by Robert Musil
“So I was mistaken about the pregnancy,” Ulrich noted mentally, unable to think of anything to say in response to his cousin’s outburst. Then he said abruptly: “I warned you about Arnheim!” Perhaps he now felt obligated to tell her what he knew about the tycoon’s mixing up both their souls in his business deals; but he instantly dropped the idea, for he felt that in this conversation every word had its allotted place, like the objects in his study that he had found carefully dusted on his return, as though he had been dead for the space of a minute.
Diotima chided him: “You shouldn’t take it so lightly. There’s a deep friendship between Arnheim and me; and if at times there’s also something else between us, something I might call a great anxiety, it only comes from our frankness. I don’t know whether you’ve ever experienced this, or whether you can: between two people who reach a certain level of emotional rapport any lie becomes so impossible that they can hardly speak to each other at all anymore!”
In this reproof Ulrich’s finely tuned ear heard that his cousin’s soul was more accessible to him than usual, and because he was highly amused by her unintended confession that she could not talk with Arnheim without lying, he demonstrated his own openness for a while by not saying anything either. Then, when she had lain back again, he bent over her arm and kissed its hand in a gentle gesture of friendship. Light as the marrow of elder twigs it rested in his own, and remained lying there even after the kiss. Her pulse throbbed on his fingertips. The powder-fine scent of her nearness clung to his face like a puff of cloud. And although this gallant kiss on the hand had been only in jest, it was like infidelity in leaving behind a certain bitter aftertaste of desire, of having leaned so closely over a person that one drank from her like an animal, and no longer saw one’s own image rising back up out of the water.
‘What are you thinking?” Diotima asked. Ulrich merely shook his head and so gave her a fresh opportunity—in the darkness that was brightened only by a last velvety glimmering—to make comparative studies of silence. She was reminded of a wonderful saying: “There are people with whom not even the greatest hero would trust himself to remain silent.” Or it was something like that. She seemed to remember that it was a quotation; Arnheim had used it, and she had applied it to herself. Other than Arnheim’s, she had since the first weeks of her marriage never held a man’s hand in hers for longer than two seconds; but it was happening now with Ulrich’s hand. Wrapped up in herself as she was, she overlooked what the next step might be, but found herself a moment later pleasantly convinced that she had been quite right not to wait idly for the hour of supreme love—perhaps yet to come, perhaps not—but to use the time of temporizing indecision to devote herself somewhat more to her husband. Married people have it easy; where others would be breaking faith with a lover, they can say that they are remembering their duty.
And because Diotima told herself that, come what might, she must do her duty for now at the post where fate had placed her, she had undertaken to improve her husband’s shortcomings and infuse him with a little more soul. Again a poet’s words came to mind, roughly to the effect that there was no deeper despair than to be entwined in a common fate with a person one did not love; and that also proved that she must make an effort to feel something for Tuzzi as long as their fate had not separated them. In sensible contrast to the incalculable events of the soul, from which she had made him suffer long enough, she set about it systematically; she felt pride in the books on which she was lying, for they concerned themselves with the physiology and psychology of marriage, and somehow everything harmonized: that it was dark, that she had these books by her, that Ulrich was holding her hand, that she had conveyed to him the magnificent pessimism that she might soon be expressing in her public role by renouncing her ideals. So thinking, Diotima pressed Ulrich’s hand from time to time as if her suitcases were standing packed for her to take leave of everything that had been. She moaned softly, and the faintest wave of pain ran through her body by way of excuse; but Ulrich reassured her with the pressure of his fingertips. After this had happened several times, Diotima thought it really might be too much, yet she no longer dared to withdraw her hand, because it lay so light and dry in his, even trembling at times, as she herself recognized, like an inadmissible indication of the physiology of love, which she had not the slightest intention of betraying by some awkward movement of flight.
It was “Rachelle,” busying herself in the adjoining room—she had been acting in an oddly impertinent fashion lately—who put an end to this scene by suddenly turning on the light on the other side of the open door. Diotima hastily pulled her hand away from Ulrich’s, in which a space that had been filled with weightlessness remained lying for a moment longer.
“Rachelle,” Diotima called in a hushed voice, “turn the light on in here too!”
When this was done their illumined heads had the look of something just emerged from the depths, as though the darkness had not quite dried off them. Shadows lay around Diotima’s mouth, giving it moistness and fullness; the little mother-of-pearl bulges on her neck and under her cheeks, which ordinarily seemed to have been created for the delectation of lovers, were hard as a linocut and shaded with slashes of ink. Ulrich’s head, too, loomed up in the unaccustomed light, painted in black and white like that of a savage on the warpath. Blinking, he tried to make out the titles on the books surrounding Diotima, and saw with amazement what his cousin’s choice of reading matter revealed about her desire to learn the hygiene of body and soul. “Someday he’s going to hurt me!” she suddenly thought, following his glance and troubled by it, but it did not enter her consciousness in the form of that sentence: she merely felt much too defenseless as she lay there in the light under his gaze and struggled to recover her poise. With a gesture meant to be thoroughly superior, as befitted a woman “independent” of everything, she waved her hand over her reading and said in the most matter-of-fact tone: “Would you believe that adultery sometimes strikes me as far too simple a solution for marital conflict?”
“At all events it’s the most sparing,” Ulrich replied, irritating her with his mocking tone. “I’d say it can do no harm at all.”
Diotima gave him a reproachful look and made a sign to warn him that Rachel could hear what they were saying from the next room. Then she said aloud: “That’s certainly not what I meant!” and called her maid, who appeared sullenly and accepted with bitter jealousy her being sent out.
This interlude had, however, given their feelings time to put themselves to rights. The illusion, favored by the darkness, that they were committing a tiny infidelity together, though rather indefinably and toward no one in particular, evaporated in the light, and Ulrich now turned to the business that had to be attended to before he could leave.
“I haven’t yet told you that I’m resigning as Secretary,” he began.
Diotima, however, had heard of it, and told him that he would have to stay on; there was no way out of it. “There’s such an immense amount of work still to be done,” she pleaded. “Be patient a while longer; we’re bound to find a solution soon! A real secretary will be found to place at your disposal.”
This impersonal “will be found” aroused Ulrich’s curiosity, and he asked for details.
“Arnheim has offered to lend you his own secretary.”
“No, thanks,” Ulrich replied. “I have the feeling that might not be quite disinterested.” Again he was more than strongly tempted to let Diotima in on the simple connection with the oil fields, but she had not even noticed the ambiguity of his answer, and simply continued:
“Apart from that, my husband has also offered to let you have one of the clerks in his office.”
“Wouldn’t you mind?”
“To be frank, I wouldn’t be entirely happy about that,” Diotima said more energetically. “Especially as there’s no dearth of possibilities. Even your friend the General has given me to understand that he’d be delighted to send you an aide from his department.”
&n
bsp; “And Leinsdorf ?”
“These three offers were made to me spontaneously, so I had no reason to ask Leinsdorf; but I’m sure he wouldn’t shrink from making a sacrifice.”
“Everyone’s spoiling me,” Ulrich commented, summing up with these words the amazing readiness of Arnheim, Tuzzi, and Stumm to plant a man of their own inside the Parallel Campaign at such low cost. “But perhaps it would be most advisable for me to take on your husband’s clerk.”
“My dear friend—” Diotima said, still protesting, but she did not really know how to go on, which was probably why something quite tangled came out. Again she propped herself up on an elbow and said with feeling: “I reject adultery as too crude a solution of marital conflicts—I’ve told you that! But even so, there’s nothing so hard as being linked for life in a single destiny with a person one doesn’t love enough!”
This was a most unnatural cry of nature. But Ulrich, unmoved, would not be shaken from his resolve. “No doubt Section Chief Tuzzi would like this way of having a hand in your operation; but so would the others,” he pointed out. “All three are in love with you, and each of them has to reconcile this somehow with his duty.” How odd, he thought, that Diotima did not understand either the language of facts or that of the comments he made on them, and rising to take his leave, he added with even heavier irony: “The only one who loves you unselfishly is myself—because I have no duties of any land and no commitments. But feelings without distraction are destructive; you’ve meanwhile found that out for yourself, and you have always regarded me with a justifiable, even if only instinctive, mistrust.”
Although Diotima did not know why, this was precisely and endearingly the reason that she was pleased to see Ulrich siding with her own house in this matter of the secretary, and she did not let go of the hand he offered her.
“And how does this fit in with your affair with ‘that’ woman?” she asked, playfully taking her cue from his remark—insofar as Diotima could be playful; the effect was rather that of a shot-putter playing with a feather.
Ulrich did not know whom she could mean.
“That judge’s wife you introduced to me!”
“You noticed that, cousin?”
“Dr. Arnheim drew my attention to it.”
“Oh, did he? How flattering that he should think he can hurt my standing with you in this fashion. But of course my relations with the lady are entirely innocent!” Ulrich stated, defending Bonadea’s honor in the conventional fashion.
“She was in your house twice during your absence,” Diotima said with a laugh. “The first time, we happened to be passing by, and we heard about the second time some other way. So there’s no point in trying to be discreet. But on the other hand, I wish I could understand you! I simply can’t!”
“How on earth could I explain this to you, of all people!”
“Try!” Diotima commanded. She had put on her expression of “official immorality,” a sort of bespectacled look she donned whenever her mind commanded her to speak or hear things that were out of bounds for her soul as a lady. But Ulrich declined and repeated that his understanding of Bonadea could only be guesswork.
“All right,” Diotima gave in, “even though your lady friend herself was not sparing with her hints! She seems to feel called upon to justify some wrong or other in my eyes. But do speak of this, if you’d rather, as if you were merely guessing!”
Now Ulrich felt a thirst for knowledge, and he learned that Bonadea had been to see Diotima several times, and not only in matters connected with the Parallel Campaign and her husband’s position.
“I must admit I find her a beautiful woman,” Diotima conceded, “and she is extraordinarily high-minded. I’m really upset that you’re always eliciting confidences from me but always withholding yours!”
At this moment Ulrich’s attitude was approximately “die devil take both of you!” He felt like giving Diotima a scare and paying Bonadea back for her intrusiveness, or else he was suddenly feeling the full distance between himself and the life in which he had been indulging.
“All right,” he told her, summoning up a gloomy expression: “The woman is a nymphomaniac and I find that irresistible!”
Diotima knew “academically” what nymphomania was. There was a pause, and then she drawled: “The poor woman! And you find that attractive?”
“Isn’t it idiotic?” Ulrich said.
Diotima wanted to know “the details”—would he explain this “lamentable phenomenon” and enable her to understand it in “human terms”? He did so without exactly going into detail, but she was nevertheless overcome by a feeling of satisfaction that doubtless rested on that well-known gratitude to God that she was not like the other woman; but at its apex this feeling faded into dismay and curiosity, which was not to be without influence on her subsequent relations with Ulrich. Pensively she said: “But it must be simply awful to embrace a person who doesn’t mean anything to you!”
“You think so?” her cousin asked candidly. At this insinuation Diotima felt hurt and indignant to the marrow, but she could not let herself show it; she contented herself with letting go of his hand and sinking back into her pillows with a dismissive gesture. “You never should have told me this!” she said from where she lay. “You treated that poor woman very badly just now, and you’ve been most indiscreet!”
“I’m never indiscreet!” Ulrich objected, and could not help laughing at his cousin. “You’re really being unfair. You are the first woman to whom I’ve ever confided anything about another woman, and it was you who made me do it!”
Diotima was flattered. She wanted to say something of the same kind, to the effect that without a spiritual transformation one cheated oneself of the best in life; but she could not come out with it because it suddenly seemed too personal. Finally, something from one of the books surrounding her prompted her to answer noncommittally, from within the protection of her official persona: “Like all men,” she chided him, “you make the mistake of treating your love partner not as an equal but merely as a complement to yourself, and then you’re disappointed. Has it never occurred to you that the only way to a transcendent, harmonious eroticism may lie through stricter self-discipline?”
Ulrich’s jaw nearly dropped, but he answered in spontaneous self-defense: “Do you know that Section Chief Tuzzi has already grilled me today on the possibilities of the origin and training of the soul?”
Diotima sat up straight: “What? Tuzzi talks with you about soul?” she asked in amazement.
“Of course he does; he’s trying to find out what it is,” Ulrich assured her, but he could not be induced to stay any longer. He merely promised to betray a confidence some other time and tell her all about that too.
18
PROBLEMS OF A MORALIST WITH A LETTER TO WRITE
With this visit to Diotima the restless state Ulrich had been in since his return came to an end. On the afternoon of the very next day he sat down at his desk, and in doing so felt at home again, and began writing a letter to Agathe.
It was clear to him—as simple and clear as a windless day sometimes is—that her rash scheme was extremely dangerous. What had happened so far could still be taken as a risky prank, of no concern to anyone but themselves, but that depended entirely on its being rescinded before it acquired connections with reality, and the danger was growing with every passing day. Ulrich had written this much when he stopped, uneasy at the thought of entrusting to the mails a letter in which this was so openly discussed. He told himself that it would be better in every way to take the next train back, in place of the letter; but of course this made no sense to him either, since he had let days go by without doing anything about it. He knew he would not go.
He realized that there was something behind this tantamount to a choice: he simply felt like letting things take their course and seeing what came of this incident. So his problem was just how far he actually, definitely could want to risk it, and all sorts of wide-ranging thoughts went through his
mind.
It occurred to him right at the start, for instance, that whenever he had taken a “moral” stance so far, he had always been psychologically worse off than when he was doing or thinking something that might usually be considered “immoral.” This is a common occurrence, for in situations that are in conflict with their surroundings these ideas and actions develop all their energies, while in the mere doing of what is right and proper they understandably behave as if they were paying taxes. This suggests that all evil is carried out with zest and imagination, while good is distinguished by an unmistakable dreariness and dearth of feeling. Ulrich recalled that his sister had expressed this moral dilemma quite casually by asking him whether being good was no longer a good thing. It ought to be difficult and breathtaking, she had maintained, and wondered why, nevertheless, moral people were almost always bores.
He smiled contentedly, spinning this thought out with the realization that Agathe and he were as one in their particular opposition to Hagauer, which could be roughly characterized as that of people who were bad in a good way to a man who was good in a bad way. Leaving out of account the broad middle of life’s spectrum, which is, reasonably enough, occupied by people whose minds have not been troubled by the general terms good and evil since they let go of their mothers apron strings, there remain the two extremes where purposeful moral efforts are still made. Today these are left to just such bad/good and good/bad people, the first kind never having seen good fly or heard it sing, thus expecting their fellowmen to enthuse with them about a moral landscape where stuffed birds perch on dummy trees, while the second kind, the good/bad mortals, exasperated by their competitors, industriously show a penchant for evil, at least in theory, as if they were convinced that only wrongdoing, which is emotionally not quite as threadbare as doing good, still twitches with a bit of moral vitality. And so Ulrich’s world—not, of course, that he was fully aware of this—had at that time the option of letting itself be ruined by either its lame morality or its lively immoralists, and to this day it probably does not know which of those two choices it finally embraced with stunning success, unless that majority who can never spare the time to concern themselves with morality in general did pay attention to one case in particular because they had lost confidence in their own situation and, as a result, had of course lost a number of other things as well. For bad/bad people, who can so easily be blamed for everything, were even then as rare as they are today, and the good/good ones represent a mission as far removed as a distant nebula. Still, it was precisely of them that Ulrich was thinking, while everything else he appeared to be thinking about left him cold.
