The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  “Funny!” Ulrich suddenly said into the darkness, the first of the four to break the silence. ‘What an absurdly twisted notion it is to think how this fellow’s fun would have been spoiled if he only knew he was being watched the whole time!”

  Meingast’s shadow detached itself from the nothingness and stood, a slender compression of darkness, facing in the direction of Ulrich’s voice.

  “We attach far too much importance to sex,” the Master said. “These are in fact the goatlike caperings of our era’s will.” He said nothing further. But Clarisse, who had winced with annoyance at Ulrich’s words, felt borne forward by what Meingast said, although in this darkness there was no telling in what direction.

  15

  THE TESTAMENT

  When Ulrich returned home from what he had experienced, even more dissatisfied than he had been before, he decided that he must not avoid a decision any longer, and tried to recall as best he could the “incident,” as he euphemistically called what had happened in his last few hours with Agathe, only a few days after their deep discussion.

  He was all packed and ready to leave on a sleeper that came through the town late, and so he and Agathe met for a final meal. They had agreed earlier that she would join him soon, and they somewhat uncertainly estimated this separation at from five days to two weeks.

  At dinner Agathe said: “There’s something more we have to do before you leave.”

  “What?” Ulrich asked.

  “We have to change the will!”

  Ulrich remembered looking at his sister without surprise; despite all their earlier talk he had assumed she was leading up to a joke. But Agathe was gazing down at her plate, with the familiar meditative wrinkle between her eyebrows. Slowly she said:

  “He won’t keep as much of me between his fingers as would be left if a woolen thread had been burned away between them!”

  Something must have been intensely at work in her in the last few days. Ulrich was about to tell her that he regarded such deliberations about how Hagauer’s interests could be injured as impermissible and did not want to hear any more about it. But at that moment their father’s old servant came in with the next course, and they could only go on talking in veiled allusions.

  “Aunt Malvina…,” Agathe said, smiling at her brother. “Do you remember Aunt Malvina? She had intended to leave everything she owned to our cousin; it was all arranged and everyone knew about it! Accordingly, all she was left in her parents’ will was the legal minimum she was entitled to, all the rest going to her brother, so that neither of the children, whose father was equally devoted to both of them, should inherit more than the other. You remember that, surely? The annuity that Agathe—Alexandra, our cousin, that is”—she corrected herself with a laugh—”had been receiving since her marriage was, for the time being, discounted against her legal share; it was a complicated arrangement, to give Aunt Malvina time to die….”

  “I don’t understand you,” Ulrich muttered.

  “Oh, but it’s perfectly simple! Aunt Malvina is dead, but before she died she lost all her money; she even had to be supported. Now, if Papa should for some reason have forgotten to revoke that provision in his will, Alexandra gets nothing at all, even if her marriage contract had stipulated joint ownership of property!”

  “I don’t know about that; it seems very doubtful!” Ulrich said impulsively. “Besides, Father must have given certain assurances. He can’t possibly have made such provisions without talking it over with his son-in-law!”

  He remembered saying this only too well, because he could not possibly keep silent while listening to his sister’s dangerous error. He could still see vividly in his mind the smile with which she had looked at him. “Isn’t it just like him?” she seemed to be thinking. “One only has to present a case to him as if it weren’t flesh and blood but some abstraction, and one can lead him around by the nose.” And then she had asked curtly: “Is there any written evidence of such arrangements?” and answered herself: “I never heard anything about it, and if anyone knew about it, it would certainly be me. But of course Papa was strange about everything.”

  Now the servant was back at the table, and she took advantage of Ulrich’s helplessness to add: “Verbal agreements can always be contested. But if the will was changed again after Aunt Malvina lost everything, then all signs point to this new codicil having been lost.”

  Again Ulrich let himself be tempted to steer her right: “That still leaves the sizable automatic inheritance that can’t be taken away from children of one’s body.”

  “But I’ve just told you that all of that was paid out during the father’s lifetime! After all, Alexandra was married twice.” They were alone for a moment, and Agathe hastened to add: “I’ve looked at that passage very carefully. Only a few words need to be changed to make it look as if my share had already been paid out to me in full. Who knows anything about it now? When Papa went back to leaving us equal shares after Aunt Malvina’s losses, he put it in a codicil that can be destroyed. Anyway, there’s nothing to have prevented me from having renounced my legal share in your favor for one reason or another.”

  Ulrich looked at her dumbfounded and missed his opportunity to respond to her inventions as he felt obliged to do; by the time he was ready, they were no longer alone, and he had to resort to circumlocutions.

  “One really shouldn’t,” he began hesitantly, “even think such things!”

  “Why not?” Agatha retorted.

  Such questions are simple as long as they are left alone, but the moment they rear their heads they are a monstrous serpent that had been curled up into a harmless blob. Ulrich remembered answering: “Even Nietzsche asks the ‘free spirits’ to observe certain external rules for the sake of a greater internal freedom!” He had said this with a smile, although he felt it was rather cowardly to hide behind someone else’s words.

  “That’s a lame principle!” Agathe said, dismissing it out of hand. “That’s the principle behind my marriage!”

  And Ulrich thought: “It really is a lame principle.” It seems that people who have new and revolutionary answers to particular problems make up for it by compromising on everything else, which enables them to lead highly moral lives in carpet slippers; all the more so as the attempt to keep everything constant except what they are trying to change corresponds totally to the creative economy of thinking in which they feel at home. Even Ulrich had always regarded this more as a strict than as a slack procedure, but when he was having this talk with his sister he felt that she had struck home; he could no longer bear the indecision he had loved, and it seemed to him that it was precisely Agathe who had been given the mission of bringing him to this point. And while he was nevertheless propounding the “rule of the free spirits” to her, she laughed and asked him whether he didn’t notice that the moment he tried to formulate general principles a different man appeared in his place.

  “And even though you are surely right to admire him, basically he doesn’t mean a thing to you!” she declared, giving her brother a willful and challenging look. Again he had no ready answer and said nothing, expecting an interruption at any moment, yet he could not bring himself to drop the subject. This situation emboldened her.

  “In the short time we’ve been together,” she went on, “you’ve given me such wonderful guidelines for my life, things I would never have dared think out for myself, but then you always end up wondering whether they’re really true! It seems to me that the truth the way you use it is only a way of mistreating people!”

  She was amazed at her own daring in making such reproaches; her own life seemed so worthless to her that she surely ought to have kept quiet. But she drew her courage from Ulrich himself, and there was something so curiously feminine in her way of leaning on him while she attacked him that he felt it too.

  “You don’t understand the desire to organize ideas in large, articulated masses,” Ulrich said. “The battle experiences of the intellect are alien to you; all you see
in them is columns marching in some land of formation, the impersonality of many feet stirring up the truth like a cloud of dust!”

  “But didn’t you yourself describe to me, far more precisely and clearly than I ever could, the two states of mind in which you can live?” she answered.

  A glowing cloud, with ever-changing outlines, flew across her face. She felt the desire to bring her brother to the point where he could no longer retreat. The thought made her feverish, but she did not yet know whether she would have enough courage to carry it through, and so she put off ending the meal.

  Ulrich knew all this, he guessed it, but he had pulled himself together and taken up his position. He sat facing her, his eyes focused, absent, his mouth forced to utterance, and had the impression that he was not really there but had remained somewhere behind himself, calling out to himself what he was saying:

  “Suppose that, on a trip somewhere, I wanted to steal some stranger’s golden cigarette case—I ask you, isn’t that simply unthinkable? I don’t want to go into the question right now of whether a move such as you’re contemplating is or isn’t justifiable on grounds of intellectual freedom. For all I know, it may be in order to do Hagauer some injury. But imagine me in a hotel, neither penniless nor a professional thief, nor a mental defective with deformed head or body, nor the offspring of a hysterical mother or a drunkard father, nor confused or stigmatized by anything else in any way at all: yet I steal, nevertheless. I repeat: This couldn’t happen anywhere in the world! It’s simply impossible! It can be ruled out with absolute scientific certainty!”

  Agathe burst out laughing. “But Ulo, what if one does it all the same?”

  Ulrich himself had to laugh at this answer, which he had not anticipated. He leapt to his feet and pushed his chair back hastily in order not to encourage her by his concurrence. Agathe got up from the table.

  “You cannot do this!” he pleaded with her.

  “But Ulo,” she said, “do you think even in your dreams, or do you dream something that’s happening?”

  This question reminded him of his argument, a few days before, that all moral demands pointed to a kind of dream state that had fled from them by the time they were fully postulated. But Agathe had already gone, after her last remark, into her father’s study, which now could be seen lamplit beyond two open doors; and Ulrich, who had not followed her, saw her standing in this frame. She was holding a sheet of paper in the light, reading something. “Doesn’t she have any idea what it is she’s taking on herself?” he wondered. But on that whole key ring of contemporary notions, such as neurotic inferiority, mental deficiency, arrested development, and the like, none fit, and in the lovely picture she made while committing her crime there was no trace of greed or vengefulness or any other inner ugliness. And although with the aid of such concepts Ulrich could have seen even the actions of a criminal or a near psychotic as relatively controlled and civilized, because the distorted and displaced motives of ordinary life shimmer in their depths, his sister’s gently fierce determination, an inextricable blend of purity and criminality, left him momentarily speechless. He could not accept the idea that this person, quite openly engaged in committing a bad act, could be a bad person, while at the same time he had to watch how Agathe took one paper after another out of the desk, read it, and laid it aside, seriously searching for a specific document. Her determination gave the impression of having descended from some other planet to the plane of everyday decision.

  As he watched, Ulrich was also troubled by the question of why he had talked Hagauer into leaving in good faith. It seemed to him that he had behaved all along as the tool of his sister’s will, and to the very last his responses, even when he was disagreeing with her, had only encouraged her. Truth dealt cruelly with people, she had said. “Well put, but she has no idea what truth means!” Ulrich mused. “With the passing of the years it leaves one stiff and gouty, but in one’s youth it’s a life of hunting and sailing!” He had sat down again. Now he suddenly realized not only that Agathe had somehow got from him what she had said about truth, but that he had sketched out for her in advance what she was doing next door. Had he not said that in the highest state of human awareness there was no such thing as good and evil, but only faith or doubt; that strict rules were contrary to the innermost nature of morality and that faith can never be more than an hour old; that in a state of faith one could never do anything base; that intuition was a more passionate state than truth? And Agathe was now on the point of abandoning the safe enclosure of morality and venturing out upon those boundless deeps where there is no decision other than whether one will rise or fall. She was doing this just as she had the other day when she took her father’s medals from his reluctant hand to exchange them for the imitations, and at this moment he loved her in spite of her lack of principle, with the remarkable feeling that it was his own thoughts that had gone from him to her and were now returning from her to him, poorer in deliberation but with that balsamic scent of freedom about them like a creation of the wild. And while he was trembling with the strain of controlling himself, he cautiously made a suggestion:

  “I’ll put off leaving for a day and sound out a notary or lawyer. Perhaps what you’re doing is terribly obvious!”

  But Agathe had already ascertained that the notary her father had used was no longer alive. “There’s not a soul left who knows anything about this business,” she said. “Let it be!”

  Ulrich saw that she had taken a piece of paper and was practicing imitating her father’s handwriting.

  Fascinated, he had drawn closer and stood behind her. There in piles lay the papers on which his father’s hand had lived—one could still almost feel its movements—and here Agathe, with an actress’s mimicry, conjured up almost the same thing. It was strange to see this happening. The purpose it was serving, the thought that it was a forgery, disappeared. And in truth Agathe had not given this any thought at all. An aura of justice with flames, not with logic, hovered about her. Goodness, decency, abiding by the law, as she had come to know it in people she knew, notably Professor Hagauer, had always seemed to her like removing a spot from a dress; while the wrongdoing that enveloped her at this moment was like the world drowning in the light of a rising sun. It seemed to her that right and wrong no longer constituted a general notion, a compromise devised to serve millions of people, but were a magical encounter between Me and You, the madness of original creation before there was anything to compare it to or anything to measure it by. She was really making Ulrich the present of a crime by putting herself in his hands, trusting him wholeheartedly to understand her rashness, as children do who come up with the most unexpected ideas when they want to give someone a present and have nothing to give. And Ulrich guessed most of this. As his eyes followed her movements he felt a pleasure he had never known before, for it had in it something of the magical absurdity of yielding totally and without remonstrance, for once, to what another being was doing. Even when the thought intervened that this was causing harm to a third person, it flashed only for an instant, like an ax, and he quickly put his mind at rest, since what his sister was doing here was really not anyone else’s business; it was not at all certain that these attempts at copying someone’s handwriting would actually be used, and what Agathe was doing inside her own four walls was her own affair as long as it had no effect beyond them.

  She now called out to her brother, turned around, and was surprised to find him standing behind her. She awoke. She had written all she wanted to write and resolutely singed it over a candle flame in order to make the handwriting look old. She held out her free hand to Ulrich, who did not take it, but he was not able to withdraw entirely behind a somber frown either. She responded by saying: “Listen! If something is a contradiction, and you love both sides of it—really love it!—doesn’t that cancel it out, willy-nilly?”

  “That’s much too frivolous a way of putting it,” Ulrich muttered. But Agathe knew how he would judge it in his “second thinking.” She took
a clean sheet of paper and lightheartedly wrote, in the old-fashioned hand she was so good at imitating: “My bad daughter Agathe proffers no reason to change the above-ordained instructions to the disadvantage of my good son Ulo!” Not yet satisfied, she wrote on the second sheet: “My daughter Agathe is for some time longer to be educated by my good son Uli.”

  So that was how it had happened, but now that Ulrich had reawakened it down to the last detail, he ended up with just as little knowledge of what to do about it as before.

  He ought not to have left without first straightening things out, no doubt about that! And clearly the fashionable superstition that one shouldn’t take anything too seriously had played him a trick when it whispered to him to quit the field for a time and not give too much weight to the issue between them by emotional resistance. Heat can’t pass from the cooler to the hotter; the most violent extremes, left to themselves, eventually give rise to a new mediocrity; one could hardly take a train or walk in the street without a cocked gun if one could not trust the law of averages, which automatically reduces extreme possibilities to improbability. It was this European faith in empiricism that Ulrich was obeying when, despite all his scruples, he returned home. Deep down he was even glad that Agathe had shown herself to be different.