Gustav. No. Once bit, twice shy. After the first time, one keeps one’s eyes open, but you have never been really bitten yet. You be careful of those who have, they’re dangerous customers. [He goes round the circular table on the right.]
Adolf. What you say jabs a knife into my flesh. I’ve got a feeling as though something in me were cut through, but I can do nothing to stop it all by myself, and it’s as well it should be so, for abscesses will be opened in that way which would otherwise never be able to come to a head. She never loved me? Why did she marry me, then?
Gustav. Tell me first how it came about that she did marry you, and whether she married you or you her?
Adolf. God knows! That’s much too hard a question to be answered offhand, and how did it take place? —it took more than a day.
Gustav. Shall I guess? [He goes behind the round table, toward the left, then sits on the sofa.]
Adolf. You’ll get nothing for your pains.
Gustav. Not so fast! From the insight which you’ve given me into your own character, and that of your wife, I find it pretty easy to work out the sequence of the whole thing. Listen to me and you’ll be quite convinced. [Dispassionately and in an almost jocular tone.] The husband happened to be traveling on study and she was alone. At first she found a pleasure in being free. Then she imagined that she felt the void, for I presume that she found it pretty boring after being alone for a fortnight. Then he turned up, and the void begins gradually to be filled—the picture of the absent man begins gradually to fade in comparison, for the simple reason that he is a long way off—you know of course the psychological algebra of distance?And when both of them, alone as they were, felt the awakening of passion, they were frightened of themselves, of him, of their own conscience. They sought for protection, skulked behind the fig-leaf, played at brother and sister, and the more sensual grew their feelings the more spiritual did they pretend their relationship really was.
Adolf. Brother and sister! How did you know that?
Gustav. I just thought that was how it was. Children play at mother and father, but of course when they grow older they play at brother and sister—so as to conceal what requires concealment; they then discard their chaste desires; they play blind man’s- buff till they’ve caught each other in some dark corner, where they’re pretty sure not to be seen by anybody. [With increased severity.] But they are warned by their inner consciences that an eye sees them through the darkness. They are afraid— and in their panic the absent man begins to haunt their imagination—to assume monstrous proportions—to become metamorphosed—he becomes a nightmare who opposes them in that love’s young dream of theirs. He becomes the creditor [he raffs slowly on the table three times with his finger, as though knocking at the door] who knocks at the door. They see his black hand thrust itself between them when their own are reaching after the dish of pottage. They hear his unwelcome voice in the stillness of the night, which is only broken by the beating of their own pulses. He doesn’t prevent their belonging to each other, but he is enough to mar their happiness, and when they have felt this invisible power of his, and when at last they want to run away, and make their futile efforts to escape the memory which haunts them, the guilt which they have left behind, the public opinion which they are afraid of, and they lack the strength to bear their own guilt, then a scapegoat has to be exterminated and slaughtered. They posed as believers in Free Love, but they didn’t have the pluck to go straight to him, to speak straight out to him and say, “We love each other.” They were cowardly, and that’s why the tyrant had to be assassinated. Am I not right?
Adolf. Yes; but you’re forgetting that she trained me, gave me new thoughts.