Creditors and Pariah | Page 3

used
to have men for friends, but I thought them superfluous after I married,
and I felt quite satisfied with the one I had chosen. Later I was drawn
into new circles and made a lot of acquaintances, but my wife was

jealous of them--she wanted to keep me to herself: worse still--she
wanted also to keep my friends to herself. And so I was left alone with
my own jealousy.
GUSTAV. Yes, you have a strong tendency toward that kind of
disease.
ADOLPH. I was afraid of losing her--and I tried to prevent it. There is
nothing strange in that. But I was never afraid that she might be
deceiving me--
GUSTAV. No, that's what married men are never afraid of.
ADOLPH. Yes, isn't it queer? What I really feared was that her friends
would get such an influence over her that they would begin to exercise
some kind of indirect power over me--and THAT is something I
couldn't bear.
GUSTAV. So your ideas don't agree--yours and your wife's?
ADOLPH. Seeing that you have heard so much already, I may as well
tell you everything. My wife has an independent nature--what are you
smiling at?
GUSTAV. Go on! She has an independent nature--
ADOLPH. Which cannot accept anything from me--
GUSTAV. But from everybody else.
ADOLPH. [After a pause] Yes.--And it looked as if she especially
hated my ideas because they were mine, and not because there was
anything wrong about them. For it used to happen quite often that she
advanced ideas that had once been mine, and that she stood up for them
as her own. Yes, it even happened that friends of mine gave her ideas
which they had taken directly from me, and then they seemed all right.
Everything was all right except what came from me.
GUSTAV. Which means that you are not entirely happy?
ADOLPH. Oh yes, I am happy. I have the one I wanted, and I have
never wanted anybody else.
GUSTAV. And you have never wanted to be free?
ADOLPH. No, I can't say that I have. Oh, well, sometimes I have
imagined that it might seem like a rest to be free. But the moment she
leaves me, I begin to long for her--long for her as for my own arms and
legs. It is queer that sometimes I have a feeling that she is nothing in
herself, but only a part of myself--an organ that can take away with it
my will, my very desire to live. It seems almost as if I had deposited

with her that centre of vitality of which the anatomical books tell us.
GUSTAV. Perhaps, when we get to the bottom of it, that is just what
has happened.
ADOLPH. How could it be so? Is she not an independent being, with
thoughts of her own? And when I met her I was nothing--a child of an
artist whom she undertook to educate.
GUSTAV. But later you developed her thoughts and educated her,
didn't you?
ADOLPH. No, she stopped growing and I pushed on.
GUSTAV. Yes, isn't it strange that her "authoring" seemed to fall off
after her first book--or that it failed to improve, at least? But that first
time she had a subject which wrote itself--for I understand she used her
former husband for a model. You never knew him, did you? They say
he was an idiot.
ADOLPH. I never knew him, as he was away for six months at a time.
But he must have been an arch-idiot, judging by her picture of him.
[Pause] And you may feel sure that the picture was correct.
GUSTAV. I do!--But why did she ever take him?
ADOLPH. Because she didn't know him well enough. Of course, you
never DO get acquainted until afterward!
GUSTAV. And for that reason one ought not to marry until--
afterward.--And he was a tyrant, of course?
ADOLPH. Of course?
GUSTAV. Why, so are all married men. [Feeling his way] And you not
the least.
ADOLPH. I? Who let my wife come and go as she pleases--
GUSTAV. Well, that's nothing. You couldn't lock her up, could you?
But do you like her to stay away whole nights?
ADOLPH. No, really, I don't.
GUSTAV. There, you see! [With a change of tactics] And to tell the
truth, it would only make you ridiculous to like it.
ADOLPH. Ridiculous? Can a man be ridiculous because he trusts his
wife?
GUSTAV. Of course he can. And it's just what you are already--and
thoroughly at that!
ADOLPH. [Convulsively] I! It's what I dread most of all--and there's
going to be a change.

GUSTAV. Don't get excited now--or you'll have another attack.
ADOLPH. But why isn't she ridiculous when I stay out all night?
GUSTAV. Yes, why? Well, it's nothing that concerns you, but