There's
something
wrong with the lust of men.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
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"? Weren't these signs linked in a chain? The exhibitionist with the carpenter, with the Master's flight . . . ? Not one of these notions was clearly formed in her; they lodged invisibly in the walls of the house, summoned but still keeping their answer to themselves. But what Clarisse really felt as she stepped out on the stairs and saw the bird that was eating the caterpillar was an ineffable correspondence of inner and outer happenings.
She conveyed it in some curious way to Walter. The impression he received instantly corresponded with what he had called "invoking God"; there was no mistaking it this time. He could not make out what was going on inside Clarisse, she was too far away, but there was something in her bearing that was not happenstance, as she stood facing the world into which the little flight of stairs descended like steps leading down to a swimming pool. It was something exalted. It was not the attitude of ordinary life. And suddenly he understood; this was what Clarisse meant when she said: "It's not by chance that
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this man is under my window! " Gazing at his wife, he himself felt how the pressure of strange forces came flooding in to fill appear- ances. In the fact that he was standing here and Clarisse there, at such an angle to him that he had to tum his eyes away from the direc- tion they had automatically taken, along the length of the garden, in order to see her clearly-even in this simple juxtaposition, the mute emphasis of life suddenly outweighed natural contingency. Out of the fullness of images thrusting themselves upon the eye something geometrically linear and extraordinary reared up. This must be how it could happen that Clarisse found a meaning in almost empty cor- relations, such as the circumstance of one man stopping under her window while another was a carpenter. Events seemed to have a way of arranging themselves that was different from the usual pattern, as elements in some strange entity that revealed them in unexpected aspects, and because it brought these aspects out from their obscure hiding places, it justified Clarisse's claim that it was she herself who was attracting events toward herself. It was hard to express this with- out sounding fanciful, but then it occurred to Walter that it came closest to something he knew very well-what happens when you paint a picture. A painting, too, has its own inexplicable way of ex- cluding every color or line not in accord with its basic form, style, and palette of colors, while on the other hand it extracts from the painter's hand whatever it needs, thanks to the laws of genius, which are not the same as the usual laws of nature. At this point he no lon- ger had in him any of that easy, healthy self-assurance which scruti- nizes life's excrescences for anything that might come in handy and which he had been extolling only a little while ago; what he felt was more the misery of a little boy too timid to join in a game.
But Siegmund was not the man to let go of something so easily once he had taken it up. "Clarisse is high-strung," he declared. "She's always been ready to run her head through a wall, and now she's got it stuck in one. You'll have to get a good grip on her, even if she resists you. "
"You doctors don't have a clue about human psychology! " Walter cried. He looked for a second point of attack and found it. "You talk of'signs,' "he went on, his irritation overlaid by his pleasure in being able to speak about Clarisse, "and you carefully examine when signs indicate a disorder and when they don't, but I tell you this: the true
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human condition is the one in which everything is a sign! But every- thing! You may be able to look truth in the eye, but truth will never look you in the eye; this divine, uncertain feeling is something you'll never know! "
"You're obviously both crazy," Siegmund remarked dryly.
"Yes, of course we are! " Walter cried out. "You're not a creative man, after all; you've never learned what it means to 'express one- self,' which means first of all, for an artist, to understand something. The expression we impart to things is what develops our ability to perceive them aright. I can only understand what I want, or someone else wants, by carrying it out! This is our living experience, as distinct from your dead experience! Of course you'll say it's paradoxical, a confusion of cause and effect; you and your medical causality! "
But Siegmund did not say this; he merely reiterated doggedly: "It will definitely be for her own good ifyou won't put up with too much. Excitable people need a certain amount of strictness. "
"And when I play the piano at the open window," Walter asked, as if he had not heard his brother-in-law's warning, "what am I doing? People are passing by, some of them young girls, perhaps anyone who feels like it stops to listen; I play for young lovers and lonely old people. Clever people, stupid people. I'm not giving them something to think about. What I'm playing isn't rational information. I'm giv- ing them myself. I sit invisible in my room and give them signs: just a few notes, and it's their life, and it's my life. You could certainly call this crazy too . . . ! " Suddenly he fell silent. That feeling: "Oh, I could tell all of you a thing or two! "-that basic ambitious urge of every inhabitant of earth who feels the need to communicate something but has no more than an average creative capacity-had fallen to pieces. Every time Walter sat in the soft emptiness of the room be- hind his open window and released his music into the air with the proud awareness of the artist giving happiness to unknown thou- sands, this feeling was like an open umbrella, and the instant he stopped playing, it was like a sloppily closed one. All the airiness was gone, it was as if everything that had happened had not happened, and all he could say was that art had lost its connection to the people and everything was no good.
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"? Weren't these signs linked in a chain? The exhibitionist with the carpenter, with the Master's flight . . . ? Not one of these notions was clearly formed in her; they lodged invisibly in the walls of the house, summoned but still keeping their answer to themselves. But what Clarisse really felt as she stepped out on the stairs and saw the bird that was eating the caterpillar was an ineffable correspondence of inner and outer happenings.
She conveyed it in some curious way to Walter. The impression he received instantly corresponded with what he had called "invoking God"; there was no mistaking it this time. He could not make out what was going on inside Clarisse, she was too far away, but there was something in her bearing that was not happenstance, as she stood facing the world into which the little flight of stairs descended like steps leading down to a swimming pool. It was something exalted. It was not the attitude of ordinary life. And suddenly he understood; this was what Clarisse meant when she said: "It's not by chance that
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this man is under my window! " Gazing at his wife, he himself felt how the pressure of strange forces came flooding in to fill appear- ances. In the fact that he was standing here and Clarisse there, at such an angle to him that he had to tum his eyes away from the direc- tion they had automatically taken, along the length of the garden, in order to see her clearly-even in this simple juxtaposition, the mute emphasis of life suddenly outweighed natural contingency. Out of the fullness of images thrusting themselves upon the eye something geometrically linear and extraordinary reared up. This must be how it could happen that Clarisse found a meaning in almost empty cor- relations, such as the circumstance of one man stopping under her window while another was a carpenter. Events seemed to have a way of arranging themselves that was different from the usual pattern, as elements in some strange entity that revealed them in unexpected aspects, and because it brought these aspects out from their obscure hiding places, it justified Clarisse's claim that it was she herself who was attracting events toward herself. It was hard to express this with- out sounding fanciful, but then it occurred to Walter that it came closest to something he knew very well-what happens when you paint a picture. A painting, too, has its own inexplicable way of ex- cluding every color or line not in accord with its basic form, style, and palette of colors, while on the other hand it extracts from the painter's hand whatever it needs, thanks to the laws of genius, which are not the same as the usual laws of nature. At this point he no lon- ger had in him any of that easy, healthy self-assurance which scruti- nizes life's excrescences for anything that might come in handy and which he had been extolling only a little while ago; what he felt was more the misery of a little boy too timid to join in a game.
But Siegmund was not the man to let go of something so easily once he had taken it up. "Clarisse is high-strung," he declared. "She's always been ready to run her head through a wall, and now she's got it stuck in one. You'll have to get a good grip on her, even if she resists you. "
"You doctors don't have a clue about human psychology! " Walter cried. He looked for a second point of attack and found it. "You talk of'signs,' "he went on, his irritation overlaid by his pleasure in being able to speak about Clarisse, "and you carefully examine when signs indicate a disorder and when they don't, but I tell you this: the true
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human condition is the one in which everything is a sign! But every- thing! You may be able to look truth in the eye, but truth will never look you in the eye; this divine, uncertain feeling is something you'll never know! "
"You're obviously both crazy," Siegmund remarked dryly.
"Yes, of course we are! " Walter cried out. "You're not a creative man, after all; you've never learned what it means to 'express one- self,' which means first of all, for an artist, to understand something. The expression we impart to things is what develops our ability to perceive them aright. I can only understand what I want, or someone else wants, by carrying it out! This is our living experience, as distinct from your dead experience! Of course you'll say it's paradoxical, a confusion of cause and effect; you and your medical causality! "
But Siegmund did not say this; he merely reiterated doggedly: "It will definitely be for her own good ifyou won't put up with too much. Excitable people need a certain amount of strictness. "
"And when I play the piano at the open window," Walter asked, as if he had not heard his brother-in-law's warning, "what am I doing? People are passing by, some of them young girls, perhaps anyone who feels like it stops to listen; I play for young lovers and lonely old people. Clever people, stupid people. I'm not giving them something to think about. What I'm playing isn't rational information. I'm giv- ing them myself. I sit invisible in my room and give them signs: just a few notes, and it's their life, and it's my life. You could certainly call this crazy too . . . ! " Suddenly he fell silent. That feeling: "Oh, I could tell all of you a thing or two! "-that basic ambitious urge of every inhabitant of earth who feels the need to communicate something but has no more than an average creative capacity-had fallen to pieces. Every time Walter sat in the soft emptiness of the room be- hind his open window and released his music into the air with the proud awareness of the artist giving happiness to unknown thou- sands, this feeling was like an open umbrella, and the instant he stopped playing, it was like a sloppily closed one. All the airiness was gone, it was as if everything that had happened had not happened, and all he could say was that art had lost its connection to the people and everything was no good.
