QUITT
(While pushing him into a chair and dragging him offstage on it) Until now you have lived off the fact that I have my limits, you phony. Now show me my limits, you model of the independent life. (Far upstage he tips him out of sight and comes back.)
(PAULA walks off with measured steps. HANS reappears with a dustpan and whisk broom. The others are cleaning themselves. Everyone begins to smile. QUITT does not smile. HANS sweeps the splinters together. PAULA returns dressed and smiles also, with closed lips.)
VON WULLNOW
I believe he’s finally learned his lesson.
KOERBER-KENT
He’ll never learn anything, He’s got no memory. The jack-in-the-box merely uses the floor to propel himself. He doesn’t forget because he doesn’t remember anything. The horsefly lands on the very spot it’s just been shooed away from. He doesn’t think backward and forward like us who have a sense of history — as Mrs. Tax might say — he only has a good nose. I would call him a mere animal, an involuntary, fidgeting animal. The sparrows in the field, not by living, but by being lived, are the divine principle. I can see him now on his bicycle animalistically rushing down the tree-lined avenues.
QUITT
Don’t always look at me when you speak; I can’t listen to you that way.
VON WULLNOW
It’s a pity that there are no more tree-lined avenues. How sweet, for instance, the memory of the manor house at dawn — the house at the vanishing point of the two rows of chestnut trees, the windows reflecting darkly, only the dormers of the servants’ quarters already lighted up; a hedgehog rustles in the dry leaves at our feet, the special stagnant air of that time of day when the sick go into themselves and die willingly, and a chestnut suddenly thuds down and bursts on the gun on our shoulder while we have turned around for one last look at our parents’ house before we stalk cross-country to our hunting ground. Yes, a delicate being, our minority stockholder, as delicate as a thief when it comes to opening a drawer, as delicate as a murderer when it comes to handling a knife.
LUTZ
Von Wullnow, your language is so elevated it makes me hesitate to tell my joke now.
VON WULLNOW
I order you to. You’ve been looking all this time as if you had something to get off your chest.
LUTZ
Two people love each other. They make love so rapidly, the way you sometimes devour a slice of bread with honey on it. When they are finished — (Glances at PAULA.) Oh, pardon me.
VON WULLNOW
Mrs. Tax isn’t listening anyway. And besides, she’s above that sort of thing. She’d probably consider our dirty jokes as proof of our commercialized sexuality, wouldn’t you? Go on.
LUTZ
— the man gets up at once. Oh, says the woman, you’ve scarcely finished and you’re already leaving? And that’s supposed to be love? Look, the man replies, I counted to ten, didn’t I?
(There’s either brief laughter or there isn’t. VON WULLNOW is already in the process of departing with LUTZ and KOERBERKENT — only HANS, who is still sweeping up broken glass, giggles, kneeling on the floor. The gentlemen turn around toward him; he gets up and proceeds out in front of them, giggling.)
VON WULLNOW
Quitt, we trust you as you trust us. Forget your superannuated sensitivity. Sensitive for me is a word I only associate with condoms.
QUITT
(To PAULA) Aren’t you leaving?
PAULA
I was to remind you that you still wanted to explain something to me.
QUITT
I merely wished you would stay, now you can go. (Pause. PAULA sits down again. Pause.) I noticed how I happened to think of you disgustingly by chance. One minute before and all I could have attached to you was your name. Suddenly there was something conspicuous about you. I wanted to get up and grab you between the legs.
PAULA
Are you speaking about me or about a thing?
QUITT
(Laughs briefly. Pause.) Just now I almost said: About you, you thing. Something seems to want to slip out of me today, something I’m afraid of but which still tantalizes me. You know the stories about laughing at funerals. Once I sat opposite a woman I didn’t know. We looked into each other’s eyes until I felt hot. Suddenly she stuck out her tongue at me, not just mockingly, a little between her lips, but all the way to the root, with the whole face a gruesome grimace — as though she wanted to stick herself out at me. Ever since then I’ve felt like doing something like that myself. Usually I manage to do it only in my head, for just a moment. It starts with my wanting to undo someone’s shoelaces who’s walking by or pulling a hair out of his nose, and stops with the urge to unzip my fly in company.
PAULA
Shouldn’t we talk about our arrangement instead?
QUITT
But I’m finally beginning to enjoy talking. I am speaking now. Before, my lips just moved. I had to strain my muscles to enunciate properly. My whole chin ached, the cheeks became numb. Now I know what I am saying.