ACT III
Scene—A theatrical dressing-room, hung with red. Door upper right. Across upper left corner, a Spanish screen. Centre, a table set endwise, on which dance costumes lie. Chair on each side of this table. Lower right, a smaller table, with a chair. Lower left, a high, very wide, old-fashioned arm-chair. Above it, a tall mirror, with a make-up stand before it holding puff, rouge, etc., etc.
Alva is at lower right, filling two glasses with red wine and champagne.
Alva—Never since I began to work for the stage have I seen the public so wildly enthusiastic.
Lulu—[Voice from behind the screen.] Don’t give me too much red wine. Will he see me to-day?
Alva—Father?
Lulu—Yes.
Alva—I don’t know if he’s in the theater.
Lulu—Doesn’t he want to see me at all?
Alva—He has so little time.
Lulu—His bride occupies him.
Alva—Speculations. He gives himself no rest. [Schön enters.] You? We’re just speaking of you.
Lulu—Is he there?
Schön—You’re changing?
Lulu—[Peeping over the Spanish screen, to Schön.] You write in all the papers that I’m the most gifted danseuse who ever trod the stage, a second Taglioni and I don’t know what else—and you haven’t once found me gifted enough to convince yourself of the fact.
Schön—I have so much to write. You see, I was convincing to others: there are hardly any seats left.—You must keep rather more in the proscenium.
Lulu—I must first accustom myself to the light.
Alva—She has kept strictly to her part.
Schön—[To Alva.] You must get more out of your performers! You don’t know enough yet about the technique. [To Lulu.] What do you come as now?
Lulu—As a flower-girl.
Schön—[To Alva.] In tights?
Alva—No. In a skirt to the ankles.
Schön—It would have been better if you hadn’t bothered with symbolism.
Alva—I look at a dancer’s feet.
Schön—The point is, what the public looks at. A vision like her has no need, praise God, of your symbolic mummery.
Alva—The public doesn’t look as if it were being bored!
Schön—Of course not; because I have been working the press in her favor for the last six months. Has the Prince been here?
Alva—Nobody’s been here.
Schön—Well, that’s what you get for letting a dancer come on thru two acts in raincoats.
Alva—Who is the Prince?
Schön—Shall we see each other afterwards?
Alva—Are you alone?
Schön—With acquaintances. At Peter’s?
Alva—At twelve?
Schön—At twelve. [Exit.]
Lulu—I’d given up hoping that he’d ever come.
Alva—Don’t let yourself be misled by his grumpy growls. If you’ll only be careful not to spend all your strength before the last number begins—[Lulu steps out in a classical, sleeveless dress, white with a red border, a bright wreath in her hair and a basket of flowers in her hands.]
Lulu—He doesn’t seem to have noticed at all how cleverly you have deployed your performers.
Alva—I won’t blow in sun, moon and stars in the first act!
Lulu—[Sipping.] You disclose me by degrees.
Alva—And I was well aware that you knew all about changing costumes.
Lulu—If I’d tried to sell my flowers so before the Alhambra café, they’d have had me behind lock and key right off the very first night.
Alva—Why? You were a child!
Lulu—Do you remember how I looked the first time I came into your room?
Alva—You wore a dark blue dress with black velvet.
Lulu—They had to stick me somewhere and didn’t know where.
Alva—My mother had been lying sick for two years already then.
Lulu—You were playing theater, and asked me if I wanted to play, too.
Alva—To be sure! We played theater!
Lulu—I see you still—the way you shoved the figures back and forth.
Alva—For a long time my most terrible memory was when all at once I saw clearly into your relations——
Lulu—You got icy curt towards me then.
Alva—Oh, God— I saw in you something so infinitely far above me. I had perhaps more veneration for you than for my mother. Think—when my mother died—I was seventeen—I went and stood before my father and demanded that he make you his wife on the spot or we’d have to fight a duel.
Lulu—He told me that at the time.
Alva—Since I’ve grown older, I can only pity him. He will never comprehend me. There he is making up a story for himself about a little diplomatic game that puts me in the rôle of laboring against his marriage with the Countess.
Lulu—Does she still look out upon the world as innocently as ever?
Alva—She loves him. I’m convinced of that. Her family has done everything to induce her to turn back. I don’t think any sacrifice in the world would be too great for her to make for his sake.
Lulu—[Holds out her glass to him.] A little more, please.
Alva—[Giving it to her.] You’re drinking too much.
Lulu—He shall learn to believe in my success! He doesn’t believe in art at all. He only believes in newspapers.
Alva—He believes in nothing.
Lulu—He brought me into the theater so that eventually someone might be found rich enough to marry me.
Alva—Well, all right. Why need that trouble us?
Lulu—I am to feel pleased if I can dance myself into a millionaire’s heart.
Alva—God forbid that anyone should snatch you from us!
Lulu—You’ve composed the music for it, tho.
Alva—You know that it was always my desire to write a piece for you.
Lulu—I am not at all suited to the stage, however.
Alva—You came into the world a dancer!
Lulu—Then why don’t you make your pieces as interesting as life is, at least?
Alva—Because if we did no man would believe us.
Lulu—If I hadn’t known more about acting than people on the stage pretend to, what might not have happened to me?
Alva—I provided your part with all the impossibilities imaginable, though.
Lulu—Nobody in the real world is taken in by hocus-pocus like that.
Alva—It’s enough for me that the public finds itself most tremendously stirred up.
Lulu—But I’d like to find myself most tremendously stirred up. [Drinks.]
Alva—You don’t seem to be in need of much more for that.
Lulu—Can you wonder, since every one of my scenes has an ulterior purpose? There are some men down there debating with themselves very earnestly already.—I can feel that without looking.
Alva—What does it feel like?
Lulu—No one of them has any notion of the others. Each thinks that he alone is the unhappy victim.
Alva—But how can you feel that?
Lulu—One gets such an icy thrill running up one’s body.
Alva—You are incredible. [An electric bell rings over the door.]
Lulu—My cape.... I shall keep in the proscenium!
Alva—[Putting a wide shawl round her shoulders.] Here is your cape.
Lulu—He shall have nothing more to fear for his shameless boosting.
Alva—Keep yourself under control!
Lulu—God grant that I dance the last sparks of intelligence out of their heads. [Exit.]
Alva—Yes, a more interesting piece could be written about her. [Sits, right, and takes out his notebook. Writes. Looks up.] First act: Dr. Goll. Rotten already! I can call up Dr. Goll from purgatory or wherever he’s doing penance for his orgies, but I’ll be made to answer for his sins. [Long-continued but much deadened applause and bravos outside.] That storm sounds like a menagerie when the meat appears at the cage!—Second act: Walter Schwarz. Still more impossible! How our souls do strip off their last coverings in the light of such lightning-strokes!—Third act?—Is it really to go on this way? [The attendant opens the door from outside and lets Escerny enter. He acts as tho he were at home, and without greeting Alva takes the chair near the mirror. Alva continues, not heeding him.] It can not go on this way in the third act!
Escerny—Up to the middle of the third act it didn’t seem to be going so well to-day as sometimes.
Alva—I was not on the stage.
Escerny—Now she’s in full career again.
Alva—She’s lengthening each number.
Escerny—I once had the pleasure of meeting the artiste at Dr. Schön’s house.
Alva—My father introduced her to the public through certain critiques in his paper.
Escerny—[Bowing slightly.] I was conferring with Dr. Schön about the publication of my discoveries at Lake Tanganyika.
Alva—[Bowing slightly.] From what he has let drop there can be no doubt that he takes the liveliest interest in your book.
Escerny—One very good thing about the artiste is that the audience seems not to exist for her at all.
Alva—As a child she learned the quick changing of clothes; but I was surprised to discover in her so important a danseuse.
Escerny—When she dances her solo she grows intoxicated with her own beauty,—she seems to be mortally love-sick of it herself.
Alva—Here she comes. [Gets up and opens the door. Enter Lulu.]
Lulu—[Without wreath or basket, to Alva.] You’re called for. I was three times before the curtain. [To Escerny.] Dr. Schön is not in your box?
Escerny—Not in mine.
Alva—[To Lulu.] Didn’t you see him?
Lulu—He is probably away again.
Escerny—He has the furthest lower box on the left.
Lulu—It seems he is ashamed of me!
Alva—There wasn’t a good seat left for him.
Lulu—[To Alva.] Ask him, though, if he likes me better now.
Alva—I’ll send him up.
Escerny—He applauded.
Lulu—Did he really?
Alva—Give yourself some rest. [Exit.]
Lulu—I’ve got to change again now.
Escerny—But your dresser isn’t here?
Lulu—I can do it quicker alone. Where did you say Dr. Schön was sitting?
Escerny—I saw him in the left parquet-box farthest back.
Lulu—I’ve still five costumes now before me; dancing-girl, ballerina, queen of the night, Ariel, and Lascaris.... [She goes behind the Spanish screen.]
Escerny—Would you think it possible that at our first encounter I expected nothing more than to make the acquaintance of a young lady of the literary world?... [He sits at the left of the centre table, and remains there to the end of the scene.] Have I perhaps erred in my judgment of your nature, or did I rightly interpret the smile which the thundering storms of applause called forth on your lips?—That you are secretly pained at the necessity of profaning your art before people of doubtful disinterestedness? [Lulu makes no answer.] That you would gladly exchange the shimmer of publicity at every moment for a quiet, sunny happiness in distinguished seclusion? [Lulu makes no answer.] That you feel you possess enough dignity and rank to fetter a man to your feet—in order to enjoy his utter helplessness?... [Lulu makes no answer.] That in a comfortable, richly furnished villa you would feel in a more fitting place than here,—with unlimited means, to live completely as your own mistress? [Lulu steps forth in a short, bright, pleated petticoat and white satin bodice, black shoes and stockings, and spurs with bells at her heels.]
Lulu—[Busy with the lacing of her bodice.] If there’s just one evening I don’t go on, I dream the whole night that I’m dancing and feel the next day as if I’d been racked.
Escerny—But what difference could it make to you to see before you instead of this mob one spectator, specially elect?
Lulu—That would make no difference. I don’t see anybody anyway.
Escerny—A lighted summer-house—the splashing of the water near at hand.... I am forced in my exploring-trips to the practice of a quite inhuman tyranny——
Lulu—[Putting on a pearl necklace before the mirror.] A good school!
Escerny—And if I now long to deliver myself unreservedly into the power of a woman, that is a natural need for relaxation.... Can you imagine a greater life-happiness for a woman than to have a man entirely in her power?
Lulu—[Jingling her heels.] Oh, yes!
Escerny—[Disconcerted.] Among men of culture you will not find one who can help losing his head over you.
Lulu—Your wishes, however, no one can quite fulfil without deceiving you.
Escerny—To be deceived by a girl like you must be ten times more enrapturing than to be uprightly loved by anybody else.
Lulu—You have not known what it was to be uprightly loved by any girl yet in all your life! [Turning her back to him and pointing.] Would you undo this knot for me? I’ve laced myself too tight. I am always so excited getting dressed.
Escerny—[After repeated efforts.] I’m sorry; I can’t.
Lulu—Then leave it. Perhaps I can. [Goes left.]
Escerny—I confess that I am lacking in deftness. Maybe I was a poor student in my relations with women.
Lulu—And probably you don’t have much opportunity in Africa, either?
Escerny—[Seriously.] Let me confess to you frankly that my isolation in the world embitters many an hour.
Lulu—The knot is almost done....
Escerny—What draws me to you is not your dancing. It’s your physical and spiritual refinement, as revealed in every one of your movements. No one who takes the interest I do in works of art could be deceived as to that. For ten evenings I’ve been studying your spiritual life in your dance, until to-day when you entered as the flower-girl I became perfectly clear. Yours is a grand nature—unselfish; you can see no one suffer; you embody the joy of life. As a wife you will make a man happy above all things.... You are all open-heartedness. You would be a poor actor. [The bell rings again.]
Lulu—[Having somewhat loosened her laces, takes a deep breath and jingles her spurs.] Now I can breathe again. The curtain is going up. [She takes from the centre table a skirt-dance costume—of bright yellow silk, without a waist, closed at the neck, reaching to the ankles, with wide, loose sleeves—and throws it over her.] I must dance.
Escerny—[Rises and kisses her hand.] Allow me to remain here a little while longer.
Lulu—Please stay.
Escerny—I need a little solitude. [Lulu goes out.] What is to be aristocratic? To be eccentric, like me? Or to be perfect in body and mind, like this girl? [Applause and bravos outside.] She gives me back my faith in humanity,—gives me back my life. Should not this woman’s children be more princely, body and soul, than children whose mother has no more vitality in her than I have felt in me until to-day? [Sitting, right; ecstatically.] The dance has ennobled her body.... [Alva enters.]
Alva—One is never sure a moment that some miserable chance won’t throw the whole performance out for good. [He throws himself into the big chair, left, so that the two men are in exactly reversed positions from their former ones. Both converse somewhat boredly and apathetically.]
Escerny—But the audience has never shown itself so responsive before.
Alva—She’s finished the skirt-dance.
Escerny—I hear her coming....
Alva—She isn’t coming. She has no time. She changes her costume in the wings.
Escerny—She has two ballet-costumes, if I’m not mistaken?
Alva—I find the white one more becoming to her than the rose-color.
Escerny—Do you?
Alva—Don’t you?
Escerny—I find she looks too bodiless in the white tulle.
Alva—I find she looks too animal in the rose tulle.
Escerny—I don’t find that.
Alva—The white tulle brings out the child-like side of her nature more.
Escerny—The rose tulle brings out the womanly side of her nature more. [The electric bell rings over the door. Alva jumps up.]
Alva—For heaven’s sake, what is wrong?
Escerny—[Getting up too.] What’s the matter? [The electric bell continues ringing till after they go out.]
Alva—Something’s gone wrong there——
Escerny—How can you get so frightened all of a sudden?
Alva—That must be a hellish confusion! [He runs out. Escerny follows him. The door remains open. Faint dance-music heard. Pause. Lulu enters in a long cloak, and shuts the door to behind her. She wears a rose-colored ballet costume with flower-garlands. She walks across the stage and sits down in the big arm-chair near the mirror. After a pause Alva returns.]
Alva—You had a faint?
Lulu—Please lock the door.
Alva—At least come down to the stage.
Lulu—Did you see him?
Alva—See whom?
Lulu—With his fiancée?
Alva—With his—— [To Schön, who enters.] You might have spared yourself that jest!
Schön—What’s the matter with her? [To Lulu.] How can you play the scene straight at me!
Lulu—I feel as if I’d been whipped.
Schön—[After bolting the door.] You will dance—as sure as I’ve taken the responsibility for you!
Lulu—Before your fiancée?
Schön—Have you a right to trouble yourself before whom? You’ve been engaged here. You receive your salary....
Lulu—Is that your affair?
Schön—You dance for anyone who buys a ticket. Whom I sit with in my box has nothing to do with your business!
Alva—I wish you’d stayed sitting in your box! [To Lulu.] Tell me, please, what I am to do. [A knock at the door.] There is the manager. [Calls.] Yes, in a moment! [To Lulu.] You won’t compel us to break off the performance?
Schön—[To Lulu.] Onto the stage with you!
Lulu—Let me have just a moment! I can’t now. I’m utterly miserable.
Alva—The devil take the whole theater crowd!
Lulu—Put in the next number. No one will notice if I dance now or in five minutes. There’s no strength in my feet.
Alva—But you will dance then?
Lulu—As well as I can.
Alva—As badly as you like. [A knock at the door again.] I’m coming.
Lulu—[When Alva is gone.] You are right to show me where I belong. You couldn’t do it better than by letting me dance that skirt-dance before your fiancée.... You do me the greatest service when you point out to me where my place is.
Schön—[Sardonically.] For you with your origin it’s incomparable luck to still have the chance of appearing before respectable people!
Lulu—Even when my shamelessness makes them not know where to look.
Schön—Nonsense!—Shamelessness?—Don’t make a necessity of virtue! Your shamelessness is what balances your every step with gold. One cries “bravo,” another “fie”—it’s all the same to you! Can you wish for a more brilliant triumph than when a respectable girl can hardly be kept in the box? Has your life any other aim? As long as you still have a spark of self-respect, you are no perfect dancer. The more terribly you make people shudder, the higher you stand in your profession!
Lulu—And it is absolutely indifferent to me what they think of me. I don’t, in the least, want to be any better than I am. I’m content with myself.
Schön—[In moral indignation.] That is your true nature. That’s straight!—Corruption!
Lulu—I wouldn’t have known that I had had a spark of self-respect——
Schön—[Suddenly distrustful.] No harlequinading——
Lulu—O Lord—I know very well what I’d have become if you hadn’t saved me from it.
Schön—Are you anything different then to-day?—heh?
Lulu—God be thanked, no!
Schön—Just so!
Lulu—[Laughs.] And how awfully glad of it I am!
Schön—[Spits.] Will you dance now?
Lulu—In anything, before anyone!
Schön—Then down to the stage!
Lulu—[Begging like a child.] Just a minute more! Please! I can’t stand up straight yet. They’ll ring.
Schön—You have become what you are in spite of everything I sacrificed for your education and your welfare.
Lulu—Had you overrated your ennobling influence?
Schön—Spare me your witticisms.
Lulu—The Prince was here.
Schön—Well?
Lulu—He takes me with him to Africa.
Schön—Africa?
Lulu—Why not? Didn’t you make me a dancer just so that someone might come and take me away with him?
Schön—But not to Africa, though!
Lulu—Then why didn’t you calmly let me fall in a faint, and mutely thank the Lord for it?
Schön—Because, more’s the pity, I had no reason for believing in your faint!
Lulu—[Making fun of him.] You couldn’t bear it any longer out front there?
Schön—Because I had to bring home to you what you are and to whom you are not to look up.
Lulu—You were afraid, though, that my legs might possibly have been really injured?
Schön—I know too well you are indestructible.
Lulu—So you know that?
Schön—[Bursting out.] Don’t look at me so impudently!
Lulu—No one is keeping you here.
Schön—I’m going as soon as the bell rings.
Lulu—As soon as you have the energy! Where is your energy? You have been engaged three years. Why don’t you marry? You recognize no obstacles. Why do you try to put the blame on me? You ordered me to marry Dr. Goll: I forced Dr. Goll to marry me. You ordered me to marry the painter: I made the best of a bad bargain. Artists are your creatures, princes your protégés. Why don’t you marry?
Schön—[Raging.] Do you imagine you stand in the way?
Lulu—[From here to the end of the act triumphant.] If you knew how happy your rage is making me! How proud I am that you take every means to humble me! You push me down as low—as low as a woman can be debased to, for then, you hope, you can sooner get over me. But you have suffered unspeakably yourself from everything you said just now to me. I see it in your eyes. Already you are near the end of your composure. Go! For your innocent fiancée’s sake, leave me alone! One minute more and your mood will change, and then you’ll make a scene with me of another kind, that you can’t answer for now.
Schön—I fear you no longer.
Lulu—Me? Fear yourself! I do not need you. I beg you to go! Don’t give me the blame. You know that I don’t need to faint to destroy your future. You have unlimited confidence in my honorableness. You believe not only that I’m an ensnaring daughter of Eve; you believe, too, that I’m a very good-natured creature. I am neither the one nor the other. The bad thing for you is that you think I am.
Schön—[Desperate.] Leave my thoughts alone! You have two husbands under the sod. Take the Prince, dance him into the ground. I am through with you. I know where the angel in you leaves off and the devil begins. If I take the world as it’s made, the Creator must bear the responsibility, not I! To me life is not an amusement!
Lulu—And, therefore, you make claims upon life greater than anyone can make.... Tell me, who of us two is more full of claims and demands, you or I?
Schön—Be silent! I don’t know how or what I think. When I hear you, I don’t think any more. In a week I’ll be married. I conjure you, by the angel that is in you, during that time come no more to my sight!
Lulu—I will lock my doors.
Schön—Go on and boast! God knows that since I began wrestling with the world and with life I have cursed no one like you!
Lulu—That comes from my lowly origin.
Schön—From your depravity!
Lulu—With a thousand pleasures I take the blame on myself! You must feel clean now; you must think yourself a model of austerity now, a paragon of unflinching principle—or else you can’t marry the child at all in her boundless inexperience——
Schön—Do you want me to grab you and——
Lulu—Yes! Yes! What must I say to make you? Not for the world now would I exchange with the innocent child! Besides, the girl loves you as no woman has ever loved you yet!
Schön—Silence, beast! Silence!
Lulu—Marry her—and then she’ll dance in her childish wretchedness before my eyes, instead of I before hers!
Schön—[Raising his fists.] God forgive me——
Lulu—Strike me! Where is your riding-whip? Strike me on the legs——
Schön—[Grasping his temples.] Away, away! [Rushes to the door, recollects himself, turns around.] Can I go before the girl now, this way? Home!—If I could only slip out of the world!
Lulu—Be a man! Look yourself in the face once:—you have no trace of a conscience; you shrink back from no wickedness; in the most cold-blooded way you are meaning to make the girl that loves you unhappy. You conquer half the world; you do what you please;—and you know as well as I that——
Schön—[Sunk in the chair, right centre, utterly exhausted.] Stop.
Lulu—That you are too weak—to tear yourself away from me.
Schön—[Groaning.] Oh! Oh! You make me weep.
Lulu—This moment makes me I cannot tell you how glad.
Schön—My age! My position!
Lulu—He cries like a child—the terrible man of might. Now go so to your bride and tell her what kind of a girl I am at heart—not a bit jealous!
Schön—[Sobbing.] The child! The innocent child!
Lulu—How can the incarnate devil get so weak all of a sudden!——But now go, please. You are nothing more now to me.
Schön—I cannot go to her.
Lulu—Out with you. Come to me again when you have got back your strength.
Schön—Tell me in God’s name what I must do.
Lulu—[Gets up; her cloak remains on the chair. Shoving aside the costumes on the centre table.] Here is writing-paper——
Schön—I can’t write....
Lulu—[Upright behind him, her arm on the back of his chair.] Write! “My dear Countess....”
Schön—[Hesitating.] I call her Adelheid....
Lulu—[With emphasis.] “My dear Countess....”
Schön—My sentence of death! [He writes.]
Lulu—“Take back your promise. I cannot reconcile it with my conscience——” [Schön drops the pen and glances up at her entreatingly.] Write “conscience”! “—to fetter you to my unhappy lot....”
Schön—[Writing.] You are right. You are right.
Lulu—“I give you my word that I am unworthy of your love——” [Schön turns round again.] Write “love”! “These lines are the proof of it. For three years I have tried to tear myself free; I have not the strength. I am writing you at the side of the woman who commands me. Forget me. Dr. Ludwig Schön.”
Schön—[Groaning.] O God!
Lulu—[Half startled.] No, no O God! [With emphasis.] “Dr. Ludwig Schön.” Postscript: “Do not attempt to save me.”
Schön—[Having written to the end, quite collapses.] Now—comes the—execution.
CURTAIN