SCHÖN. I have made the most superhuman e...

SCHÖN. I have made the most superhuman efforts to raise you in society. You can be ten times as proud of your name as of your intimacy with me.

LULU. (Comes down the steps and puts her arm around Schön's neck.) Why are you still afraid, now that you're at the zenith of your hopes?

SCHÖN. No comedy! The zenith of my hopes? I am at last engaged: I have now the hope of bringing my bride into a clean house.

LULU. (Sitting.) She has developed delightfully in the two years!

SCHÖN. She no longer looks thru one so earnestly.

LULU. She is now, for the first time, a woman. We can meet each other wherever it seems suitable to you.

SCHÖN. We shall meet each other nowhere but in the presence of your husband!

LULU. You don't believe yourself what you say.

Schön. Then he must believe it. Go on and call him! Thru his marriage to you, thru all that I've done for him, he has become my friend.

LULU. (Rising.) Mine, too.

SCHÖN. Then I'll cut down the sword over my head.

LULU. You have, indeed, chained me up. But I owe my happiness to you. You will get friends by the crowd as soon as you have a pretty young wife again.

SCHÖN. You judge women by yourself! He's got the sense of a child or he would have tracked out your doublings and windings long ago.

LULU. I only wish he would! Then, at last he'd get out of his swaddling-clothes. He puts his trust in the marriage contract he has in his pocket. Trouble is past and gone. One can now give oneself and let oneself go as if one were at home. That isn't the sense of a child! It's banal! He has no education; he sees nothing; he sees neither me nor himself; he is blind, blind, blind....

Schön. (Half to himself.) When his eyes open!!

LULU. Open his eyes for him! I'm going to ruin. I'm neglecting myself. He doesn't know me at all. What am I to him? He calls me darling and little devil. He would say the same to any piano-teacher. He makes no pretensions. Everything is alright, to him. That comes from his never in his life having felt the need of intercourse with women.

SCHÖN. If that's true!

LULU. He admits it perfectly openly.

SCHÖN. A man who has painted them, rags and tags and velvet gowns, since he was fourteen.

LULU. Women make him anxious. He trembles for his health and comfort. But he isn't afraid of me!

SCHÖN. How many girls would deem themselves God knows how blessed in your situation.

LULU. (Softly pleading.) Seduce him. Corrupt him. You know how. Take him into bad company—you know the people. I am nothing to him but a woman, just woman. He makes me feel so ridiculous. He will be prouder of me. He doesn't know any differences. I'm thinking my head off, day and night, how to shake him up. In my despair I dance the can-can. He yawns; and drivels something about obscenity.

SCHÖN. Nonsense. He is an artist, though.

LULU. At least he believes he is.

SCHÖN. That's the chief thing!

LULU. When I pose for him.... He believes, too, that he's a famous man.

SCHÖN. We have made him one.

LULU. He believes everything. He's as mistrustful as a thief, and lets himself be lied to, till one loses all respect! When we first knew each other I informed him I had never yet loved— (Schön falls into an easy-chair.) Otherwise he would really have taken me for a fallen woman!

SCHÖN. You make God knows what exorbitant demands on legitimate relations!

LULU. I make no exorbitant demands. Often I even dream still of Goll.

SCHÖN. He was, at any rate, not banal!

LULU. He is there, as if he had never been away. Only he walks as tho in his socks. He isn't angry with me; he's awfully sad. And then he is fearful, as tho he were there without the permission of the police. Otherwise, he feels at ease with us. Only he can't quite get over my having thrown away so much money since—

SCHÖN. You yearn for the whip once more?

LULU. Maybe. I don't dance any more.

SCHÖN. Teach him to do it.

LULU. A waste of trouble.

SCHÖN. Out of a hundred women, ninety educate their husbands to suit themselves.

LULU. He loves me.

SCHÖN. That's fatal, of course.

LULU. He loves me—

SCHÖN. That is an unbridgeable abyss.

LULU. He doesn't know me, but he loves me! If he had anything like a correct idea of me, he'd tie a stone around my neck and sink me in the sea where it's deepest.

SCHÖN. Let's finish this? (He gets up.)

LULU. As you say.

SCHÖN. I've married you off. Twice I have married you off. You live in luxury. I've created a position for your husband. If that doesn't satisfy you, and he laughs in his sleeve at it, I don't pretend to meet ideal claims; but—leave me out of the game, out of it!

LULU. (Resolutely.) If I belong to any person on this earth, I belong to you. Without you I'd be—I won't say where. You took me by the hand, gave me food to eat, had me dressed,—when I was going to steal your watch. Do you think that can be forgotten? Anybody else would have called the police. You sent me to school, and had me learn manners. Who but you in the whole world has ever thought anything of me? I've danced and posed, and was glad to be able to earn my living that way. But love at command, I can't!

SCHÖN. (Raising his voice.) Leave me out! Do what you will. I'm not coming to make scandal; I'm coming to shake the scandal from my neck. My engagement is costing me sacrifices enough! I had imagined that with a healthy young man, than whom a woman of your years can wish herself no better, you would, at last, have been contented. If you are under obligations to me, don't throw yourself a third time in my way! Am I to wait yet longer before putting my pile in security? Am I to risk the whole success of my patents falling into the water again after two years? What good is it to me to be your married-man, when you can be seen going in and out of my house at every hour of the day? Why the devil didn't Dr. Goll stay alive just one year more! With him you were in safe keeping. Then I'd have had my wife long since under my roof!

LULU. And what would you have had then? The kid gets on your nerves. The child is too uncorrupted for you. She's been much too carefully brought up. What should I have against your marriage? But you are deceived about yourself if you think that on account of your impending marriage you may express your contempt to me.

SCHÖN. Contempt? I shall soon give the child the right idea. If anything is contemptible, it's your intrigues!

LULU. (Laughing.) Am I jealous of the child? That never once entered my head.

SCHÖN. Then why talk about the child? The child is not even a whole year younger than you are. Leave me my freedom to live what life I still have. No matter how the child's been brought up, she's got her five senses just like you.... (Schwarz appears, right, brush in hand.)

Wedekind, Frank. Erdgeist. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29682/29682-h/29682-h.htm

Full-text of Erdgeist on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29682/29682-h/29682-h.htm