Authors: Robert Musil
And they had, besides, a bewilderingly frank friendliness and kindliness. "Do you come in," they would say, with all the dignity of great ladies, if one knocked at their rustic doors. Or if one stood chatting with them for a while in the open air, one of them might suddenly ask with extreme courtesy and reserve: "Shall I not hold your coat for you?" Once, when Homo said to a charming fourteen-year-old girl: "Come in the hay"—simply because ‘the hay' suddenly seemed as natural to him as fodder is to cattle—the childish face under the pointed, ancestral kerchief showed not the slightest dismay : there was only a mirthful puffing and flashing, a tipping this way and that on the rocking shoe-boats, and almost a collapse on to her little bottom, with her rake still on her shoulder, the whole performance conveying, with winsome clumsiness, comic-opera astonishment at the man's intensity of desire.
Another time he asked a tall, Valkyrie-like peasant woman: "Well, and are you still a virgin?" and chucked her under the chin—this time, too, merely because such jests need a touch of virile emphasis.
But she let her chin rest quietly on his hand and answered solemnly : "Yes, of course...."
Homo was taken aback. "You're still a virgin!" he repeated, and laughed.
She giggled.
"Tell me!" he said, drawing closer and playfully shaking her chin.
Then she blew into his face and laughed. "Was once, of course!"
"If I come to see you, what can I have?" he went on with his cross-examination.
"Whatever you want."
"Everything I want?"
"Everything."
"Really everything?"
"Everything! Everything!" and her passion was so brilliantly and passionately acted, that the theatrical quality of it, up here, nearly 5,000 feet above sea-level, left him quite bewildered.
After this he could not rid himself of the feeling that this life, which was brighter and more highly spiced than any life he had led before, was no longer part of reality, but a play floating in the air.
Meanwhile summer had come. When he had received the first letter and recognised his ailing little boy's childish handwriting, the shock of happiness and secret possession had flashed right through him, down to the soles of his feet. Their knowing where he was seemed to give everything tremendous solidity. He was here: oh, now everything was known and he had no more need to explain anything. All white and mauve, green and brown, there were the meadows around him. He was no phantom. A fairy-tale wood of ancient larches, feathery with new green, spread over an emerald slope. Under the moss there might be living crystals, mauve and white. The stream in the midst of the wood somewhere ran over a boulder, falling so that it looked like a big silver comb. He no longer answered his wife's letters. Here, amid the secrets of Nature, their belonging together was only one secret more. There was a tender scarlet flower, one that existed in no other man's world, only in his, and into earthly cares and comforts. He loved his child, but just as the boy would outlive them, so too the boy had earlier killed the other-worldly part of them. And suddenly he flushed hot with a new certainty. He was not a man inclined to religious belief, but at this moment he was illumined within. Thoughts cast as little light as smoky candles in this great radiance of emotion that he experienced; it was all simply one glorious word blazing with the light of youth: Reunion. He was taking her with him for all eternity, and in the moment when he yielded to this thought, the little blemishes that the years had wrought in his beloved were taken from her and all was, eternally, the first day of all. Every worldly consideration vanished, and every possibility of tedium and of unfaithfulness, for no one will sacrifice eternity for the sake of a quarter of an hour's frivolity. And for the first time he experienced love beyond all doubt as a heavenly sacrament. He recognised the Providence that had guided his life into this solitude and felt the ground with its gold and jewels beneath his feet no longer as an earthly treasure, but as an enchanted world ordained for him alone.
From this day onward he was released from a bondage, as though rid of a stiff knee or a heavy rucksack. It was the bondage of wanting to be alive, the horror of dying. It did not happen to him as he had always thought it would, when in the fullness of one's strength one seems to see one's end approaching, so that one drinks more deeply of life, savours it more intensely. It was merely that he felt no longer involved, felt himself buoyed up by a glorious lightness that made him supreme lord of his own existence.
Although the mining operations had not progressed according to plan it was indeed a gold-digger's life they were leading. A lad had stolen wine, and that was a crime against the community, the punishment of which could count on general approval. The lad was brought in with his wrists thus God had ordered things, wholly as a wonder. There was a place in the body that was kept hidden away, and no one might see it lest he should die: only one man. At this moment it seemed to him as wonderfully senseless and unpractical as only profound religious feeling can be. And only now did he realise what he had done in cutting himself off for this summer and letting himself drift on his own tide, this tide that had taken control of him. Among the trees with their arsenic-green beards he sank down on one knee and spread out his arms, a thing he had never done before in all his life, and it was as though in this moment someone lifted him out of his own embrace. He felt his beloved's hand in his, her voice sounded in his ear, and it was as though even now his whole body were answering to a touch, as though he were being cast in the mould of some other body. But he had invalidated his life. His
heart had grown humble before his beloved, and poor as a mendicant; only a little more, and vows and tears would have poured from his very soul. And yet it was certain that he would not turn back, and strangely there was associated with his agitation an image of the meadows in flower round about these woods, and despite all longing for the future a feeling that here, amid anemones, forget-me-not, orchids, gentian, and the glorious greenish-brown sorrel, he would lie dead. He lay down and stretched out on the moss. "How am I to take you across with me?" he asked himself. And his body felt strangely tired, was like a rigid face relaxing into a smile.
Here he was, having always thought he was living in reality—but was there anything more unreal than that one human being should for him be different from all other human beings?—that among innumerable bodies there was one on which his inmost existence was almost as dependent as on his own body?—whose hunger and fatigue, hearing and seeing, were linked with his own? As the child grew older, this had grown—as the secrets of the soil grow into a sapling- bound. Mozart Amadeo Hoffingott gave orders that he should constitute a warning to others by being tied upright to a tree for a day and a night. But when the foreman came with the rope, in jest portentously swinging it and then hanging it over a nail, the lad began to tremble all over in the belief that he was about to be hanged. And it was always just the same—although this was hard to explain—when horses arrived, either fresh horses from beyond the valley or some that had been brought down for a few days' rest: they would stand about on the meadow, or lie down, but would always group themselves somehow, apparently at random, in a perspective, so that it looked as if it were done accordingly to some secretly agreed aesthetic principle, just like that memory of the little green, blue, and pink houses at the foot of Mount Selvot. But if they were up above, standing around all night tethered in some high corrie in the mountains, three or four at a time tied to a felled tree, and one had started out in the moonlight at three in the morning and now came past the place at half-past four, they would all look round to see who was passing, and in the insubstantial dawn light one felt oneself to be a thought in some very slow-thinking mind. Since there was some thieving, and various other risks as well, all the dogs in the district had been bought up to serve as guards. The patrols brought them along in whole packs, two or three led on one rope, collarless. By now there were as many dogs as men in the place, and one might well wonder which was actually entitled to feel he was master in his own house on this earth and which was only adopted as a domestic companion. There were pure-bred gun-dogs among them, Venetian setters such as a few people in this district still kept, and snappy mongrels like spiteful little monkeys. They too would stand about in groups that had formed without anyone's knowing why, and which kept firmly together, but from time to time the members of a group would attack each other furiously. Some were half starved, some refused to eat. One little white dog snapped at the cook's hand as he was putting down a plate of meat and soup for it, and bit one finger off.
At half-past four in the morning it was already broad daylight, though the sun was not yet up. When one passed the grazing-land high up on the mountain, the cattle were still half asleep. In big, dim, white, stony shapes they lay with their legs drawn in under them, their hindquarters drooping a little to one side. They did not look at the passer-by, nor after him, but imperturbably kept their faces turned towards the expected light, and their monotonously, slowly moving jaws seemed to be praying. Walking through the circle of them was like traversing some twilit, lofty sphere of existence, and when one looked back at them from above, the line formed by the spine, the hind legs, and the curving tail made them seem like a scattering of treble-signs.
There was plenty of incident. For instance, a man might break his leg, and two others would carry him into camp on their crossed arms. Or suddenly the shout of: "Take co-ver!" would ring out, and everyone would run for cover because a great rock was being dynamited for the building of the road. Once, at such a moment, a shower swept a few flickers of moisture over the grass. In the shelter of a bush on the far side of the stream there was a fire burning, forgotten in the excitement, though only a few minutes earlier it had been very important: standing near it, the only watcher left, was a young birch-tree. And still dangling by one leg from this birch was the black pig. The fire, the birch, and the pig were now alone. The pig had squealed even while one man was merely leading it along on a rope, talking to it, urging it to come on. Then it squealed all the louder as it saw two other men come delightedly running towards it. It was frantic at being seized by the ears and unceremoniously dragged forward. It straddled all four legs in resistance, but the pain in its ears forced it to make little jumps onward.
Finally, at the other end of the bridge, someone had grabbed a hatchet and struck it on the forehead with the blade. From that moment on everything went more quietly. Both fore-legs buckled at the same instant, and the little pig did not scream again until the knife was actually in its throat. There was a shrieking, twitching blare, which sank down into a death-rattle that was no more than a pathetic snore. All these were things Homo saw for the first time in his life.
When dusk fell, they all gathered in the little vicarage, where they had rented a room to serve as their mess. Admittedly the meat, which came the long way up the mountain only twice a week, was often going off, and not infrequently one had a touch of food-poisoning. But still all of them came here as soon as it was dark, stumbling along the invisible tracks with their little lanterns. For what caused them more suffering than food-poisoning was melancholy and boredom, even though everything was so beautiful. They swilled it away with wine. After an hour a cloud of sadness and ragtime hung over the room. The gramophone went round and round, like a gilded hurdy-gurdy trundling over a soft meadow spattered with wonderful stars. They no longer talked to each other. They merely talked. What should they have said to each other, a literary man of independent means, a business man, a former inspector of prisons, a mining engineer, and a retired major? They communicated in sign-language—and this even though they used words: words of discomfort, of relative comfort, of homesickness—it was an animal language. Often they would argue with superfluous intensity about some question that concerned none of them, and would reach the point of insulting each other, and the next day seconds would be passing to and fro. Then it would turn out that nobody had meant a word of it. They had only done it to kill time, and even if none of them had ever really known anything of the world, each of them felt he had behaved as uncouthly as a butcher, and this filled them with resentment against each other.
It was that standard psychic unit which is Europe. It was idleness as undefined as at other times their occupation was. It was a longing for wife, child, home comforts. And interspersed with this, ever and again, there was a gramophone. "Rosa, we're going to Lodz, Lodz, Lodz ..." or: "Whate'er befall I still recall...." It was an astral emanation of powder and gauze, a mist of far-off variety-shows and European sexuality. Indecent jokes exploded into guffaws, each joke, it seemed, beginning: "You know the one about the Jew in the train.... " Only once somebody asked: "How far is it to Babylon?" And then everyone fell silent, and the major put on the "Tosca" record and, as it was about to start, said mournfully: "Once I wanted to marry Geraldine Farrar." Then her voice came through the horn, out into the room, and this woman's voice that all these drunken men were marvelling at seemed to step into a lift, and the next instant the lift was flashing away up to the top with her, arriving nowhere, coming down again, bouncing in the air. Her skirts billowed out with the movement, with this up and down, this long lying close to, clinging tightly to, one note, and again there was the rise and fall, and with it all this streaming away as if for ever, and yet again and yet again and again this being seized by yet another spasm, and again a streaming out: a voluptuous ecstasy. Homo felt it was that naked voluptuousness which is distributed throughout all the things there are in cities, a lust no longer distinguishable from manslaughter, or jealousy, or business, or motor-car racing—ah, it was no longer lust, it was a craving for adventure—no, it was not a craving for adventure either, it was a knife slashing down out of the sky, a destroying angel, angelic madness—the war?