by Robert Musil
When she grew tired, she began to feel a longing for meadows and woods, for walking in silence and open air. But there was no way to get there on foot. She took a streetcar. She had been raised to control herself in front of strangers. So when she bought a ticket and asked for directions, her voice betrayed no agitation. She sat upright and still, with not a quiver in so much as a finger. And as she sat like this, the thoughts came. She would no doubt have felt better if she could have given vent to her feelings; with her limbs fettered, these thoughts were like big bundles she tried in vain to force through an opening. She resented what Ulrich had said. She did not want to hold it against him. She denied herself the right to do that. What good was she to him?! She took up his time and gave him nothing in return; she disturbed his work and his way of life. At the thought of his way of life she felt a pang. In all the time she had lived with him, no other woman seemed to have entered the house. Agathe was convinced that her brother always needed to have a woman. So he was depriving himself for her sake. And as she was unable to compensate him in any way, she was selfish and wicked. At this moment she would have liked to turn around and tenderly beg his forgiveness. But then she remembered how cold he had been. Obviously he regretted having taken her in. All the things he had planned and said before he had gotten sick of her—he no longer mentioned any of them! Once again Agathe’s heart was tormented by the great disillusionment that had come with the letter. She was jealous. Senselessly and vulgarly jealous. She wished she could force herself on her brother, and felt the passionate and impotent friendship of one who rushes headlong into the path of rejection. “I could steal for him, walk the streets for him!” she thought, and though she realized this was ridiculous, she could not help it. Ulrich’s talk, with its joking manner and apparently impartial superiority, felt like a mockery. She admired his aplomb and all those intellectual needs surpassing her own. But she could not see why all ideas should always apply to all human beings equally. What she needed in her shame and humiliation was personal comfort, not general edification! She did not want to be brave!! And after a while she reproached herself for being the way she was, and increased her pain by imagining that she deserved nothing better than Ulrich’s indifference.
This self-belittlement, for which neither Ulrich’s behavior nor even Hagauer’s painful letter had provided sufficient cause, was a temperamental outburst. Everything that Agathe, in the not very long time since she had been a child, had felt to be her failure to meet the demands of society had been brought about by her living, throughout that period, in disregard or even in opposition to her deepest inclinations. These inclinations were towards devotion and trust, for she had never become as much at home in solitude as her brother; and if until now she had found it impossible to give herself wholeheartedly to a person or a cause, it was because she bore within herself the possibility of a greater devotion, whether it stretched out its arms to the world or to God! One well-known path of devotion to all of humanity consists in not getting along with one’s neighbors; in the same way a hidden and fervent longing for God may arise when a social misfit is endowed with great love. The religious criminal, in this sense, is no more absurd a phenomenon than the religious old woman who never found a husband, and Agathe’s behavior toward Hagauer, which had the completely senseless form of a self-serving action, was just as much the outburst of an impatient will as was the violence with which she accused herself of having been awakened to life by her brother and now losing it because of her weakness.
She soon lost patience with sitting in the sedately rolling streetcar; when the houses by the side of the road became lower and more rural, she got out and continued on foot. The courtyards were open; through gateways and across low fences she saw artisans, animals, and children at play. The air was filled with a peace in whose vastness voices spoke and tools tapped; these sounds stirred in the bright air with the irregular, soft movements of a butterfly, while Agathe felt herself gliding past them like a shadow toward the nearby rising ground of vineyards and woods. But she halted at one point, outside a yard where coopers were at work, and listened to the good sound of mallets knocking against barrel staves. All her life she had felt pleasure in watching the modest, sensible, well-thought-out actions of hands performing such labor. This time, too, she could not have enough of the rhythmic thuds and the slow striding motions of the men circling the barrel. It allowed her to forget her grief for a moment and plunged her into a pleasant unthinking accord with the world. She always felt admiration for people who could do things like this that had evolved so variously and naturally out of a need that was universally acknowledged. Only she herself did not wish to be active, even though she had a number of mental and practical talents. Life was already complete without her. And suddenly, before the connection became clear to her, she heard bells ringing and could barely prevent herself from weeping again. The two bells of the little suburban church had probably been tolling all along, but Agathe noticed them only now and was instantly overcome by how these useless sounds, shut out from the good, abounding earth and flying passionately through the air, were related to her own existence.
She hastily resumed walking, and accompanied by the tolling of the bells, which now would not leave her ears, she swiftly advanced between the last houses onto the hills, whose lower slopes were studded with vineyards and, here and there, bushes lining the paths, while from above the bright green of the forest beckoned. And now she knew where she was being drawn, and it was a lovely feeling, as though with every step she were sinking more deeply into nature. Her heart pounded with delight and effort when she sometimes stopped and assured herself that the bells were still going with her, though hidden high in the air and hardly audible. It seemed to her that she had never before heard bells ringing like this in the middle of an ordinary day, for no apparent festive reason, democratically mingled with the natural, self-assured business of life. But of all the tongues of this thousand-voiced city, this was the last one that spoke to her, and there was something about it that seized hold of her, as though it wanted to lift her high and swing her up the mountain, but then each time it would let go of her again and lose itself in a small metallic sound that was in no way an exception to the chirping, buzzing, or rustling of all the other sounds of the countryside. So Agathe climbed and walked on for perhaps another hour, when she suddenly found herself facing the little wilderness of shrubs she had carried in her memory. It enclosed a neglected grave by the edge of the forest, where a poet had killed himself nearly a hundred years ago and where, in accordance with his last wish, he had been laid to rest. Ulrich had said he was not a good poet, though a famous one, and the rather shortsighted lyricism that expresses itself in the wish to be buried at a site that serves as a scenic view had found a sharp critic in him. But Agathe had loved the inscription on the big stone slab since the day they had come upon it on a walk and together deciphered the rain-worn beautiful Biedermeier letters, and she leaned over the black chains with the big angular links that defined the limit separating the rectangle of death from life.
“I was as nothing to you all” were the words the life-weary poet had asked to be inscribed on his tombstone, and it occurred to Agathe that they could apply to her too. This thought, by the edge of a forest lookout, above the verdant vineyards and the alien, immeasurable city with its slowly stirring plumes of smoke in the morning sun, moved her once again. On a sudden impulse, she kneeled down and leaned her forehead against one of the stone pillars to which the chains were attached; the unaccustomed position and the cool touch of the stone conjured up for her the somewhat rigid and will-less peace of the death that awaited her. She tried to collect herself. But she did not succeed right away: birdcalls intruded into her hearing; she was surprised by how many different birdcalls there were; branches moved, and as she did not feel the wind, it seemed to her that the trees themselves were moving their branches; in a sudden hush, a faint scurrying could be heard; the stone she was resting her forehead against was so smooth tha
t it felt as if there were a piece of ice between her skin and the stone that kept her from quite reaching it. Only after a while did she know that what was distracting her was the very thing she was trying to recall, that fundamental sense of being utterly superfluous, which, reduced to its simplest terms, could only be expressed with the words that life was so complete without her that she had no business meddling with it. This cruel feeling was at bottom neither despairing nor aggrieved; rather, it was a listening and a watching that Agathe had always known, now merely devoid of any impulse, indeed any chance, to include herself. There was almost a quality of being sheltered in this banishment, just as there is an awe that forgets to ask questions. She could just as well go away. But where? There had to be some place, somewhere. Agathe was not one of those people in whom even a conviction of the vanity of all imaginings can take the form of a kind of satisfaction akin to belligerent or spiteful austerity as a way of accepting one’s unsatisfactory lot. She was generous and incautious in such matters and not like Ulrich, who put every conceivable difficulty in the way of his feelings, in order to disallow them if they did not pass the test. She was stupid! That was it, she told herself. She did not want to think things through. Defiantly she pressed her deeply lowered brow against the iron chains, which gave a little and then firmly resisted. In these last weeks she had somehow begun to believe in God again, but without thinking of Him. Certain states in which the world had always seemed different to her from the way it appears, and in such a way that she too was no longer shut out but entirely flooded by a radiant conviction, had almost, under Ulrich’s influence, been brought close to an inner metamorphosis and a complete transformation. She would have been prepared to conceive of a God who opens his world like a hiding place. But Ulrich said this was not necessary, it could only do harm to imagine more than one could experience. And it was up to him to decide such things. But then he must also guide her without abandoning her. He was the threshold between two lives, and all the longing she felt for one of them, and all her flight from the other, led to him first. She loved him as shamelessly as one loves life. When she opened her eyes in the morning, it was he who awoke in all her limbs. Even now he was looking at her from the dark mirror of her anguish: And only at this moment did Agathe remember that she wanted to kill herself. She had the feeling that to spite him she had run away from home to God when she left the house with the resolve to kill herself. But now that resolve seemed to be exhausted and to have sunk back to its source, which was that Ulrich had hurt her. She was angry at him, that feeling was still with her, but the birds were singing, and she heard them again. She was just as bewildered as before, but now joyfully bewildered. She wanted to take some kind of action, but it should be directed at Ulrich, not just at herself. The infinite torpor in which she had lain on her knees gave way to the warm and lively sensation of blood streaming into her limbs as she rose to her feet.
When she looked up, a man was standing near her. She was embarrassed, for she did not know how long he had been watching her. When her glance, still darkened by excitement, slid across his, she noticed that he was observing her with unconcealed sympathy and apparently wanted to instill her with hearty confidence: The man was tall and gaunt, wore dark clothes, and a short blond beard covered his chin and cheeks. Beneath this beard one could discern soft, slightly pouting lips whose youthfulness contrasted oddly with the gray hair that was already mingling with the blond, as if age had overlooked them beneath the growth of facial hair. This face was altogether difficult to decipher. The first impression suggested a secondary-school teacher; the sternness in this face was not carved out of hard wood but was rather like something soft that had been toughened amid daily little vexations. But if one took as one’s point of departure this very softness, in which the manly beard appeared like a thing implanted to satisfy a convention its wearer believed in, one realized that in this perhaps somewhat womanish foundation there were hard, almost ascetic details, evidently shaped out of that soft material by a ceaselessly active will.
Agathe did not know what to make of this face, which held her in suspension between attraction and repulsion. She understood only that this man wanted to help her.
“Life offers as much opportunity to strengthen the will as it does to weaken it,” the stranger said, wiping his fogged eyeglasses in order to see better. “One should never flee from difficulties but should seek to master them!” Agathe looked at him in astonishment. Clearly he must have been watching her for a long time, for these words came from the midst of an inner conversation. Suddenly startled, he lifted his hat, making good his failure to perform that indispensable courtesy earlier; but he quickly regained his composure and proceeded straightforwardly. “Pardon my asking if I can help you,” he said. “It seems to me that emotional pain, indeed often even a shocking injury to the self, such as I am witnessing here, is more easily confided to a stranger!”
It appeared that the stranger was not speaking without effort; he seemed to have been fulfilling a charitable duty in engaging with this beautiful woman, and now that they were walking side by side, he was positively struggling with his words. For Agathe had simply stood up and begun slowly walking away from the grave, and he with her, out from among the trees into the open space by the edge of the hills, undecided whether they would now take one of the paths leading downward, or if they did, which one. Instead they walked a considerable way along the hillside in conversation; then they turned around, and then they walked again in the first direction, neither of them knowing where the other had intended to go, and each willing to yield to the other’s choice. “Won’t you tell me why you were weeping?” the stranger repeated with the mild voice of a doctor asking where it hurts. Agathe shook her head. “It wouldn’t be easy to explain,” she said, and suddenly asked him: “But I have a question for you: What makes you so sure that you can help me without knowing me? I should think that one can’t help anyone!”
The man by her side did not answer right away. He opened his mouth to speak several times, but it seemed he was forcing himself to wait. Finally, he said: “Probably one can only help someone who is suffering from something one has lived through oneself.”
He fell silent. Agathe laughed at the thought that this man could suppose that he might have experienced what she was suffering, which would fill him with revulsion if he knew what it was. The man seemed not to hear this laugh or else to regard it as bad manners due to nervous agitation.
After a moment’s reflection he said calmly: “Of course I don’t mean that anyone has a right to imagine that he can show anyone else how to go about his life. But you see: In a catastrophe, fear is infectious, and—escape is infectious too! I mean the mere fact of having escaped, as from a burning house. All the others have lost their heads and are running into the flames: What a tremendous help if a single person stands outside and waves, nothing more than that: waving and shouting that there is a way out, though his words may be unintelligible to them. . . !”
Agathe nearly laughed again at the dreadful thoughts this kindly man harbored in his imagination; but just because they were so incongruent with his appearance, their expression molded his wax-soft face almost uncannily from within.
“My, you talk like a fireman!” she replied, deliberately adopting the teasing superficial manner of a fashionable lady in order to hide her curiosity. “But surely you must have formed some idea of what kind of catastrophe I am involved in?!” —Unwittingly, the seriousness in her mockery came through, for this man’s simple notion of wanting to help her aroused her indignation by the equally simple gratitude that arose in her. The stranger looked at her with astonishment. Then he collected himself and retorted almost in the manner of a rebuke: “You are probably still too young to know that our life is very simple. It is insurmountably confusing only when one thinks of oneself; but the moment one does not think of oneself and asks oneself how one can help another person, it is very simple!”
Agathe considered this and did not respond. And
whether because of her silence or because of the encouragingly wide-open space into which his words sailed out, the stranger went on talking without looking at her: “The overestimation of the personal is a modern superstition. These days there is so much talk of a culture of personality, living life to the fullest, life affirmation, and the like. But these murky, ambiguous terms only betray their users’ need to veil the true meaning of their revolt. What is it that one is supposed to affirm? Everything and anything, with no discrimination? Development always involves opposition, an American thinker has said. We can’t very well develop one side of our nature without holding back the growth of the other side. And what is it that should be lived to the full? The mind or the instincts? Our whims or our character? Selfishness or love? If our higher nature is to be lived to the full, our lower nature must learn renunciation and obedience.”
Agathe was wondering why it should be simpler to attend to others’ needs than to one’s own. She was one of those not at all egotistic natures whose thoughts always revolve around themselves but who never look after their own interests, and this is much further removed from the usual, self-serving sort of selfishness than is the contented unselfishness of those who look after their fellow men. And so what her neighbor was saying was at bottom foreign to her, but somehow it affected her nonetheless, and particular words, wielded with such energetic emphasis, danced before her eyes unsettlingly, as if their meaning was more to be seen in the air than heard. They happened to be walking along a ridge that gave Agathe a wonderful view of the deeply sunken valley, while her companion evidently experienced the site as akin to a pulpit or lectern. She stopped, and with her hat, which she had all along been carelessly swinging in her hand, she drew a line through the stranger’s speech. “So you did form an image of me,” she said. “I see it shining through, and it’s not flattering!”