Agathe

by Robert Musil

  And so in the course of time the wall calendar became a festering wound, reminding Hagauer at every glance how long his wife had avoided coming home. Thrifty with his emotions as with his housekeeping, he wrote her postcards, giving her news of himself and asking her, with gradually mounting urgency, when she expected to return. He received no answer. Soon he no longer beamed when acquaintances asked him sympathetically whether his wife would be away much longer in fulfillment of sad obligations, but fortunately he always had a great deal to do, since apart from the demands of school and of the clubs he belonged to, each day brought him through the mail a plethora of invitations, inquiries, avowals of approval, attacks, proofs to be corrected, magazines and important books: for while Hagauer’s human self resided in the provinces, forming part of the unappealing impression these were capable of making on a stranger passing through, his mind was at home in Europe, and this prevented him for a long time from grasping the full significance of Agathe’s prolonged absence. But one day there arrived with the mail a letter from Ulrich dryly informing him of the facts: that Agathe had no intention of returning to him and was requesting his consent to a divorce. Despite its polite form, this letter was so curt and so inconsiderate in tone that Hagauer indignantly realized Ulrich was about as concerned with his, the recipient’s, feelings as if he intended to remove an insect from a leaf. His first movement of inner defense was: Nothing serious, a whim! The message lay like a mocking specter in the bright daylight of pressing correspondence, tributes, and honorable mentions. It was only that evening, when Hagauer saw his empty house again, that he sat down at his desk and informed Ulrich with dignified brevity that it would be best to regard his note as not having ever been written. But soon a new letter from Ulrich arrived rejecting this view, repeating Agathe’s wish (without her knowing about it), and asking Hagauer, in somewhat more courteous detail, to do all that he could to facilitate the necessary legal steps, as befitted a man of his moral stature, and as was desirable, too, if the deplorable concomitants of a public dispute were to be avoided. Now Hagauer grasped the seriousness of the situation and allowed himself three days’ time to come up with an answer that would leave nothing to be either desired or regretted afterward.

  For two of those three days he suffered from a feeling as if someone had struck him a blow to the heart. “A bad dream!” he plaintively said to himself several times, and whenever he did not take himself very firmly in hand, he forgot to believe in the reality of what was being demanded of him. During these days he felt a deep discomfort in his breast that was very much like injured love, and in addition an indefinable jealousy that was directed, certainly not against a lover whom he suspected of being the cause of Agathe’s behavior, but against an intangible Something that had in effect demoted him. It was a kind of humiliation, similar to that of a very orderly man who has shattered or forgotten something: as if something that has had its fixed place in the mind since time immemorial, that one no longer notices but upon which a great deal depends, was suddenly broken. Pale and distraught, in a genuine torment that must not be underestimated because it lacked beauty, Hagauer walked about avoiding people, shrinking from the explanations he would have to give, the humiliations he would have to endure. It was not until the third day that his condition arrived at some stability. Hagauer had a natural aversion to Ulrich that was as great as Ulrich’s dislike of him, and though this had never quite shown itself before, it did so now when with a sudden leap of intuition he imputed all the blame for Agathe’s behavior to that footloose gypsy brother of hers, who must have completely turned her head; he sat down at his desk and with a few sparse words demanded the immediate return of his wife, declaring with iron resolve that as her husband he would discuss all further matters only with her.

  Ulrich sent a refusal, equally brief and equally iron in its resolution.

  Now Hagauer decided to work on Agathe directly; he made copies of his correspondence with Ulrich and added a long, carefully reasoned letter, and it was all of this that Agathe saw before her when she opened the large envelope with the official seal.

  Hagauer himself had felt as if all of what seemed intent on happening could not be true. After discharging his professional obligations, he had sat in the “deserted house” in the evening facing a blank sheet of paper, just as Ulrich had earlier, not knowing how to begin. But in Hagauer’s life the well-known “buttons technique” had proved successful more than once, and he resorted to it this time as well. It consists in taking a methodical approach to one’s thoughts, even when faced with an unsettling challenge, much as a man will have buttons sewn to his clothes because to assume that clothes can be removed from the body more quickly without buttons would actually entail a loss of time. The English author Surway, for instance, whose book on the subject Hagauer now consulted, because even in his distress it remained important to compare Surway’s views with his own, distinguishes five such buttons in a successful reasoning process: (a) observations of an event that immediately give rise to a sensation of difficulty in interpreting that event, (b) closer ascertainment and definition of these difficulties, (c) arriving at a conjecture as to a possible solution, (d) rational development of conclusions to be drawn from this conjecture, (e) further observations, leading to the acceptance or rejection of the hypothesis and thereby to the success of the reasoning process. Hagauer had already profitably applied a similar method to such a worldly subject as lawn tennis when he learned to play it at the Civil Service Club, and the game had acquired considerable intellectual charm for him as a result, but he had never yet made use of it in purely emotional matters; for his everyday affective life consisted largely of professional relations and, under more personal circumstances, of that “right feeling” that is a compound of all the feelings that are possible and in circulation among members of the white race in any given instance, with a certain premium on those that most nearly correspond with one’s locality, profession, and class. Applying the buttons to his wife’s extraordinary desire to divorce him was therefore not easy given his lack of practice, and as for the “right feeling,” it has a tendency to split in two where personal difficulties are concerned. It told Hagauer, on the one hand, that a man of the times like himself is obligated on many accounts not to put obstacles in the way of dissolving a relationship based on trust; but on the other hand, if one does not want a divorce, that same right feeling will also have a great deal to say that absolves one of such obligation, for the recklessness that has come to the fore in this domain can certainly not be condoned. In a case like his own, Hagauer knew, a modern man must “relax,” in other words disperse his attention, loosen up physically, and listen to whatever speaks to him from his innermost depths. Cautiously he put a halt to his deliberations, stared at the orphaned wall calendar, and listened into himself; and after a while a voice did indeed respond from a depth beneath his conscious mind, and told him precisely what he had already been thinking: that there was no reason why he should put up with anything so arbitrary as Agathe’s demand.

  But at this point, Professor Hagauer’s mind was already unexpectedly confronted with buttons a to e in Surway’s or some equivalent series of buttons and freshly cognizant of the difficulties of interpreting the event under observation. “Am I, Gottlieb Hagauer,” Hagauer asked himself, “to blame for this embarrassing episode?” He examined himself and could not find a single fault in his own comportment. “Is the cause another man she’s in love with?” was his second surmise in the direction of a possible solution. But he found this assumption difficult to make, because when he forced himself to consider the question objectively, it was hard to imagine what another man could offer Agathe that was better than what he gave her. Nevertheless, as this question was more easily clouded by personal vanity than any other, he subjected it to the most exacting scrutiny and, in doing so, found vistas opening out that he had never considered, and suddenly Hagauer felt himself transported to point c in Surway’s scheme and on the trail of a possible solution via d an
d e: For the first time since his marriage, he was struck by a number of phenomena reported, as far as he knew, only in women whose love of the other sex is not in the slightest deep or passionate. It was painful for him that he could not find any evidence in his memory of that wide-open, dreamswept surrender he had become acquainted with earlier, during his bachelor years, in females about whose sensual way of life there could be no doubt, but whose example now offered him the advantage of being able to rule out, in complete scientific calm, the destruction of his matrimonial bliss by a third party. Thus Agathe’s behavior was automatically reduced to a purely idiosyncratic revolt against this happiness, all the more so because she had left without the slightest premonitory indication; and because in the short span of time that had elapsed since then no rationally motivated change of mind could have occurred, Hagauer came to the firm and final conclusion that Agathe’s incomprehensible conduct could only be explained as one of those gradually gathering temptations to deny life that are said to occur in personalities that do not know what they want.

  But was Agathe’s nature really of that kind? This still remained to be investigated. Hagauer thoughtfully stroked his beard with the end of his pen. True, she did usually give the impression of being an “agreeable companion,” as he put it, but even when faced with matters that held the liveliest interest for him, she tended to show a marked indifference, not to say inertia! There was in fact something about her that was not in harmony with himself or with other people and their interests; it wasn’t contrariness; she always laughed or became serious at appropriate moments; but now that he thought about it, she had always, through all the years, given a somewhat distracted impression. She seemed to listen to whatever was being conveyed or explained to her, but she never seemed to believe it. Now that he thought about it more closely, her indifference seemed downright unhealthy. Sometimes one got the feeling that she was not aware of her surroundings at all . . . : And suddenly, before he himself knew it, his pen had begun to run swiftly, covering the page with his characteristically upright script. “Who knows what it is,” he wrote, “that makes you think you are too good to love the life I am in a position to offer you, and which I can say in all modesty is a pure and full life: you have always handled it as though with tongs, it seems to me now. You have denied yourself the riches of human and moral values that even a modest life has to offer, and even if I had to assume that there might have been something that made you feel justified in doing this, you would have shown yourself lacking in the moral will to effect a change and would have chosen an artificial and fantastical solution instead!”

  He thought it over once more. He mustered the schoolboys who had passed through his guiding hands, looking for a case that might cast a light on the matter; but before he was quite underway with this, there popped into his mind the missing piece in his deliberations that he had been looking for with vague discomfort. At this moment Agathe was for him no longer a purely individual case that could not be approached through a general rule; for when he considered how much she was prepared to give up without being blinded by any particular passion, he was led inescapably, and with delight, to the basic assumption, familiar to modern pedagogy, that she lacked the capacity for suprasubjective reflection and stable mental contact with her environment. Quickly he wrote: “Probably even now as you set about doing whatever it is you have in mind, you have only the vaguest idea of what it is; but I am warning you, before you make a lasting decision! You may well be the most extreme opposite of a self-knowing and life-oriented person such as myself, but just for that reason you should not thoughtlessly divest yourself of the support I am offering!”—Actually Hagauer had wanted to write something else. For human intelligence is not a self-enclosed and isolated faculty, its defects entail moral defects—hence the expression “moral idiocy”—just as moral flaws (though this is more rarely considered) may move the intelligence in whatever direction they choose, or blind it altogether! Thus Hagauer saw in his mind’s eye a distinct type that he was inclined to characterize, on the basis of conclusions already arrived at, as “an on the whole adequately intelligent variety of moral idiocy that expresses itself only in certain deficient forms of behavior.” But he could not bring himself to use this illuminating expression, partly because he wanted to avoid further provoking his runaway wife, partly because a layperson usually misunderstands such terms when they are applied to him- or herself. Factually, however, it had to be acknowledged that the objectionable manifestations belonged in the broad category of substandard mentality, and at last Hagauer hit on a way out of this tension between conscience and chivalry: by subsuming the irregularities in his wife’s behavior in a widespread pattern of female underperformance, he could classify them as social imbecility! Having formed this conception, he rounded off his letter in moving words. With the prophetic wrath of the scorned lover and pedagogue, he described Agathe’s asocial nature, so precariously lacking in a sense of community, as a “minus variant” that never grapples vigorously and creatively with the problems of life in the way that “our modern age” requires of “its people,” persisting instead in obstinate self-chosen isolation, “separated from life by a pane of glass,” constantly on the brink of pathological danger. “If there was something about me you didn’t like, you should have opposed it,” he wrote; “but the fact is that your mind is no match for the energies of our time and therefore dodges their demands! Having warned you about your character,” he concluded, “I repeat: You need reliable support more urgently than others do. In your own interest I urge you to come back immediately, and declare furthermore that the responsibility I bear as your husband forbids me to accede to your wish.”

  Before signing this letter, Hagauer read it through once more, found its analysis of the psychological type in question very incomplete, but refrained from altering anything, except that at the end—expelling through his moustache with a vigorous exhalation the unaccustomed, proudly accomplished effort to reflect on his wife, and pondering how much still needed to be said on the question of the “modern age”—he interpolated, above the word “responsibility,” a chivalrous locution about his venerated father-in-law’s precious bequest to him.

  After Agathe had read all this, a strange thing happened: the content of these remarks did not leave her unaffected. Slowly, after reading it again word for word—standing all the while, without taking the time to sit down—she let the letter sink and handed it to Ulrich, who had been observing his sister’s agitation with surprise.

  20

  ULRICH AND AGATHE LOOK FOR A REASON AFTER THE FACT

  While Ulrich read, Agathe watched the play of expressions on his face and was disheartened. He had bowed his head over the letter, and his response seemed irresolute, as though undecided between mockery, gravity, sorrow, or contempt. At that moment a heavy weight descended on her; it encroached on her from all sides, as if the air were becoming dense and unbearably stale after having just recently been unnaturally, deliciously light. What Agathe had done with her father’s will was for the first time oppressing her conscience. But it would be insufficient to say that she suddenly realized the full measure of the guilt she had incurred in actual fact; rather, what she felt was the full measure of her guilt in relation to everything, including her brother, and the sum of it all was an indescribable disillusionment. Everything she had done seemed incomprehensible. She had spoken of wanting to kill her husband, she had forged a will, and she had attached herself to her brother without asking him if she would be disrupting his life: she had done this in a kind of imaginative delirium. And what she was especially ashamed of at this moment was that the most obvious and natural thought had never occurred to her, for any other woman wanting to free herself from a husband she does not like will either look for a better one or compensate herself by some other, equally natural action. Ulrich himself had pointed this out often enough, but she had not listened. Now she stood there and did not know what he would say. Her behavior seemed to her so obviously that
of someone who is really not of sound mind that she thought Hagauer was right to hold up a mirror to her in the way that he had; and the sight of his letter in Ulrich’s hand mortified her, much as a person might feel when, already accused of a crime, he receives a letter from a former teacher assuring him of his contempt. Of course she had never allowed Hagauer to have any influence over her; nevertheless, the effect was as though he were in a position to say: “I had the wrong idea about you!” or “Unfortunately I was never mistaken about you and always had the feeling you would come to a bad end!” In her need to shake off this ridiculous and sorrowful feeling, she interrupted Ulrich, who was still attentively reading the letter and, it seemed, finding it hard to read all the way through.

  “He’s actually describing me very accurately,” she said with seeming equanimity but with a touch of provocation that clearly betrayed a wish to hear the opposite. “And even though he doesn’t explicitly say so, it’s true nonetheless: either I must have been non compos mentis when I married him for no compelling reason, or I am now, when I’m leaving him for just as little reason.”

  Ulrich, who was reading for the third time those parts of the letter that made his imagination an involuntary witness of her close relationship with Hagauer, distractedly muttered something she could not make out.