by Robert Musil
He mulled it over once more. He mustered the schoolboys who had passed through his guiding hands, searching for a case that might be instructive. But even before he had got into this, there popped into his mind the missing bit that had been uneasily hovering in the back of his mind. At this point Agathe ceased to be a completely personal problem for him, without any clues to its general nature, for when he thought how much she was ready to give up in life without being blinded by any specific passion he was led inescapably, to his joy, to that basic assumption so familiar to modern pedagogy, that she lacked the capacity for objective thought and for keeping in firm intellectual touch with the world of reality! Swiftly he wrote: “Probably you are even at this moment far from being aware of what it is, exactly, that you are about to do; but I warn you, before you come to a decisive conclusion! You are perhaps the absolute opposite of the kind of person, such as I represent, who knows life and knows how to face it, but that is precisely why you should not lightly divest yourself of the support I offer you!”
Actually, Hagauer had meant to write something else. For human intelligence is not a self-contained and unrelated faculty; its flaws involve moral flaws—we speak of moral idiocy—just as moral flaws, though so much less attention is paid to them, often misdirect or totally confuse the rational power in whatever direction they choose. And so Hagauer had formed in his mind an image of a fixed type that he was now inclined, in the course of these reflections, to define as “an adequately intelligent variant of moral idiocy that expresses itself only in certain irregular forms of behavior.” But he could not bring himself to use this illuminating phrase, partly to avoid provoking his runaway wife even more, and partly because a layperson usually misunderstands such terms when applied to himself. Objectively, however, it was now established that the forms of behavior that Hagauer deprecated came under the great inclusive genus of the “subnormal,” and in the end Hagauer hit upon a way out of this conflict between conscience and chivalry: the irregularities in his wife’s conduct could be classified with a fairly general pattern of female behavior and termed “socially deficient.”
In this spirit he concluded his letter in words charged with feeling. With the prophetic ire of the scorned lover and pedagogue, he depicted Agathe’s asocial, solipsistic, and morbid temperament as a “minus factor” that never permitted her to grapple vigorously and creatively with life’s problems, as “our era” demands of “its people,” but “shielded her instead from reality behind a pane of glass,” mired in deliberate isolation and always on the edge of pathological peril. “If there was something about me you didn’t like, you ought to have done something about it,” he wrote, “but the truth is that your mind is not equipped to cope with the energies of our time, and evades its demands! Now that I have warned you about your character,” he concluded, “I repeat: You, more urgently than most people, need someone strong to lean on. In your own interest I urge you to come back immediately, and I assure you 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. Although not satisfied with his description of the psychological type under discussion, he made no changes except at the end—expelling as a gusty sigh through his mustache the unaccustomed, proudly mastered strain of thinking hard about his wife as he pondered how much more still needed to be said about “our modern age”—where he inserted beside the word “responsibility” a chivalrous phrase about his venerated late father-in-law’s precious bequest to him.
When Agathe had read all this, a strange thing happened: the content of these arguments did not fail to make an impression on her. After reading it word for word a second time, where she stood, without bothering to sit down, she slowly lowered the letter and handed it to Ulrich, who had been observing his sister’s agitation with astonishment.
153
ULRICH AND AGATHE LOOK FOR A REASON AFTER THE FACT
While Ulrich was reading, Agathe dispiritedly watched his face. It was bent over the letter, and its expression seemed to be irresolute, as though he could not decide between ridicule, gravity, sadness, or contempt. Now a heavy weight descended on Agathe from all sides, as if the air that had been so unnaturally light and delicious were becoming unbearably dense and sultry; what she had done to her father’s will oppressed her conscience for the first time. To say that she suddenly realized the full measure of her culpability would not be sufficient; what she realized rather was her guilt toward everything, even her brother, and she was overcome with an indescribable disillusionment. Everything she had done seemed incomprehensible to her. She had talked of killing her husband, she had falsified a will, and she had imposed herself on her brother without asking whether she would be disrupting his life: she had done this in a state of being drunk on her own fantasies. What she was most ashamed of at this moment was that it had never occurred to her to do the obvious, the most natural thing: any other woman who wanted to leave a husband she did not like would either look for a better man or arrange for something else, something equally natural. Ulrich himself had pointed this out often enough, but she had paid no attention. And now here she stood and did not know what he would say. Her behavior seemed to her so much that of a being who was not entirely mentally competent that she thought Hagauer was right; he was only holding up the mirror to her in his own way. Seeing his letter in Ulrich’s hand struck her dumb in the same way a person might be struck dumb who had been charged with a crime and on top of that receives a letter from a former teacher excoriating him. She had of course never allowed Hagauer to have any influence over her; nevertheless, it now looked as if he had the right to say: “I’m disappointed in you!” or else: “I’m afraid I’ve never been disappointed in you but always had the feeling you’d come to a bad end!” In her need to shake off this absurd and distressing feeling she impatiently interrupted Ulrich, who was still absorbed in reading the letter without giving any sign of coming to the end, by saying: “His description of me is really quite accurate.” She spoke in an apparently casual tone but with a note of defiance, clearly betraying some hope of hearing the opposite. “And even if he doesn’t say it in so many words, it’s true; either I was not mentally competent when I married him for no compelling reason, or I am not so now, when I’m leaving him for just as little reason.”
Ulrich, who was rereading for the third time those passages that made his vivid imagination an involuntary witness of her close relations with Hagauer, absently muttered something she did not catch.
“Do please listen to me!” Agathe pleaded. “Am I the up-to-date woman, active somehow either economically or intellectually? No. Am I a woman in love? No again. Am I the good, nest-building wife and mother who simplifies things and smooths over the rough spots? That least of all. What else is there? Then what in the world am I good for? The social life we’re caught up in, I can tell you frankly, basically means nothing at all to me. And I almost think I could get along without whatever it is in music, art, and literature that sends the cognoscenti into raptures. Hagauer, for instance, is different: he needs all that, if only for his quotations and allusions. He at least has the pleasure and satisfaction of a collector. So isn’t he right when he accuses me of doing nothing at all, of rejecting the ‘wealth of the beautiful and moral,’ and tells me that it’s only with Professor Hagauer that I can find any sympathy and tolerance?”
Ulrich handed the letter back to her and replied with composure. “Let’s face it, the term for you is ‘socially retarded,’ isn’t it?” He smiled, but there was in his tone a hint of irritation left from his having been made privy to this intimate letter.
But her brother’s answer did not sit well with Agathe. It made her feel worse. Shyly she tried to turn the tables on him: “In that case why did you insist, if that is what you did, without telling me anything, that I must get a divorce and lose my only protector?”
“Well,” he said evasively, “probably because it is so delightfully easy to adopt a
firm, manly tone in our exchanges. I bang my fist on the table, he bangs his fist on the table; so of course I have to bang mine twice as hard the next time around. That’s why I think I did it.”
Up to now—although her dejection kept her from realizing it herself—Agathe had been really glad, overjoyed in fact, at her brother’s secretly doing the opposite of what he had outwardly advocated during the time of their humorous brother-sister flirtation, since offending Hagauer could only have the effect of erecting a barrier to her ever returning to him. Yet even in the place of that secret joy there was now only a hollow sense of loss, and Agathe fell silent.
“We mustn’t overlook,” Ulrich went on, “how well Hagauer succeeds in misunderstanding you so accurately, if I may say so. Just wait, you’ll see that in his own way—without hiring detectives, just by cogitating over the weaknesses of your attachment to the human race—he’ll find out what you did to Father’s will. How are we going to defend you then?”
So it happened that for the first time since they had been together again the subject came up of the blissful but horrible prank Agathe had played on Hagauer. She fiercely shrugged her shoulders, with a vague gesture of waving it aside.
“Hagauer is in the right, of course,” Ulrich offered, with gentle emphasis, for her consideration.
“He’s not in the right!” she answered vehemently.
“He’s partly right,” Ulrich compromised. “In so risky a situation we must start off by facing things openly, including ourselves. What you’ve done can put us both in jail.”
Agathe stared at him with startled eyes. She had known this, of course, but it had never been so straightforwardly stated.
Ulrich responded with a reassuring gesture. “But that’s not the worst of it,” he continued. “How do we keep what you’ve done, and the way you did it, from being perceived as”—he groped for the right word and failed to find it—“well, let’s just say that to some extent it’s the way Hagauer sees it, that it’s all a bit on the shadowy side, the side of abnormality and the kind of flaw that comes from something already flawed. Hagauer voices what the world thinks, even though it sounds ridiculous coming from him.”
“Now we’re getting to the cigarette case,” Agathe said in a small voice.
“Right, here it comes,” Ulrich said firmly. “I have to tell you something that’s been on my mind for a long time.”
Agathe tried to stop him. “Wouldn’t it be better to undo the whole thing?” she asked. “Suppose I have a friendly talk with him and make some sort of apology?”
“It’s already too late for that. He might use it to blackmail you into coming back to him,” Ulrich declared.
Agathe was silent.
Ulrich returned to his hypothetical cigarette case, stolen on a whim by a man who is well off. He had worked out a theory that there could be only three basic motivations for such a theft of property: poverty, profession, or, if it was neither of these, a damaged psyche. “You pointed out when we talked about it once that it might be done out of conviction too,” he added.
“I said one might just do it!” Agathe interjected.
“Right, on principle.”
“No, not on principle!”
“But that’s just it!” Ulrich said. “If one does such a thing at all, there has to be at least some conviction behind it! There’s no getting away from that. Nobody ‘just does’ anything; there has to be a reason, either an external or an internal one. It may be hard to know one from the other, but we won’t philosophize about that now. I’m only saying that if one feels one is doing the right thing with absolutely no basis for it, or some decision arises out of the blue, then there’s good reason to suspect some sickness, something constitutionally wrong.”
This was certainly far more and much worse than Ulrich had meant to say; it merely converged with the drift of his qualms.
“Is that all you have to say to me about it?” Agathe asked very quietly.
“No, it’s not all,” Ulrich replied grimly. “When one has no reason, one must look for one!”
Neither of them was in any doubt where to look for it. But Ulrich was after something else, and after a slight pause he continued thoughtfully: “The moment you fall out of step with the rest of the world, you can never ever know what’s good and what’s evil. If you want to be good you have to be convinced that the world is good. And neither one of us is. We’re living at a time when morality is either dissolving or in convulsions. But for the sake of a world yet to come, one should keep oneself pure.”
“Do you really think that will have any effect on whether it comes or not?” Agathe asked skeptically.
“No, I’m afraid I don’t think that. Or at most I think like this: If even those people who understand don’t act as they should, it certainly won’t come at all, and there’s no way to stop everything from falling apart!”
“And what do you care whether it’s any different five hundred years from now or not?”
Ulrich hesitated. “I’m doing my duty, don’t you see? Maybe like a soldier.”
Probably because on that miserable morning Agathe needed a more comforting, more affectionate kind of answer than Ulrich was giving, she said: “No different from your General, then?”
Ulrich said nothing.
Agathe was not inclined to stop. “You don’t even know for sure whether it’s your duty,” she went on. “You do it because that’s how you are and because you enjoy it. And that’s all I did!”
Suddenly she lost her self-control. Something was terribly sad. Tears sprang to her eyes, and a violent sob rose in her throat. To hide it from her brother’s eyes, she threw her arms around his neck and hid her face against his shoulder. Ulrich felt her crying and the trembling of her back. A burdensome embarrassment came over him: he was aware of turning cold. At this moment, when he should have been sympathetic, all the tender and happy feelings he thought he had for his sister deserted him; his sensibility was disturbed and wouldn’t function. He stroked Agathe’s back and whispered some comforting words, but it went against his grain. Since he did not share her agitation, the contact of their two bodies seemed to him like that of two wisps of straw. He put an end to it by leading Agathe to a chair and himself sitting down in another, some distance away. Then he gave her his answer: “You’re not enjoying this business with the will at all. And you never shall, because it’s all been a disorderly mess!”
“Order?” Agathe exclaimed through her tears. “Duty?”
She was really quite beside herself because Ulrich had behaved so coldly. But she was already smiling again. She realized that she would have to work things out for herself. She felt that the smile she had forced seemed to be hovering somewhere out there, far from her icy lips. Ulrich meanwhile had shaken off his embarrassment; he was even pleased not to have felt the usual physical stirring; he realized that this, too, would have to be different between them. But he did not have time to think about that now, because he could see that Agathe was deeply troubled, and so he began to talk.
“Don’t be upset by the words I used,” he pleaded, “and don’t hold them against me. I suppose I’m wrong to use words such as ‘order’ and ‘duty’—they sound too much like preaching. But why”—he now went off at a tangent—“why the devil is preaching contemptible? It really ought to be our greatest joy!”
Agathe had no desire to answer this.
Ulrich let it drop.
“Please don’t think I’m trying to set myself up as morally superior!” he begged. “I didn’t mean to say that I never do anything bad. What I don’t like is having to do it in secret. I like the good highway robbers of morality, not the sneak thieves. I’d like to make a moral robber out of you,” he joked, “and not let you err out of weakness.”
“It’s not a point of honor with me,” his sister said from behind her distantly hovering smile.
“It’s really extremely funny that there are times like ours, when all young people are infatuated with whatever’s bad,”
he said with a laugh, to distance the conversation from the personal level. “This current preference for the morally gruesome is a weakness, of course. Probably middle-class gorging on goodness; being all sucked dry. I myself originally thought one had to say no to everything; everyone thinks so who is between twenty-five and forty-five today; but of course it was only a kind of fashion. I can imagine a reaction setting in soon, and with it a new generation that will again stick morality instead of immorality in its buttonhole. The oldest donkeys, who never in their lives felt any moral fervor, who merely uttered moral platitudes when the occasion called for them, will then suddenly be hailed as precursors and pioneers of a new character!”
Ulrich had risen to his feet and was restlessly pacing the room.
“We might put it this way,” he suggested. “Good has become a cliché almost by its very nature, while evil remains criticism. The immoral achieves its divine right by being a drastic critique of the moral! It shows us that life has other possibilities. It shows us up for liars. For this we show our gratitude by a certain forbearance. That there are truly delightful people who forge wills should prove that there is something amiss with the sanctity of private property. Even if this doesn’t need proving, it is where our task begins: for every kind of crime, we must be able to conceive of criminals who can be excused, even including infanticide or whatever other horrors there may be… .”
He had been trying in vain to catch his sister’s eye, even though he was teasing her by bringing up the will. Now she made an involuntary gesture of protest. She was no theoretician; the only crime she regarded as excusable was her own, and she was insulted all over again by his comparison.