by Robert Musil
So motivated, and dressed as for a social occasion, she spent several evenings wandering up and down past Diotima’s windows, and never had long to wait before they lit up along the whole front, betokening something going on inside. She had told her husband that she was invited out but would not stay too long, and in the course of a few days, while she was still trying to screw up her courage, her lies and her strolls in front of a house where she had no business to be unleashed a growing impulse that would soon drive her up those steps to the front door. What if she was seen by some acquaintance, or even by her husband if he should pass that way by chance, or what if she was noticed by the doorman, or by a policeman, who might decide to question her—the more often she went out on this expedition, the greater the risks, and the more probable that if she hesitated too long an incident would occur. Now, it was true that Bonadea had more than once slipped into doorways or places where she did not want to be seen, but on those occasions she had been fortified by the thought that it had to be; this time she was about to intrude where she was not expected and could not be sure of her reception. She felt like an assassin who has started out with none too clear an idea of what it would be like, and is then swept by circumstances into a state in which the actual pistol shot or the glitter of vitriol drops flying through the air no longer adds much to the excitement.
Without any such dramatic intentions, Bonadea nevertheless felt similarly benumbed by the time she actually found herself pressing the doorbell and walking inside. Little Rachel had slipped over to Ulrich and told him that someone was waiting out in the hall to see him, not mentioning that this someone was a heavily veiled unknown lady—who, when Rachel shut the door to the salon behind him, flung the veil back from her face. At the moment she was absolutely convinced that Moosbrugger’s fate depended on her taking instant action, and she received Ulrich not like a lover plagued by jealousy, but gasping for breath like a marathon runner. With no effort, she lied that her husband had told her yesterday that Moosbrugger would soon be past saving.
“There’s nothing I hate so much,” she ended, “as this obscene kind of murderer. But even though it goes against my grain, I’ve taken the risk of being regarded as an intruder here, because you must go straight back to the lady of the house and her very influential guests and get their help if you still want to get anything done.” She had no idea what she expected to come of this. Perhaps that Ulrich would be deeply moved and would thank her, then call Diotima, who would then take Bonadea into some private place to talk, away from the other guests. Or else Diotima might be drawn to the hall by the sound of voices, and Bonadea was ready to let her see that she, Bonadea, was far from being the person least qualified to take an interest in Ulrich’s noble causes. Her eyes were moist and flashing, her hands trembled, her voice rose out of control. Ulrich, deeply embarrassed, smiled desperately to quiet her down and gain time while he found a way to talk her into leaving as quickly as possible. It was a ticklish situation and could have ended with Bonadea’s having a screaming or crying fit, if Rachel had not come to his aid. Little Rachel had been standing close by all this time, with wide-open, shining eyes. When the beautiful stranger, trembling all over, had asked to speak to Ulrich, the maid had instantly divined the romantic nature of the affair. She managed to hear most of what was said, and the syllables of Moosbrugger’s name fell on her ear like pistol shots. The sadness, passion, and jealousy throbbing in this lady’s voice moved her powerfully, although she knew nothing of what was behind it. She guessed that the woman was Ulrich’s mistress, and it doubled her infatuation with him. It was as though the two of them had burst into full-throated song together and made her want to lift up her own voice and join in, or do something to help. And so, with a glance enjoining secrecy, she opened a door and invited the pair into the only room not being used for the gathering this evening. It was Rachel’s first conscious act of disloyalty to her mistress, and she knew what would happen if she was found out, but life was so exciting, and romantic passion such an untidy state of mind, that she had no chance to think twice about it.
When the gaslight flamed upward and Bonadea’s eyes gradually took in her surroundings, her legs almost gave way under her, and her cheeks flushed red with jealousy: they were inside Diotima’s bedroom. There were stockings, hairbrushes, and much else lying around, whatever is left in view when a woman must change hastily from head to foot for a big party and the maid has not had time to put things away or has left it till the next morning, as in this case, because the room was due for a thorough cleaning then anyway; on big-party evenings the bedroom was used to store furnishings from the other rooms where the space was needed. So the air was heavy with the smell of all this furniture jammed together, and of powder, soap, and scent.
“What a silly thing for the girl to do,” Ulrich said with a laugh. “We can’t stay here. Anyway, you shouldn’t have come. There’s nothing to be done for Moosbrugger.”
“So I shouldn’t have bothered, is that it?” Bonadea echoed him almost inaudibly. Her eyes strayed all over the place. How could the girl have even thought of taking Ulrich into the most private room in the house, she wondered in anguish, if she had not done it often before? Yet she could not bring herself to confront him with this proof of his infidelity, but chose instead to say dully: “How can you sleep in peace when such injustice is being done? I haven’t been able to sleep at night, which is why I decided to come looking for you.” She had turned her back on the room and stood staring out the window into the opaque, glassy darkness outside, at what might be treetops or some deep courtyard down below. Upset as she was, she had enough sense of orientation to know that she was not looking out on the street, and when she considered that here she was in her rival’s bedroom, standing in a flood of light in the uncurtained window beside her faithless lover, as on a stage in front of an unseen audience, it threw her mind into turmoil. She had taken off her hat and thrown her coat back; her forehead and the warm tips of her breasts touched the cold windowpane; tenderness and tears moistened her eyes. Slowly she freed herself from the spell and turned back to her friend, but her eyes still held some of that soft, yielding darkness she had gazed into, and were deeper than she knew.
“Ulrich,” she said with feeling, “you’re not a bad man! You only pretend to be. You go to a lot of trouble to be as good as you can be.”
These incongruously perceptive words of Bonadea’s made the situation precarious again; for once, they were not the ridiculous desire of a woman to mask her body’s demands for consolation with an overlay of lofty sentiment, but the beauty of that body itself claiming its right to the gentle dignity of love. Ulrich went up to her and put his arm around her shoulder; together they turned and looked into the darkness outside. A faint glimmer of light from the house was dissolving in the infinite darkness beyond so that it looked like a dense mist softening the air, and Ulrich felt as if he were staring out into a mildly chilly October night, though it was late winter; the whole city seemed wrapped in a vast woolen blanket. Then it occurred to him that one could just as well say that a woolen blanket resembled a night in October. He felt a gentle uncertainty on his skin and drew Bonadea closer.
“Will you go back to them now?” Bonadea asked.
“And save Moosbrugger from injustice? No; I don’t even know whether injustice is being done to him. What do I really know about him? I saw him once, just a glimpse in a courtroom, and I’ve read a few things that were written about him. It’s as though I had dreamed that the tip of your breast is like a poppy leaf. Does that give me the right to think it is any such thing?”
He stopped to think. So did Bonadea. He was thinking, “One human being, when you think of it, means nothing more to another one than a string of similes.” Bonadea’s thinking concluded with: “Come, let’s get away from here.”
“That’s impossible,” Ulrich told her. “They would wonder about my disappearance, and then if something should leak out about your coming here, it could cause quite a scandal
.”
Again they both fell silent, staring out the window together, into something that could have been a night in October, a night in January, a woolen blanket, sorrow, or joy, though they didn’t attempt to define it.
“Why do you never do the natural next thing?” Bonadea asked.
He suddenly remembered a recent dream. He was one of those people who seldom have dreams, or at least never remember their dreams, so that it gave him a queer feeling to have this unexpected memory opening up and letting him in. In the dream, he had kept trying to cross a steep mountainside and was driven back, again and again, by violent dizzy spells. Without trying to interpret it, he now knew that the dream was about Moosbrugger, who never actually appeared in it. Since a dream image often has several meanings, it was also a physical representation of his mind’s useless struggles to make some headway, as recently manifested again and again in his conversation and in his affairs, struggles that exactly resembled walking without a path to follow and being unable to get beyond a certain point. He could not help smiling at the ingenuous concreteness of the dream imagery for this: smooth rock and slippery earth underfoot, the occasional lone tree to hold on to or to aim for, the abrupt increase in the steepness of the grade as he went. He had tried and failed to make it on a higher and a lower route and was growing sick with vertigo, when he said to someone with him, Let’s give it up; there’s the easy road down there in the valley that everyone takes! The meaning was obvious. Incidentally, it occurred to Ulrich that the person with him might very well have been Bonadea. It was quite possible that he had also dreamed of her nipple as a poppy leaf—some unconnected thing that might, to the groping touch, easily seem broad and jagged, the dark purplish hue of a mallow, floating like a mist from some as yet unlit cranny in the dream world.
Now he experienced a moment of that special lucidity that lights up everything going on behind the scenes of oneself, though one may be far from being able to express it. He understood the relationship between a dream and what it expresses, which is no more than analogy, a metaphor, something he often thought about. A metaphor holds a truth and an untruth, felt as inextricably bound up with each other. If one takes it as it is and gives it some sensual form, in the shape of reality, one gets dreams and art; but between these two and real, full-scale life there is a glass partition. If one analyzes it for its rational content and separates the unverifiable from the verifiable, one gets truth and knowledge but kills the feeling. Like certain kinds of bacteria that split an organic substance into two parts, mankind splits the original living body of the metaphor into the firm substance of reality and truth, and the glassy unreality of intuition, faith, and artifact. There seems to be nothing in between; and yet how often a vaguely conceived undertaking does succeed, if only one goes ahead without worrying it too much! Ulrich felt that he had at last emerged from the tangle of streets through which his thoughts and moods had so often taken him, into the central square where all streets had their beginning. And he touched on all this in answering Bonadea’s question as to why he never did the natural next thing. She probably did not understand his answer, but this was decidedly one of her good days; after thinking it over, she slipped her arm more firmly into his and summed it all up by saying: “Well, in your dreams you don’t think either; you only live through some story or other.” This was almost true. He squeezed her hand. Suddenly her eyes filled with tears again. They coursed slowly down her cheeks, and from her skin, bathed in those salty tears, there arose the indefinable scent of desire. Ulrich breathed it in and felt a great longing for this slippery nebulous state, for surrender and forgetfulness. But he pulled himself together and led her tenderly to the door. At this moment he felt sure that there was still something ahead of him and that he must not fritter it away in halfhearted attachments.
“You must go now,” he said gently, “and don’t be angry with me because I don’t know when we can see each other again. I have a great deal to work out for myself just now.”
And wonder of wonders! Bonadea put up no resistance and said nothing in anger or wounded pride. Her jealousy was gone. She felt that she was herself part of a story. She felt like taking him in her arms, guessing that he needed to be brought down to earth again, and was tempted to make the sign of the cross over his forehead for his protection, as she did with her children. It was all so romantic that it never occurred to her that it could be the end. She put on her hat and kissed him, and then she kissed him again through her veil, so that the threads seemed to glow like red-hot wires.
With the help of Rachel, who had been guarding the door and listening, Bonadea managed to slip away unseen, even though the party was breaking up and people were coming out. Ulrich pressed a big tip into Rachel’s hand and complimented her on her presence of mind, making Rachel so ecstatic that her fingers unconsciously kept clutching his hand with the money. He had to laugh; when she blushed scarlet at this, he patted her on the shoulder.
116
THE TWO TREES OF LIFE AND A PROPOSAL TO ESTABLISH A GENERAL SECRETARIAT FOR PRECISION AND SOUL
That evening at the Tuzzis’, there had been fewer guests than formerly; attendance at meetings of the Parallel Campaign was falling off, and people tended to leave earlier. Even the last-minute appearance of His Grace—who incidentally looked worried and preoccupied, and was in a bad mood, in fact, because he had received disturbing news about the nationalist intrigues against his work—could not prevent the party from breaking up. People lingered on for a bit in the expectation that he had brought some special news, but then, when he gave no sign of having anything of the kind to report and paid scant attention to the remaining guests, even the last of them left. By the time Ulrich reappeared, he was shocked to see the rooms almost empty. Shortly afterward only the “innermost circle” was left, joined by Section Chief Tuzzi, who had meanwhile come home.
His Grace had reverted to a favorite topic: “Of course we can regard an eighty-eight-year-old monarch of peace as a symbol; it gives us so much to think about. But it must be given a political content as well. Without that, it is only too natural for people to lose interest. In other words, as far as I am concerned, I’ve done all I could. The German Nationalists are furious with me for appointing Wisnieczky, whom they regard as a Slavophile, and the Slavs are furious because, as far as they’re concerned, when he was in the government he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. All that only goes to show that he is a true patriot who stands above parties, and I wouldn’t think of dropping him! However, we must supplement this with all possible speed on the cultural front, so that people have something positive to go on. Our public-opinion survey of what the various population sectors want is moving far too slowly. An Austrian Year or a World Year of Austria is a splendid idea, of course, but I must say that every symbol must in due course turn into something real; that is to say, I can let myself be deeply moved by a symbol without necessarily understanding it, but after a while I am bound to turn away from the mirror of my heart and get something else done, something I have meanwhile found needs doing. I wonder if I have managed to make my point? Our admirable friend the lady of the house is doing her utmost, and the discussions that have been held in this house for months have been most fruitful, I’m sure, but attendance is falling off nevertheless, and I have a feeling that we shall soon have to decide on something definite. I don’t know what it will be: perhaps a second steeple on St. Stephen’s, or an Imperial and Royal Colony in Africa; it doesn’t matter what—it’s sure to turn into something else at the last moment anyway. The main thing is to harness the inventiveness of the participants in time, before it all dribbles away.”
Count Leinsdorf felt that he had spoken to the point. Arnheim now took the floor on everybody else’s behalf. “What you say about the need, at times, to fructify thought by taking action, even if only pro tem, is most realistic and is true to life in general. You will be interested to know that there is a new mood, corresponding to what you say, among those of us meeting here regularly. We
are no longer being swamped with an endless stream of considerations; almost no new proposals are being put forward now, and the older proposals are hardly ever mentioned, or at any rate nobody is fighting for them in any persistent way. Everyone seems to realize that in accepting the invitation to take part in this campaign he has obligated himself to come to an agreement, so that any acceptable proposal would now stand a good chance of being approved.”
“And how are we coming along, my dear fellow?” said His Grace, turning to Ulrich, whom he had spotted meanwhile. “Can we see our way to winding it up?”
Ulrich had to admit that it was not so. An exchange of views can be drawn out on paper to everyone’s pleasure for far longer than in person, and even the influx of proposed reforms had not abated, so that he was still founding organizations and referring them, in His Grace’s name, to the various government departments whose readiness to deal with them had, however, shown a marked decline lately. This was what he had to report.