It was a strange position that he, health personified, should be
standing
here in the cool garden between a man he regarded condescendingly and two unnaturally overheated people just out of earshot, whose mute gesticulations he watched with a superior air and yet with longing.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
But haven't you noticed?
In all these cases we've been talking about, in dream, in myth, poem, childhood, even in love, feeling more comes at the cost of understanding less, and that means: through a loss of reality.
"
"Then you don't really believe in it? " Agathe asked.
Ulrich did not answer. But after a while he said: "Translated into the ghastlyjargon ofour times, we could call this faculty we all lack to such a frightening degree nowadays 'the percentual share' of an indi- vidual's experiences and actions. In dreams it's apparently a hundred percent, in our waking life not even half as much. You noticed it today at once in my house; but it's exactly the same with my relations to the people you'll meet. I also once called it-if I'm not mistaken, in conversation with a woman where it was truly relevant, I must admit-the acoustics of the void. If a pin drops in an empty room,
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the sound it makes is somehow disproportionate, even incommen- surable; but it's the same when there's a void between people. There's no way to tell: is one screaming, or is there a deathly silence? For everything out of place and askew acquires the magnetic attrac- tion of a tremendous temptation when there's nothing with which to counteract it. Don't you agree? . . . But I'm sorry," he interrupted himself, "you must be tired, and I'm not letting you have your rest. It seems there are many things in my surroundings and my social life that won't be much to your liking, I'm afraid. "
Agathe had opened her eyes. After coming out of hiding at last, her glance contained something uncommonly hard to define, which Ulrich felt coursing sympathetically through his whole body. He sud- denly started to talk again: "When I was younger I tried to see just that as a source of strength. And if one doesn't have anything to pit against life? Fine, then life flees from man into his works! That's more or less what I thought. And I suppose there's something daunt- ing about the lovelessness and irresponsibility of today's world. At the very least there's something in it of adolescence, which centuries can go through as well as teenagers, years of rapid, uneven growth. And like every young man I began by plunging into work, adven- tures, amusements; what difference did it make what one did, as long as one did it wholeheartedly? Do you remember that we once spoke of 'the morality of achievement'? We're born with that image, and orient ourselves by it. But the older one gets, the more clearly one finds out that this apparent exuberance, this independence and mo- bility in everything, this sovereignty of the driving parts and the par- tial drives-both your own against yourself and yours against the world-in short, everything that we 'people of the present' have regarded as a strength and a special distinction of our species, is basically nothing but a weakness of the whole as against its parts. Passion and willpower can do nothing about it. The moment you're ready to go all out into the middle of something, you find your- self washed back to the periphery. Today this is the experience in all experiences! "
Agathe, with her eyes now open, was waiting for something to hap- pen in his voice; when nothing changed and her brother's words sim- ply came to an end like a path turning off a road into a dead end, she said: "So your experience tells you that one can never really act with
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conviction and will never be able to. By conviction," she explained, "I don't mean whatever knowledge or moral training have been drilled into us, but simply feeling entirely at home with oneself and with everything, feeling replete now where there's emptiness, something one starts out from and returns to-" She broke off. "Oh, I don't really know what I mean! I was hoping you'd explain it to me. "
"You mean just what we were talking about," Ulrich answered gently. "And you're also the only person I can talk to about these things. But there'd be no point in starting over just to add a few more seductive words. I'd have to say, rather, that being 'at the inner core' ofthings, in a state ofunmarred 'inwardness'-using the word not in any sentimental sense but with the meaning we just gave it-is ap- parently not a demand that can be satisfied by rational thinking. " He had leaned forward and was touching her arm and gazing steadily into her eyes. "Human nature is probably averse to it," he said in a low voice. "All we really know is that we feel a painful need for it! Perhaps it's connected with the need for sibling love, an addition to ordinary love, moving in an imaginary direction toward a love un- mixed with otherness and not-loving. " And after a pause he added: "You know how popular those babes-in-the-wood games are in bed: people who could murder their real siblings fool around as brother- and-sister babies under the same blanket. "
In the dim light his face twitched in self-mockery. But Agathe put her trust in his face and not in his confused words. She had seen faces quivering like this a moment before they plunged; this one did not come nearer; it seemed to be moving at infinitely great speed over an immense distance. Tersely she answered: "Being brother and sister isn't really enough, that's all. "
'Well, we've already spoken of being twins," Ulrich responded, getting noiselessly to his feet, because he thought that she was finally being overwhelmed by fatigue.
'We'd have to be Siamese twins," Agathe managed to say.
"Right, Siamese twins! " her brother echoed, gently disengaging her hand from his and carefully placing it on the coverlet. His words had a weightless sound, light and volatile, expanding in widening cir- cles even after he had left the room.
Agathe smiled and gradually sank into a lonely sadness, whose darkness imperceptibly turned into that of sleep. Ulrich meanwhile
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tiptoed into his study and stayed there, unable to work, for another two hours, until he, too, grew tired, learning for the first time what it was like to be cramped out of considerateness. He was amazed at how much he would have wanted to do during this time that would involve making noise and so had to be suppressed. This was new for him. And it almost irritated him a little, although he did his best to imagine sympathetically what it would be like to be really physically attached to another person. He knew hardly anything about how such nervous systems worked in tandem, like two leaves on a single stalk, united not only through a single bloodstream but still more by the effect oftheir total interdependence. He assumed that every agi- tation in one soul would also be felt by the other, even though what- ever evoked it was going on in a body that was not, in the main, one's own. "An embrace, for instance-you are embraced by way of the other body," he thought. "You may not even want it, but your other self floods you with an ovezwhelming wave of acceptance! What do you care who's kissing your sister? But her excitement is something you must love jointly. Or suppose it's you who are making love, and you have to flnd a way to 'ensure' her participation; you can't just let her be flooded with senseless physiological processes . . . ! " Ulrich felt a strong arousal and a great uneasiness at this idea; it was hard for him to draw the line between a new way oflooking at something and a distortion of the ordinary way.
SPRING IN THE VEGETABLE GARDEN
The praise Meingast bestowed on her and the new ideas she was get- ting from him had deeply impressed Clarisse.
Her mental unrest and excitability, which sometimes worried even her, had eased, but they did not give way this time, as they so often did, to dejection, frustration, and hopelessness; they were succeeded
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instead by an extraordinary taut lucidity and a transparent inner at- mosphere. Once again she took stock of herself and arrived at a criti- cal estimate. Without questioning it, and even with a certain satisfaction, she noted that she was not overly bright; she had not been educated enough. Ulrich, on the other hand, whenever she thought of him by comparison, was like a skater gliding to and fro at will on a surface of intellectual ice. There was no telling where it came from when he said something, or when he laughed, when he was irritable, when his eyes flashed, when he was there and with his broad shoulders preempting Walter's space in the room. Even when he merely turned his head in curiosity, the sinews of his neck taut- ened like the rigging of a sailboat taking off with the wind into the blue. There was always more to him than she could grasp, which acted as a spur to her desire to fling herself on him bodily to catch hold ofit. But the tumult in which this sometimes happened, so that once nothing in the world had mattered except that she wanted to bear Ulrich's child, had now receded far into the distance, leaving behind not even that flotsam and jetsam that incomprehensibly keeps bobbing up in the memory after the tide of passion has ebbed. When she thought ofher failure at Ulrich's house, insofar as she ever still did, Clarisse felt cross, at most, but her self-confidence was hale and hearty thanks to the new ideas supplied by her philosophic guest, not to mention the sheer excitement of again seeing this old friend who had been transported into the sublime. Thus many days passed in all kinds of suspense while everyone in the little house, now bathed in spring sunshine, waited to see whether Ulrich would or would not bring the permit to visit Moosbrugger in his eerie domicile.
There was one idea in particular that seemed important to Clarisse in this connection: The Master had called the world "so thoroughly stripped of illusions" that people could no longer say about anything whether they ought to love it or hate it. Since then Clarisse felt that one was obliged to surrender oneselfto an illusion ifone received the grace of having one. For an illusion is a mercy. How was anyone at that time to know whether to tum right or left on leaving the house, unless he had a job, like Walter, which then cramped him, or, like herself, had a visit to pay to her parents or brothers and sisters, who bored her! It's different in an illusion! There life is arranged as effi-
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ciently as a modem kitchen: you sit in the middle and hardly need stir to set all the gadgets going. That had always been Clarisse's sort of thing. Besides, she understood "illusion" to mean nothing other than what was called "the will," only with added intensity. Up to now Clarisse had felt intimidated by being able to understand so little of what was going on in the world. But since Meingast's return she saw this as a veritable advantage that freed her to love, hate, and act as she pleased. For according to the Master's word mankind needed nothing so much as willpower, and when it came to wanting some- thing with a will, Clarisse had always had that inner power! When Clarisse thought about it she was chilled with joy and hot with re- sponsibility. Of course, what was meant by will here was not the grim effort it took to learn a piano piece or win an argument; it meant being powerfully steered by life itself, being deeply moved within oneself, being swept away with happiness!
Eventually she could not help telling Walter something about it. She informed him that her conscience was growing stronger day by day. But despite his admiration for Meingast, the suspected instiga- tor of this deed, Walter answered angrily: "It's probably lucky for us that Ulrich doesn't seem able to get the permit! "
Clarisse's lips merely quivered slightly, betraying sympathy for his ignorance and stubbornness.
"What is it you want from this criminal, anyway, who has nothing whatever to do with any of us? " Walter demanded manfully.
"It'll come to me when I get there! " she said.
"I should think you ought to know it already," Walter asserted. His little wife smiled the way she always did when she was about to
hurt him to the quick. But then she merely said: ''I'm going to do something. "
"Clarisse! " Walter remonstrated firmly. "You may not do anything without my permission. I am your lawful husband and guardian. "
This tone was new to her. She turned away and took a few steps in confusion.
"Clarisse! " Walter called after her, getting up to follow her. "I in- tend to take steps to deal with the insanity that's going around in this house! "
Now she realized that the healing power ofher resolve was already
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manifesting itself, even in the strengthening of Walter's character. She turned on her heel: "What steps? " she asked, and a flash oflight- ning from her narrowed eyes struck into the moist, wide-open brown ofhis.
"Now look," he said to mollify her, backing away a little, in sur- prise at her demanding such a concrete response. 'We've all got this in our system, this intellectual taste for the unhealthy, the prob- lematic, for making our flesh creep; every thinking person has it; but-"
"But we let the philistines have their way! " Clarisse interrupted triumphantly. Now she advanced on him without taking her eyes off him; felt how a sense ofher own healing power held him in its strong embrace and overpowered him. Her heart was filled with an odd and inexpressible joy.
"But we won't make such a to-do over it," Walter muttered sulkily, finishing his sentence. Behind him, at the hem of his jacket, he felt an obstacle; reaching backward, he identified it as the edge of one of those light, thin-legged little tables they had, which suddenly seemed spooky to him; he realized that if he kept backing away he would make it slide backward, which would be ludicrous. So he resisted the sudden desire to get far away from this struggle, to some dark-green meadow under blossoming fruit trees, among people whose healthy cheerfulness would wash his wounds clean. It was a quiet, stout wish, graced with women hanging on his words and paying their toll of grateful admiration. At the moment Clarisse came up close he actu- ally felt rudely molested, in a nightmarish way. But to his surprise Clarisse did not say: ''You're a coward! " Instead, she said: 'Walter? Why are we unhappy? "
At the sound ofher appealing, clairvoyant voice he felt that happi- ness with any other woman could never take the place of his unhap- piness with Clarisse. 'W e have to be! " he answered with an equally noble upsurge.
"No, we shouldn't have to be," she said obligingly. She let her head droop to one side, trying to find a way to convince him. It didn't matter what it was: They stood there facing each other like a day without an evening, pouring out its fire hour after hour without lessening.
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"You'll have to admit," she said finally, at once shyly and stub- bornly, "that really great crimes come about not because somebody commits them but because we let them happen. "
Now Walter knew, ofcourse, what was coming, and felt a shock of disappointment.
"Oh God! " he cried out impatiently. "I know as well as you do that far more people's lives are ruined by indifference and by the ease with which most of us today can square our conscience than by the evil intentions of isolated individuals. And of course it's admirable that you're now going to say that this is why we must all quicken our conscience and carefully weigh in advance every step we take. "
Clarisse interrupted him by opening her mouth, but thought bet- ter of it and did not respond.
"Of course I think about poverty too, and hunger, and all the cor- ruption that's allowed to go on in this world, or mines caving in be- cause the management economized on safety measures," Walter went on in a deflated tone, "and I've agreed with you about it al- ready. "
"But in that case two lovers mustn't love each other either, as long as they're not in a state of 'pure happiness,' " Clarisse said. "And the world will never improve until there are such lovers! "
Walter struck his hands together. "Don't you understand how un- fair to life such great, dazzling, uncompromising demands are? " he exclaimed. "And it's the same with this Moosbrugger, who keeps popping into your head like something on a turntable. Of course you're right to claim that no stone should be left untumed as long as such miserable human creatures are simply killed off because society doesn't know what to do with them. But of course it's even more right that the healthy, normal conscience is justified in simply refus- ing to bother with such overrefined scruples. A healthy way of think- ing is recognizable, in fact, by certain signs; one can't prove it but has to have it in one's blood. "
"In your blood," Clarisse replied," 'of course' always means 'of course not. ' "
Nettled, Walter shook his head to show that he would not answer this. He was fed up with always being the one to warn that a diet of one-sided ideas was unhealthy; in the long run, it was probably also making him unsure of himself.
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But Clarisse read his thoughts with that nervous sensitivity that never failed to amaze him. With her head high, she jumped over all the intermediate stages and landed on his main point with the sub- dued but intense question: "Can you imagine Jesus as boss of a coal mine? '' He could see in her face that by "Jesus" she really meant him, through one of those exaggerations in which love is indistin- guishable from madness. He waved this off with a gesture at once indignant and discouraged. "Not so direct, Clarisse! " he pleaded. "Such things mustn't be said so directly! "
"Yes, they must," she answered. "It's the only way! If we don't have the strength to save him, we will never have the strength to save ourselves! "
"And what difference will it make if they do string him up? " Wal- ter burst out. The brutality of it made him believe he felt the liberat- ing taste of life itself on his tongue, gloriously blended with the taste of death and the doom of their entanglement with it that Clarisse was conjuring up with her hints.
Clarisse looked at him expectantly. But Walter said nothing more, either from relief after his outburst or from indecision. And like someone forced to play an unbeatable final trump card, she said: ''I've had a sign! "
"But that's just one ofyour fantasies! " Walter shouted at the ceil- ing, which represented heaven. But with those last airy words Cla- risse had ended their tete-a-tete, giving him no chance to say anything more.
Yet he saw her only a short while later talking eagerly with Mein- gast, who was rightly troubled by a feeling that they were being watched but was too nearsighted to be sure of it. Walter was not re- ally participating in the gardening being done so zestfully by his visit- ing brother-in-law, Siegmund, who with rolled-up shirtsleeves was kneeling in a furrow doing something or other that Walter had in- sisted must be done in the spring if one wanted to be a human being and not a bookmark in the pages of a gardening book. Instead of gar- dening, Walter was sneaking glances at the pair talking in the far cor- ner of the open kitchen garden.
Not that he suspected anything untoward in the corner he was ob- serving. Still, his hands felt unnaturally cold in the spring air; his legs were cold too, what with the wet places on his trousers from occa-
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sionally kneeling to give Siegmund instructions. He took a high tone with his brother-in-law, the way weak, downtrodden people will whenever they get a chance to work off their frustrations on some- one. He knew that Siegmund, who had taken it into his head to re- vere Walter, would not be easily shaken in his loyalty. But this did not prevent him from feeling a veritable after-sunset loneliness, a graveyard chill, as he watched Clarisse; she never cast a glance in his direction but was all eyes for Meingast, hanging on the Master's words. Moreover, Walter actually took a certain pride in this. Ever since Meingast had come to stay in his house, he was just as proud of the chasms that suddenly opened up in it as he was anxious to cover them up again. From his standing height he had dispatched to the kneeling Siegmund the words: "Ofcourse we all feel and are familiar with a certain hankering for the morbid and problematic! " He was no sneaking coward. In the short time since Clarisse had called him a philistine for saying the same thing to her, he had formulated a new phrase: "life's petty dishonesty. "
"A little dishonesty is good, like sweet or sour," he now instructed his brother-in-law, "but we are obligated to refine it in ourselves to the point where it would do credit to a healthy life! What I mean by a little dishonesty," he went on, "is as much the nostalgic flirting with death that seizes us when we listen to Tristan as the secret fascina- tion that's in most sex crimes, even though we don't succumb to it. For there's something dishonest and antihuman, you see, both in ele- mental life when it overpowers us with want and disease, and in exag- gerated scruples of mind and conscience trying to do violence to life. Everything that tries to overstep the limits set for us is dishonest! Mysticism is just as dishonest as the conceit that nature can be re- duced to a mathematical formula! And the plan to visit Moosbrugger is just as dishonest as"-here Walter paused for a moment-"as if you were to invoke God at a patient's bedside! "
There was certainly something in what he had said, and he had even managed to take Siegmund by surprise with his appeal to the physician's professional and spontaneous humanitarianism, to make him see Clarisse's scheme and her overwrought motivation as an im- permissible overstepping of bounds. However, Walter was a genius compared with Siegmund, as may be seen in Walter's healthy out- look having led him to confess such ideas as these, while his brother-
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 993
in-law's even healthier outlook manifested itself in his dogged si- lence in the face of such dubious subject matter. Siegmund patted the soil with his fingers while tilting his head now to one side, now to the other, without opening his lips, as ifhe were trying to pour some- thing out of a test tube, or then again, as if he had just heard enough with that ear. And when Walter had finished there was a fearfully profound silence, in which Walter now heard a statement that Cla- risse must have called out to him once, for without being as vivid as a hallucination, it was as if the hollow space were punctuated by these words: "Nietzsche and Christ both perished of their incomplete- ness! " Somehow, in some uncanny fashion reminiscent of the "coal mine boss," he felt flattered.
It was a strange position that he, health personified, should be standing here in the cool garden between a man he regarded condescendingly and two unnaturally overheated people just out of earshot, whose mute gesticulations he watched with a superior air and yet with longing. For Clarisse was the slightly dishonest element his own health needed to keep from flagging, and a secret voice told him that Meingast was at this very moment en- gaged in immeasurably increasing the permissible limits of this dis- honesty. He admired Meingast as an obscure relation admires a famous one, and seeing Clarisse whispering conspiratorially with him aroused his envy more than his jealousy-a feeling, that is, that ate into him even more deeply than jealousy would have, and yet it was also somehow uplifting; the consciousness of his own dignity forbade him to get angry or to go over there and disturb them; in view oftheir agitation he felt himself superior, and from all this arose, he did not know how, some vague, mongrel notion, spawned outside all logic, that the two of them over there were in some reckless and reprehen- sible fashion invoking God.
If such a curiously mixed state of mind must be called thinking, it was of a kind that cannot possibly be put into words, because the chemistry of its darkness is instantly ruined by the luminous influ- ence of language. Besides, as his remark to Siegmund had shown, Walter did not associate belief of any sort with the word "God," and when the word occurred to him it generated an abashed void around itself. And so it happened that the first thing Walter said to his brother-in-law, after a long silence, had nothing to do with this. ''You're an idiot to think you have no right to talk her out of this visit
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in the strongest possible terms," he said bitterly. "What are you a doctor for? "
Siegmund wasn't in the least offended. "You're the one who will have to have it out with her," he replied, glancing up calmly before turning back to what he was doing.
Walter sighed, then started over again. "Clarisse is an extraordi- nary person, of course. I can understand her very well. I'll even admit that she's not all wrong to be as austere in her views as she is. Just thinking ofthe poverty, hunger, misery ofevery kind the world is so full of, the disasters in coal mines, for instance, because the man- agement wouldn't spend enough on timbering . . . "
Siegmund gave no sign that he was giving it any thought.
'Well, she does! " Walter continued sternly. "And I think it's won- derful of her. The rest of us get ourselves a good conscience much too easily. And she's better than we are for insisting that we all ought to change and have a more active conscience, the kind with no limit to it, ever. But what I'm asking you is whether this isn't bound to lead to a pathological state of moral scrupulousness, if it isn't something like that already. You must have an opinion! "
Siegmund responded to this pressing challenge by propping him- self up on one knee and giving his brother-in-law a searching look. "Crazy! " he said. "But not, strictly speaking, in a medical sense. "
"And what do you say," Walter continued, forgetting his superior stance, "to her claim that she's being sent signs? "
"She says she's being sent signs? " Siegmund said dubiously.
"Signs, I tell you. That crazy killer, for instance. And that crazy swine outside our window the other day! "
"A swine? "
"No, a kind of exhibitionist. "
"I see," Siegmund said, turning it over in his mind. "You're sent
signs too, when you find something to paint. She just expresses her- self in a more high-strung way than you," he concluded.
"And what about her claim that she has to take these people's sins on herself, and yours and mine as well, and I don't know whose else's? " Walter pressed him.
Siegmund had risen to his feet and was brushing the dirt from his hands. "She feels oppressed by sin, does she? " he asked, again super-
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fluously, politely agreeing as if glad to be able at last to support his brother-in-law. "That's a symptom! "
"That's a symptom? " Walter echoed, crushed.
"Fixed ideas about sin are a symptom," Siegmund affirmed with the detachment of a professional.
"But it's like this," Walter added, instantly appealing against the judgment he had just been suing for: "You must first ask yourself: Does sin exist? Of course it does. But in that case there's also a fixed idea of sin that is no delusion. You might not understand that, be- cause it's beyond empiricism! It's a human being's aggrieved sense of responsibility toward a higher life! "
"But she insists she's receiving signs? " Siegmund persisted.
"But you just said that signs are sent to me too! " Walter cried. "And I can tell you there are times when I would like to go down on my knees and beg fate to leave me in peace; but it keeps sending signs, and it sends the most inspiring signs through Clarisse! " Then he continued more calmly: "She now claims, for instance, that this man Moosbrugger represents her and me in our 'sinful body' and has been sent to us as a warning; but it can be understood as a symbol of our neglecting the higher possibilities of our lives, our 'astral body,' as it were. Years ago, when Meingast left u s - "
"But an obsession with sin is a symptom of specific disorders," Siegmund reminded him, with the relentless equanimity of the expert.
"Symptoms, that's all you know! " Walter said in animated defense of his Clarisse. "Anything beyond that is outside your experience! But perhaps this superstition, which regards everything that doesn't accord with the most pedestrian experience as a disorder, is itself the true sin and sinful form of our life. Clarisse demands spiritual action against this! Many years ago, when Meingast left and we . . . " He thought of how he and Clarisse had "taken Meingast's sins upon themselves," but realized it was hopeless to try telling Siegmund the process of a spiritual awakening, so he ended vaguely by saying: "Anyway, I don't suppose you'll deny that there have always been people who have, so to speak, drawn humanity's sins on themselves or even concentrated them in themselves. "
His brother-in-law looked at him complacently. "There you are! "
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he said amiably. "You yourself prove just what I've been saying. That she regards herself as oppressed by sin is a characteristic attitude of certain disorders. But there are also untypical modes of behavior in life: I never claimed anything more. "
"And the exaggerated stringency with which she carries things out? " Walter asked after a while, with a sigh. "Surely to be so rigor- ous can hardly be called normal? "
Clarisse, meanwhile, was having an important conversation with Meingast.
"You've said," she reminded him, "that the kind of people who pride themselves on understanding and explaining the world will never change anything in it, isn't that so? "
"Yes," the Master replied. "'True' and 'false' are the evasions of people who never want to arrive at a decision. Truth is something without end. "
"So that's why you said one must have the courage to choose be- tween 'worth' and 'worthless'? " she pressed on.
"Right," the Master said, somewhat bored.
"And then there's your marvelously contemptuous formulation," Clarisse cried, "that in modem life people only do what is happening anyway. "
Meingast stopped and looked down; one might have said that he was either inclining an ear or studying a pebble lying before him on the path, slightly to the right. But Clarisse did not go on proffering honeyed praises; she, too, had now bent her head, so that her chin almost rested in the hollow of her neck, and her gaze bored into the ground between the tips of Meingast's boots. A gentle flush rose to her pale cheeks as, cautiously lowering her voice, she continued:
"You said all sexuality was nothing but goatish caperings. "
"Yes, I did say that in a particular context. Whatever our age lacks in willpower it expends, apart from its so-called scientific endeavors, in sexuality. "
After some hesitation, Clarisse said: "I have plenty of willpower myself, but Walter is for capering. "
"What's really the matter between you two? " the Master asked with some curiosity, but almost immediately added in a tone of dis- gust: "I can guess, I suppose. "
They were standing in a comer of the treeless garden that lay
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under the full spring sun, almost diametrically opposite the comer where Siegmund was squatting on the ground with Walter standing over and haranguing him. The garden formed a rectangle parallel with and against the long wall of the house, with a gravel path run- ning around its vegetable and flower beds, and two others forming a bright cross on the still-bare ground in the middle. Warily glancing in the direction ofthe two men, Clarisse replied: "Perhaps he can't help it; you see, I attract Walter in a way that's not quite right. "
"I can imagine," the Master answered, this time with a sympa- thetic look. "There is something boyish about you. "
At this praise Clarisse felt happiness bouncing through her veins like hailstones. "Did you notice before," she eagerly asked him, "that I can change clothes faster than a man? ''
A blank expression came over the philosopher's benevolently seamed face. Clarisse giggled. "That's a double word," she explained. "There are others too: sex murder, for instance. "
The Master probably thought it would be wise not to show sur- prise at anything. "Oh yes, I know," he replied. "You did say once that to satisfy desire in the usual embrace is a kind of sex murder. " But what did she mean by "changing," he wanted to know.
"To offer no resistance is murder," Clarisse explained with the speed of someone going through one's paces on slippery ground and losing one's footing through overagility.
"Now you've really lost me," Meingast admitted. "You must be talking about that fellow the carpenter again. What is it you want from him? ''
Clarisse moodily scraped the gravel with the tip of her shoe. "It's all part of the same thing," she said. And suddenly she looked up at the Master. "I think Walter should learn to deny me," she said in an abruptly cut-off sentence.
"I can't judge that," Meingast remarked, after waiting in vain for her to go on. "But certainly radical solutions are always best. "
He said this only to cover all contingencies. But Clarisse dropped her head again so that her gaze burrowed somewhere in Meingast's suit, and after a while her hand reached slowly for his forearm. She suddenly had an uncontrollable impulse to take hold of that hard, lean arm under the broad sleeve and touch the Master, who was pre- tending to have forgotten all those illuminating things he had said
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about the carpenter. While this was happening she was dominated by the feeling that she was pushing a part of herself over to him, and in the slowness with which her hand disappeared inside his sleeve, in this flooding slowness, there eddied fragments of a mysterious lust, which derived from her perception that the Master was keeping still and letting her touch him.
But Meingast for some reason stared aghast at the hand clutching his arm this way and creeping up it like some many-legged creature mounting its female. Under the little woman's lowered eyelids he caught a flash ofsomething peculiar and realized the dubious charac- ter of what was taking place, although he was moved by her doing it so publicly.
"Come! " he said gently, removing her hand from his arm. 'W e're too conspicuous, standing here like this; let's go on walking. "
As they strolled up and down the path, Clarisse said: "I can dress quickly, faster than a man ifI have to. Clothes come flying onto my body when I'm-what shall I call it? -when I'm like that! Maybe it's a kind ofelectricity. I attract things that belong to me. But it's usually a sinister attraction. "
Meingast smiled at her puns, which he still did not understand, and fished haphazardly in his mind for an impressive retort. "So you put on your clothes like a hero his destiny? " he responded.
To his surprise, Clarisse stopped short and cried: "Yes, that's it ex- actly! Whoever lives like this feels it even in a dress, shoes, knife and fork! "
"There's some truth in that," the Master confirmed her obscurely credible assertion. Then he asked point-blank: "But how do you do it with Walter, actually? "
Clarisse failed to understand. She looked at him, and suddenly saw in his eyes yellow clouds that seemed to be driven on a desert wind.
"You said," Meingast went on with some reluctance, "that you at- tract him in a way that 'isn't right. ' You mean, I suppose, not right for a woman? How do you mean? Are you frigid with men? ''
Clarisse did not know the word.
"Being frigid," the Master explained, "is when a woman is unable to enjoy the act oflove with men. "
"But I only know Walter," Clarisse objected timidly.
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"Even so, it does seem a fair assumption, after what you've been telling me. "
Clarisse was nonplussed. She had to think about it. She didn't know. "Me? But I'm not supposed to---I'm the one who must put a stop to it! " she said. "I can't permit it to happen! "
"You don't say? " The Master's laugh was vulgar. "You have to pre- vent yourself from feeling anything? Or prevent Walter from getting satisfaction? ''
Clarisse blushed. But now she understood more clearly what she had to say. "When you give in, everything gets swamped in lust," she replied seriously. "I won't let a man's lust leave him and become my lust. That's why I've attracted men ever since I was a little girl. There's something wrong with the lust of men. "
For various reasons Meingast preferred not to go into that.
"Do you have that much self-control? '' he asked.
'Well, yes and no," Clarisse said candidly. "But I told you, ifI let
him have his way, I'd be a sex murderer! " Warming to her subject, she went on: "My woman friends say they 'pass out' in the arms of a man. I don't know what that is. I've never passed out in a man's arms. But I do know what it's like to 'pass out' without being in a man's arms. You must know about that too; after all, you did say that the world is too devoid ofillusions . . . ! "
Meingast waved this offwith a gesture, as ifto say she had misun- derstood him. But now it was all too clear to her.
'When you say, for instance, that one must decide against the lesser value for the sake of the higher value," she cried, "it means that there's a life in an immense and boundless ecstasy! Not sexual ecstasy but the ecstasy of genius! Against which Walter would com- mit treason if I don't prevent him! "
Meingast shook his head. Denial filled him on hearing this altered and impassioned version of his words; it was a startled, almost fright- ened denial, but ofall the things it prompted him to say, he chose the most superficial: "But who knows whether he could do anything else? "
Clarisse stopped, as if rooted to the ground by a bolt of lightning. "He must! " she cried. "You yourself taught us that! "
"So I did," the Master granted reluctantly, trying in vain to get her
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to keep walking by setting an example. "But what do you really want? "
"There was nothing I wanted before you came, don't you see? " Clarisse said softly. "But it's such an awful life, to take nothing more than the little bit ofsexual pleasure out ofthe vast ocean ofthe possi- ble joys in life! So now I want something. "
"That's just what I am asking you about,'' Meingast prompted.
"Then you don't really believe in it? " Agathe asked.
Ulrich did not answer. But after a while he said: "Translated into the ghastlyjargon ofour times, we could call this faculty we all lack to such a frightening degree nowadays 'the percentual share' of an indi- vidual's experiences and actions. In dreams it's apparently a hundred percent, in our waking life not even half as much. You noticed it today at once in my house; but it's exactly the same with my relations to the people you'll meet. I also once called it-if I'm not mistaken, in conversation with a woman where it was truly relevant, I must admit-the acoustics of the void. If a pin drops in an empty room,
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the sound it makes is somehow disproportionate, even incommen- surable; but it's the same when there's a void between people. There's no way to tell: is one screaming, or is there a deathly silence? For everything out of place and askew acquires the magnetic attrac- tion of a tremendous temptation when there's nothing with which to counteract it. Don't you agree? . . . But I'm sorry," he interrupted himself, "you must be tired, and I'm not letting you have your rest. It seems there are many things in my surroundings and my social life that won't be much to your liking, I'm afraid. "
Agathe had opened her eyes. After coming out of hiding at last, her glance contained something uncommonly hard to define, which Ulrich felt coursing sympathetically through his whole body. He sud- denly started to talk again: "When I was younger I tried to see just that as a source of strength. And if one doesn't have anything to pit against life? Fine, then life flees from man into his works! That's more or less what I thought. And I suppose there's something daunt- ing about the lovelessness and irresponsibility of today's world. At the very least there's something in it of adolescence, which centuries can go through as well as teenagers, years of rapid, uneven growth. And like every young man I began by plunging into work, adven- tures, amusements; what difference did it make what one did, as long as one did it wholeheartedly? Do you remember that we once spoke of 'the morality of achievement'? We're born with that image, and orient ourselves by it. But the older one gets, the more clearly one finds out that this apparent exuberance, this independence and mo- bility in everything, this sovereignty of the driving parts and the par- tial drives-both your own against yourself and yours against the world-in short, everything that we 'people of the present' have regarded as a strength and a special distinction of our species, is basically nothing but a weakness of the whole as against its parts. Passion and willpower can do nothing about it. The moment you're ready to go all out into the middle of something, you find your- self washed back to the periphery. Today this is the experience in all experiences! "
Agathe, with her eyes now open, was waiting for something to hap- pen in his voice; when nothing changed and her brother's words sim- ply came to an end like a path turning off a road into a dead end, she said: "So your experience tells you that one can never really act with
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conviction and will never be able to. By conviction," she explained, "I don't mean whatever knowledge or moral training have been drilled into us, but simply feeling entirely at home with oneself and with everything, feeling replete now where there's emptiness, something one starts out from and returns to-" She broke off. "Oh, I don't really know what I mean! I was hoping you'd explain it to me. "
"You mean just what we were talking about," Ulrich answered gently. "And you're also the only person I can talk to about these things. But there'd be no point in starting over just to add a few more seductive words. I'd have to say, rather, that being 'at the inner core' ofthings, in a state ofunmarred 'inwardness'-using the word not in any sentimental sense but with the meaning we just gave it-is ap- parently not a demand that can be satisfied by rational thinking. " He had leaned forward and was touching her arm and gazing steadily into her eyes. "Human nature is probably averse to it," he said in a low voice. "All we really know is that we feel a painful need for it! Perhaps it's connected with the need for sibling love, an addition to ordinary love, moving in an imaginary direction toward a love un- mixed with otherness and not-loving. " And after a pause he added: "You know how popular those babes-in-the-wood games are in bed: people who could murder their real siblings fool around as brother- and-sister babies under the same blanket. "
In the dim light his face twitched in self-mockery. But Agathe put her trust in his face and not in his confused words. She had seen faces quivering like this a moment before they plunged; this one did not come nearer; it seemed to be moving at infinitely great speed over an immense distance. Tersely she answered: "Being brother and sister isn't really enough, that's all. "
'Well, we've already spoken of being twins," Ulrich responded, getting noiselessly to his feet, because he thought that she was finally being overwhelmed by fatigue.
'We'd have to be Siamese twins," Agathe managed to say.
"Right, Siamese twins! " her brother echoed, gently disengaging her hand from his and carefully placing it on the coverlet. His words had a weightless sound, light and volatile, expanding in widening cir- cles even after he had left the room.
Agathe smiled and gradually sank into a lonely sadness, whose darkness imperceptibly turned into that of sleep. Ulrich meanwhile
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tiptoed into his study and stayed there, unable to work, for another two hours, until he, too, grew tired, learning for the first time what it was like to be cramped out of considerateness. He was amazed at how much he would have wanted to do during this time that would involve making noise and so had to be suppressed. This was new for him. And it almost irritated him a little, although he did his best to imagine sympathetically what it would be like to be really physically attached to another person. He knew hardly anything about how such nervous systems worked in tandem, like two leaves on a single stalk, united not only through a single bloodstream but still more by the effect oftheir total interdependence. He assumed that every agi- tation in one soul would also be felt by the other, even though what- ever evoked it was going on in a body that was not, in the main, one's own. "An embrace, for instance-you are embraced by way of the other body," he thought. "You may not even want it, but your other self floods you with an ovezwhelming wave of acceptance! What do you care who's kissing your sister? But her excitement is something you must love jointly. Or suppose it's you who are making love, and you have to flnd a way to 'ensure' her participation; you can't just let her be flooded with senseless physiological processes . . . ! " Ulrich felt a strong arousal and a great uneasiness at this idea; it was hard for him to draw the line between a new way oflooking at something and a distortion of the ordinary way.
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The praise Meingast bestowed on her and the new ideas she was get- ting from him had deeply impressed Clarisse.
Her mental unrest and excitability, which sometimes worried even her, had eased, but they did not give way this time, as they so often did, to dejection, frustration, and hopelessness; they were succeeded
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instead by an extraordinary taut lucidity and a transparent inner at- mosphere. Once again she took stock of herself and arrived at a criti- cal estimate. Without questioning it, and even with a certain satisfaction, she noted that she was not overly bright; she had not been educated enough. Ulrich, on the other hand, whenever she thought of him by comparison, was like a skater gliding to and fro at will on a surface of intellectual ice. There was no telling where it came from when he said something, or when he laughed, when he was irritable, when his eyes flashed, when he was there and with his broad shoulders preempting Walter's space in the room. Even when he merely turned his head in curiosity, the sinews of his neck taut- ened like the rigging of a sailboat taking off with the wind into the blue. There was always more to him than she could grasp, which acted as a spur to her desire to fling herself on him bodily to catch hold ofit. But the tumult in which this sometimes happened, so that once nothing in the world had mattered except that she wanted to bear Ulrich's child, had now receded far into the distance, leaving behind not even that flotsam and jetsam that incomprehensibly keeps bobbing up in the memory after the tide of passion has ebbed. When she thought ofher failure at Ulrich's house, insofar as she ever still did, Clarisse felt cross, at most, but her self-confidence was hale and hearty thanks to the new ideas supplied by her philosophic guest, not to mention the sheer excitement of again seeing this old friend who had been transported into the sublime. Thus many days passed in all kinds of suspense while everyone in the little house, now bathed in spring sunshine, waited to see whether Ulrich would or would not bring the permit to visit Moosbrugger in his eerie domicile.
There was one idea in particular that seemed important to Clarisse in this connection: The Master had called the world "so thoroughly stripped of illusions" that people could no longer say about anything whether they ought to love it or hate it. Since then Clarisse felt that one was obliged to surrender oneselfto an illusion ifone received the grace of having one. For an illusion is a mercy. How was anyone at that time to know whether to tum right or left on leaving the house, unless he had a job, like Walter, which then cramped him, or, like herself, had a visit to pay to her parents or brothers and sisters, who bored her! It's different in an illusion! There life is arranged as effi-
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ciently as a modem kitchen: you sit in the middle and hardly need stir to set all the gadgets going. That had always been Clarisse's sort of thing. Besides, she understood "illusion" to mean nothing other than what was called "the will," only with added intensity. Up to now Clarisse had felt intimidated by being able to understand so little of what was going on in the world. But since Meingast's return she saw this as a veritable advantage that freed her to love, hate, and act as she pleased. For according to the Master's word mankind needed nothing so much as willpower, and when it came to wanting some- thing with a will, Clarisse had always had that inner power! When Clarisse thought about it she was chilled with joy and hot with re- sponsibility. Of course, what was meant by will here was not the grim effort it took to learn a piano piece or win an argument; it meant being powerfully steered by life itself, being deeply moved within oneself, being swept away with happiness!
Eventually she could not help telling Walter something about it. She informed him that her conscience was growing stronger day by day. But despite his admiration for Meingast, the suspected instiga- tor of this deed, Walter answered angrily: "It's probably lucky for us that Ulrich doesn't seem able to get the permit! "
Clarisse's lips merely quivered slightly, betraying sympathy for his ignorance and stubbornness.
"What is it you want from this criminal, anyway, who has nothing whatever to do with any of us? " Walter demanded manfully.
"It'll come to me when I get there! " she said.
"I should think you ought to know it already," Walter asserted. His little wife smiled the way she always did when she was about to
hurt him to the quick. But then she merely said: ''I'm going to do something. "
"Clarisse! " Walter remonstrated firmly. "You may not do anything without my permission. I am your lawful husband and guardian. "
This tone was new to her. She turned away and took a few steps in confusion.
"Clarisse! " Walter called after her, getting up to follow her. "I in- tend to take steps to deal with the insanity that's going around in this house! "
Now she realized that the healing power ofher resolve was already
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manifesting itself, even in the strengthening of Walter's character. She turned on her heel: "What steps? " she asked, and a flash oflight- ning from her narrowed eyes struck into the moist, wide-open brown ofhis.
"Now look," he said to mollify her, backing away a little, in sur- prise at her demanding such a concrete response. 'We've all got this in our system, this intellectual taste for the unhealthy, the prob- lematic, for making our flesh creep; every thinking person has it; but-"
"But we let the philistines have their way! " Clarisse interrupted triumphantly. Now she advanced on him without taking her eyes off him; felt how a sense ofher own healing power held him in its strong embrace and overpowered him. Her heart was filled with an odd and inexpressible joy.
"But we won't make such a to-do over it," Walter muttered sulkily, finishing his sentence. Behind him, at the hem of his jacket, he felt an obstacle; reaching backward, he identified it as the edge of one of those light, thin-legged little tables they had, which suddenly seemed spooky to him; he realized that if he kept backing away he would make it slide backward, which would be ludicrous. So he resisted the sudden desire to get far away from this struggle, to some dark-green meadow under blossoming fruit trees, among people whose healthy cheerfulness would wash his wounds clean. It was a quiet, stout wish, graced with women hanging on his words and paying their toll of grateful admiration. At the moment Clarisse came up close he actu- ally felt rudely molested, in a nightmarish way. But to his surprise Clarisse did not say: ''You're a coward! " Instead, she said: 'Walter? Why are we unhappy? "
At the sound ofher appealing, clairvoyant voice he felt that happi- ness with any other woman could never take the place of his unhap- piness with Clarisse. 'W e have to be! " he answered with an equally noble upsurge.
"No, we shouldn't have to be," she said obligingly. She let her head droop to one side, trying to find a way to convince him. It didn't matter what it was: They stood there facing each other like a day without an evening, pouring out its fire hour after hour without lessening.
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"You'll have to admit," she said finally, at once shyly and stub- bornly, "that really great crimes come about not because somebody commits them but because we let them happen. "
Now Walter knew, ofcourse, what was coming, and felt a shock of disappointment.
"Oh God! " he cried out impatiently. "I know as well as you do that far more people's lives are ruined by indifference and by the ease with which most of us today can square our conscience than by the evil intentions of isolated individuals. And of course it's admirable that you're now going to say that this is why we must all quicken our conscience and carefully weigh in advance every step we take. "
Clarisse interrupted him by opening her mouth, but thought bet- ter of it and did not respond.
"Of course I think about poverty too, and hunger, and all the cor- ruption that's allowed to go on in this world, or mines caving in be- cause the management economized on safety measures," Walter went on in a deflated tone, "and I've agreed with you about it al- ready. "
"But in that case two lovers mustn't love each other either, as long as they're not in a state of 'pure happiness,' " Clarisse said. "And the world will never improve until there are such lovers! "
Walter struck his hands together. "Don't you understand how un- fair to life such great, dazzling, uncompromising demands are? " he exclaimed. "And it's the same with this Moosbrugger, who keeps popping into your head like something on a turntable. Of course you're right to claim that no stone should be left untumed as long as such miserable human creatures are simply killed off because society doesn't know what to do with them. But of course it's even more right that the healthy, normal conscience is justified in simply refus- ing to bother with such overrefined scruples. A healthy way of think- ing is recognizable, in fact, by certain signs; one can't prove it but has to have it in one's blood. "
"In your blood," Clarisse replied," 'of course' always means 'of course not. ' "
Nettled, Walter shook his head to show that he would not answer this. He was fed up with always being the one to warn that a diet of one-sided ideas was unhealthy; in the long run, it was probably also making him unsure of himself.
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But Clarisse read his thoughts with that nervous sensitivity that never failed to amaze him. With her head high, she jumped over all the intermediate stages and landed on his main point with the sub- dued but intense question: "Can you imagine Jesus as boss of a coal mine? '' He could see in her face that by "Jesus" she really meant him, through one of those exaggerations in which love is indistin- guishable from madness. He waved this off with a gesture at once indignant and discouraged. "Not so direct, Clarisse! " he pleaded. "Such things mustn't be said so directly! "
"Yes, they must," she answered. "It's the only way! If we don't have the strength to save him, we will never have the strength to save ourselves! "
"And what difference will it make if they do string him up? " Wal- ter burst out. The brutality of it made him believe he felt the liberat- ing taste of life itself on his tongue, gloriously blended with the taste of death and the doom of their entanglement with it that Clarisse was conjuring up with her hints.
Clarisse looked at him expectantly. But Walter said nothing more, either from relief after his outburst or from indecision. And like someone forced to play an unbeatable final trump card, she said: ''I've had a sign! "
"But that's just one ofyour fantasies! " Walter shouted at the ceil- ing, which represented heaven. But with those last airy words Cla- risse had ended their tete-a-tete, giving him no chance to say anything more.
Yet he saw her only a short while later talking eagerly with Mein- gast, who was rightly troubled by a feeling that they were being watched but was too nearsighted to be sure of it. Walter was not re- ally participating in the gardening being done so zestfully by his visit- ing brother-in-law, Siegmund, who with rolled-up shirtsleeves was kneeling in a furrow doing something or other that Walter had in- sisted must be done in the spring if one wanted to be a human being and not a bookmark in the pages of a gardening book. Instead of gar- dening, Walter was sneaking glances at the pair talking in the far cor- ner of the open kitchen garden.
Not that he suspected anything untoward in the corner he was ob- serving. Still, his hands felt unnaturally cold in the spring air; his legs were cold too, what with the wet places on his trousers from occa-
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sionally kneeling to give Siegmund instructions. He took a high tone with his brother-in-law, the way weak, downtrodden people will whenever they get a chance to work off their frustrations on some- one. He knew that Siegmund, who had taken it into his head to re- vere Walter, would not be easily shaken in his loyalty. But this did not prevent him from feeling a veritable after-sunset loneliness, a graveyard chill, as he watched Clarisse; she never cast a glance in his direction but was all eyes for Meingast, hanging on the Master's words. Moreover, Walter actually took a certain pride in this. Ever since Meingast had come to stay in his house, he was just as proud of the chasms that suddenly opened up in it as he was anxious to cover them up again. From his standing height he had dispatched to the kneeling Siegmund the words: "Ofcourse we all feel and are familiar with a certain hankering for the morbid and problematic! " He was no sneaking coward. In the short time since Clarisse had called him a philistine for saying the same thing to her, he had formulated a new phrase: "life's petty dishonesty. "
"A little dishonesty is good, like sweet or sour," he now instructed his brother-in-law, "but we are obligated to refine it in ourselves to the point where it would do credit to a healthy life! What I mean by a little dishonesty," he went on, "is as much the nostalgic flirting with death that seizes us when we listen to Tristan as the secret fascina- tion that's in most sex crimes, even though we don't succumb to it. For there's something dishonest and antihuman, you see, both in ele- mental life when it overpowers us with want and disease, and in exag- gerated scruples of mind and conscience trying to do violence to life. Everything that tries to overstep the limits set for us is dishonest! Mysticism is just as dishonest as the conceit that nature can be re- duced to a mathematical formula! And the plan to visit Moosbrugger is just as dishonest as"-here Walter paused for a moment-"as if you were to invoke God at a patient's bedside! "
There was certainly something in what he had said, and he had even managed to take Siegmund by surprise with his appeal to the physician's professional and spontaneous humanitarianism, to make him see Clarisse's scheme and her overwrought motivation as an im- permissible overstepping of bounds. However, Walter was a genius compared with Siegmund, as may be seen in Walter's healthy out- look having led him to confess such ideas as these, while his brother-
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in-law's even healthier outlook manifested itself in his dogged si- lence in the face of such dubious subject matter. Siegmund patted the soil with his fingers while tilting his head now to one side, now to the other, without opening his lips, as ifhe were trying to pour some- thing out of a test tube, or then again, as if he had just heard enough with that ear. And when Walter had finished there was a fearfully profound silence, in which Walter now heard a statement that Cla- risse must have called out to him once, for without being as vivid as a hallucination, it was as if the hollow space were punctuated by these words: "Nietzsche and Christ both perished of their incomplete- ness! " Somehow, in some uncanny fashion reminiscent of the "coal mine boss," he felt flattered.
It was a strange position that he, health personified, should be standing here in the cool garden between a man he regarded condescendingly and two unnaturally overheated people just out of earshot, whose mute gesticulations he watched with a superior air and yet with longing. For Clarisse was the slightly dishonest element his own health needed to keep from flagging, and a secret voice told him that Meingast was at this very moment en- gaged in immeasurably increasing the permissible limits of this dis- honesty. He admired Meingast as an obscure relation admires a famous one, and seeing Clarisse whispering conspiratorially with him aroused his envy more than his jealousy-a feeling, that is, that ate into him even more deeply than jealousy would have, and yet it was also somehow uplifting; the consciousness of his own dignity forbade him to get angry or to go over there and disturb them; in view oftheir agitation he felt himself superior, and from all this arose, he did not know how, some vague, mongrel notion, spawned outside all logic, that the two of them over there were in some reckless and reprehen- sible fashion invoking God.
If such a curiously mixed state of mind must be called thinking, it was of a kind that cannot possibly be put into words, because the chemistry of its darkness is instantly ruined by the luminous influ- ence of language. Besides, as his remark to Siegmund had shown, Walter did not associate belief of any sort with the word "God," and when the word occurred to him it generated an abashed void around itself. And so it happened that the first thing Walter said to his brother-in-law, after a long silence, had nothing to do with this. ''You're an idiot to think you have no right to talk her out of this visit
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in the strongest possible terms," he said bitterly. "What are you a doctor for? "
Siegmund wasn't in the least offended. "You're the one who will have to have it out with her," he replied, glancing up calmly before turning back to what he was doing.
Walter sighed, then started over again. "Clarisse is an extraordi- nary person, of course. I can understand her very well. I'll even admit that she's not all wrong to be as austere in her views as she is. Just thinking ofthe poverty, hunger, misery ofevery kind the world is so full of, the disasters in coal mines, for instance, because the man- agement wouldn't spend enough on timbering . . . "
Siegmund gave no sign that he was giving it any thought.
'Well, she does! " Walter continued sternly. "And I think it's won- derful of her. The rest of us get ourselves a good conscience much too easily. And she's better than we are for insisting that we all ought to change and have a more active conscience, the kind with no limit to it, ever. But what I'm asking you is whether this isn't bound to lead to a pathological state of moral scrupulousness, if it isn't something like that already. You must have an opinion! "
Siegmund responded to this pressing challenge by propping him- self up on one knee and giving his brother-in-law a searching look. "Crazy! " he said. "But not, strictly speaking, in a medical sense. "
"And what do you say," Walter continued, forgetting his superior stance, "to her claim that she's being sent signs? "
"She says she's being sent signs? " Siegmund said dubiously.
"Signs, I tell you. That crazy killer, for instance. And that crazy swine outside our window the other day! "
"A swine? "
"No, a kind of exhibitionist. "
"I see," Siegmund said, turning it over in his mind. "You're sent
signs too, when you find something to paint. She just expresses her- self in a more high-strung way than you," he concluded.
"And what about her claim that she has to take these people's sins on herself, and yours and mine as well, and I don't know whose else's? " Walter pressed him.
Siegmund had risen to his feet and was brushing the dirt from his hands. "She feels oppressed by sin, does she? " he asked, again super-
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fluously, politely agreeing as if glad to be able at last to support his brother-in-law. "That's a symptom! "
"That's a symptom? " Walter echoed, crushed.
"Fixed ideas about sin are a symptom," Siegmund affirmed with the detachment of a professional.
"But it's like this," Walter added, instantly appealing against the judgment he had just been suing for: "You must first ask yourself: Does sin exist? Of course it does. But in that case there's also a fixed idea of sin that is no delusion. You might not understand that, be- cause it's beyond empiricism! It's a human being's aggrieved sense of responsibility toward a higher life! "
"But she insists she's receiving signs? " Siegmund persisted.
"But you just said that signs are sent to me too! " Walter cried. "And I can tell you there are times when I would like to go down on my knees and beg fate to leave me in peace; but it keeps sending signs, and it sends the most inspiring signs through Clarisse! " Then he continued more calmly: "She now claims, for instance, that this man Moosbrugger represents her and me in our 'sinful body' and has been sent to us as a warning; but it can be understood as a symbol of our neglecting the higher possibilities of our lives, our 'astral body,' as it were. Years ago, when Meingast left u s - "
"But an obsession with sin is a symptom of specific disorders," Siegmund reminded him, with the relentless equanimity of the expert.
"Symptoms, that's all you know! " Walter said in animated defense of his Clarisse. "Anything beyond that is outside your experience! But perhaps this superstition, which regards everything that doesn't accord with the most pedestrian experience as a disorder, is itself the true sin and sinful form of our life. Clarisse demands spiritual action against this! Many years ago, when Meingast left and we . . . " He thought of how he and Clarisse had "taken Meingast's sins upon themselves," but realized it was hopeless to try telling Siegmund the process of a spiritual awakening, so he ended vaguely by saying: "Anyway, I don't suppose you'll deny that there have always been people who have, so to speak, drawn humanity's sins on themselves or even concentrated them in themselves. "
His brother-in-law looked at him complacently. "There you are! "
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he said amiably. "You yourself prove just what I've been saying. That she regards herself as oppressed by sin is a characteristic attitude of certain disorders. But there are also untypical modes of behavior in life: I never claimed anything more. "
"And the exaggerated stringency with which she carries things out? " Walter asked after a while, with a sigh. "Surely to be so rigor- ous can hardly be called normal? "
Clarisse, meanwhile, was having an important conversation with Meingast.
"You've said," she reminded him, "that the kind of people who pride themselves on understanding and explaining the world will never change anything in it, isn't that so? "
"Yes," the Master replied. "'True' and 'false' are the evasions of people who never want to arrive at a decision. Truth is something without end. "
"So that's why you said one must have the courage to choose be- tween 'worth' and 'worthless'? " she pressed on.
"Right," the Master said, somewhat bored.
"And then there's your marvelously contemptuous formulation," Clarisse cried, "that in modem life people only do what is happening anyway. "
Meingast stopped and looked down; one might have said that he was either inclining an ear or studying a pebble lying before him on the path, slightly to the right. But Clarisse did not go on proffering honeyed praises; she, too, had now bent her head, so that her chin almost rested in the hollow of her neck, and her gaze bored into the ground between the tips of Meingast's boots. A gentle flush rose to her pale cheeks as, cautiously lowering her voice, she continued:
"You said all sexuality was nothing but goatish caperings. "
"Yes, I did say that in a particular context. Whatever our age lacks in willpower it expends, apart from its so-called scientific endeavors, in sexuality. "
After some hesitation, Clarisse said: "I have plenty of willpower myself, but Walter is for capering. "
"What's really the matter between you two? " the Master asked with some curiosity, but almost immediately added in a tone of dis- gust: "I can guess, I suppose. "
They were standing in a comer of the treeless garden that lay
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under the full spring sun, almost diametrically opposite the comer where Siegmund was squatting on the ground with Walter standing over and haranguing him. The garden formed a rectangle parallel with and against the long wall of the house, with a gravel path run- ning around its vegetable and flower beds, and two others forming a bright cross on the still-bare ground in the middle. Warily glancing in the direction ofthe two men, Clarisse replied: "Perhaps he can't help it; you see, I attract Walter in a way that's not quite right. "
"I can imagine," the Master answered, this time with a sympa- thetic look. "There is something boyish about you. "
At this praise Clarisse felt happiness bouncing through her veins like hailstones. "Did you notice before," she eagerly asked him, "that I can change clothes faster than a man? ''
A blank expression came over the philosopher's benevolently seamed face. Clarisse giggled. "That's a double word," she explained. "There are others too: sex murder, for instance. "
The Master probably thought it would be wise not to show sur- prise at anything. "Oh yes, I know," he replied. "You did say once that to satisfy desire in the usual embrace is a kind of sex murder. " But what did she mean by "changing," he wanted to know.
"To offer no resistance is murder," Clarisse explained with the speed of someone going through one's paces on slippery ground and losing one's footing through overagility.
"Now you've really lost me," Meingast admitted. "You must be talking about that fellow the carpenter again. What is it you want from him? ''
Clarisse moodily scraped the gravel with the tip of her shoe. "It's all part of the same thing," she said. And suddenly she looked up at the Master. "I think Walter should learn to deny me," she said in an abruptly cut-off sentence.
"I can't judge that," Meingast remarked, after waiting in vain for her to go on. "But certainly radical solutions are always best. "
He said this only to cover all contingencies. But Clarisse dropped her head again so that her gaze burrowed somewhere in Meingast's suit, and after a while her hand reached slowly for his forearm. She suddenly had an uncontrollable impulse to take hold of that hard, lean arm under the broad sleeve and touch the Master, who was pre- tending to have forgotten all those illuminating things he had said
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about the carpenter. While this was happening she was dominated by the feeling that she was pushing a part of herself over to him, and in the slowness with which her hand disappeared inside his sleeve, in this flooding slowness, there eddied fragments of a mysterious lust, which derived from her perception that the Master was keeping still and letting her touch him.
But Meingast for some reason stared aghast at the hand clutching his arm this way and creeping up it like some many-legged creature mounting its female. Under the little woman's lowered eyelids he caught a flash ofsomething peculiar and realized the dubious charac- ter of what was taking place, although he was moved by her doing it so publicly.
"Come! " he said gently, removing her hand from his arm. 'W e're too conspicuous, standing here like this; let's go on walking. "
As they strolled up and down the path, Clarisse said: "I can dress quickly, faster than a man ifI have to. Clothes come flying onto my body when I'm-what shall I call it? -when I'm like that! Maybe it's a kind ofelectricity. I attract things that belong to me. But it's usually a sinister attraction. "
Meingast smiled at her puns, which he still did not understand, and fished haphazardly in his mind for an impressive retort. "So you put on your clothes like a hero his destiny? " he responded.
To his surprise, Clarisse stopped short and cried: "Yes, that's it ex- actly! Whoever lives like this feels it even in a dress, shoes, knife and fork! "
"There's some truth in that," the Master confirmed her obscurely credible assertion. Then he asked point-blank: "But how do you do it with Walter, actually? "
Clarisse failed to understand. She looked at him, and suddenly saw in his eyes yellow clouds that seemed to be driven on a desert wind.
"You said," Meingast went on with some reluctance, "that you at- tract him in a way that 'isn't right. ' You mean, I suppose, not right for a woman? How do you mean? Are you frigid with men? ''
Clarisse did not know the word.
"Being frigid," the Master explained, "is when a woman is unable to enjoy the act oflove with men. "
"But I only know Walter," Clarisse objected timidly.
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"Even so, it does seem a fair assumption, after what you've been telling me. "
Clarisse was nonplussed. She had to think about it. She didn't know. "Me? But I'm not supposed to---I'm the one who must put a stop to it! " she said. "I can't permit it to happen! "
"You don't say? " The Master's laugh was vulgar. "You have to pre- vent yourself from feeling anything? Or prevent Walter from getting satisfaction? ''
Clarisse blushed. But now she understood more clearly what she had to say. "When you give in, everything gets swamped in lust," she replied seriously. "I won't let a man's lust leave him and become my lust. That's why I've attracted men ever since I was a little girl. There's something wrong with the lust of men. "
For various reasons Meingast preferred not to go into that.
"Do you have that much self-control? '' he asked.
'Well, yes and no," Clarisse said candidly. "But I told you, ifI let
him have his way, I'd be a sex murderer! " Warming to her subject, she went on: "My woman friends say they 'pass out' in the arms of a man. I don't know what that is. I've never passed out in a man's arms. But I do know what it's like to 'pass out' without being in a man's arms. You must know about that too; after all, you did say that the world is too devoid ofillusions . . . ! "
Meingast waved this offwith a gesture, as ifto say she had misun- derstood him. But now it was all too clear to her.
'When you say, for instance, that one must decide against the lesser value for the sake of the higher value," she cried, "it means that there's a life in an immense and boundless ecstasy! Not sexual ecstasy but the ecstasy of genius! Against which Walter would com- mit treason if I don't prevent him! "
Meingast shook his head. Denial filled him on hearing this altered and impassioned version of his words; it was a startled, almost fright- ened denial, but ofall the things it prompted him to say, he chose the most superficial: "But who knows whether he could do anything else? "
Clarisse stopped, as if rooted to the ground by a bolt of lightning. "He must! " she cried. "You yourself taught us that! "
"So I did," the Master granted reluctantly, trying in vain to get her
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to keep walking by setting an example. "But what do you really want? "
"There was nothing I wanted before you came, don't you see? " Clarisse said softly. "But it's such an awful life, to take nothing more than the little bit ofsexual pleasure out ofthe vast ocean ofthe possi- ble joys in life! So now I want something. "
"That's just what I am asking you about,'' Meingast prompted.
