No More Learning

Walter was expecting Ulrich to give him an answer that he could resent. He wanted to pay him back with interest! He had made up his mind to tell Ulrich that people like Meingast were saviors. "Salva- tion, after all, means the same thing as making one whole," he thought. And: "Saviors may be wrong, but they make us whole again! " he intended to say. And he was going to add: "I don't suppose you have any idea what that means? " The resentment he felt toward Ulrich was like what he felt when he had to go to the dentist.
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But Ulrich merely asked him distractedly just what Meingast had actually been writing and doing in the past few years.
''You see! " Walter said, disappointed. ''You see, you don't even know that much, but you disparage him! "
'Well," Ulrich said lightly, "I don't have to know; a few lines are sufficient! " He set his foot on the stairs. But Clarisse held him by the jacket and whispered: "Meingast isn't even his real name! "
"Of course it isn't; but is that a secret? "
"He turned into Meingast once, and now that he's here with us he's changing again! " Clarisse whispered intensely and mysteriously, and this whisper had something in common with a blowtorch. Walter flung himself on it to put it out. "Clarisse! " he implored her. "Cla- risse, stop this nonsense! "
Clarisse kept quiet and smiled. Ulrich went ahead up the stairs; he wanted at long last to see this messenger who had descended upon Walter and Clarisse's domestic life from Zarathustra's mountains. By the time they got upstairs, Walter was in a temper not only at him but at Meingast as well.
Meingast received his admirers in their dark apartment. He had seen them coming, and Clarisse immediately walked over to him where he stood against the gray windowpane, becoming a small pointed shadow beside his tall gaunt one. There was no introduction, or only a one-sided one in that Ulrich's name was mentioned in order to refresh the Master's memory. Then they were all silent. Ulrich, being curious to see how the situation would develop, positioned himself at the other, unoccupied, window, and Walter made the sur- prising move of joining him there, probably for no better reason than, being subject to momentarily equal forces of repulsion, he was attracted by the stimulus of the brightness filtering into the room through the less obstructed window.
The calendar said March, but meteorology is not always depend- able; it sometimes produces a premature June evening or a belated one, Clarisse thought. The darkness outside the window seemed to her like a summer night. Where the light of the gas lamps fell, the night was lacquered a bright yellow. The bushes nearby were a surg- ing mass of black. Where they hung into the light they became green or whitish-there was no right word for it-scalloped into leaves and
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floating in the lamplight like laundry spread out in a gently running stream. A narrow iron ribbon on dwarflike posts-a mere reminder and admonition to think of order-ran for a while along the edge of the lawn where the bushes stood, and then vanished in the darkness: Clarisse knew it came to an end there. There might at some time have been a plan to embellish the area with the suggestion of a gar- den, but it had soon been abandoned.
Clarisse moved close to Meingast, to see as far as possible up the road from his angle; her nose was flat against the windowpane, and their two bodies were touching hard and at as many points as if Cla- risse had stretched out full length on the stairs, as she occasionally did. Her right arm had to give way, and was clasped at the elbow by Meingast's long fingers as by the sinewy talons of an extremely ab- sentminded eagle crumpling something like a silk handkerchief in its claws. Clarisse had for a while been watching a man who had some- thing wrong with him, but she couldn't make outwhatitwas. His gait was by turns hesitant and negligent; he gave the impression that something was wrapping itself around his will to walk, and every time he had tom through this he walked for a bit like anyone who was not hurrying but not stopping either. The rhythm of this irregular move- ment had caught Clarisse's attention; as the man passed a streetlamp she tried to make out his features, which struck her as hollow and numb. When he passed the next-to-last streetlamp she decided that it was an insignificant, unpleasant, and furtive face, but as he ap- proached the nearest lamppost, the one almost beneath her window, his face looked extremely pale, and it floated around on the light as the light floated around on the darkness, so that the thin iron post of the streetlamp looked very straight and aroused beside it, striking the eye with a more penetrating vivid green than it really warranted.
All four had gradually begun to observe this man, who thought himself unseen. He now noticed the bushes bathed in light, and they made him think of the scalloping of a woman's petticoat, more luxu- rious than any he had ever seen, but one he would like to see. At this moment he was seized by his resolve. He stepped over the low rail- ing, stood on the grass, which reminded him ofthe green wood shav- ings in a box of toy trees, stared for a while in bewilderment at his feet, was roused by his head as it cautiously looked around, and con- cealed himself in the shadows, as was his habit. People lured out-
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doors by the warm weather were returning home; their noise and their pleasure could be heard from far off. It filled the man with fear, and he sought comfort under the petticoat ofleaves. Clarisse still had no idea what was the matter with him. He emerged whenever a group of people had passed by, their eyes blinded to the darkness by the gaslight. Without lifting his feet, he shuffled toward the circle of light, like someone on a shallow bank who will not go into water over the soles of his shoes. Clarisse was struck by how pale the man was; his face was distorted into a white disk She was overcome with pity for him. But he was making strange little movements that puzzled her for a long time, until, suddenly horrified, she had to grab hold of something; and since Meingast still had a grip on her arm, so that she could not move freely, she grabbed his wide trousers in her search for protection, pulling them taut over the Master's leg like a flag in a gale. So the two of them stood, without letting go.
Ulrich, thinking he was the first to have realized that the man under the windows was one of those sick people who through the abnormality of their sex lives attract the lively curiosity of the sexually normal, worried needlessly for a while about the effect this discovery might have on Clarisse, since she was so unstable. Then he forgot about it, and would have been glad to know for himself what might actually be going on in such a person. The change, he thought, must have been so complete at the moment of stepping over the rail as to defy any attempt to describe it in detail. And as naturally as ifit were an appropriate comparison, he was reminded of a singer who has just finished eating and drinking and then steps up to the piano, folds his hands over his stomach, and, opening his mouth to sing, is partly someone else and partly not. Ulrich also thought of His Grace Count ~insdorf, who was able to switch into a religious-ethical circuit and into a banker's imperial man-of-the-world circuit. He was fascinated by the completeness of this transformation, which takes place in- wardly but is confirmed outwardly by the world's acceptance. He did not care how this man down there had got where he was in psycho- logical terms, but he could not help imagining his head gradually fill- ing with tension, like a balloon filling with gas, probably, slowly and for days, but still swaying on the ropes that anchor it to terra firma until there is an inaudible command or some chance occurrence, or simply the set time finally runs its course, at which point anything at
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all would serve to let the ropes go, and the head, with no connection to the human world, floats off into the emptiness of the abnormal. And there the man actually stood in the shelter of the bushes with his sunken, ordinary face, lurking like a beast of prey. To carry out his purpose he really should have waited for the merrymakers to thin out so that the area might be safer for him. But the moment women passed by, alone in the interval between groups, or sometimes even protected within a group, dancing along and laughing gaily, they were no longer people to him but dolls playing some grotesque part in his consciousness. He was filled with the utter ruthlessness of a killer, immune to their mortal fear; but at the same time he was him- selfsuffering some minor torment at the thought that they might dis- cover him and chase him off like a dog before he could reach the climax of insensibility, and his tongue quivered in his mouth with anxiety. He waited in a stupor, and gradually the last glimmer of twi- light faded. Now a solitary woman neared his hiding place, but when he was still separated from her by the streetlamps, he could already see her detached from all her surroundings, bobbing up and down on the waves of light and darkness, a black lump dripping with light before she came closer. Ulrich, too, saw her, a shapeless middle-aged woman approaching. She had a body like a sack filled with gravel, and her expression was not congenial but domineering and cantan- kerous. But the gaunt pale man in the bushes knew how to get at her without her noticing until it was too late. The dull motions of her eyes and her legs were probably already twitching in his flesh, and he was getting ready to assault her before she had a chance to defend herself, to assault her with the sight of him, which would take her by surprise and enter into her forever, however she might twist and tum. This excitement was whirling and turning in his knees, hands, and larynx, or so it seemed at least to Ulrich as he observed the man groping his way through the bushes where they were already in the half-light, getting ready to step out at the right moment and expose himself. Dazed, the miserable man, leaning into the last slight resist- ance of the twigs, glued his eyes on the ugly face now pitching up and down toward him in the full light, his breath panting obediently in time with the rhythm of the stranger. 'Will she scream? " Ulrich thought. This coarse person was perfectly capable of flying into a rage instead ofa panic, and going over to the attack; in which case the
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demented coward would have to take to his heels, and his frustrated lust would plunge its knife into his own flesh, the squat handle first! But at this tense moment Ulrich heard the casual voices of two men coming down the road, and since he could hear them through the glass they must have penetrated the hissing excitement down below, for the man beneath the window cautiously dropped the nearly opened veil of twigs and withdrew soundlessly back into the midst of the darkness.
"What a swine! " Clarisse whispered to the friend beside her, ener- getically but not at all indignantly. Back before Meingast's transfor- mation he had often heard her use such terms, provoked by his free-and-easy ways with her, so the word might be considered histor- ical. Clarisse assumed that Meingast would still remember it, despite his transformation, and it really did seem to her that his fingers stirred very faintly on her arm in answer. There was nothing at all accidental about this evening; it was not even by chance that the man had chosen Clarisse's window to stand under. She was firmly con- vinced that she had a baneful attraction for men who had something wrong with them; it had often proved to be so! Taken all in all, it was not so much that her ideas were confused as that they left out con- nections, or that they were saturated with affect in many places where other people have no such inner wellspring. Her conviction that she had been the one who had made it possible at the time for Meingast to remake himself was in itself not improbable; if one also considered how independently this change had taken its own course, because there had been no contact over distance and for years, and further how great a change it was-for it had made a prophet out of a superficial worldling-and finally how it was soon after Meingast's departure that the love between Walter and Clarisse had risen to that height ofdiscord where it still remained, then even Clarisse's notion that she and Walter would have had to take on the sins of the still untransformed Meingast to make his rise possible was no worse rea- soning than any number of respected ideas people believe in today. This had given rise, however, to the relationship of knightly servitude that Clarisse felt toward the returned Master, and whenever she now spoke of his new "transformation," instead of simply a change, she was only giving fitting expression to the elevated state in which she had since found herself. The awareness offinding herselfin a signifi-
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cant relationship could uplift Clarisse in the literal sense. One doesn't quite know whether to paint saints with a cloud under their feet or whether they should be standing on nothing a finger's breadth above the ground, and this was exactly how it now stood with her, since Meingast had chosen her house in which to accomplish his great work, which apparently was grounded in something quite pro- found. Clarisse was not in love with him as a woman; it was rather like a boy who admires a man: ecstatic when he manages to set his hat at the same angle as his idol, and filled with a secret ambition even to outdo him eventually.
Walter knew this. He could not hear what Clarisse was whispering to Meingast, nor could his eye make out any more of the pair than a heavily fused mass of shadow in the dim light of the window, but he could see through everything. He, too, had recognized what was wrong with the man in the bushes, and the silence that reigned in the room lay most heavily upon him. He managed to make out that Ul- rich, who stood motionless beside him, was staring intently out the window, and he assumed that the two at the other window were doing the same. "Why doesn't anyone break this silence? " he thought. "Why doesn't someone open the window and scare this monster off? " It occurred to him that they were obligated to call the police, but there was no telephone in the house, and he lacked the courage to undertake something that might make his companions look down on him. He had no desire whatever to be an "outraged bourgeois," but he was just so exasperated! He could understand very well the "chivalric relationship" in which his wife stood to Mein- gast, for even in lovemaking it was impossible for her to imagine exal- tation without effort: she derived her exaltation not from sensuality, only from ambition. He remembered how incredibly alive she could sometimes be in his arms, at a time when he had still been preoc- cupied with art; but except by such detours it was impossible to arouse her. "Perhaps ambition is all that really takes people out of themselves," he reflected dubiously. It had not escaped him that Clarisse "stood watch" while Meingast was working, in order to pro- tect his ideas with her body, although she did not even know what these ideas were. Painfully, Walter regarded the lonely egotist in his bush; this wretch offered a warning example for the devastation that can be created in an all-too-isolated mind. That he knew exactly what
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Clarisse was feeling as she stood there watching tormented him. "She will be slightly excited, as if she had just run up a flight of stairs," he thought. He himself felt a pressure in the scene that was before his eyes, ll! ' if something had been wrapped in a cocoon and was trying to break its envelope, and he felt how within this mysteri- ous pressure, which Clarisse, too, was feeling, the will was aroused not merely to watch but right away, soon, somehow, to do something, to inteiVene in what was happening in order to set it free. Other peo- ple got their ideas from life, but whatever Clarisse experienced came, evexy time, from ideas: such an enviable madness! And Walter was more inclined to the exaggerations of his wife, even if she was perhaps mentally ill, than to the way of thinking of his friend Ulrich, who fancied himself cautious and cool: somehow the more irrational was closer to him; perhaps it left him personally untouched, it ap- pealed to his sympathy. In any event, many people prefer crazy ideas to difficult ones, and he even derived a certain satisfaction from Cla- risse's whispering with Meingast in the dark, while Ulrich was con- demned to stand beside him as a mute shadow; it seiVed Ulrich right to be beaten by Meingast. But from time to time Walter was tor- mented by the expectation that Clarisse would fling open the win- dow or rush down the stairs to the bushes: then he detested both male shadows and their obscene silent watching, which made the sit- uation for the poor little Prometheus he was shielding, who was so vulnerable to evexy temptation of the spirit, more problematic from one minute to the next.
During this time the afflicted man's shame and frustrated lust had fused into an all-peiVasive disappointment that filled his gaunt body with its massive bitterness as he withdrew into his bushes. When he had reached the innermost darkness he collapsed, letting himself fall to the ground, and his head hung from his neck like a leaf. The world stood ready to punish him, and he saw his situation much as it would have appeared to the two passersby had they discovered him. But after this man had wept for himself for a while, dxy-eyed, the original change came over him once again, this time mixed with even more vengefulness and spite. And again it miscarried. A girl passed by who might have been around fifteen and was obviously late coming from somewhere; she seemed lovely to him, a small, hastening ideal: the depraved man felt that he now really ought to step out and speak to
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her in a friendly way, but this plunged him instantly into wild terror. His imagination, ready to conjure up anything that could even be suggested by a woman, became fearful and awkward when con- fronted with the natural possibility of admiring this defenseless little creature approaching in her beauty. The more she was suited to please his daylight self, the less pleasure she provided his shadow self, and he vainly tried to hate her, since he could not love her. So he stood uneasily at the borderline between shadow and light and ex- posed himself. When the child noticed his secret she had already passed by him and was about eight paces away; at fust she had merely looked at the leaves moving without realizing what was going on, and when she did she could already feel secure enough not to be scared to death: her mouth did stay open for a while, but then she gave a loud scream and began to run; the scamp even seemed to enjoy looking back, and the man felt himself humiliatingly aban- doned. He wrathfully hoped that a drop of poison might somehow have fallen into her eyes and would later eat its way through her heart.
This relatively harmless and comical outcome relieved the specta- tors' sense of humanity; this time they would indeed have intervened if the scene had not resolved itself as it did; and preoccupied with this, they hardly noticed how the business below did come to an end; they could only confirm that it had done so when they observed that the male "hyena," as Walter put it, had suddenly disappeared. The man finally realized his intentions when a perfectly ordinary woman came along who looked at him aghast and with loathing. involuntarily shocked into stopping for a moment, and then tried to pretend that she had not seen anything. During this instant he felt himself, to- gether with his roof of leaves and the whole topsy-turvy world he had come from, sliding deep into the defenseless woman's resisting gaze. That may have been how it happened, or perhaps it was some other way. Clarisse had not been paying attention. With a deep breath she raised herself from her half-crouching position; she and Meingast had let go of each other some time before. It seemed to her that she was suddenly landing on the wooden floor with the soles of her feet, and a whirlpool of inexpressible, horrible desire stilled itself in her body. She was firmly convinced that everything that had just oc- curred had a special meaning, minted just for her; and strange as it
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may sound, the repulsive scene left her with the impression that she was a bride who had just been serenaded. In her head, intentions were dancing helter-skelter, some ready to be carried out and others, new ones, just occurring to her.
"Funny! " Ulrich suddenly said into the darkness, the first of the four to break the silence. ''What an absurdly twisted notion it is to think how this fellow's fun would have been spoiled if he only knew he was being watched the whole time! "
Meingast's shadow detached itself from the nothingness and stood, a slender compression of darkness, facing in the direction of Ulrich's voice.
'We attach far too much importance to sex," the Master said. "These are in fact the goatlike caperings of our era's wilL" He said nothing further. But Clarisse, who had winced with annoyance at Ul- rich's words, felt borne forward by what Meingast said, although in this darkness there was no telling in what direction.
THE TESTAMENT
When Ulrich returned home from what he had experienced, even more dissatisfied than he had been before, he decided that he must not avoid a decision any longer, and tried to recall as best he could the "incident," as he euphemistically called what had happened in his last few hours with Agathe, only a few days after their deep discussion.
He was all packed and ready to leave on a sleeper that came through the town late, and so he and Agathe met for a final meal. They had agreed earlier that she would join him soon, and they somewhat uncertainly estimated this separation at from five days to two weeks.
At dinner Agathe said: ''There's something more we have to do before you leave. "
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'What? " Ulrich asked.
''We have to change the will! "
Ulrich remembered looking at his sister without surprise; despite
all their earlier talk he had assumed she was leading up to a joke. But Agathe was gazing down at her plate, with the familiar meditative wrinkle between her eyebrows. Slowly she said:
"He won't keep as much of me between his fingers as would be left if a woolen thread had been burned away between them! "
Something must have been intensely at work in her in the last few days. Ulrich was about to tell her that he regarded such deliberations about how Hagauer's interests could be injured as impermissible and did not want to hear any more about it. But at that moment their father's old servant came in with the next course, and they could only go on talking in veiled allusions.
"Aunt Malvina . . . ," Agathe said, smiling at her brother. "Do you remember Aunt Malvina? She had intended to leave every- thing she owned to our cousin; it was all arranged and everyone knew about it! Accordingly, all she was left in her parents' will was the legal minimum she was entitled to, all the rest going to her brother, so that neither of the children, whose father was equally devoted to both of them, should inherit more than the other. You remember that, surely? The annuity that Agathe-Alexandra, our cousin, that is"-she corrected herselfwith a laugh-"had been re- ceiving since her marriage was, for the time being, discounted against her legal share; it was a complicated arrangement, to give Aunt Malvina time to die. . . . "
"I don't understand you," Ulrich muttered.
"Oh, but it's perfectly simple! Aunt Malvina is dead, but before she died she lost all her money; she even had to be supported. Now, if Papa should for some reason have forgotten to revoke that provi- sion in his will, Alexandra gets nothing at all, even if her marriage contract had stipulated joint ownership of property! "
"I don't know about that; it seems very doubtful! " Ulrich said im- pulsively. "Besides, Father must have given certain assurances. He can't possibly have made such provisions without talking it over with his son-in-law! "
He remembered saying this only too well, because he could not
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possibly keep silent while listening to his sister's dangerous error. He could still see vividly in his mind the smile with which she had looked at him. "Isn't it just like him? " she seemed to be thinking. "One only has to present a case to him as ifit weren't flesh and blood but some abstraction, and one can lead him around by the nose. " And then she had asked curtly: "Is there any written evidence of such arrange- ments? " and answered herself: "I never heard anything about it, and if anyone knew about it, it would certainly be me. But of course Papa was strange about everything. "
Now the servant was back at the table, and she took advantage of Ulrich's helplessness to add: "Verbal agreemen. ts_can always be con- tested. But if the will was changed again after Aunt Malvina lost ev- erything, then all signs point to this new codicil having been lost. "
Again Ulrich let himself be tempted to steer her right: "That still leaves the sizable automatic inheritance that can't be taken away from children of one's body. "
"But I've just told you that all of that was paid out during the fa- ther's lifetime! After all, Alexandra was married twice. " They were alone for a moment, and Agathe hastened to add: ''I've looked at that passage very carefully. Only a few words need to be changed to make it look as if my share had already been paid out to me in full. Who knows anything about it now? When Papa went back to leaving us equal shares after Aunt Malvina's losses, he put it in a codicil that can be destroyed. Anyway, there's nothing to have prevented me from having renounced my legal share in your favor for one reason or another. "
Ulrich looked at her dumbfounded and missed his opportunity to respond to her inventions as he felt obliged to do; by the time he was ready, they were no longer alone, and he had to resort to circum- locutions.
"One really shouldn't," he began hesitantly, "even think such things! "
"Why not? '' Agatha retorted.
Such questions are simple as long as they are left alone, but the moment they rear their heads they are a monstrous serpent that had been curled up into a harmless blob. Ulrich remembered answering: "Even Nietzsche asks the 'free spirits' to observe certain external
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rules for the sake of a greater internal freedom! " He had said this with a smile, although he felt it was rather cowardly to hide behind someone else's words.
"That's a lame principle!
" Agathe said, dismissing it out of hand. "That's the principle behind my marriage! "
And Ulrich thought: "It really is a lame principle. " It seems that people who have new and revolutionary answers to particular prob- lems make up for it by compromising on everything else, which en- ables them to lead highly moral lives in carpet slippers; all the more so as the attempt to keep everything constant except what they are trying to change corresponds totally to the creative economy of thinking in which they feel at home. Even Ulrich had always re- garded this more as a strict than as a slack procedure, but when he was having this talk with his sister he felt that she had struck home; he could no longer bear the indecision he had loved, and it seemed to him that it was precisely Agathe who had been given the mission of bringing him to this point. And while he was nevertheless propound- ing the "rule of the free spirits" to her, she laughed and asked him whether he didn't notice that the moment he tried to formulate gen- eral principles a different man appeared in his place.
"And even though you are surely right to admire him, basically he doesn't mean a thing to you! " she declared, giving her brother a will- ful and challenging look. Again he had no ready answer and said nothing, expecting an interruption at any moment, yet he could not bring himself to drop the subject. This situation emboldened her.
"In the short time we've been together," she went on, "you've given me such wonderful guidelines for my life, things I would never have dared think out for myself, but then you always end up wonder- ing whether they're really true! It seems to me that the truth the way you use it is only a way of mistreating people! "
She was amazed at her own daring in making such reproaches; her own life seemed so worthless to her that she surely ought to have kept quiet. But she drew her courage from Ulrich himself, and there was something so curiously feminine in her way of leaning on him while she attacked him that he felt it too.
"You don't understand the desire to organize ideas in large, ar- ticulated masses," Ulrich said. "The battle experiences of the intel- lect are alien to you; all you see in them is columns marching in some
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kind of formation, the impersonality of many feet stirring up the truth like a cloud of dust! "
"But didn't you yourself describe to me, far more precisely and clearly than I ever could, the two states of mind in which you can live? " she answered.
A glowing cloud, with ever-changing outlines, flew across her face. She felt the desire to bring her brother to the point where he could no longer retreat. The thought made her feverish, but she did not yet know whether she would have enough courage to carry it through, and so she put off ending the meal.
Ulrich knew all this, he guessed it, but he had pulled himself to- gether and taken up his position. He sat facing her, his eyes focused, absent, his mouth forced to utterance, and had the impression that he was not really there but had remained somewhere behind him- self, calling out to himself what he was saying:
"Suppose that, on a trip somewhere, I wanted to steal some stran- ger's golden cigarette e a s e - l ask you, isn't that simply unthinkable? I don't want to go into the question right now of whether a move s u c h as y o u ' r e c o n t e m p l a t i n g is o r i s n ' t j u s t i f i a b l e o n g r o u n d s o f i n t e l - lectual freedom. For all I know, it may be in order to do Hagauer some injury. But imagine me in a hotel, neither penniless nor a pro- fessional thief, nor a mental defective with deformed head or body, nor the offspring of a hysterical mother or a drunkard father, nor confused or stigmatized by anything else in any way at all: yet I steal, nevertheless. I repeat: This couldn't happen anywhere in the world! It's simply impossible! It can be ruled out with absolute scientific certainty! "
Agathe burst out laughing. "But Ulo, what if one does it all the same? "
Ulrich himself had to laugh at this answer, which he had not antici- pated. He leapt to his feet and pushed his chair back hastily in order not to encourage her by his concurrence. Agathe got up from the table.
"You cannot do this! " he pleaded with her.
"But Ulo," she said, "do you think even in your dreams, or do you dream something that's happening? "
This question reminded him of his argument, a few days before, that all moral demands pointed to a kind of dream state that had fled
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from them by the time they were fully postulated. But Agathe had already gone, after her last remark, into her father's study, which now could be seen lamplit beyond two open doors; and Ulrich, who had not followed her, saw her standing in this frame. She was holding a sheet of paper in the light, reading something. "Doesn't she have any idea what it is she's taking on herself? '' he wondered. But on that whole key ring of contemporary notions, such as neurotic inferiority, mental deficiency, arrested development, and the like, none fit, and in the lovely picture she made while committing her crime there was no trace of greed or vengefulness or any other inner ugliness. And although with the aid of such concepts Ulrich could have seen even the actions of a criminal or a near psychotic as relatively controlled and civilized, because the distorted and displaced motives of ordi- nary life shimmer in their depths, his sister's gently fierce determina- tion, an inextricable blend of purity and criminality, left him momentarily speechless. He could not accept the idea that this per- son, quite openly engaged in committing a bad act, could be a bad person, while at the same time he had to watch how Agathe took one paper after another out ofthe desk, read it, and laid it aside, seriously searching for a specific document. Her determination gave the im- pression ofhaving descended from some other planet to the plane of everyday decision.
As he watched, Ulrich was also troubled by the question ofwhy he had talked Hagauer into leaving in good faith. It seemed to him that he had behaved all along as the tool ofhis sister's will, and to the very last his responses, even when he was disagreeing with her, had only encouraged her. Truth dealt cruellywith people, she had said. "Well put, but she has no idea what truth means! " Ulrich mused. "With the passing of the years it leaves one stiff and gouty, but in one's youth it's a life of hunting and sailing! " He had sat down again. Now he suddenly realized not only that Agathe had somehow got from him what she had said about truth, but that he had sketched out for her in advance what she was doing next door. Had he not said that in the rughest state of human awareness there was no such thing as good and evil, but only faith or doubt; that strict rules were contrary to the innermost nature of morality and that faith can never be more than an hour old; that in a state of faith one could never do anything base; that intuition was a more passionate state than truth? And Agathe
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was now on the point of abandoning the safe enclosure of morality and venturing out upon those boundless deeps where there is no de- cision other than whether one will rise or fall. She was doing this just as she had the other day when she took her father's medals from his reluctant hand to exchange them for the imitations, and at this mo- ment he loved her in spite of her lack of principle, with the remark- able feeling that it was his own thoughts that had gone from him to her and were now returning from her to him, poorer in deliberation but with that balsamic scent offreedom about them like a creation of the wild. And while he was trembling with the strain of controlling himself, he cautiously made a suggestion:
"I'll put off leaving for a day and sound out a notary or lawyer. Perhaps what you're doing is terribly obvious! "
But Agathe had already ascertained that the notary her father had used was no longer alive. "There's not a soul left who knows anything about this business," she said. "Let it be! "
Ulrich saw that she had taken a piece of paper and was practicing imitating her father's handwriting.
Fascinated, he had drawn closer and stood behind her. There in piles lay the papers on which his father's hand had lived-one could still almost feel its movements-and here Agathe, with an actress's mimicry, conjured up almost the same thing. It was strange to see this happening. The purpose it was serving, the thought that it was a forgery, disappeared. And in truth Agathe had not given this any thought at all. An aura ofjustice with flames, not with logic, hovered about her. Goodness, decency, abiding by the law, as she had come to know it in people she knew, notably Professor Hagauer, had al- ways seemed to her like removing a spot from a dress; while the wrongdoing that enveloped her at this moment was like the world drowning in the light ofa rising sun. It seemed to her that right and wrong no longer constituted a general notion, a compromise devised to serve millions of people, but were a magical encounter between Me and You, the madness of original creation before there was any- thing to compare it to or anything to measure it by. She was really making Ulrich the present of a crime by putting herself in his hands, trusting him wholeheartedly to understand her rashness, as children do who come up with the most unexpected ideas when they want to give someone a present and have nothing to give. And Ulrich
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guessed most of this. As his eyes followed her movements he felt a pleasure he had never known before, for it had in it something ofthe magical absurdity of yielding totally and without remonstrance, for once, to what another being was doing. Even when the thought in- tervened that this was causing harm to a third person, it flashed only for an instant, like an ax, and he quickly put his mind at rest, since what his sister was doing here was really not anyone else's business; it was not at all certain that these attempts at copying someone's hand- writing would actually be used, and what Agathe was doing inside her own four walls was her own affair as long as it had no effect beyond them.
She now called out to her brother, turned around, and was sur- prised to find him standing behind her. She awoke. She had written all she wanted to write and resolutely singed it over a candle flame in order to make the handwriting look old. She held out her free hand to Ulrich, who did not take it, but he was not able to withdraw en- tirely behind a somber frown either. She responded by saying: "Lis- ten! If something is a contradiction, and you love both sides of it-really love it! -doesn't that cancel it out, willy-nilly? "
"That's much too frivolous a way of putting it," Ulrich muttered. But Agathe knew how he would judge it in his "second thinking. " She took a clean sheet of paper and lightheartedly wrote, in the old- fashioned hand she was so good at imitating: "My bad daughter Agathe proffers no reason to change the above-ordained instructions to the disadvantage of my good son Ulo! " Not yet satisfied, she wrote on the second sheet: "My daughter Agathe is for some time longer to be educated by my good son Uli. "
So that was how it had happened, but now that Ulrich had reawak- ened it down to the last detail, he ended up with just as little knowl- edge ofwhat to do about it as before.
He ought not to have left without first straightening things out, no doubt about that! And clearly the fashionable superstition that one shouldn't take anything too seriously had played him a trick when it whispered to him to quit the field for a time and not give too much weight to the issue between them by emotional resistance. Heat can't pass from the cooler to the hotter; the most violent extremes, left to themselves, eventually give rise to a new mediocrity; one could hardly take a train or walk in the street without a cocked gun if one
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could not trust the law of averages, which automatically reduces ex- treme possibilities to improbability. It was this European faith in em- piricism that Ulrich was obeying when, despite all his scruples, he returned home. Deep down he was even glad that Agathe had shown herself to be different.
Nevertheless, the matter could not be properly resolved other than by Ulrich's now taking action, and as soon as possible, to make up for his negligence. He should have sent his sister an immediate special delivery letter or telegram, which should have stated in ef- fect: "I won't have anything to do with you unless you . . . ! " But he had absolutely no intention of writing anything of the kind; at the moment he simply could not do it.
Besides, they had decided before that fateful incident that in the next few weeks they would try to live together or at least move in together, and this was what they had mainly talked about in the brief time remaining befm:e his departure. They had agreed that for the moment it would be for "the time it will take to get the divorce," so that Agathe would have a refuge and counsel. But now, in thinking about it, Ulrich also remembered an earlier remark of his sister's about wanting "to kill Hagauer"; this ''scheme" had evidently been working in her and taken on a new form. She had insisted vehe- mently on selling the family property at once, possibly also in the interest of making the inheritance evaporate, although it might seem advisable on other grounds as well. In any case, they had agreed to put the sale in the hands of a broker and had set their terms. And so Ulrich now had to give some thought as well to what was to become of his sister after he returned to his casually interim life, which he did not himself regard as real. It was impossible for her present situation to continue. Amazingly close though they had grown in so short a time-as though their fates were linked, even though this had arisen from all sorts of unconnected details; Agathe probably had a more quixotic view of it-they knew hardly anything of each other in the many and various superficialities on which a shared life depends. When he thought of his sister objectively Ulrich could even perceive numerous unsolved problems, nor could he form a very clear idea of her past; his best guess was that she dealt most casually with every- thing that happened to her or through her, and that she lived rather vaguely and perhaps with fantasies that ran alongside her actual life;
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such an explanation would plausibly account for her having stayed so long with Hagauer and then broken with him so suddenly. And even the carelessness with which she treated the future fitted in with this view: she had left home, and that seemed to satisfy her for the pres- ent; and when questions arose about what should happen now, she avoided them. Nor was Ulrich himself capable of either picturing a life for her without a husband, in which she would hover around in vague expectations like a young girl, or imagining what the man would look like who would be right for his sister; he had even told her so shortly before he left.
She had given him a startled look-perhaps she was clowning a bit, pretending to be startled-and then calmly countered with the question: "Can't I just stay with you for the time being, without our having to decide everything? ''
It was in this fashion, without anything more definite, that the idea of their moving in together had been ratified. But Ulrich realized that this experiment meant the end of the experiment of his "life on leave. " He did not want to think about the possible consequences, but that his life would henceforth be subject to certain restrictions was not unwelcome, and for the first time he again thought of the circle and especially the women of the Parallel Campaign. The idea ofcutting himself off from everything, as part ofhis new life, seemed delightful. Just as it often takes only a trifling alteration in a room to change its dull acoustics to a glorious resonance, so now in his imagi- nation his little house was transformed into a shell within which one heard the roar of the city as a distant river.
And then, toward the end of that conversation, this other special little conversation had taken place:
"We'll live like hermits," Agathe had said with a bright smile, "but of course we'll each be free to pursue any love affairs. For you, at any rate, there's no obstacle! " she assured him.
"Do you realize," Ulrich said by way of an answer, "that we shall be entering into the Millennium? ''
"What's that? ''
"We've talked so much about the love that isn't a stream flowing toward its goal but a state of being like the ocean. Now tell me hon- estly: When they told you in school that the angels in heaven did nothing but bask in the presence of the Lord and sing His praises,
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were you able to imagine this blissful state of doing nothing and thinking nothing? "
. . I always thought it must be rather boring, which is certainly due to my imperfection," was Agathe's answer.
. . But after everything we've agreed on," Ulrich explained, "you must now imagine this ocean as a state of motionlessness and detach- ment, filled with everlasting, crystal-clear events. In ages past, peo- ple tried to imagine such a life on earth. That is the Millennium, formed in our own image and yet like no world we know. That's how we'll live now! We shall cast offall self-seeking, we shall collect nei- ther goods, nor knowledge, nor lovers, nor friends, nor principles, nor even ourselves! Our spirit will open up, dissolving boundaries toward man and beast, spreading open in such a way that we can no longer remain 'us' but will maintain our identities only by merging with all the world! "
This little interlude had been a joke. He had been sitting with paper and pencil, making notes and talking meanwhile with his sister about what she could expect from the sale of the house and the furni- ture. He was also still cross, and he himself did not know whether he was blaspheming or dreaming. And with all this they had not got around to talking seriously about the will.
It was probably because ofthese ambiguities in the way it had hap- pened that Ulrich even now was far from feeling any active regret. There was much about his sister's bold stroke that pleased him, though he was himself the defeated one; he had to admit that it sud- denly brought the person living by the "rule of the free spirits," to whom he had given far too much ease within himself, into grave con- flict with that deep, undefined person from whom real seriousness emanates. Nor did he want to dodge the consequences of this act by quickly making it good in the usual way; but then, there was no norm, and events had to be allowed to take their course.
REUNION WITH DIOTIMA'S DIPLOMATIC HUSBAND
Next morning Ulrich's mind was no clearer, and late that afternoon he decided to lighten the serious mood that was oppressing him by looking up his cousin who was occupied with liberating the soul from civilization.
To his surprise he was received by Section ChiefTuzzi, who came to greet him even before Rachel had returned from Diotima's room. "My wife's not feeling well today," the seasoned husband said, with that unconscious tone of tenderness in his voice which regular monthly use has made into a formula that exposes the domestic se- cret to the world. "I don't know whether she'll be up to a visit. " Though dressed to go out, he was quite willing to stay and keep Ul-
rich company.
Ulrich took the opportunity of inquiring about Arnheim. "Arnheim's been in England and is now in St. Petersburg," Tuzzi
told him. The effect of this trivial and predictable news on Ulrich, depressed as he was by his own experiences, was to make him feel as though world, fullness, and motion were rushing in upon him.
"A good thing too," the diplomat added. "Let him travel here and there as much as he likes. It gives one a chance to make one's obser- vations and pick up some information. "
"So you still believe," said Ulrich, amused, "that he's on some pac- ifist mission for the Czar? "
"I believe it more than ever," was the plain answer from the man who bore official responsibility for carrying out Austro-Hungarian policy. But suddenly Ulrich doubted whether Tuzzi was really so un- suspecting or was only pretending to be and pulling his leg; some- what annoyed, he dropped Arnheim and asked: "I hear that 'Action! ' has become the watchword since I left. "
As always when the Parallel Campaign came up, Tuzzi seemed
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to relish playing both the innocent and the shrewd insider. He shrugged and grinned.
"I'll let my wife fill you in on that-you'll hear all about it from her as soon as she's able to see you! " But a moment later his little mus- tache began to twitch and the large dark eyes in the tanned face glis- tened with a vague distress. "You're a man who has read all the books," he said hesitantly. "Could you perhaps tell me what is meant by a man having soul? "
This was apparently something Tuzzi really wanted to talk about, and it was obviously his insecurity that was responsible for the im- pression that he was distressed. When Ulrich failed to respond im- mediately, he went on: "When we speak of someone as 'a good soul,' we mean an honest, conscientious, dependable fellow-I have an ad- ministrator in my office like that-but what that amounts to, surely, is the virtues of an underling. Or there's soul as a quality of women, meaning more or less that they cry more easily, or blush more easily, than men do. . . . "
"Your wife has soul," Ulrich corrected him, as gravely as ifhe were stating that she had raven-black hair.
A faint pallor rushed across Tuzzi's face. "My wife has a mind," he said slowly. "She is rightly regarded as a woman of some intellect. I like to tease her about it and tell her she's an aesthete. That galls her. But that isn't soul. . . . " He thought for a moment. "Have you ever been to a fortune-teller? " he asked. "They read the future in your palm, or from a hair of your head, sometimes amazingly on target. They have a gift for it, or tricks. But can you make any sense of some- body telling you, for instance, that there are signs that a time is com- ing when our souls will behold each other directly, so to speak, without the mediation of the senses? Let me say at once," he added quickly, "that this is not to be understood only as a figure of speech, but if you're not a good person, then no matter what you do, people today can feel it much more clearly than in earlier centuries, because this is an age of the awakening soul. Do you believe that? "
With Tuzzi, one never knew if his barbs were directed against himself or his listener, so Ulrich answered: "If I were you I'd just let it come to the test. "
"Don't make jokes, my dear friend," Tuzzi said plaintively. "It's
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not decent when you're safely on the sidelines. My wife expects me to take such propositions seriously even if I can't subscribe to them, and I have to surrender without having a chance to defend myself. So in my hour of need I remembered that you're one of those bookish people. . . . "
"Both of these assertions come from Maeterlinck, if I'm not mis- taken," Ulrich said helpfully.
"Really? From . . . ? Yes, I can see that.