VERONIKA
[Half to herself, distraught between suspense and hope]
I must be patient.
PIPER
Woman, they all are mine.
I hold them in my hands; they bide with me.
What's breath and blood,—what are the hearts of children,
To Hamelin,—while it heaps its money-bags?
VERONIKA
You cared not for the money.
PIPER
No?—You seem
A foreign woman,—come from very far,
That you should know.
VERONIKA
I know. I was not born
There. But you wrong them. There were yet a few
Who would have dealt with you more honestly
Than this Jacobus, or—
PIPER
Or Kurt the Syndic!
Believe It not. Those two be tongue and brain
For the whole town! I know them. And that town
Stands as the will of other towns, a score,
That make us wandering poor the things we are!
It stands for all, unto the end of time,
That turns this bright world black and the Sun cold,
With hate, and hoarding;—all-triumphant Greed
That spreads above the roots of all despair,
And misery, and rotting of the soul!
Now shall they learn—if money-bags can learn—
What turns the bright world black, and the Sun cold;
And what's that creature that they call a child!—
And what this winged thing men name a heart
Beating queer rhythms that they long to kill.—
What is this hunger and this thirst to sing,
To laugh, to fight,—to hope, to be believed?
And what is truth? And who did make the stars?
* * * * *
I have to pay for fifty thousand hates,
Greeds, cruelties; such barbarous tortured days
A tiger would disdain;—for all my kind!
Not my one mother, not my own of kin,—
All, all, who wear the motley in the heart
Or on the body:—for all caged glories
And trodden wings, and sorrows laughed to scorn.
I,—I!—At last.
VERONIKA
Ah, me! How can I say:
Yet make them happier than they let you be?
PIPER
Woman, you could!—They know not how to be
Happy! They turn to darkness and to woe
All that is made for joy. They deal with men
As, far across the mountains, in the south,
Men trap a singing thrush, put out his eyes,—
And cage him up and bid him then to sing—
Sing before God that made him,—yes, to sing!