by Robert Musil
“That’s a Leinsdorf idea,” Tuzzi said disdainfully. “Do you recall the last discussion here before you went away? Leinsdorf said: ‘Something’s got to be done!’ That’s all there was to it, and that’s what they mean by their new watchword, ‘Action!’ And Arnheim is of course trying to foist his Russian pacifism on it. Do you remember how I warned them about it? I’m afraid they’ll have cause to remember me! Nowhere in the world is foreign policy as difficult as it is here, and I said even then: ‘Whoever takes it upon himself these days to put fundamental political ideas into practice has to be part gambler and part criminal.’” This time, Tuzzi was really opening up, probably because Ulrich might be called by his wife at any moment, or because in this conversation he did not want to be the only one to have things explained to him.
“The Parallel Campaign is arousing suspicion all over the world,” he reported, “and at home, where it’s being viewed as both anti-German and anti-Slav, it’s also having repercussions in our foreign relations. But if you want to know the difference between amateur and professional pacifism, let me tell you something: Austria could prevent a war for at least thirty years by joining the Entente Cordiale! And this could of course be done on the Emperor’s Jubilee with a matchless pacifist flourish, while at the same time we assure Germany of our brotherly love whether or not she follows suit. The majority of our nationalities would be overjoyed. With easy French and English credit we could make our army so strong that Germany couldn’t bully us. We’d be rid of Italy altogether. France wouldn’t be able to do a thing without us. In short, we would be the key to peace and war, we’d make the big political deals. I’m not giving away any secrets; this is a simple diplomatic calculation that any commercial attaché could work out. So why can’t it be done? Imponderables at Court. Where they dislike the Emperor so heartily that they’d consider it almost indecent to let it happen. Monarchies are at a disadvantage today because they’re weighed down by decency! Then there are imponderables of so-called public opinion—which brings me to the Parallel Campaign. Why doesn’t it educate public opinion? Why doesn’t it teach the public to see things objectively? You see”—but at this point Tuzzi’s statements lost some of their plausibility and began to sound more like concealed affliction—“this fellow Arnheim really amuses me with those books he writes! He didn’t invent writing, and the other night, when I couldn’t fall asleep, I had time to think about it a little. There have always been politicians who wrote novels or plays, like Clemenceau, for instance, or Disraeli; not Bismarck, but Bismarck was a destroyer. And now look at those French lawyers who are at the helm today: enviable! Political profiteers, but with a first-rate diplomatic corps to advise them, to give them guidelines, and all of them have at one time or another dashed off plays or novels without the slightest embarrassment, at least when they were young, and even today they’re still writing books. Do you think these books are worth anything? I don’t. But I give you my word that last night I was thinking that our own diplomats are missing out on something because they’re not writing books too. And I’ll tell you why: First of all, it’s as true for a diplomat as for an athlete that he has to sweat off his excess water. Secondly, it’s good for public security. Do you know what the European balance of power is?”
They were interrupted by Rachel, who came to tell Ulrich that Diotima was expecting him. Tuzzi let her hand him his hat and coat. “If you were a patriot. . .,” he said, slipping into the sleeves as Rachel held his coat for him.
“What would I do then?” Ulrich asked him, looking at the black pupils of Rachel’s eyes.
“If you were a patriot, you’d alert my wife or Count Leinsdorf to some of these problems. I can’t do it myself—coming from a husband it could easily seem narrow-minded.”
“But nobody here takes me seriously,” Ulrich said calmly.
“Oh, don’t say that!” Tuzzi cried out. “They may not take you seriously the way they take other people seriously, but for a long time now they’ve all been quite afraid of you. They’re afraid that you’re liable to put Leinsdorf up to something crazy. Do you know what the European balance of power is?” the diplomat probed intently.
“I suppose so; more or less,” Ulrich said.
“Then I must congratulate you!” Tuzzi flared up bitterly. “We professional diplomats have no idea—none of us do. It is what mustn’t be disturbed if people are not to be at each other’s throats. But what it is that mustn’t be disturbed, no one knows exactly. Just cast your mind back a little over what’s been going on around you these last few years and is still going on: the Italo-Turkish war, Poincaré in Moscow, the Baghdad question, armed intervention in Libya, Austro-Serbian tensions, the Adriatic problem . . . Is that a balance? Our never-to-be-forgotten Baron Ährenthal—But I mustn’t keep you any longer!”
“Too bad,” Ulrich said. “If that’s what the European balance of power comes to, then it’s the best possible expression of the European spirit!”
“Yes, that’s what makes it so interesting,” Tuzzi replied from the door, with an indulgent smile. “And from that point of view the spiritual achievement of our Parallel Campaign is not to be underestimated!”
“Why don’t you put a stop to it?”
Tuzzi shrugged his shoulders. “In this country, if a man in His Grace’s position wants something, one can’t come out against it. All one can do is just keep one’s eyes open.”
“And how have you been getting on?” Ulrich asked the little black-and-white sentry who was now taking him to Diotima.
140
DIOTIMA HAS CHANGED THE BOOKS SHE READS
“My dear friend,” Diotima said when Ulrich came in, “I didn’t want to let you leave without having a word with you, but to have to receive you in this state . . .!” She was wearing a negligee in which her majestic form, through its accidental position, looked slightly pregnant; this lent the proud body, which had never given birth, something of the lovely abandon of the travail of motherhood. Beside her on the sofa lay a fur collar, which she had obviously been using to keep herself warm, and on her forehead a compress against migraine had been allowed to stay in place because she knew it was decorative, like a Greek headband. Though it was late, no lamp had been lit, and the mingled scent of medications and fresheners for some unknown malaise hung in the air, mixed with a powerful fragrance that had been tossed over all the individual odors like a blanket.
Ulrich bent his face low to kiss Diotima’s hand, as if he were trying to make out from the scent of her arm what changes had taken place during his absence. But her skin exuded only the same rich, well-fed, well-bathed aroma it always did.
“Ah, my friend, how good it is to have you back! Oh!” she suddenly moaned, but with a smile. “I’m having the most awful cramps!”
Such information, from a straightforward person as neutral as a weather report, on Diotima’s lips took on all the emphasis of a breakdown and a confession.
“Dear cousin!” Ulrich exclaimed, and leaned forward with a smile to look into her face. For an instant Ulrich confused Tuzzi’s delicate hint about his wife’s indisposition with a conjecture that Diotima had become pregnant, which would have been a momentous turn of events for the household.
Half guessing what was in his mind, she made a languid gesture of denial. What she had was only menstrual cramps, which were, however, something new in her experience; she had begun having them only in the last few months, suggesting an obscure connection with her wavering between Arnheim and her husband. When she heard of Ulrich’s return it gave her some comfort, and she welcomed him as the confidant of her struggles, which is why she had received him. She lay there, with only a token pretense of sitting up, abandoned to the pains that raged within her, and was in his company a piece of untrammeled nature, without fences or No Trespassing signs, a rare enough condition with her. She had assumed she could convincingly plead a nervous stomachache, no more than a sign of a sensitive constitution; otherwise, she would not have let him see her.
> “Why don’t you take something for it?” Ulrich asked her.
“Ah,” Diotima sighed, “it’s only this excitement. My nerves can’t take it much longer!”
There was a little pause, because this was really Ulrich’s cue to inquire after Arnheim, but he was more interested in finding out about the things that directly concerned himself, and he could not immediately find a way. Finally, he asked:
“Liberating the soul from civilization is not so easy, I suppose?” and added: “I’m afraid I can flatter myself that I predicted long since that your efforts to blaze a trail for the spirit into the world would come to a painful end!”
Diotima remembered how she had escaped from the reception and sat with Ulrich on the shoe bench in her foyer: she had been almost as depressed then as she was today, and yet there had been countless risings and ebbings of hope since then.
“Wasn’t it glorious, dear friend,” she said, “when we still believed in the great idea! Today I can say that the world listened, but how deeply disappointed I am myself!”
“But why, actually?” Ulrich asked.
“I don’t know. It must be my fault.”
She was about to add something about Arnheim, but Ulrich wanted to know what people had made of the great demonstration; the last he remembered of it was not finding Diotima at home after Count Leinsdorf had sent him to prepare her for some firm intervention, while making sure she would not worry.
Diotima made a disdainful gesture. “The police arrested a few young people, and then they let them go; Leinsdorf was very annoyed, but what else could they do? Now he’s backing Wisnieczky more than ever, and insists that something must be done. But Wisnieczky can’t organize any propaganda if no one knows what it’s supposed to be for!”
“I hear it’s supposed to be ‘Watchword: Action!’” Ulrich interjected. The name of Baron Wisnieczky, who as Cabinet Minister had been wrecked by the opposition of the German nationalist parties—so that putting him at the head of the committee to drum up support for the undefined great patriotic idea of the Parallel Campaign could only arouse intense suspicion—vividly reminded Ulrich of His Grace’s political ministrations, whose fruit this was. It seemed that the casual course of Count Leinsdorf’s thinking—perhaps confirmed by the predictable failure of all attempts to electrify the spirit of the homeland, and beyond that of all Europe, by a concerted effort of its leading intellects—had now led him to the realization that it would be best to give this spirit a push, no matter from what direction. In His Grace’s deliberations this might also have been supported by experiences with cases of possession, whose victims were sometimes supposed to be helped by being ruthlessly screamed at or shaken. But this speculation, which had rushed through Ulrich’s mind before Diotima could reply, was now interrupted by her answer. This time, the invalid again addressed him as “dear friend.”
“My dear friend,” she said, “there is some truth in that! Our century is thirsting for action. An action—”
“But what action? What kind of action?” Ulrich broke in.
“It doesn’t matter! In action there is a magnificent pessimism about words. We can’t deny that in the past all we have done is talk. We have lived for great and eternal words and ideals; for a heightening of human values; for being true to our inmost selves; for an ever-increasing enrichment of life. We have striven for a synthesis, we have lived for new aesthetic joys and new standards of happiness, and I won’t deny that the quest for truth is child’s play compared with the immense responsibility of becoming a truth oneself. But we over-reached, considering the meager sense of reality the human soul has in our time, and we have lived in a dream of yearning, but for nothing!”
Diotima had urgently risen on one elbow. “It’s a healthy sign these days to renounce the search for the buried entrance to the soul and try instead to come to terms with life as it is!” she concluded.
Now Ulrich had a second, authorized version of the slogan “Action!” to set beside the conjectural Leinsdorfian one. Diotima seemed to have changed her library books. He remembered seeing her, as he came in, surrounded by piles of books, but it had grown too dark to make out the titles; besides, some were covered by the meditative young woman’s body as by a great serpent that had now reared up higher and was eagerly watching his face. Since girlhood Diotima had been inclined to nourish herself on very sentimental and subjective books, but now, as Ulrich gathered from what she said, she had been seized by that spiritual urge for renewal which is constantly at work, striving to find what it has failed to find in the ideas of the last twenty years in the ideas of the next twenty years. This may turn out to be the root of those great changes of mood in history, which seesaw between humanitarianism and ruthlessness, rage and indifference, or other such contradictions for which there seems to be no adequate explanation. It passed through Ulrich’s mind that the little residue of uncertainty left over from every moral experience, about which he had talked so much with Agathe, must really be the cause of this human instability; but because he shied away from the pleasure with which he remembered those conversations, he forced his thoughts to turn aside and focus instead on the General, who had been the first to tell him that the age was receiving a new spirit, and had done so in a tone of healthy irritation that left no room for beguiling oneself with bewitching doubts. And because he was now thinking of the General, the latter’s request that Ulrich might look into the ruffled relationship between his cousin and Arnheim came to mind, so that he ended by responding bluntly to Diotima’s speech of farewell to the soul:
“ ‘Boundless love’ doesn’t seem to have quite agreed with you!”
“Oh, you’re incorrigible!” His cousin sighed, letting herself fall back into her pillows, where she closed her eyes; unaccustomed to such straightforward language in Ulrich’s absence, she needed time to recollect just how much she had confided in him. But suddenly his nearness brought it back. She dimly remembered a talk with Ulrich about “love beyond measure,” which had been continued at their last or penultimate meeting: a conversation in which she had sworn that souls could step outside the prison of the body, or at least lean out of it halfway, as it were, and Ulrich had retorted that these were the delirious ravings of starved love, and that she should concede her “concession” to Arnheim, or himself, or anyone at all; he had even named Tuzzi in that connection, as she now recalled—suggestions of this kind were probably easier to remember than the rest of the things a man like Ulrich talks about. At the time, she had probably been justified in feeling this as impudent, but since past pain is a harmless old friend compared with present pain, it now enjoyed the advantage of being a memory of frankness between friends. So Diotima opened her eyes again and said: “There’s probably no perfect love on this earth!”
She said it with a smile, but beneath her compress her brow was sadly furrowed, which gave her face a curiously twisted expression in the dim light. In whatever concerned her personally Diotima was not averse to believing in supernatural possibilities. Even General Stumm’s unexpected appearance at the Council meeting had startled her as though it were the doing of spirits, and as a child she had prayed that she might never die. This made it easier for her to believe in a supernatural way in her relationship with Arnheim, or more accurately, to believe with that not quite complete disbelief, that something-that-cannot-be-ruled-out, which today has become the basic attitude in matters of faith. Had Arnheim been capable of doing more than drawing something invisible from her soul and his own, something that touched in midair when they were five yards apart, or had their eyes been able to meet in such a way that something tangible would come of it—a coffee bean, a barleycorn, an ink stain—some trace of some kind of real use or even just a suggestion of progress, then the next thing Diotima would have expected was that someday this connection would go higher still, turning into one of those otherworldly connections that it is just as hard to form an exact idea of as it is of most worldly ones. She could even put up with Arnheim’s lately being
away more often and for longer periods than before, and his being immersed to a surprising degree in his business affairs even on days when he was present. She permitted herself no doubt that his love for her was still the great event in his life, and whenever they came together again alone, the level of their souls instantly rose so high, and their sense of contact was so powerful, that their feelings were struck dumb, and if they could not find anything impersonal to talk about, a vacuum developed that left a bitter exhaustion in its wake. However little the possibility could be excluded that this was passion, she could just as little bring herself—accustomed as she was by the times she lived in to regard everything not practical as merely a matter of belief, or rather of unsettled unbelief—to exclude the possibility that something more would come of it, which would be contrary to all reasonable expectations. But at this moment, when she had opened her eyes to look straight at Ulrich, of whom she could make out only a dark outline, and who stood there in silence, she asked herself: “What am I waiting for? What am I really expecting to happen?”
At length Ulrich said: “But Arnheim wanted to marry you!”
Diotima again propped herself up on her arm, and she said: “Can one solve the problem of love by getting divorced or married?”
“So I was mistaken about the pregnancy,” Ulrich noted mentally, unable to think of anything to say in response to his cousin’s outburst. Then he said abruptly: “I warned you about Arnheim!” Perhaps he now felt obligated to tell her what he knew about the tycoon’s mixing up both their souls in his business deals; but he instantly dropped the idea, for he felt that in this conversation every word had its allotted place, like the objects in his study that he had found carefully dusted on his return, as though he had been dead for the space of a minute.
Diotima chided him: “You shouldn’t take it so lightly. There’s a deep friendship between Arnheim and me; and if at times there’s also something else between us, something I might call a great anxiety, it only comes from our frankness. I don’t know whether you’ve ever experienced this, or whether you can: between two people who reach a certain level of emotional rapport any lie becomes so impossible that they can hardly speak to each other at all anymore!”