No, no, that don't do me no good inside. I don't let that there rest on me—not on me an' not on Gustav. Can't be done! That keeps bitin' into me. I can't let that go. It cost me ten years o' my life. I knows that! I knows what I went through that time when I tried to hang myself. I ain't never goin' to get over that, 's long's I live! I'll find out who was at the bottom of it all! I made up my mind to that!
FIELITZ
Good Lord, an' why not? Go ahead an' do it! Keep peggin' away at it. What business is it o' mine? Has I got to have myself excited this way all the time when, the doctor told me how bad it is for me….
RAUCHHAUPT
Missis, there ain't a soul as knows what that was. I knows it. I just ran home, blind…. couldn't see nothin'! I didn't know nothin' no more o' God or the world. I just kept pantin' for air! An' then there I lay—like a dead person on the bed. They rubbed me with towels an' they brushed me with brushes, an' sprayed camphor all over me an' such stuff! Then I came back to life.
MRS. FIELITZ
How many hundreds o' times has you been tellin' me that? I knows, Rauchhaupt, that you went off o' your head. Well, what about that? Look at me! My hair didn't get no blacker from that there business; I didn't get no stronger from it neither. Who's worse off right now—you or me? That's what I'd like to know. You got your health; you're lookin' prosperous! An' me? What am I to-day? An' how does I look? Well, then, what more d'you want?—I dreamed o' my own funeral, already!—What do you want more'n that? I ain't goin' to bother nobody much longer. There ain't much good to be got by houndin' me!… An' that's the truth.—An' anyhow, you're a foolish kind o' a man, Rauchhaupt. You're so crazy, nobody wouldn't hardly believe it. First you was always wantin' to get rid o' the boy …
RAUCHHAUPT
Oh, you don't know Gustav, that you don't! What that there boy could do when I had him … an' the way he was kind to children an' such like! An' the way he c'n sing! An' the thoughts he's got in his head! That there time when he ran away from the asylum, he went an' he sat down in front o' the church where he was always listenin' to the bells, an' there he sat reel still, waitin'. You ought to ha' seen the boy then, Mrs. Fielitz, the way all that shows in his face. That's somethin'! Only thing is, he can't get it out the way the likes o' us c'n do it.