MRS. KRAUSE. Mr. Kahl does it strickly fer 'is personal pleasure.
MRS. SPILLER. "Woods, wildlife, and women," – as his Excellency, Minister von Schadendorf, used to say.
KAHL. 'N d-day after t-t-t'morrow, we're g-gonna have a pigeon shoot.
LOTH. What in the world is that supposed to be: a pigeon shoot?
HELEN. I simply can't bear that sort of thing. It's just sadistic and childish. A boy who pitches a stone through a window is doing something more constructive.
HOFFMANN. Isn't that a bit much, Helen?
HELEN. I'm not sure. From my point of view, it makes a lot more sense to smash windows than to tie pigeons to a post and then try to shoot them.
HOFFMANN. But, Helen, you really must consider. . .
LOTH. (While cutting up something or other on his plate.) It is a disgraceful barbarity.
KAHL. A c-couple o' lousy p-pigeons?
MRS. SPILLER. Nnngg – You know, Mr. Kahl keeps – nnngg – two hundred of them in his loft.
LOTH. All hunting is a form of the barbaric.
HOFFMANN. But one you can't exterminate. Right now, for instance, they're trying to track down five hundred live foxes, and foresters all over Germany are devoting their entire attention to looking into holes in the ground.
LOTH. Who needs all those foxes?
HOFFMANN. The English – who bestow upon them the honor of being released from their cages only to be chased to death by members of the aristocracy.
LOTH. Moslem or Christian – all the same. Once a beast, always a beast.
HOFFMANN. May I pass you some lobster, Mother?
MRS. KRAUSE. Sure. They're mighty tasty this year.
MRS. SPILLER. Madame has such refined taste – nnngg.
MRS. KRAUSE. (To Loth.) Guess ya never et no lobster neither, hunh Doctor?
LOTH. Yes, once in a while – by the sea up in Warnemünde,* where I was born.
MRS. KRAUSE. (To Kahl.) 'Times, honest-ta-God, a body don't know what to eat no more, hunh William?
* A port on the Baltic Sea, Warnemünde is now in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). [All footnotes are from Gerhard Hauptmann, Before Daybreak, introduced and translated by Peter Bauland. Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures; no. 92. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1979.]
print version
return to list
previous document