No More Learning

I am reliably informed that any day now there is going to be a fierce demonstration against our campaign by those who consider us anti-German. Your Grace will see the people of Vienna demonstrating in the streets. There is to be a protest against the appointment of Baron Wisnieczky. Our friends Tuzzi and Arn- heim are assumed to be acting in collusion, while you, sir, are said to be working to undermine the German influence on the Parallel Campaign. "
Count Leinsdorf's eyes now reflected something between the im- passivity of a frog's gaze·and the irritability of a hull's. Tuzzi looked up slowly at Ulrich's face and gave him a warm, questioning look. Arnheim laughed heartily and stood up, trying to catch the Section Chief's eye with an urbane, humorous glance as a way of deprecating the absurd insinuation about the two of them,. but as he could not connect with him he turned to Diotima instead. Tuzzi had mean- while taken Ulrich by the arm and asked where he had got his infor- mation. Ulrich told him it was no secret but a widely accepted rumor he had heard at a friend's house. Tuzzi brought his face closer, forc- ing Ulrich to turn slightly aside from the others, and with this effect of privacy he suddenly whispered: "Don't you know yet why Arn- heim is here? He is an intimate friend ofPrince Mosyutov and very much persona grata with the Czar. He keeps in touch with Russia and is supposed to influence this Campaign in a pacifist direction. Unofficially, of course, on his Russian Majesty's private initiative, as it were. A matter of ideology. Something for you,' my friend," he con- cluded in a mocking tone. "Leinsdorfhas no inkling ofit. "
Section Chief Tuzzi had this information through official chan- nels. He believed it because he saw pacifism as a movement that was in keeping with the outlook a beautiful woman would have, which would explain Diotima's being so enraptured with Amheim and Am- heim's spending more time in Tuzzi's house than anywhere else. Before this he had come close to being jealous. He could believe in "intellectual affinities" up to a point, but he did not care to use devi- ous methods to find out whether this point had been passed or not, so he had forced himself to go on trusting his wife. But while this was a victory of his· manly self-respect over mere sexual instincts, these could still arouse enough jealousyin him to make him see for the first time that a professional man can never really keep an eye on his wife unless he is willing to neglect his work. Though he told himself that if an engine driver could not keep his woman with him on the job, a man at the controls of an empire could afford even less to be a jeal- ous husband, it went against his character as a diplomat to settle for the noble ignorance in which this left him, and it undermined his professional self-assurance. So he was most thankful to be restored to his old self-confidence by this harmless explanation for everything that had worried him. There was even a little bonus in his feeling that it served his wife right that he knew all about Amheim, while she saw only the human being and never dreamed that he was an agent of the Czar. Now Tuzzi again enjoyed asking her for little scraps ofinforma- tion, which she undertook to provide with a mixture of graciousness and impatience. He had· worked out a whole series of seemingly harmless questions, the answers to which would enable him to draw his own conclusions. The husband would have been glad to take the "cousin" into his confidence, and was just wondering how to go about it without exposing his wife, when Count Leinsdorf again took the lead in the conversation. He alone had remained seated, and no- body had noticed anything of the struggle going on inside him as the problems piled up. But his fighting spirit seemed to be restored. He twirled his Wallenstein mustache and said slowly and firmly: "Some- thing will have to be done. "
"Have you come to·a decision, Count? " they asked him.
"I haven't been able to come up with anything," he said simply. "Still, something must be done. " He sat there like a man who does not intend to move from the spot until his will is done.
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The effect was so powerful that everyone present felt the futile straining after an answer rattling inside him like a penny in a piggy bank that no amount of shaking will get out through the slot.
Arnheim said: "Now, really, we can't let ourselves be influenced by that sort of thing. "
Leinsdorf did not reply.
The whole litany of proposals intended to give the Parallel Cam- paign some content was gone over again:
Count Leinsdorf reacted like a pendulum, always in a different po- sition but always swinging the same way: This can't be done because we have to think of the Church. That can't be done, the freethinkers won't like it. The Association of ArchitectS has already protested against this. There are qualms about that in the Department of Finance.
So it went, on and on.
Ulrich kept out ofit: He felt as ifthe five persons taking their tum to speak had just crystallized out of some impure liquid in which his senses had been marinated for months now. Whatever had he meant by telling Diotima that it was necessary to take control of the imagi- nary, or that other time, when he had said that reality should be abol- ished? Now she was sitting here, remembering such statements of his, and probably thinking all sorts of things about him. And what on earth had made him say to her that one should live like a character in a book? He felt certain that she had passed all that on to Amheim by now.
But he also felt sure that he knew what time it was, or the price of eggs, as well as anyone. If he nevertheless happened, just now, to hold aposition halfway between his own and that of the others, it did not take some queer shape such as might result from a dim and ab- sent state of mind; on the contrary, he again felt flooded by that illu- mination he had noticed earlier, in Bonadea's presence. He recalled going With the Tuzzis to a racecourse last fall, not so long ago, when there was an incident involving great, suspicious betting losses, and a peaceful crowd had in a matter of seconds turned into a turbulent sea of people pouring into the enclosure, not only smashing every- thing within reach but rifling the cash boxes as well, until the police succeeded. in transforming them back into an assemblage ofpeople out for a harmless and customary good time. In such a world it was
absurd to think in terms of metaphors and the vague borderline shapes life might possibly, or impossibly, assume. Ulrich felt that there was nothing amiss with his perception of life as a crude and needy condition where it was better not to worry too much about tomorrow because it was hard enough to get through today. How could one fail to see that the human world is no hovering, insubstan- tial thing but craves the most concentrated solidity, for fear that any- thing out of the way might make it go utterly to pieces? Or, to take it a step further, how could a sound observer fail to recognize that this living compound of anxieties, instincts, and ideas, such as it is, though it uses ideas at most in order to justify itself, or as stimulants, gives those ideas their form and coherence, whatever defines them and sets them in motion? We may press the wine from the grapes, but how much more beautiful than a pool ofwine is the sloping vine- yard with its inedible rough soil and its endless rows of shining wooden stakes. In short, he reflected, the cosmos was generated not by a theory but-he was about to say "by violence," but a word he had not expected leapt to mind, and so he f'mished by thinking: but by violence and love, and the usual linkage between these two is wrong.
At this moment violence and love again did not have quite their conventional meaning for Ulrich. Everything that inclined him to- ward nihilism and hardness was implied in the word "violence. " It meant whatever flowed from every kind of skeptical, factual, con- scious behavior; a certain hard, cold aggressiveness had even entered into his choice of a career, so that an undercurrent of cruelty might have led to his becoming a mathematician. It was like the dense foli- age of a tree hiding the trunk. And if we speak of love not merely in the usual sense but are moved by the word to long for a condition profoundly different, unto the very atoms that make up the body, from the poverty of lovelessness; or when we feel that we can lay claim to every quality as naturally as to none; or when it seems to us that what happens is only semblances prevailing, because life- bursting with conceit over its here-and-now but really a most uncer- tain, even a downright unreal condition-pours itself headlong into the few dozen cake molds ofwhich reality consists; or that in all the orbits in which we keep revolving there is a piece missing; or that of all the systems we have set up, none has the secret of staying at rest:
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then all these things, however different they look, are also bound up with each other like the branches of a tree, completely concealing the trunk on all sides.
These two trees were the shape his life had taken, like a two- pronged fork. He could not say when it had entered into the sign of the tree with the hard, tangled branchwork, but it had happened early on, for even his immature Napoleonic plans had shown him to be a man who looked on life as aproblem he had set himself, some- thing it was his vocation to work out. This urge to attack life and mas- ter it had always been clearly discernible in him, whether it had manifested itself as a rejection of the existing order or as various forms of striving for a new one, as logical or moral needs or even merely as an urge to keep the body in fighting trim. And everything that, as time went on, he had called essayism, the sense ofpossibility, and imaginative in contrast with pedantic precision; his suggestions that history was something one had to invent, that one should live the history of ideas instead of the history of the world, that one should get a grip on whatever cannot quite be realized in practice and should perhaps end up trying to live as if one were a character in a book, afigure with all the inessential elements left out, so that what was left would consolidate itself as some magical entity-all these different versions of his thinking, all in their extreme formulations against reality, had just one thing in common:" an unmistakable, ruth- less passion to influence reality.
Harder to recognize because more shadowy and dreamlike were the ramifications of the other tree that formed an image for his life, rooted perhaps in some primal memory of a childlike relationship to the world, all trustfulness and yielding, which ·had lived on· as a haunting sense of having once beheld the whoie vast earth in what normally only fills the flowerpot in which the herbs of morality send up their stunted sprouts. No doubt that regrettably absurd affair of the major's wife was his only attempt to reach a full development on this gentle shadow side ofhis life; it was. also the beginningofa recoil that had never stopped. Since then, the leaves and twigs always drift- ing on the surface were the only sign that the tree still existed, though it had disappeared from view. This dormant half of his per- sonality perhaps revealed itself most clearly in his instinctive assump- tion that the active and busy side of him was only standing in for the
real self, an assumption that cast a shadow on his active self. In all he did-involving physical passions as well as spiritual-he had always ended up feeling trapped in endless preparations that would never come to fruition in anything, so that as the years went by his life had lost any sense of its own necessity, just as alamp runs out of oil. His development had evidently split into two tracks, one running on the surface in daylight, the other in the dark below and closed to traffic, so that the state of moral arrest that had oppressed him for a long time, and perhaps more than was strictly necessary, might simply be the result of his failure to bring these two tracks together.
Now, as he realized that this failure to achieve integration had lately been apparent to him in what he called the strained relation- ship between literature and reality, metaphor and truth, it flashed on Ulrich how much more all this signified than any random insight that turned up in one ofthose meandering conversations he had recently engaged in with the most inappropriate people. These two basic strategies, the figurative and the unequivocal, have been distinguish- able ever since-the beginnings of humanity. Single-mindedness is the law of all waking thought and action, as much present in a compelling logical conclusion as in the mind of the blackmailer who enforces his will on his victim step by step, and it arises from the exigencies oflife where only the single-minded control of circumstances can avert di- saster. Metaphor, by contrast, is like the image that fuses several meanings in a dream; it is the gliding logic of the soul, corresponding to the way things relate to each other in the intuitions of art and reli- gion. But even what there is in life of common likes and dislikes, ac- cord and rejection, admiration, subordination, leadership, imitation, and their opposites, the many ways man relates to himself and to na- ture, which are not yet and perhaps never will be purely objective, cannot be understood in other than metaphoric or figurative terms. No doubt what is called the higher humanism is only the effort to fuse together these two great halves oflife, metaphor and truth, once they have been carefully distinguished from each other. But once one has distinguished everything in a metaphor that might be true from what is mere froth, one usually has gained a little truth, but at the cost of destroying the whole value of the metaphor. The extrac- tion of the truth may have been an inescapable part of our intellec- tual evolution, but it has had the same effect of boiling down a liquid
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to thicken it, while the really vital juices and elements escape in a cloud of steam. It is often hard, nowadays, to avoid the impression that the concepts and the rules of the moral life are only metaphors that have been boiled to death, with the revolting greasy kitchen va- pors of humanism billowing around the corpses, and if a digression is permissible at this point, it can only be this, that one consequence of this impression that vaguely hovers over everything is what our era should frankly call its reverence for all that is common. For when we lie nowadays it is not so much' mit of weakness as out of a conviction that a man cannot prevail in life unless he is able to lie. We resort to violence because, after much long and futile talk, the simplicity of violence is an immense relief. People band together in organizations because obedience to orders enables them to do things they have long been incapable of doing out ofpersonal cc;mviction, and the hos- tility between organizations allows them to engage in the unending reciprocity ofblood feuds, while love would all too soon put everyone to. sleep. This has much less to do with the question ofwhether men are good or evil than with the fact that they have lost their sense of high and low. Another paradoxical result of this disorientation is the vulgar profusion of intellectual jewelry with which our mistrust of
· the intellect decks itself out. The coupling of a "philosophy" with ac- tivities that can absorb only a very small part ofit, such as politics; the general obsession with turning every viewpoint into a standpoint and regarding every standpoint as a viewpoint; the need of every kind of fanatic to keep reiterating the one idea that has ever come his way, like an image multiplied to infinity in a hall of mirrors: all these wide- spread phenomena, far from signifying a movement toward human- ism, as they wish to do, in fact represent its failure. All in all, it seems that what needs to be excised from human relations is the soul that finds itself misplaced in them. The moment Ulrich realized this he felt that his life, if it had any meaning at all, demonstrated the pres- ence of the two fundamental spheres of human existence in their separateness and in their way ofworking against each other. Clearly, people like himself were already being hom, but they were isolated, and in his isolation he was incapable of bringing together again what had fallen apart. He had no illusions about the value ofhis philosoph- ical experimentation; even ifhe observed the strictest logical consist- ency in linking thought to thought, the effect was still one of piling
one ladder upon another, so that the topmost rungs teetered far above the level of natural life. He Contemplated this with revulsion.
This could have been the reason he suddenly looked at Tuzzi. Tuzzi was speaking. As though his ear were receiving the first sounds of the morning, Ulrich heard him say: "I am in no position to judge whether our time is devoid of great human and artistic achievements as you say; I can only assure you that foreign policy is nowhere else so hard to determine as in this country ofours. It is fairly safe to predict that even in our great Jubilee Year, French foreign policy will be mo- tivated by the desire to settle scores and by colonialism, the English will be pushing their pawns to advantage on the world's chessboard, as their game has been characterized, and the Germans will be pur- suing what they call, not always unambiguously, their Place in the Sun. But our old Empire is so self-contained that it's anyone's guess in what direction we may be driven by circumstances. " It was as though Tuzzi ~ere trying to put on the brakes, to utter a warning. That whiff of unintended irony came only from the naively factual tone in which he dryly presented to them his conviction that to want for nothing in this world was highly dangerous. The effect on Ulrich was to perk him up, as if he had been chewing on a coffee bean.
Meanwhile Tuzzi kept harping on his warning note, and he ended by saying:
"Who can tak~ it upon himself, today, even to think of putting great political ideas into practice? It would take a criminal or a gam- bler courting bankruptcy. You surely wouldn't want that? The func- tion ofdiplomacy is to keep what we have. "
"Keeping what we have leads to war," Arnheim countered.
"It may, I suppose," Tuzzi conceded. "All one can do, probably, is to choose the most favorable moment for being led into it. Remem- ber Czar Alexander II? His father, Nicholas, was a despot, but he died a natural death. Alexander was a magnanimous ruler who began his reign by instituting sweeping liberal reforms, so that Russian lib- eralism turned into Russian radicalism, and Alexander survived three attempts to assassinate him, only to succumb to a fourth. " .
Ulrich looked at Diotima. There she sat, upright, alert, serious, vo- luptuous, and corroborated her husband: "That's right. From what I have seen of the radical temper in our own discussions, I would say that ifyou give them an inch they'll take a mile. "
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Tuzzi smiled with the sense of having won a small victory over Arnheim.
Arnheim looked impassive where he sat, his lips slightly parted, like a bud opening. Diotima, a silent tower of radiant flesh, gazed at him across the moat between them.
The General polished his hom-rimmed glasses.
Ulrich spoke with care: "That's only because those who feel called upon to act, in order to restore some meaning to life, have one thing in common: they despise 'mere' thinking just at the point where it could lead us to truths rather than simple personal opinions; instead, where everything depends on pursuing those views to their inex- haustible wellspring, they opt for shortcuts and half-truths. "
Nobody spoke in answer. And why should anyone have answered him? What a· man said was only words, after all. What mattered was that there were six people ·sitting in a room and having an important discussion; what they said or did not say in the course of it, their feel- ings, apprehensions, possibilities, were all included in this actuality without being on a level with it; they were included in the same way the dark movements of the liver and stomach are included in the ac- tuality of a fully dressed person about to put his signature to an im- portant document. This hierarchical order was not to be disturbed; this was reality itself.
Ulrich's old friend Stumm had now finished cle~ing his glasses; he put them on and looked at Ulrich. .
Even though Ulrich had always assumed that he was only toying with these people, he suddenly felt quite forlorn among them. He remembered feeling something like it a few weeks or months before, a little puff of Creation's breath asserting itself against the petrifl. ed lunar landscape where it had been exhaled; he thought that all the decisive moments of his life had been accompanied by such a sense of wonder and isolation. But was it anxiety that was troubling him this time? He could not qliite pin his feeling down, but it suggested that he had never in his life come to a real decision, and that it was high time he did. This occurred to him not in so many words but only as an uneasy feeling, as though something were trying to tear him away from these people he was sitting with, and even though they meant nothing to him, his will suddenly clung to them, kicking and screaming.
Count Leinsdorf was now reminded by the silence in the room of his duties as a political realist, and said in a rallying tone: "Well then, what's to be done? We must do somethingfmal, even ifit's only tem- porary, to save our campaign from all those threats against it. "
This moved Ulrich to try something preposterous. .
"Your Grace," he said, "there is really only one real task for the Parallel Campaign: to make a start at taking stock ofour general. cul- tural situation. We must act more or less as ifwe expected the Day of Judgment to dawn in 1918, when the old spiritual books will be closed and a higher accounting set up. I suggest that you found, in His Majesty's name, a World Secretariat for Precision and Soul. Without that, all our other tasks cannot be solved, or else they are illusory tasks. " He now added some ofthe things that had crossed his mind during the few minutes he had been lost in thought.
As he spoke, it seemed to him not only that everybody's eyes were popping out of their sockets in sheer amazement, but also that their torsos were lifting up from their backsides. They had expected him to follow their host's example and come up with an anecdote, and when the joke failed to materialize he was left sitting there like a child sur- rounded by leaning towers that looked slightly offended at his silly game. Only Count Leinsdorf managed to put a good face on it. "Quite so," he said, though surprised. "Nevertheless, we are obliged now to go beyond mere suggestions and offer some concrete solu- tion, and in that respect I must say that Property and Culture have left us badly stranded. "
Arnheim felt he must save the great nobleman from being taken in by Ulrich's jokes.
"Our friend is caught up in an idea of his own," he explained. "He thinks it is possible to synthesize a right way to live, just like synthetic rubber or nitrogen. But the human mind"-here he gave Ulrich his most chivalrous smile-"is sadly limited in being unable to breed its life forms as white mice are bred in the laboratory; on the contrary, it takes a huge granary to support no more than a few families of mice. " He immediately apologized for indulging in sq daring an analogy, but was in fact quite pleased with himself for coming up with something in the aristocratic Leinsdorf style of scientific large-scale land man- agement, while so vividly illustrating the difference between ideas with and without the res~onsihilityfor carrying them out.
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But His Grace shook his head irritably. "I take his point quite well," he said. "People used to grow naturally into the conditions of their lives as they found them, and it was a sound way of coming into their own; but nowadays, with everything being shaken up as it is, everything uprooted from its natural soil, we will have to replace the traditional handicrafts system, even in the raising of squls, as it were, by the intelligence of the factory. " It was one of those remarkable statements His Grace occasionally voiced, to his own and everyone else's surprise, all the more so as he had merely been staring at Ul- rich with a dumbfounded expression the whole time before he began to speak.
"Still, everything our learned friend is saying is totally impractica- ble, just the same," Arnheim said firmly.
"Oh, would you say so? " Count Leinsdorf said curtly, full of fight- ing spirit.
Diotima now tried to make peace. "But, Count," she said, as if asking him for something one doesn't put into words: namely, to come to his senses. 'We've long since tried everything my cousin says·. What else are these long, strenuous talks, such as the ones we had this evening, about, after all? "
"Indeed? '' the annoyed peer huffed. "I had an idea from the first that all these clever fellows won't get us anywhere. All of that psycho- analysis and relativity theory and whatever they call all 'that stuff is pure vanity. Every on:e of them is trying to make his own special blueprint of the world prevail over all the others. Let me tell you, even if our Herr Doktor did not express himself as well as he might have, he's basically quite right. People are always trying on some- thing new whenever the times begin to change, and no good ever comes ofit. "
The nervous strain caused by the abortive meanderings of the Par- allel Campaign had now broken through to the surface. Count Leins- dorf had, without being aware of it, switched from twisting his mustache to fretfully twiddling his thumbs. Perhaps something else had also come to the SJ. uface: his dislike of Arnheim. While he had been astonished when Ulrich brought up the word "soul," he was quite pleased with what followed. 'When a fellow like Amheim ban- dies that word about," he thought, "that's a lot offlimflam. We don't need it from him-what else is religion for? '' But Arnheim, too, was
upset; he had gone white to the lips. Up to now, Count Leinsdorfhad spoken in that tone only to the General. Amheim was not the sort of man to take it lying down. Still, he could not help being impressed with Count Leinsdorf's firmness in taking Ulrich's part, which pain- fully reminded him of his own divided feelings about Ulrich. He felt at a loss, because he had wanted to talk things out with Ulrich but had not found an opportunity to do so before this fortuitous clash in front ofalfthe others, and so, instead ofturning on Count Leinsdorf, whom he simply ignored, he addressed his words to Ulrich, with every sign of intense mental and physical agitation to a degree quite out of character for him.
"Do you actually believe what you have just been saying? " he asked sternly, with no regard to considerations of civility. "Do you believe it can be done? Are you really of the opinion that it is possible to live in accordance with some analogy? If so, what would you do if His Grace were to give you a free hand? Do tell me, I beg you! "
It was an awkward moment. Diotima was oddly enough reminded of a story she had read in the papers a few days before. A woman had received a merciless sentence for giving her lover an opportunity to murder her aged husband, who had not "exercised his marital rights" for years but would not agree to a separation. The case had caught Diotima's attention by its quasi-medical physical detail, and held it by a certain perverse fascination; it was all so understandable that one was not inclined to blame any of the persons involved, limited as they were in their ability to help themselves; it was only some unnat- ural general state of affairs that gave rise to such situations. She had no idea what made her think of this case just at this moment. But she was also thinking that Ulrich had been talking to her lately about all sorts of things that were "up in the air," and always ended up by an- noying her with some outrageous suggestion of a personal kind. She had herself spoken of the soul emerging from its insubstantial state, in the case of a few privileged human beings. She decided that her cousin was just as unsure of himself as she was of herself, and per- haps just as passionate too.
All of this was intetwoven just now-in her head or in her heart, that abandoned seat of the noble Leinsdor- fian amity-with the story of the condemned woman, in a way that caused her to sit there with parted lips, feeling that something terri- ble would happen if Amheim and Ulrich were allowed to go on like
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this, but that it might be even worse ifanyone interfered and tried to stop them.
During Arnheim's attack on him, Ulrich had been looking at Tuzzi. It cost Tuzzi an effort to hide his eager curiosity in the brown furrows of his face. He was thinking that all these goings-on. in his house were now coming to a head, propelled by their inherent con- tradictions. Nor had he any sympathy for Ulrich, whose line of talk went quite against Tuzzi's grain, convinced as he was that a man's worth lay in his will or in his work, and certainly not in his feelings or ideas; to talk such nonsense about mere figures of speech, he felt, was positively indecent.
Ulrich might have been sensing some of this, because he remem- bered telling Tuzzi that he would kill himselfifthe year he was "tak- ing off" from his life were to pass without results. He had not said it in so many words but had made his meaning painfully clear, and he now felt ashamed of himself. Again he had the impression, without being able to account for it, that his moment of truth was at hand. Suddenly Gerda Fischel came to mind; there was a dangerous possi- bility of her coming to see him, to continue their last conversation. He realized that even as he had only been toying with her, they had already reached the limit ofwhat words could do, and there was only one last step: he would have to fall in with the girl's unexpressed longings, ungird his intellectual loins, and breach her "inner ram- parts. " This was crazy; he would never have gone this far with Gerda had he not felt safe with her on this point. He was feeling a strangely sober, irritated exaltation, when he caught sight of Arnheim's angry face and heard himself accused of having no respect for reality, fol- lowed by the words "Forgive my saying so, but such a crass Either/Or as yours is really too juvenile," but he had lost the slightest inclina- tion to answer any of ~t. He glanced at his watch and, with a smile of appeasement, said it had grown much too late for going on with the subject.
In so saying he had regained his contact with the others. Section Chief Tuzzi even stood up, and barely masked this discourtesy by pretending to do something or other. Count Leinsdorf, too, had meanwhile calmed down; he would have been pleased to hear Ulrich put the Prussian in his place but did not mind his doing nothing about it. "When you like a man, you like him, that's that," he thought,
"no matter how clever the other fellow's talk may be. " And with a daring, though quite unconscious approach to Arnheim's idea of the Mystery of the Whole, he continued cheerfully, as he looked at Ul- rich's expression (which was, at the moment, anything but intelli- gent): "One might even say that a nice, likable person simply can't say or do anything really. stupid. "
The party quickly broke up. The General slipped his hom-rims into his pistol pocket, after having tried in vain to stick them into the bottom ofhis tunic; he had not yet found a proper place for this civil- ian instrument of wisdom. "Here we have an armed truce of the in- tellect," he said to Tuzzi, like a pleased accomplice, alluding to the speedy dispersal of the last guests.
Only Count Leinsdorf conscientiously held them all back for an- other moment: 'What is the consensus, then? '' And when no one found anything to say, he added peaceably: "Oh well, we shall see, we shall see. "
117
A DARK DAY FOR RACHEL
Soliman's sexual awakening and his decision to seduce Rachel made him feel as cold-blooded as a hunter sighting game, or a butcher sharpening his knives for the slaughter, but he had no idea how to go about it and what, exactly, a successful seduction was; in short, the more he had a man's will, the more it made him feel the weakness of a boy. Rachel also had her sense of the inevitable next step, and ever since she had so self-forgetfully clung to Ulrich's hand, that evening of the incident with Bonadea, she was quite beside herself, afloat in a state of acute erotic distraction that was also raining flowers on Soli- man, as it were. But conditions just then were not favorable and made for delays. The cook had taken sick, Rachel's time offhad to be sacrificed, the heavy social schedule in the house was keeping her
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busy, and although Arnheim continued to visit Diotima often enough, it was as though they had decided that the two youngsters needed watching, for he seldom brought Soliman, and when he did, they saw each other only briefly, in the presence of their employers, with the proper blank and sullen looks on their face~.
At this time they almost learned to hate each other, because they made one another feel the misery of being kept on too. short a leash. Soliman was also driven by his mountjng ardor to violent escapades; he planned to slip away from the hotel at night unbeknownst to his master, so he stole a bedsheet, which he tried to cut up and twist into a rope ladder; when he made a mess ofit, he threw the tortured bed- sheet down a light shaft. Then for a long time he vainly studied ways and means to clamber up and do:wn a housefront, using windowsills and the carved figures on the fa~ade, and on his daytime errands ex- amined the city's fabled architecture solely for the hand- and foot- holds it might offer a cat burglar. Meanwhile Rachel, who had been told of all these plans and setbacks in hasty whispers, would think that she saw the black full moon of his face on the pavement below, looking up at her, or that she heard his chirping call, to which she attempted a shy response, leaning far out her window into the empty night, until she had to admit that the night was indeed empty. She no longer regarded this romantic muddle as a nuisance but surrendered herselfto it with a yearning wistfulness. The yearning was actually for Ulrich; Soliman was the man one didn't love but to whom one would give oneself nonetheless, as she never doubted; the fact that they had been kept apart lately, that they had hardly spoken to each other ex- cept in stolen whispers and were both in disfavor with their employ- ers, had much the same effect on her as a night full of uncertainty, mystery, and sighs has on all lovers: it concentrated her fantasies like a burning glass, whose intense ray is felt less as a pleasant warmth than as a heat one cannot stand much longer.
ln this regard, Rachel, who did not waste any time fantasizing about rope ladders and climbing walls, was the more practical- minded. The nebulous dream of an elopement soon dwindled to a plan for a single night together, and when this could not be arranged, a stolen quarter of an hour would have to do. After all, neither Di- otima nor Count Leinsdorf nor Arnheim_:_staying on together for another hour or two after some crowded and unproductive meeting
with the best minds in town, while they all worried about the prog- ress oftheir "business," without need offurther attentions from their staff-ever considered that such an hour "at liberty" consists of four quarter hours. But Rachel had thought about it, and since the cook was still not quite recovered and had permission to retire early, the young maid was so overburdened that there was no telling where she might be at any given time, even as she was spared much of her regu- lar duty as a parlor maid. Experimentally-more or less as a person afraid of committing suicide outright will go on making halfhearted attempts until one of them succeeds by mistake-she had smuggled Soliman into her room several times already, always prepared with some story of having been on duty if he was caught, while hinting to him that there were other ways to her bedroom than climbing the walls. So far, however, the young lovers had not gone beyond yawn- ing together in the front hall while spying out the situation, until one evening, when the voices inside the meeting room had been heard endlessly responding to each other, monotonous as the sounds of threshing, Soliman used a lovely expression he had read in a novel and said that he could stand it no longer.
Even inside her little room it was he who bolted the door, but then they did not dare tum on the light but stood there blindly facing each other as though the loss of sight had deprived them of all their other senses as well, like two statues in the park at night. Soliman naturally thought . of pressing Rachel's hand or pinching her leg to make her shriek, his way of conducting his male conquest of her thus far, but he had to refrain from causing any noise, and when at last he made' some clumsy pass at her, there was only Rachel's impatient indiffer- ence in response. For Rachel felt the hand offate on her spine, push- ing her ahead, and her nose and forehead were ice cold, as though she had already been drained of all her illusions. It made Soliman feel quite at a loss too; he was all thumbs, and there was no telling how long it would take them to break the deadlock oftheir rigid pos- ture face-to-face in the dark. In the end, it had to be the civilized and more experienced Rachel who took the part of th~ seducer. What helped her was the resentment she now felt in place of her former love for Diotima; ever since she had ceased to be content to enjoy vicariously her mistress's exaltations and was involved in her own love affair, she had greatly changed. She not only told lies to cover up
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her encounters with Soliman, she even pulled Diotima's hair when she combed it, to revenge herself for the vigilance with which her innocence was being guarded. But what enraged her most was some- thing i,n which she had formerly delighted: having to wear Diotima's cast-off chemises, panties, and stockings, for even though she cut these things down to a third of their former size and remodeled them, she felt imprisoned in them, as though wearing the yoke of propriety on her bare body. But this lingerie now gave her the inspi- ration she needed in this situation. For she had told Soliman earlier abopt the changes she had been noticing for some time in her mis- tress's underthings, and now she could break their deadlock by sim- ply showiTig him.
"Here, you can see for yourselfwhat they're really up to," she said in the darkness, showing Soliman the moonbeam frill of her little panties. "And if they're carrying on together like this, then they're certainly also making a fool of the master about that war they're cooking up in our house. " And as the boy gingerly fmgered the fine- textured and dangerous panties, she added somewhat breathlessly, "I bet that your pants are as black as you are, Soliman; that's what they're all saying. " Now Soliman vengefully but gently dug his nails into her thigh, and Rachel had to move closer to free herself, and had to do and say one thing and another, all of which produced no ·real result, until she finally used her sharp little teeth on Soliman's face (which was pressed childishly against her own and at every move- ment she made kept on clumsily getting itself in the way),·as if it were
'a large apple. At which point she forgot to feel embarrassed at what she was doing, . and Soliman forgot to feel self-conscious, and love raged like a storm through the darkness.
When it was over, it dropped the lovers with a thud, vanished through the w. alls, and the darkness between them was like a lump of coal with which the sinners had blackened themselves. They had lost track of time, overestimated the time they had tak~n. and were afraid. Rachel's halfhearted final kiss was a mere annoyance to Soli- man; he wanted the light switched on, and behaved like a burglar who has his loot and is now wholly intent upon making his getaway. Rachel, who had quickly and shamefacedly straightened her clothes,
. gave him a look that was fathomless and aimless at once. Her tousled hair hung down over her eyes, and behind them she saw again all the
great images ofher ideal self, forgotten until this moment. Her fanta- sies had been filled with her wish not only for every possible desir- able trait in herself but also for a handsome, rich, and exciting lover-and now here in front of her stood Soliman, still half un- dressed, looking hopelessly ugly, and she didn't believe a single word of all the stories he had told her. She might have liked to take advan- tage of the dark to craille his tense, plump face in her anns a little while longer before they let go of each other. But now that the light was on, he was only her new lover, a thousand possibilities shrunken into one somewhat ludicrous little wretch, whose existence excluded all others. And Rachel herself was back to being a servant girl who had let herself be seduced and was now beginning to be terrified·of having a baby, which would bring it all to light. She was simply too crushed by this transformation even to give a sigh. She helped Soli- man to finish dressing, for in his confusion the boy had flung off his tight little jacket with all those buttons, but she was helping him not out of tenderness but only so that they could hurry downstairs. She had paid far more than it was worth, and to be caught out now would be the last straw. All the same, when they had finished, Soliman turned round and flashed her a dazzling smile that turned into a whinny of self-satisfaction. Rachel quickly picked up a box of match~s, turned out the light, softly drew the bolt, and whispered, before opening the door: "You must give me one more kiss. " For that was the right way to do things, but it tasted to both of them like toothpowder on their lips.
Back down in the front hall, they were amazed to find they still had time. The voices on the other side of the door were running on as before. By the time the guests were dispersing, Soliman had disap-· peared, and half an hour later Rachel was combing her mistress's hair with great attentiveness and almost with her former humble devotion.
"I am glad that my little lecture seems to have done you some good," Diotima said with approval, and this woman who in so many ways never quite achieved any real satisfaction kindly patted her little maid's hand.
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Walter had changed out of his office suit into a better one and was knotting his tie at Clarisse's dresser mirror, which despite its irregu- larly curving art nouveau framf" showed a shallow, distorted image in its cheap glass.
''They're absolutely right," he said gmffly. "The famous campaign is nothing but a fake. "
"But what's the point of marching and screaming? " Clarisse said.
"What's the point of anything these days? Marching together, at least they're forming a procession, feeling each other's physical pres- ence. And at least they're not thinktng, and at least they're not writ- ing; something may come of it. "
"Do you really think the campaign is worth all that indignation? "
Walter shrugged his shoulders. "Haven't you read that resolution by the German faction in the paper? Haranguing the Prime Minister about defamation and unfairness to the German population {Uld so on? ·And the sneering proclamation of the Czech League? Or the lit- tle item about the Polish delegates returning to their voting districts? For anyone who can read between the lines, that one's the most re- vealing story, because so much depends on the Poles, and now they've left the government in the lurch! This was no time to provoke everyone by coming out with this patriotic campaign. "
"This morning in town," Clarisse said, "I saw mounted police go by, a whole regiment of them. A woman said they're being kept in reserve somewhere. "
"Of course. There are troops standing by in the barracks too. " "Do you suppose there'll be trouble? "
"Who can tell? " .
"Will they run the people down? How awful, all those horses' bod-
ies jammed in among the people . . . "
Walter had undone his tie and was reknotting it all over again.
"Have you ever been mixed up in anything of this kind? " Clarisse asked. 1
"As a student. "
"Never since then? "
Walter shook his head.
"Didn't you say just now that if there's trouble, it will all be Ul-
ri<'h's fault? "
''I said nothing of the kind," Walter protested. "He takes no inter-
est at all in politics, unfortunately. All I said was that it's just like him to start up something of this sort; he's involved with the people who arP n·sponsible for all this. "
· 'Td like to come into town with you," Clarisse announced. "That's out of the question. It would upset you too much. " Walter spoke with great firmness. He had heard all sorts of things in the offl<·e about what might happen at the demonstration, and he wanted to k<·ep Clarisse away from it. It wouldn't do at all to expose her to the hysteria of a large crowd; Clarisse had to be treated with care, like a pregnant woman. He almost got a lump in his throat at the word "pregnant," even though he did not actually pronounce it, so unexpectedly had it cqme to mind, warming him with the thought of motherhood, however foolishly, considering his wife's ill-tempered refusal of herself. Well, life is full of such contradictions, he told him- self, not without some pride, and offered: 'Til stay home, if you'd
ra:ther. "
"No," she said. "You should be there, at least. "
She wanted to be left to herself. When Walter had told her of the
upcoming demonstration and described what it would be like, it had made her think of a huge serpent covered with scales, each in sepa- rate motion, and she had wanted to see this for herself, but without the fuss of a long argument about it.
Walter put his arm around her. "I'll stay home too? " he repeated, in a questioning tone.
She brushed his arm off, took a book from the shelf, and ignored him. It was a volume of her Nietzsche. But instead of going, Walter pleaded: "Let me see what you're up to. "
The afternoon was ending. A vague foretaste of spring made itself felt in the house, like birdsong muted by walls and glass; an illusory
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scent of flowers rose from the varnish on the floor, the upholstery, the polished brass doorknobs. Walter held out his hand for her book. Clarisse clutched it with two hands, one fmger between the pages where she had opened it.
And now they had one of their "terrible scenes," of which this marriage had seen so many. They were all on the same pattern. Imagine a theater with the stage blacked out, and the lights going on in two boxes on opposite sides ofthe proscenium, with Walter in one of them and Clarisse in the other, singled out among all the men and women, and between them the deep black abyss, warm with the bod- ies of invisible human beings. Now Clarisse opens her lips and speaks, and Walter replies, and the whole audience listens in breath- less suspense, for never before has human talent produced such a spectacle ofson et lumiere, sturm und drang. . . . Such was the scene, once more, with Walter stretching out his arm, imploring her, and Clarisse, a few steps aw11y from him, with her finger wedged between the pages ofher book Opening it at random, she had hit on that fine passage where the master speaks of the impoverishment that follows the decay of the will and manifests itself in every form of life as a proliferation of detail at the expense of the whole. "Life driven back into the most minute forms, leaving the rest devitalized . . . " was what she remembered, though she had only a vague sense ofthe gen- eral drift of the context over which she had run her eye before Wal- ter had again interrupted her; and yet, despite the unfavorable circumstances, she had made a great discovery. For although in this passage the master spoke of all the arts, and even of all the forms taken by human life, his examples were all literary ones, and since· Clarisse did not understand generalizations, she saw that Nietzsche had not· grasped the full implication of his own ideas-for they ap- plied to music as well! She could hear her husband's morbid piano playing as though he were ~ctuallyplaying there beside her, his exag- gerated pauses, choked with emotion, the halting way his notes came from under his fmgertips when his thoughts were straying toward her and when-to use another ofthe master's expt:essions-"the sec- ondary moral element" overwhelmed the artist in him. Clarisse had come to recognize the sound Walter made when he was full of unut- tered desire for her, and she could see the music draining out of his
face, leaving only his lips shining, so that he looked as though he had
cut his fmger and was about to faint. This was how he looked now, with that nervous ~mile as he held his arm stretched out toward her. Nietzsche, of course, could not have known any of this, and yet it was like a sign that she had been led to open the book, by chance, at the place t<tuching on this very thing, and as she suddenly saw, heard, and grasped it all, she was struck by the lightning flash of inspiration where she stood, on a high mountain called Nietzsche, which had buried Walter although it reached no higher than the soles of her feet. The "practical philosophy and poetry" of most people, who are neither originators nor on the other hand unsusceptible to ideas, consists of just such shimmering fusions of someone else's great thought with their own small private modifications.
Walter had meanwhile stood and was coming toward Clarisse. He had decided to forget the demonstration he had intended to join and stay home with her. He saw her leaning back against the wall in re- pugnance as he approached her, yet this deliberate gesture of a woman shrinking from a man unfortunately did not infect him with the same abhorrence but only aroused in him those male urges that might have been precisely what she shrank from. For a man must be capable of taking charge and of'imposing his will on whoever resists him, and the need to prove his manhood suddenly meant just as much to Walter as the need to fight offthe last shreds ofhis youthful superstition that a man must amount to something special. One doesn't have to be something special! he thought defiantly. It was somehow cowardly not to be able to get along without that illusion. We are all inclined to excesses, he thought dismissively. We all have something morbid, some horror, withdrawal, malevolence, in our makeup; each one of us could do something that he alor;te could do, but what of it? He resented the mania for fostering the extraordinary in oneself instead of reabsorbing those all too corruptible outgrowths and, by assimilating them organically, injecting some new life into the bloodstream of the civilization, which was far too inclined to grow sluggish. So he thought now, and he was looking fmward to the day when music and painting would no longer mean anything more to him than a refined form of amusement. Wanting a child was part of this new sense of mission; the dominant desire of his youth to become a titan, a new Prometheus, had ended in his coming to be- lieve, somewhat overemphatically, that one must first become like
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everyone else. He was now ashamed ofhaving no children; he would have liked at least five, ifClarisse and his income had permitted it, so that he could be the center of a warm circle of life; he 'wanted to surpass in mediocrity that great mediocre mass of humanity which transmits life itself, paradoxical as his desire was.
But whether he had taken too long to think, or had slept too late . before starting to dress and beginning this conversation, his cheeks were glowing now, and Clarisse showed that she instantly under- stood why he was moving closer to her book; and this fine attune- ment to each other's moods, despite the painful signs ofher aversion to him, immediately subdued the brute in him and broke down the
simplicity of his impulse.
"Why won't you show me what you're reading? Can't we just
talk? " he pleaded, intimidated.
'W e can't 'just talk'! " Clarisse hissed at him.
"You're hysterical! " Walter exclaimed. He tried to get the book,
open as it was, away from her. She stubbornly clung to it. After they had been wrestling over it silently for a while, Walter started wonder- ing, 'What on earth do I want the book for? '' and let go. At this point the incident would have been closed if Clarisse had not, at the very moment she was released, pressed herself up against the wall even more fiercely than before, as though she had to force her body back- ward through a stiffhedge to escape some threat ofviolence. She was fighting for breath, her face white, and hoarsely screamed: "Instead of amounting to something yourself, you just want to make a child to do it for you! "
Her lips spat these words at him venomously, and all Walter could do was gasp his "Let's talk! " at her again.
"I won't talk; you make me sick! " Clarissl! ' answered, suddenly in full possession of her voice again, and using it with such sharpness that it crashed like heavy china to the floor, midway between them. Walter took a step backward and stared at her in amazement.
Clarisse did not really mean it. She was merely afraid ofgiving in, from good nature or· recklessness, and letting Walter bind her to him with swaddling bands, which must not happen, not now when she was ready to settle the whole question once and for all. The situation' had come to a head. She thought ofthis term, heavily underlined-it was the one Walter had used to explain why the populace was
demonstrating in the streets; for Ulrich, who was linked to Nietzsche by dint of having given her the philosopher's works as a wedding present, was on the other side of the conflict, the side against which this spearhead would be directed, if there was trouble. Now Nietz- sche had just given her a sign, and if she was standing on a high mountain, what was a high mountain other than the earth coming to a point-to a head? The way things were interrelated was truly amazing, like a code that hardly anyone could decipher; even Cla- risse didn't have too clear a perception of it, but that was just why she needed to be alone and had to get Walter out of the house. The wild hatred that flared up in her face at this point in her thoughts was an expression of a physical rage in which she as a person was only vaguely involved, a kind of pianist'sfurioso such as Walter also had at his fingertips, so that he too, after having stared at his wife in bewil- derment, suddenly went white in the face, bared his teeth, and, re- sponding to the loathing ofhim she had expressed, shouted: "Beware of genius!