The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  Professor Lindner merely shook his head at this.

  But when the middle course had been taken away and dessert came on the table, he began cautiously and ruminatively: “Look, it’s precisely in those years when the appetites are greatest that one can win the most momentous victories over oneself, not for instance by starving oneself in an unhealthy way but through occasionally renouncing a favorite dish after one has eaten enough.”

  Peter was silent and showed no understanding of this, but his head was again vividly suffused with red up to his ears.

  “It would be wrong,” his father continued, troubled, “if I wanted to punish you for this poor grade, because aside from the fact that you are lying childishly, you demonstrate such a lack of the concept of moral honor that one must first make the soil tillable in order for the punishment to have an effect on it. So I’m not asking anything of you except that you understand this yourself, and I’m sure that then you’ll punish yourself!”

  This was the moment for Peter to point animatedly to his weak health and also to the overwork that could have caused his recent failures in school and that rendered it impossible for him to steel his character by renouncing dessert.

  “The French philosopher Comte,” Professor Lindner replied calmly, “was accustomed after dining, without particular inducement, to chew on a crust of dry bread instead of dessert, just to remember those who do not have even dry bread. It is an admirable trait, which reminds us that every exercise of abstemiousness and plainness has profound social significance!”

  Peter had long had a most unfavorable impression of philosophy, but now his father added literature to his bad associations by continuing: “The writer Tolstoy, too, says that abstemiousness is the first step toward freedom. Man has many slavish desires, and in order for the struggle against all of them to be successful, one must begin with the most elemental: the craving for food, idleness, and sensual desires.” Professor Lindner was accustomed to pronounce any of these three terms, which occurred often in his admonitions, as impersonally as the others; and long before Peter had been able to connect anything specific with the expression “sensual desires” he had already been introduced to the struggle against them, alongside the struggles against idleness and the craving for food, without thinking about them any more than his father, who had no need to think further about them because he was certain that basic instruction in these struggles begins with self-determination. In this fashion it came about that on a day when Peter did not yet know sensual longing in its most desired form but was already slinking about its skirts, he was surprised for the first time by a sudden feeling of angry revulsion against the loveless connection between it and idleness and the craving for food that his father was accustomed to make; he was not allowed to come straight out with this but had to lie, and cried: “I’m a plain and simple person and can’t compare myself with writers and philosophers!”—whereby, in spite of his agitation, he did not choose his words without reflection.

  His tutor did not respond.

  “I’m hungry!” Peter added, still more passionately.

  Lindner put on a pained and scornful smile.

  “Ill die if I don’t get enough to eat!” Peter was almost blubbering.

  “The first response of the individual to all interventions and attacks from without occurs through the instrument of the voice!” his father instructed him.

  And the “pitiable cries of the desires,” as Lindner called them, died away. On this particularly manly day Peter did not want to cry, but the necessity of developing the spirit for voluble verbal defense was a terrible burden to him. He could not think of anything more at all to say, and at this moment he even hated the lie because one had to speak in order to use it. Eagerness for murder alternated in his eyes with howls of complaint. When it had got to this point, Professor Lindner said to him kindly: “You must impose on yourself serious exercises in being silent, so that it is not the careless and ignorant person in you who speaks but the reflective and well-brought-up one, who utters words that bring joy and firmness!” And then, with a friendly expression, he lapsed into reflection. “I have no better advice, if one wants to make others good”—he finally revealed to his son the conclusion he had come to—”than to be good oneself; Matthias Claudius says too: ‘I can’t think of any other way except by being oneself the way one wants children to be’!” And with these words Professor Lindner amiably but decisively pushed away the dessert, although it was his favorite—rice pudding with sugar and chocolate—without touching it, through such loving inexorability forcing his son, who was gnashing his teeth, to do the same.

  At this moment the housekeeper came in to report that Agathe was there. August Lindner straightened up in confusion. “So she did come!” a horribly distinct mute voice said to him. He was prepared to feel indignant, but he was also ready to feel a fraternal gentleness that combined in sympathetic understanding with a delicate sense of moral action, and these two countercurrents, with an enormous train of principles, staged a wild chase through his entire body before he was able to utter the simple command to show the lady into the living room. “You wait for me here!” he said to Peter severely, and hastily left. But Peter had noticed something unusual about his father’s behavior, he just didn’t know what; in any event, it gave him so much rash courage that after the latters departure, and a brief hesitation, he scooped into his mouth a spoonful of the chocolate that was standing ready to be sprinkled, then a spoonful of sugar, and finally a big spoonful of pudding, chocolate, and sugar, a procedure he repeated several times before smoothing out all the dishes to cover his tracks. And Agathe sat for a while alone in the strange house and waited for Professor Lindner; for he was pacing back and forth in another room, collecting his thoughts before going to encounter the lovely and perilous female. She looked around and suddenly felt anxious, as if she had lost her way climbing among the branches of a dream tree and had to fear not being able to escape in one piece from its world of contorted wood and myriad leaves. A profusion of details confused her, and in the paltry taste they evinced there was a repellent acerbity intertwined in the most remarkable way with an opposite quality, for which, in her agitation, she could not immediately find words. The repulsion was perhaps reminiscent of the frozen stiffness of chalk drawings, but the room also looked as if it might smell in a grandmotherly, cloying way of medicines and ointments; and old-fashioned and unmanly ghosts, fixated with unpleasant maliciousness upon human suffering, were hovering within its walls. Agathe sniffed. And although the air held nothing more than her imaginings, she gradually found herself being led further and further backward by her feelings, until she remembered the rather anxious “smell of heaven,” that aroma of incense half aired and emptied of its spices which clung to the scarves of the habits her teachers had once worn when she was a girl being brought up together with little friends in a pious convent school without at all succumbing to piety herself. For as edifying as this odor may be for people who associate it with what is right, its effect on the hearts of growing, worldly-oriented, and resistant girls consisted in a vivid memory of smells of protest, just as ideas and first experiences were associated with a man’s mustache or with his energetic cheeks, pungent with cologne and dusted with talc. God knows, even that odor does not deliver what it promises! And as Agathe sat on one of Lindners renunciative upholstered chairs and waited, the empty smell of the world closed inescapably about her with the empty smell of heaven like two hollow hemispheres, and an intimation came over her that she was about to make up for a negligently endured class in the school of life.

  She knew now where she was. Afraid yet ready, she tried to adapt to these surroundings and think of the teachings from which she had perhaps let herself be diverted too soon. But her heart reared up at this docility like a horse that refuses to respond to encouragement, and began to run wild with terror, as happens in the presence of feelings that would like to warn the understanding but can’t find any words. Nevertheless, after a while
she tried again, and in support thought of her father, who had been a liberal man and had always exhibited a somewhat superficial Enlightenment style and yet, in total contradiction, had made up his mind to send her to a convent school for her education. She was inclined to regard this as a kind of conciliatory sacrifice, an attempt, propelled by a secret insecurity, to do for once the opposite of what one thinks is one’s firm conviction: and because she felt a kinship with any kind of inconsistency, the situation into which she had got herself seemed to her for an instant like a daughters secret, unconscious act of repetition. But even this second, voluntarily encouraged shudder of piety did not last; apparently she had definitively lost her ability to anchor her animated imaginings in a creed when she had been placed under that all-too-clerical care: for all she had to do was inspect her present surroundings again, and with that cruel instinct youth has for the distance separating the infinitude of a teaching from the finiteness of the teacher, which indeed easily leads one to deduce the master from the servant, the sight of the home surrounding her, in which she had imprisoned herself and settled full of expectation, suddenly and irresistibly impelled her to laughter.

  Yet she unconsciously dug her nails into the wood of the chair, for she was ashamed of her lack of resolution. What she most wanted to do was suddenly and as quickly as possible fling into the face of this unknown man everything that was oppressing her, if he would only finally deign to show himself: The criminal trafficking with her father’s will—absolutely unpardonable, if one regarded it undefiantly. Hagauer’s letters, distorting her image as horribly as a bad mirror without her being quite able to deny the likeness. Then, too, that she wanted to destroy this husband without actually killing him; that she had indeed once married him, but not really, only blinded by self-contempt. There were in her life nothing but unusual incompletions; and finally, bringing everything together, she would also have to talk about the presentiment that hovered between herself and Ulrich, and this she could never betray, under any circumstances! She felt as churlish as a child who is constantly expected to perform a task that is too difficult. Why was the light she sometimes glimpsed always immediately extinguished again, like a lantern bobbing through a vast darkness, its gleam alternately swallowed up and exposed? She was robbed of all resolution, and superfluously remembered that Ulrich had once said that whoever seeks this light has to cross an abyss that has no bottom and no bridge. Did he himself, therefore, in his inmost soul, not believe in the possibility of what it was they were seeking together? This was what she was thinking, and although she did not really dare to doubt, she still felt herself deeply shaken. So no one could help her except the abyss itself! This abyss was God: oh, what did she know! With aversion and contempt she examined the tiny bridge that was supposed to lead across, the humility of the room, the pictures hung piously on the walls, everything feigning a confidential relationship with Him. She was just as close to abasing herself as she was to turning away in horror. What she would probably most have liked to do was run away once more; but when she remembered that she always ran away she thought of Ulrich again and seemed to herself “a terrible coward.” The silence at home had been like the calm before a storm, and the pressure of what was approaching had catapulted her here. This was the way she saw it now, not without quite suppressing a smile; and it was also natural that something else Ulrich had said should occur to her, for he had said at some time or other: “A person never finds himself a total coward, because if something frightens him he runs just far enough away to consider himself a hero again!” And so here she sat!

  44

  A MIGHTY DISCUSSION

  At this moment Lindner entered, having made up his mind to say as much as his visitor would; but once they found themselves face-to-face, things turned out differently. Agathe immediately went on the verbal attack, which to her surprise turned out to be far more ordinary than what led up to it would have indicated.

  “You will of course recall that I asked you to explain some things to me,” she began. “Now I’m here. I still remember quite well what you said against my getting a divorce. Perhaps I’ve understood it even better since!”

  They were sitting at a large round table, separated from each other by the entire span of its diameter. In relation to her final moments alone Agathe first felt herself, at the very beginning of this encounter, deep under water, but then on solid ground; she laid out the word “divorce” like a bait, although her curiosity to learn Lindners opinion was genuine too.

  And Lindner actually answered at almost the same instant: “I know quite well why you are asking me for this explanation. People will have been murmuring to you your whole life long that a belief in the suprahuman, and obeying commandments that have their origin in this belief, belong to the Middle Ages! You have discovered that such fairy tales have been disposed of by science! But are you certain that’s really the way it is?”

  Agathe noticed to her astonishment that at every third word or so, his lips puffed out like two assailants beneath his scanty beard. She gave no answer.

  “Have you thought about it?” Lindner continued severely. “Do you know the vast number of problems it involves? It’s clear you don’t! But you have a magnificent way of dismissing this with a wave of your hand, and you apparently don’t even realize that you’re simply acting under the influence of an external compulsion!”

  He had plunged into danger. It was not clear what murmurers he had in mind. He felt himself carried away. His speech was a long tunnel he had bored right through a mountain in order to fall upon an idea, “lies of freethinking men,” which was sparkling on the other side in a cocksure light. He was not thinking of either Ulrich or Hagauer but meant both of them, meant everyone. “And even if you had thought about it”—he exclaimed in an assertively rising voice— “and were to be convinced of these mistaken doctrines that the body is nothing but a system of dead corpuscles, and the soul an interplay of glands, and society a ragbag of mechano-economic laws; and even if that were correct—which it is far from being—I would still deny that such a way of thinking knows anything about the truth of life! For what calls itself science doesn’t have the slightest qualification to explicate by externals what lives within a human being as spiritual inner certainty. Life’s truth is a knowledge with no beginning, and the facts of true life are not communicated by rational proof: whoever lives and suffers has them within himself as the secret power of higher claims and as the living explanation of his self!”

  Lindner had stood up. His eyes sparkled like two preachers in the high pulpit formed by his long legs. He looked down on Agathe omnipotently.

  “Why is he talking so much right away?” she thought. “And what does he have against Ulrich? He hardly knows him, and yet he speaks against him openly.” Then her feminine experience in the arousal of feelings told her more quickly and certainly than reflection would have done that Lindner was speaking this way only because, in some ridiculous fashion, he was jealous. She looked up at him with an enchanting smile.

  He stood before her tall, waveringly supple, and armed, and seemed to her like a bellicose giant grasshopper from some past geologic age. “Good heavens!” she thought. “Now I’m going to say something that will annoy him all over again, and he’ll chase after me again with his Where am I? What game am I playing?” It confused her that Lindner irritated her to the point of laughter and yet that she was not able to shrug off some of his individual expressions, like “knowledge with no beginning” or “living explanation”; such strange terms at present, but secretly familiar to her, as if she had always used them herself without being able to remember ever having heard them before. She thought: “It’s gruesome, but he’s already planted some of his words in my heart like children!”

  Lindner was aware of having made an impression on her, and this satisfaction conciliated him somewhat. He saw before him a young woman in whom agitation seemed to alternate precariously with feigned indifference, even boldness; since he took himself for a scr
upulous expert on the female soul, he did not allow himself to be put off by this, knowing as he did that in beautiful women there was an inordinately great temptation to be arrogant and vain. He could hardly ever observe a beautiful face without an admixture of pity. People so marked were, he was convinced, almost always martyrs to their shining outward aspect, which seduced them to self-conceit and its dragging train of cold-heartedness and superficiality. Still, it can also happen that a soul dwells behind a beautiful countenance, and how often has insecurity not taken refuge behind arrogance, or despair beneath frivolity! Often, indeed, this is true of particularly noble people, who are merely lacking the support of proper and unshakable convictions. And now Lindner was gradually and completely overcome once more with how the successful person has to put himself in the frame of mind of the slighted one; and as he did this he became aware that the form of Agathe’s face and body possessed that delightful repose unique to the great and noble; even her knee seemed to him, in the folds of its covering envelope, like the knee of Niobe. He was astonished that this specific image should force itself on him, since so far as he knew there was nothing in the least appropriate about it; but apparently the nobility of his moral pain had unilaterally come together in this image with the suspiciousness many children have, for he felt no less attracted than alarmed. He now noticed her breast too, which was breathing in small, rapid waves. He felt hot and bothered, and if his knowledge of the world had not come to his aid again he would even have felt at a loss; but at this moment of greatest captiousness it whispered to him that this bosom must enclose something unspoken, and that according to all he knew, this secret might well be connected with the divorce from his colleague Hagauer; and this saved him from embarrassing foolishness by instantaneously offering the possibility of desiring the revelation of this secret instead of the bosom. He desired this with all his might, while the union of sin with the chivalric slaying of the dragon of sin hovered before his eyes in glowing colors, much as they glowed in the stained glass in his study.