The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann Volume I Part 49

I should say there is. It has a purpose; it has for me! You don't know how I've succeeded in struggling along hitherto. I don't want to grow sentimental. Perhaps I didn't feel it quite so keenly either; perhaps I wasn't so clearly conscious of it as I am now, that in all my endeavour I had taken on something desolate, something machine-like. No spirit, no fire, no life! Heaven knows whether I had any faith left! And all that has come back to me to-day--with such strange fullness, such primal energy, such joy ... Pshaw, what's the use ... You don't understand.

DR. SCHIMMELPFENNIG

The various things you fellows need to keep you going--faith, love, hope.

I consider all that trash. The thing is simply this: humanity lies in its death throes and we're merely trying to make the agony as bearable as we can by administering narcotics.

LOTH

Is that your latest point of view?

DR. SCHIMMELPFENNIG

It's five or six years old by this time and I see no reason to change it.

LOTH

I congratulate you on it.

DR. SCHIMMELPFENNIG

Thank you.

_A long pause ensues._

DR. SCHIMMELPFENNIG

[_After several disquieted and unsuccessful beginnings._] The trouble is just this. I feel that I'm responsible ... I absolutely owe you an elucidation. I don't believe that you will be able to marry Helen Krause.

LOTH

[_Frigidly._] Oh, is that what you think?

DR. SCHIMMELPFENNIG

Yes, that's my opinion. There are obstacles present which just you would ...

LOTH

Look here! Don't for heaven's sake have any scruples on that account. The conditions, as a matter of fact, aren't so complicated as all that. At bottom they're really terribly simple.

DR. SCHIMMELPFENNIG

Simply terrible, you'd better say.

LOTH

I was referring simply to the obstacles.

DR. SCHIMMELPFENNIG

So was I, very largely. But take it all in all, I can't imagine that you really know the conditions as they are.

LOTH

Please, Schimmel, express yourself more clearly.

DR. SCHIMMELPFENNIG

You must absolutely have dropped the chief demand which you used to make in regard to marriage, although you did give me to understand that you laid as much weight as ever on the propagation of a race sound in mind and body.

LOTH

Dropped my demand...? Dropped it? But why should I?

DR. SCHIMMELPFENNIG

I see. Then there's nothing else left me but to ... Then you don't know the conditions here. You do not know, for instance, that Hoffmann had a son who perished through alcoholism at the age of three.

LOTH

Wha ... what d'you say?

DR. SCHIMMELPFENNIG

I'm sorry, Loth, but I've got to tell you. You can do afterward as you please. But the thing was no joke. They were visiting here just as they are now. They sent for me--half an hour too late. The little fellow had bled to death long before I arrived.

_LOTH drinks in the DOCTOR'S _words with every evidence of profound and terrible emotion._

DR. SCHIMMELPFENNIG

The silly little chap grabbed for the vinegar bottle, thinking his beloved rum was in it. The bottle fell and the child tumbled on the broken gla.s.s. Down here, you see, the _vena saphena_, was completely severed.

LOTH

Whose, _whose_ child was that?

DR. SCHIMMELPFENNIG

The child of Hoffmann and of the same woman who again, up there ... And she drinks too, drinks to the point of unconsciousness, drinks whatever she can get hold of!

LOTH

So it's not, it's not inherited from Hoffmann?

DR. SCHIMMELPFENNIG

Not at all. That's the tragic aspect of the man! He suffers under it as much as he is capable of suffering. To be sure, he knew that he was marrying into a family of dipsomaniacs. The old farmer simply spends his life in the tavern.