught which keeps him vainly aching for her presence, which will not let him die apart from her, or find a little rest, which makes him a spectacle of torture for the Day to feed its eyes upon, the draught seems to him verily no blessing. They are the bitter dregs he is drinking now of the cup of wonder. "The dreadful draught," he terms it, and reaching, with the enumeration of his sufferings, the point of cursing it, he has the flashed intuition of a truth; by a poet's spring reaches a conclusion worthy of a philosopher: that he, he himself is responsible for the effect upon him of the drink. "The dreadful draught," he cries, "which devoted me to torment, I myself, I myself, I brewed it! From my father's anguish and my mother's woe, from the tears of love of all my life, from laughing and weeping, joys and hurts, I furnished the poisoned ingredients of the cup!" He had, more plainly, if we seize the sense of his raving, fed and fostered an inherited emotional nature which made him the cup's easy victim. And recognising it, he adds to his curse upon the dreadful cup, with all the strength of his tortured heart, his curse upon him who brewed it,--and exhausted with his own delirious violence drops back in a swoon. Kurwenal, who has vainly striven to calm his frenzy, now sees him with horror relapsed into deathlike stillness; he calls him, laments over him and over this fatal love, the world's loveliest madness, which rewards so ill those who follow its lure. "Are you then dead?" he weeps, "Do you still live?... Have you succumbed to the curse?" He listens almost hopelessly for his breathing, and starts up with a return of joy: "No! He lives! He rises! How softly his lips stir...."--"The ship!" Tristan murmurs, "Do you not see it yet?"--"The ship?... Certainly!" the poor nurse answers, with his determined cheerfulness, "It will arrive this very day.... It cannot delay much longer!"--"And upon it"--Tristan describes the vision which is calling back the light to his eyes--"upon it, Isolde. How she beckons, how graciously she drinks to our peace! Do you see her?... Do you not see her yet?... How sweetly, lovely and gentle, she comes wandering over the plains of the sea. On soft billows of joyous flowers she advances, luminous, toward the land. She smiles comfort to me and delicious rest, she brings me utmost relief.... Ah, Isolde, Isolde! How kind, how fair are you!... What, Kurwenal," he breaks off with that return to agitation toward which his fever by its law begins from the moment of returning consciousness to drive his poor brain, till, reaching a violence his strength cannot support, it plunges him back exhausted into unconsciousness, "What, Kurwenal, you do not see her? Away, to the watch-tower, dull-witted churl, that the sight may not escape you which is so plain to me! Do you not hear me?... To the tower! Quick, to the tower!... Are you there?... The ship! The ship! Isolde's ship! You must--must see it! The ship!... Is it possible," he cries despairingly, "that you do not see it yet?" He has been starting up from his bed, in his eagerness. Kurwenal has struggled with him to keep him down. While he hesitates as before between obedience and fear to leave his patient, the servant realises that the shepherd's pipe has changed its tune,--has changed it for a shrill, lively, tripping air. He listens with all his soul for a second, then with a shout of triumph dashes to the battlements and sends his eyes sweeping the sea. "Ha! The ship!... I see it nearing from the north!"--"Did I not know it?" Tristan exults like a child. "Did I not say so? Did I not say she lived and knit me still to life? From the world which for me contains her only, how should Isolde have departed?" His joy is new life poured into him; his agitation this time produces no exhaustion, he has strength for the moment to squander. "Hahei! Hahei!" shouts Kurwenal from his post, "How boldly it steers, how the sails strain in the wind! How it chases, how it flies!"--"The pennant?... The pennant?" Tristan holds his breath for the answer. "The bright pennant of joy floats gaily from the topmast!"--"Cheer! The pennant of joy!... In the bright light of day, Isolde coming to me! To me, Isolde!... Do you see her self?"--"The ship has disappeared behind the reef..." Tristan's joy drops like a shot bird. One seems to feel his heart stop. "The reef?..." he asks trembling, "Is there danger in it?... That is where the surf rages, the ships founder.... Who is at the helm?"--"The safest of sea-men."--"Could he betray me? Might he be a confederate of Melot's?"--"Trust him as you would myself!"--"But you, wretch, are a traitor too!... Do you see her again?"--"Not yet!"--"Lost!" wails Tristan--but at Kurwenal's shout in a moment more that the ship has cleared the rocks and is sailing up the safe channel into port, springs again to the peaks of joy and promises Kurwenal the bequest of all his worldly goods. And now Kurwenal from his outlook communicates that he sees Isolde,--she is waving,--the keel is in the harbour,--Isolde has sprung ashore. "Down!" Tristan orders wildly, "Down to the shore! Assist her! Assist my lady!"--"I will bring her up here in my arms--trust to them! But you, Tristan," the poor nurse stops on his hurried way down to enjoin, "stay reliably on the bed!"