Agathe

by Robert Musil

  Nevertheless, on this day, and not for the first time since the day before, Lindner had appeared at mealtime nearly fifteen minutes late. The table was set; the plates, stacked three high at each of the two seats, looked at him with the round glare of reproach; the little glass knife rests, from which knives, spoons, and forks stared like gun barrels from their mounts, and the rolled-up napkins in their rings, were arrayed like an army left in the lurch by its general. Lindner had hastily stuck the mail, which he usually opened before the meal, into his pocket and with a bad conscience hurried into the dining room, uncertain in his bewilderment what it was that befell him there—it might well have been something like mistrust, for at the same moment, from the other side and just as hastily as he, his son, Peter, stepped in as if he had merely been waiting for his father to arrive.

  27

  THE DO-GOODER AND THE GOOD-FOR-NOTHING. BUT ALSO AGATHE

  Peter was a quite robust fellow, about seventeen years old, in whom Lindner’s precipitous height had been pervaded and reduced by a broader physique; he came up only as far as his father’s shoulders, but his head, which was shaped like a large squarish-round billiard ball, sat on a neck of sturdy flesh whose circumference would have sufficed for one of Papa’s thighs. Peter had lingered on a soccer field instead of in school and had on his way home unfortunately accosted a girl, from whom his manly beauty had wrung a half promise to meet with him again: delayed by this development, he had secretly slunk into the house and to the door of the dining room, uncertain till the last moment how he was going to excuse himself; but when to his surprise he heard no one in the room, he had rushed in, and, just on the point of putting on the bored expression of long waiting, was now very embarrassed when he collided with his father. His red face flushed with still redder spots, and he immediately let loose a great flood of words, casting sidelong glances at his father when he thought he wasn’t noticing, but then letting his gaze leap fearlessly into the older Lindner’s eyes when he felt them directed at himself. This was calculated, time-tested behavior; its purpose was to create the impression of a young man who was candid and unrestrained to the point of folly, and who might be capable of anything except keeping something hidden. But when that was not sufficient, Peter did not shy away from letting slip, apparently inadvertently, words disrespectful of his father or in some other way offensive to him, which then worked like lightning rods to attract a flash of displeasure and thereby divert his father’s attention from more dangerous paths. For Peter feared his father the way hell fears heaven, with the dignity of roasting flesh on which the spirit gazes from above. He loved soccer, but even there he preferred watching from the sidelines with an expert mien and making weighty judgments to exerting himself on the field. He intended to become a pilot and perform heroic feats someday; however, he did not conceive of this as a goal toward which one must work but thought of it as a personal disposition, an innate attribute of people who will one day be able to fly. Nor did it make a difference to him that his aversion to work was in contradiction to the teachings of school: this son of a recognized pedagogue had not the slightest interest in being respected by his teachers; it was enough for him to be the physically strongest in the class, and if one of his classmates struck him as being too smart, he was prepared to adjust the imbalance with a punch to the nose or stomach. As everyone knows, one can lead a respected existence this way, but his method had one disadvantage: he could not apply it at home against his father, indeed it was imperative that his father find out about it as little as possible. For faced with this spiritual authority that had raised him and gently held him in its clutches, Peter’s vehemence broke down into wailing attempts at rebellion, which Lindner senior called the pitiful shrieks of the desires. Exposed since childhood to the best principles, Peter had a hard time denying their truth to himself, and was able to satisfy his honor and virtue only with the cunning of an Indian brave by avoiding open verbal combat. He did, of course, employ many words in order to adapt to his opponent, but he never descended to the need to tell the truth, which in his opinion was unmanly and a waste of breath.

  So this time too his protestations and grimaces bubbled forth at once, but they elicited no reaction from the master. Professor Lindner had hastily made the sign of the cross over the soup and was eating gravely, silently, and in a hurry. Once in a while, briefly and without focus, his glance would come to rest on the part in his son’s hair. That part had on this day been drawn through the dense, reddish-brown hair with comb, water, and a good deal of pomade like a narrow-gauge railroad track through a reluctantly swerving forest thicket. When Peter felt his father’s gaze resting there, he lowered his head to cover with his chin the red, screamingly beautiful tie with which his educator was not yet acquainted. For at any moment the gaze might gently widen at such a discovery and the mouth follow it with words about “submission to the slogans of coxcombs and buffoons” or “social preening and servile vanity” that offended Peter. But this time nothing happened, and it was only a while later, when the plates were being changed, that Lindner said kindly and vaguely—it was not even certain whether he was referring to the tie or whether his admonition was prompted by an unconsciously registered impression: “People who still need to struggle a lot with their vanity should avoid anything conspicuous in their outward appearance. . . !”

  Peter took advantage of his father’s unexpected lapse of character to produce a story about an “Unsatisfactory” he claimed to have earned by an act of chivalry, because, tested after another student, he had deliberately made himself look unprepared in order not to outshine his classmate by meeting incredible demands that were simply beyond the reach of weaker students.

  Professor Lindner merely shook his head at this.

  But when the middle course had been taken away and dessert was brought to the table, he began, pensively and circumspectly: “Look, it’s precisely in the years of the greatest appetite that one can win the most momentous victories over oneself, not by starving oneself, which is unhealthy, but by occasionally renouncing a favorite dish after one has eaten enough.”

  Peter was silent and showed no understanding of this, but his head once again was blushing bright red up to his ears.

  “It would be a mistake,” his father continued, “if I were to punish you for this poor grade, because the childish lies you have added to it are evidence of such a lack of the very notion of moral honor that one must first make the soil tillable on which punishment can take effect. So I’m not asking anything of you except that you recognize this yourself, and I’m sure that then you will punish yourself.”

  That was the moment when Peter vigorously alluded to his weak health and also to the overwork that could have caused his recent failures in school and that made it impossible for him to steel his character by renouncing dessert.

  “The French philosopher Comte,” Professor Lindner replied calmly, “was accustomed after dining, often without any particular inducement, to chew on a crust of dry bread in place of dessert, just to remember those who do not even have dry bread. It is a fine trait that reminds us that every exercise of abstinence and simplicity has profound social significance!”

  Peter had long had an extremely unfavorable view of philosophy, but now his father reminded him unpleasantly of the literary arts as well, for he continued: “The author Tolstoy also says that abstemiousness is the first step toward freedom. Man has many slavish desires, and in order for the struggle against all of them to be successful, one must begin with the most elemental ones: gluttony, idleness, and lust.” Professor Lindner was accustomed to pronouncing any of these three terms, which occurred frequently in his admonitions, as impersonally as the others; and long before Peter was able to develop a concrete notion of what was meant by “lust,” he had already been introduced to the struggle against it, along with the struggle against gluttony and idleness, without giving any more thought to the matter than his father, who did not have to give it any thought because he was certain that this wa
s where basic instruction in self-determination begins. And so it happened that on a day when Peter did not yet know sensual pleasure in its most desired form but was already slinking around its skirts, he was surprised for the first time by a sudden feeling of angry revulsion against the loveless way in which his father habitually connected sensual pleasure with idleness and the craving for food. As he could not risk saying it directly, he had to lie, and cried: “I’m a simple person and can’t compare myself with writers and philosophers!”—and though he was agitated, the words he chose were not ill-considered.

  His educator did not respond.

  “I’m hungry!” Peter added, still more passionately.

  Lindner responded with a pained, disdainful smile.

  “I’ll die if I don’t get enough to eat!” Peter cried, almost bawling.

  “A person’s first response to all intrusions and offenses from without occurs through the vocal organs!” his father instructed him.

  And the “pitiful shrieks of the desires,” as Lindner called them, died away. Peter did not want to cry on this particularly manly day, but the need to develop verbal agility in self-defense weighed terribly on him. He could think of nothing further to say, and at that moment he even hated lies, because one had to speak in order to use them. In his eyes, bloodlust and wails of lament alternated. At this point Professor Lindner said kindly: “You need to impose serious discipline on yourself in practicing silence, so that it’s not the thoughtless and uneducated person in you that speaks but the one who is prudent and well brought up and whose words communicate peace and firmness!” And then, with a friendly face, he lapsed into reflection. “I have no better advice, if one wants to make others good,” he disclosed to his son the conclusion he had come to, “than to be good oneself; Matthias Claudius also says: ‘I cannot conceive of any other way than to be oneself the way one wants children to be!’” And with these words, Professor Lindner amiably and resolutely pushed the dessert away from himself—even though it was his favorite, rice pudding with sugar and chocolate—without tasting it, and by means of this loving obduracy forced his teeth-gnashing son to do the same.

  At that moment the housekeeper entered the room and announced Agathe. August Lindner sat up in consternation. “So she did come!” a horribly distinct mute voice said to him. He was prepared to feel indignant, but he was also prepared to feel a fraternal indulgence guided by the natural empath’s delicate moral sense of touch, and these two antagonists, each with a great retinue of principles, performed a wild chase through his entire body before he managed to give the simple order to show the lady into the living room. “You wait for me here!” he said to Peter severely and left the room with long strides. But Peter had noticed something unusual in his father, he just didn’t know what; in any case, whatever it was inspired him with such recklessness and courage that after Lindner’s departure and a brief hesitation he scooped into his mouth a spoonful of chocolate that was standing ready to be sprinkled, then a spoonful of sugar, and finally a big spoonful of rice, chocolate, and sugar, and repeated this several times before smoothing out the bowls for all eventualities.

  And Agathe sat awhile alone in the strange house waiting for Professor Lindner, for he was pacing back and forth in another room, collecting his thoughts before confronting the beautiful and dangerous woman.

  She looked around and suddenly felt anxious, as if she had lost her way climbing among the branches of a dreamed tree and had to fear not being able to find her way back safely from its world of twisted wood and myriad leaves. A profusion of details bewildered her, and in the austere taste that had found expression in them a forbidding severity was very peculiarly entwined with an opposite for which, in her unsettled state, she could not find a ready word. The forbidding quality may have been reminiscent of the frozen stiffness of chalk drawings, but the room also looked as if it smelled, in a grandmotherly, cosseted way, of medicaments and ointments; and there was a hovering presence within it of old-fashioned, unmanly spirits preoccupied with human suffering in a disagreeably ostentatious way. Agathe sniffed. And though the air contained nothing more than her imaginings, she gradually found herself being led further and further back, and now remembered the slightly anxious “smell of heaven,” that odor of incense, stale and emptied of its spice, that clung to the habits her teachers wore when she was a girl being brought up together with little friends in a pious institute, and where she was far from languishing in piety. For edifying though this odor is for people who form the right association with it, in the hearts of worldly and resistant adolescent girls its effect consisted in a vivid memory of feelings of protest, not unlike those that imagination and first experiences associate with a man’s moustache or with his energetic cheeks, redolent of pungent essences and a hint of talc. God knows, that scent, too, does not keep its promises! And while Agathe sat waiting on one of Lindner’s renunciatory upholstered chairs, the empty smell of the world and the empty smell of heaven joined together and enclosed her inescapably like two hollow hemispheres, and a premonition came over her that she was about to repeat a lesson she had lived through without paying sufficient attention.

  She now knew where she was. Reluctantly willing, she tried to adapt to these surroundings and remember the teachings from which she had perhaps allowed herself to be diverted too early. But her heart reared up at this compliance like a horse that is not amenable to any coaxing, and began to run wild with terror, as happens when there are feelings that want to warn the understanding but find no words. Nevertheless, after a while she tried it once again; and to support the effort, she thought of her father, who had been a liberal man and in his self-presentation had always exhibited a somewhat shallow Enlightenment style, but had nonetheless mustered a decision to consign his daughter to a convent school for her education. She felt inclined to regard this as a kind of atoning sacrifice and as an attempt, compelled by a secret insecurity, for once to do the opposite of what one takes to be one’s firm conviction: and because she felt a kinship with every inconsistency, the position she had put herself into appeared to her for a moment like a mysteriously unconscious daughterly act of repetition. But this second, voluntarily indulged shudder of piety did not last either; apparently, during the time when her soul was placed under the all-too-solicitous care of the clergy, she had lost the ability once and for all to anchor her lively intuitions in a creed. For all she had to do was inspect her immediate surroundings again, and with the cruel instinct of youth for the distance that separates the infinity of a teaching from the finiteness of the teacher, which of course easily leads one to deduce the master from the servant, the sight of this home in which she sat like a figure in a framed picture, this prison in which she had willingly and, full of expectation, ensconced herself, suddenly and irresistibly provoked her to laughter.

  Yet unconsciously she dug her nails into the wood of the chair, for she was ashamed of her indecision. What she most wanted to do was to fling everything that oppressed her, now and as quickly and suddenly as possible, into the face of this presumptuous consoler, if he would just finally deign to show himself: That underhanded business with the will—completely unforgivable if considered without defiance. Hagauer’s letters, distorting her image as horribly as a bad mirror, yet still accurate enough so that a resemblance could not be denied. Then too, perhaps, that she had wanted to destroy that man, though without really, actually killing him; and that she had indeed once married him, but also not really, but blindly, blinded by self-contempt. Her life was filled with unusual half measures; but ultimately, the intuition or presage that hovered between herself and Ulrich, unifying everything, would have to be included in her confession, and this was a betrayal she could never commit, under any circumstances! She felt as surly as a child who is constantly expected to perform a task that is too difficult. Why was the light she sometimes saw instantly extinguished, every time, like a lantern swaying through a vast darkness, its glow swallowed up at one moment and set free at the next?! She was r
obbed of all resolution, and on top of that she remembered Ulrich’s saying once that whoever seeks this light must cross an abyss that has no bottom and no bridge. Did he himself then, deep down, not believe in the possibility of what they were seeking together? That was what she was thinking, and though she did not really dare to doubt, she felt deeply shaken. So no one could help her except the abyss itself! This abyss was God: Oh, what did she know! With aversion and contempt, she surveyed the little bridges that were supposed to lead across: the humbleness of the room, the pictures hung piously on the walls, all those things simulating a confidential relationship with Him. She was as close to humbling herself as she was to running way in horror. Probably what she most wanted to do was run away: but when she remembered that she was always running away, she thought of Ulrich again and seemed to herself a “terrible coward.” Hadn’t the silence at home already been something like a windless calm before a storm? And then she had been propelled over here by the pressure of what was approaching. That was how she saw it now, not without a hint of a smile; and then it was not surprising that something else Ulrich had said should occur to her, for he had said at some time: “A person never finds himself to be a complete coward; because if something frightens him, he’ll run away just far enough to consider himself a hero again!” And so there she sat!