Adolph. Brother and sister? How could you know that?
Gustav. I guessed it. Children are in the habit of playing papa and mamma, but when they grow up they play brother and sister—in order to hide what should be hidden!—And then they took the vow of chastity—and then they played hide-and-seek—until they got in a dark corner where they were sure of not being seen by anybody. [With mock severity] But they felt that there was one whose eye reached them in the darkness—and they grew frightened— and their fright raised the spectre of the absent one—his figure began to assume immense proportions—it became metamorphosed: turned into a nightmare that disturbed their amorous slumbers; a creditor who knocked at all doors. Then they saw his black hand between their own as these sneaked toward each other across the table; and they heard his grating voice through that stillness of the night that should have been broken only by the beating of their own pulses. He did not prevent them from possessing each other but he spoiled their happiness. And when they became aware of his invisible interference with their happiness; when they took flight at last—a vain flight from the memories that pursued them, from the liability they had left behind, from the public opinion they could not face—and when they found themselves without the strength needed to carry their own guilt, then they had to send out into the fields for a scapegoat to be sacrificed. They were free-thinkers, but they did not have the courage to step forward and speak openly to him the words: “We love each other!” To sum it up, they were cowards, and so the tyrant had to be slaughtered. Is that right?
Adolph. Yes, but you forget that she educated me, that she filled my head with new thoughts—
Gustav. I have not forgotten it. But tell me: why could she not educate the other man also—into a free-thinker?
Adolph. Oh, he was an idiot!
Gustav. Oh, of course—he was an idiot! But that’s rather an ambiguous term, and, as pictured in her novel, his idiocy seems mainly to have consisted in failure to understand her. Pardon me a question: but is your wife so very profound after all? I have discovered nothing profound in her writings.
Adolph. Neither have I.—But then I have also to confess a certain difficulty in understanding her. It is as if the cogs of our brain wheels didn’t fit into each other, and as if something went to pieces in my head when I try to comprehend her.
Gustav. Maybe you are an idiot, too?
Adolph. I don’t think so! And it seems to me all the time as if she were in the wrong—Would you care to read this letter, for instance, which I got today?
[Takes out a letter from his pocket-book.]
Gustav. [Glancing through the letter] Hm! The handwriting seems strangely familiar.