The Man Without Qualities: Picador Classic

by Robert Musil

  Agathe seemed to see no point in trying to explain her decision rationally. Outwardly her marriage was in the most perfect order, as was only to be expected in the case of a man of Hagauer’s character. No quarrels, hardly any differences of opinion; if only because Agathe, as she told Ulrich, never confided her opinion to him on any subject. Of course no vices: no drink, no gambling, not even bachelor habits. Income fairly apportioned. Orderly household. Smooth social life as well as unsocial life, when they were alone.

  “So if you simply leave him for no reason at all,” Ulrich said, “the divorce will be decided in his favor, provided he sues.”

  “Let him sue!” Agathe said defiantly.

  “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to offer him a small financial compensation if he’ll agree to a friendly settlement?”

  “All I took away with me,” she replied, “was what I would need during an absence of three weeks, except for a few childish things and mementos from the time before Hagauer. He can keep all the rest; I don’t want it. But for the future he’s to get nothing more out of me—absolutely nothing!”

  Again she had spoken with surprising vehemence. One could perhaps explain it by saying that Agathe wanted to revenge herself on this man for having let him take too much advantage of her in the past. Ulrich’s fighting spirit, his sportsmanship, his inventiveness in surmounting obstacles, were now aroused, although he was not especially pleased to feel it; it was too much like the effect of a stimulant that moves the superficial emotions while the deeper ones remain quite untouched. Groping for an overview, he gave the conversation a different turn:

  “I’ve read some of his work, and I’ve heard of him too,” he said. “As far as I can gather, he’s regarded as a coming man in pedagogy and education.”

  “Yes,” Agatha said. “So he is.”

  “Judging by what I know of his work, he’s not only a sound educator but a pioneer of reform in higher education. I remember one book of his in which he discussed the unique value of history and the humanities for a moral education on the one hand, and on the other the equally unique value of science and mathematics as intellectual discipline, and then, thirdly, the unique value of that brimming sense of life in sports and military exercise that makes one fit for action. Is that it?”

  “I suppose so,” Agatha said, “but did you notice his way with quotations?”

  “Quotations? Let me see: I dimly remember noticing something there. He uses lots of quotations. He quotes the classics. Of course, he quotes the moderns too… . Now I’ve got it: He does something positively revolutionary for a schoolmaster—he quotes not merely academic sources but even aircraft designers, political figures, and artists of today… . But I’ve already said that, haven’t I?” He ended on that uncertain note with which recollection runs into a dead end.

  “What he does,” Agatha added, “with music, for instance, is to go recklessly as far as Richard Strauss, or with painting as far as Picasso, but he will never, even if only to illustrate something that’s wrong, cite a name that hasn’t become more or less established currency in the newspapers, even if it’s only treated negatively.”

  That was it. Just what he had been groping for in his memory. He looked up. He was pleased by the taste and the acuity shown in Agathe’s reply.

  “So he’s become a leader, over time, by being among the first to follow in time’s train,” he commented with a laugh. “All those who come after him see him already ahead of them! But do you like our leading figures yourself?”

  “I don’t know. In any case, I don’t quote them.”

  “Still, we ought to give him his due,” Ulrich said. “Your husband’s name stands for a program that many people today regard as the most advanced. His achievement represents a solid small step forward. His rise cannot be long in coming. Sooner or later he will have at least a university chair, even though he has had to toil for his living as a schoolteacher, while as for me, all I ever had to do was go straight along the course laid out for me—and today I’ve come so far that I probably wouldn’t even get a lectureship.”

  Agathe was disappointed, which was probably why her face took on a blank, porcelain-smooth, ladylike mask as she sweetly said: “Oh, I don’t know; perhaps you ought to keep on his good side.”

  “When do you expect him?” Ulrich asked.

  “Not before the funeral; he has no time to spare. But under no circumstances is he to stay in this house—I won’t have it!”

  “As you like,” Ulrich decided unexpectedly. “I shall meet him at the station and drop him off at some hotel. And if you want, I’ll tell him, ‘This is where you stay.’”

  Agathe was surprised and suddenly elated.

  “That will make him furious, because he’ll have to pay; he was of course counting on staying here with us!” Her expression had instantly changed and regained the look of a wild and mischievous child.

  “What is the situation, actually?” her brother asked. “Does the house belong to you, me, or both of us? Is there a will?”

  “Papa left a big package for me that’s supposed to contain all we need to know.” They went to the study, which lay beyond the deceased.

  Again they moved through candlelight and the scent of flowers, through the field of vision of those two eyes that no longer saw. In the flickering half-darkness Agathe was for the space of a second a shimmering haze of gold, gray, and pink. They found the package holding the will and took it back with them to the tea table, where they then forgot to open it.

  For as they sat down again Agathe told her brother that, to all intents and purposes, she had been living apart from her husband, though under the same roof; she didn’t say how long this had been going on.

  It made a bad impression on Ulrich at first. When a married woman sees a man as a possible lover, she is likely to treat him to this kind of confidence, and although his sister had come out with it in embarrassment, indeed with defiance, in a clumsy and palpable effort to throw down a challenge, he was annoyed with her for not coming up with something more original; he thought she was making too much of it.

  “Frankly,” he said, “I have never understood how you could have lived with such a man at all.”

  Agathe told him that it was their father’s idea, and what could she have done to stop it?

  “But you were a widow by then, not an underage virgin!”

  “That’s just it. I had come back to Papa. Everyone was saying that I was still too young to live on my own; even if I was a widow, I was only nineteen. And then I just couldn’t stand it here.”

  “Then why couldn’t you have looked for another man? Or studied something and made yourself independent that way?” Ulrich demanded relentlessly.

  Agathe merely shook her head. There was a pause before she answered: “I’ve told you already: I’m lazy.”

  Ulrich felt that this was no answer. “So you had some special reason for marrying Hagauer?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were in love with someone you couldn’t have?”

  Agathe hesitated. “I loved my first husband.”

  Ulrich regretted he had used the word “love” so glibly, as though he regarded the importance of the social arrangement it refers to as inviolable. “Trying to comfort the grieving is no better than handing a dry crust to a beggar,” he thought. Nevertheless, he felt tempted to go on in the same vein. “And then you realized what you’d let yourself in for, and you started to make trouble for Hagauer?” he suggested.

  “Yes,” she admitted, “but not right away—quite late,” she added. “Very late, in fact.”

  At this point they got into a little argument.

  These confessions were visibly costing Agathe an effort, even though she was making them of her own accord and evidently, as was to be expected at her age, saw in her sex life an important subject of general conversation. From the first she seemed ready to take her chances on his sympathy or lack of it; she wanted his trust and was determined, not without candor and passion, t
o win her brother over. But Ulrich, still in the mood to dispense moral guidance, could not yet meet her halfway. For all his strong-mindedness he was by no means always free of those same prejudices he rejected intellectually, having too often let his life go one way and his mind another. For he had more than once exploited and misused his power over women, with a hunter’s delight in catching and observing his quarry, so he had almost always seen the woman as the prey struck down by the amorous male spear. The lust of humiliation to which the woman in love subjects herself was fixed in his mind, while the man is very far from feeling a comparable surrender. This masculine notion of female weakness before male power is still quite common today, although with the successive waves of new generations more modern concepts have arisen, and the naturalness with which Agathe treated her dependence on Hagauer offended her brother. It seemed to him that his sister had suffered defilement without being quite aware of it when she subjected herself to the influence of a man he disliked and went on enduring it for years. He did not say so, but Agathe must have read something of the kind in his face, for she suddenly said:

  “After all, I couldn’t simply bolt the moment I had married him; that would have been hysteria!”

  Ulrich was suddenly jerked out of his role as elder brother and dispenser of edifying narrow-mindedness.

  “Would it really be hysteria to feel disgusted and draw all the necessary conclusions?” He tried to soften this by following it up with a smile and looking at his sister in the friendliest possible manner.

  Agathe looked back at him, her face somehow rendered defenseless with the effort of deciphering the expression on his.

  “Surely a normal healthy person is not so sensitive to distasteful circumstances?” she persisted. “What does it matter, after all?”

  Ulrich reacted by pulling himself together, not wanting to let his mind be ruled by one part of himself. He was once more all objective intelligence. “You’re quite right,” he said. “What happens doesn’t really matter. What counts is the system of ideas by which we understand it, and the way it fits into our personal outlook.”

  “How do you mean?” Agathe asked dubiously.

  Ulrich apologized for putting it so abstractly, but while he was searching for a more easily accessible formulation, his brotherly jealousy reasserted itself and influenced his choice of terms.

  “Suppose that a woman we care about has been raped,” he offered. “From a heroic perspective, we would have to be prepared for vengeance or suicide; from a cynical-empirical standpoint, we would expect her to shake it off like a duck shedding water; and what would actually happen nowadays would probably be a mixture of these two. But this lack of a touchstone within ourselves is more sordid than all the rest.”

  However, Agathe did not accept this way of putting it either. “Does it really seem so horrible to you?” she asked simply.

  “I don’t know. I thought it must be humiliating to live with a person one doesn’t love. But now … just as you like.”

  “Is it worse than a woman who wants to marry less than three months after a divorce having to submit to an examination by an officially appointed gynecologist to see whether she’s pregnant, because of the laws of inheritance? I read that somewhere.” Agathe’s forehead seemed to bulge with defensive anger, and the little vertical furrow between her eyebrows appeared again. “And they all put up with it, if they have to!” she said disdainfully.

  “I don’t deny it,” Ulrich responded. “Everything that actually happens passes over us like rain and sunshine. You’re probably being much more sensible than I in regarding that as natural. But a man’s nature isn’t natural; it wants to change nature, so it sometimes goes to extremes.” His smile was a plea for friendship, and his eyes saw how young she looked. When she got excited her face did not pucker up but smoothed out even more under the stress going on behind it, like a glove within which the hand clenches into a fist.

  “I’ve never thought about it in such general terms,” she now said. “But after listening to you, I am again reminded that I’ve been leading a dreadfully wrong kind of life.”

  “It’s only because you’ve already told me so much, of your own accord, without coming to the point,” said her brother, lightly acknowledging this concession in response to his own. “How am I to judge the situation properly when you won’t let me know anything about the man for whom you are, after all, really leaving Hagauer?”

  Agathe stared at him like a child or a pupil whose teacher is being unfair. “Does there have to be a man? Can’t it happen of itself? Did I do something wrong by leaving him without having a lover? I would be lying if I said that I’ve never had one; I don’t want to be so absurd; but I haven’t got a lover now, and I’d resent it very much if you thought I’d really need one in order to leave Hagauer!”

  Her brother had no choice but to assure her that passionate women were known to leave their husbands even without having a lover, and that he even regarded this as the more dignified course.

  The tea they had come together to share merged into an informal and haphazard supper, at Ulrich’s suggestion, because he was very tired and wanted to go to bed early to get a good night’s sleep on account of the next day, which was likely to be busy with bothersome details. They smoked their final cigarettes before parting, and Ulrich still did not know what to make of his sister. She did not have anything either emancipated or bohemian about her, even if she was sitting there in those wide trousers in which she had received her unknown brother. It was more something hermaphroditic, as it now seemed to him; as she moved and gestured in talking, the light masculine outfit suggested the tender form beneath with the semitransparency of water, and in contrast to the independent freedom of her legs, she wore her beautiful hair up, in true feminine style. But the center of this ambivalence was still her face, so rich in feminine charm yet with something missing, something held in reserve, whose nature he could not quite make out.

  And that he knew so little about her and was sitting with her so intimately, though not at all as he would with a woman for whom he would count as a man, was something very pleasant in his present state of fatigue, to which he was now beginning to succumb.

  “What a change from yesterday!” he thought.

  He was grateful for it and tried to think of something affectionately brotherly to say to Agathe as they said goodnight, but as all this was something new to him, he could think of nothing to say. So he merely put his arm around her and kissed her.

  126

  START OF A NEW DAY IN A HOUSE OF MOURNING

  The next morning Ulrich woke early as smoothly as a fish leaping out of water, from a dreamless sound sleep that had wiped out every trace of the previous day’s fatigue. He prowled through the house looking for breakfast. The ritual of mourning had not yet fully resumed; only a scent of it hung in all the rooms; it made him think of a shop that had opened its shutters early in the day, while the street is still empty of people. Then he got his scientific work out of his suitcase and took it into his father’s study. As he sat there, with a fire in the grate, the room looked more human than on the previous evening: Even though a pedantic mind, always weighing all pros and cons, had created it, right up to the plaster busts facing each other symmetrically on the top bookshelves, the many little personal things left lying about—pencils, eyeglass, thermometer, an open book, boxes of pen nibs, and the like—gave the room the touching emptiness of a habitat that had just been abandoned. Ulrich sat, not too far from the window, in the midst of it, at the desk, the room’s nerve center, and felt a peculiar listlessness. The walls were hung with portraits of his forebears, and some of the furniture dated from their time. The man who had lived here had formed the egg of his life from the shells of theirs; now he was dead, and his belongings stood as sharply there as if he had been chiseled out of the space; yet already the order of things was about to crumble, adapt itself to his successor, and one sensed all these objects that had outlasted him quickening with a new life as ye
t almost imperceptible behind their fixedly mournful air.

  In this mood Ulrich spread out his work, which he had interrupted weeks and months ago, and his eyes immediately alighted on the equations in hydrodynamics where he had stopped. He dimly remembered having thought of Clarisse as he used the three basic states of water to exemplify a new mathematical operation, and Clarisse having distracted him from it. There is a kind of recollection that evokes not the word itself but the atmosphere in which it was spoken, and so Ulrich suddenly thought: “Carbon …” and got the feeling, as if from nowhere, that at this instant all he needed to continue was to know all the various states in which carbon occurred; but he could not remember, and thought instead: “The human being comes in twos. As man and as woman.” He paused at this for quite a while, evidently stunned with amazement, as if he had just made some earthshaking discovery. But beneath this stalling of his mind something different was concealed. For one can be hard, selfish, eager, sharply profiled against the world, as it were, and can suddenly feel oneself, the same Ulrich What’s-his-name, quite the opposite: deeply absorbed, a selfless, happy creature at one with an ineffably tender and somehow also selfless condition of everything around him. And he asked himself: “How long is it since I last felt like this?” To his surprise it turned out to be hardly more than twenty-four hours. The silence surrounding Ulrich was refreshing, and the condition he was reminded of did not seem as uncommon as he ordinarily thought. “We’re all organisms, after all,” he thought, relaxing, “who have to strain all their energies and appetites in an unkind world to prevail against each other. But together with his enemies and victims each one of us is also a particle and an offspring of this world, not at all as detached from the others and as independent as he imagines.” In which case it was surely not incomprehensible that at times an intimation of oneness and love arises from the world, almost a certainty that the normal exigencies of life keep us from seeing more than half of the great pattern of the interrelationships of being. There was nothing objectionable in this for a man of mathematical-scientific bent and precise feelings; on the contrary, it reminded Ulrich of a study by a psychologist whom he happened to know personally, which dealt with two main opposing groups of concepts, one based on a sense of being enveloped by the content of one’s experiences, the other on one’s enveloping them, and advanced the connection that such a “being on the inside” and “looking at something from the outside,” a feeling of “concavity” and “convexity,” a “spatiality” as well as a “corporeality,” an “introspection” and an “observation,” occurred in so many other pairs of opposites of experience and in their linguistic tropes that one might assume a primal dual form of human consciousness behind it all. It was not one of those strictly factual academic studies but one of the imaginative kind, a speculative groping into the future, that are prompted by some stimulus outside the scope of everyday scientific activity; but it was well grounded and its deductions were persuasive, moving toward a unity of feeling back in the mists of creation, whose tangled wreckage, Ulrich thought, might be the origin of the present-day attitude that vaguely organizes our experience around the contrast between a male and a female mode of experience but is secretly and mysteriously shadowed by ancient dreams.