The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann Volume Ii Part 93

[_Modestly._] Mother, how'd it be if I was to open the window jus' a speck an' was to light my pipe for a bit?

MRS. JOHN

Does you have to smoke? If not, you better let it be!

JOHN

No, I don't has to, mother. Only I'd like to! Never mind, though. A quid'll be just as good in the end.

[_With comfortable circ.u.mstantiality he prepares a new quid._

MRS. JOHN

[_After a brief silence._] How's that? You has to go to the public registry office again?

JOHN

That's what he told me, that I had to come back again an' tell him exackly ... that I had to give the exack place an' time when that little kid was born.

MRS. JOHN

[_Holding a needle in her mouth._] Well, why didn't you tell him that right away?

JOHN

How was I to know it? I didn't know, you see.

MRS. JOHN

You didn't know that?

JOHN

Well, I wasn't here, was I?

MRS. JOHN

You wasn't. That's right. If you goes an' leaves me here in Berlin an'

stays from one year's end to another in Hamburg, an' at most comes to see me once a month--how is you to know what happens in your own home?

JOHN

Don't you want me to go where the boss has most work for me? I goes where I c'n make good money.

MRS. JOHN

I wrote you in my letter as how our little boy was born in this here room.

JOHN

I knows that an' I told him that. Ain't that natural, I axes him, that the child was born in our room? An' he says that ain't natural at all.

Well then, says I, for all I cares, maybe it was up in the loft with the rats an' mice! I got mad like 'cause he said maybe the child wasn't born here at all. Then he yells at me: What kind o' talk is that? What? says I. I takes an interest in wages an' earnin' an' not in talk--not me, Mr.

Registrar! An' now I'm to give him the exack day an' hour ...

MRS. JOHN

An' didn't I write it all out for you on a bit o' paper?

JOHN

When a man's mad he's forgetful. I believe if he'd up and axed me: Is you Paul John, foreman-mason? I'd ha' answered: I don' know. Well an' then I'd been a bit jolly too an' taken a drink or two with Fritz. An' while we was doin' that who comes along but Schubert an' Karl an' they says as how I has to set up on account o' bein' a father now. Those fellers, they didn't let me go an' they was waitin' downstairs in front o' the public registry. An' so I kept thinkin' o' them standin' there. So when he axes me on what day my wife was delivered, I didn't know nothin' an' just laughed right in his face.

MRS. JOHN

I wish you'd first attended to what you had to an' left your drinkin'

till later.

JOHN

It's easy to say that! But if you're up to them kind o' tricks in your old age, mother, you can't blame me for bein' reel glad.

MRS. JOHN

All right. You go on to the registry now an' say that your child was borne by your wife in your dwellin' on the twenty-fifth o' May.

JOHN

Wasn't it on the twenty-sixth? 'Cause I said right along the twenty-sixth. Then he must ha' noticed that I wasn't quite sober. So he says: If that's a fac', all right; if not, you gotta come back.

MRS. JOHN

In that case you'd better leave it as it is.

_The door is opened and SELMA k.n.o.bBE pushes in a wretched perambulator which presents the saddest contrast to MRS. JOHN'S.

Swaddled in pitiful rags a newly born child lies therein._

MRS. JOHN

Oh, no, Selma, comin' into my room with that there sick child--that was all right before. But that can't be done no more.

SELMA

He just gasps with that cough o' his'n. Over at our place they smokes all the time.

MRS. JOHN

I told you, Selma, that you could come from time to time and get milk or bread. But while my little Adelbert is here an' c'n catch maybe consumption or somethin', you just leave that poor little thing at home with his fine mother.