A large room in the Blue Dove Inn. Wainscotted walls, with tankards and jugs ranged along the shelf above the panels. Benches fastened to the walls and covered with cushions and draperies. In the background, a corner-stand with potted flowers and bird-cages. Sconces containing wax candles are hung on the walls; candelabra stand on a table that also contains bowls of fruit, beakers, goblets, tumblers, dice, playing-cards, and a lute.
It is night. PRINCE ERIC and JORGHEN PERSSON are seated at the table. They are looking pale and tired, and have ceased drinking.
ERIC. You want to go to sleep, Jorghen, and I prefer to dream while still awake. To go to bed is to me like dying: to be swathed in linen sheets and stretch out in a long bed like a coffin. And then the corpse has the trouble of washing itself and reading its own burial service.
JORGHEN. Are you afraid of death, Prince?
ERIC. As the children are afraid of going to bed, and I am sure I'll cry like a child when my turn comes. If I only knew what death is!
JORGHEN. Some call it a sleep, and others an awakening, but no one knows anything with certainty.
ERIC. How could we possibly know anything of that other life, when we know so little of this one?
JORGHEN. Yes, what is life?
ERIC. One large madhouse, it seems to me! Think of my sane and shrewd and sensible father—doesn't he act like a madman? He rids the country of foreigners and takes the heads of those that helped him. He rids the country of foreigners only to drag in a lot of others, like Peutinger and Norman,[5] whom he puts above the lords of the realm and all other authorities. He is mad, of course!—He rids the Church of human inventions only to demand the acceptance of new inventions at the penalty of death. This liberator is the greatest tyrant that ever lived, and yet this tyrant is the greatest liberator that ever lived! This evening, you know, he wanted to prohibit me from coming here; and when I insisted on going all the same, he threw his Hungarian war-hammer after me, as if he had been the god Thor chasing the trolls. He came within an inch of killing me, just as it is said—which you may not have heard—that he killed my mother.
JORGHEN. [Becoming attentive] No, I never heard of that.
ERIC. That's what they say. And I can understand it. There is greatness in it. To feel raised above all human considerations; to kill whatever stands in the way? and trample everything else.... Sometimes, you know, when I see him coming in his big, soft hat and his blue cloak, using his boar-spear in place of a stick, I think he is Odin himself. When he is angry, the people say that they can hear him from the top story down to the cellars, and that the sound of it is like thunder. But I am not afraid of him, and that's why he hates me. At the same time he has a great deal of respect for me. [JORGHEN smiles sceptically] Yes, you may smile! That's only because you have no respect for anything; not, even for yourself.