So he has lost them. Well, I shan’t need to take any sauce from the old werewolf, when he’s my father-in-law.
Anthony.
I had a hard time when I was young. I wasn’t born a prickly hedgehog any more than you were, but I’ve turned into one by degrees. At first all my prickles were turned inside and people for fun used to nip my smooth sensitive skin and laugh when I shrank back, because the points went into my heart and bowels. But that wouldn’t do for me. I turned my skin inside out and now the prickles get into their fingers, and I have peace.
Leonard (aside).
The devil’s own peace, I should think!
Anthony.
My father never rested night and day, and worked himself into his grave when he was only thirty. My poor mother made a living, as best she could, with her spinning-wheel. I grew up without any schooling. When I got bigger and still could earn nothing, I should have liked at the least to go without eating. But if I did pretend to be sick at dinner-time and push my plate back, what was the good? My stomach was too much for me at supper-time, and I had to be well again. My greatest sorrow was my own clumsiness. I would quarrel with myself over it, as if I was to blame, as if I had provided myself in the womb with nothing but wolf’s teeth and deliberately left behind me every useful craft and quality. I was fit to blush when the sun shone on me. As soon as I was confirmed, the man they buried yesterday, old Master Gebhardt, came into our little room. He wrinkled his brow and twisted his face, as he always did when he had something good in his mind; then he said to my mother: “Have you brought this boy into the world to eat your head off?” I was just about to cut myself a slice of bread, but I felt so ashamed that I quickly put the loaf back in the cupboard. My mother was annoyed at his words. She stopped her wheel, and retorted hotly that her son was a good boy. “Well, we shall see,” replied old Gebhardt, “if he wants, he can come now, just as he stands, into my workshop. I want no apprentice money. He’ll get his food, and I’ll see to his clothes, too. And if he’s willing to get up early and go to bed late, he’ll get a chance now and then of earning a little money for his old mother.” Mother began to cry and I began to dance, and when at last we started to speak, the old man closed his ears and motioned to me to come. I didn’t need to put my hat on, because I hadn’t got one. I followed him without even saying good-bye to my mother, and when I got half-an-hour off on my first Sunday to go and see her, he sent her half a ham with me. God’s peace on his grave! I can still hear him, in that half-angry way of his: “By Gosh, under your coat with it, for fear my wife should see!”
Leonard.
You can weep, then?
Anthony (wiping his eyes).