The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  Guessing this, Ulrich asked him impatiently: ‘Why are you talking so pompously? Is it that prophet of yours? It used to be you couldn’t have enough simplicity and naturalness!”

  Walter put up with this for Clarisse’s sake, lest his friend decline to help, but had there been just one ray of light in that moonless gloom, the flash of his teeth would have been visible as he bared them in frustration. He said nothing, but his suppressed rage made him weak, and the presence of his muscular friend shielding him from the eerie loneliness of the place made him soft. Suddenly he said: “Imagine loving a woman and then meeting a man you admire and realizing that your wife admires and loves him, too, and that both of you feel, in love, jealousy, and admiration, this man’s hopeless superiority—”

  “I’d rather not imagine it!” Ulrich should have heard him out, but he squared his shoulders with a laugh and interrupted him.

  Walter shot him a venomous glance. He had meant to ask: “What would you do in such a case?” But it was the same game they had been playing since their school days. As they entered the dimly lit hall he said:

  “Drop that act of yours! You’re not as conceited and thick-skinned as all that!” Then he had to run to catch up with Ulrich on the stairs, where he hastily whispered the rest of what Ulrich needed to know.

  “What has Walter been telling you?” Clarisse asked when they got upstairs.

  “I can do it, all right,” Ulrich said, going straight to the point, “but I don’t think it would be sensible.”

  “Did you hear that? His very first word was ‘sensible,’ “ Clarisse called out to Meingast, laughing. She was rushing back and forth between the clothes closet, the washstand, the mirror, and the half-open door between her room and the one where the men were. They could catch glimpses of her now and then: with a wet face and her hair hanging down; with her hair brushed up; still bare-legged; in stocking feet; in her long-skirted dinner dress below with a dressing jacket above that looked like a white institutional uniform. She enjoyed this appearing and disappearing. Since she had got her way, all her feelings were submerged in an easy sensuality. “I’m dancing on light-ropes!” she shouted into the room. The men smiled, but Siegmund glanced at his watch and dryly asked her to hurry up. He was treating the whole thing as a gymnastic exercise.

  Then Clarisse glided on a “light-rope” to the far corner of her room, for a pin, and shut the drawer of her night table with a bang.

  “I can change faster than a man,” she called back to Siegmund in the other room, but suddenly paused over the double meaning of “change,” which right now could mean for her both “dressing for dinner” and “being transformed by mysterious destinies.” She quickly finished dressing, stuck her head through the door, and gravely regarded her friends one after the other. Anyone who did not think of it as a game might have been alarmed that something in this solemn countenance had been extinguished that should have been part of a natural, healthy face. She bowed to her friends and said ceremonially: “So now I have put on my destiny!” But when she straightened up again she looked quite normal, even rather charming, and her brother Siegmund cried: “Forward—march! Papa doesn’t like people to be late for dinner!”

  When the four of them walked to the streetcar—Meingast had disappeared before they left the house—Ulrich fell back a few steps with Siegmund and asked him whether he had not been a bit worried about his sister of late. The glow of Siegmund’s cigarette sketched a flatly rising arc in the darkness.

  “No doubt she’s abnormal,” he replied. “But is Meingast normal? Or even Walter? Is playing the piano normal? It’s an unusual state of excitement associated with tremors in the wrists and ankles. For a physician, there’s no such thing as normal. Still, if you want my serious opinion, my sister is somewhat overwrought, and I think it will pass once the great panjandrum has left. What do you make of him?” There was a hint of malice in “the great panjandrum.”

  “He’s a gasbag,” Ulrich said.

  “Isn’t he, though!” Siegmund was delighted. “Repulsive, repulsive.

  “But his ideas are interesting, I wouldn’t deny that altogether,” he added after a pause.

  20

  COUNT LEINSDORF HAS QUALMS ABOUT

  “CAPITAL AND CULTURE”

  And so it happened that Ulrich again appeared before Count Leinsdorf.

  He found His Grace, enveloped in tranquility, dedication, solemnity, and beauty, at his desk, reading a newspaper that was lying spread out over a high pile of documents. The Imperial liege-Count sadly shook his head after once more expressing his condolences to Ulrich.

  “Your father was one of the last true representatives of capital and culture,” he said. “How well I remember the days when we both sat in the Bohemian Diet. He well deserved the confidence we always placed in him!”

  Ulrich inquired out of politeness how the Parallel Campaign had fared in his absence.

  “Well, because of that hullabaloo in the street outside my house that afternoon, which you observed, we’ve set up a Commission to Ascertain the Desires of the Concerned Sections of the Population in Reference to Administrative Reform,” Count Leinsdorf told him. “The Prime Minister himself asked us to take this off his shoulders for the time being, because as a patriotic enterprise we enjoy, so to speak, the public’s confidence.”

  With a straight face Ulrich assured him that at any rate the Commission’s name had been well chosen and was likely to have a certain effect.

  “Yes, a good deal depends on finding the right words,” His Grace said pensively, and suddenly asked: “What do you make of this business of the municipal employees in Trieste? I should think it would be high time for the government to pull itself together and take a firm stand.” He made as if to hand over the paper he had folded up when Ulrich came in, but at the last moment chose to open it again and read aloud to his visitor, with vivid feeling, from a long-winded article. “Can you imagine this sort of thing happening in any other country in the world?” he asked, when he had finished. “For years the Austrian city of Trieste has been hiring only Italians, subjects of the King of Italy, in its civil service, to make a point that their allegiance is to Italy, not to us. I was there once on His Majesty’s birthday: not a single flag in all Trieste except on the administration building, the tax office, the prison, and the roofs of a few barracks! But if you should have any business in some municipal office in Trieste on the King of Italy s birthday, you wouldn’t find a clerk anywhere without a flower in his buttonhole!”

  “But why has this been tolerated till now?” Ulrich inquired.

  “Why shouldn’t it be tolerated?” Count Leinsdorf said in a disgruntled tone. “If our government forces the city to discharge its foreign staff, we will immediately be accused of Germanizing. That is just the reproach every government fears. Even His Majesty doesn’t like it. After all, we’re not Prussians!”

  Ulrich seemed to remember that the coastal and port city of Trieste had been founded on Slavic soil by the imperialistic Venetian Republic and today embraced a large Slavic population, so that even if one were to view it as merely the private concern of its inhabitants—without regard to its also being the gateway to the Empire’s eastern trade and in every way dependent on the Empire for its prosperity—there was no getting around the fact that its large Slavic lower middle class passionately contested the favored Italian upper class’s right to consider the city as its own property. Ulrich said as much to the Count.

  “True enough,” Count Leinsdorf instructed him, “but once the word is out that we’re Germanizing, the Slovenes immediately side with the Italians, even though they have to take time off from tearing each other’s hair out, and all the other minorities rally to support them as well! We’ve been through this often enough. In terms of practical politics, it’s the Germans we have to regard as a threat to peace within the Empire, whether we want to or not.” This conclusion left Count Leinsdorf deep in thought for a while, for he had touched on the great political sch
eme that weighed on his mind, though it had not come clearly into focus for him until this moment. But suddenly he livened up again, and continued cheerfully: “Anyway, the others have been told off properly this time.” With a tremor of impatience, he replaced his pince-nez and again read aloud to Ulrich with relish all those satisfying passages in the edict issued by His Imperial and Royal Majesty’s Governor in Trieste.

  “ ‘Repeated warnings issued by the governmental institutions of public safety to no avail…harm done to our people…In view of this obstinate resistance to the prescribed official orders, the Governor of Trieste finds himself obliged to take steps toward enforcing the observance of the existing lawful regulations…’” Me interrupted himself to ask: “Spoken with dignity, don’t you think?” He raised his head but immediately lowered it again, eager to get to the final bit, whose official urbane authority underlined his voice with great aesthetic satisfaction:

  “ ‘Furthermore,’ “ he read,” ‘it is reserved to the administration at any time to give careful and sympathetic consideration to each individual case of application for citizenship made by such public functionaries, insofar as these are officially deemed worthy of exceptional regard through long years of public service and an unblemished record, and in such cases the Imperial and Royal Administration is inclined to avoid immediate enforcement of these regulations, while reserving its right to enforce them at such time and in such circumstances as it may think fit.’ Now, that’s the tone our government should have taken all along!” Count Leinsdorf exclaimed.

  “Don’t you think, sir, on the basis of this last point, that in the last analysis this leaves things pretty much where they have always been?” Ulrich asked a little later, when the tail end of this long snake of an official sentence had finally vanished inside his ear.

  “Yes, that’s just it!” His Grace replied, twiddling his thumbs for a while, as he always did when some hard thinking was going on inside. Then he gave Ulrich a searching look and opened his heart to him.

  “Do you remember how, when we were at the police exhibition, the Interior Minister announced that there was a new spirit of ‘mutual support and strictness’ in the offing? Well, I wouldn’t expect them to immediately lock up all the troublemakers who were raising such a rumpus on my doorstep, but the Minister could at least have said a few dignified words of repudiation in Parliament!” His feelings were hurt.

  “I assumed it was done during my absence,” Ulrich cried with

  feigned astonishment, aware that a genuine distress was roiling the mind of his benevolent friend.

  “Not a thing was done!” His Grace said. Again he fixed his worried, protuberant eyes on Ulrich’s face with a searching look, and he opened his heart further: “But something will be done!” He straightened up and leaned back in his chair, shutting his eyes as he lapsed into silence.

  When he opened them again he began to explain in a calmer tone: “You see, my dear fellow, our Constitution of 1861 entrusted the undisputed leadership in the new experimental governmental scheme to the German element in the population, and in particular to those within that element who represented capital and culture. That was a munificent gift of His Majesty’s, a proof of his generosity and his confidence, perhaps not quite in keeping with the times; for what has become of capital and culture since then?” Count Leinsdorf raised one hand and then dropped it in resignation on the other. “When His Majesty ascended the throne in 1848, at Olmütz, that is to say, practically in exile…,” he went on slowly, but suddenly becoming impatient or uncertain, he fished a few notes out of his pocket with trembling fingers, struggled in some agitation to set his pince-nez firmly on his nose, and read aloud, his voice sometimes quavering with emotion, as he strained to decipher his own handwriting:

  “ … he was surrounded by the uproar of the nationalities’ wild urge for freedom. He succeeded in quenching the extreme manifestations of this upsurge. Finally, even if after granting some concessions to the demands of his peoples, he stood triumphant as the victor, and a gracious and magnanimous victor, moreover, who forgave his subjects the errors of their ways and held out his hand to them with the offer of a peace honorable for them as well. Although the Constitution and the other liberties had been granted by him under the press of circumstances, it was nevertheless an act of His Majesty’s free will, the fruit of his wisdom and compassion, and of hope in the progressive civilization of his peoples. But in recent years this model relationship between the Emperor and his peoples has been tarnished by the work of agitators, demagogues—’” Here Count Leinsdorf broke off reading his exposition of political history, in which every word had been scrupulously weighed and polished,

  and gazed pensively at the portrait of his ancestor the Grand Marshal and Knight of the Order of Maria Theresa, hanging on the wall facing him. When Ulrich’s expectant gaze finally drew his attention, he said: “That’s as far as I’ve come.

  “But you can see that I have been giving these problems a great deal of thought lately,” he went on. “What I have just read to you is the beginning of the response which the Minister should have presented to Parliament in die matter of the demonstration against me, if he had been doing his job! I’ve gradually worked it out for myself, and I don’t mind telling you that I shall have occasion to present it to His Majesty as soon as I have finished it. You see, it was not without purpose that the Constitution of 1861 entrusted the leadership of our country to capital and culture. It was meant to secure our future. But where are capital and culture today?”

  He seemed really put out with the Minister of the Interior, and to divert him Ulrich remarked innocently that one could at least say about capital that it was nowadays not only in the hands of the bankers but also in the time-tested hands of the landed aristocracy.

  “I’ve nothing at all against the Jews,” Count Leinsdorf assured Ulrich out of the blue, as though Ulrich had said something that required such a disclaimer. “They are intelligent, hardworking, and reliable. But it was a great mistake to give them those unsuitable names. Rosenberg and Rosenthal, for instance, are aristocratic names; Baer and Wolf and all such creatures are originally heraldic beasts; Meyer derives from landed property; Silver and Gold are armorial colors. All those Jewish names,” His Grace disclosed, to Ulrich’s surprise, “are nothing but the insolence of our bureaucrats aimed at our nobility. It was the noble families, not the Jews, who were the butt of these officials, which is why the Jews were given other names as well, like Abrahams, Jewison, or Schmucker. You cannot infrequently observe this animus of our bureaucracy against the old nobility surfacing even today, if you know how to look for it,” he said oracularly, with a gloomy, obstinate air, as though the struggle of the central administration against feudalism had not long since been overtaken by history and vanished completely from sight. In fact, there was nothing His Grace could resent so pure-heartedly as the social privileges enjoyed by important bureaucrats by virtue of their position even when their names might be plain Fuchsenbauer or Schlosser. Count Leinsdorf was no diehard country Junker; he wanted to move with the times, and did not mind such a name when it was that of a Member of Parliament or even a cabinet minister or an influential private citizen, nor did he at all object to the political or economic influence of the middle class; what provoked him, with a passion that was the last vestige of venerable traditions, was the social status of high-ranking administrative officials with middle-class names. Ulrich wondered whether Leinsdorf’s remarks might have been prompted by his own cousin’s husband. It was not out of the question, but Count Leinsdorf continued talking and was, as always happened, soon lifted above all personal concerns by an idea that had apparently been working inside him for a long time.

  “The whole so-called Jewish Question would disappear without a trace if the Jews would only make up their minds to speak Hebrew, go back to their old names, and wear Eastern dress,” he explained. “Frankly, a Galician Jew who has just recently made his fortune in Vienna doesn’t look right on the Espl
anade at Ischl, wearing Tyrolean costume with a chamois tuft on his hat. But put him in a long, flowing robe, as rich as you like so long as it covers his legs, and you’ll see how admirably his face and his grand sweeping gestures go with his costume! All those things people tend to joke about would then be in their proper place—even the showy rings they like to wear. I am against assimilation the way the English nobility practice it; it’s a tedious and uncertain process. But give the Jews back their true character and watch them become a veritable ornament, a genuine aristocracy of a rare and special kind among the nations gratefully thronging around His Majesty’s throne—or, if you’d prefer to see it in everyday terms, imagine them strolling along on our Ringstrasse, the only place in the world where you can see, in the midst of Western European elegance at its finest, a Mohammedan with his red fez, a Slovak in sheepskins, or a bare-legged Tyrolean!”