by Robert Musil
Agathe interrupted this rumination with a question she addressed to him in a temperate, even restrained tone, after she had regained her composure. “You claimed that I was acting on insinuations, on external compulsion; what did you mean by that?”
Disconcerted, Lindner raised the glance that had been resting on her heart to her eyes. This had never happened to him before: he could no longer remember the last thing he had said. He had seen in this young woman a victim of the free-minded spirit that was confusing the age, and in his victorious joy had forgotten it.
Agathe repeated her question slightly differently: “I confided to you that I want a divorce from Professor Hagauer, and you replied that I was acting under insinuating influences. It might be useful to me to find out what you understand by them. I repeat, none of the customary reasons is entirely apt; even my aversion has not been insurmountable, as the standards of the world go. I am merely convinced that they may not be surmounted but are to be immeasurably enlarged!”
“By whom?”
“That’s just the problem you’re supposed to help me solve.” She again looked at him with a gentle smile that was a kind of horribly deep décolleté and that exposed her inner bosom as if it were covered by a mere wisp of black lace.
Lindner involuntarily protected his eyes from the sight with a motion of his hand feigning some adjustment to his glasses. The truth was that courage played the same timid role in his view of the world as it did in the feelings he harbored toward Agathe. He was one of those people who have recognized that it greatly facilitates the victory of humility if one first flattens arrogance with a blow of one’s fist, and his learned nature bade him fear no arrogance so bitterly as that of open-minded science, which reproaches faith with being unscientific. Had someone told him that the saints, with their empty and beseeching raised hands, were outmoded and in todays world would have to be portrayed grasping sabers, pistols, or even newer instruments in their fists, he would no doubt have been appalled; but he did not want to see the arms of knowledge withheld from faith. This was almost entirely an error, but he was not alone in committing it; and that was why he had assailed Agathe with words that would have merited an honorable place in his writings—and presumably did— but were out of place directed to the woman who was confiding in him. Since he now saw sitting modestly and reflectively before him the emissary of quarters of the world hostile to him, delivered into his hands by a benevolent or demonic fate, he felt this himself and was embarrassed how to respond. “Ah!” he said, as generally and disparagingly as possible, and accidentally hitting not far from the mark: “I meant the spirit that runs everything today and makes young people afraid they might look stupid, even unscientific, if they don’t go along with every modem superstition. How should I know what slogans are in their minds: ‘Live life to the full!’ ‘Say yes to life!’ ‘Cultivate your personality!’ ‘Freedom of thought and art!’ In any case, everything but the commandments of simple and eternal morality.”
The happy intensification “stupid, even unscientific” gladdened him with its subtlety and reinvigorated his combative spirit. “You will be surprised,” he continued, “that in conversing with you I am placing such emphasis on science, without knowing whether you have occupied yourself with it a little or a lot—”
“Not at all!” Agathe interrupted him. “I’m just an ignorant woman.” She emphasized it and seemed to be pleased with it, perhaps with a kind of non-sanctimoniousness.
“But it’s the world you move in!” Lindner corrected her emphatically. “And whether it’s freedom in values or freedom in science, they both express the same thing: spirit that has been detached from morality.”
Agathe again felt these words as sober shadows that were, however, cast by something still darker in their vicinity. She was not minded to conceal her disappointment, but revealed it with a laugh: “Last time, you advised me not to think about myself, and now you’re the one who is talking about me incessantly,” she mockingly offered for the man standing before her to think about.
He repeated: “You’re afraid of seeming old-fashioned to yourself!”
Something in Agathe’s eyes twitched angrily. “You leave me speechless: this certainly doesn’t apply to me!”
“And I say to you: ‘You have been bought dear; do not become the servants of man!’ “ The way he said this, which was in total contrast to his entire physical appearance, like a too-heavy blossom on a weak stem, made Agathe brighten. She asked urgently and almost coarsely: “So what should I do? I was hoping you would give me a definite answer!”
Lindner swallowed and turned gloomy with earnestness. “Do what is your duty!”
“I don’t know what my duty is!”
“Then you must seek duties out!”
“I don’t know what duties are!”
Lindner smiled grimly. “There we have it! That’s the liberation of the personality!” he exclaimed. “Vain reflection! You can see it in yourself: when a person is free he is unhappy! When a person is free he’s a phantom!” he added, raising his voice somewhat more, out of embarrassment. But then he lowered it again, and concluded with conviction: “Duty is what mankind in proper self-awareness has erected against its own weakness. Duty is one and the same truth that all great personalities have acknowledged or pointed to. Duty is the work of the experience of centuries and the result of the visionary glance of the blessed. But what even the simplest person knows with precision in his inmost being, if only he lives an upright life, is duty too!”
“That was a hymn with quivering candles!” Agathe noted appreciatively.
It was disagreeable that Lindner, too, felt that he had sung falsely. He ought to have said something else but didn’t trust himself to recognize in what the deviation from the genuine voice of his heart consisted. He merely allowed himself the thought that this young creature must be deeply disappointed by her husband, since she was raging so impudently and bitterly against herself, and that in spite of all the censure she provoked, she would have been worthy of a stronger man; but he had the impression that a far more dangerous idea was on the point of succeeding this one. Agathe, meanwhile, slowly and very decisively shook her head; and with the spontaneous assurance with which an excited person is seduced by another into doing something that unbalances an already precarious situation completely, she continued: “But we’re talking about my divorce! And why aren’t you saying anything more about God today? Why don’t you simply say to me: ‘God orders you to stay with Professor Hagauer!’ I can’t honestly imagine that He would command such a thing!”
Lindner shrugged his tall shoulders indignantly; indeed, as they rose he himself actually seemed to hover in the air. “I have never said a word to you about it; you’re the only one who has tried to!” He defended himself gruffly. “And for the rest, don’t believe for a minute that God bothers Himself with the tiny egoistic antics of our emotions! That’s what His law is for, which we must follow! Or doesn’t that seem heroic enough for you, since people today are always looking for what’s personal’? Well, in that case I’ll set a higher heroism against your claims: heroic submission!”
Every word of this carried significantly more weight than a layperson really ought to permit himself, were it only in his thoughts; Agathe, in return, could only go on smiling in the face of such coarse derision if she did not want to be forced to stand up and break off the visit; and she smiled, of course, with such assured adroitness that Lindner felt himself goaded into ever-greater confusion. He became aware that his inspirations were ominously rising and increasingly reinforcing a glowing intoxication that was robbing him of reflection and resounded with the will to break the obstinate mind and perhaps save the soul he saw facing him. “Our duty is painful!” he exclaimed. “Our duty may be repulsive and disgusting! Don’t think I have any intention of becoming your husband’s lawyer, or that my nature is to stand by his side. But you must obey the law, because it is the only thing that bestows lasting peace on us and protects us from
ourselves!”
Agathe now laughed at him; she had guessed at the weapon, stemming from her divorce, that these effects put in her hand, and she turned the knife in the wound. “I understand so little about all that,” she said. “But may I honestly confess an impression I have? When you’re angry you get a little slippery!”
“Oh, come on!” Lindner retorted. He recoiled, his one desire not to concede such a thing at any price. He raised his voice defensively and entreated the sinning phantom sitting before him: “The spirit must not submit itself to the flesh and all its charms and horrors! Not even in the form of disgust! And I say to you: Even though you might find it painful to control the reluctance of the flesh, as the school of marriage has apparently asked of you, you are not simply permitted to run away from it. For there lives in man a desire for liberation, and we can no more be the slaves of our fleshly disgust than the slaves of our lust! This is obviously what you wanted to hear, since otherwise you would not have come to me!” he concluded, no less grandiloquently than spitefully. He stood towering before Agathe; the strands of his beard moved around his lips. He had never spoken such words to a woman before, with the exception of his own deceased wife, and his feelings toward her had been different. But now these feelings were intermingled with desire, as if he were swinging a whip in his fist to chastise the whole earth; yet they were simultaneously timid, as if he were being lofted like an escaped hat on the crest of the tornado of the sermon of repentance that had taken hold of him.
“There you go again, saying such remarkable things!” Agathe noted without passion, intending to shut off his insolence with a few dry words; but then she measured the enormous crash looming up before him and preferred to humble herself gently by holding back, so she continued, in a voice that had apparently suddenly been darkened by repentance: “I came only because I wanted you to lead me.”
Lindner went on swinging his whip of words with confused zeal; he had some sense that Agathe was deliberately leading him on, but he could not find a way out, and entrusted himself to the future. “To be chained to a man for a lifetime without feeling any physical attraction is certainly a heavy sentence,” he exclaimed. “But hasn’t one brought this on oneself, especially if the partner is unworthy, by not having paid enough attention to the signs of the inner life? There are many women who allow themselves to be deluded by external circumstances, and who knows if one is not being punished in order to be shaken up?” Suddenly his voice cracked. Agathe had been accompanying his words with assenting nods of her head; but imagining Hagauer as a bewitching seducer was too much for her, and her merry eyes betrayed it. Lindner, driven crazy by this, blared in falsetto: “ Tor he that spares the rod hates his child, but whosoever loves it chastises it!’ “
His victim’s resistance had now transformed this philosopher of life, dwelling in his lofty watchtower, into a poet of chastisement and the exciting conditions that went with it. He was intoxicated by a feeling he did not recognize, which emanated from an inner fusion of the moral reprimand with which he was goading his visitor and a provocation of all his manliness, a fusion that one might symbolically characterize, as he himself now saw, as lustful.
But the “arrogant conquering female,” who was finally to have been driven from the empty vanity of her worldly beauty to despair, matter-of-factly picked up on his threats about the rod and quietly asked: “Who is going to punish me? Whom are you thinking of? Are you thinking of God?”
But it was unthinkable to say such a thing! Lindner suddenly lost his courage. His scalp prickled with sweat. It was absolutely impossible that the name of God should be uttered in such a context. His glance, extended like a two-tined fork, slowly withdrew from Agathe. Agathe felt it. “So he can’t do it either!” she thought. She felt a reckless desire to go on tugging at this man until she heard from his mouth what he did not want to yield to her. But for now it was enough: the conversation had reached its outer limit. Agathe understood that it had only been a passionate rhetorical subterfuge, heated to the point where it became transparent, and all to avoid mentioning the decisive point. Besides, Lindner, too, now knew that everything he had said, indeed everything that had got him worked up, even the excess itself, was only the product of his fear of excesses; the most dissolute aspect of which he considered to be the approach with the prying tools of mind and feeling to what ought to remain veiled in lofty abstractions, toward which this excessive young woman was obviously pushing him. He now named this to himself as “an offense against die decency of faith.” For in these moments the blood drained back out of Lindner’s head and resumed its normal course; he awoke like a person who finds himself standing naked far from his front door, and remembered that he could not send Agathe away without consolation and instruction. Breathing deeply, he stood back from her, stroked his beard, and said reproachfully: “You have a restless and over-imaginative nature!”
“And you have a peculiar idea of gallantry!” Agathe responded coolly, for she had no desire to go on any longer.
Lindner found it necessary to repair his standing by saying something more: “You should learn in the school of reality to take your subjectivity mercilessly in hand, for whoever is incapable of it will be overtaken by imagination and fantasy, and dragged to the ground…!” He paused, for this strange woman was still drawing the voice from his breast quite against his will. “Woe to him who abandons morality; he is abandoning reality!” he added softly.
Agathe shrugged her shoulders. “I hope next time you will come to us!” she proposed.
“To that I must respond: Never!” Lindner protested, suddenly and now totally down to earth. ‘Tour brother and I have differences of opinion about life that make it preferable for us to avoid contact,” he added as excuse.
“So I’m the one who will have to come studiously to the school of reality,” Agathe replied quietly.
“No!” Lindner insisted, but then in a remarkable fashion, almost menacingly, he blocked her path; for with those words she had got up to go. “That cannot be! You cannot put me in the ambiguous position toward my colleague Hagauer of receiving your visits without his knowledge!”
“Are you always as passionate as you are today?” Agathe asked mockingly, thereby forcing him to make way for her. She now felt, at the end, spiritless but strengthened. The fear Lindner had betrayed drew her toward actions alien to her true condition; but while the demands her brother made demoralized her easily, this man gave her back the freedom to animate her inner self however she wanted, and it comforted her to confuse him.
“Did I perhaps compromise myself a little?” Lindner asked himself after she had left. He stiffened his shoulders and marched up and down the room a few times. Finally he decided to continue seeing her, containing his malaise, which was quite pronounced, in the soldierly words: “One must set oneself to remain gallant in the face of every embarrassment!”
When Agathe got up to leave, Peter had slipped hurriedly away from the keyhole, where he had been listening, not without astonishment, to what his father had been up to with the “big goose.”
45
BEGINNING OF A SERIES OF WONDROUS EXPERIENCES
Shortly after this visit there was a repetition of the “impossible” that was already hovering almost physically around Agathe and Ulrich, and it truly came to pass without anything at all actually happening.
Brother and sister were changing to go out for the evening. There was no one in the house to help Agathe aside from Ulrich; they had started late and had thus been in the greatest haste for a quarter of an hour, when a short pause intervened. Piece by piece, nearly all the ornaments of war a woman puts on for such occasions were strewn on the chair backs and surfaces of the room, and Agathe was in the act of bending over her foot with all the concentration that pulling on a thin silk stocking demands. Ulrich was standing at her back. He saw her head, her neck, her shoulders, and this nearly naked back; her body was curved over her raised knee, slightly to one side, and the tension of this process roun
ded three folds on her neck, which shot slender and merry through her clear skin like three arrows: the charming physicality of this painting, born of the momentarily spreading stillness, seemed to have lost its frame and passed so abruptly and directly into Ulrich’s body that he moved from the spot and, neither with the involuntariness of a banner being unfurled by the wind nor exactly with deliberate reflection, crept closer on tiptoe, surprised the bent-over figure, and with gentle ferocity bit into one of these arrows, while his arm closed tightly around his sister. Then Ulrich’s teeth just as cautiously released his overpowered victim; his right hand had grabbed her knee, and while with his left arm he pressed her body to his, he pulled her upright with him on upward-bounding tendons. Agathe cried out in fright.
Up to this point everything had taken place as playfully and jokingly as much that had gone on before, and even if it was tinged with the colors of love, it was only with the actually shy intention of concealing love’s unwonted dangerous nature beneath such cheerfully intimate dress. But when Agathe got over her fright, and felt herself not so much flying through the air as rather resting in it, suddenly liberated into weightlessness and directed instead by the gentle force of the gradually decelerating motion, it brought about one of those accidents beyond human control, in which she seemed to herself strangely soothed, indeed carried away from all earthly unrest; with a movement changing the balance of her body that she could never have repeated, she also brushed away the last silken thread of compulsion, turned in falling to her brother, continued, so to speak, her rise as she fell, until she lay, sinking down, as a cloud of happiness in his arms. Ulrich bore her, gently pressing her body to his, through the darkening room to the window and placed her beside him in the mellow light of the evening, which flowed over her face like tears. Despite the energy everything demanded, and the force Ulrich had exercised on his sister, what they were doing seemed to them remarkably remote from energy and force; one might perhaps have been able, again, to compare it with the wondrous ardor of a painting, which for the hand that invades the frame to grasp it is nothing but a ridiculous painted surface. So, too, they had nothing in mind beyond what was taking place physically, which totally filled their consciousness; and yet, alongside its nature as a harmless, indeed, at the beginning, even coarse joke, which called all their muscles into play, this physical action possessed a second nature, which, with the greatest tenderness, paralyzed their limbs and at the same time ensnared them with an inexpressible sensitivity. Questioningly they flung their arms around each other’s shoulders. The fraternal stature of their bodies communicated itself to them as if they were rising up from a single root. They looked into each others eyes with as much curiosity as if they were seeing such things for the first time. And although they would not have been able to articulate what had really happened, since their part in it had been too pressing, they still believed they knew that they had just unexpectedly found themselves for an instant in the midst of that shared condition at whose border they had long been hesitating, which they had already described to each other so often but had so far only gazed at from outside.