R (coming forward). Are you ready?

STRANGER. So ready, that I've no answer left for you.

TEMPTER. On the brink of the grave, I understand! You'll have to lie in
your coffin and appear to die; the old Adam will be covered with three
shovelfuls of earth, and a De Profundis will be sung. Then you'll rise
again from the dead, having laid aside your old name, and be baptized
once more like a new-born child! What will you be called? (The STRANGER
does not reply.) It is written: Johannes, brother Johannes, because he
preached in the wilderness and...

STRANGER. Do not trouble me.

TEMPTER. Speak to me a little, before you depart into the long silence.
For you'll not be allowed to speak for a whole year.

STRANGER. All the better. Speaking at last becomes a vice, like
drinking. And why speak, if words do not cloak thoughts?

TEMPTER. _You_ at the graveside.... Was life so bitter?

STRANGER. Yes. My life was.

TEMPTER. Did you never know one pleasure?

STRANGER. Yes, many pleasures; but they were very brief and seemed only
to exist in order to make the pain of their loss the sharper.

TEMPTER. Can't it be put the other way round: that pain exists in order
to make joy more keen?

STRANGER. It can be put in any way.

(A woman enters with a child to be baptized.)

TEMPTER. Look! A little mortal, who's to be consecrated to suffering.

STRANGER. Poor child!

TEMPTER. A human history, that's about to begin. (A bridal couple cross
the stage.) And there--what's loveliest, and most bitter. Adam and Eve
in Paradise, that in a week will be a Hell, and in a fortnight Paradise
again.

STRANGER. What is loveliest, brightest! The first, the only, the last
that ever gave life meaning! I, too, once sat in the sunlight on a
verandah, in the spring beneath the first tree to show new green, and a
small crown crowned a head, and a white veil lay like thin morning mist
over a face... that was not that of a human being. Then came darkness!

TEMPTER. Whence?

STRANGER. From the light itself. I know no more.

TEMPTER. It could only have been a shadow, for light is needed to throw
shadows; but for darkness no light is needed.

STRANGER. Stop! Or we'll never come to an end.

(The CONFESSOR and the CHAPTER appear in procession.)

TEMPTER (disappearing). Farewell!

CONFESSOR (advancing with a large black bier-cloth). Lord! Grant him
eternal peace!

CHOIR. May he be illumined with perpetual light!

CONFESSOR (wrapping the ST