No More Learning

"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.
"One has to be here for a purpose. One has to be 'good' for some- thing. Otherwise everything is horribly confused," Clarisse an- swered.
"Is what you want connected with Moosbrugger? " Meingast probed.
"That's hard to say. We'll have to see what comes of it," Clarisse replied. Then she said thoughtfully: ''I'm going to abduct him. I'm going to create a scandal! " As she said this, her expression took on an air of mystery. ''I've been watching you! " she said suddenly. "You have strange people coming to see you. You invite them when you think we're not home. Boys and young men! You don't talk about what they want! " Meingast stared at her, speechless. "You're work- ing up to something,'' Clarisse went on, "you're getting something going! But I,'' she uttered in a forceful whisper, ''I'm also strong enough to have several different friends at the same time. I've gained a man's character and a man's responsibilities. living with Walter, I've learned masculine feelings! " Again her hand groped for Mein- gast's arm; it was evident she was unaware of what she was doing. Her fingers came out of her sleeve curved like claws. ''I'm two peo- ple in one,'' she whispered, "you must know that! But it's not easy. You're right that one mustn't be afraid to use force in a case like this! "
Meingast was still staring at her in embarrassment. He had never known her in such a state. The import of her words was incompre- hensible. For Clarisse herself at the moment, the concept of being two people in one was self-evident, but Meingast wondered whether she had guessed something of his secret life and was alluding to that. There was nothing much to guess at yet; he had only recently begun to perceive a shift in his feelings that accorded with his male-ori- ented philosophy, and begun to surround himself with young men who meant more to him than disciples. But that might have been
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why he had changed his residence and come here, where he felt safe from observation; he had never thought of such a possibility, and this little person, who had turned uncanny, was apparently capable of guessing what was going on in him. Somehow more and more of her arm was emerging from the sleeve of her dress without reducing the distance between the two bodies it connected, and this bare, skinny forearm, together with its attached hand, which was clutching Mein- gast, seemed at this moment to have such an unusual shape that ev- erything in the man's imagination that had hitherto been distinct became wildly muddled.
But Clarisse no longer came out with what she had been just about to say, even though it was perfectly clear inside her. The double words were signs, scattered throughout the language like snapped- off twigs or leaves strewn on the ground, to mark a secret path. "Sex murder" and "changing" and even "quick" and many other words- perhaps all others-exhibited double meanings, one ofwhich was se- cret and private. But a double language means a double life. Ordinary language is evidently that of sin, the secret one that of the astral body. "Quick," for instance, in its sinful form mea. nt ordinary, everyday, tiring haste, while in its joyous form everything flew off it in joyful leaps and bounds. But then the joyous form can also be called the form of energy or of innocence, while the sinful form can be called all the names having to do with the depression, dullness, and irresolution of ordinary life. There were these amazing connec- tions between the self and things, so that something one did had an effect where one would never have expected it; and the less Clarisse could express all this, the more intensely the words kept coming in- side her, too fast for her to gather them in. But for quite some time she had been convinced of one thing: the duty, the privilege, the mis- sion of whatever it is we call conscience, illusion, will, is to find the vital form, the light form. This is the one where nothing is accidental, where there is no room for wavering, where happiness and compul- sion coincide. Other people have called this "living authentically" and spoken of the "intelligible character"; they have referred to in- stinct as innocence and to the intellect as sin. Clarisse could not think in these terms, but she had made the discovery that one could set something in motion, and then sometimes parts of the astral body would attach themselves to it of their own accord and in this fashion
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become embodied in it. For reasons primarily rooted in Walter's hy- persensitive inaction, but also because of heroic aspirations she never had the means of satisfying, she had been led to think that by taking forceful action one could set up a memorial to oneself in ad- vance, and the memorial would then draw one into itself. So she was not at all clear about what she intended to do with Moosbrugger, and could not answer Meingast's question.
Nor did she want to. While Walter had forbidden her to say that the Master was about to undergo another transformation, there was no doubt that his spirit was moving toward secret preparations for some action, she did not know what, but one which could be as mag- nificent as his spirit was. He was therefore bound to understand her, even ifhe pretended not to. The less she said, the more she showed him how much she knew. She also had a right to take hold of him, and he could not forbid it. Thus he accorded recognition to her un- dertaking and she entered into his and took part in it. This, too, was a kind of being-two-people-in-one, and so forceful that she could hardly grasp it. All her strength, more than she could know she had, was flowing through her arm in an inexhaustible stream from her to her mysterious friend, draining the very marrow from her bones and leaving her faint with sensations surpassing any of those from making love. She could do nothing but look at her hand, smiling, or alter- nately look into his face. Meingast, too, was doing nothing but gaze now at her, now at her hand.
All at once, something happened that at first took Clarisse by sur- prise and then threw her into a whirl of bacchantic ecstasy:
Meingast had been trying to keep a superior smile fixed on his face in order not to betray his uncertainty. But this uncertainty was grow- ing from moment to moment, constantly reborn from something ap- parently incomprehensible. For every act undertaken with doubts is preceded by a briefspan ofweakness, corresponding to the moments of remorse after the thing is done, though in the normal course of events it may barely be apparent. The convictions and vivid illusions that protect and justify the completed act have not yet been fully formed and are still wavering in the mounting tide of passion, vague and formless as they will probably be when they tremble and collapse afterward in the outgoing tide of passionate remorse. It was in just this state of his intentions that Meingast had been surprised. It was
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doubly painful for him because of the past and because of the regard in which he was now held by Walter and Clarisse, and then, every intense excitement changes the sense of one's image of reality so that it can rise to new heights. His own frightened state made Clarisse frightening to Meingast, and the failure of his efforts to get back to sober reality only increased his dismay. So instead of projecting su- perior strength, the smile on his face stiffened from one minute to the next; indeed, it became a sort of floating stiffness, which ended by floating away stiffiy, as i f on stilts. At this moment the Master was behaving no differently than a large dog facing some much smaller creature he does not dare to attack, like a caterpillar, toad, or snake; he reared up higher and higher on his long legs, drew back his lips and arched his back, and found himself suddenly swept away by the currents of discomfort from the place where they had their source, without being able to conceal his flight by any word or gesture.
Clarisse did not let go of him. As he took his first, hesitant steps, her clinging might have been taken for ingenuous eagerness, but after that he was dragging her along with him while barely finding the necessaty words to explain that he was in a hurry to get back to his room and work. It was only in the front hall that he managed to shake her off completely; up till then he had been driven only by his urge to escape, paying no attention to what Clarisse was saying and choked by his caution not to attract the attention of Walter and Sieg- mund. Walter had actually been able to guess at the general pattern of what was going on. He could see that Clarisse was passionately demanding something that Meingast was refusing her, and jealousy bored into his breast like a double-threaded screw. For although he suffered agonies at the thought that Clarisse was offering her favors to their friend, he was even more furious at the insult of seeing her apparently disdained. If that feeling were taken to its logical conclu- sion, he would have to force Meingast to take Clarisse, only to be plunged into despair by the sweep of that same impulse. He felt deeply sad and heroically excited. It was insufferable, with Clarisse poised on the razor's edge of her destiny, that he should have to lis- ten to Siegmund asking whether the seedlings should be planted looselyinthesoilorifithadtobepattedfirmlyaroundthem. Hehad to say something, and felt like a piano in the fraction of a second between the moment when the ten-fingered crash of an incredible
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blow hits it and the cry of pain. Light was in his throat, words that would surely put a wholly new and different face on everything. Yet all he managed to say was something quite different from what he expected. "I won't have it! " he said, again and again, more to the garden than to Siegmund.
But it turned out that Siegmund, intent as he had seemed to be on the seedlings and on pushing the soil this way and that, had also no- ticed what was going on and even given it some thought. For now he rose to his feet, brushed the dirt from his knees, and gave his brother-in-law some advice.
"If you feel she's going too far, you'll have to give her something else to think about," he said in a tone that implied he had of course been thinking all this time, with a doctor's sense of responsibility, about everything Walter had confided in him.
"And how am I to do that? " Walter asked, disconcerted.
"Like any man! " Siegmund said. "All a woman's fuss and fury is to be cured in one place, to quote Mephistopheles more or less! "
Siegmund put up with a great deal from Walter. Life is full of such relationships, in which one partner keeps the upper hand and con- stantly suppresses the other, who never rebels. In fact, and in accord- ance with Siegmund's own convictions, this is the way normal, healthy life is. The world would probably have come to an end in the Bronze Age if everyone had stood up for himself to the last drop of his blood. Instead, the weaker have always moved away and looked around for neighbors they in their tum could push around; the ma- jority of human relationships follow this model to this day, and with time these things take care of themselves.
In his family circle, where Walter passed for a genius, Siegmund had always been treated as a bit of a blockhead; he had accepted it, and even today would have been the one who yielded and did hom- age wherever it was a matter of precedence in the family hierarchy. That old hierarchical structure had ceased to matter years ago, com- pared with the new status each of them had acquired, and precisely for that reason it could be left undisturbed. Siegmund not only had a very respectable practice as a physician-and the doctor's power, un- like that of the bureaucrat, is not imposed from above but is owed to his personal ability; people come to him for help and submit to him willingly-but also had a wealthy wife, who had presented him
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within a brief period with herself and three children, and to whom he was unfaithful with other women, not often but regularly, whenever it pleased him. So he was certainly in a position, if he chose, to give Walter confident and reliable advice.
At this moment Clarisse came back out of the house. She no lon- ger remembered what had been said during their tempestuous rush indoors. She realized that the Master had been trying to get away from her, but the memory ofit had lost its details, had folded up and closed. Something had happened! With this one notion in her head, Clarisse felt like someone emerging from a thunderstorm, still charged from head to toe with sensual energy. In front of her, a few yards beyond the bottom of the small flight of stone steps she had come out by, she saw a shiny blackbird with a flame-colored beak, dining on a fat caterpillar. There was an immense energy in the crea- ture, or in the two contrasting colors. One could not say that Clarisse was thinking anything about it; it was more like a response coming from behind and all around her. The blackbird was a sinful body in the act of committing violence. The caterpillar the sinful form of a butterfly. Fate had placed the two creatures in her path, as a sign that she must act. One could see how the blackbird assumed the caterpil- lar's sins through its flaming orange-red beak. Wasn't the bird a "black genie"? Just as the dove is the "white spirit"?