The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2 Read online

  “You’ll have to admit,” she said finally, at once shyly and stubbornly, “that really great crimes come about not because somebody commits them but because we let them happen.”

  Now Walter knew, of course, what was coming, and felt a shock of disappointment.

  “Oh God!” he cried out impatiently. “I know as well as you do that far more people’s lives are ruined by indifference and by the ease with which most of us today can square our conscience than by the evil intentions of isolated individuals. And of course it’s admirable that you’re now going to say that this is why we must all quicken our conscience and carefully weigh in advance every step we take.”

  Clarisse interrupted him by opening her mouth, but thought better of it and did not respond.

  “Of course I think about poverty too, and hunger, and all the corruption that’s allowed to go on in this world, or mines caving in because the management economized on safety measures,” Walter went on in a deflated tone, “and I’ve agreed with you about it already.”

  “But in that case two lovers mustn’t love each other either, as long as they’re not in a state of pure happiness,’ “ Clarisse said. “And the world will never improve until there are such lovers!”

  Walter struck his hands together. “Don’t you understand how unfair to life such great, dazzling, uncompromising demands are?” he exclaimed. “And it’s the same with this Moosbrugger, who keeps popping into your head like something on a turntable. Of course you’re right to claim that no stone should be left unturned as long as such miserable human creatures are simply killed off because society doesn’t know what to do with them. But of course it’s even more right that the healthy, normal conscience is justified in simply refusing to bother with such over-refined scruples. A healthy way of thinking is recognizable, in fact, by certain signs; one can’t prove it but has to have it in one’s blood.”

  “In your blood,” Clarisse replied, “ ‘of course’ always means ‘of course not.’ “

  Nettled, Walter shook his head to show that he would not answer this. He was fed up with always being the one to warn that a diet of one-sided ideas was unhealthy; in the long run, it was probably also making him unsure of himself.

  But Clarisse read his thoughts with that nervous sensitivity that never failed to amaze him. With her head high, she jumped over all the intermediate stages and landed on his main point with the subdued but intense question: “Can you imagine Jesus as boss of a coal mine?” He could see in her face that by “Jesus” she really meant him, through one of those exaggerations in which love is indistinguishable from madness. He waved this off with a gesture at once indignant and discouraged. “Not so direct, Clarisse!” he pleaded. “Such things mustn’t be said so directly!”

  “Yes, they must,” she answered. “It’s the only way! If we don’t have the strength to save him, we will never have the strength to save ourselves!”

  “And what difference will it make if they do string him up?” Walter burst out. The brutality of it made him believe he felt the liberating taste of life itself on his tongue, gloriously blended with the taste of death and the doom of their entanglement with it that Clarisse was conjuring up with her hints.

  Clarisse looked at him expectantly. But Walter said nothing more, either from relief after his outburst or from indecision. And like someone forced to play an unbeatable final trump card, she said: “I’ve had a sign!”

  “But that’s just one of your fantasies!” Walter shouted at the ceiling, which represented heaven. But with those last airy words Clarisse had ended their tête-à-tête, giving him no chance to say anything more.

  Yet he saw her only a short while later talking eagerly with Meingast, who was rightly troubled by a feeling that they were being watched but was too nearsighted to be sure of it. Walter was not really participating in the gardening being done so zestfully by his visiting brother-in-law, Siegmund, who with rolled-up shirtsleeves was kneeling in a furrow doing something or other that Walter had insisted must be done in the spring if one wanted to be a human being and not a bookmark in the pages of a gardening book. Instead of gardening, Walter was sneaking glances at the pair talking in the far corner of the open kitchen garden.

  Not that he suspected anything untoward in the corner he was observing. Still, his hands felt unnaturally cold in the spring air; his legs were cold too, what with the wet places on his trousers from occasionally kneeling to give Siegmund instructions. He took a high tone with his brother-in-law, the way weak, downtrodden people will whenever they get a chance to work off their frustrations on someone. He knew that Siegmund, who had taken it into his head to revere Walter, would not be easily shaken in his loyalty. But this did not prevent him from feeling a veritable after-sunset loneliness, a graveyard chill, as he watched Clarisse; she never cast a glance in his direction but was all eyes for Meingast, hanging on the Master’s words. Moreover, Walter actually took a certain pride in this. Ever since Meingast had come to stay in his house, he was just as proud of the chasms that suddenly opened up in it as he was anxious to cover them up again. From his standing height he had dispatched to the kneeling Siegmund the words: “Of course we all feel and are familiar with a certain hankering for the morbid and problematic! He was no sneaking coward. In the short time since Clarisse had called him a philistine for saying the same thing to her, he had formulated a new phrase: “life’s petty dishonesty.”

  “A little dishonesty is good, like sweet or sour,” he now instructed his brother-in-law, “but we are obligated to refine it in ourselves to the point where it would do credit to a healthy life! What I mean by a little dishonesty,” he went on, “is as much the nostalgic flirting with death that seizes us when we listen to Tristan as the secret fascination that’s in most sex crimes, even though we don’t succumb to it. For there’s something dishonest and antihuman, you see, both in elemental life when it overpowers us with want and disease, and in exaggerated scruples of mind and conscience trying to do violence to life. Everything that tries to overstep the limits set for us is dishonest! Mysticism is just as dishonest as the conceit that nature can be reduced to a mathematical formula! And the plan to visit Moosbrugger is just as dishonest as”—here Walter paused for a moment—”as if you were to invoke God at a patient’s bedside!”

  There was certainly something in what he had said, and he had even managed to take Siegmund by surprise with his appeal to the physician’s professional and spontaneous humanitarianism, to make him see Clarisse’s scheme and her overwrought motivation as an impermissible overstepping of bounds. However, Walter was a genius compared with Siegmund, as may be seen in Walter’s healthy outlook having led him to confess such ideas as these, while his brother-in-law’s even healthier outlook manifested itself in his dogged silence in the face of such dubious subject matter. Siegmund patted the soil with his fingers while tilting his head now to one side, now to the other, without opening his lips, as if he were trying to pour something out of a test tube, or then again, as if he had just heard enough with that ear. And when Walter had finished there was a fearfully profound silence, in which Walter now heard a statement that Clarisse must have called out to him once, for without being as vivid as a hallucination, it was as if the hollow space were punctuated by these words: “Nietzsche and Christ both perished of their incompleteness !” Somehow, in some uncanny fashion reminiscent of the “coal mine boss,” he felt flattered. It was a strange position that he, health personified, should be standing here in the cool garden between a man he regarded condescendingly and two unnaturally overheated people just out of earshot, whose mute gesticulations he watched with a superior air and yet with longing. For Clarisse was the slightly dishonest element his own health needed to keep from flagging, and a secret voice told him that Meingast was at this very moment engaged in immeasurably increasing the permissible limits of this dishonesty. He admired Meingast as an obscure relation admires a famous one, and seeing Clarisse whispering conspiratorially with him aroused his envy mor
e than his jealousy—a feeling, that is, that ate into him even more deeply than jealousy would have, and yet it was also somehow uplifting; the consciousness of his own dignity forbade him to get angry or to go over there and disturb them; in view of their agitation he felt himself superior, and from all this arose, he did not know how, some vague, mongrel notion, spawned outside all logic, that the two of them over there were in some reckless and reprehensible fashion invoking God.

  If such a curiously mixed state of mind must be called thinking, it was of a kind that cannot possibly be put into words, because the chemistry of its darkness is instantly ruined by the luminous influence of language. Besides, as his remark to Siegmund had shown, Walter did not associate belief of any sort with the word “God,” and when the word occurred to him it generated an abashed void around itself. And so it happened that the first thing Walter said to his brother-in-law, after a long silence, had nothing to do with this. “You’re an idiot to think you have no right to talk her out of this visit in the strongest possible terms,” he said bitterly. “What are you a doctor for?”

  Siegmund wasn’t in the least offended. “You’re the one who will have to have it out with her,” he replied, glancing up calmly before turning back to what he was doing.

  Walter sighed, then started over again. “Clarisse is an extraordinary person, of course. I can understand her very well. I’ll even admit that she’s not all wrong to be as austere in her views as she is. Just thinking of the poverty, hunger, misery of every kind the world is so full of, the disasters in coal mines, for instance, because the management wouldn’t spend enough on timbering…”

  Siegmund gave no sign that he was giving it any thought.

  “Well, she does!” Walter continued sternly. “And I think it’s wonderful of her. The rest of us get ourselves a good conscience much too easily. And she’s better than we are for insisting that we all ought to change and have a more active conscience, the kind with no limit to it, ever. But what I’m asking you is whether this isn’t bound to lead to a pathological state of moral scrupulousness, if it isn’t something like that already. You must have an opinion!”

  Siegmund responded to this pressing challenge by propping himself up on one knee and giving his brother-in-law a searching look. “Crazy!” he said. “But not, strictly speaking, in a medical sense.”

  “And what do you say,” Walter continued, forgetting his superior stance, “to her claim that she’s being sent signs?”

  “She says she’s being sent signs?” Siegmund said dubiously.

  “Signs, I tell you. That crazy killer, for instance. And that crazy swine outside our window the other day!”

  “A swine?”

  “No, a land of exhibitionist.”

  “I see,” Siegmund said, turning it over in his mind. “You’re sent signs too, when you find something to paint. She just expresses herself in a more high-strung way than you,” he concluded.

  “And what about her claim that she has to take these people’s sins on herself, and yours and mine as well, and I don’t know whose else’s?” Walter pressed him.

  Siegmund had risen to his feet and was brushing the dirt from his hands. “She feels oppressed by sin, does she?” he asked, again superfluously, politely agreeing as if glad to be able at last to support his brother-in-law. “That’s a symptom!”

  “That’s a symptom?” Walter echoed, crushed.

  “Fixed ideas about sin are a symptom,” Siegmund affirmed with the detachment of a professional.

  “But it’s like this,” Walter added, instantly appealing against the judgment he had just been suing for: “You must first ask yourself: Does sin exist? Of course it does. But in that case there’s also a fixed idea of sin that is no delusion. You might not understand that, because it’s beyond empiricism! It’s a human being’s aggrieved sense of responsibility toward a higher life!”

  “But she insists she’s receiving signs?” Siegmund persisted.

  “But you just said that signs are sent to me too!” Walter cried. “And I can tell you there are times when I would like to go down on my knees and beg fate to leave me in peace; but it keeps sending signs, and it sends the most inspiring signs through Clarisse!” Then he continued more calmly: “She now claims, for instance, that this man Moosbrugger represents her and me in our ‘sinful body and has been sent to us as a warning; but it can be understood as a symbol of our neglecting the higher possibilities of our lives, our ‘astral body,’ as it were. Years ago, when Meingast left us—”

  “But an obsession with sin is a symptom of specific disorders,” Siegmund reminded him, with the relentless equanimity of the expert.

  “Symptoms, that’s all you know!” Walter said in animated defense of his Clarisse. “Anything beyond that is outside your experience! But perhaps this superstition, which regards everything that doesn’t accord with the most pedestrian experience as a disorder, is itself the true sin and sinful form of our life. Clarisse demands spiritual action against this! Many years ago, when Meingast left and we…” He thought of how he and Clarisse had “taken Meingast’s sins upon themselves,” but realized it was hopeless to try telling Siegmund the process of a spiritual awakening, so he ended vaguely by saying: “Anyway, I don’t suppose you’ll deny that there have always been people who have, so to speak, drawn humanity’s sins on themselves or even concentrated them in themselves.”

  His brother-in-law looked at him complacently. “There you are!” he said amiably. “You yourself prove just what I’ve been saying. That she regards herself as oppressed by sin is a characteristic attitude of certain disorders. But there are also untypical modes of behavior in life: I never claimed anything more.”

  “And the exaggerated stringency with which she carries things out?” Walter asked after a while, with a sigh. “Surely to be so rigorous can hardly be called normal?”

  Clarisse, meanwhile, was having an important conversation with Meingast.

  “You’ve said,” she reminded him, “that the kind of people who pride themselves on understanding and explaining the world will never change anything in it, isn’t that so?”

  “Yes,” the Master replied. “ True’ and ‘false’ are the evasions of people who never want to arrive at a decision. Truth is something without end.”

  “So that’s why you said one must have the courage to choose between worth’ and worthless’?” she pressed on.

  “Right,” the Master said, somewhat bored.

  “And then there’s your marvelously contemptuous formulation,” Clarisse cried, “that in modern life people only do what is happening anyway.”

  Meingast stopped and looked down; one might have said that he was either inclining an ear or studying a pebble lying before him on the path, slightly to the right. But Clarisse did not go on proffering honeyed praises; she, too, had now bent her head, so that her chin almost rested in the hollow of her neck, and her gaze bored into the ground between the tips of Meingast’s boots. A gentle flush rose to her pale cheeks as, cautiously lowering her voice, she continued:

  “You said all sexuality was nothing but goatish caperings.”

  “Yes, I did say that in a particular context. Whatever our age lacks in willpower it expends, apart from its so-called scientific endeavors, in sexuality.”

  After some hesitation, Clarisse said: “I have plenty of willpower myself, but Walter is for capering.”

  “What’s really the matter between you two?” the Master asked with some curiosity, but almost immediately added in a tone of disgust: “I can guess, I suppose.”

  They were standing in a corner of the treeless garden that lay under the full spring sun, almost diametrically opposite the corner where Siegmund was squatting on the ground with Walter standing over and haranguing him. The garden formed a rectangle parallel with and against the long wall of the house, with a gravel path running around its vegetable and flower beds, and two others forming a bright cross on the still-bare ground in the middle. Warily glancing in the d
irection of the two men, Clarisse replied: “Perhaps he can’t help it; you see, I attract Walter in a way that’s not quite right.”

  “I can imagine,” the Master answered, this time with a sympathetic look. “There is something boyish about you.”

  At this praise Clarisse felt happiness bouncing through her veins like hailstones. “Did you notice before,93 she eagerly asked him, “that I can change clothes faster than a man?”

  A blank expression came over the philosopher’s benevolently seamed face. Clarisse giggled. “That’s a double word,” she explained. “There are others too: sex murder, for instance.”

  The Master probably thought it would be wise not to show surprise at anything. “Oh yes, I know,” he replied. “You did say once that to satisfy desire in the usual embrace is a kind of sex murder.” But what did she mean by “changing,” he wanted to know.

  “To offer no resistance is murder,” Clarisse explained with the speed of someone going through one’s paces on slippery ground and losing one’s footing through over-agility.

  “Now you’ve really lost me,” Meingast admitted. “You must be talking about that fellow the carpenter again. What is it you want from him?”

  Clarisse moodily scraped the gravel with the tip of her shoe. “It’s all part of the same thing,” she said. And suddenly she looked up at the Master. “I think Walter should learn to deny me,” she said in an abruptly cut-off sentence.

  “I can’t judge that,” Meingast remarked, after waiting in vain for her to go on. “But certainly radical solutions are always best.”

  He said this only to cover all contingencies. But Clarisse dropped her head again so that her gaze burrowed somewhere in Meingast’s suit, and after a while her hand reached slowly for his forearm. She suddenly had an uncontrollable impulse to take hold of that hard, lean arm under the broad sleeve and touch the Master, who was pretending to have forgotten all those illuminating things he had said about the carpenter. While this was happening she was dominated by the feeling that she was pushing a part of herself over to him, and in the slowness with which her hand disappeared inside his sleeve, in this flooding slowness, there eddied fragments of a mysterious lust, which derived from her perception that the Master was keeping still and letting her touch him.