But there are also those who say that such regularity of phenomena which are not casually related to each other cannot be explained at all by con- ventional logic, and the point has been made, among others, that such phenomena must be analyzed not as
individual
instances but as involving some unknown laws of aggregates or collectives.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v1
"A businessman's work is surely a veritable refuge ofsanity?
At least it's the only profession resting on a theoretically sound basis.
"
"That it is! " Fischel agreed. "The businessman serves the cause of human progress, asking only for a reasonable profit. And yet he is just as badly off as everyone else, when it comes to that," he added gloomily.
Ulrich had agreed to walk him home.
On their arrival, they found a mood already strained to the break- ingpoint.
All Gerda's friends were present, and a tremendous battle of words was in full swing. Most of the young people were still at school or in their first or second term at the university, though a few had jobs in business. How they had come to form this group was something they themselves no longer knew. One by one. Some had met in nationalist student fraternities, others in the socialist or Catholic youth movement, and others out hiking with a horde of Wanderoogel.
It would not be wholly out of order to suppose that the only thing they all had in common was Leo Fischel. To endure, a spiritual movement needs a physical basis, and this physical basis was Fischel's apartment, together with the refreshments provided by Frau Cl~mentine, along with a certain regulation of the traffic. Gerda went with the apartment, Hans Sepp went with Gerda, and Hans Sepp, the student with the impure complexion and all-the- purer soul, though not their leader, because these young people ac- knowledged no leader, was the most impassioned of them all. They might meet elsewhere occasionally, where the hostess would be someone other than Gerda, but the nucleus of their movement was basically as described.
Still, the source of these young people's inspiration was as remark-
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able an enigma as the appearance of a previously unknown disease, or a sequence of winning numbers in a game of chanc:e. When the sun of old-style European idealism began to fade and its white blaze darkened, many torches were passed from hand to hand-ideas, torches of the mind, stolen from Heaven knows where, or invented bywhom? -and flaring up here and there, they became that dancing pool offire a little spiritual community. And so there was much talk, those last few years before the great war carried all of it to its fore- gone conclusion, among the younger generation, about love and fel- lowship-and the young anti-Semites who met at Bank Director Fischel's felt themselves to be most particularly under the sign of an all-embracing love and fellowship. True fellowship is the work of an inner law, and the deepest, simplest, most perfect, and foremost of these is the law oflove. Love, as already noted, not in its base, sensual form, for physical possession is an invention of Mammon that in the end only disrupts the community and strips it of its meaning. And one can't, of course,. love just everybody and anybody. But one can respect the character ofevery individual, as long as that person truth- fully strives to keep growing, with an unremitting inner responsibil- ity. And so they fiercely argued about everything, in the name of love.
But on this particular day a uiuted front had formed against Frau Clementine, who was so pleased at feeling young again, and inwardly agreed that married love really did have something in common with interest paid on capital, but drew the line at tolerating harsh criticism of the Parallel Campaign on the grounds that Aryans could create viable symbols only if they kept alien elements out of it. Clementine was just on the verge of losing her temper, and Gerda's cheeks were aflame with round red spots because her mother would take no hint to leave the room. When Leo Fischel had entered with Ulrich, she was pleading in sign language with Hans Sepp to break it off, and Hans said in a conciliating tone: ''These days, no one can create any- thing great! " supposing that he had thereby reduced everything to the customary impersonal formula acceptable to all those present.
Unluckily, Ulrich joined in at this point and asked Hans-poking a little malicious fun at Fischel-whether he did not believe in any kind of progress at all. .
"Progress? " Hans Sepp retorted with a patronizing air. "You need
only think of the kind of ~en we had a hundred years ago, before progress set in: Beethoven! Goethe! Napoleonl Hebbell"
"Hmm," Ulrich said. "The last-named was only just hom a hun- dred years ago. "
"Our young friends dismiss- numerical precision," Director Fischel gloated.
Ulrich did not pursue this. He knew that Hans Sepp held him in jealous contempt, yet he felt a certain sympathy for Gerda's peculiar friends. So he sat down among them and wen~ on: "We're undeni- ably making so much progress in the several branches of human ca- pability that we actually feel we can't keep up with it! Isn't it possible that this can also make us feel·that there is no progress? After all, progress is surely the product of all our joint efforts, so we can practi- cally predict that ari. y real progress is likely to be precisely what no- body wanted. "
Hans Sepp's dark shock of hair turned into a tremulous hom pointed at Ulrich. "There, now you've said it yourself: what nobody wanted! A lot of cackling back and forth, a hundred ways, but no way to go! Ideas, of course, but no soul! And·no character! The sentence leaps off the page, the word leaps from the sentence, the whole is no longer a whole, as Nietzsche has already said. Never mind that Nietz- sche's egomania is another minus value for existence! Can you tell me one single, solid, ultimate value from which you, for instance, take your bearings in life? " ·
"Just like that-on demand! " Fischel protested, but Ulrich asked Hans: "Is it really utterly impossible for you to live without some ulti- mate value? "
"Utterly," said Hans, "but I admit that I am bound to be unhappy as a result. " .
"The hell you say! " Ulrich_ laughed. "Everything we can do de- pends on our not being overly perfectionist, not waiting for the ulti- mate inspiration. That's what the Middle Ages did, and ignorant they stayed. "
"Did they, now? " Hans Sepp retorted. ''I'd say that we're the igno- rant ones. "
"But you must admit that our ignorance is manifestly of a very rich and varied sort? "
A drawling voice was heard muttering at the back: "Variety . . .
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knowledge . . . relative progress! All con~epts from the mechanistic outlook of an era corrupted by capitalism: There's hardly more to be said. . . . "
Leo Fischel was also muttering to himself; something to the effect that in his opinion Ulrich was being far too indulgent with these juve- nile misfits. He took cover behind the newspaper he unfolded.
But Ulrich was enjoying }timself. "Is the modem house, with its six rooms,. maid's bath, vacuum cleaner, and all that, progress, com~ pared with the old h~uses with their high ceilings, thick walls, and handsome archways, or not? "
"No! " Hans Sepp shouted. .
"Is the airplane progress, compared with the mail coach? "
"Yes! " Director Fischel shouted.
"The machine compared with handicrafts? "
"Handicrafts! " from Hans, and "Machine! " from Leo.
"It seems to m~," Ulrich said, ·~that every step forward· is also a
step backward. Progress always exists in only one particular sense. And since there's no sense in our life as a whole, neither is there such a thing as progress as a whole. "
. Leo Fischel lowered his paper. 'Would you say that it's better to be able to cross the Atlantic in six days rather than having to spend . six weeks on it? "
''I'd be inclined to say that it's definitely progress to have the choice. But our young Christians wouldn't agree to that, either. "
The ·circle offriends sat still, taut as a drawn bow. Ulrich had para- lyzed their tongues but not their fighting spirit. He went on evenly: "But you can also say the opposite: If our life makes progress in the particular instance, it also makes sense in the particular instance. But once it has made sense to offer up human sacrifice to the gods, say, or bum witches, or wear powdered wigs, then·that remains one-oflife's valid possibilities, even when more hygienic habits and more hu- mane customs represent progress. The trouble is that progress al- ways wants to do away with the old meamng. "
"Do you mean to say," Fischel asked, "that we should go back to human sacrifice after we have succeeded in putting such abominable acts of darkness behind us? "
. "Is it darkness, necessarily? " Hans Sepp replied in Ulrich's place. "When you devour an innocent rabbit, that's darkness, but when a
cannibal dines reverently and with religious rites on a stranger, we simply cannot know what goes on inside him. "
"There certainly must have been something to be said for the ages we have left behind," Ulrich agreed, "otherwise so many nice people would never have gone along with them. I wonder if we could tum that to account for ourselves, without sacrificing tQo much? And per- haps we are still sacrificing so many human beings today only be- cause we never clearly faced the pro~lem of the light way to overcome mankind's earlier answers. The way in which everything hangs together is extremely obscure and hard to express. "
"But to your way of thinking, the ideal aim must always be some sort of bottom line or balanced books, right? " Hans Sepp burst out, against Ulrich this time. "You believe in bourgeois'progress every bit as much as Director Fischel, you just manage to express it in the most twisted and perverted words you can find, so that you can't be pirined down. " Hans had been the spokesman for his friends. Ulrich turned to look at Gerda's face. He intended to pick up casually where he had left off, ignoring the fact that Fischel and the young men were as ready to pounce on him as on each other.
"But aren't you striving toward some goal yourself, Hans? " he asked doggedly.
"Something is striving. Inside me. Through me," Hans rapped out.
"And is it going to get there? " Leo Fischel indulged himself in sar- casm, thereby, as all but himself realized, going over to Ulrich's side.
"I wouldn't know," Hans answered gloomily.
"You should take your exams-that would be progress. " Fischel could not refrain from piling it on, so irritated was he, no less by his friend than by these callow youths.
At this moment the room seemed to explode. Frau Clementine cast an imploring look at her husband; Gerda tried to forestall Hans as he struggled for words, which finally came bursting out as yet an- other attack on Ulrich.
"You may be sure," he shouted, "that. basically even you don't have a single idea that Director Fischel couldn't come up with just as welll"
With this parting shot he rushed out of the room, followed by his cohorts, making their bows in angry haste. Director Fischel, blud- geoned by the looks he was getting from his wife, pretended to re-
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member his duties as a host and trudged grumpily into the foyer to speed his guests on their way. Clementine heaved a sigh of relief, now that the air was cleared, then she rose too, and Ulrich suddenly found himself alone with Gerda.
103
THE TEMPTATION
Gerda was visibly upset when they were left alone together. He took her hand; her ann started trembling, and she broke away from him.
"You have no idea what it means to Hans to have a goal," she said. "You make fun of all that; that's cheap enough. It seems to me your mind is more disgusting than ever! " She had been groping for the harshest possible word and was startled by what she had come up with. Ulrich tried to catch hold ofher hand again; she pulledlier arm close to her side. "That's no longer good enough for us! " She hurled her words with a fierce disdain, but her body swayed toward him.
"I know," Ulrich said sarc~tically. "Everything you people do must meet the highest standards. That's exactly what makes me be- have the way you've just described so amiably. You probably wouldn't believe how much it meant to me to talk to·you quite differ- ently back in the old days. "
"You were never any different! " Gerda answered quickly.
'Tve always been undecided," Ulrich said simply, searching her face. "Would you be interested in hearing about what's going on at my cousin's? "
Something now flickered in Gerda's eyes that was clearly distinct from her uneasiness at Ulrich's proximity: she was burning to find out all she could on that subject, for Hans's sake, and was trying to hide her eagerness. Ulrich perceived this with a certain satisfaction, and like an animal scenting danger, he instinctively changed course and began to talk of something else.
"Do you still remember my story about the moon? " he asked. "First I'd like to tell you something else like that. "
"More of your lies, I'm-sure! " she snapped.
"Not if I can possibly help it. . . . You must remember, from the lectures you've attended, how people go about deciding whether something is a law or not? Either you start out with reasons for be- lieving that it is a law, as in physics or chemistry, and even though your observations never quite add up to the preCise results you're looking for, they come fairly close in some definite pattern, and you work it out from there. Or else, as happens so often in life, you have no such reasons and find yourself facing a phenomenon about which you can't quite tell whether it is a law or pure chance; that's where things acquire a human interest. Then you translate a series of obser- vations into a series offigures, which you divide into categories to see which numbers lie between this value and that, and the next, and so on; you arrange them in series where the frequency with which something happens shows or doesn't show a systematic increase or decrease, and you get either a stable series or a distribl)tive func- tion. You then calculate the degree of. aberration, the mean devi- ation, the degree of deviation from some arbitrary value, the central value, the normal value, the average value, the dispersion, and so forth, and with the help of all these concepts you study your given phenomenon. "
Ulrich laid all this out in so casual a tone that it would have been hard to tell whether he was only just working it out in his own mind or hypnotizing Gerda with a display of science for the fun of it. Gerda had moved away from him, leaning forward in an armchair with a furrow of concentration between her eyebrows as she looked down at the floor. To be spoken to in this matter-of-fact tone, an appeal to her intellect, put a damper on her rebelliousness, which she now felt fading away, together with the self-assurance it had given her. Her schooling had taken her through a few semesters at the university, skimming a vast body of new knowledge that could no longer be con- tained in the old framework of classic and humanistic studies. Such an education leaves many young people feeling powerless in facing a new time, a new world where the soil can no longer be worked with the old tools. She had no idea where Ulrich's line of reasoning was taking her. She believed him because she was in love with him, and
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doubted him because she was ten years younger than he and be- longed to a new generation keenly aware of its fresh energies; the two conflicting strands of feeling mingled hazily within her as she
. listened.
''Besides which, you see, we have data that are indistinguishable
from those that demonstrate a natural law, yet they have no such basis. Statistical series can sometimes have the same regularity that we associate with natural law. I'm sure you can think of examples you've heard in some sociology lecture, like the statistics about di- vorce in America, let's say. Or the ratio between male and female births, one of the most stable factors of the kind. Or the number of conscripts annually who try to evade their military service by some form of self-mutilation, also a relative constant, or the suicide statis- tics; even theft, rape, and bankruptcy occur, as far as I know, at more
·or less the same annual rate. . . . "
At this point Gerda's resistance tried to break through. "Are you
trying to explain progress to me? " she cried out, doing her best to sound sarcastic.
"But of course," Ulrich came back at her, without breaking stride. "It's called the law of large numbers, a bit nebulously. Meaning that one person may commit suicide for this reason and another for that reason, but when a great number is involved, then the accidental and the personal elements cancel each ·other out, and what's left . . . but that's just it: what is left? I ask you. Because you see, what'S left is what each one of us as laymen calls, simply, the average, which is a "something," but nobody really knows exactly what. Let me add that efforts have been made to find a logical and formal explanation for this law of large numbers, as an accepted fact, as it were.
But there are also those who say that such regularity of phenomena which are not casually related to each other cannot be explained at all by con- ventional logic, and the point has been made, among others, that such phenomena must be analyzed not as individual instances but as involving some unknown laws of aggregates or collectives. I don't
want to bother you with the details, which I no longer have at my fingertips anyway, but I would certainly love to know, for myself, whether there are such laws of the collective phenomenon, or whether it is simply by some irony of nature that the particular in- stance arises from the happening of nothing in particular, and that
the ultimate meaning turns out to be something arrived at by taking the average ofwhat is basically meaningless. It would certainly make a radical differenc~ to our sense of ourselves if we knew the answer, one way or another! Whichever it turns out to be, any possibility of leading an ordered life depends on this law oflarge numbers. If there were no such law of averages, we might have a year with nothing at all happening, followed by one in which you could count on nothing for certain, famine alternating with oversupply, no births followed by too many, and we would all be fluttering to and fro between our heavenly and our hellish possibilities like little birds when someone suddenly comes up to their cage. "
"Is all this true? " Gerda asked hesitantly.
"You ought to know it yourself. "
"Of course I do, as far as the details go! But what I don't know is
whether this is what you meant before, when they were all arguing. What you were saying about progress simply sounded like a deliber- ate provocation. "
"That's what you·always think about me. But what do we really know about the nature of our progress? Not a thing. There are all sorts of possibilities for the way things might tum out, and I simply mentioned just one more. "
"How things might tum out! That's always the way with you; it would never occur to you to wonder how things should be. "
"You and·your friends-always jumping the gun. There's always got to be a supreme goal, an ideal, a program-an absolute. Yet in the end, all that ever comes of it is a compromise, some common denominator. Isn't it tiring and ridiculous to be always reaching for the heights and always ending up settling for some mediocre result? "
It was essentially the same conversation he had had with Diotima, with only superficial differences. Nor did it make much difference which woman happened to . be sitting there facing him; a body, intra-· duced into a given magnetic field, invariably sets certain processes in motion. Ulrich studied Gerda, who was not answering his last ques- tion. There she sat, a skinny girl, with a little furrow of resentment between her eyes. Another hollow, vertical furrow could be seen in the V of her low-cut blouse. Her arms and legs were long and deli- cate. She suggested a limp springtime, aglow with a premature sum- mer heat, together with the full impact ofthe willfulness locked in so
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young a body. He felt a strange mixture of aversion and detachment at the thought that he was closer to a decision than he had realized and that this young girl was destined to play a part ill it. Willy-nilly he suddenly found himself telling her his impressions of the so-called younger generation in the Parallel Campaign, ending with words that took Gerda by surprise:
"These younger people are also very radical, and I'm not popular with them either. But I pay them back in the same coin, because I, too, am radical in my own way, and I can put up with any kind of disorder more easily than the intellectual kind. I like to see ideas not onlydeveloped but brought together. I want not only the oscillation but also the density of an idea. This is what you, my indispensable friend, criticize as my tendency to describe only what might be, in- stead of what ought to be. Well, I do know the difference. This is probably the most anachronistic attitude one can have nowadays, when intellectual rigor and the emotional life are at the farthest re- move from each other, but our precision in technology has unfortu- nately advanced to such a point that it seems to regard the imprecision of life as its proper complement. Why won't you under- stand? The chances are you're incapable of understanding ~e. and it's perverse of me to try to confuse a mind so well attuned to the times. Still, Gerda, I sometimes honestly wonder whether I might be wrong, after all. Possibly the very people I can't stand are carrying out what I once hoped to accomplish myself. They may be doing it all wrong, not using their heads, one running-this way and the other that way, each spouting an idea that he regards as the only possible idea in the world; each one of them feels tremendously clever, and they all agree in regarding our times as cursed ·with sterility. But suppose it's the other way around, and every one of them is stupid, but all of them together are pregnant with the future? Everyone of our truths seems to be born split into two opposing falsehoods, and this, too, can be a way of arriving at a result that transcends the merely per- sonal. In that case the final balance, the sum total of all the experi- ments, no longer rests with the individual, who becomes unbearably one-sided, but with the experimental collective. In short, I ask you to make allowances for an old man whose loneliness sometimes drives him to excess. "
"You've certainly given me a lot to think about," Gerda said
grimly. ''Why don't you write a book? That way, you might be able to help yourself and us, too. "
"Why on earth should I feel called upon to write a book? " Ulrich objected. "I was born of my mother, after all, not an inkwell. "
G~rda was wondering whether a book by Ulrich would really help anyone. Like all the young people in her circle, she overrated the power of the printed word. A total silence had fallen in the apartment since they had stopped talking, as if the elder Fischels had left the house in the wake of their indignant guests. And Gerda sensed the force emanating from the more powerful male body beside her, as she always did, contrary to all her resolutions, when they were alone to- gether; the effort to resist made her tremble. Ulrich noticed it; he stood up, laid his hand on Gerda's frail shoulder, and said to her: "Look at it this way, Gerda. Suppose the moral sphere works more or less like the physical, as suggested by the kinetic theory of gases: ev- erything whirling around at random, each element doing what it will, but as soon as you work out rationally what is least likely to result from all this, that's precisely the result you get! Such correspondences, strange as they are, do exist. So suppose we also assume that there is a certain number ofideas circulating in our day,'resulting in some aver- age value that keeps shifting, very slowly and automatically-it's what we call progress, or the historical situation. What matters most about this, however, is that our personal, individual share in all this makes no difference; whether we individually move to the right or to the left, whether we think and act on a high or a low level, in an unpredictable m:: a calculated fashion, a new or an old style, does not affect this aver- age term, which is all that. God and the world care about. "
As he spoke he tried to put his arm around her, though it was pal- pably costing him an effort.
Gerda was furious. "You always begin by philosophizing," she cried out, "and it always turns into the usual rooster's cock-a-doodle- doo! " Her face was aflame, with flecks ofcolor in it. . Her lips seemed to be sweating, but there was something attractive about her indigna- tion. ''What you make of it is precisely what we don't want! "
N~w Ulrich could not resist the temptation to ask her, in a low voice: "Is possession so deadly? "
"I don't want to talk about that," Gerda retorted in an equally low tone.
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"It's all the same, whether it's a person you own or a thing. I know that," Ulrich went on. "Gerda, I understand you and Hans better than you think. So what is it that you and Hans want? Tell me. "
"Nothing! That's just it," Gerda exclaimed triumphantly. ''There's no way to state it. Papa also keeps on saying: 'You must make clear to yourselfwhat it is you actually want. Then you will see what nonsense it is. ' Well, everything is nonsense when you make it clear to yourself. To be sensible is never to get beyond the commonplace. I know you'll have some~ingto say about that, you and your sensible way of thinking. " '
Ulrich shook his head. "And what about this demonstration against Count Leinsdorf? " he asked gently, as though he were not changing the subject.
"Oh, so yo1,1 spy on us! " Gerda exclaimed.
"Call it spying if you like, I don't mind; but tell me about it, Gerda. ''
Gerda showed some embarrassment. "Nothing special. Just some sort of demonstration by the Young Germans-marching past his residence, yelling 'Shamel' and things like that. The Parallel Cam- paign is a shame! " '
"In what way? "
Gerda shrugged.
"Do sit down again," Ulrich pleaded. ''You're making far too much
of it. Let's have a quiet talk about it, shall we? ''
Gerda obeyed.
"Now listen to me, and tell me ifyou think I'm on the right track.
You say that possession kills. You're thinking of money, to begin with, and ofyour parents. I agree that they're dead souls. . . . "
Gerda looked offended.
"Very well, let's not talk about money but of 'having' in other ways. Take the man who 'has' himself in hand; the man who 'has' his con- victions; the man· who lets himself be 'had' by another person or by his own passions or merely his own habits or successes; the man who wants to conquer something, the man who wants anything at all: you reject all that? You want to be nomads, nomads forever on the move, as Hans once called it, if I remember. Moving on toward some other meaning, or state of being? Am I right so far? "
"All you're saying is quite right, in an awful sort of way; the intelli- gence doing a good imitation ofthe soul. "
"And intelligence is implicated in all that 'having', isn't it? The in- telligence is what measures, weighs, classifies, and collects every- thing, like an old banker. But what about all the things I talked with you about today that have quite a lot to do with our soUls? "
"A cold kind ofsoul. "
"You're absolutely right, Gerda. Now all I have to do is to tell you why I'm taking the part of the cold souls or even the bankers. "
"Because you're a coward. " Ulrich noticed that as she spoke she bared her teeth like a terrified little animal.
"So be it," he replied. "But surely you believe me capable, ifnoth- ing else, of being man enough to escape by, if necessary, climbing a lightning rod or down the tiniest foothold on a wall, if I were not so sure that every attempt at breaking out only leads back to Papa. "
Gerda had refused to enter into this conversation with Ulrich ever since their last talk on a similar subject. The feelings he was talking about were hers and Hans's alone, and she dreaded, even more than Ulrich's sarcasm, his coming over to her side, which merely left her at his mercy before she could tell whether he meant what he said or was just acting the Devil quoting scripture. From the moment, ear- lier on, when she had been taken by surprise at the sadness in his words-she was now enduring the consequences of having so briefly let down her guard-she had been visibly engaged in a violent inner struggle. But Ulrich was in a similar fix himself. He was far from tak- ing a perverse pleruiure in his power over the girl; he simply did not take Gerda seriously, and since this involved a certain element ofdis- like, he generally expressed himself freely to her, without regard for her feelings. But for some time now, the more·zestfully he took the world's part against her, the more he felt curiously inclined to con- fide in her, to let her see him as he really was, withou~ deceit or mak- ing himself look good, and wanting to see her true inner self as naked as a garden slug. He now looked at her thoughtfully and said: "I feel like letting my eyes rest between your cheeks like clouds in the sky. I don't really know how clouds feel in the sky, but then, I know as much as anybody about those moments when God seizes us like a glove and slowly turns us inside out on his fingers. You and your
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friends make it too easy for yourselves. You sense the negative side of the world we all live in, and you loudly proclaim that the positive world belongs to your parents and elders, and the world ofthe shad- owy negative to you, the new generation. I don't exactly relish play- ing the spy for your parents, my dear Gerda, but I put it to you that in choosing between the banker and an angel, the more realistic charac- ter of the banker's profession counts for something too. "
"Would you like some tea? " Gerda said sharply. "What can I do to make you comfortable here? I want you to see me at my best as the perfect daughter of the house. " She had pulled herself together again.
"Then suppose you marry Hans? "
"But I don't want to marry him! "
"You must have some plan or other-you can't go on living forever
on your opposition to your parents. "
"One of these days I shall leave home, make myself independent,
and he and I will remain friends. "
"Please, Gerda, let's suppose that you and Hans will be married or
something like it; it can hardly be avoided if things keep going the way they are. And now try to imagine yourself brushing your teeth in the morning, and Hans making out the income tax return, in an otheiWorldly state of mind. "
"DoIhavetoknowthat? " ·
"Your Papa would say so, if he had any notion of otheiWorldly states of mind; most people on life's voyage, I'm sorry to say, know very well how to stow their uncommon experiences so deep in the hold of their ship that they never perceive them at all. But let me ask a simpler question: Will you be expecting Hans to be faithful to you? Marital fidelity is part and parcel of the ownership complex, you know. You would have to accept Hans's fmding inspiration in an- other woman. Indeed, according to your principles, you would have to see it as an enrichment ofyour own life. "
"Don't suppose for a minute that we never discuss these questions ourselves," Gerda replied. ''You can't become a new human being overnight; but it is very bourgeois to consider this an argument against . making the effort. "
"What your father wants is actually something quite different from
what you think. He doesn't even claim to know more about all that than you and Hans; he merely says that he can't understand what you're up to. But he does know that power is a very sensible thing. He believes there's more sense in it than in you and him and Hans all rolled into one. What if he were to offer Hans enough money to let him finish his course and get his degree, without having to worry? And ifhe promised him, after a fair trial period, not that the marriage would take place, but at least that he would not stand in its way on principle? Ori only one condition: namely, that until the end of the trial period you two stop seeing each other, or keeping in touch, even to the extent you do now? "
"So this is what you're lending yourself to, is it? "
"I merely want to help you understand your father. He is a sinister deity who wields uncanny powers. He thinks he can make Hans see things his way by using money. In his opinion, a Hans with a limited monthly income couldn't possibly go on exceeding every limit of foolishness. But your father may be a dreamer, in his own way. I ad- mire him, just as I admire compromises, averages, dry facts, dead numbers. I don't believe in the Devil, but if I did I should think of him as the trainer who drives Heaven to break its own records. Any- way, I promised him to keep at you until there was nothing left of your fantasies-only reality. "
Ulrich was far from saying all this with a clear conscience. Gerda stood facing him as if in flames, the anger in her eyes overlaid with tears. All at once, a way had been opened up for her and Hans. But had Ulrich betrayed her, or did he want to help them? She had no idea, but whichever it was, it was likely to make her as unhappy as it made her happy. In her confusion she mistrusted him, and yet she felt with. a passion that there was a sacred bond between them, if only he would admit it.
He now added: "Your father of course harbors a secret hope that I may use the opportunity to win you for myself and change your mind altogether. "
"That's out of the question! " Gerda forced herself to say.
"As far as you and I are concerned, I suppose· that is out of the question," Ulrich said gently. "But we can't go on like this, either. I've already gone too far. " He tried to smile, but felt extreme self-
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loathing as he did. so. He really wanted none of this. He sensed the irresolution in her and despised himself for the cruelty it aroused in him.
At that very instant Gerda stared at him with horrified eyes. Sud- denly she was beautiful, like a fire one has approached t<;>o closely; almost without form, only a warmth th~tparalyzes the will.
"You must come to see me," he suggested. 'W e can't speak freely here. " Male ruthlessness shone out of his eyes in a blaze of empty light. .
"No," Gerda said defensively. But she averted her eyes, and Ul- rich sadly saw-as though by turning away she had again presented herself to his scrutiny-the body of this young girl, neither beautiful nor ugly, breathing hard. He gave a deep and wholly sincere sigh.
104
RACHEL AND SOLIMAN ON THE WARPATH
In the Tuzzi household, charged as it was with a high mission as a gathering place of ideas, there was a light-footed, quick, ardent, on- German creature in service. The little lady's maid, Rachel, was like a chambermaid in Mozart. She opened the front door and stood ready with arms half outstretched to receive the visitor's overcoat.
"That it is! " Fischel agreed. "The businessman serves the cause of human progress, asking only for a reasonable profit. And yet he is just as badly off as everyone else, when it comes to that," he added gloomily.
Ulrich had agreed to walk him home.
On their arrival, they found a mood already strained to the break- ingpoint.
All Gerda's friends were present, and a tremendous battle of words was in full swing. Most of the young people were still at school or in their first or second term at the university, though a few had jobs in business. How they had come to form this group was something they themselves no longer knew. One by one. Some had met in nationalist student fraternities, others in the socialist or Catholic youth movement, and others out hiking with a horde of Wanderoogel.
It would not be wholly out of order to suppose that the only thing they all had in common was Leo Fischel. To endure, a spiritual movement needs a physical basis, and this physical basis was Fischel's apartment, together with the refreshments provided by Frau Cl~mentine, along with a certain regulation of the traffic. Gerda went with the apartment, Hans Sepp went with Gerda, and Hans Sepp, the student with the impure complexion and all-the- purer soul, though not their leader, because these young people ac- knowledged no leader, was the most impassioned of them all. They might meet elsewhere occasionally, where the hostess would be someone other than Gerda, but the nucleus of their movement was basically as described.
Still, the source of these young people's inspiration was as remark-
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able an enigma as the appearance of a previously unknown disease, or a sequence of winning numbers in a game of chanc:e. When the sun of old-style European idealism began to fade and its white blaze darkened, many torches were passed from hand to hand-ideas, torches of the mind, stolen from Heaven knows where, or invented bywhom? -and flaring up here and there, they became that dancing pool offire a little spiritual community. And so there was much talk, those last few years before the great war carried all of it to its fore- gone conclusion, among the younger generation, about love and fel- lowship-and the young anti-Semites who met at Bank Director Fischel's felt themselves to be most particularly under the sign of an all-embracing love and fellowship. True fellowship is the work of an inner law, and the deepest, simplest, most perfect, and foremost of these is the law oflove. Love, as already noted, not in its base, sensual form, for physical possession is an invention of Mammon that in the end only disrupts the community and strips it of its meaning. And one can't, of course,. love just everybody and anybody. But one can respect the character ofevery individual, as long as that person truth- fully strives to keep growing, with an unremitting inner responsibil- ity. And so they fiercely argued about everything, in the name of love.
But on this particular day a uiuted front had formed against Frau Clementine, who was so pleased at feeling young again, and inwardly agreed that married love really did have something in common with interest paid on capital, but drew the line at tolerating harsh criticism of the Parallel Campaign on the grounds that Aryans could create viable symbols only if they kept alien elements out of it. Clementine was just on the verge of losing her temper, and Gerda's cheeks were aflame with round red spots because her mother would take no hint to leave the room. When Leo Fischel had entered with Ulrich, she was pleading in sign language with Hans Sepp to break it off, and Hans said in a conciliating tone: ''These days, no one can create any- thing great! " supposing that he had thereby reduced everything to the customary impersonal formula acceptable to all those present.
Unluckily, Ulrich joined in at this point and asked Hans-poking a little malicious fun at Fischel-whether he did not believe in any kind of progress at all. .
"Progress? " Hans Sepp retorted with a patronizing air. "You need
only think of the kind of ~en we had a hundred years ago, before progress set in: Beethoven! Goethe! Napoleonl Hebbell"
"Hmm," Ulrich said. "The last-named was only just hom a hun- dred years ago. "
"Our young friends dismiss- numerical precision," Director Fischel gloated.
Ulrich did not pursue this. He knew that Hans Sepp held him in jealous contempt, yet he felt a certain sympathy for Gerda's peculiar friends. So he sat down among them and wen~ on: "We're undeni- ably making so much progress in the several branches of human ca- pability that we actually feel we can't keep up with it! Isn't it possible that this can also make us feel·that there is no progress? After all, progress is surely the product of all our joint efforts, so we can practi- cally predict that ari. y real progress is likely to be precisely what no- body wanted. "
Hans Sepp's dark shock of hair turned into a tremulous hom pointed at Ulrich. "There, now you've said it yourself: what nobody wanted! A lot of cackling back and forth, a hundred ways, but no way to go! Ideas, of course, but no soul! And·no character! The sentence leaps off the page, the word leaps from the sentence, the whole is no longer a whole, as Nietzsche has already said. Never mind that Nietz- sche's egomania is another minus value for existence! Can you tell me one single, solid, ultimate value from which you, for instance, take your bearings in life? " ·
"Just like that-on demand! " Fischel protested, but Ulrich asked Hans: "Is it really utterly impossible for you to live without some ulti- mate value? "
"Utterly," said Hans, "but I admit that I am bound to be unhappy as a result. " .
"The hell you say! " Ulrich_ laughed. "Everything we can do de- pends on our not being overly perfectionist, not waiting for the ulti- mate inspiration. That's what the Middle Ages did, and ignorant they stayed. "
"Did they, now? " Hans Sepp retorted. ''I'd say that we're the igno- rant ones. "
"But you must admit that our ignorance is manifestly of a very rich and varied sort? "
A drawling voice was heard muttering at the back: "Variety . . .
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knowledge . . . relative progress! All con~epts from the mechanistic outlook of an era corrupted by capitalism: There's hardly more to be said. . . . "
Leo Fischel was also muttering to himself; something to the effect that in his opinion Ulrich was being far too indulgent with these juve- nile misfits. He took cover behind the newspaper he unfolded.
But Ulrich was enjoying }timself. "Is the modem house, with its six rooms,. maid's bath, vacuum cleaner, and all that, progress, com~ pared with the old h~uses with their high ceilings, thick walls, and handsome archways, or not? "
"No! " Hans Sepp shouted. .
"Is the airplane progress, compared with the mail coach? "
"Yes! " Director Fischel shouted.
"The machine compared with handicrafts? "
"Handicrafts! " from Hans, and "Machine! " from Leo.
"It seems to m~," Ulrich said, ·~that every step forward· is also a
step backward. Progress always exists in only one particular sense. And since there's no sense in our life as a whole, neither is there such a thing as progress as a whole. "
. Leo Fischel lowered his paper. 'Would you say that it's better to be able to cross the Atlantic in six days rather than having to spend . six weeks on it? "
''I'd be inclined to say that it's definitely progress to have the choice. But our young Christians wouldn't agree to that, either. "
The ·circle offriends sat still, taut as a drawn bow. Ulrich had para- lyzed their tongues but not their fighting spirit. He went on evenly: "But you can also say the opposite: If our life makes progress in the particular instance, it also makes sense in the particular instance. But once it has made sense to offer up human sacrifice to the gods, say, or bum witches, or wear powdered wigs, then·that remains one-oflife's valid possibilities, even when more hygienic habits and more hu- mane customs represent progress. The trouble is that progress al- ways wants to do away with the old meamng. "
"Do you mean to say," Fischel asked, "that we should go back to human sacrifice after we have succeeded in putting such abominable acts of darkness behind us? "
. "Is it darkness, necessarily? " Hans Sepp replied in Ulrich's place. "When you devour an innocent rabbit, that's darkness, but when a
cannibal dines reverently and with religious rites on a stranger, we simply cannot know what goes on inside him. "
"There certainly must have been something to be said for the ages we have left behind," Ulrich agreed, "otherwise so many nice people would never have gone along with them. I wonder if we could tum that to account for ourselves, without sacrificing tQo much? And per- haps we are still sacrificing so many human beings today only be- cause we never clearly faced the pro~lem of the light way to overcome mankind's earlier answers. The way in which everything hangs together is extremely obscure and hard to express. "
"But to your way of thinking, the ideal aim must always be some sort of bottom line or balanced books, right? " Hans Sepp burst out, against Ulrich this time. "You believe in bourgeois'progress every bit as much as Director Fischel, you just manage to express it in the most twisted and perverted words you can find, so that you can't be pirined down. " Hans had been the spokesman for his friends. Ulrich turned to look at Gerda's face. He intended to pick up casually where he had left off, ignoring the fact that Fischel and the young men were as ready to pounce on him as on each other.
"But aren't you striving toward some goal yourself, Hans? " he asked doggedly.
"Something is striving. Inside me. Through me," Hans rapped out.
"And is it going to get there? " Leo Fischel indulged himself in sar- casm, thereby, as all but himself realized, going over to Ulrich's side.
"I wouldn't know," Hans answered gloomily.
"You should take your exams-that would be progress. " Fischel could not refrain from piling it on, so irritated was he, no less by his friend than by these callow youths.
At this moment the room seemed to explode. Frau Clementine cast an imploring look at her husband; Gerda tried to forestall Hans as he struggled for words, which finally came bursting out as yet an- other attack on Ulrich.
"You may be sure," he shouted, "that. basically even you don't have a single idea that Director Fischel couldn't come up with just as welll"
With this parting shot he rushed out of the room, followed by his cohorts, making their bows in angry haste. Director Fischel, blud- geoned by the looks he was getting from his wife, pretended to re-
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member his duties as a host and trudged grumpily into the foyer to speed his guests on their way. Clementine heaved a sigh of relief, now that the air was cleared, then she rose too, and Ulrich suddenly found himself alone with Gerda.
103
THE TEMPTATION
Gerda was visibly upset when they were left alone together. He took her hand; her ann started trembling, and she broke away from him.
"You have no idea what it means to Hans to have a goal," she said. "You make fun of all that; that's cheap enough. It seems to me your mind is more disgusting than ever! " She had been groping for the harshest possible word and was startled by what she had come up with. Ulrich tried to catch hold ofher hand again; she pulledlier arm close to her side. "That's no longer good enough for us! " She hurled her words with a fierce disdain, but her body swayed toward him.
"I know," Ulrich said sarc~tically. "Everything you people do must meet the highest standards. That's exactly what makes me be- have the way you've just described so amiably. You probably wouldn't believe how much it meant to me to talk to·you quite differ- ently back in the old days. "
"You were never any different! " Gerda answered quickly.
'Tve always been undecided," Ulrich said simply, searching her face. "Would you be interested in hearing about what's going on at my cousin's? "
Something now flickered in Gerda's eyes that was clearly distinct from her uneasiness at Ulrich's proximity: she was burning to find out all she could on that subject, for Hans's sake, and was trying to hide her eagerness. Ulrich perceived this with a certain satisfaction, and like an animal scenting danger, he instinctively changed course and began to talk of something else.
"Do you still remember my story about the moon? " he asked. "First I'd like to tell you something else like that. "
"More of your lies, I'm-sure! " she snapped.
"Not if I can possibly help it. . . . You must remember, from the lectures you've attended, how people go about deciding whether something is a law or not? Either you start out with reasons for be- lieving that it is a law, as in physics or chemistry, and even though your observations never quite add up to the preCise results you're looking for, they come fairly close in some definite pattern, and you work it out from there. Or else, as happens so often in life, you have no such reasons and find yourself facing a phenomenon about which you can't quite tell whether it is a law or pure chance; that's where things acquire a human interest. Then you translate a series of obser- vations into a series offigures, which you divide into categories to see which numbers lie between this value and that, and the next, and so on; you arrange them in series where the frequency with which something happens shows or doesn't show a systematic increase or decrease, and you get either a stable series or a distribl)tive func- tion. You then calculate the degree of. aberration, the mean devi- ation, the degree of deviation from some arbitrary value, the central value, the normal value, the average value, the dispersion, and so forth, and with the help of all these concepts you study your given phenomenon. "
Ulrich laid all this out in so casual a tone that it would have been hard to tell whether he was only just working it out in his own mind or hypnotizing Gerda with a display of science for the fun of it. Gerda had moved away from him, leaning forward in an armchair with a furrow of concentration between her eyebrows as she looked down at the floor. To be spoken to in this matter-of-fact tone, an appeal to her intellect, put a damper on her rebelliousness, which she now felt fading away, together with the self-assurance it had given her. Her schooling had taken her through a few semesters at the university, skimming a vast body of new knowledge that could no longer be con- tained in the old framework of classic and humanistic studies. Such an education leaves many young people feeling powerless in facing a new time, a new world where the soil can no longer be worked with the old tools. She had no idea where Ulrich's line of reasoning was taking her. She believed him because she was in love with him, and
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doubted him because she was ten years younger than he and be- longed to a new generation keenly aware of its fresh energies; the two conflicting strands of feeling mingled hazily within her as she
. listened.
''Besides which, you see, we have data that are indistinguishable
from those that demonstrate a natural law, yet they have no such basis. Statistical series can sometimes have the same regularity that we associate with natural law. I'm sure you can think of examples you've heard in some sociology lecture, like the statistics about di- vorce in America, let's say. Or the ratio between male and female births, one of the most stable factors of the kind. Or the number of conscripts annually who try to evade their military service by some form of self-mutilation, also a relative constant, or the suicide statis- tics; even theft, rape, and bankruptcy occur, as far as I know, at more
·or less the same annual rate. . . . "
At this point Gerda's resistance tried to break through. "Are you
trying to explain progress to me? " she cried out, doing her best to sound sarcastic.
"But of course," Ulrich came back at her, without breaking stride. "It's called the law of large numbers, a bit nebulously. Meaning that one person may commit suicide for this reason and another for that reason, but when a great number is involved, then the accidental and the personal elements cancel each ·other out, and what's left . . . but that's just it: what is left? I ask you. Because you see, what'S left is what each one of us as laymen calls, simply, the average, which is a "something," but nobody really knows exactly what. Let me add that efforts have been made to find a logical and formal explanation for this law of large numbers, as an accepted fact, as it were.
But there are also those who say that such regularity of phenomena which are not casually related to each other cannot be explained at all by con- ventional logic, and the point has been made, among others, that such phenomena must be analyzed not as individual instances but as involving some unknown laws of aggregates or collectives. I don't
want to bother you with the details, which I no longer have at my fingertips anyway, but I would certainly love to know, for myself, whether there are such laws of the collective phenomenon, or whether it is simply by some irony of nature that the particular in- stance arises from the happening of nothing in particular, and that
the ultimate meaning turns out to be something arrived at by taking the average ofwhat is basically meaningless. It would certainly make a radical differenc~ to our sense of ourselves if we knew the answer, one way or another! Whichever it turns out to be, any possibility of leading an ordered life depends on this law oflarge numbers. If there were no such law of averages, we might have a year with nothing at all happening, followed by one in which you could count on nothing for certain, famine alternating with oversupply, no births followed by too many, and we would all be fluttering to and fro between our heavenly and our hellish possibilities like little birds when someone suddenly comes up to their cage. "
"Is all this true? " Gerda asked hesitantly.
"You ought to know it yourself. "
"Of course I do, as far as the details go! But what I don't know is
whether this is what you meant before, when they were all arguing. What you were saying about progress simply sounded like a deliber- ate provocation. "
"That's what you·always think about me. But what do we really know about the nature of our progress? Not a thing. There are all sorts of possibilities for the way things might tum out, and I simply mentioned just one more. "
"How things might tum out! That's always the way with you; it would never occur to you to wonder how things should be. "
"You and·your friends-always jumping the gun. There's always got to be a supreme goal, an ideal, a program-an absolute. Yet in the end, all that ever comes of it is a compromise, some common denominator. Isn't it tiring and ridiculous to be always reaching for the heights and always ending up settling for some mediocre result? "
It was essentially the same conversation he had had with Diotima, with only superficial differences. Nor did it make much difference which woman happened to . be sitting there facing him; a body, intra-· duced into a given magnetic field, invariably sets certain processes in motion. Ulrich studied Gerda, who was not answering his last ques- tion. There she sat, a skinny girl, with a little furrow of resentment between her eyes. Another hollow, vertical furrow could be seen in the V of her low-cut blouse. Her arms and legs were long and deli- cate. She suggested a limp springtime, aglow with a premature sum- mer heat, together with the full impact ofthe willfulness locked in so
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young a body. He felt a strange mixture of aversion and detachment at the thought that he was closer to a decision than he had realized and that this young girl was destined to play a part ill it. Willy-nilly he suddenly found himself telling her his impressions of the so-called younger generation in the Parallel Campaign, ending with words that took Gerda by surprise:
"These younger people are also very radical, and I'm not popular with them either. But I pay them back in the same coin, because I, too, am radical in my own way, and I can put up with any kind of disorder more easily than the intellectual kind. I like to see ideas not onlydeveloped but brought together. I want not only the oscillation but also the density of an idea. This is what you, my indispensable friend, criticize as my tendency to describe only what might be, in- stead of what ought to be. Well, I do know the difference. This is probably the most anachronistic attitude one can have nowadays, when intellectual rigor and the emotional life are at the farthest re- move from each other, but our precision in technology has unfortu- nately advanced to such a point that it seems to regard the imprecision of life as its proper complement. Why won't you under- stand? The chances are you're incapable of understanding ~e. and it's perverse of me to try to confuse a mind so well attuned to the times. Still, Gerda, I sometimes honestly wonder whether I might be wrong, after all. Possibly the very people I can't stand are carrying out what I once hoped to accomplish myself. They may be doing it all wrong, not using their heads, one running-this way and the other that way, each spouting an idea that he regards as the only possible idea in the world; each one of them feels tremendously clever, and they all agree in regarding our times as cursed ·with sterility. But suppose it's the other way around, and every one of them is stupid, but all of them together are pregnant with the future? Everyone of our truths seems to be born split into two opposing falsehoods, and this, too, can be a way of arriving at a result that transcends the merely per- sonal. In that case the final balance, the sum total of all the experi- ments, no longer rests with the individual, who becomes unbearably one-sided, but with the experimental collective. In short, I ask you to make allowances for an old man whose loneliness sometimes drives him to excess. "
"You've certainly given me a lot to think about," Gerda said
grimly. ''Why don't you write a book? That way, you might be able to help yourself and us, too. "
"Why on earth should I feel called upon to write a book? " Ulrich objected. "I was born of my mother, after all, not an inkwell. "
G~rda was wondering whether a book by Ulrich would really help anyone. Like all the young people in her circle, she overrated the power of the printed word. A total silence had fallen in the apartment since they had stopped talking, as if the elder Fischels had left the house in the wake of their indignant guests. And Gerda sensed the force emanating from the more powerful male body beside her, as she always did, contrary to all her resolutions, when they were alone to- gether; the effort to resist made her tremble. Ulrich noticed it; he stood up, laid his hand on Gerda's frail shoulder, and said to her: "Look at it this way, Gerda. Suppose the moral sphere works more or less like the physical, as suggested by the kinetic theory of gases: ev- erything whirling around at random, each element doing what it will, but as soon as you work out rationally what is least likely to result from all this, that's precisely the result you get! Such correspondences, strange as they are, do exist. So suppose we also assume that there is a certain number ofideas circulating in our day,'resulting in some aver- age value that keeps shifting, very slowly and automatically-it's what we call progress, or the historical situation. What matters most about this, however, is that our personal, individual share in all this makes no difference; whether we individually move to the right or to the left, whether we think and act on a high or a low level, in an unpredictable m:: a calculated fashion, a new or an old style, does not affect this aver- age term, which is all that. God and the world care about. "
As he spoke he tried to put his arm around her, though it was pal- pably costing him an effort.
Gerda was furious. "You always begin by philosophizing," she cried out, "and it always turns into the usual rooster's cock-a-doodle- doo! " Her face was aflame, with flecks ofcolor in it. . Her lips seemed to be sweating, but there was something attractive about her indigna- tion. ''What you make of it is precisely what we don't want! "
N~w Ulrich could not resist the temptation to ask her, in a low voice: "Is possession so deadly? "
"I don't want to talk about that," Gerda retorted in an equally low tone.
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"It's all the same, whether it's a person you own or a thing. I know that," Ulrich went on. "Gerda, I understand you and Hans better than you think. So what is it that you and Hans want? Tell me. "
"Nothing! That's just it," Gerda exclaimed triumphantly. ''There's no way to state it. Papa also keeps on saying: 'You must make clear to yourselfwhat it is you actually want. Then you will see what nonsense it is. ' Well, everything is nonsense when you make it clear to yourself. To be sensible is never to get beyond the commonplace. I know you'll have some~ingto say about that, you and your sensible way of thinking. " '
Ulrich shook his head. "And what about this demonstration against Count Leinsdorf? " he asked gently, as though he were not changing the subject.
"Oh, so yo1,1 spy on us! " Gerda exclaimed.
"Call it spying if you like, I don't mind; but tell me about it, Gerda. ''
Gerda showed some embarrassment. "Nothing special. Just some sort of demonstration by the Young Germans-marching past his residence, yelling 'Shamel' and things like that. The Parallel Cam- paign is a shame! " '
"In what way? "
Gerda shrugged.
"Do sit down again," Ulrich pleaded. ''You're making far too much
of it. Let's have a quiet talk about it, shall we? ''
Gerda obeyed.
"Now listen to me, and tell me ifyou think I'm on the right track.
You say that possession kills. You're thinking of money, to begin with, and ofyour parents. I agree that they're dead souls. . . . "
Gerda looked offended.
"Very well, let's not talk about money but of 'having' in other ways. Take the man who 'has' himself in hand; the man who 'has' his con- victions; the man· who lets himself be 'had' by another person or by his own passions or merely his own habits or successes; the man who wants to conquer something, the man who wants anything at all: you reject all that? You want to be nomads, nomads forever on the move, as Hans once called it, if I remember. Moving on toward some other meaning, or state of being? Am I right so far? "
"All you're saying is quite right, in an awful sort of way; the intelli- gence doing a good imitation ofthe soul. "
"And intelligence is implicated in all that 'having', isn't it? The in- telligence is what measures, weighs, classifies, and collects every- thing, like an old banker. But what about all the things I talked with you about today that have quite a lot to do with our soUls? "
"A cold kind ofsoul. "
"You're absolutely right, Gerda. Now all I have to do is to tell you why I'm taking the part of the cold souls or even the bankers. "
"Because you're a coward. " Ulrich noticed that as she spoke she bared her teeth like a terrified little animal.
"So be it," he replied. "But surely you believe me capable, ifnoth- ing else, of being man enough to escape by, if necessary, climbing a lightning rod or down the tiniest foothold on a wall, if I were not so sure that every attempt at breaking out only leads back to Papa. "
Gerda had refused to enter into this conversation with Ulrich ever since their last talk on a similar subject. The feelings he was talking about were hers and Hans's alone, and she dreaded, even more than Ulrich's sarcasm, his coming over to her side, which merely left her at his mercy before she could tell whether he meant what he said or was just acting the Devil quoting scripture. From the moment, ear- lier on, when she had been taken by surprise at the sadness in his words-she was now enduring the consequences of having so briefly let down her guard-she had been visibly engaged in a violent inner struggle. But Ulrich was in a similar fix himself. He was far from tak- ing a perverse pleruiure in his power over the girl; he simply did not take Gerda seriously, and since this involved a certain element ofdis- like, he generally expressed himself freely to her, without regard for her feelings. But for some time now, the more·zestfully he took the world's part against her, the more he felt curiously inclined to con- fide in her, to let her see him as he really was, withou~ deceit or mak- ing himself look good, and wanting to see her true inner self as naked as a garden slug. He now looked at her thoughtfully and said: "I feel like letting my eyes rest between your cheeks like clouds in the sky. I don't really know how clouds feel in the sky, but then, I know as much as anybody about those moments when God seizes us like a glove and slowly turns us inside out on his fingers. You and your
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friends make it too easy for yourselves. You sense the negative side of the world we all live in, and you loudly proclaim that the positive world belongs to your parents and elders, and the world ofthe shad- owy negative to you, the new generation. I don't exactly relish play- ing the spy for your parents, my dear Gerda, but I put it to you that in choosing between the banker and an angel, the more realistic charac- ter of the banker's profession counts for something too. "
"Would you like some tea? " Gerda said sharply. "What can I do to make you comfortable here? I want you to see me at my best as the perfect daughter of the house. " She had pulled herself together again.
"Then suppose you marry Hans? "
"But I don't want to marry him! "
"You must have some plan or other-you can't go on living forever
on your opposition to your parents. "
"One of these days I shall leave home, make myself independent,
and he and I will remain friends. "
"Please, Gerda, let's suppose that you and Hans will be married or
something like it; it can hardly be avoided if things keep going the way they are. And now try to imagine yourself brushing your teeth in the morning, and Hans making out the income tax return, in an otheiWorldly state of mind. "
"DoIhavetoknowthat? " ·
"Your Papa would say so, if he had any notion of otheiWorldly states of mind; most people on life's voyage, I'm sorry to say, know very well how to stow their uncommon experiences so deep in the hold of their ship that they never perceive them at all. But let me ask a simpler question: Will you be expecting Hans to be faithful to you? Marital fidelity is part and parcel of the ownership complex, you know. You would have to accept Hans's fmding inspiration in an- other woman. Indeed, according to your principles, you would have to see it as an enrichment ofyour own life. "
"Don't suppose for a minute that we never discuss these questions ourselves," Gerda replied. ''You can't become a new human being overnight; but it is very bourgeois to consider this an argument against . making the effort. "
"What your father wants is actually something quite different from
what you think. He doesn't even claim to know more about all that than you and Hans; he merely says that he can't understand what you're up to. But he does know that power is a very sensible thing. He believes there's more sense in it than in you and him and Hans all rolled into one. What if he were to offer Hans enough money to let him finish his course and get his degree, without having to worry? And ifhe promised him, after a fair trial period, not that the marriage would take place, but at least that he would not stand in its way on principle? Ori only one condition: namely, that until the end of the trial period you two stop seeing each other, or keeping in touch, even to the extent you do now? "
"So this is what you're lending yourself to, is it? "
"I merely want to help you understand your father. He is a sinister deity who wields uncanny powers. He thinks he can make Hans see things his way by using money. In his opinion, a Hans with a limited monthly income couldn't possibly go on exceeding every limit of foolishness. But your father may be a dreamer, in his own way. I ad- mire him, just as I admire compromises, averages, dry facts, dead numbers. I don't believe in the Devil, but if I did I should think of him as the trainer who drives Heaven to break its own records. Any- way, I promised him to keep at you until there was nothing left of your fantasies-only reality. "
Ulrich was far from saying all this with a clear conscience. Gerda stood facing him as if in flames, the anger in her eyes overlaid with tears. All at once, a way had been opened up for her and Hans. But had Ulrich betrayed her, or did he want to help them? She had no idea, but whichever it was, it was likely to make her as unhappy as it made her happy. In her confusion she mistrusted him, and yet she felt with. a passion that there was a sacred bond between them, if only he would admit it.
He now added: "Your father of course harbors a secret hope that I may use the opportunity to win you for myself and change your mind altogether. "
"That's out of the question! " Gerda forced herself to say.
"As far as you and I are concerned, I suppose· that is out of the question," Ulrich said gently. "But we can't go on like this, either. I've already gone too far. " He tried to smile, but felt extreme self-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 539
540 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
loathing as he did. so. He really wanted none of this. He sensed the irresolution in her and despised himself for the cruelty it aroused in him.
At that very instant Gerda stared at him with horrified eyes. Sud- denly she was beautiful, like a fire one has approached t<;>o closely; almost without form, only a warmth th~tparalyzes the will.
"You must come to see me," he suggested. 'W e can't speak freely here. " Male ruthlessness shone out of his eyes in a blaze of empty light. .
"No," Gerda said defensively. But she averted her eyes, and Ul- rich sadly saw-as though by turning away she had again presented herself to his scrutiny-the body of this young girl, neither beautiful nor ugly, breathing hard. He gave a deep and wholly sincere sigh.
104
RACHEL AND SOLIMAN ON THE WARPATH
In the Tuzzi household, charged as it was with a high mission as a gathering place of ideas, there was a light-footed, quick, ardent, on- German creature in service. The little lady's maid, Rachel, was like a chambermaid in Mozart. She opened the front door and stood ready with arms half outstretched to receive the visitor's overcoat.
