He had seen them coming, and Clarisse immediately walked over to him where he stood against the gray windowpane,
becoming
a small pointed shadow beside his tall gaunt one.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
Is that it?
Or possibly the ideas of an 'unworldly aesthete'?
"
'Well," Stumm von Bordwehr agreed diplomatically, "something like that. "
"Like what? What do you think is more dangerous to the life of the mind-dreams or oil fields? There's no need to stuff your mouth with bread; stop it! I couldn't care less what Amheim thinks of me. But you started off by saying, 'Amheim, for one. ' So who else is there who doesn't see me as enough of a man of action? "
'Well, you know," Stumm affirmed, "quite a few. I told you that 'Action! ' is now the great rallying cry. "
'What does that mean? "
"I don't really know either. Old man Leinsdorf said: 'Something has to be done! ' That's how it started. "
"And Diotima? "
"Diotimacalls it aNew Spririt. So now lots ofpeople on the Coun- cilaresayingthat. Iwonderifyouknowwhatit'slike,thatdizzyfeel- ing in your stomach when a beautiful woman has such a head on her shoulders? "
'Til take your word for it," Ulrich conceded, refusing to let Stumm wriggle out of it. "But now I'd like to hear what Diotima has to say about this New Spirit. "
"It's what people are saying," Stumm answered. "The people on the Council are saying that the times are getting a New Spirit. Not right away, but in a few years; unless something unexpected happens sooner. And this New Spirit won't have many ideas in it. Nor is it a time for feelings. Ideas and feelings-they're more for people who have nothing to do. In short, it's a spirit of action, that's really all I know about it. But it has sometimes occurred to me," the General added pensively, "to wonder if, in the end, that isn't simply the mili- tary spirit? "
846 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"An action has to make sense! " Ulrich claimed, and in all serious- ness, far beyond this jesters' motley conversation, his conscience re- minded him ofthe first conversation he had had on that subject with Agathe, on the Swedish rampart.
But the General agreed. ,"That's what I just said. If someone doesn't have anything to do, and doesn't know what to do with him- self, he becomes energetic. Then he starts boozing, bawling, brawl- ing, and bullying man and beast. On the other hand, you'll have to admit that someone who knows exactly what he wants can be an intri- guer. Just look at any of our youngsters on the General Staff, silently pressing his lips together and making a face like Moltke: In ten years he'll have a general's paunch under his tunic buttons-not a benign one, like mine, but a bellyful of poison. So it's hard to decide how much sense any action can make. " He thought it over, and added: "If you know how to get hold of it, there's a great deal to be learned in the army-I'm more and more convinced ofit as time goes on-but don't you think the simplest thing would be ifwe could still find the Great Idea? "
"No," Ulrich retorted. "That was nonsense. "
"All right, but in that case there's really nothing left but action. " Stumm sighed. "It's almost what I've been saying myself. Do you re- member, by the way, my warning you once that all these excessive ideas only end up in homicide? That's what we've got to prevent! But," he wheedled, "what we need is someone to take over the lead- ership. "
"And what part have you had the kindness to assign to me in the matter? " Ulrich asked, yawning openly.
"Very well, I'm leaving," Stumm assured him. "But now that we've had this heart-to-heart talk, ifyou wanted to be a true comrade there is something important you could do. Things are not going too well between Diotima and Arnheim. "
"You don't say! " His host showed some small signs of life.
"You'll see for yourself; no need to take it from me. Besides, she confides in you more than in me. "
"She confides in you? Since when? "
"She seems to have got used to me a little," the General said proudly.
"Congratulations. "
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 847
"Thanks. And you ought to look in on Leinsdorf again soon. On account of his antipathy to the Prussians. "
"I won't do it. "
"Now look, I know you don't like Amheim. But you'll have to do it anyway. "
"That's not why. I have no intention of going back to Leinsdorf. "
"But why not? He's such a fine old gentleman. Arrogant, and I can't stand him, but he's been splendid to you. "
''I'm getting out of this whole affair. "
"But Leinsdorf won't let you go. Nor Diotima either. And I cer- tainly won't! You wouldn't leave me all alone . . . ? "
''I'm fed up with the whole stupid business. "
"You are, as always, supremely right. But what isn't stupid? Look, without you, I'm pretty dumb. So will you go to Leinsdorf for my sake? "
"But what's this about Diotima and Amheim? "
"I won't tell you; otherwise you won't go to Diotima either! " Sud- denly the General had an inspiration. "If you like, Leinsdorf can get you an assistant to take care of whatever you don't like. Or I can get you one from the War Ministry. Pull out as far as you like, but keep a guiding hand over me! "
"Let me get some sleep first," Ulrich pleaded.
"I won't go till you promise. "
"All right, I'll sleep on it," Ulrich conceded. "Don't forget to put
the bread of military science back in your bag. "
WHAT'S NEW WITH WALTER AND CLARISSE. A SHOWMAN AND HIS SPECTATORS
Toward evening his restlessness drove Ulrich to go out to Walter and Clarisse's. On the way he tried to remember Clarisse's letter, which he had either stowed away irretrievably in his luggage or lost, but he could recall nothing in detail except for a final sentence, "I hope you'll be coming back soon," and his general impression that he would really have to talk with Walter, a feeling tinged not only with regret and uneasiness but also with a certain malice. It was this fleet- ing and involuntary feeling, of no significance, that he now dwelled on instead of brushing it aside, feeling rather like someone with ver- tigo who finds relief by getting himself down as low as he can.
When he turned the comer to the house, he saw Clarisse standing in the sun by the side wall where the espaliered peach tree was. She had her hands behind her and was leaning back against the yielding branches, gazing into the distance, oblivious to his approach. There was something self-forgetful and rigid in her attitude, but also some- thing faintly theatrical, apparent only to the friend who knew her ways so well; she looked as ifshe were acting out a part in the signifi- cant drama ofher own ideas and one ofthose ideas had taken hold of her, refusing to let go. He remembered her saying to him: "I want the child from you! " The words did not affect him as disagreeably now as they had at the time; he called out to her softly and waited.
But Clarisse was thinking: "This time Meingast is going through his transformation in our house. " He had undergone several rather remarkable transformations in his lifetime, and without reacting to Walter's lengthy answer to his letter, he had, one day, turned the an- nouncement of his coming into reality. Clarisse was convinced that the work he then immediately plunged into in their house had to do with a transformation. The thought of some Indian god who takes up his abode somewhere before each new purification mingled in her mind with the memory of creatures that choose a specific place to
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 849
change into a pupa, and from this notion, which struck her as tre- mendously healthy and down-to-earth, she went on to take in the sensuous fragrance of peaches ripening on a sunny wall. The logical result of all this was that she was standing under the window in the glow of the sinking sun, while the prophet had withdrawn into the shadowy cavern behind it. The day before, he had explained to her and Walter that in its original sense "knight" had meant boy, servant, squire, man-at-arms, and hero. Now she said to herself, "I am his knight! " and served him and safeguarded his labors: There was no need to say a word; she simply stood still, dazzled, and faced down the rays of the sun.
When Ulrich spoke to her she slowly turned her face toward the unexpected voice, and he discovered that something had changed. The eyes that looked toward him contained a chill such as the colors of a landscape radiate after the dying of day, and he instantly real- ized: She no longer wants anything from you! There was no trace anymore in her look of how she had wanted to "force him out of his block of stone," of his having been a great devil or god, of wanting to escape with him through the hole in the music, ofwanting to kill him if he would not love her. Not that he cared; it was doubtless a quite ordinary little experience, this extinguished glow of self-interest in a gaze; still, it was like a small rent in the veil oflife through which the indifferent void stares out, and it laid the basis for much that was to happen later.
Ulrich was told that Meingast was there, and understood.
They went quietly into the house to fetch Walter, and the three of them just as quietly came back out of doors again so as not to disturb the great man working. Through an open door Ulrich twice caught a glimpse of Meingast's back. Meingast was housed in an empty room detached from the rest of the apartment but belonging to it; Clarisse and Walter had dug up an iron bedstead somewhere for him; a kitchen stool and a tin basin served as a washstand and bath, and in addition to these the room, with its uncurtained window, held only an old kitchen cupboard containing books, and a small, unpainted deal table. Meingast sat at this table writing, and did not tum his head when they passed his door. All this Ulrich either saw for himself or found out from his friends, who had no scruples about providing much more primitive accommodations for the Master than they had
850 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
themselves; on the contrary, for some reason, they seemed to take pride in his being content with it. It was touching, and it made things easy for them. Walter declared that if one went into this room in Meingast's absence one felt the indescribable aura of a threadbare old glove that had been worn on a noble and forceful hand.
And in fact Meingast greatly enjoyed working in these surround- ings, whose spartan simplicity flattered him. It made him feel his will forming the words on paper. And when in addition Clarisse was standing under his window, as she had been just then, or on the land- ing, or even if she was merely sitting in her room-"wrapped in the cloak of invisible northern lights," as she had confided to him-his pleasure was enhanced by this ambitious disciple on whom he had such a paralyzing effect. Then ideas simply flowed from his pen, and his huge dark eyes above the sharp, quivering nose began to glow. What he intended to complete under these circumstances would be one ofthe most important sections ofhis new book, and one ought to be allowed to call it not a book but a call to arms for the spirit of a new breed of men! When he heard an unfamiliar male voice coming from where Clarisse was standing, he had broken off and cautiously peered out; he did not recognize Ulrich, though he dimly remem- bered him, but he found no reason in the footsteps coming up the stairs to shut his door or tum his head from his work. He wore a heavy wool cardigan under his jacket, showing his imperviousness to weather and people.
Ulrich was taken out for a walk and treated to ecstatic praise ofthe Master, who was meanwhile devoting himself to his work.
Walter said: "Being friends with a man like Meingast makes one realize how much one has suffered from antipathy to others! As- sociating with him, one feels . . . let me put it this way: everything seems painted in pure colors, without any grays at all! "
Clarisse said: "Being with him, one feels one has a destiny. There one stands, entirely oneself, fully illuminated. "
Walter added: "Today everything splits into hundreds of layers and becomes opaque and blurred-his mind is like glass! "
Ulrich's reply to them was: "There are always scapegoats and bellwethers; and then there are sheep who need them! "
Walter flung back at him: "It was to be expected that such a man wouldn't suit you! "
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 851
Clarisse cried out: ''You once maintained that no one can live by ideas, remember? Well, Meingast can! "
Walter said more soberly: "Not that I always see eye-to-eye with him, ofcourse . . . "
Clarisse broke in: "Listening to him, one feels shudders of light inside. "
Ulrich retorted: "A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he's stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above average are usually re- garded by their contemporaries as geniuses. "
What a curious phenomenon admiration is! In the life of individu- als it occurs only in spasms, but it is firmly institutionalized in collec- tive life. Walter would actually have found it more satisfying if he himself could have occupied Meingast's place in his own and Cla- risse's esteem, and could not at all understand why this was not so; and yet there was a certain slight advantage in it too. The emotion he was spared in this way was likewise credited to Meingast's account, as when one adopts someone else's child as one's own. On the other hand, it was for this very reason that his admiration for Meingast was not really a pure and wholesome feeling, as Walter himself realized; it was rather an overcharged need to surrender himself to believing in him. There was something assiduous in this admiration; it was a "keyboard emotion," raging without real conviction. Ulrich sensed this too. One of the elementary needs for passion, which life today breaks into fragments and jumbles to the point where they are un- recognizable, was here seeking a way back, for Walter praised Mein- gast with the ferocity of a theater audience that applauds far beyond the limits of its real opinion the commonplaces that are designed to arouse its need to applaud. He praised him out of one of those des- perate urges to admire, which normally find their outlet in festivals and celebrations, in great contemporaries or ideas and the honors bestowed on them, in situations where everyone involved joins in without anybody really knowing for whom or for what, while being inwardly prepared to be twice as mean as usual the next day in order to have nothing to reproach oneself for. This was how Ulrich thought about his friends, and he kept them on their toes by aiming barbed remarks at Meingast from time to time; for like everyone who knows better, he had been annoyed countless times by his contemporaries'
852 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
capacity for enthusiasms, which almost invariably fasten on the wrong object and so end up destroying even what indifference has let survive.
Dusk had already fallen by the time they had returned, still talk- ing, to the house.
"This Meingast lives on our current confusion of intuition and faith," Ulrich finally said. "Almost everything that isn't science can only be intuited, and for that you need passion and prudence. So a methodology for dealing with what we don't know is almost the same as a methodology for life. But you two 'believe' the minute someone like Meingast comes along! And so does everyone. But this 'belief' is almost as much of a disaster as if you decided to plump your es- teemed bodies down on a basket ofeggs to hatch their unknown con- tents! "
They were standing at the foot of the stairs. And suddenly Ulrich realized why he had come here and was talking with them the way he used to. It did not surprise him when Walter answered:
"And the world is supposed to stand still until you've worked out your methodology? ''
They evidently did not take him seriously because they did not re- alize how desolate this area of faith was that stretches between the certaintyofknowledge and the mists ofintuition! Old ideas swarmed in his head, crowding so thickly they almost suffocated thought. But now he knew that it was no longer necessary to start all over again, like a carpet weaver whose mind has been blinded by a dream, and that this was the only reason he was here again. Everything had become so much simpler lately. The last two weeks had annulled ev- erything that had gone before and had tied up the lines of his inner motions with a powerful knot.
Walter was expecting Ulrich to give him an answer that he could resent. He wanted to pay him back with interest! He had made up his mind to tell Ulrich that people like Meingast were saviors. "Salva- tion, after all, means the same thing as making one whole," he thought. And: "Saviors may be wrong, but they make us whole again! " he intended to say. And he was going to add: "I don't suppose you have any idea what that means? " The resentment he felt toward Ulrich was like what he felt when he had to go to the dentist.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 853
But Ulrich merely asked him distractedly just what Meingast had actually been writing and doing in the past few years.
''You see! " Walter said, disappointed. ''You see, you don't even know that much, but you disparage him! "
'Well," Ulrich said lightly, "I don't have to know; a few lines are sufficient! " He set his foot on the stairs. But Clarisse held him by the jacket and whispered: "Meingast isn't even his real name! "
"Of course it isn't; but is that a secret? "
"He turned into Meingast once, and now that he's here with us he's changing again! " Clarisse whispered intensely and mysteriously, and this whisper had something in common with a blowtorch. Walter flung himself on it to put it out. "Clarisse! " he implored her. "Cla- risse, stop this nonsense! "
Clarisse kept quiet and smiled. Ulrich went ahead up the stairs; he wanted at long last to see this messenger who had descended upon Walter and Clarisse's domestic life from Zarathustra's mountains. By the time they got upstairs, Walter was in a temper not only at him but at Meingast as well.
Meingast received his admirers in their dark apartment.
He had seen them coming, and Clarisse immediately walked over to him where he stood against the gray windowpane, becoming a small pointed shadow beside his tall gaunt one. There was no introduction, or only a one-sided one in that Ulrich's name was mentioned in order to refresh the Master's memory. Then they were all silent. Ulrich, being curious to see how the situation would develop, positioned himself at the other, unoccupied, window, and Walter made the sur- prising move of joining him there, probably for no better reason than, being subject to momentarily equal forces of repulsion, he was attracted by the stimulus of the brightness filtering into the room through the less obstructed window.
The calendar said March, but meteorology is not always depend- able; it sometimes produces a premature June evening or a belated one, Clarisse thought. The darkness outside the window seemed to her like a summer night. Where the light of the gas lamps fell, the night was lacquered a bright yellow. The bushes nearby were a surg- ing mass of black. Where they hung into the light they became green or whitish-there was no right word for it-scalloped into leaves and
854 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
floating in the lamplight like laundry spread out in a gently running stream. A narrow iron ribbon on dwarflike posts-a mere reminder and admonition to think of order-ran for a while along the edge of the lawn where the bushes stood, and then vanished in the darkness: Clarisse knew it came to an end there. There might at some time have been a plan to embellish the area with the suggestion of a gar- den, but it had soon been abandoned.
Clarisse moved close to Meingast, to see as far as possible up the road from his angle; her nose was flat against the windowpane, and their two bodies were touching hard and at as many points as if Cla- risse had stretched out full length on the stairs, as she occasionally did. Her right arm had to give way, and was clasped at the elbow by Meingast's long fingers as by the sinewy talons of an extremely ab- sentminded eagle crumpling something like a silk handkerchief in its claws. Clarisse had for a while been watching a man who had some- thing wrong with him, but she couldn't make outwhatitwas. His gait was by turns hesitant and negligent; he gave the impression that something was wrapping itself around his will to walk, and every time he had tom through this he walked for a bit like anyone who was not hurrying but not stopping either. The rhythm of this irregular move- ment had caught Clarisse's attention; as the man passed a streetlamp she tried to make out his features, which struck her as hollow and numb. When he passed the next-to-last streetlamp she decided that it was an insignificant, unpleasant, and furtive face, but as he ap- proached the nearest lamppost, the one almost beneath her window, his face looked extremely pale, and it floated around on the light as the light floated around on the darkness, so that the thin iron post of the streetlamp looked very straight and aroused beside it, striking the eye with a more penetrating vivid green than it really warranted.
All four had gradually begun to observe this man, who thought himself unseen. He now noticed the bushes bathed in light, and they made him think of the scalloping of a woman's petticoat, more luxu- rious than any he had ever seen, but one he would like to see. At this moment he was seized by his resolve. He stepped over the low rail- ing, stood on the grass, which reminded him ofthe green wood shav- ings in a box of toy trees, stared for a while in bewilderment at his feet, was roused by his head as it cautiously looked around, and con- cealed himself in the shadows, as was his habit. People lured out-
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · Bss
doors by the warm weather were returning home; their noise and their pleasure could be heard from far off. It filled the man with fear, and he sought comfort under the petticoat ofleaves. Clarisse still had no idea what was the matter with him. He emerged whenever a group of people had passed by, their eyes blinded to the darkness by the gaslight. Without lifting his feet, he shuffled toward the circle of light, like someone on a shallow bank who will not go into water over the soles of his shoes. Clarisse was struck by how pale the man was; his face was distorted into a white disk She was overcome with pity for him. But he was making strange little movements that puzzled her for a long time, until, suddenly horrified, she had to grab hold of something; and since Meingast still had a grip on her arm, so that she could not move freely, she grabbed his wide trousers in her search for protection, pulling them taut over the Master's leg like a flag in a gale. So the two of them stood, without letting go.
Ulrich, thinking he was the first to have realized that the man under the windows was one of those sick people who through the abnormality of their sex lives attract the lively curiosity of the sexually normal, worried needlessly for a while about the effect this discovery might have on Clarisse, since she was so unstable. Then he forgot about it, and would have been glad to know for himself what might actually be going on in such a person. The change, he thought, must have been so complete at the moment of stepping over the rail as to defy any attempt to describe it in detail. And as naturally as ifit were an appropriate comparison, he was reminded of a singer who has just finished eating and drinking and then steps up to the piano, folds his hands over his stomach, and, opening his mouth to sing, is partly someone else and partly not. Ulrich also thought of His Grace Count ~insdorf, who was able to switch into a religious-ethical circuit and into a banker's imperial man-of-the-world circuit. He was fascinated by the completeness of this transformation, which takes place in- wardly but is confirmed outwardly by the world's acceptance. He did not care how this man down there had got where he was in psycho- logical terms, but he could not help imagining his head gradually fill- ing with tension, like a balloon filling with gas, probably, slowly and for days, but still swaying on the ropes that anchor it to terra firma until there is an inaudible command or some chance occurrence, or simply the set time finally runs its course, at which point anything at
8s6 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
all would serve to let the ropes go, and the head, with no connection to the human world, floats off into the emptiness of the abnormal. And there the man actually stood in the shelter of the bushes with his sunken, ordinary face, lurking like a beast of prey. To carry out his purpose he really should have waited for the merrymakers to thin out so that the area might be safer for him. But the moment women passed by, alone in the interval between groups, or sometimes even protected within a group, dancing along and laughing gaily, they were no longer people to him but dolls playing some grotesque part in his consciousness. He was filled with the utter ruthlessness of a killer, immune to their mortal fear; but at the same time he was him- selfsuffering some minor torment at the thought that they might dis- cover him and chase him off like a dog before he could reach the climax of insensibility, and his tongue quivered in his mouth with anxiety. He waited in a stupor, and gradually the last glimmer of twi- light faded. Now a solitary woman neared his hiding place, but when he was still separated from her by the streetlamps, he could already see her detached from all her surroundings, bobbing up and down on the waves of light and darkness, a black lump dripping with light before she came closer. Ulrich, too, saw her, a shapeless middle-aged woman approaching. She had a body like a sack filled with gravel, and her expression was not congenial but domineering and cantan- kerous. But the gaunt pale man in the bushes knew how to get at her without her noticing until it was too late. The dull motions of her eyes and her legs were probably already twitching in his flesh, and he was getting ready to assault her before she had a chance to defend herself, to assault her with the sight of him, which would take her by surprise and enter into her forever, however she might twist and tum. This excitement was whirling and turning in his knees, hands, and larynx, or so it seemed at least to Ulrich as he observed the man groping his way through the bushes where they were already in the half-light, getting ready to step out at the right moment and expose himself. Dazed, the miserable man, leaning into the last slight resist- ance of the twigs, glued his eyes on the ugly face now pitching up and down toward him in the full light, his breath panting obediently in time with the rhythm of the stranger. 'Will she scream? " Ulrich thought. This coarse person was perfectly capable of flying into a rage instead ofa panic, and going over to the attack; in which case the
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 857
demented coward would have to take to his heels, and his frustrated lust would plunge its knife into his own flesh, the squat handle first! But at this tense moment Ulrich heard the casual voices of two men coming down the road, and since he could hear them through the glass they must have penetrated the hissing excitement down below, for the man beneath the window cautiously dropped the nearly opened veil of twigs and withdrew soundlessly back into the midst of the darkness.
"What a swine! " Clarisse whispered to the friend beside her, ener- getically but not at all indignantly. Back before Meingast's transfor- mation he had often heard her use such terms, provoked by his free-and-easy ways with her, so the word might be considered histor- ical. Clarisse assumed that Meingast would still remember it, despite his transformation, and it really did seem to her that his fingers stirred very faintly on her arm in answer. There was nothing at all accidental about this evening; it was not even by chance that the man had chosen Clarisse's window to stand under. She was firmly con- vinced that she had a baneful attraction for men who had something wrong with them; it had often proved to be so! Taken all in all, it was not so much that her ideas were confused as that they left out con- nections, or that they were saturated with affect in many places where other people have no such inner wellspring. Her conviction that she had been the one who had made it possible at the time for Meingast to remake himself was in itself not improbable; if one also considered how independently this change had taken its own course, because there had been no contact over distance and for years, and further how great a change it was-for it had made a prophet out of a superficial worldling-and finally how it was soon after Meingast's departure that the love between Walter and Clarisse had risen to that height ofdiscord where it still remained, then even Clarisse's notion that she and Walter would have had to take on the sins of the still untransformed Meingast to make his rise possible was no worse rea- soning than any number of respected ideas people believe in today. This had given rise, however, to the relationship of knightly servitude that Clarisse felt toward the returned Master, and whenever she now spoke of his new "transformation," instead of simply a change, she was only giving fitting expression to the elevated state in which she had since found herself. The awareness offinding herselfin a signifi-
858 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
cant relationship could uplift Clarisse in the literal sense. One doesn't quite know whether to paint saints with a cloud under their feet or whether they should be standing on nothing a finger's breadth above the ground, and this was exactly how it now stood with her, since Meingast had chosen her house in which to accomplish his great work, which apparently was grounded in something quite pro- found. Clarisse was not in love with him as a woman; it was rather like a boy who admires a man: ecstatic when he manages to set his hat at the same angle as his idol, and filled with a secret ambition even to outdo him eventually.
Walter knew this. He could not hear what Clarisse was whispering to Meingast, nor could his eye make out any more of the pair than a heavily fused mass of shadow in the dim light of the window, but he could see through everything. He, too, had recognized what was wrong with the man in the bushes, and the silence that reigned in the room lay most heavily upon him. He managed to make out that Ul- rich, who stood motionless beside him, was staring intently out the window, and he assumed that the two at the other window were doing the same. "Why doesn't anyone break this silence? " he thought. "Why doesn't someone open the window and scare this monster off? " It occurred to him that they were obligated to call the police, but there was no telephone in the house, and he lacked the courage to undertake something that might make his companions look down on him. He had no desire whatever to be an "outraged bourgeois," but he was just so exasperated! He could understand very well the "chivalric relationship" in which his wife stood to Mein- gast, for even in lovemaking it was impossible for her to imagine exal- tation without effort: she derived her exaltation not from sensuality, only from ambition. He remembered how incredibly alive she could sometimes be in his arms, at a time when he had still been preoc- cupied with art; but except by such detours it was impossible to arouse her. "Perhaps ambition is all that really takes people out of themselves," he reflected dubiously. It had not escaped him that Clarisse "stood watch" while Meingast was working, in order to pro- tect his ideas with her body, although she did not even know what these ideas were. Painfully, Walter regarded the lonely egotist in his bush; this wretch offered a warning example for the devastation that can be created in an all-too-isolated mind. That he knew exactly what
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Clarisse was feeling as she stood there watching tormented him. "She will be slightly excited, as if she had just run up a flight of stairs," he thought. He himself felt a pressure in the scene that was before his eyes, ll! ' if something had been wrapped in a cocoon and was trying to break its envelope, and he felt how within this mysteri- ous pressure, which Clarisse, too, was feeling, the will was aroused not merely to watch but right away, soon, somehow, to do something, to inteiVene in what was happening in order to set it free. Other peo- ple got their ideas from life, but whatever Clarisse experienced came, evexy time, from ideas: such an enviable madness! And Walter was more inclined to the exaggerations of his wife, even if she was perhaps mentally ill, than to the way of thinking of his friend Ulrich, who fancied himself cautious and cool: somehow the more irrational was closer to him; perhaps it left him personally untouched, it ap- pealed to his sympathy. In any event, many people prefer crazy ideas to difficult ones, and he even derived a certain satisfaction from Cla- risse's whispering with Meingast in the dark, while Ulrich was con- demned to stand beside him as a mute shadow; it seiVed Ulrich right to be beaten by Meingast. But from time to time Walter was tor- mented by the expectation that Clarisse would fling open the win- dow or rush down the stairs to the bushes: then he detested both male shadows and their obscene silent watching, which made the sit- uation for the poor little Prometheus he was shielding, who was so vulnerable to evexy temptation of the spirit, more problematic from one minute to the next.
During this time the afflicted man's shame and frustrated lust had fused into an all-peiVasive disappointment that filled his gaunt body with its massive bitterness as he withdrew into his bushes. When he had reached the innermost darkness he collapsed, letting himself fall to the ground, and his head hung from his neck like a leaf. The world stood ready to punish him, and he saw his situation much as it would have appeared to the two passersby had they discovered him. But after this man had wept for himself for a while, dxy-eyed, the original change came over him once again, this time mixed with even more vengefulness and spite. And again it miscarried. A girl passed by who might have been around fifteen and was obviously late coming from somewhere; she seemed lovely to him, a small, hastening ideal: the depraved man felt that he now really ought to step out and speak to
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her in a friendly way, but this plunged him instantly into wild terror. His imagination, ready to conjure up anything that could even be suggested by a woman, became fearful and awkward when con- fronted with the natural possibility of admiring this defenseless little creature approaching in her beauty. The more she was suited to please his daylight self, the less pleasure she provided his shadow self, and he vainly tried to hate her, since he could not love her. So he stood uneasily at the borderline between shadow and light and ex- posed himself. When the child noticed his secret she had already passed by him and was about eight paces away; at fust she had merely looked at the leaves moving without realizing what was going on, and when she did she could already feel secure enough not to be scared to death: her mouth did stay open for a while, but then she gave a loud scream and began to run; the scamp even seemed to enjoy looking back, and the man felt himself humiliatingly aban- doned. He wrathfully hoped that a drop of poison might somehow have fallen into her eyes and would later eat its way through her heart.
This relatively harmless and comical outcome relieved the specta- tors' sense of humanity; this time they would indeed have intervened if the scene had not resolved itself as it did; and preoccupied with this, they hardly noticed how the business below did come to an end; they could only confirm that it had done so when they observed that the male "hyena," as Walter put it, had suddenly disappeared. The man finally realized his intentions when a perfectly ordinary woman came along who looked at him aghast and with loathing. involuntarily shocked into stopping for a moment, and then tried to pretend that she had not seen anything. During this instant he felt himself, to- gether with his roof of leaves and the whole topsy-turvy world he had come from, sliding deep into the defenseless woman's resisting gaze. That may have been how it happened, or perhaps it was some other way. Clarisse had not been paying attention. With a deep breath she raised herself from her half-crouching position; she and Meingast had let go of each other some time before. It seemed to her that she was suddenly landing on the wooden floor with the soles of her feet, and a whirlpool of inexpressible, horrible desire stilled itself in her body. She was firmly convinced that everything that had just oc- curred had a special meaning, minted just for her; and strange as it
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may sound, the repulsive scene left her with the impression that she was a bride who had just been serenaded. In her head, intentions were dancing helter-skelter, some ready to be carried out and others, new ones, just occurring to her.
"Funny! " Ulrich suddenly said into the darkness, the first of the four to break the silence. ''What an absurdly twisted notion it is to think how this fellow's fun would have been spoiled if he only knew he was being watched the whole time! "
Meingast's shadow detached itself from the nothingness and stood, a slender compression of darkness, facing in the direction of Ulrich's voice.
'We attach far too much importance to sex," the Master said. "These are in fact the goatlike caperings of our era's wilL" He said nothing further. But Clarisse, who had winced with annoyance at Ul- rich's words, felt borne forward by what Meingast said, although in this darkness there was no telling in what direction.
THE TESTAMENT
When Ulrich returned home from what he had experienced, even more dissatisfied than he had been before, he decided that he must not avoid a decision any longer, and tried to recall as best he could the "incident," as he euphemistically called what had happened in his last few hours with Agathe, only a few days after their deep discussion.
He was all packed and ready to leave on a sleeper that came through the town late, and so he and Agathe met for a final meal. They had agreed earlier that she would join him soon, and they somewhat uncertainly estimated this separation at from five days to two weeks.
At dinner Agathe said: ''There's something more we have to do before you leave. "
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'What? " Ulrich asked.
''We have to change the will! "
Ulrich remembered looking at his sister without surprise; despite
all their earlier talk he had assumed she was leading up to a joke. But Agathe was gazing down at her plate, with the familiar meditative wrinkle between her eyebrows. Slowly she said:
"He won't keep as much of me between his fingers as would be left if a woolen thread had been burned away between them! "
Something must have been intensely at work in her in the last few days. Ulrich was about to tell her that he regarded such deliberations about how Hagauer's interests could be injured as impermissible and did not want to hear any more about it. But at that moment their father's old servant came in with the next course, and they could only go on talking in veiled allusions.
"Aunt Malvina . . . ," Agathe said, smiling at her brother. "Do you remember Aunt Malvina? She had intended to leave every- thing she owned to our cousin; it was all arranged and everyone knew about it! Accordingly, all she was left in her parents' will was the legal minimum she was entitled to, all the rest going to her brother, so that neither of the children, whose father was equally devoted to both of them, should inherit more than the other. You remember that, surely? The annuity that Agathe-Alexandra, our cousin, that is"-she corrected herselfwith a laugh-"had been re- ceiving since her marriage was, for the time being, discounted against her legal share; it was a complicated arrangement, to give Aunt Malvina time to die. . . . "
"I don't understand you," Ulrich muttered.
"Oh, but it's perfectly simple! Aunt Malvina is dead, but before she died she lost all her money; she even had to be supported. Now, if Papa should for some reason have forgotten to revoke that provi- sion in his will, Alexandra gets nothing at all, even if her marriage contract had stipulated joint ownership of property! "
"I don't know about that; it seems very doubtful! " Ulrich said im- pulsively. "Besides, Father must have given certain assurances. He can't possibly have made such provisions without talking it over with his son-in-law! "
He remembered saying this only too well, because he could not
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possibly keep silent while listening to his sister's dangerous error. He could still see vividly in his mind the smile with which she had looked at him. "Isn't it just like him? " she seemed to be thinking. "One only has to present a case to him as ifit weren't flesh and blood but some abstraction, and one can lead him around by the nose. " And then she had asked curtly: "Is there any written evidence of such arrange- ments? " and answered herself: "I never heard anything about it, and if anyone knew about it, it would certainly be me. But of course Papa was strange about everything. "
Now the servant was back at the table, and she took advantage of Ulrich's helplessness to add: "Verbal agreemen. ts_can always be con- tested. But if the will was changed again after Aunt Malvina lost ev- erything, then all signs point to this new codicil having been lost. "
Again Ulrich let himself be tempted to steer her right: "That still leaves the sizable automatic inheritance that can't be taken away from children of one's body. "
"But I've just told you that all of that was paid out during the fa- ther's lifetime! After all, Alexandra was married twice. " They were alone for a moment, and Agathe hastened to add: ''I've looked at that passage very carefully. Only a few words need to be changed to make it look as if my share had already been paid out to me in full. Who knows anything about it now? When Papa went back to leaving us equal shares after Aunt Malvina's losses, he put it in a codicil that can be destroyed. Anyway, there's nothing to have prevented me from having renounced my legal share in your favor for one reason or another. "
Ulrich looked at her dumbfounded and missed his opportunity to respond to her inventions as he felt obliged to do; by the time he was ready, they were no longer alone, and he had to resort to circum- locutions.
"One really shouldn't," he began hesitantly, "even think such things! "
"Why not? '' Agatha retorted.
Such questions are simple as long as they are left alone, but the moment they rear their heads they are a monstrous serpent that had been curled up into a harmless blob. Ulrich remembered answering: "Even Nietzsche asks the 'free spirits' to observe certain external
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rules for the sake of a greater internal freedom! " He had said this with a smile, although he felt it was rather cowardly to hide behind someone else's words.
"That's a lame principle! " Agathe said, dismissing it out of hand. "That's the principle behind my marriage! "
And Ulrich thought: "It really is a lame principle. " It seems that people who have new and revolutionary answers to particular prob- lems make up for it by compromising on everything else, which en- ables them to lead highly moral lives in carpet slippers; all the more so as the attempt to keep everything constant except what they are trying to change corresponds totally to the creative economy of thinking in which they feel at home. Even Ulrich had always re- garded this more as a strict than as a slack procedure, but when he was having this talk with his sister he felt that she had struck home; he could no longer bear the indecision he had loved, and it seemed to him that it was precisely Agathe who had been given the mission of bringing him to this point. And while he was nevertheless propound- ing the "rule of the free spirits" to her, she laughed and asked him whether he didn't notice that the moment he tried to formulate gen- eral principles a different man appeared in his place.
"And even though you are surely right to admire him, basically he doesn't mean a thing to you! " she declared, giving her brother a will- ful and challenging look. Again he had no ready answer and said nothing, expecting an interruption at any moment, yet he could not bring himself to drop the subject. This situation emboldened her.
"In the short time we've been together," she went on, "you've given me such wonderful guidelines for my life, things I would never have dared think out for myself, but then you always end up wonder- ing whether they're really true! It seems to me that the truth the way you use it is only a way of mistreating people! "
She was amazed at her own daring in making such reproaches; her own life seemed so worthless to her that she surely ought to have kept quiet. But she drew her courage from Ulrich himself, and there was something so curiously feminine in her way of leaning on him while she attacked him that he felt it too.
"You don't understand the desire to organize ideas in large, ar- ticulated masses," Ulrich said. "The battle experiences of the intel- lect are alien to you; all you see in them is columns marching in some
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kind of formation, the impersonality of many feet stirring up the truth like a cloud of dust! "
"But didn't you yourself describe to me, far more precisely and clearly than I ever could, the two states of mind in which you can live? " she answered.
A glowing cloud, with ever-changing outlines, flew across her face. She felt the desire to bring her brother to the point where he could no longer retreat. The thought made her feverish, but she did not yet know whether she would have enough courage to carry it through, and so she put off ending the meal.
Ulrich knew all this, he guessed it, but he had pulled himself to- gether and taken up his position. He sat facing her, his eyes focused, absent, his mouth forced to utterance, and had the impression that he was not really there but had remained somewhere behind him- self, calling out to himself what he was saying:
"Suppose that, on a trip somewhere, I wanted to steal some stran- ger's golden cigarette e a s e - l ask you, isn't that simply unthinkable? I don't want to go into the question right now of whether a move s u c h as y o u ' r e c o n t e m p l a t i n g is o r i s n ' t j u s t i f i a b l e o n g r o u n d s o f i n t e l - lectual freedom. For all I know, it may be in order to do Hagauer some injury. But imagine me in a hotel, neither penniless nor a pro- fessional thief, nor a mental defective with deformed head or body, nor the offspring of a hysterical mother or a drunkard father, nor confused or stigmatized by anything else in any way at all: yet I steal, nevertheless. I repeat: This couldn't happen anywhere in the world!
'Well," Stumm von Bordwehr agreed diplomatically, "something like that. "
"Like what? What do you think is more dangerous to the life of the mind-dreams or oil fields? There's no need to stuff your mouth with bread; stop it! I couldn't care less what Amheim thinks of me. But you started off by saying, 'Amheim, for one. ' So who else is there who doesn't see me as enough of a man of action? "
'Well, you know," Stumm affirmed, "quite a few. I told you that 'Action! ' is now the great rallying cry. "
'What does that mean? "
"I don't really know either. Old man Leinsdorf said: 'Something has to be done! ' That's how it started. "
"And Diotima? "
"Diotimacalls it aNew Spririt. So now lots ofpeople on the Coun- cilaresayingthat. Iwonderifyouknowwhatit'slike,thatdizzyfeel- ing in your stomach when a beautiful woman has such a head on her shoulders? "
'Til take your word for it," Ulrich conceded, refusing to let Stumm wriggle out of it. "But now I'd like to hear what Diotima has to say about this New Spirit. "
"It's what people are saying," Stumm answered. "The people on the Council are saying that the times are getting a New Spirit. Not right away, but in a few years; unless something unexpected happens sooner. And this New Spirit won't have many ideas in it. Nor is it a time for feelings. Ideas and feelings-they're more for people who have nothing to do. In short, it's a spirit of action, that's really all I know about it. But it has sometimes occurred to me," the General added pensively, "to wonder if, in the end, that isn't simply the mili- tary spirit? "
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"An action has to make sense! " Ulrich claimed, and in all serious- ness, far beyond this jesters' motley conversation, his conscience re- minded him ofthe first conversation he had had on that subject with Agathe, on the Swedish rampart.
But the General agreed. ,"That's what I just said. If someone doesn't have anything to do, and doesn't know what to do with him- self, he becomes energetic. Then he starts boozing, bawling, brawl- ing, and bullying man and beast. On the other hand, you'll have to admit that someone who knows exactly what he wants can be an intri- guer. Just look at any of our youngsters on the General Staff, silently pressing his lips together and making a face like Moltke: In ten years he'll have a general's paunch under his tunic buttons-not a benign one, like mine, but a bellyful of poison. So it's hard to decide how much sense any action can make. " He thought it over, and added: "If you know how to get hold of it, there's a great deal to be learned in the army-I'm more and more convinced ofit as time goes on-but don't you think the simplest thing would be ifwe could still find the Great Idea? "
"No," Ulrich retorted. "That was nonsense. "
"All right, but in that case there's really nothing left but action. " Stumm sighed. "It's almost what I've been saying myself. Do you re- member, by the way, my warning you once that all these excessive ideas only end up in homicide? That's what we've got to prevent! But," he wheedled, "what we need is someone to take over the lead- ership. "
"And what part have you had the kindness to assign to me in the matter? " Ulrich asked, yawning openly.
"Very well, I'm leaving," Stumm assured him. "But now that we've had this heart-to-heart talk, ifyou wanted to be a true comrade there is something important you could do. Things are not going too well between Diotima and Arnheim. "
"You don't say! " His host showed some small signs of life.
"You'll see for yourself; no need to take it from me. Besides, she confides in you more than in me. "
"She confides in you? Since when? "
"She seems to have got used to me a little," the General said proudly.
"Congratulations. "
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"Thanks. And you ought to look in on Leinsdorf again soon. On account of his antipathy to the Prussians. "
"I won't do it. "
"Now look, I know you don't like Amheim. But you'll have to do it anyway. "
"That's not why. I have no intention of going back to Leinsdorf. "
"But why not? He's such a fine old gentleman. Arrogant, and I can't stand him, but he's been splendid to you. "
''I'm getting out of this whole affair. "
"But Leinsdorf won't let you go. Nor Diotima either. And I cer- tainly won't! You wouldn't leave me all alone . . . ? "
''I'm fed up with the whole stupid business. "
"You are, as always, supremely right. But what isn't stupid? Look, without you, I'm pretty dumb. So will you go to Leinsdorf for my sake? "
"But what's this about Diotima and Amheim? "
"I won't tell you; otherwise you won't go to Diotima either! " Sud- denly the General had an inspiration. "If you like, Leinsdorf can get you an assistant to take care of whatever you don't like. Or I can get you one from the War Ministry. Pull out as far as you like, but keep a guiding hand over me! "
"Let me get some sleep first," Ulrich pleaded.
"I won't go till you promise. "
"All right, I'll sleep on it," Ulrich conceded. "Don't forget to put
the bread of military science back in your bag. "
WHAT'S NEW WITH WALTER AND CLARISSE. A SHOWMAN AND HIS SPECTATORS
Toward evening his restlessness drove Ulrich to go out to Walter and Clarisse's. On the way he tried to remember Clarisse's letter, which he had either stowed away irretrievably in his luggage or lost, but he could recall nothing in detail except for a final sentence, "I hope you'll be coming back soon," and his general impression that he would really have to talk with Walter, a feeling tinged not only with regret and uneasiness but also with a certain malice. It was this fleet- ing and involuntary feeling, of no significance, that he now dwelled on instead of brushing it aside, feeling rather like someone with ver- tigo who finds relief by getting himself down as low as he can.
When he turned the comer to the house, he saw Clarisse standing in the sun by the side wall where the espaliered peach tree was. She had her hands behind her and was leaning back against the yielding branches, gazing into the distance, oblivious to his approach. There was something self-forgetful and rigid in her attitude, but also some- thing faintly theatrical, apparent only to the friend who knew her ways so well; she looked as ifshe were acting out a part in the signifi- cant drama ofher own ideas and one ofthose ideas had taken hold of her, refusing to let go. He remembered her saying to him: "I want the child from you! " The words did not affect him as disagreeably now as they had at the time; he called out to her softly and waited.
But Clarisse was thinking: "This time Meingast is going through his transformation in our house. " He had undergone several rather remarkable transformations in his lifetime, and without reacting to Walter's lengthy answer to his letter, he had, one day, turned the an- nouncement of his coming into reality. Clarisse was convinced that the work he then immediately plunged into in their house had to do with a transformation. The thought of some Indian god who takes up his abode somewhere before each new purification mingled in her mind with the memory of creatures that choose a specific place to
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change into a pupa, and from this notion, which struck her as tre- mendously healthy and down-to-earth, she went on to take in the sensuous fragrance of peaches ripening on a sunny wall. The logical result of all this was that she was standing under the window in the glow of the sinking sun, while the prophet had withdrawn into the shadowy cavern behind it. The day before, he had explained to her and Walter that in its original sense "knight" had meant boy, servant, squire, man-at-arms, and hero. Now she said to herself, "I am his knight! " and served him and safeguarded his labors: There was no need to say a word; she simply stood still, dazzled, and faced down the rays of the sun.
When Ulrich spoke to her she slowly turned her face toward the unexpected voice, and he discovered that something had changed. The eyes that looked toward him contained a chill such as the colors of a landscape radiate after the dying of day, and he instantly real- ized: She no longer wants anything from you! There was no trace anymore in her look of how she had wanted to "force him out of his block of stone," of his having been a great devil or god, of wanting to escape with him through the hole in the music, ofwanting to kill him if he would not love her. Not that he cared; it was doubtless a quite ordinary little experience, this extinguished glow of self-interest in a gaze; still, it was like a small rent in the veil oflife through which the indifferent void stares out, and it laid the basis for much that was to happen later.
Ulrich was told that Meingast was there, and understood.
They went quietly into the house to fetch Walter, and the three of them just as quietly came back out of doors again so as not to disturb the great man working. Through an open door Ulrich twice caught a glimpse of Meingast's back. Meingast was housed in an empty room detached from the rest of the apartment but belonging to it; Clarisse and Walter had dug up an iron bedstead somewhere for him; a kitchen stool and a tin basin served as a washstand and bath, and in addition to these the room, with its uncurtained window, held only an old kitchen cupboard containing books, and a small, unpainted deal table. Meingast sat at this table writing, and did not tum his head when they passed his door. All this Ulrich either saw for himself or found out from his friends, who had no scruples about providing much more primitive accommodations for the Master than they had
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themselves; on the contrary, for some reason, they seemed to take pride in his being content with it. It was touching, and it made things easy for them. Walter declared that if one went into this room in Meingast's absence one felt the indescribable aura of a threadbare old glove that had been worn on a noble and forceful hand.
And in fact Meingast greatly enjoyed working in these surround- ings, whose spartan simplicity flattered him. It made him feel his will forming the words on paper. And when in addition Clarisse was standing under his window, as she had been just then, or on the land- ing, or even if she was merely sitting in her room-"wrapped in the cloak of invisible northern lights," as she had confided to him-his pleasure was enhanced by this ambitious disciple on whom he had such a paralyzing effect. Then ideas simply flowed from his pen, and his huge dark eyes above the sharp, quivering nose began to glow. What he intended to complete under these circumstances would be one ofthe most important sections ofhis new book, and one ought to be allowed to call it not a book but a call to arms for the spirit of a new breed of men! When he heard an unfamiliar male voice coming from where Clarisse was standing, he had broken off and cautiously peered out; he did not recognize Ulrich, though he dimly remem- bered him, but he found no reason in the footsteps coming up the stairs to shut his door or tum his head from his work. He wore a heavy wool cardigan under his jacket, showing his imperviousness to weather and people.
Ulrich was taken out for a walk and treated to ecstatic praise ofthe Master, who was meanwhile devoting himself to his work.
Walter said: "Being friends with a man like Meingast makes one realize how much one has suffered from antipathy to others! As- sociating with him, one feels . . . let me put it this way: everything seems painted in pure colors, without any grays at all! "
Clarisse said: "Being with him, one feels one has a destiny. There one stands, entirely oneself, fully illuminated. "
Walter added: "Today everything splits into hundreds of layers and becomes opaque and blurred-his mind is like glass! "
Ulrich's reply to them was: "There are always scapegoats and bellwethers; and then there are sheep who need them! "
Walter flung back at him: "It was to be expected that such a man wouldn't suit you! "
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Clarisse cried out: ''You once maintained that no one can live by ideas, remember? Well, Meingast can! "
Walter said more soberly: "Not that I always see eye-to-eye with him, ofcourse . . . "
Clarisse broke in: "Listening to him, one feels shudders of light inside. "
Ulrich retorted: "A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he's stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above average are usually re- garded by their contemporaries as geniuses. "
What a curious phenomenon admiration is! In the life of individu- als it occurs only in spasms, but it is firmly institutionalized in collec- tive life. Walter would actually have found it more satisfying if he himself could have occupied Meingast's place in his own and Cla- risse's esteem, and could not at all understand why this was not so; and yet there was a certain slight advantage in it too. The emotion he was spared in this way was likewise credited to Meingast's account, as when one adopts someone else's child as one's own. On the other hand, it was for this very reason that his admiration for Meingast was not really a pure and wholesome feeling, as Walter himself realized; it was rather an overcharged need to surrender himself to believing in him. There was something assiduous in this admiration; it was a "keyboard emotion," raging without real conviction. Ulrich sensed this too. One of the elementary needs for passion, which life today breaks into fragments and jumbles to the point where they are un- recognizable, was here seeking a way back, for Walter praised Mein- gast with the ferocity of a theater audience that applauds far beyond the limits of its real opinion the commonplaces that are designed to arouse its need to applaud. He praised him out of one of those des- perate urges to admire, which normally find their outlet in festivals and celebrations, in great contemporaries or ideas and the honors bestowed on them, in situations where everyone involved joins in without anybody really knowing for whom or for what, while being inwardly prepared to be twice as mean as usual the next day in order to have nothing to reproach oneself for. This was how Ulrich thought about his friends, and he kept them on their toes by aiming barbed remarks at Meingast from time to time; for like everyone who knows better, he had been annoyed countless times by his contemporaries'
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capacity for enthusiasms, which almost invariably fasten on the wrong object and so end up destroying even what indifference has let survive.
Dusk had already fallen by the time they had returned, still talk- ing, to the house.
"This Meingast lives on our current confusion of intuition and faith," Ulrich finally said. "Almost everything that isn't science can only be intuited, and for that you need passion and prudence. So a methodology for dealing with what we don't know is almost the same as a methodology for life. But you two 'believe' the minute someone like Meingast comes along! And so does everyone. But this 'belief' is almost as much of a disaster as if you decided to plump your es- teemed bodies down on a basket ofeggs to hatch their unknown con- tents! "
They were standing at the foot of the stairs. And suddenly Ulrich realized why he had come here and was talking with them the way he used to. It did not surprise him when Walter answered:
"And the world is supposed to stand still until you've worked out your methodology? ''
They evidently did not take him seriously because they did not re- alize how desolate this area of faith was that stretches between the certaintyofknowledge and the mists ofintuition! Old ideas swarmed in his head, crowding so thickly they almost suffocated thought. But now he knew that it was no longer necessary to start all over again, like a carpet weaver whose mind has been blinded by a dream, and that this was the only reason he was here again. Everything had become so much simpler lately. The last two weeks had annulled ev- erything that had gone before and had tied up the lines of his inner motions with a powerful knot.
Walter was expecting Ulrich to give him an answer that he could resent. He wanted to pay him back with interest! He had made up his mind to tell Ulrich that people like Meingast were saviors. "Salva- tion, after all, means the same thing as making one whole," he thought. And: "Saviors may be wrong, but they make us whole again! " he intended to say. And he was going to add: "I don't suppose you have any idea what that means? " The resentment he felt toward Ulrich was like what he felt when he had to go to the dentist.
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But Ulrich merely asked him distractedly just what Meingast had actually been writing and doing in the past few years.
''You see! " Walter said, disappointed. ''You see, you don't even know that much, but you disparage him! "
'Well," Ulrich said lightly, "I don't have to know; a few lines are sufficient! " He set his foot on the stairs. But Clarisse held him by the jacket and whispered: "Meingast isn't even his real name! "
"Of course it isn't; but is that a secret? "
"He turned into Meingast once, and now that he's here with us he's changing again! " Clarisse whispered intensely and mysteriously, and this whisper had something in common with a blowtorch. Walter flung himself on it to put it out. "Clarisse! " he implored her. "Cla- risse, stop this nonsense! "
Clarisse kept quiet and smiled. Ulrich went ahead up the stairs; he wanted at long last to see this messenger who had descended upon Walter and Clarisse's domestic life from Zarathustra's mountains. By the time they got upstairs, Walter was in a temper not only at him but at Meingast as well.
Meingast received his admirers in their dark apartment.
He had seen them coming, and Clarisse immediately walked over to him where he stood against the gray windowpane, becoming a small pointed shadow beside his tall gaunt one. There was no introduction, or only a one-sided one in that Ulrich's name was mentioned in order to refresh the Master's memory. Then they were all silent. Ulrich, being curious to see how the situation would develop, positioned himself at the other, unoccupied, window, and Walter made the sur- prising move of joining him there, probably for no better reason than, being subject to momentarily equal forces of repulsion, he was attracted by the stimulus of the brightness filtering into the room through the less obstructed window.
The calendar said March, but meteorology is not always depend- able; it sometimes produces a premature June evening or a belated one, Clarisse thought. The darkness outside the window seemed to her like a summer night. Where the light of the gas lamps fell, the night was lacquered a bright yellow. The bushes nearby were a surg- ing mass of black. Where they hung into the light they became green or whitish-there was no right word for it-scalloped into leaves and
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floating in the lamplight like laundry spread out in a gently running stream. A narrow iron ribbon on dwarflike posts-a mere reminder and admonition to think of order-ran for a while along the edge of the lawn where the bushes stood, and then vanished in the darkness: Clarisse knew it came to an end there. There might at some time have been a plan to embellish the area with the suggestion of a gar- den, but it had soon been abandoned.
Clarisse moved close to Meingast, to see as far as possible up the road from his angle; her nose was flat against the windowpane, and their two bodies were touching hard and at as many points as if Cla- risse had stretched out full length on the stairs, as she occasionally did. Her right arm had to give way, and was clasped at the elbow by Meingast's long fingers as by the sinewy talons of an extremely ab- sentminded eagle crumpling something like a silk handkerchief in its claws. Clarisse had for a while been watching a man who had some- thing wrong with him, but she couldn't make outwhatitwas. His gait was by turns hesitant and negligent; he gave the impression that something was wrapping itself around his will to walk, and every time he had tom through this he walked for a bit like anyone who was not hurrying but not stopping either. The rhythm of this irregular move- ment had caught Clarisse's attention; as the man passed a streetlamp she tried to make out his features, which struck her as hollow and numb. When he passed the next-to-last streetlamp she decided that it was an insignificant, unpleasant, and furtive face, but as he ap- proached the nearest lamppost, the one almost beneath her window, his face looked extremely pale, and it floated around on the light as the light floated around on the darkness, so that the thin iron post of the streetlamp looked very straight and aroused beside it, striking the eye with a more penetrating vivid green than it really warranted.
All four had gradually begun to observe this man, who thought himself unseen. He now noticed the bushes bathed in light, and they made him think of the scalloping of a woman's petticoat, more luxu- rious than any he had ever seen, but one he would like to see. At this moment he was seized by his resolve. He stepped over the low rail- ing, stood on the grass, which reminded him ofthe green wood shav- ings in a box of toy trees, stared for a while in bewilderment at his feet, was roused by his head as it cautiously looked around, and con- cealed himself in the shadows, as was his habit. People lured out-
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doors by the warm weather were returning home; their noise and their pleasure could be heard from far off. It filled the man with fear, and he sought comfort under the petticoat ofleaves. Clarisse still had no idea what was the matter with him. He emerged whenever a group of people had passed by, their eyes blinded to the darkness by the gaslight. Without lifting his feet, he shuffled toward the circle of light, like someone on a shallow bank who will not go into water over the soles of his shoes. Clarisse was struck by how pale the man was; his face was distorted into a white disk She was overcome with pity for him. But he was making strange little movements that puzzled her for a long time, until, suddenly horrified, she had to grab hold of something; and since Meingast still had a grip on her arm, so that she could not move freely, she grabbed his wide trousers in her search for protection, pulling them taut over the Master's leg like a flag in a gale. So the two of them stood, without letting go.
Ulrich, thinking he was the first to have realized that the man under the windows was one of those sick people who through the abnormality of their sex lives attract the lively curiosity of the sexually normal, worried needlessly for a while about the effect this discovery might have on Clarisse, since she was so unstable. Then he forgot about it, and would have been glad to know for himself what might actually be going on in such a person. The change, he thought, must have been so complete at the moment of stepping over the rail as to defy any attempt to describe it in detail. And as naturally as ifit were an appropriate comparison, he was reminded of a singer who has just finished eating and drinking and then steps up to the piano, folds his hands over his stomach, and, opening his mouth to sing, is partly someone else and partly not. Ulrich also thought of His Grace Count ~insdorf, who was able to switch into a religious-ethical circuit and into a banker's imperial man-of-the-world circuit. He was fascinated by the completeness of this transformation, which takes place in- wardly but is confirmed outwardly by the world's acceptance. He did not care how this man down there had got where he was in psycho- logical terms, but he could not help imagining his head gradually fill- ing with tension, like a balloon filling with gas, probably, slowly and for days, but still swaying on the ropes that anchor it to terra firma until there is an inaudible command or some chance occurrence, or simply the set time finally runs its course, at which point anything at
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all would serve to let the ropes go, and the head, with no connection to the human world, floats off into the emptiness of the abnormal. And there the man actually stood in the shelter of the bushes with his sunken, ordinary face, lurking like a beast of prey. To carry out his purpose he really should have waited for the merrymakers to thin out so that the area might be safer for him. But the moment women passed by, alone in the interval between groups, or sometimes even protected within a group, dancing along and laughing gaily, they were no longer people to him but dolls playing some grotesque part in his consciousness. He was filled with the utter ruthlessness of a killer, immune to their mortal fear; but at the same time he was him- selfsuffering some minor torment at the thought that they might dis- cover him and chase him off like a dog before he could reach the climax of insensibility, and his tongue quivered in his mouth with anxiety. He waited in a stupor, and gradually the last glimmer of twi- light faded. Now a solitary woman neared his hiding place, but when he was still separated from her by the streetlamps, he could already see her detached from all her surroundings, bobbing up and down on the waves of light and darkness, a black lump dripping with light before she came closer. Ulrich, too, saw her, a shapeless middle-aged woman approaching. She had a body like a sack filled with gravel, and her expression was not congenial but domineering and cantan- kerous. But the gaunt pale man in the bushes knew how to get at her without her noticing until it was too late. The dull motions of her eyes and her legs were probably already twitching in his flesh, and he was getting ready to assault her before she had a chance to defend herself, to assault her with the sight of him, which would take her by surprise and enter into her forever, however she might twist and tum. This excitement was whirling and turning in his knees, hands, and larynx, or so it seemed at least to Ulrich as he observed the man groping his way through the bushes where they were already in the half-light, getting ready to step out at the right moment and expose himself. Dazed, the miserable man, leaning into the last slight resist- ance of the twigs, glued his eyes on the ugly face now pitching up and down toward him in the full light, his breath panting obediently in time with the rhythm of the stranger. 'Will she scream? " Ulrich thought. This coarse person was perfectly capable of flying into a rage instead ofa panic, and going over to the attack; in which case the
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demented coward would have to take to his heels, and his frustrated lust would plunge its knife into his own flesh, the squat handle first! But at this tense moment Ulrich heard the casual voices of two men coming down the road, and since he could hear them through the glass they must have penetrated the hissing excitement down below, for the man beneath the window cautiously dropped the nearly opened veil of twigs and withdrew soundlessly back into the midst of the darkness.
"What a swine! " Clarisse whispered to the friend beside her, ener- getically but not at all indignantly. Back before Meingast's transfor- mation he had often heard her use such terms, provoked by his free-and-easy ways with her, so the word might be considered histor- ical. Clarisse assumed that Meingast would still remember it, despite his transformation, and it really did seem to her that his fingers stirred very faintly on her arm in answer. There was nothing at all accidental about this evening; it was not even by chance that the man had chosen Clarisse's window to stand under. She was firmly con- vinced that she had a baneful attraction for men who had something wrong with them; it had often proved to be so! Taken all in all, it was not so much that her ideas were confused as that they left out con- nections, or that they were saturated with affect in many places where other people have no such inner wellspring. Her conviction that she had been the one who had made it possible at the time for Meingast to remake himself was in itself not improbable; if one also considered how independently this change had taken its own course, because there had been no contact over distance and for years, and further how great a change it was-for it had made a prophet out of a superficial worldling-and finally how it was soon after Meingast's departure that the love between Walter and Clarisse had risen to that height ofdiscord where it still remained, then even Clarisse's notion that she and Walter would have had to take on the sins of the still untransformed Meingast to make his rise possible was no worse rea- soning than any number of respected ideas people believe in today. This had given rise, however, to the relationship of knightly servitude that Clarisse felt toward the returned Master, and whenever she now spoke of his new "transformation," instead of simply a change, she was only giving fitting expression to the elevated state in which she had since found herself. The awareness offinding herselfin a signifi-
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cant relationship could uplift Clarisse in the literal sense. One doesn't quite know whether to paint saints with a cloud under their feet or whether they should be standing on nothing a finger's breadth above the ground, and this was exactly how it now stood with her, since Meingast had chosen her house in which to accomplish his great work, which apparently was grounded in something quite pro- found. Clarisse was not in love with him as a woman; it was rather like a boy who admires a man: ecstatic when he manages to set his hat at the same angle as his idol, and filled with a secret ambition even to outdo him eventually.
Walter knew this. He could not hear what Clarisse was whispering to Meingast, nor could his eye make out any more of the pair than a heavily fused mass of shadow in the dim light of the window, but he could see through everything. He, too, had recognized what was wrong with the man in the bushes, and the silence that reigned in the room lay most heavily upon him. He managed to make out that Ul- rich, who stood motionless beside him, was staring intently out the window, and he assumed that the two at the other window were doing the same. "Why doesn't anyone break this silence? " he thought. "Why doesn't someone open the window and scare this monster off? " It occurred to him that they were obligated to call the police, but there was no telephone in the house, and he lacked the courage to undertake something that might make his companions look down on him. He had no desire whatever to be an "outraged bourgeois," but he was just so exasperated! He could understand very well the "chivalric relationship" in which his wife stood to Mein- gast, for even in lovemaking it was impossible for her to imagine exal- tation without effort: she derived her exaltation not from sensuality, only from ambition. He remembered how incredibly alive she could sometimes be in his arms, at a time when he had still been preoc- cupied with art; but except by such detours it was impossible to arouse her. "Perhaps ambition is all that really takes people out of themselves," he reflected dubiously. It had not escaped him that Clarisse "stood watch" while Meingast was working, in order to pro- tect his ideas with her body, although she did not even know what these ideas were. Painfully, Walter regarded the lonely egotist in his bush; this wretch offered a warning example for the devastation that can be created in an all-too-isolated mind. That he knew exactly what
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Clarisse was feeling as she stood there watching tormented him. "She will be slightly excited, as if she had just run up a flight of stairs," he thought. He himself felt a pressure in the scene that was before his eyes, ll! ' if something had been wrapped in a cocoon and was trying to break its envelope, and he felt how within this mysteri- ous pressure, which Clarisse, too, was feeling, the will was aroused not merely to watch but right away, soon, somehow, to do something, to inteiVene in what was happening in order to set it free. Other peo- ple got their ideas from life, but whatever Clarisse experienced came, evexy time, from ideas: such an enviable madness! And Walter was more inclined to the exaggerations of his wife, even if she was perhaps mentally ill, than to the way of thinking of his friend Ulrich, who fancied himself cautious and cool: somehow the more irrational was closer to him; perhaps it left him personally untouched, it ap- pealed to his sympathy. In any event, many people prefer crazy ideas to difficult ones, and he even derived a certain satisfaction from Cla- risse's whispering with Meingast in the dark, while Ulrich was con- demned to stand beside him as a mute shadow; it seiVed Ulrich right to be beaten by Meingast. But from time to time Walter was tor- mented by the expectation that Clarisse would fling open the win- dow or rush down the stairs to the bushes: then he detested both male shadows and their obscene silent watching, which made the sit- uation for the poor little Prometheus he was shielding, who was so vulnerable to evexy temptation of the spirit, more problematic from one minute to the next.
During this time the afflicted man's shame and frustrated lust had fused into an all-peiVasive disappointment that filled his gaunt body with its massive bitterness as he withdrew into his bushes. When he had reached the innermost darkness he collapsed, letting himself fall to the ground, and his head hung from his neck like a leaf. The world stood ready to punish him, and he saw his situation much as it would have appeared to the two passersby had they discovered him. But after this man had wept for himself for a while, dxy-eyed, the original change came over him once again, this time mixed with even more vengefulness and spite. And again it miscarried. A girl passed by who might have been around fifteen and was obviously late coming from somewhere; she seemed lovely to him, a small, hastening ideal: the depraved man felt that he now really ought to step out and speak to
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her in a friendly way, but this plunged him instantly into wild terror. His imagination, ready to conjure up anything that could even be suggested by a woman, became fearful and awkward when con- fronted with the natural possibility of admiring this defenseless little creature approaching in her beauty. The more she was suited to please his daylight self, the less pleasure she provided his shadow self, and he vainly tried to hate her, since he could not love her. So he stood uneasily at the borderline between shadow and light and ex- posed himself. When the child noticed his secret she had already passed by him and was about eight paces away; at fust she had merely looked at the leaves moving without realizing what was going on, and when she did she could already feel secure enough not to be scared to death: her mouth did stay open for a while, but then she gave a loud scream and began to run; the scamp even seemed to enjoy looking back, and the man felt himself humiliatingly aban- doned. He wrathfully hoped that a drop of poison might somehow have fallen into her eyes and would later eat its way through her heart.
This relatively harmless and comical outcome relieved the specta- tors' sense of humanity; this time they would indeed have intervened if the scene had not resolved itself as it did; and preoccupied with this, they hardly noticed how the business below did come to an end; they could only confirm that it had done so when they observed that the male "hyena," as Walter put it, had suddenly disappeared. The man finally realized his intentions when a perfectly ordinary woman came along who looked at him aghast and with loathing. involuntarily shocked into stopping for a moment, and then tried to pretend that she had not seen anything. During this instant he felt himself, to- gether with his roof of leaves and the whole topsy-turvy world he had come from, sliding deep into the defenseless woman's resisting gaze. That may have been how it happened, or perhaps it was some other way. Clarisse had not been paying attention. With a deep breath she raised herself from her half-crouching position; she and Meingast had let go of each other some time before. It seemed to her that she was suddenly landing on the wooden floor with the soles of her feet, and a whirlpool of inexpressible, horrible desire stilled itself in her body. She was firmly convinced that everything that had just oc- curred had a special meaning, minted just for her; and strange as it
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may sound, the repulsive scene left her with the impression that she was a bride who had just been serenaded. In her head, intentions were dancing helter-skelter, some ready to be carried out and others, new ones, just occurring to her.
"Funny! " Ulrich suddenly said into the darkness, the first of the four to break the silence. ''What an absurdly twisted notion it is to think how this fellow's fun would have been spoiled if he only knew he was being watched the whole time! "
Meingast's shadow detached itself from the nothingness and stood, a slender compression of darkness, facing in the direction of Ulrich's voice.
'We attach far too much importance to sex," the Master said. "These are in fact the goatlike caperings of our era's wilL" He said nothing further. But Clarisse, who had winced with annoyance at Ul- rich's words, felt borne forward by what Meingast said, although in this darkness there was no telling in what direction.
THE TESTAMENT
When Ulrich returned home from what he had experienced, even more dissatisfied than he had been before, he decided that he must not avoid a decision any longer, and tried to recall as best he could the "incident," as he euphemistically called what had happened in his last few hours with Agathe, only a few days after their deep discussion.
He was all packed and ready to leave on a sleeper that came through the town late, and so he and Agathe met for a final meal. They had agreed earlier that she would join him soon, and they somewhat uncertainly estimated this separation at from five days to two weeks.
At dinner Agathe said: ''There's something more we have to do before you leave. "
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'What? " Ulrich asked.
''We have to change the will! "
Ulrich remembered looking at his sister without surprise; despite
all their earlier talk he had assumed she was leading up to a joke. But Agathe was gazing down at her plate, with the familiar meditative wrinkle between her eyebrows. Slowly she said:
"He won't keep as much of me between his fingers as would be left if a woolen thread had been burned away between them! "
Something must have been intensely at work in her in the last few days. Ulrich was about to tell her that he regarded such deliberations about how Hagauer's interests could be injured as impermissible and did not want to hear any more about it. But at that moment their father's old servant came in with the next course, and they could only go on talking in veiled allusions.
"Aunt Malvina . . . ," Agathe said, smiling at her brother. "Do you remember Aunt Malvina? She had intended to leave every- thing she owned to our cousin; it was all arranged and everyone knew about it! Accordingly, all she was left in her parents' will was the legal minimum she was entitled to, all the rest going to her brother, so that neither of the children, whose father was equally devoted to both of them, should inherit more than the other. You remember that, surely? The annuity that Agathe-Alexandra, our cousin, that is"-she corrected herselfwith a laugh-"had been re- ceiving since her marriage was, for the time being, discounted against her legal share; it was a complicated arrangement, to give Aunt Malvina time to die. . . . "
"I don't understand you," Ulrich muttered.
"Oh, but it's perfectly simple! Aunt Malvina is dead, but before she died she lost all her money; she even had to be supported. Now, if Papa should for some reason have forgotten to revoke that provi- sion in his will, Alexandra gets nothing at all, even if her marriage contract had stipulated joint ownership of property! "
"I don't know about that; it seems very doubtful! " Ulrich said im- pulsively. "Besides, Father must have given certain assurances. He can't possibly have made such provisions without talking it over with his son-in-law! "
He remembered saying this only too well, because he could not
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possibly keep silent while listening to his sister's dangerous error. He could still see vividly in his mind the smile with which she had looked at him. "Isn't it just like him? " she seemed to be thinking. "One only has to present a case to him as ifit weren't flesh and blood but some abstraction, and one can lead him around by the nose. " And then she had asked curtly: "Is there any written evidence of such arrange- ments? " and answered herself: "I never heard anything about it, and if anyone knew about it, it would certainly be me. But of course Papa was strange about everything. "
Now the servant was back at the table, and she took advantage of Ulrich's helplessness to add: "Verbal agreemen. ts_can always be con- tested. But if the will was changed again after Aunt Malvina lost ev- erything, then all signs point to this new codicil having been lost. "
Again Ulrich let himself be tempted to steer her right: "That still leaves the sizable automatic inheritance that can't be taken away from children of one's body. "
"But I've just told you that all of that was paid out during the fa- ther's lifetime! After all, Alexandra was married twice. " They were alone for a moment, and Agathe hastened to add: ''I've looked at that passage very carefully. Only a few words need to be changed to make it look as if my share had already been paid out to me in full. Who knows anything about it now? When Papa went back to leaving us equal shares after Aunt Malvina's losses, he put it in a codicil that can be destroyed. Anyway, there's nothing to have prevented me from having renounced my legal share in your favor for one reason or another. "
Ulrich looked at her dumbfounded and missed his opportunity to respond to her inventions as he felt obliged to do; by the time he was ready, they were no longer alone, and he had to resort to circum- locutions.
"One really shouldn't," he began hesitantly, "even think such things! "
"Why not? '' Agatha retorted.
Such questions are simple as long as they are left alone, but the moment they rear their heads they are a monstrous serpent that had been curled up into a harmless blob. Ulrich remembered answering: "Even Nietzsche asks the 'free spirits' to observe certain external
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rules for the sake of a greater internal freedom! " He had said this with a smile, although he felt it was rather cowardly to hide behind someone else's words.
"That's a lame principle! " Agathe said, dismissing it out of hand. "That's the principle behind my marriage! "
And Ulrich thought: "It really is a lame principle. " It seems that people who have new and revolutionary answers to particular prob- lems make up for it by compromising on everything else, which en- ables them to lead highly moral lives in carpet slippers; all the more so as the attempt to keep everything constant except what they are trying to change corresponds totally to the creative economy of thinking in which they feel at home. Even Ulrich had always re- garded this more as a strict than as a slack procedure, but when he was having this talk with his sister he felt that she had struck home; he could no longer bear the indecision he had loved, and it seemed to him that it was precisely Agathe who had been given the mission of bringing him to this point. And while he was nevertheless propound- ing the "rule of the free spirits" to her, she laughed and asked him whether he didn't notice that the moment he tried to formulate gen- eral principles a different man appeared in his place.
"And even though you are surely right to admire him, basically he doesn't mean a thing to you! " she declared, giving her brother a will- ful and challenging look. Again he had no ready answer and said nothing, expecting an interruption at any moment, yet he could not bring himself to drop the subject. This situation emboldened her.
"In the short time we've been together," she went on, "you've given me such wonderful guidelines for my life, things I would never have dared think out for myself, but then you always end up wonder- ing whether they're really true! It seems to me that the truth the way you use it is only a way of mistreating people! "
She was amazed at her own daring in making such reproaches; her own life seemed so worthless to her that she surely ought to have kept quiet. But she drew her courage from Ulrich himself, and there was something so curiously feminine in her way of leaning on him while she attacked him that he felt it too.
"You don't understand the desire to organize ideas in large, ar- ticulated masses," Ulrich said. "The battle experiences of the intel- lect are alien to you; all you see in them is columns marching in some
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kind of formation, the impersonality of many feet stirring up the truth like a cloud of dust! "
"But didn't you yourself describe to me, far more precisely and clearly than I ever could, the two states of mind in which you can live? " she answered.
A glowing cloud, with ever-changing outlines, flew across her face. She felt the desire to bring her brother to the point where he could no longer retreat. The thought made her feverish, but she did not yet know whether she would have enough courage to carry it through, and so she put off ending the meal.
Ulrich knew all this, he guessed it, but he had pulled himself to- gether and taken up his position. He sat facing her, his eyes focused, absent, his mouth forced to utterance, and had the impression that he was not really there but had remained somewhere behind him- self, calling out to himself what he was saying:
"Suppose that, on a trip somewhere, I wanted to steal some stran- ger's golden cigarette e a s e - l ask you, isn't that simply unthinkable? I don't want to go into the question right now of whether a move s u c h as y o u ' r e c o n t e m p l a t i n g is o r i s n ' t j u s t i f i a b l e o n g r o u n d s o f i n t e l - lectual freedom. For all I know, it may be in order to do Hagauer some injury. But imagine me in a hotel, neither penniless nor a pro- fessional thief, nor a mental defective with deformed head or body, nor the offspring of a hysterical mother or a drunkard father, nor confused or stigmatized by anything else in any way at all: yet I steal, nevertheless. I repeat: This couldn't happen anywhere in the world!
