by Robert Musil
“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.
Ulrich laughed. “It looks like an intellectual game, but this kind of juggling does mean something,” he assured her. “It goes to show that there’s something amiss in the way we judge our conduct. And there really is, you know. In a company of will-forgers you would certainly stand up for the inviolability of the legal regulations; it’s only in the company of the righteous that it all gets blurred and perverted. If only Hagauer were a rogue, you would be flamingly just; it’s too bad he’s such a decent fellow! That’s the seesaw we’re on.”
He waited for a response but none came, so he shrugged his shoulders and came back to the point:
“We’re looking to justify what you did. We have established that respectable people are deeply attracted to crime, though of course only in their imagination. We might add that criminals, to hear them talk, would almost without exception like to be regarded as respectable people. So we might arrive at a definition: Crimes are the concentrated form, within sinners, of everything other people work off in little irregularities, in their imagination and in innumerable petty everyday acts and attitudes of spite and viciousness. We could also say: Crimes are in the air and simply seek the path of least resistance, which leads them to certain individuals. We could even say that while they are the acts of individuals who are incapable of behaving morally, in the main they’re the condensed expression of some kind of general human maladjustment where the distinction between good and evil is concerned. This is what has imbued us from our youth with the critical spirit our contemporaries have never been able to get beyond!”
“But what is good and evil?” Agathe tossed off the question, while Ulrich remained oblivious to the pain his banter was causing her.
“Well, how would I know?” he answered with a laugh. “I’ve only just noticed for the first time that I loathe evil. Until today I really didn’t know how much. My dear Agathe, you have no idea what it’s like,” he complained moodily. “Take science, for instance! For a mathematician, to put it very simply, minus five is no worse than plus five. A scientist researching a problem mustn’t recoil in horror from anything, and under certain conditions he might get more excited by a lovely cancer than a lovely woman. A man of knowledge knows that nothing is true and that the whole truth will be revealed only at the end of time. Science is amoral. All our glorious thrusting of ourselves into the Unknown gets us out of the habit of being personally concerned with our conscience; in fact, it doesn’t even give us the satisfaction of taking our conscience entirely seriously. And art? Doesn’t it amount to a creation of images that don’t correspond to the realities of life? I’m not talking about bogus idealism, or the paintings of voluptuous nudes in a period when everyone goes around covered up to the eyeballs,” he joked again. “But think of a real work of art: have you never had the feeling that something about it is reminiscent of the smell of burning metal you get from a knife you’re whetting on a grindstone? It’s a cosmic, meteoric, lightning-and-thunder smell, something divinely uncanny!”
This was the only point at which Agathe interrupted him with real interest: “Didn’t you once write poetry yourself?” she asked him.
“You still remember that? When did I let you in on it?” Ulrich asked. “Yes; we all write verses at one time or another. I even went on doing it when I was a mathematician,” he admitted. “But the older I got, the worse they became; not so much because of lack of talent, I think, as from a growing aversion to the disorderly and bohemian romanticism of that sort of emotional excess. . . .”
His sister shook her head almost imperceptibly, but Ulrich noticed it. “Yes,” he insisted, “a poem should be no more of an exceptional phenomenon than an act of goodness! But what, if I may ask, becomes of the moment of inspiration the moment after? You love poetry, I know; but what I’m saying is that it isn’t enough to breathe out one great puff of fire and let it fade away. This kind of sporadic performance is the counterpart of the kind of morality that exhausts itself in half-baked criticism.” And abruptly returning to his main subject, he said to his sister: “If I were to behave in this Hagauer matter the way you’re expecting me to today, I would have to be skeptical, casual, and ironic. The exemplary children you or I might yet have would then be able to say truthfully of us that we belonged to a very secure period of middle-class values that was never plagued by doubts, or plagued at most by superficial doubts. But in fact you and I have already gone to such trouble over our philosophy. . . !”
Ulrich probably wanted to say a great deal more; he was actually only leading up to some way of coming down on his sister’s side, which he had already worked out, and it would have been good if he had revealed it to her. For she suddenly stood up and on some vague pretext got her outdoor things.
“So we’re leaving it that I’m morally retarded?” she asked with a forced attempt at humor. “I can’t keep up with all you’ve been saying to the contrary!”
“We’re both morally retarded!” Ulrich gallantly assured her. “Both of us!” And he was rather proud of the haste with which his sister left him without saying when she would return.
154
AGATHE WANTS TO COMMIT SUICIDE AND MAKES A GENTLEMAN’S ACQUAINTANCE
In truth she had rushed off to spare her brother the sight of the tears she could barely hold back. She was as sad as a person who has lost everything. She did not know why. It had come over her while Ulrich was talking. Why? She didn’t know that either. He should have done something other than talk. What? She didn’t know. He was right, of course, not to take seriously the “stupid coincidence” of her being upset and the arrival of that letter, and to go on talking as he always did. But Agathe had to get away.
At first she felt only the need to walk. She rushed headlong from their house. Where the layout of the streets forced her to detour, she always kept to the same general direction. She fled, in the way people and animals flee from a catastrophe. Why, she did not ask herself. It was only when she grew tired that she realized what she intended to do: never go back!
She would keep walking until dusk. Farther from home with every step. She assumed that by the time she came up against the barricade of evening her decision would be made. The decision was to kill herself. It was not an actual decision to kill herself, but the expectation that by evening it would be. Behind this expectation was a desperate seething and whirling inside her head. She did not even have anything with her to kill herself with. Her little poison capsule lay somewhere in a drawer or in a suitcase. The only clear thing about her death was the longing never to have to go back again. She wanted to walk out of life. That was where the walking came from. It was as if every step she took was already a step out of life.
As she tired she began to long for green fields and woods, for walking in silence and the open air. She could not get there on foot. She took a streetcar. She had been brought up to control herself in public. So her voice betrayed no emotion when she bought her ticket and asked for directions. She sat straight-backed and impassive, with not a finger twitching. And as she sat there the thoughts started coming. She would of course have felt better had she been able to let herself go; with her limbs fettered as they were, these thoughts came in large bundles that she vainly tried to force through an opening. She bore Ulrich a grudge for what he had said. She didn’t want to hold it against him. She gave up her right to. What had she done for him? She was only taking up his time, and doing nothing for him in return; she was in the way of his work and his habits. When she thought of his habits she felt a pang. It seemed that no woman had entered his house in all the time she’d been there. Agathe was convinced that her brother always had to have a woman in his life. So he was depriving himself for her sake. At this moment she would have liked to turn back and tenderly beg his forgiveness. As there was no way she could make it up to him, she was being selfish and bad. But then she remembered again how cold he had been. He was obviously sorry he had taken her in. To think of all he had planned and said before he got tired of her! Now he no longer mentioned any of it. Agathe’s heart was again tormented with the great disillusionment her husband’s letter had brought her. She was jealous. Senselessly and commonly jealous. She would have liked to force herself on her brother; she felt the passionate and helpless friendship of the person throwing himself against his own rejection. “I could steal or walk the streets for him!” she thought, knowing this was ridiculous but not able to help it. Ulrich’s conversations, with their humor and sovereign air of being above the battle, made a mockery of this idea. She admired his superiority and all his intellectual needs, which surpassed her own. But she didn’t see why every idea always had to be equally true for everyone! In her humbled state she needed some personal comforting, not edifying sermons! She did not want to be brave! And after a while, she reproached herself for being the way she was, and enlarged her pain by imagining that she deserved nothing better than Ulrich’s indifference.
This self-denigration, for which neither Ulrich’s conduct nor even Hagauer’s upsetting letter was sufficient cause, was a temperamental outburst. Ever since Agathe had outgrown her childhood, not so very long ago, everything she regarded as her failure in the face of society’s demands had had to do with her sense of not living in accord with her own deepest inclinations, or even in opposition to them. She inclined to devotion and trustfulness, for she had never become so much at home in solitude as her brother; and if she had found it impossible to yield herself heart and soul to a person or a cause, it was because she had the capacity for some greater devotion, whether it reached out to the whole world or to God. There is the well-known path of devotion to all mankind that begins with an inability to get along with one’s neighbor, and just so may a deep latent yearning for God arise in an antisocial character equipped with a great capacity for love; in that sense, the religious criminal is no greater paradox than the religious old woman who never found a husband. Agathe’s behavior toward Hagauer, which had the absurd appearance of a selfish action, was as much the outburst of an impatient will as was the intensity with which she accused herself of losing life by her own weakness just when she had been awakened to it by her brother.
She soon lost patience with the slow, rumbling streetcar. When the buildings along the way grew lower and more rural, she got off and continued the rest of the way on foot. The courtyards were open; through archways and over low fences came glimpses of handymen at their chores, animals, children at play. The air was filled with a peace in whose distances voices sounded and tools banged; sounds moved in the bright air with the irregular, gentle motions of a butterfly, while Agathe felt herself gliding like a shadow past them toward the rising ground of vineyards and woodland. Just once she paused, in front of a yard where coopers were at work and there was the good noise of mallets hammering on barrel staves. She had always liked watching such honest work and taken pleasure in the modest, sensible, well-considered labor of the workmen. This time, too, she could not get enough of the rhythm of the mallets and the men’s moving round and round the barrel. For a few moments it made her forget her misery and plunged her into a pleasant, unthinking oneness with the world. She always admired people who could do this kind of task, with skills developed so variously and naturally out of a generally acknowledged need. But there was nothing she wanted to do herself, although she had all kinds of mental and practical aptitudes. Life was complete without her. And suddenly, before she saw the connection, she heard church bells ringing, and could barely restrain herself from bursting into tears again. Both bells of the little local church had probably been chiming the whole time, but Agathe just now noticed it and was instantly overcome by how these useless chimes, excluded from the good, lavish earth and flying passionately through the air, were related to her own existence.
She hastily resumed walking, and accompanied by the chimes, which now would not leave her ears, she passed swiftly between the last of the houses and emerged where the road climbed the hillside with its vineyards and scattered bushes lining the paths below, while above, the bright green of the woods beckoned. Now she knew where she was going, and it was a beautiful feeling, as though with every step she were sinking more deeply into nature. Her heart pounded with joy and effort when she sometimes stopped and found the bells still accompanying her, though now hidden high in the air and scarcely audible. It seemed to her she had never heard bells chiming like this in the midst of an ordinary day, for no apparent festive reason, mingling democratically with the natural and self-sufficient affairs of men. But of all the tongues of this thousand-voiced city, this was the last to speak to her, and something in it seized hold of her as if to lift her high and swing her up the hill, only to drop her again as it faded into a slight metallic sound no better than all the chirping, rumbling, and rustling sounds
of the countryside. So Agathe climbed and walked upward for perhaps another hour, until she suddenly found herself facing the little shrubby wilderness she had carried in her memory. It enclosed a neglected grave at the edge of the woods, where nearly a hundred years before a poet had killed himself and where, in accordance with his last wish, he had also been laid to rest. Ulrich had said that he was not a good poet, even if he was famous. Ulrich was sharply critical of the rather shortsighted poetics that expressed a longing to be buried high up with a view. But Agathe had loved the inscription on the big stone slab since the day they had come this way and together deciphered the beautiful, rain-worn Biedermeier lettering, and she leaned over the black chain fence with its great angular links, which marked off the rectangle of death from life.
“I meant nothing to all of you” were the words the disgruntled poet had had inscribed on his gravestone, and Agathe thought that this could equally well be said of herself. This thought, here on the edge of the wooded pulpit above the greening vineyards and the alien, immeasurable city that was slowly waving its trails of smoke in the morning sun, moved her afresh. Impulsively she knelt down to press her forehead against one of the stone posts that held the chains; the unaccustomed position and the cool touch of the stone feigned the rather stiff and passive tranquillity of the death that was awaiting her. She tried to pull herself together, but was not immediately successful; bird calls intruded on her ear, so many and such various bird calls that it surprised her; branches stirred, and since she did not feel the wind she had the impression that the trees were waving their branches of their own accord. In a sudden hush, a faint pattering could be heard; the stone she was resting against, touching, was so smooth that she felt that a piece of ice between it and her forehead was keeping her from quite touching it. Only after a while did she realize that what distracted her was precisely what she was trying to hold on to, that fundamental sense of being superfluous which, reduced to its simplest terms, could be expressed only in the words that life was so complete without her that she had no business being in it. This cruel feeling contained, at bottom, neither despair nor offense, but was rather a listening and looking on that Agathe had always known; it was just that she had no impulse, indeed no possibility, of taking a hand in her own fate. This state of exclusion was almost a shelter, just as there is a kind of astonishment that forgets to ask questions. She could just as well go away. Where to? There really must be a Somewhere. Agathe was not one of those people who can find satisfaction in their conviction of the emptiness of all illusions, which, as a way of accepting a disappointing fate, is equivalent to a militant and spiteful asceticism. She was generous and uncritical in such matters, unlike Ulrich, who subjected all his feelings to the most relentless scrutiny in order to outlaw any that did not pass the test. She was simply stupid! That’s what she told herself. She didn’t want to think things over! Defiantly she pressed her forehead against the iron chains, which gave a little and then stiffened in resistance. During these last weeks she had somehow begun to believe in God again, but without thinking of Him. Certain states of mind, in which she perceived the world differently from what it appeared to be, in such a way that even she lived no longer shut out but completely enveloped in a radiant certainty, had been brought, under Ulrich’s influence, to something akin to an inward metamorphosis, a total transformation.