" He stopped again to think, with an almost
alarming
look of resolution, as his trim little beard rose and then sank to a downward, vertical position every time he was on the verge of saying something but paused to reconsider.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v1
Gerda saw the man's tall, straight body, powerfully poised between violence and beauty.
Panic-stricken, she noticed that her own body, still standing there in her underthings, was covered with gooseflesh.
Again she groped for words that might help her, that might make her less of a miserable figure where she stood.
She longed to say something that would turn Ulrich into her lover in a way she vaguely imagined as dissolving in infinite sweetness, some- thing one could achieve without having to do what she was about to do, something as blissful as it was indefinable.
For an instant she saw herself standing with him in a field of candles growing out of the earth, row upon row to infinity, like so many pansies, all bursting into
· flame at her feet on signal. But as she could not utter a single word of all this, she went on feeling painfully unattractive and miserable, her arms trembling, unable to finish undressing; she had to clamp her bloodless lips together to keep them from twitching weirdly without a sound.
At this point Ulrich, who saw her agony and realized that the whole struggle up to now might come to nothing, went over to her and slipped off her shoulder straps. Gerda slid into bed like a boy. For an instant Ulrich saw a naked adolescent in motion; it affected him no more, sexually, than the sudden blinking of a fish. He guessed that Gerda had made up her mind to get it over with because it was too late to get out of it, and he had never yet perceived as clearly as in the instant he followed her into bed how much the passionate intru- sion into another body is a sequel to a child's liking for secret and forbidden hiding places. His hands encountered the girl's skin, still bristling with fear, and he felt frightened too, instead of attracted. This body, al~eadyflabby while still unripe, repelled him; it made no sense to do what he was doing, and he would have liked nothing bet- ter than to escape from this bed, so that he had to call to mind every- thing he could think of that would help him to see it through. In his frantic haste he ~ummoned up all the usual reasons people find now- adays to justify their acting without sincerity, or faith, or scruple, or satisfaction; and in abandoning himself to this effort he found, not, of course, any feeling of love, but a half-crazy anticipation of something like a massacre, a sex murder or, ifthere is such a thing, a lustful suicide, inspired by the demons of the void who lurk behind all of
life's images. This reminded him of his brawl with the hoodlums that night" he met Bonadea, and he decided to be quicker this time. But now something awful happened. Gerda had been gathering up all her inner resources to alchemize them into willpower with which to resist the shameful terror she was suffering, as though she were fac- ing her execution; but the instant she felt Ulrich beside her, so strangely naked, his hands on her bare skin, her body flung off all her will. Even while somewhere deep inside her she still felt a friendship beyond words for him, a trembling, tender longing to put her arms around him, kiss his hair, follow his voice to its source with her lips; and imagined that to touch his real self would make her rrielt like a fragment of snow on a warm hand-but it would have to be the Ul- rich she knew, dressed as usual, as he appeared in the familiar setting of her parental home, not this naked stranger whose hostility she sensed and who did not take her sacrifice seriously even as he gave her no time to think what she was doing-Gerda suddenly heard herself screaming. like a little cloud, a soap bubble, a scream hung in the air, and others·followed, little screams expelled from her chest as though she were wrestling with something, a whimpering from which high-pitched cries of ee-ee bubbled and floated off, from lips that grimaced and twisted and were wet as if with deadly lust. She wanted to jump up, but she couldn't move. Her eyes would not obey her and kept sending out signals without permission. Gerda was pleading to be let off, like a child facing some punishment or being taken to the doctor, who cannot go one step farther because it is being tom and convulsed by its own shrieks of terror. Her hands w~re up over her breasts, and she was menacing Ulrich with her naus while frantically pressing her long thighs together. This revolt of her body against herself was frightful. She perceived it with utmost clar- ity as a kind of theater, but she was also the audience sitting alone and desolate in the dark auditorium and could do nothing to prevent her fate from being acted out before her, in a screaming frenzy; nothing to keep herself from taking the lead in the performance.
Ulrich stared in horror into the tiny pupils of her veiled eyes, with their strangely unbending gaze, and watched, aghast, those weird motions in which desire and taboo, the soul and the soulless, were indescribably intertwined. His eye caught a fleeting glimpse of her pale fair skin and the short black hairs that shaded into red where
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they grew more densely. It occurred to him that he was facing a fit of hysteria, and he had no idea how to handle it. He was afraid that these horribly distressing screams might get even louder, and re- membered that such a fit might be stopped by an angry shout or . even by a sudden, vicious slap. Then the thought tha~ this horror might have been avoided somehow led him to think that a younger man might persist in going further with Gerda even in these circum- stances. "That might be a way of getting her over it," he thought, "perhaps it's a mistake to give in to her, now that the silly goose has let herself in too deep. " He did nothing of the sort; it was only that such irritable thoughts kept zigzagging through his mind while he was instinctively whispering an uninterrupted stream of comforting words, promising not to do anything to her, assuring her that nothing had really happened, asking her to forgive him, at the same time that all his words, swept up like chaffin his loathing ofthe scene she was making, seemed to him so absurd and undignified that he had to fight off a temptation to grab an armful of pillows to press on her mouth and choke off these shrieks that wouldn't stop.
At long last her fit began to wear off and her body quieted down. Her eyes brimming with tears, she sat up in the bed, her little breasts drooping slackly from a body not yet under the mind's full control. Ulrich took a deep breath, again overcome with repugnance at the inhuman, merely physical aspects of the experience. Gerda was re- gaining normal consciousness; something bloomed in her eyes, like the first actual awakening after the eyes have been open for some time, and she stared blankly ahead for a second, then noticed that she was sitting up stark naked and glanced at Ulrich; the blood cam~ in great waves back to her face. Ulrich couldn't think of anything bet- ter to do than whisper the same reassurances to her again; he put his arm around her shoulder, drew her to his chest, and told her to think nothing of it. Gerda found herself back in the situation that had driven her to hysteria, but. now everything looked strangely pale and forlorn: the tumbled bed, her nude body in the arms of a man in- tently whispering to her, the feelings that had brought her to this. She was fully aware ofwhat it all meant, but she also knew that some- thing horrible had happened, something she would rather not focus on, and while she could tell that Ulrich's voice sounded more tender, all it meant was that he regarded her as a sick person, but it was he
who had made her sick! Still, it no longer mattered; all she wanted was to be gone from this place, to get away without having to say a word.
She dropped her head and pushed Ulrich away, felt for her cami- sole, and pulled it over her head like a child or someone who did not care how she looked. Ulrich helped her to dress, he even pulled her stockings up over her legs, and he also felt as though he were dress- ing a child. Gerda was a bit unsteady on her feet when she stood up. She thought of how she had felt earlier in the day when she left home, the home to which she was about to return, and felt, in deep misery and shame, that she had not passed the test. She did not utter a word in answer to anything Ulrich was saying. A very distant mem- ory came back to her, of Ulrich once saying, as a joke on himself, that solitude sometimes led him into excess. · She did not feel angry at him. She simply wanted never again to hear him say anything what- soever. When he offered to get her a cab she only shook her head, pulled her hat on over her ruffled hair, and left him without a glance. Seeing her walk away with her veil now sadly trailing from her hand, he felt awkward as a schoolboy. He probably should not have let her go in this state, but he could think of no way to stop her, half-dressed as he was because he had been attending to her, unprepared even to confront the serious mood in which he was left, as though he would have to get fully dressed before he could decide what to· do with himself.
120
THE PARALLEL CAMPAIGN CAUSES A STIR
When Walter reached the center oftown he sensed something in the air. There was no visible difference in the way people moved on the sidewalks or in the carriages and streetcars, and ifthere was some- thing unusual here and there it faded out before one could tell what
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it was; nevertheless, everything seemed to be carrying a little sign pointing in one direction, and Walter had barely walked a few steps before he felt such a sign on himself as well. He followed the indi- ~ated direction and felt that the Department of Fine Arts official he was, as well as the struggling painter and musician, and even Cla- risse's tormented husband, were all giving way to a person who was none of the above. The very streets, with all their bustle and their ornate, pompous buildings, seemed to be in an analogous "expectant state," as though the hard facets of a crystal were being'dissolved in some liquid medium and about to fall back into an earlier, more amorphous condition. However conservative he was in rejecting in- novations, he was also always ready in his qwn mind to condemn the present, and the dissolution of the existing order that he was now sensing was positively stimulating. As in his recent daydream, the crowds he ran into had an aura of mobility and haste, and a unity that seemed more unforced than the usual group spirit based on intellect, morality, and sound security measures; more that of a free, informal community. They made him think Of a huge bunch of flowers just after it has been untied, opening freely without, ·however, falling apart; and of a body unclothed, standing free, smiling, naked, having no need of words. Nor was he troubled when, quickening his pace, he ran into a large contingent of police standing by; he enjoyed the sight, like that of a m$. tary camp in readiness for the alarm to be given; all those red uniform collars, dismounted riders, movements of small units reporting their arrival or departure, stirred his senses into a warlike mood.
Beyond this point, where a cordon was about to be drawn across the street, the scene was more somber. There were hardly any women on the sidewalks, and even the colorful uniforms of the army officers who normally were seen hereabouts when off duty had somehow been swallowed up by the prevailing uncertainty. There were still many pedestrians like himself coming downtown, but the impression they gave was more that of chaff and litter in the wake of a strong gust of wind. Soon he saw the first groups forming, appar- ently held together not only by curiosity but just as much by indeci- sion whether to follow the unusual attraction farther or to turn around and'go home.
Walter's questions elicited a variety of answers. Some said that
there was a great patriotic parade; others thought they had heard of a protest march against certain dangerously nationalistic activists, and opinions were equally split as to whether the general uproar was caused by the Pan-Germans protesting against the government's coddling ofthe Slavic minorities, as most people thought, or by loyal supporters of the government urging all patriotic Kakanians to march shoulder-to-shoulder in its defense against such continual dis- orders. They were all tagalongs like himself and knew nothing more than he had already heard rumored at the office, but an irrepressible itch to gossip led Walter on to speak to people, and even though they mostly admitted to having no idea, or laughed the whole thing off as a joke, including their own curiosity, the farther he went the more ev- eryone seemed to be in agreement that it was high time something was done, though no one volunteered to tell him just what that should be. As he kept on, he noticed more often on the faces he met something senseless that overflowed and drowned out reason itself, something that told him that no one cared any longer what was hap- pening, wherever they were being drawn to, as long as it was some- thing unusual that would "take them out of themselves," if only. in the attenuated form of a common general excitement, suggesting a remote kinship with long-forgotten states of communal ecstasy and transfiguration, a sort of developing unconscious readiness to leap out of their clothes, and even their skins. ·
Trading speculations and saying things that were not at all in char- acter, Walter fell in with the rest, who were gradually transforming themselves from small crumbling groups ofpeople, just waiting, and other people walking aimlessly along, into a procession that ad- vanced toward the supposed scene of events, still without any defi- nite intent yet visibly growing in density and energy. Emotionally they were still at the stage where they were like rabbits scampering about outside their burrows; ready to scunjr back inside at the slight- est sign of danger, when from the front of the disordered procession, far ahead and out of sight, a more definite sort of excitement came rippling back toward the rear. Up there a group of students, young men anyway, who had already taken some sort of action and had re- turned from "the battlefield," joined the vanguard, and sounds of talking and shouting too far away to be understood, garbled mes- sages, and waves of excitement were running through the crowd and,
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depending on the listeners' temperaments or what scraps of informa- tion they snatched up, spread indignation or fear, the itch to fight or some moral imperative, causing the gathering mob to thrust forward in a mood guided by the kind of commonplace notions that take a different form inside every head but are of so little significance, de- spite being uppermost in the consciousness, that they join in a single vital force that affects the muscles more than the brain. In the midst of this moving-throng Walter also became infected and soon found himself in that stimulated but vacuous state rather likt> the early stages of drunkenness. Nobody really knows the exact nature of the change that turns individuals with a will of their own into a mob with a single will, capable of going to the wildest extremes ofgood or evil and incapable ofstopping to think anything through, even if most of the individuals involved have spent their lives dedicated to modera- tion and prudence in the conduct of their private affairs. A mob in a state of mounting excitement for which it has no outlet will probably discharge all that energy into the first available channel, and thost> among its participants who are the most excitable, sensitive, and most vulnerable to pressure, those at the extreme end~ of the spec- trum who are primed to commit sudden acts of violence or risE' to unprecedented levels of sentimental generosity, are most likdy to sl"'t the example and lead the way; they are the points of leas~ resistance in the mass, but the shout that is uttered through them rather than by them, the stone that somehow finds its way into their hands, the emotion into which they burst, is what opens the way along which the others, who have been generating excitement among themselves to the point where it must be discharged, then come surging in a frenzy, giving to what happens the character of mob action, which is experi- enced by those involved in it as both compulsion and liberation.
What makes such agitated behavior interesting, incidentally, ob- servable as it is among spectators of any sporting event or among crowds listening to speeches, is not so much the psychology of the emotional release it affords as the question of what it is that primes people to get themselves into such a state in the first place. Assuming that life makes sense, even its senseless manifestations would have some meaning and would not necessarily look like mere demonstra- tions of mental deficiency. Walter happened to know this better than most and could think of all sorts of remedies for it, so that he was
constantly struggling against being swept along by this tidal wave of communal passion, which, demeaning as it was, nevertheless raised his spirits sky-high. The thought of Clarisse flashed through his mind. What a good thing she isn't here, he thought: she'd be crushed flat. A stab of grief kept him from pursuing his thought of her-with it had come the all-too-distinct impression she had· given him of being raving mad. Maybe I'm the one that's mad, he thought, be- eause it's taken me so long to notice it. I soon will be, if I go on living \\ith her. I don't believe it, he thought, but there's no doubt about·it. Hight between my hands her darling face turned into a hideous mask. he thought. But he couldn't think it all through properly; his mind was awash with despair. He could only feel that despite his lwlple~~ anguish for her, it was incomparably finer to love Clarisse than to be mnning with the pack here-and to escape his fears. , he pressed himself deeper into the ranks of the marchers.
Me:mwhill' Ulrich had arrived at the Palais Leinsdorf, though by anothc>r rcmtl'. As he turned into the gate he noticed a double guard at the entrance and a large detachment of police stationed inside the l'Ourtyard. His Grace welcomed him with composure, while appar- ently aware of having become a target of popular disfavor.
"I think I once told you that anything favored by a good many peo- ple is sun' to tmn out to be worthwhile. Well, I have to take that baek. Of <:nllfse, there are exceptions," he said.
His Gnu:e>'s majordomo now arrived with the latest bulletin: the demonstrators were approaching the Palais, and should he arrange to have the gate and shutters loeked? His Grace shook his head. "What an idea! " he said kindly. "They'd like nothing better; it would allow them to think we're afraid of them. Besides; we've got all those men down there from the police looking out for us. " Then, turning to Ulrich, he said indignantly: "Let them come and sma'ih our windows! I told you all along that all that intellectual chatter would get . us no- where. " Behind his fa~-ade of dignified ealm, a deep resentment seemed to be working within him.
Ulrich had just walked over to the window when the marchers ar- rived. They were flanked by police, who dispersed the onlookers lin- ing the avenue like a cloud of dust raised by the firm tread of the marchers. A little farther back, vehicles could be seen wedged in the erowd, while its relentless current flowed around them in endless
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blackwavesonwhichthefoam ofupturnedfacesseemedtobedanc- ing. When the spearhead of the mob came within sight of Count Leinsdorf's windows, it looked as though it had been slowed down by some command; an immense ripple ran backward along the column as the advancing ranks jammed up, like a muscle tightening before launching a blow. The next instant this blow came whizzing through the air, in the weird form of a massed shout of indignation made visi- ble by all those wide-open mouths before their roar was heard. In rhythmical succession the rows offaces snapped open as they arrived on the scene, and since the noise of the ones in the rear was blotted out by the louder noise of those in the front, the spectacle could be seen repeating itself continually in the distance.
"The maw of the mob," Count Leinsdorf said, just behind Ulrich; as solerimly as if it were some familiar phrase like "our daily bread. " "But what is it they're actuallyyelling? I can't make it out, with all that din. "
Ulrich said he thought they were mostly screaming "Boo! "
"Yes, but there's something more, isn't there? "
Ulrich did not tell him that among the indistinct dancing sound
waves of boos, a clear, long-drawn-out "Down with Leinsdorfl" could often enough be heard. He even thought he had heard several outcries of"Hurray for Germany! " interspersed with "Lori. g live Am- heim! " but could not be absolutely sure, because the thick glass of the windows muffled the sounds.
Ulrich had come here as soon as Gerda left him, because he felt it was necessary to tell Count Leinsdorf, if no one else, the news that had come to his ears, which exposed Arnheim beyond all expecta- tion. He had not yet had a chance to speak ofit. As he looked down at the dark surge of bodies beneath . the window, thoughts of his own days in the army made him say to himself: "It would take only one company to make a clean sweep ofthe square. " He could imagine all those gaping mouths turning into a single frothing maw suddenly succumbing to panic, growing slack and drooping at the edges, lips slowly sinking over teeth; his imagination transformed the menacing black crowd into a flock of hens scattering before a dog rushing into their midst. All his anger had contracted again into a hard knot, but the old satisfaction in watching moral man retreat before brute vio- lent man was, as always, a two-edged feeling.
"Are you all right? " Count Leinsdorfwas asking. He had been pac- ing the floor behind Ulrich and had actually received the impression from some odd movement of Ulrich's that he had cut himself, though there was no sharp-edged object anywhere in the vicinity. When he received no answer he stood still, shook his head, and said: "We must not forget, after all, that it is not so very long since His Majesty's generous decision to let the people have a voice in the con- duct of their own affairs·; so it is understandable that a degree of uni- versal political maturity that would be worthy of our Sovereign's magnanimity is still lacking. I believe I said as much at our very first meeting. "
This little speech made Ulrich drop any notion of telling His Grace or Diotima about Arnheim's machinations; despite his. antago- nism to Arnheim he felt closer to him than to the others, and his memory of himself setting upon Gerda, like a big dog on a howling little one, a memory he now realized had been haunting him all along, troubled him less when he thought of Arnheim's infamous conduct toward Diotima. The episode of the screaming body staging a dramatic scene for a captive audience of two embarrassed souls could also be seen from the farcical side, and the people down there in the street at whom Ulrich was still staring spellbound without tak- ing the slightest notice of Count Leinsdorf were also staging a farce. It was this that fascinated him. They did not really want to attack or rip anyone apart, although they looked as if they did. They made a serious show of being enraged, but it was not the kind of seriousness that drives men into a line of fire, not even that of a fire brigade! They're only going through some kind of ritual, he thought, some time-hallowed display of righteous indignation, the half-civilized, half-barbaric legacy of ancient communal rites no individual need take wholly seriously. He envied them. How appealing they are, even in this state where they are doing their best to be as unappealing as possible, he thought. The warm defense against loneliness that a crowd provides came radiating up from below, and here he was, fated to stand up here, outside its protective shelter-he felt this viv- idly, for an instant, as if he were looking up from down there and
seeing his own image behind the thick pane of glass set in the wall of the building. It would have been better for him and his fate, he felt, had he been able to fly into a rage at this moment, or, on Count
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Leinsdorf's behalf, give the alarm to. the guard, or alternatively had he been cap·able of feeling close to the ·people as their friend; a man who plays cards with his fellows, bargains with them, quarrels with them, and enjoys the same pleasures they do is free to order them shot, too, when the occasion calls for it, without its seeming to be anything unnatural. There is a way of being on good terms with life that allows a man to go about his business with no second thoughts, in a live-and-let-live fashion, Ulrich was thinking. It may have a pecu- liarity of its 9Wll but is no less dependable than a natural instinct, and it is from this that the intimate scent of a healthy personality ema- nates, while whoever lacks this gift for compromise with life and is solitary, unyielding, and in dead earnest makes the others feel uneasy and unnerves them, as a caterpillar might, not because it is danger- ous but because it is repellent. He felt a depressing aversion for the unnatura)ness of the solitary man and his mental games, such as may be aroused by the sight of a turbulent crowd in the grip of natural, shared emotions.
The demonstration had been growing more intense. Count Leins- dorf was pacing the room in some agitation, with an occasional glance through the second window. He was in distress, though he wo. uld not show it; his eyes protruded like two little marbles from among the soft furrows of his face, and he stretched his arms now and then before he crossed them again behind his back. Ulrich sud- denly realized that it was he, who had been standing at the window the whole time, who was being taken for the Count. All the eyes doWn. there. seemed focused on his face, and sticks were being bran- dished at him. A few steps beyond, where the street curved from view as though it were slipping into the wings, the performers were already beginning to take off the greasepaint, as it were; there was no point in looking fierce for no one in particular, so they naturally let their faces relax, and some even began to joke and laugh as if they were on a picnic. Ulrich noticed this and laughed too, but the new- comers took him for the Count laughing and their rage rose to a fear- some pitch, which only made Ulrich laugh all the more and Without restraint.
But all at once he broke off in disgust. With his eyes still moving from the. threatening open-mouthed faces to the high-spirited ones farther back, and his mind refusing to absorb any more of this spec-
tacle, he was undergoing a strange transformation. I can't go on with this life, and I can't keep on rebelling against it any longer, either, was what he felt, while keenly aware of the room behind him with the large paintings on the wall, the long Empire desk, the stiff per- pendicular lines of. draperies and bell ropes, like another, smaller stage, with him standing up front on the apron, in the opening be- tween the curtains, facing the drama running its course on the greater stage outside. The two stages had their own way offusing into one without regard for the fact that he was standing between them. Then his sense ofthe room behind him contracted and turned inside out, passing through him or flowing past him as if turned to water, making for a strange spatial inversion, Ulrich thought, so that the people were passing behind him. Perhaps he had passed through them and arrived beyond them at some zero point, or else they were moving both before and behind him, lapping against him as the same ever-changing ripples of a stream lap against a stone in their midst. It was an experience beyond his understanding; he was chiefly aware of the glassiness, emptiness, tranquillity of the state in which he found himself. Is it really possible, he wondered, to leave one's own space for some hidden other space? He felt as though chance had led him through a secret door.
He shook these dreams offwith so violent a motion of his whole body that Count Leinsdorf stood still in surprise. 'Whatever is the matter with you today? " His Grace asked. "You're taking it much too hard. I must stick to my decision: the Germans will have to be won over by way of the non-Germans, whether it hurts or not. " At these words Ulrich was at least able to smile again, and was grateful to see the Count's face before him, with all its knots and furrows. He was reminded ofthat special moment just before a plane lands, when the ground rises up again with all its voluptuous COt:J. tours out of the map- like flatness to which it had been reduced for hours on end, and things revert to their familiar earthly meanings, which seem to be growing out of the ground itself. At the same moment the incredible idea flashed through his mind to commit some crime, or perhaps it was an unfocused passing image, for he was not thinking of anything in particular. It might have had some reference to Moosbrugger, for he would have liked to help that fool whom fate had chanced to bring his way as two people come to occupy the same park bench. But all
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this "crime" really amounted to for him was the urge to shut himself out, to abandon the life he had been living companionably with oth- ers. His "dissident" or even "misanthropic" attitude, his so variously justified and well-earned position, had not "arisen" from anything, there was nothing to justify it, it simply existed, he had held it all his life, though rarely with such intensity. It is probably safe to say that in all the revolutions that have ever taken place in this world, it has al- ways been the thinking men who have come off worst. They always begin with the promise of a new civilization, make a clean sweep of every advance hitherte achieved by the human mind as though it were enemy property, and are overtaken by the next upheaval before they can surpass the heights previously attained. Our so-called peri- ods of civilization are nothing but a long series of detours, one for every failure of amovement forward; the idea of placing himself out- side this series was nothing new for Ulrich. The only new element was the increasing force of the signs that his mind was coming to a decision and that he was, in fact, ready to act on it. He did not make the slightest effort to come down to specifics. For some moments he was content to be permeated with the feeling that this time it would not be something general or theoretical, the sort of thing he had grown so tired of, but that he must do something personal, take an action that would involve him as a man of flesh and blood, with arms and legs. He knew that at the instant ofcommitting his undefined "crime" he would no longer be in a position to defy the world openly, but only God knew why this should arouse·in him such a sensation of passionate tenderness. It was somehow linked with his strange spa- tial experience of a while ago, a faint echo of which he could bring back at will, when what was happening on thi! ; side and on the other side of the window fused into one to form an obscurely exciting rela- tionship to the world that might have suggested to Ulrich-if he could have taken the time to think about it-the legendary voluptu- ousness that overcame mythical heroes on the point of being de- voured by the goddesses they had wooed.
Instead, he was interrupted by Count Leinsdorf, who had mean- while fought his own inner struggle through to a decision.
"I must stay at my post and face down this insurrection," His Grace began, "so I can't leave. But you, my dear fellow, must really go to your cousin as quickly as possible, before she has time to be
frightened and possibly moved to say something to some reporter that might not be quite the thing at this moment. You might tell her . . . " He paused to consider his message. "Yes, it will be best if you say to her: Strong remedies produce strong reactions. And tell her, too, that those who set out to make life better must not shrink, in a crisis, from using the stake or the knife.
" He stopped again to think, with an almost alarming look of resolution, as his trim little beard rose and then sank to a downward, vertical position every time he was on the verge of saying something but paused to reconsider. In the end, his innate kindliness broke through and he said: "But tell her not to worry, not ~obe afraid ofthe troublemakers. The more ofa case they have, the more quickly they adjust themselves to the reali- ties when they are given a chance. I don't know whether you've no- ticed this, but there has never yet been an opposition party that· didn't cease to be in opposition when they took over the helm. This is not merely, as you might think, something that goes without saying. It is, rather, a very important point, because it is, if I may say so, the basic reality, the touchstone, the continuity in politics. "
1. 21
TALKING MAN-TO-MAN
When Ulrich arrived at Diotima's, Rachel, who let him in, told him that Madame was out but that Dr. Amheim was there, waiting for her. Ulrich said he would wait too, not noticing that his little ally of the other night had blushed scarlet at the sight of him.
Amheim, who had been at the window, watching what unrest there still was in the streets, crossed the room to shake hands with Ulrich. His face lit up at seeing Ulrich unexpectedly, for he had wanted to speak with Ulrich but had hesitated to seek him out; how- ever, he did not want to rush into things, and could not immediately think ofa good opening. Ulrich was also reluctant to start offwith the
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Galician oil fields, and so both men fell silent after their first words of greeting and ended up walking over to the window together, where they stared mutely at the flurries of movement down below.
After a while, Arnheim spoke: .
"I really don't understand you. Isn't it a thousand times more im- portant to come to grips with life than to write? "
"But I haven't been writing," Ulrich said crisply.
''I'm glad to hear it. " Arnheim adjusted to the fact. 'Writing, like the pearl, is a disease. Look down there. . . . " He pointed two of his beautifully manicured fingers at the street, with a movement that for all·its rapidity had the air of a papal blessing about it. "See how they come along, singly and in clusters, and from time to time a mouth is tom open and something inside makes it yell something. The same man under different circumstances would write something; I agree with you on that. "
"But you are a famous writer yourself, aren't you? "
"Oh, that doesn't mean anything. " But after saying this, gracefully leaving the question open, Arnheim turned to face Ulrich, confront- ing him as it were broadside, and standing chest-to-chest with him, said, carefully spacing his words:
"May I ask you something? "
Ulrich could not say n:o to that, of course, but as he had instinc- tively moved back a little, this rhetorical courtesy served to rope him. in again.
"I hope," Arnheim began, "that you will not hold our recent little difference of opinion against me but rather credit it to my keen inter- est in your views even when they seem-as they do often enough- to run counter to mine. So let me ask you whether you really ~eant what you said-to sum it up, if I may: that we must live with a tight rein on our conscience. Is this a good way of putting it? "
The smile Ulrich gave him in answer said: I don't know; let me wait and see what more you have to say.
"You spoke of having to leave life in a free-floating state, like a certain kind of metaphor that hovers inconclusively between two worlds at once, as it were, did you not? You also said some extremely fascinating things to your cousin. I would be mortified ifyou were to take me for . a Prussian industrial militarist who is unlikely to under- stand that sort of thing. But you say, for instance, that our reality and
our history arise only from those aspects of ourselves that don't mat- ter. I take this to mean that we must change the forms and patterns of what happens, and that it doesn't matter much, in your opinion, what happens m~anwhileto Tom, Dick, and Harry. "
"What I mean," Ulrich intetjected warily and reluctantly, "is that our reality is like a fabric being turned out by the thousands of bales, technically flawless in quality but in antiquated patterns no one both- ers to bring up-to-date. "
"In other words," Amheim broke in, "I understand you to say that the present state of the world, which is clearly unsatisfactory, arises from our leaders' concern with making world history instead of turn- ing all our energies to permeating the world of power with new ideas. An even closer analogy to our present state of affairs is the case of the manufacturer who keeps turning out goods in response to the mar- ket, instead of regulating it. So you see that your ideas touch me very closely. But just because of this you must see that these ideas at times strike me, a man continually engaged in making decisions that keep vast industries going, as positively monstrous! Such as when you de-. mand that we give up attaching any meaningful reality to our actions! Or propose that we abandon the 'provisionally definitive' character of our behavior, as our friend Leinsdorf so gracefully phrases it, when, in fact, we can do no such thing! "
"I demand nothing at all," Ulrich said.
"Oh, you demand a great deal more! You demand that we live our lives in a scientific, experimental way," Amheim said with energy and warmth. "You want responsible leaders to regard their job not as making history but as a mandate to draw up reports on experiments as a basis for further experiments. A perfectly delightful idea, of course. But how do wars and revolutions-for instance-fit in with that? Can you raise the dead when your experiment has been carried out and taken off the schedule? "
Ulrich now succumbed after all to the temptation to talk, which is not so very different from the temptation to go on smoking, and conceded that one probably had to tackle everything one wanted to do effectively with the utmost seriousness, even when one knew that in fifty years every experiment would tum out not to have been worthwhile. But such a "punctured seriousness" ~as nothing so very unusual, after all; people risked their lives every day in sport and for
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nothing at all. Psychologically, there was nothing impossible about a life conducted as an experiment; all that was needed was the deter- mination to assume a certain unlimited responsibility. "That's the crucial difference," he concluded. "In the old days, people felt as it were deductively, starting from certain assumptions. Those days are gone. Today we live without a guiding principle, but also without any method of conscious, inductive thinking; we simply go on trying this and that like a band of monkeys. "
"Splendid! " Amheim admitted freely. "But allow me one last question. Your cousin tells me that you're taking a great interest in the case of a dangerous psychopath. I happen to understand this very well, incidentally. We really don't know how to handle such cases, and society's method of dealing with them is disgracefully hit-or- miss. But in the circumstances-which leave us no choice but either to kill an 'innocent' man or to let him go on killing innocent people- would you let him escape the night before his execution, if you could? " .
"No! " Ulrich said.
"No? Really not? " Arnheim asked with sudden animation.
"I don't know. I don't think so. I might ofcourse talk myselfout of
it by claiming that in a malfunctioning world I have no right to act freely on my own personal convictions; but I shall simply admit that I don't know what I would do. "
"That man must surely be stopped from doing ft. uther harm," Am- heim said pensively. "And yet, when he is having one of his seizures, he is certainly a man possessed by the demonic, which in all virile epochs has been felt to be akin to the divine. In the old days such a man would have been sent into the wilderness. Even then he might have committed murder, but perhaps in a visionary state, like Abra- ham about to slaughter his son Isaac. There it is! We no longer have any idea of how to deal with such things, and there is no sincerity in what we do. "
Arnheim might have let himself be carried away in uttering these last words without quite knowing what he meant by them; his ambi- tion might have been spurred on by Ulrich's not mustering up enough "heart and rashness" to answer with an unqualified "yes". when asked whether he would save Moosbrugger. But although Ul- rich felt this tum of the conversation to be almost an omen, an unex-
pected reminder of his "resolve" at Count Leinsdorf's, he resented Amheim's flamboyance in making the most of the Moosbrugger problem, and both factors made him ask dryly, but intently: 'Would you set him free? "
"No," Amheim replied with a smile, "but I'd like to propose some- thing else. . " And without giving him time to put up resistance, he added: "It's a suggestion I've been wanting to make to you for some time, to make you give up your suspicions of me, which, frankly, hurt my feelings; I want you on my side, in fact. Do you have any concep- tion ofwhat a great industrial enterprise looks like from the inside? It is controlled by two bodies, the top management and the board of directors, usually capped by a third body, the executive committee, as you in Austria call it, made up of representatives of the first two, which meets almost every day. The board of directors naturally consists of men who enjoy the confidence ofthe majority share- holders. . . . " Here he paused for the first time, to give Ulrich a chance to speak if he wished, as though testing to see whether Ulrich had already noticed something. "As I was saying, the majority share- holders have their representatives on the board and the executive committee. " He prompted Ulrich. "Have you any idea who this ma- jority is? "
Ulrich had none. He had only a vague general concept of finance, which to him meant clerks, counterS, coupons, and certificates that looked like ancient documents.
Arnheim cued him in again. "Have you ever helped to elect a board of directors? No, you haven't," he answered his own question. "There would be no point in trying to imagine it, since you will never own the majority of shares in a company. " He said this so firmly that Ulrich very nearly felt ashamed of being found wanting in so impor- tant a respect; and it was in fact just like Amheim to move in one easy stride from his demons to his board of directors. Smiling, he con- tinued: "There is one person I haven't mentioned yet, the most im- portant of all, in a sense. I spoke of the majority shareholders, which sounds like a harmless plural but is in fact nearly always a single per- son, a chief shareholder, unnamed and unknown to the . general pub- lic, hidden behind those he sends out front in his place. "
Ulrich now realized that he was being told things he could read in the papers every day; still, Arnheim knew how to create suspense.
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He was sufficiently htterested to ask who was the majority share- holder in Lloyd's of London.
"No one knows," Amheim replied quietly. "That is to say, there are those in the know, of course, but one doesn't usually hear it spo- ken of. But let me get to the point. Wherever you find two such forces, a person who really gives the orders and an administrative body that executes them, what automatically happens is that every possible means ofincreasing profits is used, whe~eror not it is mor- ally or aesthetically attractive. When I say automatically I mean just that, because the way it works is to a high degree independent of any personal factor. The person who really wields the power takes no hand in carrying out his directives, while the managers are covered by the fact that they are acting not on their own behalf but as func- tionaries. You will find such arrangements everywhere these days, and by no means exclusively in the world of finance. You may depend on it that our friend Tuzzi would give the signal for war with the clearest conscience in the world, even if as a man he may be incapa- ble of shooting down an old dog, and your friend Moosbrugger will be sent to his death by thousands of people because only three of them need have a hand in it personally. This system' of indirection elevated to an art is what nowadays enables the indiVidual and society as a whole to function with a clear conscience; the button to be pres~edis always clean and shiny, and what happens at the other end of the line is the business of others, who, for their part, don't press the button. Do you find this revolting? It is how we let thousands die or vegetate, set in motion whole avalanches of suffering, but we al- ways get things done. I might go so far as to say that what we're see- ing here, in this form of the social division of labor, is nothing else than the ancient dualism of conscience between the end that is ap- proved and the means that are tolerated, though here we have it in a grandiose and dangerous form. "
In answer to Arnheim's question whether he found all this revolt- ing Ulrich had shrugged his shoulders. The split in the moral con- sciousness that Amheim spoke of, this most horrifying phenomenon of modem life, was an ancient fact of human history, but it had won its appalling good conscience only in recent times, as a consequence of the universal division of labor with all its magnificent inevitability.
Ulrich did not care to wax indignant over it, especially as it gave him, paradoxically, the funny and gratifying sensation one can get from tearing along at a hundred miles an hour past a dust-bespattered moralist who is standing by the wayside, cursing. When Arnheim came to a stop, Ulrich's first words were: "Every kind of division of ·tabor can be developed further. The question is not whether it repels me but whether I believe that we can attain more acceptable condi- tions without having to tum back the clock. "
"Aha, your general inventory! " Amheim interjected. 'W e have or- ganized the division of labor brilliantly but neglected to find ways of correlating the results. We are continuously destroying the old mo- rality and the soul in accordance with the latest patents, and think we can patch them up by resorting to the old household remedies of our religious and philosophical traditions. Levity on such a subject"-he backed off-"is really quite distasteful to me, and I :regard jokes on the whole as in dubious taste anyway. But then, I never thought of the suggestion you made to us all in the presence of Count Leins- dorf, that we need to reorganize the conscience itself, as a mere joke. "
"It was a joke," Ulrich said gruffiy. "I don't believe in such a possi- bility. I would sooner be inclined to believe that the Devil himself built up the European world and that God is willing to let the compe- tition show what he can do. "
"A pretty conceit," Amheim said. "But in that case, why were yot,~ so annoyed with me for not wanting to believe you? "
Ulrich did not answer.
"What you said just now," Amheim calmly persisted, "also contra- dicts those adventurous remarks of yours, some time ago, about the means toward attaining the right way in life. Besides, quite apart from wheth. er I can agree with you on the details, I can't help notic- ing the extent to which you are a compound ofactive tendencies and indifference. "
When Ulrich saw no need to reply even on this point, Arnheim said in the civil tone with which such rudeness must be met: "I merely wished to draw your attention to the degree to which we are expected, even in. making economic decisions, on which after all ev- erything depends, to work out the problem of our moral responsibil-
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ity on our own, and how fascinating this makes such decisions. " Even in the restraint with which this reproofwas expressed there was a faint suggestion of trying to win him over. · •·
''I'm sony," Ulrich said, "I was totally caught up in what you've been saying. " And as though he were still pursuing the same line of thought, he added: "I wonder whether you also regard it as a form of indirect dealing and divided consciousness in keeping with the spirit of the times to fill a woman's soul with mystical feelings while sensi- bly leaving her body to her husband? "
These words made Arnheim color a little, but he did not lose con- trol of the situation. ''I'm not sure I know what you mean," he said quietly, "but ifyou were speaking of a woman you love, you couldn't say this, because the body of reality is always richer than the mere outline sketch we call principles. " He had moved away from the win- dow and invited Ulrich to sit down with him. ''You don't give in eas- ily," he went on in a tone of mingled appreciation and regret. "But I know that I represent to you more of ail opposing principle than a personal opponent. And those who are privately the bitterest oppo- nents ofcapitalism are often enough its best servants in the business world; I may even say that to some extent I count myself among them, or I wouldn't presume to say this to you. Uncompromising, passionately committed persons, once they have seen that a conces- sion must be made, usually become its most brilliant champions. And so I want in any case to go ahead with my intended proposal: Will you accept a position in my finn? "
He took care to say this as casually as he could, trying by speaking rapidly and without emphasis to lessen the cheap surprise effect he could be only too sure ofcausing. Avoiding Ulrich's astonished gaze, he simply proceeded to go into the details without making any effort to indicate his own position.
"You wouldn't, of course, have the necessary training and qualifi- cations at first," he said smoothly, "to assume a leading position, nor would you feel inclined to do so, therefore I would offer you a posi- tion at my side, let us say that of my executive secretary, which I would create especially for you. I hope you won't take offense at this: it is not a position I can see as carrying an irresistible salary, to begin with; however, in time, you should be able to aim for any income you
mightwish. In a year or so, I am sure that you will understand me quite differently from now. "
When Arnheim had finished, he felt moved in spite ofhimself. Ac- tually, he had surprised himself by going so far in making this offer to Ulrich, who only had to refuse in order to put Arnheim at a disadvan- tage, whUe if he accepted, there wasn't much in it for Amheim. Any idea that this man he was talking to could accomplish something that he himself could not do on his own had vanished even as he spoke, and the need to charm Ulrich and get him into his power had become absurd in the very process of fmding articulate expression. That he had been afraid ofsomething he called this man's "wit" now seemed unnatural. He, Arnheim, was a man of some consequence, and for such a man life has to be simple! Such a man lives on good terms with other great men and circumstances, he does not act the romantic rebel or cast doubt on existing realities; it would be against his nature. On the other hand, there are, of course, all the things of beauty and ambiguity one wants in one's life as much as possible. Arnheim had never felt as intensely as he did at this moment the permanence of Western civilization, that ma. rVelous network of forces and disciplines. If Ulrich did not recognize this he was nothing but an adventurer, and the fact that Amheim had almost let himself be tempted to think of him a s - At this point words failed him, un- formulated as they still were at the back of his mind; he could not bring himself to articulate clearly, even in secret, the fact that he had considered taking Ulrich on as an adopted son. Not that it really mat- tered; it was only an idea like countless others one need not answer for, probably inspired by the kind of moodiness that afflicts every man ofaction, because a man is never really satisfied, and perhaps he had not had this idea at all, in so dubious a form, but only some vague
impulse that could be so interpreted; still, he shied away from the memory, and only kept painfully in mind that the difference between Ulrich's age and his own was not all that great; and behind this there was a secondary, shadowy sense that Ulrich might serve him as a warning against Diotima! How often he had already felt that his rela- tionship to Ulrich was somehow comparable to a secondary volcanic crater that emits the occasional warning or clue to the strange go- ings-on in the main crater, and he was somewhat troubled that the
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eruption had now occurred and his words had come pouring out and were making their way into real life. "What's to be done," flashed through his mind, "if this fellow accepts? " It was in such suspense that an Arnheim had to wait for the decision of a younger man who mattered only insofar as Arnheim's own imagination had lent him significance. Arnheim sat there stiffiy, his lips parted in a hostile ex- pression, thinking: "There'll be a way of handling it, in case there's still not a way of getting out of it. "
Even while his feelings and thoughts were running their course in this fashion the situation had not come to a standstill; question and answer followed each other without pause.
"And to what qualities of my own," Ulrich asked dryly, "do I owe this offer, which can hardly be justified from a businessman's point of view? "
"You always misjudge this sort of thing," Arnheim replied. "To be businesslike in my position is not the same as counting pennies. What I stand to lose on you is quite immaterial compared to what I hope to gain. "
"You certainly pique my curiosity," Ulrich remarked. "Very sel- dom am I told I represent a gain of any kind. I might perhaps have developed into a minor asset in my special subject, but even there, as you know, I have been a disappointment. "
"That you are a man of exceptional intelligence,L' Amheim an- swered, in the same quiet tone of unshakable confidence to which he was outwardly clinging, "is surely something of which you are fully aware ~thout my having to tell you. Still, we may have keener and more dependable minds already working for us. It is actually your character, your human qualities, that, for certain reasons, I wish to have constantly at my side. '. '
"My qualities? " Ulrich could not help smiling at this. "That's funny: I have friends who call me a man without qualities. ''
Arnheim let slip a faint gesture of impatience that said, more or less: "Tell me about it, as if I didn't know. " This twitch that ran across his face all the way to the shoulder betrayed his dissatisfaction, even while his words flowed on as programmed. Ulrich caught the fleeting grimace, and he was so ready to be provoked by Arnheim tliat he now dropped all restraint . against bringing everything out into the open.
They had meanwhile risen from their chairs, and Ulrich moved back a few steps to see his effect all the better as he said:
"You have asked me so many pointed questions, and now there is something I would like to know before I make my decision.
· flame at her feet on signal. But as she could not utter a single word of all this, she went on feeling painfully unattractive and miserable, her arms trembling, unable to finish undressing; she had to clamp her bloodless lips together to keep them from twitching weirdly without a sound.
At this point Ulrich, who saw her agony and realized that the whole struggle up to now might come to nothing, went over to her and slipped off her shoulder straps. Gerda slid into bed like a boy. For an instant Ulrich saw a naked adolescent in motion; it affected him no more, sexually, than the sudden blinking of a fish. He guessed that Gerda had made up her mind to get it over with because it was too late to get out of it, and he had never yet perceived as clearly as in the instant he followed her into bed how much the passionate intru- sion into another body is a sequel to a child's liking for secret and forbidden hiding places. His hands encountered the girl's skin, still bristling with fear, and he felt frightened too, instead of attracted. This body, al~eadyflabby while still unripe, repelled him; it made no sense to do what he was doing, and he would have liked nothing bet- ter than to escape from this bed, so that he had to call to mind every- thing he could think of that would help him to see it through. In his frantic haste he ~ummoned up all the usual reasons people find now- adays to justify their acting without sincerity, or faith, or scruple, or satisfaction; and in abandoning himself to this effort he found, not, of course, any feeling of love, but a half-crazy anticipation of something like a massacre, a sex murder or, ifthere is such a thing, a lustful suicide, inspired by the demons of the void who lurk behind all of
life's images. This reminded him of his brawl with the hoodlums that night" he met Bonadea, and he decided to be quicker this time. But now something awful happened. Gerda had been gathering up all her inner resources to alchemize them into willpower with which to resist the shameful terror she was suffering, as though she were fac- ing her execution; but the instant she felt Ulrich beside her, so strangely naked, his hands on her bare skin, her body flung off all her will. Even while somewhere deep inside her she still felt a friendship beyond words for him, a trembling, tender longing to put her arms around him, kiss his hair, follow his voice to its source with her lips; and imagined that to touch his real self would make her rrielt like a fragment of snow on a warm hand-but it would have to be the Ul- rich she knew, dressed as usual, as he appeared in the familiar setting of her parental home, not this naked stranger whose hostility she sensed and who did not take her sacrifice seriously even as he gave her no time to think what she was doing-Gerda suddenly heard herself screaming. like a little cloud, a soap bubble, a scream hung in the air, and others·followed, little screams expelled from her chest as though she were wrestling with something, a whimpering from which high-pitched cries of ee-ee bubbled and floated off, from lips that grimaced and twisted and were wet as if with deadly lust. She wanted to jump up, but she couldn't move. Her eyes would not obey her and kept sending out signals without permission. Gerda was pleading to be let off, like a child facing some punishment or being taken to the doctor, who cannot go one step farther because it is being tom and convulsed by its own shrieks of terror. Her hands w~re up over her breasts, and she was menacing Ulrich with her naus while frantically pressing her long thighs together. This revolt of her body against herself was frightful. She perceived it with utmost clar- ity as a kind of theater, but she was also the audience sitting alone and desolate in the dark auditorium and could do nothing to prevent her fate from being acted out before her, in a screaming frenzy; nothing to keep herself from taking the lead in the performance.
Ulrich stared in horror into the tiny pupils of her veiled eyes, with their strangely unbending gaze, and watched, aghast, those weird motions in which desire and taboo, the soul and the soulless, were indescribably intertwined. His eye caught a fleeting glimpse of her pale fair skin and the short black hairs that shaded into red where
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they grew more densely. It occurred to him that he was facing a fit of hysteria, and he had no idea how to handle it. He was afraid that these horribly distressing screams might get even louder, and re- membered that such a fit might be stopped by an angry shout or . even by a sudden, vicious slap. Then the thought tha~ this horror might have been avoided somehow led him to think that a younger man might persist in going further with Gerda even in these circum- stances. "That might be a way of getting her over it," he thought, "perhaps it's a mistake to give in to her, now that the silly goose has let herself in too deep. " He did nothing of the sort; it was only that such irritable thoughts kept zigzagging through his mind while he was instinctively whispering an uninterrupted stream of comforting words, promising not to do anything to her, assuring her that nothing had really happened, asking her to forgive him, at the same time that all his words, swept up like chaffin his loathing ofthe scene she was making, seemed to him so absurd and undignified that he had to fight off a temptation to grab an armful of pillows to press on her mouth and choke off these shrieks that wouldn't stop.
At long last her fit began to wear off and her body quieted down. Her eyes brimming with tears, she sat up in the bed, her little breasts drooping slackly from a body not yet under the mind's full control. Ulrich took a deep breath, again overcome with repugnance at the inhuman, merely physical aspects of the experience. Gerda was re- gaining normal consciousness; something bloomed in her eyes, like the first actual awakening after the eyes have been open for some time, and she stared blankly ahead for a second, then noticed that she was sitting up stark naked and glanced at Ulrich; the blood cam~ in great waves back to her face. Ulrich couldn't think of anything bet- ter to do than whisper the same reassurances to her again; he put his arm around her shoulder, drew her to his chest, and told her to think nothing of it. Gerda found herself back in the situation that had driven her to hysteria, but. now everything looked strangely pale and forlorn: the tumbled bed, her nude body in the arms of a man in- tently whispering to her, the feelings that had brought her to this. She was fully aware ofwhat it all meant, but she also knew that some- thing horrible had happened, something she would rather not focus on, and while she could tell that Ulrich's voice sounded more tender, all it meant was that he regarded her as a sick person, but it was he
who had made her sick! Still, it no longer mattered; all she wanted was to be gone from this place, to get away without having to say a word.
She dropped her head and pushed Ulrich away, felt for her cami- sole, and pulled it over her head like a child or someone who did not care how she looked. Ulrich helped her to dress, he even pulled her stockings up over her legs, and he also felt as though he were dress- ing a child. Gerda was a bit unsteady on her feet when she stood up. She thought of how she had felt earlier in the day when she left home, the home to which she was about to return, and felt, in deep misery and shame, that she had not passed the test. She did not utter a word in answer to anything Ulrich was saying. A very distant mem- ory came back to her, of Ulrich once saying, as a joke on himself, that solitude sometimes led him into excess. · She did not feel angry at him. She simply wanted never again to hear him say anything what- soever. When he offered to get her a cab she only shook her head, pulled her hat on over her ruffled hair, and left him without a glance. Seeing her walk away with her veil now sadly trailing from her hand, he felt awkward as a schoolboy. He probably should not have let her go in this state, but he could think of no way to stop her, half-dressed as he was because he had been attending to her, unprepared even to confront the serious mood in which he was left, as though he would have to get fully dressed before he could decide what to· do with himself.
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THE PARALLEL CAMPAIGN CAUSES A STIR
When Walter reached the center oftown he sensed something in the air. There was no visible difference in the way people moved on the sidewalks or in the carriages and streetcars, and ifthere was some- thing unusual here and there it faded out before one could tell what
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it was; nevertheless, everything seemed to be carrying a little sign pointing in one direction, and Walter had barely walked a few steps before he felt such a sign on himself as well. He followed the indi- ~ated direction and felt that the Department of Fine Arts official he was, as well as the struggling painter and musician, and even Cla- risse's tormented husband, were all giving way to a person who was none of the above. The very streets, with all their bustle and their ornate, pompous buildings, seemed to be in an analogous "expectant state," as though the hard facets of a crystal were being'dissolved in some liquid medium and about to fall back into an earlier, more amorphous condition. However conservative he was in rejecting in- novations, he was also always ready in his qwn mind to condemn the present, and the dissolution of the existing order that he was now sensing was positively stimulating. As in his recent daydream, the crowds he ran into had an aura of mobility and haste, and a unity that seemed more unforced than the usual group spirit based on intellect, morality, and sound security measures; more that of a free, informal community. They made him think Of a huge bunch of flowers just after it has been untied, opening freely without, ·however, falling apart; and of a body unclothed, standing free, smiling, naked, having no need of words. Nor was he troubled when, quickening his pace, he ran into a large contingent of police standing by; he enjoyed the sight, like that of a m$. tary camp in readiness for the alarm to be given; all those red uniform collars, dismounted riders, movements of small units reporting their arrival or departure, stirred his senses into a warlike mood.
Beyond this point, where a cordon was about to be drawn across the street, the scene was more somber. There were hardly any women on the sidewalks, and even the colorful uniforms of the army officers who normally were seen hereabouts when off duty had somehow been swallowed up by the prevailing uncertainty. There were still many pedestrians like himself coming downtown, but the impression they gave was more that of chaff and litter in the wake of a strong gust of wind. Soon he saw the first groups forming, appar- ently held together not only by curiosity but just as much by indeci- sion whether to follow the unusual attraction farther or to turn around and'go home.
Walter's questions elicited a variety of answers. Some said that
there was a great patriotic parade; others thought they had heard of a protest march against certain dangerously nationalistic activists, and opinions were equally split as to whether the general uproar was caused by the Pan-Germans protesting against the government's coddling ofthe Slavic minorities, as most people thought, or by loyal supporters of the government urging all patriotic Kakanians to march shoulder-to-shoulder in its defense against such continual dis- orders. They were all tagalongs like himself and knew nothing more than he had already heard rumored at the office, but an irrepressible itch to gossip led Walter on to speak to people, and even though they mostly admitted to having no idea, or laughed the whole thing off as a joke, including their own curiosity, the farther he went the more ev- eryone seemed to be in agreement that it was high time something was done, though no one volunteered to tell him just what that should be. As he kept on, he noticed more often on the faces he met something senseless that overflowed and drowned out reason itself, something that told him that no one cared any longer what was hap- pening, wherever they were being drawn to, as long as it was some- thing unusual that would "take them out of themselves," if only. in the attenuated form of a common general excitement, suggesting a remote kinship with long-forgotten states of communal ecstasy and transfiguration, a sort of developing unconscious readiness to leap out of their clothes, and even their skins. ·
Trading speculations and saying things that were not at all in char- acter, Walter fell in with the rest, who were gradually transforming themselves from small crumbling groups ofpeople, just waiting, and other people walking aimlessly along, into a procession that ad- vanced toward the supposed scene of events, still without any defi- nite intent yet visibly growing in density and energy. Emotionally they were still at the stage where they were like rabbits scampering about outside their burrows; ready to scunjr back inside at the slight- est sign of danger, when from the front of the disordered procession, far ahead and out of sight, a more definite sort of excitement came rippling back toward the rear. Up there a group of students, young men anyway, who had already taken some sort of action and had re- turned from "the battlefield," joined the vanguard, and sounds of talking and shouting too far away to be understood, garbled mes- sages, and waves of excitement were running through the crowd and,
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depending on the listeners' temperaments or what scraps of informa- tion they snatched up, spread indignation or fear, the itch to fight or some moral imperative, causing the gathering mob to thrust forward in a mood guided by the kind of commonplace notions that take a different form inside every head but are of so little significance, de- spite being uppermost in the consciousness, that they join in a single vital force that affects the muscles more than the brain. In the midst of this moving-throng Walter also became infected and soon found himself in that stimulated but vacuous state rather likt> the early stages of drunkenness. Nobody really knows the exact nature of the change that turns individuals with a will of their own into a mob with a single will, capable of going to the wildest extremes ofgood or evil and incapable ofstopping to think anything through, even if most of the individuals involved have spent their lives dedicated to modera- tion and prudence in the conduct of their private affairs. A mob in a state of mounting excitement for which it has no outlet will probably discharge all that energy into the first available channel, and thost> among its participants who are the most excitable, sensitive, and most vulnerable to pressure, those at the extreme end~ of the spec- trum who are primed to commit sudden acts of violence or risE' to unprecedented levels of sentimental generosity, are most likdy to sl"'t the example and lead the way; they are the points of leas~ resistance in the mass, but the shout that is uttered through them rather than by them, the stone that somehow finds its way into their hands, the emotion into which they burst, is what opens the way along which the others, who have been generating excitement among themselves to the point where it must be discharged, then come surging in a frenzy, giving to what happens the character of mob action, which is experi- enced by those involved in it as both compulsion and liberation.
What makes such agitated behavior interesting, incidentally, ob- servable as it is among spectators of any sporting event or among crowds listening to speeches, is not so much the psychology of the emotional release it affords as the question of what it is that primes people to get themselves into such a state in the first place. Assuming that life makes sense, even its senseless manifestations would have some meaning and would not necessarily look like mere demonstra- tions of mental deficiency. Walter happened to know this better than most and could think of all sorts of remedies for it, so that he was
constantly struggling against being swept along by this tidal wave of communal passion, which, demeaning as it was, nevertheless raised his spirits sky-high. The thought of Clarisse flashed through his mind. What a good thing she isn't here, he thought: she'd be crushed flat. A stab of grief kept him from pursuing his thought of her-with it had come the all-too-distinct impression she had· given him of being raving mad. Maybe I'm the one that's mad, he thought, be- eause it's taken me so long to notice it. I soon will be, if I go on living \\ith her. I don't believe it, he thought, but there's no doubt about·it. Hight between my hands her darling face turned into a hideous mask. he thought. But he couldn't think it all through properly; his mind was awash with despair. He could only feel that despite his lwlple~~ anguish for her, it was incomparably finer to love Clarisse than to be mnning with the pack here-and to escape his fears. , he pressed himself deeper into the ranks of the marchers.
Me:mwhill' Ulrich had arrived at the Palais Leinsdorf, though by anothc>r rcmtl'. As he turned into the gate he noticed a double guard at the entrance and a large detachment of police stationed inside the l'Ourtyard. His Grace welcomed him with composure, while appar- ently aware of having become a target of popular disfavor.
"I think I once told you that anything favored by a good many peo- ple is sun' to tmn out to be worthwhile. Well, I have to take that baek. Of <:nllfse, there are exceptions," he said.
His Gnu:e>'s majordomo now arrived with the latest bulletin: the demonstrators were approaching the Palais, and should he arrange to have the gate and shutters loeked? His Grace shook his head. "What an idea! " he said kindly. "They'd like nothing better; it would allow them to think we're afraid of them. Besides; we've got all those men down there from the police looking out for us. " Then, turning to Ulrich, he said indignantly: "Let them come and sma'ih our windows! I told you all along that all that intellectual chatter would get . us no- where. " Behind his fa~-ade of dignified ealm, a deep resentment seemed to be working within him.
Ulrich had just walked over to the window when the marchers ar- rived. They were flanked by police, who dispersed the onlookers lin- ing the avenue like a cloud of dust raised by the firm tread of the marchers. A little farther back, vehicles could be seen wedged in the erowd, while its relentless current flowed around them in endless
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blackwavesonwhichthefoam ofupturnedfacesseemedtobedanc- ing. When the spearhead of the mob came within sight of Count Leinsdorf's windows, it looked as though it had been slowed down by some command; an immense ripple ran backward along the column as the advancing ranks jammed up, like a muscle tightening before launching a blow. The next instant this blow came whizzing through the air, in the weird form of a massed shout of indignation made visi- ble by all those wide-open mouths before their roar was heard. In rhythmical succession the rows offaces snapped open as they arrived on the scene, and since the noise of the ones in the rear was blotted out by the louder noise of those in the front, the spectacle could be seen repeating itself continually in the distance.
"The maw of the mob," Count Leinsdorf said, just behind Ulrich; as solerimly as if it were some familiar phrase like "our daily bread. " "But what is it they're actuallyyelling? I can't make it out, with all that din. "
Ulrich said he thought they were mostly screaming "Boo! "
"Yes, but there's something more, isn't there? "
Ulrich did not tell him that among the indistinct dancing sound
waves of boos, a clear, long-drawn-out "Down with Leinsdorfl" could often enough be heard. He even thought he had heard several outcries of"Hurray for Germany! " interspersed with "Lori. g live Am- heim! " but could not be absolutely sure, because the thick glass of the windows muffled the sounds.
Ulrich had come here as soon as Gerda left him, because he felt it was necessary to tell Count Leinsdorf, if no one else, the news that had come to his ears, which exposed Arnheim beyond all expecta- tion. He had not yet had a chance to speak ofit. As he looked down at the dark surge of bodies beneath . the window, thoughts of his own days in the army made him say to himself: "It would take only one company to make a clean sweep ofthe square. " He could imagine all those gaping mouths turning into a single frothing maw suddenly succumbing to panic, growing slack and drooping at the edges, lips slowly sinking over teeth; his imagination transformed the menacing black crowd into a flock of hens scattering before a dog rushing into their midst. All his anger had contracted again into a hard knot, but the old satisfaction in watching moral man retreat before brute vio- lent man was, as always, a two-edged feeling.
"Are you all right? " Count Leinsdorfwas asking. He had been pac- ing the floor behind Ulrich and had actually received the impression from some odd movement of Ulrich's that he had cut himself, though there was no sharp-edged object anywhere in the vicinity. When he received no answer he stood still, shook his head, and said: "We must not forget, after all, that it is not so very long since His Majesty's generous decision to let the people have a voice in the con- duct of their own affairs·; so it is understandable that a degree of uni- versal political maturity that would be worthy of our Sovereign's magnanimity is still lacking. I believe I said as much at our very first meeting. "
This little speech made Ulrich drop any notion of telling His Grace or Diotima about Arnheim's machinations; despite his. antago- nism to Arnheim he felt closer to him than to the others, and his memory of himself setting upon Gerda, like a big dog on a howling little one, a memory he now realized had been haunting him all along, troubled him less when he thought of Arnheim's infamous conduct toward Diotima. The episode of the screaming body staging a dramatic scene for a captive audience of two embarrassed souls could also be seen from the farcical side, and the people down there in the street at whom Ulrich was still staring spellbound without tak- ing the slightest notice of Count Leinsdorf were also staging a farce. It was this that fascinated him. They did not really want to attack or rip anyone apart, although they looked as if they did. They made a serious show of being enraged, but it was not the kind of seriousness that drives men into a line of fire, not even that of a fire brigade! They're only going through some kind of ritual, he thought, some time-hallowed display of righteous indignation, the half-civilized, half-barbaric legacy of ancient communal rites no individual need take wholly seriously. He envied them. How appealing they are, even in this state where they are doing their best to be as unappealing as possible, he thought. The warm defense against loneliness that a crowd provides came radiating up from below, and here he was, fated to stand up here, outside its protective shelter-he felt this viv- idly, for an instant, as if he were looking up from down there and
seeing his own image behind the thick pane of glass set in the wall of the building. It would have been better for him and his fate, he felt, had he been able to fly into a rage at this moment, or, on Count
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Leinsdorf's behalf, give the alarm to. the guard, or alternatively had he been cap·able of feeling close to the ·people as their friend; a man who plays cards with his fellows, bargains with them, quarrels with them, and enjoys the same pleasures they do is free to order them shot, too, when the occasion calls for it, without its seeming to be anything unnatural. There is a way of being on good terms with life that allows a man to go about his business with no second thoughts, in a live-and-let-live fashion, Ulrich was thinking. It may have a pecu- liarity of its 9Wll but is no less dependable than a natural instinct, and it is from this that the intimate scent of a healthy personality ema- nates, while whoever lacks this gift for compromise with life and is solitary, unyielding, and in dead earnest makes the others feel uneasy and unnerves them, as a caterpillar might, not because it is danger- ous but because it is repellent. He felt a depressing aversion for the unnatura)ness of the solitary man and his mental games, such as may be aroused by the sight of a turbulent crowd in the grip of natural, shared emotions.
The demonstration had been growing more intense. Count Leins- dorf was pacing the room in some agitation, with an occasional glance through the second window. He was in distress, though he wo. uld not show it; his eyes protruded like two little marbles from among the soft furrows of his face, and he stretched his arms now and then before he crossed them again behind his back. Ulrich sud- denly realized that it was he, who had been standing at the window the whole time, who was being taken for the Count. All the eyes doWn. there. seemed focused on his face, and sticks were being bran- dished at him. A few steps beyond, where the street curved from view as though it were slipping into the wings, the performers were already beginning to take off the greasepaint, as it were; there was no point in looking fierce for no one in particular, so they naturally let their faces relax, and some even began to joke and laugh as if they were on a picnic. Ulrich noticed this and laughed too, but the new- comers took him for the Count laughing and their rage rose to a fear- some pitch, which only made Ulrich laugh all the more and Without restraint.
But all at once he broke off in disgust. With his eyes still moving from the. threatening open-mouthed faces to the high-spirited ones farther back, and his mind refusing to absorb any more of this spec-
tacle, he was undergoing a strange transformation. I can't go on with this life, and I can't keep on rebelling against it any longer, either, was what he felt, while keenly aware of the room behind him with the large paintings on the wall, the long Empire desk, the stiff per- pendicular lines of. draperies and bell ropes, like another, smaller stage, with him standing up front on the apron, in the opening be- tween the curtains, facing the drama running its course on the greater stage outside. The two stages had their own way offusing into one without regard for the fact that he was standing between them. Then his sense ofthe room behind him contracted and turned inside out, passing through him or flowing past him as if turned to water, making for a strange spatial inversion, Ulrich thought, so that the people were passing behind him. Perhaps he had passed through them and arrived beyond them at some zero point, or else they were moving both before and behind him, lapping against him as the same ever-changing ripples of a stream lap against a stone in their midst. It was an experience beyond his understanding; he was chiefly aware of the glassiness, emptiness, tranquillity of the state in which he found himself. Is it really possible, he wondered, to leave one's own space for some hidden other space? He felt as though chance had led him through a secret door.
He shook these dreams offwith so violent a motion of his whole body that Count Leinsdorf stood still in surprise. 'Whatever is the matter with you today? " His Grace asked. "You're taking it much too hard. I must stick to my decision: the Germans will have to be won over by way of the non-Germans, whether it hurts or not. " At these words Ulrich was at least able to smile again, and was grateful to see the Count's face before him, with all its knots and furrows. He was reminded ofthat special moment just before a plane lands, when the ground rises up again with all its voluptuous COt:J. tours out of the map- like flatness to which it had been reduced for hours on end, and things revert to their familiar earthly meanings, which seem to be growing out of the ground itself. At the same moment the incredible idea flashed through his mind to commit some crime, or perhaps it was an unfocused passing image, for he was not thinking of anything in particular. It might have had some reference to Moosbrugger, for he would have liked to help that fool whom fate had chanced to bring his way as two people come to occupy the same park bench. But all
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this "crime" really amounted to for him was the urge to shut himself out, to abandon the life he had been living companionably with oth- ers. His "dissident" or even "misanthropic" attitude, his so variously justified and well-earned position, had not "arisen" from anything, there was nothing to justify it, it simply existed, he had held it all his life, though rarely with such intensity. It is probably safe to say that in all the revolutions that have ever taken place in this world, it has al- ways been the thinking men who have come off worst. They always begin with the promise of a new civilization, make a clean sweep of every advance hitherte achieved by the human mind as though it were enemy property, and are overtaken by the next upheaval before they can surpass the heights previously attained. Our so-called peri- ods of civilization are nothing but a long series of detours, one for every failure of amovement forward; the idea of placing himself out- side this series was nothing new for Ulrich. The only new element was the increasing force of the signs that his mind was coming to a decision and that he was, in fact, ready to act on it. He did not make the slightest effort to come down to specifics. For some moments he was content to be permeated with the feeling that this time it would not be something general or theoretical, the sort of thing he had grown so tired of, but that he must do something personal, take an action that would involve him as a man of flesh and blood, with arms and legs. He knew that at the instant ofcommitting his undefined "crime" he would no longer be in a position to defy the world openly, but only God knew why this should arouse·in him such a sensation of passionate tenderness. It was somehow linked with his strange spa- tial experience of a while ago, a faint echo of which he could bring back at will, when what was happening on thi! ; side and on the other side of the window fused into one to form an obscurely exciting rela- tionship to the world that might have suggested to Ulrich-if he could have taken the time to think about it-the legendary voluptu- ousness that overcame mythical heroes on the point of being de- voured by the goddesses they had wooed.
Instead, he was interrupted by Count Leinsdorf, who had mean- while fought his own inner struggle through to a decision.
"I must stay at my post and face down this insurrection," His Grace began, "so I can't leave. But you, my dear fellow, must really go to your cousin as quickly as possible, before she has time to be
frightened and possibly moved to say something to some reporter that might not be quite the thing at this moment. You might tell her . . . " He paused to consider his message. "Yes, it will be best if you say to her: Strong remedies produce strong reactions. And tell her, too, that those who set out to make life better must not shrink, in a crisis, from using the stake or the knife.
" He stopped again to think, with an almost alarming look of resolution, as his trim little beard rose and then sank to a downward, vertical position every time he was on the verge of saying something but paused to reconsider. In the end, his innate kindliness broke through and he said: "But tell her not to worry, not ~obe afraid ofthe troublemakers. The more ofa case they have, the more quickly they adjust themselves to the reali- ties when they are given a chance. I don't know whether you've no- ticed this, but there has never yet been an opposition party that· didn't cease to be in opposition when they took over the helm. This is not merely, as you might think, something that goes without saying. It is, rather, a very important point, because it is, if I may say so, the basic reality, the touchstone, the continuity in politics. "
1. 21
TALKING MAN-TO-MAN
When Ulrich arrived at Diotima's, Rachel, who let him in, told him that Madame was out but that Dr. Amheim was there, waiting for her. Ulrich said he would wait too, not noticing that his little ally of the other night had blushed scarlet at the sight of him.
Amheim, who had been at the window, watching what unrest there still was in the streets, crossed the room to shake hands with Ulrich. His face lit up at seeing Ulrich unexpectedly, for he had wanted to speak with Ulrich but had hesitated to seek him out; how- ever, he did not want to rush into things, and could not immediately think ofa good opening. Ulrich was also reluctant to start offwith the
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Galician oil fields, and so both men fell silent after their first words of greeting and ended up walking over to the window together, where they stared mutely at the flurries of movement down below.
After a while, Arnheim spoke: .
"I really don't understand you. Isn't it a thousand times more im- portant to come to grips with life than to write? "
"But I haven't been writing," Ulrich said crisply.
''I'm glad to hear it. " Arnheim adjusted to the fact. 'Writing, like the pearl, is a disease. Look down there. . . . " He pointed two of his beautifully manicured fingers at the street, with a movement that for all·its rapidity had the air of a papal blessing about it. "See how they come along, singly and in clusters, and from time to time a mouth is tom open and something inside makes it yell something. The same man under different circumstances would write something; I agree with you on that. "
"But you are a famous writer yourself, aren't you? "
"Oh, that doesn't mean anything. " But after saying this, gracefully leaving the question open, Arnheim turned to face Ulrich, confront- ing him as it were broadside, and standing chest-to-chest with him, said, carefully spacing his words:
"May I ask you something? "
Ulrich could not say n:o to that, of course, but as he had instinc- tively moved back a little, this rhetorical courtesy served to rope him. in again.
"I hope," Arnheim began, "that you will not hold our recent little difference of opinion against me but rather credit it to my keen inter- est in your views even when they seem-as they do often enough- to run counter to mine. So let me ask you whether you really ~eant what you said-to sum it up, if I may: that we must live with a tight rein on our conscience. Is this a good way of putting it? "
The smile Ulrich gave him in answer said: I don't know; let me wait and see what more you have to say.
"You spoke of having to leave life in a free-floating state, like a certain kind of metaphor that hovers inconclusively between two worlds at once, as it were, did you not? You also said some extremely fascinating things to your cousin. I would be mortified ifyou were to take me for . a Prussian industrial militarist who is unlikely to under- stand that sort of thing. But you say, for instance, that our reality and
our history arise only from those aspects of ourselves that don't mat- ter. I take this to mean that we must change the forms and patterns of what happens, and that it doesn't matter much, in your opinion, what happens m~anwhileto Tom, Dick, and Harry. "
"What I mean," Ulrich intetjected warily and reluctantly, "is that our reality is like a fabric being turned out by the thousands of bales, technically flawless in quality but in antiquated patterns no one both- ers to bring up-to-date. "
"In other words," Amheim broke in, "I understand you to say that the present state of the world, which is clearly unsatisfactory, arises from our leaders' concern with making world history instead of turn- ing all our energies to permeating the world of power with new ideas. An even closer analogy to our present state of affairs is the case of the manufacturer who keeps turning out goods in response to the mar- ket, instead of regulating it. So you see that your ideas touch me very closely. But just because of this you must see that these ideas at times strike me, a man continually engaged in making decisions that keep vast industries going, as positively monstrous! Such as when you de-. mand that we give up attaching any meaningful reality to our actions! Or propose that we abandon the 'provisionally definitive' character of our behavior, as our friend Leinsdorf so gracefully phrases it, when, in fact, we can do no such thing! "
"I demand nothing at all," Ulrich said.
"Oh, you demand a great deal more! You demand that we live our lives in a scientific, experimental way," Amheim said with energy and warmth. "You want responsible leaders to regard their job not as making history but as a mandate to draw up reports on experiments as a basis for further experiments. A perfectly delightful idea, of course. But how do wars and revolutions-for instance-fit in with that? Can you raise the dead when your experiment has been carried out and taken off the schedule? "
Ulrich now succumbed after all to the temptation to talk, which is not so very different from the temptation to go on smoking, and conceded that one probably had to tackle everything one wanted to do effectively with the utmost seriousness, even when one knew that in fifty years every experiment would tum out not to have been worthwhile. But such a "punctured seriousness" ~as nothing so very unusual, after all; people risked their lives every day in sport and for
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nothing at all. Psychologically, there was nothing impossible about a life conducted as an experiment; all that was needed was the deter- mination to assume a certain unlimited responsibility. "That's the crucial difference," he concluded. "In the old days, people felt as it were deductively, starting from certain assumptions. Those days are gone. Today we live without a guiding principle, but also without any method of conscious, inductive thinking; we simply go on trying this and that like a band of monkeys. "
"Splendid! " Amheim admitted freely. "But allow me one last question. Your cousin tells me that you're taking a great interest in the case of a dangerous psychopath. I happen to understand this very well, incidentally. We really don't know how to handle such cases, and society's method of dealing with them is disgracefully hit-or- miss. But in the circumstances-which leave us no choice but either to kill an 'innocent' man or to let him go on killing innocent people- would you let him escape the night before his execution, if you could? " .
"No! " Ulrich said.
"No? Really not? " Arnheim asked with sudden animation.
"I don't know. I don't think so. I might ofcourse talk myselfout of
it by claiming that in a malfunctioning world I have no right to act freely on my own personal convictions; but I shall simply admit that I don't know what I would do. "
"That man must surely be stopped from doing ft. uther harm," Am- heim said pensively. "And yet, when he is having one of his seizures, he is certainly a man possessed by the demonic, which in all virile epochs has been felt to be akin to the divine. In the old days such a man would have been sent into the wilderness. Even then he might have committed murder, but perhaps in a visionary state, like Abra- ham about to slaughter his son Isaac. There it is! We no longer have any idea of how to deal with such things, and there is no sincerity in what we do. "
Arnheim might have let himself be carried away in uttering these last words without quite knowing what he meant by them; his ambi- tion might have been spurred on by Ulrich's not mustering up enough "heart and rashness" to answer with an unqualified "yes". when asked whether he would save Moosbrugger. But although Ul- rich felt this tum of the conversation to be almost an omen, an unex-
pected reminder of his "resolve" at Count Leinsdorf's, he resented Amheim's flamboyance in making the most of the Moosbrugger problem, and both factors made him ask dryly, but intently: 'Would you set him free? "
"No," Amheim replied with a smile, "but I'd like to propose some- thing else. . " And without giving him time to put up resistance, he added: "It's a suggestion I've been wanting to make to you for some time, to make you give up your suspicions of me, which, frankly, hurt my feelings; I want you on my side, in fact. Do you have any concep- tion ofwhat a great industrial enterprise looks like from the inside? It is controlled by two bodies, the top management and the board of directors, usually capped by a third body, the executive committee, as you in Austria call it, made up of representatives of the first two, which meets almost every day. The board of directors naturally consists of men who enjoy the confidence ofthe majority share- holders. . . . " Here he paused for the first time, to give Ulrich a chance to speak if he wished, as though testing to see whether Ulrich had already noticed something. "As I was saying, the majority share- holders have their representatives on the board and the executive committee. " He prompted Ulrich. "Have you any idea who this ma- jority is? "
Ulrich had none. He had only a vague general concept of finance, which to him meant clerks, counterS, coupons, and certificates that looked like ancient documents.
Arnheim cued him in again. "Have you ever helped to elect a board of directors? No, you haven't," he answered his own question. "There would be no point in trying to imagine it, since you will never own the majority of shares in a company. " He said this so firmly that Ulrich very nearly felt ashamed of being found wanting in so impor- tant a respect; and it was in fact just like Amheim to move in one easy stride from his demons to his board of directors. Smiling, he con- tinued: "There is one person I haven't mentioned yet, the most im- portant of all, in a sense. I spoke of the majority shareholders, which sounds like a harmless plural but is in fact nearly always a single per- son, a chief shareholder, unnamed and unknown to the . general pub- lic, hidden behind those he sends out front in his place. "
Ulrich now realized that he was being told things he could read in the papers every day; still, Arnheim knew how to create suspense.
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He was sufficiently htterested to ask who was the majority share- holder in Lloyd's of London.
"No one knows," Amheim replied quietly. "That is to say, there are those in the know, of course, but one doesn't usually hear it spo- ken of. But let me get to the point. Wherever you find two such forces, a person who really gives the orders and an administrative body that executes them, what automatically happens is that every possible means ofincreasing profits is used, whe~eror not it is mor- ally or aesthetically attractive. When I say automatically I mean just that, because the way it works is to a high degree independent of any personal factor. The person who really wields the power takes no hand in carrying out his directives, while the managers are covered by the fact that they are acting not on their own behalf but as func- tionaries. You will find such arrangements everywhere these days, and by no means exclusively in the world of finance. You may depend on it that our friend Tuzzi would give the signal for war with the clearest conscience in the world, even if as a man he may be incapa- ble of shooting down an old dog, and your friend Moosbrugger will be sent to his death by thousands of people because only three of them need have a hand in it personally. This system' of indirection elevated to an art is what nowadays enables the indiVidual and society as a whole to function with a clear conscience; the button to be pres~edis always clean and shiny, and what happens at the other end of the line is the business of others, who, for their part, don't press the button. Do you find this revolting? It is how we let thousands die or vegetate, set in motion whole avalanches of suffering, but we al- ways get things done. I might go so far as to say that what we're see- ing here, in this form of the social division of labor, is nothing else than the ancient dualism of conscience between the end that is ap- proved and the means that are tolerated, though here we have it in a grandiose and dangerous form. "
In answer to Arnheim's question whether he found all this revolt- ing Ulrich had shrugged his shoulders. The split in the moral con- sciousness that Amheim spoke of, this most horrifying phenomenon of modem life, was an ancient fact of human history, but it had won its appalling good conscience only in recent times, as a consequence of the universal division of labor with all its magnificent inevitability.
Ulrich did not care to wax indignant over it, especially as it gave him, paradoxically, the funny and gratifying sensation one can get from tearing along at a hundred miles an hour past a dust-bespattered moralist who is standing by the wayside, cursing. When Arnheim came to a stop, Ulrich's first words were: "Every kind of division of ·tabor can be developed further. The question is not whether it repels me but whether I believe that we can attain more acceptable condi- tions without having to tum back the clock. "
"Aha, your general inventory! " Amheim interjected. 'W e have or- ganized the division of labor brilliantly but neglected to find ways of correlating the results. We are continuously destroying the old mo- rality and the soul in accordance with the latest patents, and think we can patch them up by resorting to the old household remedies of our religious and philosophical traditions. Levity on such a subject"-he backed off-"is really quite distasteful to me, and I :regard jokes on the whole as in dubious taste anyway. But then, I never thought of the suggestion you made to us all in the presence of Count Leins- dorf, that we need to reorganize the conscience itself, as a mere joke. "
"It was a joke," Ulrich said gruffiy. "I don't believe in such a possi- bility. I would sooner be inclined to believe that the Devil himself built up the European world and that God is willing to let the compe- tition show what he can do. "
"A pretty conceit," Amheim said. "But in that case, why were yot,~ so annoyed with me for not wanting to believe you? "
Ulrich did not answer.
"What you said just now," Amheim calmly persisted, "also contra- dicts those adventurous remarks of yours, some time ago, about the means toward attaining the right way in life. Besides, quite apart from wheth. er I can agree with you on the details, I can't help notic- ing the extent to which you are a compound ofactive tendencies and indifference. "
When Ulrich saw no need to reply even on this point, Arnheim said in the civil tone with which such rudeness must be met: "I merely wished to draw your attention to the degree to which we are expected, even in. making economic decisions, on which after all ev- erything depends, to work out the problem of our moral responsibil-
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ity on our own, and how fascinating this makes such decisions. " Even in the restraint with which this reproofwas expressed there was a faint suggestion of trying to win him over. · •·
''I'm sony," Ulrich said, "I was totally caught up in what you've been saying. " And as though he were still pursuing the same line of thought, he added: "I wonder whether you also regard it as a form of indirect dealing and divided consciousness in keeping with the spirit of the times to fill a woman's soul with mystical feelings while sensi- bly leaving her body to her husband? "
These words made Arnheim color a little, but he did not lose con- trol of the situation. ''I'm not sure I know what you mean," he said quietly, "but ifyou were speaking of a woman you love, you couldn't say this, because the body of reality is always richer than the mere outline sketch we call principles. " He had moved away from the win- dow and invited Ulrich to sit down with him. ''You don't give in eas- ily," he went on in a tone of mingled appreciation and regret. "But I know that I represent to you more of ail opposing principle than a personal opponent. And those who are privately the bitterest oppo- nents ofcapitalism are often enough its best servants in the business world; I may even say that to some extent I count myself among them, or I wouldn't presume to say this to you. Uncompromising, passionately committed persons, once they have seen that a conces- sion must be made, usually become its most brilliant champions. And so I want in any case to go ahead with my intended proposal: Will you accept a position in my finn? "
He took care to say this as casually as he could, trying by speaking rapidly and without emphasis to lessen the cheap surprise effect he could be only too sure ofcausing. Avoiding Ulrich's astonished gaze, he simply proceeded to go into the details without making any effort to indicate his own position.
"You wouldn't, of course, have the necessary training and qualifi- cations at first," he said smoothly, "to assume a leading position, nor would you feel inclined to do so, therefore I would offer you a posi- tion at my side, let us say that of my executive secretary, which I would create especially for you. I hope you won't take offense at this: it is not a position I can see as carrying an irresistible salary, to begin with; however, in time, you should be able to aim for any income you
mightwish. In a year or so, I am sure that you will understand me quite differently from now. "
When Arnheim had finished, he felt moved in spite ofhimself. Ac- tually, he had surprised himself by going so far in making this offer to Ulrich, who only had to refuse in order to put Arnheim at a disadvan- tage, whUe if he accepted, there wasn't much in it for Amheim. Any idea that this man he was talking to could accomplish something that he himself could not do on his own had vanished even as he spoke, and the need to charm Ulrich and get him into his power had become absurd in the very process of fmding articulate expression. That he had been afraid ofsomething he called this man's "wit" now seemed unnatural. He, Arnheim, was a man of some consequence, and for such a man life has to be simple! Such a man lives on good terms with other great men and circumstances, he does not act the romantic rebel or cast doubt on existing realities; it would be against his nature. On the other hand, there are, of course, all the things of beauty and ambiguity one wants in one's life as much as possible. Arnheim had never felt as intensely as he did at this moment the permanence of Western civilization, that ma. rVelous network of forces and disciplines. If Ulrich did not recognize this he was nothing but an adventurer, and the fact that Amheim had almost let himself be tempted to think of him a s - At this point words failed him, un- formulated as they still were at the back of his mind; he could not bring himself to articulate clearly, even in secret, the fact that he had considered taking Ulrich on as an adopted son. Not that it really mat- tered; it was only an idea like countless others one need not answer for, probably inspired by the kind of moodiness that afflicts every man ofaction, because a man is never really satisfied, and perhaps he had not had this idea at all, in so dubious a form, but only some vague
impulse that could be so interpreted; still, he shied away from the memory, and only kept painfully in mind that the difference between Ulrich's age and his own was not all that great; and behind this there was a secondary, shadowy sense that Ulrich might serve him as a warning against Diotima! How often he had already felt that his rela- tionship to Ulrich was somehow comparable to a secondary volcanic crater that emits the occasional warning or clue to the strange go- ings-on in the main crater, and he was somewhat troubled that the
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eruption had now occurred and his words had come pouring out and were making their way into real life. "What's to be done," flashed through his mind, "if this fellow accepts? " It was in such suspense that an Arnheim had to wait for the decision of a younger man who mattered only insofar as Arnheim's own imagination had lent him significance. Arnheim sat there stiffiy, his lips parted in a hostile ex- pression, thinking: "There'll be a way of handling it, in case there's still not a way of getting out of it. "
Even while his feelings and thoughts were running their course in this fashion the situation had not come to a standstill; question and answer followed each other without pause.
"And to what qualities of my own," Ulrich asked dryly, "do I owe this offer, which can hardly be justified from a businessman's point of view? "
"You always misjudge this sort of thing," Arnheim replied. "To be businesslike in my position is not the same as counting pennies. What I stand to lose on you is quite immaterial compared to what I hope to gain. "
"You certainly pique my curiosity," Ulrich remarked. "Very sel- dom am I told I represent a gain of any kind. I might perhaps have developed into a minor asset in my special subject, but even there, as you know, I have been a disappointment. "
"That you are a man of exceptional intelligence,L' Amheim an- swered, in the same quiet tone of unshakable confidence to which he was outwardly clinging, "is surely something of which you are fully aware ~thout my having to tell you. Still, we may have keener and more dependable minds already working for us. It is actually your character, your human qualities, that, for certain reasons, I wish to have constantly at my side. '. '
"My qualities? " Ulrich could not help smiling at this. "That's funny: I have friends who call me a man without qualities. ''
Arnheim let slip a faint gesture of impatience that said, more or less: "Tell me about it, as if I didn't know. " This twitch that ran across his face all the way to the shoulder betrayed his dissatisfaction, even while his words flowed on as programmed. Ulrich caught the fleeting grimace, and he was so ready to be provoked by Arnheim tliat he now dropped all restraint . against bringing everything out into the open.
They had meanwhile risen from their chairs, and Ulrich moved back a few steps to see his effect all the better as he said:
"You have asked me so many pointed questions, and now there is something I would like to know before I make my decision.
