The General was silent, like a man awed by a
portentous
thought.
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He looked at Gerda.
Her body was angular, her skin looked dull and tired.
That faint breath ofold-maidishness that hung over her had suddenly become apparent to him, although it had probably always been the major factor holding him back fro111 ever coming to the point with this girl who was in love with him.
Of course, Hans also had something to do with it, what with the semi- physical nature of his communal utopia, which had an old-maidish quality ofits own.
Ulrich did not feel attracted to Gerda, but even so he was inclined to continue his dialogue with her.
This reminded him that he had invited her to come to see him.
She gave no sign ofeither remembering this invitation or of having forgotten it, and he got no opportunity to ask her about it privately.
It left him with an uneasy sense ofregret as-well as ofrelief, such as one feels when one skirts a danger recognized too late.
114
THINGS ARE COMING TO A BOIL. ARNHEIM IS GRACIOUS TO GENERAL STUMM. DIOTIMA PREPARES TO MOVE OFF INTO INFINITY. ULRICH DAYDREAMS ABOUT LIVING ONE'S LIFE AS ONE READS A BOOK
His Grace had urged Diotima to find out about the famous Makart pageant, which had brought all Austria together in the 1870s in a burst of national fervor; he still had vivid memories of the richly draped carriages, the heavily caparisoned horses, the trumpeters, and the pride people took in their medieval costumes, which lifted them out of their humdrum daily lives. It was this that had brought Diotima, Amheim, and Ulrich to go through the materials on the pe- riod at the Imperial Library, from which they were now emerging together. As Diotima, her lip curling with disdain, had predicted to His Grace, what they had come up with was quite impossible; such frippery could no longer make people forget the monotony of their existence. They were still on the library stairs when the beauty in- formed her companions that she felt like making the most of the sunny day and the year 1914-which in the few weeks ofits existence had already left the moldering past so far behind-by walking home. But they had no sooner stepped out into the light of day when they bumped into the General, on his way in. Proud to be discovered on· such a mission of high learning, he instantly offered to tum back and enlarge Diotima's entourage by joining it. This made Diotima realize after only a few steps that she was tired and wanted a cab. With no such vehicle in sight, they all stopped in front of the library, which faced a trough-shaped rectangular square, three sides ofwhich were formed by splendid ancient fa~ades, while on the fourth the asphalt street in front of a long, low palace shimmered like an ice rink, with cars and carnages rushing past, none ofwhich responded to the four people waving and signaling to them like survivors of a shipwreck,
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until they tired of it and forgot about giving anything but the occa- sional halfhearted signal in the direction of the traffic.
Arnheim had a big book under his arm. He was pleased with this gesture, both condescending and respectful toward the life of the mind. He greeted the General eagerly: "How nice to see you coming to the library too; men of position nowadays so seldom seek out the life of the mind in its own house. ".
General Stumm replied that he was quite at home in this library.
Arnheim was impressed. "Almost all we have nowadays is writers, and hardly anyone who reads books an:ymore," he went on. "Do you realize, Ge~eral, how many books are printed annually? I think it's over a hundred books a day published ill Germany alone. Over a thousand periodicals are founded every year. The whole world is writing! Everyone helps himself to ideas as though they were his own, all the time. Nobody feels any respansibility toward the situa- tion as a whole. Ever since the Church lost its influence, there is no central authority to stem our general chaos. There is no educational model, no educational principle. In these circumstances it is only natural that feeling and morality should drift without an anchor, and the most stable person begins to waver. "
The General felt his mouth turning dry. It wasn't as though Dr. Arnheim was actually addressing him in person; he was a man stand- ing in the square and thinking out loud. The General thought of how many people talk to themselves in the street, on their way to some- where; civilians, of course, because a soldier who did such a thing would be locked up, and an officer would be sent to the psychiatric clinic. Stumm felt embarrassed at the thought of standing there phi- losophizing in public, as it were, smack-dab in the middle of the Im- perial Residential capital. Apart from the two men, there seemed to be only one other, a mute figure ofbronze standing on a stone pedes- tal in the sunny square. The General had only just noticed this monu- ment and did not remember whom it represented, so that he had to apologize for his ignorance when Arnheim asked him.
"And to think that he was put here to. be venerated," the great man remarked. "But that's how it is. Every moment of our lives we move among institutions, problems, and challenges of which we have barely caught the tail end, so that the present is constantly reaching into the past. We keep crashing through the floor, if I may put it so,
into the cellars of time, even while we imagine ourselves to be occu- pying the top floor of the present. "
Amheim smiled. " He was making conversation. His moving lips flickered in the sunshine, and the lights in his eyes kept changing like those on a signaling steamer. Stumm was growing uneasy; he found it hard to keep acknowledging so many and such unusual turns in 'the conversation while being served up to the world, in full uniform, on this platter of a square. Grass was growing in the cracks between the cobblestones; it was last year's grass but looked implausibly fresh, like a corpse left lying in the snow; it was, in fact, most peculiar and disturbing that grass should be growing here between the stones, when only a few steps farther on the asphalt was being polished, in keeping with the times, by the passing cars. The General began to be troubled by a nervous fear that if he had to go on listening much longer he might suddenly go down on his knees and eat grass in front of the whole world, without knowing why. He looked around for Ul- rich and Diotima for protection.
These two had taken shelter where a thin veil of shade had spun itself around the comer of the wall, and seemed to be involved in an argument, though their voices were too low to be understood.
''You make it sound hopeless," Diotima was saying.
'What do you mean? " Ulrich asked, without real interest.
"There is still such a thing as individuality. " .
Ulrich tried to catch her eye sideways. "Good heavens, we've been
all over this already. "
"You have no heart, or you wouldn't always talk like this," she said
softly. The sun-heated air was rising from the stone pavement up be- tween her legs, which were encased in long skirts like those of a robed statue, inaccessible and to all intents nonexistent. She showed no awareness ofit. It was a caress that had nothing to do with anyone, any man. Her eyes turned pale, but that Inight have been merely the effect of her reserve in a situation where she was exposed to the glances of the passersby. Turning to Ulrich, she said with an effort:
'When a woman has to choose between duty and passion, what can she rely on if not her character? "
"You don't have to choose," Ulrich replied.
· "You go too far; I wasn't speaking of myself," his cousin whispered.
As he did not reply, they both stared across the square fot a while
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in a hostile silence. Then Diotima asked: "Do you think that what we call our soul might emerge from the shadows where it usually keeps itself? "
Ulrich gave her a puzzled look.
"In the case of unusual, specially gifted persons," she added. '~Am I to understand that you're interested in establishing a rap-
port with the Beyond? " Ulrich asked incredulously. "Has Amheim introduced you to a medium? "
Diotima was disappointed in him. "I would never have thought you capable of such a misunderstanding," she said reproachfully. "When I speak of emerging from the shadows, I mean from the un- reality, from that flickering concealment in which we sometimes sense the presence of the unusual. It is spread out like a net that torments us because it will neither hold us nor let us go. Don't you think that there have been times when it was otherWise? When the inner life was a stronger presence, when there were individuals who walked in the light or, as people used to say, walked in holiness, and miracles could happen in reality because they are an ever-present form of another reality, and nothing else! "
Diotima surprised herself by the firmness with whi~h it seemed possible to say this sort of thing, without any special elation, as though she were walking on solid ground. Ulrich felt secretly in- furiated, but actually he was deeply shocked. lias it come to this, he thought, that this giant hen can talk the way I do? Again he saw Di- otima's soul in the shape of a colossal chicken pecking at his own soul, in the shape of a little worm. He was seized by the primal child- hood terror of the giantess, mixed with another strange sensation; there was a certain gratification in be4lg spiritually coJtsumed, as it were, in mindless accord with a kinswoman. Their unanimity was a silly coincidence, of course; he did not believe that there was any magic in being related by blood, nor could he possibly·have taken his cousin seriously even if he were dead drunk. But he had been chang- ing lately, mellowing perhaps; his characteristic inner readiness to move to the ·attack was giving way to a need for tenderness, dreams, kinship, whatever, which also mi}Ilifested itself in sudden outbreaks of the ill will that was its opposite.
Which prompte~him to make fun ofhis cousin now: "Ifthat's how
you feel," he said, "then you ought to go all the way and become Arnheim's lover, openly or in secret, as soon as possible. "
"You shouldn't say such things; I've given you no right! " Diotima rebuked him.
"But I must speak of it. Until now I wasn't sure what was going on between you and Arnheim. But now I understand, and you look to me like a person who is seriously thinking of flying to the moon. I would never have thought you capable of such madness. "
''I've told you that I'm capable of going to extremes. " Her upward gaze was meant to be audacious, but the sun made her screw up her eyes, so that she seemed to be twinkling at him.
"These are the ravings of starved love," Ulrich said, "which pass off when hunger is appeased:" He wondered what Arnheiin's plans might be with regard to her. Did he regret his proposal, and was he covering his retreat by putting on some sort of act? But then he could simply leave and not come back; a man who had been in business all his life would surely have the necessary callousness for that? Here- membered noticing certain signs in Arnheim that indicated passion in an older man; his face was sometimes a grayish yellow, slack and tired, like a room with the bed still unmade at noon. The most likely explanation was the havoc caused by two almost equally strong pas- sions fighting each other to a standstill. But since he was incapable of imagining the passion for power in the degree to which it ruled Am- heim, he could not conceive ofthe measures love had to take in order to fight it.
"You're an odd sort of man," Diotima said. "Always different from what one would expect. Wasn't it you who spoke to me of seraphic love? "
"You regard that as a possibility? " Ulrich asked absentmindedly. "Not as you described it, of course. "
"So Arnheim loves you seraphically? " Ulrich began to laugh softly. "I wish you wouldn't laugh. " Diotima almost hissed at him.
"You don't understand," he apologize& "It's only the excitement. You and Arnheim are sensitive people. You love poetry. I'm sure that you are sometimes touched by a breath . . . a breath of something: the question is just what that is. And now you want to get to the bot- tom of it, with all the thoroughness of your idealism. "
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"Aren't you always saying that one must be precise and thorough? " Diotima countered. .
It was too much. ''You're mad! " he said. "Forgive my saying so, but you are mad. And you of all people mustn't be. "
Meanwhile Arnheim had been telling the General that for the last two generations the world had been undergoing the most profound revolution of all: the end of the soul was in sight.
It gave the Genera! a stab. What the devil, here was yet another problem to think about. To be honest, he ·had thought until this mo- ment, despite Diotima, that there was no such thing as the soul. At military school and in the regiment, nobody gave a hang about this kind of preacher's talk. But here was this manufacturer of guns and tanks, tallCing about. the soul as though he could see it standing there. The General's eyes began to itch and to roll around gloomily, gog- gling at the translucent air around them.
But Arnheim was not waiting to be asked for particulars; words flowed from his lips, from that pale pink slit between his clipped mustache and his little pointed beard. As he phrased it, the soul had started to shrivel and age ever since the Church began to crumble, around the beginning ofthe bourgeois era. Since then it had lost God and all solid values and ideals until the present, when men had actu- ally reached the point of living without morals, without principles, without real experiences, in fact.
The General could not quite see why one could not have experi- ences ifone had no morals. Whereupon Arnheim opened the big vol- ume bound in pigskin that he was holding, revealing an expensive facsimile of a manuscript so valuable that even a mortal of Amheim's extraordinary standing could not be permitted to take the original out of the building. The General saw the depiction of an angel with wings spread horizontally across two pages, against ·a background of dark earth, golden sky, and marvelous colors layered like clouds; he was looking at a reproduction of one of the most moving and splen- did of early medieval paintings, but since he did not know this, while he did know all about bird-hunting and depictions of it, he could only conclude that a creature with wings and a long neck that was neither human nor a snipe must be an aberration to which his companion wished to draw his attention.
Amheim was. pointing his finger at it and saying pensively: "Here
you see what that great lady who is creating the Austrian Campaign is trying to bring back into the world. . . . "
"I see, I see," Stumm said, realizing that he had failed to appreci- ate this thing for what it was and that he had better watch his step.
"The great expressiveness, and with such utter simplicity," Am- heim went on, "bears witness to what our age has lost forever. What is our science compared with this? Patchwork. Our art? Extremes, without~ mediating substance to hold them together. We lack the magic key to unity, and this, you see, is why I am so deeply moved by this Austrian plan to set the world an example of unification, of a shared idea, even though I do not quite believe it can be done. I am a German. Everything in the world today is loud and crude, and Ger- many is the loudest. In every country the people are straining them- selves morning, noon, and night, whether at work or at play, but in Germany they start earlier and stop later than anywhere else. In all the world the spirit of cold calculation and brute force has lost touch with the soul, but we in Germany have the most businessmen and the strongest army in the world. " He looked around the square with delight. "Here in Austria, things have not yet gone so far. The past is still with you, and the people have kept something of their original intuitiveness. Ifthe German spirit can still be saved from rationalism, this is the only place left. from which a start can be made. But I am afraid," he added with a sigh, "we can hardly succeed. A great idea nowadays encounters too much resistance; great ideas just barely help to prevent each other from being misused. We are living in a state of moral truce, as it were, armed to the teeth with ideas. "
He smiled at his own joke. Then something more occurred to him: "You know, the difference between Germany and Austria we have just touched on always reminds me of billiards. Even at billiards ev- erything goes wrong if you try to do it all by calculation instead of with feeling. "
The General had guessed that he was supposed to feel flattered by the reference to a moral armed truce, and he wanted to show that he had been paying attention. He did know something about billiards, so he said, "I play snooker myself, and skittles too, but I never heard that there's a difference between the Austrian and the German styles ofplay. " u
Amheim shut his eyes and gave it some thought: "I myself never
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play billiards," he said after a moment, "but I know that you can play the ball high or low, from the right or from the left; that you can strike the second ball head-on or merely graze it; that you can hit it hard or lightly, bluffa little-or a lot-and there must be many more such options. Now, if you imagine each of these elements with all their inherent gradations, you have an almost infinite number ofpos- sible combinations. To state them theoretically, I should have to take into account, besides the laws of mathematics and statics, the me- chanics ofsolids, plus the laws ofelasticity; I would have to know the coefficients of the materials, the influence of the temperature, the most precise means of measuring the coordination and gradation of my motor impulses, of estimating distances exactly, like a nonius, how to combine the various factors with better than the speed and accuracy of a slide rule, to say nothing of allowing for margins of error, fields of dispersal, and the fact that the aim, which is the cor- rect coincidence of the two balls, is in itself not clearly definable but only a collection of barely adequate data round an average value. "
Arnheim spoke slowly, and in·~way that compelled attention, as though pouring a liquid drop by drop from a vial to a glass; he did not spare his interlocutor a single detail.
"And so you see," he continued, "that I should need to have all the qualities, and do all the things, I cannot possibly ·have and do. You must be enough of a mathematician to see that. it would take a life- time to plan a single carom shOt in that fashion; it boggles the mind! And yet I step up to the table with a cigarette between my lips, a tune in my ear, and my hat on, as it were, and hardly bothering to look over the board, I take my cue to the ball and the problem is solved! General, this is the sort of thing that happens all the time in real life. You are not only an Austrian, you are a military man, so you're bound to understand me: politics, honor, war, art, all the crucial processes of life, take place beyond the scope of the conscious rational mind. Man's greatness is rooted in the irrational. Even we businessmen don't really operate by calculation-not the leading men, that is. The little fellows may have to count their pennies; we learn to regard our really successful moves as a mystery that defies analysis. A man who doesn't care deeply about feeling, morality, religion, music, 'poetry, form, discipline, chivalry, generosity, cru\dor, tolerance-believe me, such a man will never make a businessman of real stature. This is why
I have always admired the military, especially the Austrian military, based as it is on age-old traditions, and I am truly delighted that Frau Tuzzi can count on your support. It is a relief to me to know it. Your influence, with that of our younger friend, is extremely important. All great things rest on the same principles; great obligations are a blessing, General. "
To his own surprise he suddenly found himself spontaneously shaking Stumm's hand, then he ended by saying: "Hardly anyone realizes that true greatness has no rational basis; I mean to say, every- thing strong is simple. "
Stumm von Bordwehr held his breath; he was not sure he under- stood a word of it all, and wished he could rush back into the library and spend hours reading up on all these points that the great man had paid him the compliment of making to him. At last, out of this March gale whirling in his mind, there came a piercing ray of lucid- ity. What the hell, he thought, this fellow wants something from me! He looked up. Arnheim was still holding the book in both hands but was now turning his attention seriously to hailing a cab. His face was slightly flushed with animation, like that of a man who has just been trading ideas with another.
The General was silent, like a man awed by a portentous thought. If Arnheim wanted something from him, then General Stumm was free to want something from Amheim too, to the advantage of His Majesty's service. This perception opened such vistas of possibility that Stumm put off thinking about just what it all really meant. But if the angel in the book had suddenly lifted up a wing to give clever General S~mm a glimpse of what was hidden underneath, the General could not have felt more bewildered and overjoyed.
Over in Diotima's and Ulrich's comer, the following question had meanwhile been posed: Should a woman in Diotima's difficult posi- tion make a gesture ofrenunciation, or let herselfbe swept into adul- tery, or take a third, mixed course, such as belonging physically to one man and spiritually to another, or perhaps physically to neither? For this third solution there was as yet no libretto, as it were, only some great harmonic chords. Diotima still wanted it understood that she was absolutely not speaking of herself but speaking only of "a woman"-every time Ulrich tried to fuse the two together he got a warning glance from her.
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And so he also chose a devious course. ''Have you ever seen a dog? " he asked. "You only think you have. What you see is only something you feel more or less justified in regarding as a dog. It isn't a dog in every respec;t, and always has some personal quality no other. dog has. So how can we ever hope, in this life, to do 'the right thing'? A1). we can do is something that's never the right thing and is always both more· and less than that. Has a tile ever fallen off the roof in precise accord with the law of falling bodies? Never. Even in the lab, things never behave just as they should. 11ley diverge from the ideal course in all possible directions, while we keep up a fiction that this is to be blamed on our faulty execution of the experiment, and that somewhere midway a perfe. Ct result is obtainable.
"Or else you find certain stones, and because of the properties they have in common they are all regarded as diamonds. But suppose one ofthem comes from Africa. and another from Asia, one is dug out of the ground by a black man and the other by an Oriental. What if these differences in circumstances were to matter so much that they cancel out what the objects have in common? In th~ equation 'dia- mond plus circumstances is still diamond,' the use value of the dia- mond is so great that it makes the value of the circumstances negligible. But it's. possible to imagine spiritual circumstances in which the situation is reversed. .
"Everything partakes of the universal and also has something spe- cial all its own. Everything is both true to type and refuses to con- form to type and is in a category all its own, simultan~ously. The personal quality of any given creature is precisely that which doesn't coincide with anything else. . I once said to you that the more truth we discover, the less of the personal is left in the world, because of the longtime war again. st individuality that individuality is losing. By the time everything has been rationalized, there's no telling how much of us will be left. Nothing at all, possibly, but then, when the false sig- nificance we attach to personality has gone, we may enter upon a new kind of sigriificance as if embarking upon a splendid adventure.
"So how do you decide? Should 'a woman' go by the law? Then she may as well go by the laws of society. Conventional morality is a per- fectly valid average and collective value, to b~ Uterally adhered to, without deviations, wherever it is acknowledged. But no individual case can be decided on moral grounds alone; morality is irrelevant to
it in the precise degree that it shares in the inexhaustible nature of the universe. "
"That was quite a speech," Diotima said. She took a certain satis- faction in the loftiness of discourse being'imposed upon her, but in- tended to gain the upper hand by not talking in equally wild
. generalities. "But what is a woman to do, given the circumstances, in real life? "
"Let things happen," Ulrich answered.
"What things? "
"Whatever happens. Her husband, her lover, her renunciation,
her mixed feelings. "
"Do you have any idea what you are saying? " Diotima asked, feel-
ing painfully reminded of how her high resolve possibly to give up Amheim had its wings clipped every night by the mere fact that she slept in Tuzzi. 's bed. Ulrich must have sensed-some of this, because he asked her bluntly: 'Would you try your luck with me? "
'With you? " Diotima drawled, then decided to save face by taking a humorous tack. "Ifthis is an offer,justwhat is it you have iil mind? " "I'll tell you," Ulrich replied seriously. "You read a great deal,
don't you? "
"Of course. "
'What is it you do, then? I'll tell you: You leave out whatever
doesn't suit you. As the author himself has done before you. Just as you leave things out of your dreams or fantasies. By leaving things out, we bring beauty and excitement into the world. We evidently handle our reality by effecting some sort of compromise with it, an in-between state where the emotions prevent each other from reach- ing their fullest intensity, graying the colors somewhat. Children who haven't yet reached that point of control are both happier and un- happier than adults who have. And yes, stupid people also leave things out, which is why ignorance is bliss. So I propose, to begin with, that we try to love each other as ifwe were characters in a novel who have met in the pages ofa book. Let's in any case leave offall the fatty tissue that plumps up reality. "
Diotima felt called upon to argue the case; she wanted to direct the conversation away from this too~personal vein, and she also wanted to show that she understood something of the problems that had been touched upon.
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"All well and good," she said, "but art is supposed to afford us a vacation from reality, so that we can return to it with our energies restored. "
"And I am opinionated enough to say that there should be no time off,'' her cousin retorted. "What sort of a life is it that we have to drill holes in it called holidays; would we punch holes in a painting be- cause it makes too strenuous demands on our sense of beauty? Should we look forward to taking time off from eternal bliss in the next world? Even the thought of time taken off my life by having to sleep sometimes seems unacceptable to me. "
"Ah, there it is. " Diotima seized her opportunity. "You see how unnatural it all is, what you're saying. What human being doesn't need to rest and take a break? It's a perfect illustration of the differ- ence between you and Amheim. Yours is a mind that will not ac- knowledge the shadow on things, the dark side, while his has developed out of the fullness of human experience, with sunshine and shadow intenningled. "
"Of course I exaggerate,'' Ulrich admitted coolly. "You will see it even more clearly as we go into more detail. Think of the great writ- ers, for instance. We can model our lives on them, but we can't squeeze life out of them, like wine out of grapes. They have given so solid a fonn to what once moved them that it confronts us like pressed metal even between the lines. But what have they actually said? . Nobody knows. They themselves never knew all of it at a time. They're like a field over which bees fly back and forth; they them- selves are flying back and forth, as it were. Their thoughts and feel- ings show all the gradations between truth and even error, as can be demonstrated if necessary, and changeable natures that come close to us at will and then elude us when we try to observe them closely.
"There is no detaching an idea in a book from its context on the page. It catches our eye like the face of a person looming up in a crowd as it is being swept past us. I suppose I'm exaggerating a little again, but tell me, what happens in our lives that is any different from this? Leaving the precise, measurable, and definable sensory data out of account, all the other concepts on which we base our lives are no more than congealed metaphors. Take as simple a concept as manliness, and think how it keeps wavering among its many possible variants. It's like a breath that changes shape at every exhalation,
with nothing to hold on to, no finn impression, no logic. So when we simply leave out in art whatever doesn't suit us and our conceptions, we're merely going back to the original condition of life itself. "
"My dear friend," Diotima said, "you don't seem to be talking about anything in particular. " Ulrich had paused for a moment, and her words fell into that pause.
"Yes, I suppose so. I hope I haven't been talking too loudly. "
"You've been talking fast, in a low voice, and at length," she said, with a touch of sarcasm. 'Without saying a word of what you meant to say. Do you realize what you've just explained to me all over again? That reality should be abolished! It's true that when I heard you make this point the first time, on one of our trips into the country, I
·think, it made a lasting impression-I don't know why. But how this is to be done is something you haven't yet revealed, I'm sorry to say. " "Clearly, I'd have to go on talking for at least as long again to do so. But do you really expect it to be that simple? IfI'm not mistaken, you spoke of wanting to fly away with Arnheim into some kind of tran- scendent state. Something you regard as another kind of reality. What I have been saying, on the other hand, is that we must try to
recover unreality. Reality no longer makes sense. "
"Oh, Arnheim would hardly agree with you there," Diotima said. "Of course not. That's just the difference between him and me.
He is trying to make the fact that he eats, sleeps, is the great Arn- heim, and doesn't know whether to marry you or not, mean some- thing, and to this end he has been colle9ting all the treasures of the mind throughout his life. " Ulrich suddenly paused, and the silence lengthened.
After a:while he asked, in a different tone: "Can you explain to me why I should be having this conversation with you, of all people? Suddenly I'm reminded of my childhood. You won't believe this, but I was a good child, mild as the air on a warm moonlit night. I could fall madly in love with a dog, a pocketknife . . . " But then he left this statement unfinished too.
Diotima looked at him, wondering what he could mean. She again remembered how he had once hotly advocated "precision of feel- ing," while just now he was taking the opposite view. He had accused Arnheim of insufficiently clean-cut intentions, while now he favored "letting things happen. " And she was troubled by the fact that Ulrich
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was advocating an intense emotional life without any "time off," compared with Amheim's ambiguous suggestion never to let oneself in for single-minded hatred or total love/ These thoughts left her uneasy.
"Do you really believe that there is such a thing as boundless feel- ing? " Ulrich asked her.
"Oh yes, there is such a thing as boundless emotion," Diotima said, the ground finn under her feet again.
"You see, I don't quite believe that," Ulrich said absently. "Strange how often we talk about it, but we certainly do our best to avoid it throughout our lives, as if we were ~raid of drowning in it. "
He noticed that Diotima was not listening. She was upeasily watching Amheim, who was looking around for a cab.
'Tm afraid we ought to rescue him from the General," she said.
"I'll go and, get a cab and take the Generai off your hands," Ulrich offered, and at the moment he turned to go, Diotima laid her hand on his arm and said kindly, as if to reward him for his trouble: "Any feeling that isn't boundless is worthless. "
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THE TIP OF YOUR BREAST IS LIKE A POPPY LEAF
In accordance with the law that periods of great stability tend to be followed by violent upheavals, Bonadea, too, suffered a relapse. Her attempts to get on closer terms with Diotima had failed, and her fine scheme to get even with Ulrich by making friends with her rival, leaving Ulrich out in the cold-a fantasy she had spent much time in spinning out-had come to nothing. She had to swallow her pride and come knocking on his door again, but when she was there her beloved seemed to have arranged for constant interruptions, and her stories to account for her coming to see him again even though he
did not deserve it were wasted on his impervious friendliness. She was longing to make a terrible scene but committed to behaving with absolute propriety, so that in time she came to hate herself for being so good. At night her head, heavy with unappeased cravings, sat on her shoulders like a coconut with its mat of monkeylike hair growing freakishly inside the shell, and she came close to bursting with help- less rage, like a drinker deprived of his bottle. She privately called Diotima every name she could think of, such as fraud and insuffer- able pompous bitch, and came up with cynical glosses on that noble femininity which was the secret of Diotima's charm. Her aping of Diotima's style, which had delighted her for a while, had now become a prison from which she broke out into an almost licentious freedom; her curling iron and mirror lost the power to tum her into an idealized image of herself, and th~ artificial state of mind it had supported collapsed as well. Even sleep, which Bonadea had always reveled in despite her chronic inner conflicts, sometimes kept her waiting when she had· gane to bed, an experience so new to her that she thought she must be sick with insomnia, and felt what people usually feel when they are seriously ill, that her spirit was deserting her body,leaving it helpless like a wounded soldier on the battlefield. As she lay there in her vexations as if on red-hot sand, all that high- minded talk of Diotima's, which Bonadea had so admired, seemed to her infinitely beside the point, and she honestly despised it.
When she found it impossible to go to Ulrich yet again, she thought of another scheme to bring him back to his senses. It was of course the culmination of the plan that came to her first: a vision of herself effecting an entrance at Diotima's when that. siren had Ulrich with her. Bonadea regarded. all his visits with ·Diotima as transparent pretexts for carrying on their flirtation rather than actually doing something for the public good. So it was up to Bonadea to do some- thing for the public good-and this gave her the opening gambit of her plan as well: no one was paying any attention to Moosbrugger anymore, and he was going to his doom, while all the others were pontificating about it. Bonadea never stopped to wonder that it was Moosbrugger once more who came to her rescue in her hour of need. Had she bothered to think about him at all, she would have been horrified, but all she was thinking was that if Ulrich cared so much about Moosbrugger, she would see to it that he would at least
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not forget the man. & she mulled over her plan, she rem~mbered two things Ulrich had said when they were talking·about the mur- derer: namely, that everyone had a second soul, which was always innocent; and that a responsible persqn could always choose to do otherwise, but an irresponsible person had no such choice. From this she somehow concluded that she wanted to be irresponsible, which would mean that she would also be innocent, which Ulrich was not, and which he needed to be, for his own salvation.
So motivated, and dressed as for a social occasion, she spent sev- eral evenings wandering up and doWI1 past Diotima's windows, and never had long to wait before they lit up along the whole front, betokening something going on inside. She had told her husband that she was invited out but would not stay too long, and in the course of a few days, while sh~ was still trying to screw up her cour- age, her lies and her strolls in front of a house where she had no business to be unleashed a growing impulse that would soon drive her up those steps to the front door. What if she was seen by some acquaintance, or even by her husband if he should pass that way by chance, or what if she was noticed by the doorman, or by a police- man, who might decide to question her-the more often she went out on this expedition, the greater the risks, and the more probable that if she hesitated too long an incident would occur. Now, it was true that Bonadea ha~ more than once slipped into doorways or places where she did not want to be seen, but on those occasions she had been fortified by the thought that it had to be; this time she was about to intrude where she was not expected and could not be sure of her reception. She felt like an assassin who has started out with none too clear an idea of what it would be like, and is then swept by circumstances into a state in which the actual pistol shot or the glitter of vitriol drops flying through the air no longer adds much to the excitement.
Without any such dramatic intentions, Bonadea nevertheless felt similarly benumbed by. the time she actually found herself pressing the doorbell and walking inside. Little Rachel had slipped over to Ulrich and told him that someone was waiting out in the hall to see him, not mentioning that this someone was a heavily veiled unknown lady-who, when Rachel shut the door to the salon behind him,
flung the veil back from her face. At the moment she was absolutely convinced that Moosbrugger's fate depended on her taking instant action, and she received Ulrich not like a lover plagued by jealousy, but gasping for breath like a marathon runner. With no effort, she lied that her husband had tolq her yesterday that Moosbrugger would soon be past saving.
"There's nothing I hate so much," she ended, "as this obscene kind of murderer. But even though it goes against my grain, I've taken the risk of being regarded as an intruder here, because you must go straight back to the lady of the house and her very influential guests and get their help if you still want to get anything done:" She had no idea what she expected to come of this. Perhaps that Ulrich would be deeply moved and would thank her, then call Diotima, who would then take Bonadea into some private place to talk, away from the other gues~s. Or else Diotima might be drawn to the hall by the sound of voices, and Bonadea was ready to let her see that she, Bona- dea, was far from being the person least qualified to take an interest in Ulrich's noble causes. Her eyes were moist and flash~g. her hands trembled, her voice rose out of control. Ulrich, deeply embarrassed, smiled desperately to quiet her down and gain time while he found a way to talk her into leaving as quickly as possible. It was a ticklish situation and could have ended with Bonadea's having a screaming or crying fit, if Rachel had not come to his aid. Little Rachel had been standing close by all this time, with wide-open, shining eyes. When the beautiful stranger, trembling all over, had asked to speak to Ulrich, the maid had instantly divined the romantic nature of the affair. She managed to hear most of what was said, and the syllables of Moosbrugger's name fell on her ear like pistol shots. The sadness, passion, and jealousy throbbing in this lady's voice moved her power- fully, although she knew nothing of what was behind it. She guessed that the woman was Ulrich's mistress, and it doubled her infatuation with him. It was as though the two of them had burst into full- throated song together and made her want to lift up her own voice
and join in, or do something to help. And so, with a glance enjoining secrecy, she opened a door and inVited the pair into the only room not being used for the gathering this evening. It was Rachel's flrst conscious act of disloyalty to her mistress, and she knew what would
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happen if she was found out, but life was so exciting, and romantic passion such an untidy state of mind, that she had no chance to think twice about it.
When the gaslight flamed upward a11-d Bonadea's eyes gradually took in her surroundings, her legs almost gave way under her, and her cheeks flushed red with jealousy: they were inside Diotima's bedroom. There were stockings, hairbrushes, and much else lying around, whatever is left in view when a woman must change hastily from head to foot for a big party and the maid has not had time to put things away or has left it till the next morning, as in this case, because the room was due for a thorough cleaning then anyway; on big-party evenings the bedroom was used to store furnishings from the other rooms where the space was needed. So the·air was heavy with the smell of all this furniture jammed together, and of powder, soap, and scent.
"What a silly thing for the girl to do," Ulrich said with a laugh. "We can't stay here. Anyway, you shouldn't have come. There's nothing to be done for Moosbrugger. "
"So I shouldn't have bothered, is that it? " Bonadea echoed him almost inaudibly. Her eyes strayed all over the place. How could the girl have even thought of taking Ulrich into the most private room in the house, she wondered in anguish, if she had not done it often before? Yet she could not bring herself tQ confront him with this proof of his infidelity, but chose instead to say dully: "How can you sleep in peace when such injustice is being done? I haven't been able to sleep at night, which is why I decided to come looking for you. " She had turned her back on the room and stood staring out the win- dow into the opaque, glassy darkness outside, at what might be tree- tops or some deep courtyard down below.
114
THINGS ARE COMING TO A BOIL. ARNHEIM IS GRACIOUS TO GENERAL STUMM. DIOTIMA PREPARES TO MOVE OFF INTO INFINITY. ULRICH DAYDREAMS ABOUT LIVING ONE'S LIFE AS ONE READS A BOOK
His Grace had urged Diotima to find out about the famous Makart pageant, which had brought all Austria together in the 1870s in a burst of national fervor; he still had vivid memories of the richly draped carriages, the heavily caparisoned horses, the trumpeters, and the pride people took in their medieval costumes, which lifted them out of their humdrum daily lives. It was this that had brought Diotima, Amheim, and Ulrich to go through the materials on the pe- riod at the Imperial Library, from which they were now emerging together. As Diotima, her lip curling with disdain, had predicted to His Grace, what they had come up with was quite impossible; such frippery could no longer make people forget the monotony of their existence. They were still on the library stairs when the beauty in- formed her companions that she felt like making the most of the sunny day and the year 1914-which in the few weeks ofits existence had already left the moldering past so far behind-by walking home. But they had no sooner stepped out into the light of day when they bumped into the General, on his way in. Proud to be discovered on· such a mission of high learning, he instantly offered to tum back and enlarge Diotima's entourage by joining it. This made Diotima realize after only a few steps that she was tired and wanted a cab. With no such vehicle in sight, they all stopped in front of the library, which faced a trough-shaped rectangular square, three sides ofwhich were formed by splendid ancient fa~ades, while on the fourth the asphalt street in front of a long, low palace shimmered like an ice rink, with cars and carnages rushing past, none ofwhich responded to the four people waving and signaling to them like survivors of a shipwreck,
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until they tired of it and forgot about giving anything but the occa- sional halfhearted signal in the direction of the traffic.
Arnheim had a big book under his arm. He was pleased with this gesture, both condescending and respectful toward the life of the mind. He greeted the General eagerly: "How nice to see you coming to the library too; men of position nowadays so seldom seek out the life of the mind in its own house. ".
General Stumm replied that he was quite at home in this library.
Arnheim was impressed. "Almost all we have nowadays is writers, and hardly anyone who reads books an:ymore," he went on. "Do you realize, Ge~eral, how many books are printed annually? I think it's over a hundred books a day published ill Germany alone. Over a thousand periodicals are founded every year. The whole world is writing! Everyone helps himself to ideas as though they were his own, all the time. Nobody feels any respansibility toward the situa- tion as a whole. Ever since the Church lost its influence, there is no central authority to stem our general chaos. There is no educational model, no educational principle. In these circumstances it is only natural that feeling and morality should drift without an anchor, and the most stable person begins to waver. "
The General felt his mouth turning dry. It wasn't as though Dr. Arnheim was actually addressing him in person; he was a man stand- ing in the square and thinking out loud. The General thought of how many people talk to themselves in the street, on their way to some- where; civilians, of course, because a soldier who did such a thing would be locked up, and an officer would be sent to the psychiatric clinic. Stumm felt embarrassed at the thought of standing there phi- losophizing in public, as it were, smack-dab in the middle of the Im- perial Residential capital. Apart from the two men, there seemed to be only one other, a mute figure ofbronze standing on a stone pedes- tal in the sunny square. The General had only just noticed this monu- ment and did not remember whom it represented, so that he had to apologize for his ignorance when Arnheim asked him.
"And to think that he was put here to. be venerated," the great man remarked. "But that's how it is. Every moment of our lives we move among institutions, problems, and challenges of which we have barely caught the tail end, so that the present is constantly reaching into the past. We keep crashing through the floor, if I may put it so,
into the cellars of time, even while we imagine ourselves to be occu- pying the top floor of the present. "
Amheim smiled. " He was making conversation. His moving lips flickered in the sunshine, and the lights in his eyes kept changing like those on a signaling steamer. Stumm was growing uneasy; he found it hard to keep acknowledging so many and such unusual turns in 'the conversation while being served up to the world, in full uniform, on this platter of a square. Grass was growing in the cracks between the cobblestones; it was last year's grass but looked implausibly fresh, like a corpse left lying in the snow; it was, in fact, most peculiar and disturbing that grass should be growing here between the stones, when only a few steps farther on the asphalt was being polished, in keeping with the times, by the passing cars. The General began to be troubled by a nervous fear that if he had to go on listening much longer he might suddenly go down on his knees and eat grass in front of the whole world, without knowing why. He looked around for Ul- rich and Diotima for protection.
These two had taken shelter where a thin veil of shade had spun itself around the comer of the wall, and seemed to be involved in an argument, though their voices were too low to be understood.
''You make it sound hopeless," Diotima was saying.
'What do you mean? " Ulrich asked, without real interest.
"There is still such a thing as individuality. " .
Ulrich tried to catch her eye sideways. "Good heavens, we've been
all over this already. "
"You have no heart, or you wouldn't always talk like this," she said
softly. The sun-heated air was rising from the stone pavement up be- tween her legs, which were encased in long skirts like those of a robed statue, inaccessible and to all intents nonexistent. She showed no awareness ofit. It was a caress that had nothing to do with anyone, any man. Her eyes turned pale, but that Inight have been merely the effect of her reserve in a situation where she was exposed to the glances of the passersby. Turning to Ulrich, she said with an effort:
'When a woman has to choose between duty and passion, what can she rely on if not her character? "
"You don't have to choose," Ulrich replied.
· "You go too far; I wasn't speaking of myself," his cousin whispered.
As he did not reply, they both stared across the square fot a while
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in a hostile silence. Then Diotima asked: "Do you think that what we call our soul might emerge from the shadows where it usually keeps itself? "
Ulrich gave her a puzzled look.
"In the case of unusual, specially gifted persons," she added. '~Am I to understand that you're interested in establishing a rap-
port with the Beyond? " Ulrich asked incredulously. "Has Amheim introduced you to a medium? "
Diotima was disappointed in him. "I would never have thought you capable of such a misunderstanding," she said reproachfully. "When I speak of emerging from the shadows, I mean from the un- reality, from that flickering concealment in which we sometimes sense the presence of the unusual. It is spread out like a net that torments us because it will neither hold us nor let us go. Don't you think that there have been times when it was otherWise? When the inner life was a stronger presence, when there were individuals who walked in the light or, as people used to say, walked in holiness, and miracles could happen in reality because they are an ever-present form of another reality, and nothing else! "
Diotima surprised herself by the firmness with whi~h it seemed possible to say this sort of thing, without any special elation, as though she were walking on solid ground. Ulrich felt secretly in- furiated, but actually he was deeply shocked. lias it come to this, he thought, that this giant hen can talk the way I do? Again he saw Di- otima's soul in the shape of a colossal chicken pecking at his own soul, in the shape of a little worm. He was seized by the primal child- hood terror of the giantess, mixed with another strange sensation; there was a certain gratification in be4lg spiritually coJtsumed, as it were, in mindless accord with a kinswoman. Their unanimity was a silly coincidence, of course; he did not believe that there was any magic in being related by blood, nor could he possibly·have taken his cousin seriously even if he were dead drunk. But he had been chang- ing lately, mellowing perhaps; his characteristic inner readiness to move to the ·attack was giving way to a need for tenderness, dreams, kinship, whatever, which also mi}Ilifested itself in sudden outbreaks of the ill will that was its opposite.
Which prompte~him to make fun ofhis cousin now: "Ifthat's how
you feel," he said, "then you ought to go all the way and become Arnheim's lover, openly or in secret, as soon as possible. "
"You shouldn't say such things; I've given you no right! " Diotima rebuked him.
"But I must speak of it. Until now I wasn't sure what was going on between you and Arnheim. But now I understand, and you look to me like a person who is seriously thinking of flying to the moon. I would never have thought you capable of such madness. "
''I've told you that I'm capable of going to extremes. " Her upward gaze was meant to be audacious, but the sun made her screw up her eyes, so that she seemed to be twinkling at him.
"These are the ravings of starved love," Ulrich said, "which pass off when hunger is appeased:" He wondered what Arnheiin's plans might be with regard to her. Did he regret his proposal, and was he covering his retreat by putting on some sort of act? But then he could simply leave and not come back; a man who had been in business all his life would surely have the necessary callousness for that? Here- membered noticing certain signs in Arnheim that indicated passion in an older man; his face was sometimes a grayish yellow, slack and tired, like a room with the bed still unmade at noon. The most likely explanation was the havoc caused by two almost equally strong pas- sions fighting each other to a standstill. But since he was incapable of imagining the passion for power in the degree to which it ruled Am- heim, he could not conceive ofthe measures love had to take in order to fight it.
"You're an odd sort of man," Diotima said. "Always different from what one would expect. Wasn't it you who spoke to me of seraphic love? "
"You regard that as a possibility? " Ulrich asked absentmindedly. "Not as you described it, of course. "
"So Arnheim loves you seraphically? " Ulrich began to laugh softly. "I wish you wouldn't laugh. " Diotima almost hissed at him.
"You don't understand," he apologize& "It's only the excitement. You and Arnheim are sensitive people. You love poetry. I'm sure that you are sometimes touched by a breath . . . a breath of something: the question is just what that is. And now you want to get to the bot- tom of it, with all the thoroughness of your idealism. "
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"Aren't you always saying that one must be precise and thorough? " Diotima countered. .
It was too much. ''You're mad! " he said. "Forgive my saying so, but you are mad. And you of all people mustn't be. "
Meanwhile Arnheim had been telling the General that for the last two generations the world had been undergoing the most profound revolution of all: the end of the soul was in sight.
It gave the Genera! a stab. What the devil, here was yet another problem to think about. To be honest, he ·had thought until this mo- ment, despite Diotima, that there was no such thing as the soul. At military school and in the regiment, nobody gave a hang about this kind of preacher's talk. But here was this manufacturer of guns and tanks, tallCing about. the soul as though he could see it standing there. The General's eyes began to itch and to roll around gloomily, gog- gling at the translucent air around them.
But Arnheim was not waiting to be asked for particulars; words flowed from his lips, from that pale pink slit between his clipped mustache and his little pointed beard. As he phrased it, the soul had started to shrivel and age ever since the Church began to crumble, around the beginning ofthe bourgeois era. Since then it had lost God and all solid values and ideals until the present, when men had actu- ally reached the point of living without morals, without principles, without real experiences, in fact.
The General could not quite see why one could not have experi- ences ifone had no morals. Whereupon Arnheim opened the big vol- ume bound in pigskin that he was holding, revealing an expensive facsimile of a manuscript so valuable that even a mortal of Amheim's extraordinary standing could not be permitted to take the original out of the building. The General saw the depiction of an angel with wings spread horizontally across two pages, against ·a background of dark earth, golden sky, and marvelous colors layered like clouds; he was looking at a reproduction of one of the most moving and splen- did of early medieval paintings, but since he did not know this, while he did know all about bird-hunting and depictions of it, he could only conclude that a creature with wings and a long neck that was neither human nor a snipe must be an aberration to which his companion wished to draw his attention.
Amheim was. pointing his finger at it and saying pensively: "Here
you see what that great lady who is creating the Austrian Campaign is trying to bring back into the world. . . . "
"I see, I see," Stumm said, realizing that he had failed to appreci- ate this thing for what it was and that he had better watch his step.
"The great expressiveness, and with such utter simplicity," Am- heim went on, "bears witness to what our age has lost forever. What is our science compared with this? Patchwork. Our art? Extremes, without~ mediating substance to hold them together. We lack the magic key to unity, and this, you see, is why I am so deeply moved by this Austrian plan to set the world an example of unification, of a shared idea, even though I do not quite believe it can be done. I am a German. Everything in the world today is loud and crude, and Ger- many is the loudest. In every country the people are straining them- selves morning, noon, and night, whether at work or at play, but in Germany they start earlier and stop later than anywhere else. In all the world the spirit of cold calculation and brute force has lost touch with the soul, but we in Germany have the most businessmen and the strongest army in the world. " He looked around the square with delight. "Here in Austria, things have not yet gone so far. The past is still with you, and the people have kept something of their original intuitiveness. Ifthe German spirit can still be saved from rationalism, this is the only place left. from which a start can be made. But I am afraid," he added with a sigh, "we can hardly succeed. A great idea nowadays encounters too much resistance; great ideas just barely help to prevent each other from being misused. We are living in a state of moral truce, as it were, armed to the teeth with ideas. "
He smiled at his own joke. Then something more occurred to him: "You know, the difference between Germany and Austria we have just touched on always reminds me of billiards. Even at billiards ev- erything goes wrong if you try to do it all by calculation instead of with feeling. "
The General had guessed that he was supposed to feel flattered by the reference to a moral armed truce, and he wanted to show that he had been paying attention. He did know something about billiards, so he said, "I play snooker myself, and skittles too, but I never heard that there's a difference between the Austrian and the German styles ofplay. " u
Amheim shut his eyes and gave it some thought: "I myself never
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play billiards," he said after a moment, "but I know that you can play the ball high or low, from the right or from the left; that you can strike the second ball head-on or merely graze it; that you can hit it hard or lightly, bluffa little-or a lot-and there must be many more such options. Now, if you imagine each of these elements with all their inherent gradations, you have an almost infinite number ofpos- sible combinations. To state them theoretically, I should have to take into account, besides the laws of mathematics and statics, the me- chanics ofsolids, plus the laws ofelasticity; I would have to know the coefficients of the materials, the influence of the temperature, the most precise means of measuring the coordination and gradation of my motor impulses, of estimating distances exactly, like a nonius, how to combine the various factors with better than the speed and accuracy of a slide rule, to say nothing of allowing for margins of error, fields of dispersal, and the fact that the aim, which is the cor- rect coincidence of the two balls, is in itself not clearly definable but only a collection of barely adequate data round an average value. "
Arnheim spoke slowly, and in·~way that compelled attention, as though pouring a liquid drop by drop from a vial to a glass; he did not spare his interlocutor a single detail.
"And so you see," he continued, "that I should need to have all the qualities, and do all the things, I cannot possibly ·have and do. You must be enough of a mathematician to see that. it would take a life- time to plan a single carom shOt in that fashion; it boggles the mind! And yet I step up to the table with a cigarette between my lips, a tune in my ear, and my hat on, as it were, and hardly bothering to look over the board, I take my cue to the ball and the problem is solved! General, this is the sort of thing that happens all the time in real life. You are not only an Austrian, you are a military man, so you're bound to understand me: politics, honor, war, art, all the crucial processes of life, take place beyond the scope of the conscious rational mind. Man's greatness is rooted in the irrational. Even we businessmen don't really operate by calculation-not the leading men, that is. The little fellows may have to count their pennies; we learn to regard our really successful moves as a mystery that defies analysis. A man who doesn't care deeply about feeling, morality, religion, music, 'poetry, form, discipline, chivalry, generosity, cru\dor, tolerance-believe me, such a man will never make a businessman of real stature. This is why
I have always admired the military, especially the Austrian military, based as it is on age-old traditions, and I am truly delighted that Frau Tuzzi can count on your support. It is a relief to me to know it. Your influence, with that of our younger friend, is extremely important. All great things rest on the same principles; great obligations are a blessing, General. "
To his own surprise he suddenly found himself spontaneously shaking Stumm's hand, then he ended by saying: "Hardly anyone realizes that true greatness has no rational basis; I mean to say, every- thing strong is simple. "
Stumm von Bordwehr held his breath; he was not sure he under- stood a word of it all, and wished he could rush back into the library and spend hours reading up on all these points that the great man had paid him the compliment of making to him. At last, out of this March gale whirling in his mind, there came a piercing ray of lucid- ity. What the hell, he thought, this fellow wants something from me! He looked up. Arnheim was still holding the book in both hands but was now turning his attention seriously to hailing a cab. His face was slightly flushed with animation, like that of a man who has just been trading ideas with another.
The General was silent, like a man awed by a portentous thought. If Arnheim wanted something from him, then General Stumm was free to want something from Amheim too, to the advantage of His Majesty's service. This perception opened such vistas of possibility that Stumm put off thinking about just what it all really meant. But if the angel in the book had suddenly lifted up a wing to give clever General S~mm a glimpse of what was hidden underneath, the General could not have felt more bewildered and overjoyed.
Over in Diotima's and Ulrich's comer, the following question had meanwhile been posed: Should a woman in Diotima's difficult posi- tion make a gesture ofrenunciation, or let herselfbe swept into adul- tery, or take a third, mixed course, such as belonging physically to one man and spiritually to another, or perhaps physically to neither? For this third solution there was as yet no libretto, as it were, only some great harmonic chords. Diotima still wanted it understood that she was absolutely not speaking of herself but speaking only of "a woman"-every time Ulrich tried to fuse the two together he got a warning glance from her.
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And so he also chose a devious course. ''Have you ever seen a dog? " he asked. "You only think you have. What you see is only something you feel more or less justified in regarding as a dog. It isn't a dog in every respec;t, and always has some personal quality no other. dog has. So how can we ever hope, in this life, to do 'the right thing'? A1). we can do is something that's never the right thing and is always both more· and less than that. Has a tile ever fallen off the roof in precise accord with the law of falling bodies? Never. Even in the lab, things never behave just as they should. 11ley diverge from the ideal course in all possible directions, while we keep up a fiction that this is to be blamed on our faulty execution of the experiment, and that somewhere midway a perfe. Ct result is obtainable.
"Or else you find certain stones, and because of the properties they have in common they are all regarded as diamonds. But suppose one ofthem comes from Africa. and another from Asia, one is dug out of the ground by a black man and the other by an Oriental. What if these differences in circumstances were to matter so much that they cancel out what the objects have in common? In th~ equation 'dia- mond plus circumstances is still diamond,' the use value of the dia- mond is so great that it makes the value of the circumstances negligible. But it's. possible to imagine spiritual circumstances in which the situation is reversed. .
"Everything partakes of the universal and also has something spe- cial all its own. Everything is both true to type and refuses to con- form to type and is in a category all its own, simultan~ously. The personal quality of any given creature is precisely that which doesn't coincide with anything else. . I once said to you that the more truth we discover, the less of the personal is left in the world, because of the longtime war again. st individuality that individuality is losing. By the time everything has been rationalized, there's no telling how much of us will be left. Nothing at all, possibly, but then, when the false sig- nificance we attach to personality has gone, we may enter upon a new kind of sigriificance as if embarking upon a splendid adventure.
"So how do you decide? Should 'a woman' go by the law? Then she may as well go by the laws of society. Conventional morality is a per- fectly valid average and collective value, to b~ Uterally adhered to, without deviations, wherever it is acknowledged. But no individual case can be decided on moral grounds alone; morality is irrelevant to
it in the precise degree that it shares in the inexhaustible nature of the universe. "
"That was quite a speech," Diotima said. She took a certain satis- faction in the loftiness of discourse being'imposed upon her, but in- tended to gain the upper hand by not talking in equally wild
. generalities. "But what is a woman to do, given the circumstances, in real life? "
"Let things happen," Ulrich answered.
"What things? "
"Whatever happens. Her husband, her lover, her renunciation,
her mixed feelings. "
"Do you have any idea what you are saying? " Diotima asked, feel-
ing painfully reminded of how her high resolve possibly to give up Amheim had its wings clipped every night by the mere fact that she slept in Tuzzi. 's bed. Ulrich must have sensed-some of this, because he asked her bluntly: 'Would you try your luck with me? "
'With you? " Diotima drawled, then decided to save face by taking a humorous tack. "Ifthis is an offer,justwhat is it you have iil mind? " "I'll tell you," Ulrich replied seriously. "You read a great deal,
don't you? "
"Of course. "
'What is it you do, then? I'll tell you: You leave out whatever
doesn't suit you. As the author himself has done before you. Just as you leave things out of your dreams or fantasies. By leaving things out, we bring beauty and excitement into the world. We evidently handle our reality by effecting some sort of compromise with it, an in-between state where the emotions prevent each other from reach- ing their fullest intensity, graying the colors somewhat. Children who haven't yet reached that point of control are both happier and un- happier than adults who have. And yes, stupid people also leave things out, which is why ignorance is bliss. So I propose, to begin with, that we try to love each other as ifwe were characters in a novel who have met in the pages ofa book. Let's in any case leave offall the fatty tissue that plumps up reality. "
Diotima felt called upon to argue the case; she wanted to direct the conversation away from this too~personal vein, and she also wanted to show that she understood something of the problems that had been touched upon.
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"All well and good," she said, "but art is supposed to afford us a vacation from reality, so that we can return to it with our energies restored. "
"And I am opinionated enough to say that there should be no time off,'' her cousin retorted. "What sort of a life is it that we have to drill holes in it called holidays; would we punch holes in a painting be- cause it makes too strenuous demands on our sense of beauty? Should we look forward to taking time off from eternal bliss in the next world? Even the thought of time taken off my life by having to sleep sometimes seems unacceptable to me. "
"Ah, there it is. " Diotima seized her opportunity. "You see how unnatural it all is, what you're saying. What human being doesn't need to rest and take a break? It's a perfect illustration of the differ- ence between you and Amheim. Yours is a mind that will not ac- knowledge the shadow on things, the dark side, while his has developed out of the fullness of human experience, with sunshine and shadow intenningled. "
"Of course I exaggerate,'' Ulrich admitted coolly. "You will see it even more clearly as we go into more detail. Think of the great writ- ers, for instance. We can model our lives on them, but we can't squeeze life out of them, like wine out of grapes. They have given so solid a fonn to what once moved them that it confronts us like pressed metal even between the lines. But what have they actually said? . Nobody knows. They themselves never knew all of it at a time. They're like a field over which bees fly back and forth; they them- selves are flying back and forth, as it were. Their thoughts and feel- ings show all the gradations between truth and even error, as can be demonstrated if necessary, and changeable natures that come close to us at will and then elude us when we try to observe them closely.
"There is no detaching an idea in a book from its context on the page. It catches our eye like the face of a person looming up in a crowd as it is being swept past us. I suppose I'm exaggerating a little again, but tell me, what happens in our lives that is any different from this? Leaving the precise, measurable, and definable sensory data out of account, all the other concepts on which we base our lives are no more than congealed metaphors. Take as simple a concept as manliness, and think how it keeps wavering among its many possible variants. It's like a breath that changes shape at every exhalation,
with nothing to hold on to, no finn impression, no logic. So when we simply leave out in art whatever doesn't suit us and our conceptions, we're merely going back to the original condition of life itself. "
"My dear friend," Diotima said, "you don't seem to be talking about anything in particular. " Ulrich had paused for a moment, and her words fell into that pause.
"Yes, I suppose so. I hope I haven't been talking too loudly. "
"You've been talking fast, in a low voice, and at length," she said, with a touch of sarcasm. 'Without saying a word of what you meant to say. Do you realize what you've just explained to me all over again? That reality should be abolished! It's true that when I heard you make this point the first time, on one of our trips into the country, I
·think, it made a lasting impression-I don't know why. But how this is to be done is something you haven't yet revealed, I'm sorry to say. " "Clearly, I'd have to go on talking for at least as long again to do so. But do you really expect it to be that simple? IfI'm not mistaken, you spoke of wanting to fly away with Arnheim into some kind of tran- scendent state. Something you regard as another kind of reality. What I have been saying, on the other hand, is that we must try to
recover unreality. Reality no longer makes sense. "
"Oh, Arnheim would hardly agree with you there," Diotima said. "Of course not. That's just the difference between him and me.
He is trying to make the fact that he eats, sleeps, is the great Arn- heim, and doesn't know whether to marry you or not, mean some- thing, and to this end he has been colle9ting all the treasures of the mind throughout his life. " Ulrich suddenly paused, and the silence lengthened.
After a:while he asked, in a different tone: "Can you explain to me why I should be having this conversation with you, of all people? Suddenly I'm reminded of my childhood. You won't believe this, but I was a good child, mild as the air on a warm moonlit night. I could fall madly in love with a dog, a pocketknife . . . " But then he left this statement unfinished too.
Diotima looked at him, wondering what he could mean. She again remembered how he had once hotly advocated "precision of feel- ing," while just now he was taking the opposite view. He had accused Arnheim of insufficiently clean-cut intentions, while now he favored "letting things happen. " And she was troubled by the fact that Ulrich
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was advocating an intense emotional life without any "time off," compared with Amheim's ambiguous suggestion never to let oneself in for single-minded hatred or total love/ These thoughts left her uneasy.
"Do you really believe that there is such a thing as boundless feel- ing? " Ulrich asked her.
"Oh yes, there is such a thing as boundless emotion," Diotima said, the ground finn under her feet again.
"You see, I don't quite believe that," Ulrich said absently. "Strange how often we talk about it, but we certainly do our best to avoid it throughout our lives, as if we were ~raid of drowning in it. "
He noticed that Diotima was not listening. She was upeasily watching Amheim, who was looking around for a cab.
'Tm afraid we ought to rescue him from the General," she said.
"I'll go and, get a cab and take the Generai off your hands," Ulrich offered, and at the moment he turned to go, Diotima laid her hand on his arm and said kindly, as if to reward him for his trouble: "Any feeling that isn't boundless is worthless. "
115
THE TIP OF YOUR BREAST IS LIKE A POPPY LEAF
In accordance with the law that periods of great stability tend to be followed by violent upheavals, Bonadea, too, suffered a relapse. Her attempts to get on closer terms with Diotima had failed, and her fine scheme to get even with Ulrich by making friends with her rival, leaving Ulrich out in the cold-a fantasy she had spent much time in spinning out-had come to nothing. She had to swallow her pride and come knocking on his door again, but when she was there her beloved seemed to have arranged for constant interruptions, and her stories to account for her coming to see him again even though he
did not deserve it were wasted on his impervious friendliness. She was longing to make a terrible scene but committed to behaving with absolute propriety, so that in time she came to hate herself for being so good. At night her head, heavy with unappeased cravings, sat on her shoulders like a coconut with its mat of monkeylike hair growing freakishly inside the shell, and she came close to bursting with help- less rage, like a drinker deprived of his bottle. She privately called Diotima every name she could think of, such as fraud and insuffer- able pompous bitch, and came up with cynical glosses on that noble femininity which was the secret of Diotima's charm. Her aping of Diotima's style, which had delighted her for a while, had now become a prison from which she broke out into an almost licentious freedom; her curling iron and mirror lost the power to tum her into an idealized image of herself, and th~ artificial state of mind it had supported collapsed as well. Even sleep, which Bonadea had always reveled in despite her chronic inner conflicts, sometimes kept her waiting when she had· gane to bed, an experience so new to her that she thought she must be sick with insomnia, and felt what people usually feel when they are seriously ill, that her spirit was deserting her body,leaving it helpless like a wounded soldier on the battlefield. As she lay there in her vexations as if on red-hot sand, all that high- minded talk of Diotima's, which Bonadea had so admired, seemed to her infinitely beside the point, and she honestly despised it.
When she found it impossible to go to Ulrich yet again, she thought of another scheme to bring him back to his senses. It was of course the culmination of the plan that came to her first: a vision of herself effecting an entrance at Diotima's when that. siren had Ulrich with her. Bonadea regarded. all his visits with ·Diotima as transparent pretexts for carrying on their flirtation rather than actually doing something for the public good. So it was up to Bonadea to do some- thing for the public good-and this gave her the opening gambit of her plan as well: no one was paying any attention to Moosbrugger anymore, and he was going to his doom, while all the others were pontificating about it. Bonadea never stopped to wonder that it was Moosbrugger once more who came to her rescue in her hour of need. Had she bothered to think about him at all, she would have been horrified, but all she was thinking was that if Ulrich cared so much about Moosbrugger, she would see to it that he would at least
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not forget the man. & she mulled over her plan, she rem~mbered two things Ulrich had said when they were talking·about the mur- derer: namely, that everyone had a second soul, which was always innocent; and that a responsible persqn could always choose to do otherwise, but an irresponsible person had no such choice. From this she somehow concluded that she wanted to be irresponsible, which would mean that she would also be innocent, which Ulrich was not, and which he needed to be, for his own salvation.
So motivated, and dressed as for a social occasion, she spent sev- eral evenings wandering up and doWI1 past Diotima's windows, and never had long to wait before they lit up along the whole front, betokening something going on inside. She had told her husband that she was invited out but would not stay too long, and in the course of a few days, while sh~ was still trying to screw up her cour- age, her lies and her strolls in front of a house where she had no business to be unleashed a growing impulse that would soon drive her up those steps to the front door. What if she was seen by some acquaintance, or even by her husband if he should pass that way by chance, or what if she was noticed by the doorman, or by a police- man, who might decide to question her-the more often she went out on this expedition, the greater the risks, and the more probable that if she hesitated too long an incident would occur. Now, it was true that Bonadea ha~ more than once slipped into doorways or places where she did not want to be seen, but on those occasions she had been fortified by the thought that it had to be; this time she was about to intrude where she was not expected and could not be sure of her reception. She felt like an assassin who has started out with none too clear an idea of what it would be like, and is then swept by circumstances into a state in which the actual pistol shot or the glitter of vitriol drops flying through the air no longer adds much to the excitement.
Without any such dramatic intentions, Bonadea nevertheless felt similarly benumbed by. the time she actually found herself pressing the doorbell and walking inside. Little Rachel had slipped over to Ulrich and told him that someone was waiting out in the hall to see him, not mentioning that this someone was a heavily veiled unknown lady-who, when Rachel shut the door to the salon behind him,
flung the veil back from her face. At the moment she was absolutely convinced that Moosbrugger's fate depended on her taking instant action, and she received Ulrich not like a lover plagued by jealousy, but gasping for breath like a marathon runner. With no effort, she lied that her husband had tolq her yesterday that Moosbrugger would soon be past saving.
"There's nothing I hate so much," she ended, "as this obscene kind of murderer. But even though it goes against my grain, I've taken the risk of being regarded as an intruder here, because you must go straight back to the lady of the house and her very influential guests and get their help if you still want to get anything done:" She had no idea what she expected to come of this. Perhaps that Ulrich would be deeply moved and would thank her, then call Diotima, who would then take Bonadea into some private place to talk, away from the other gues~s. Or else Diotima might be drawn to the hall by the sound of voices, and Bonadea was ready to let her see that she, Bona- dea, was far from being the person least qualified to take an interest in Ulrich's noble causes. Her eyes were moist and flash~g. her hands trembled, her voice rose out of control. Ulrich, deeply embarrassed, smiled desperately to quiet her down and gain time while he found a way to talk her into leaving as quickly as possible. It was a ticklish situation and could have ended with Bonadea's having a screaming or crying fit, if Rachel had not come to his aid. Little Rachel had been standing close by all this time, with wide-open, shining eyes. When the beautiful stranger, trembling all over, had asked to speak to Ulrich, the maid had instantly divined the romantic nature of the affair. She managed to hear most of what was said, and the syllables of Moosbrugger's name fell on her ear like pistol shots. The sadness, passion, and jealousy throbbing in this lady's voice moved her power- fully, although she knew nothing of what was behind it. She guessed that the woman was Ulrich's mistress, and it doubled her infatuation with him. It was as though the two of them had burst into full- throated song together and made her want to lift up her own voice
and join in, or do something to help. And so, with a glance enjoining secrecy, she opened a door and inVited the pair into the only room not being used for the gathering this evening. It was Rachel's flrst conscious act of disloyalty to her mistress, and she knew what would
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happen if she was found out, but life was so exciting, and romantic passion such an untidy state of mind, that she had no chance to think twice about it.
When the gaslight flamed upward a11-d Bonadea's eyes gradually took in her surroundings, her legs almost gave way under her, and her cheeks flushed red with jealousy: they were inside Diotima's bedroom. There were stockings, hairbrushes, and much else lying around, whatever is left in view when a woman must change hastily from head to foot for a big party and the maid has not had time to put things away or has left it till the next morning, as in this case, because the room was due for a thorough cleaning then anyway; on big-party evenings the bedroom was used to store furnishings from the other rooms where the space was needed. So the·air was heavy with the smell of all this furniture jammed together, and of powder, soap, and scent.
"What a silly thing for the girl to do," Ulrich said with a laugh. "We can't stay here. Anyway, you shouldn't have come. There's nothing to be done for Moosbrugger. "
"So I shouldn't have bothered, is that it? " Bonadea echoed him almost inaudibly. Her eyes strayed all over the place. How could the girl have even thought of taking Ulrich into the most private room in the house, she wondered in anguish, if she had not done it often before? Yet she could not bring herself tQ confront him with this proof of his infidelity, but chose instead to say dully: "How can you sleep in peace when such injustice is being done? I haven't been able to sleep at night, which is why I decided to come looking for you. " She had turned her back on the room and stood staring out the win- dow into the opaque, glassy darkness outside, at what might be tree- tops or some deep courtyard down below.
