The Man Without Qualities

  101

  COUSINS IN CONFLICT

  At about this time Diotima turned to her cousin again. She did it at one of her evenings, coming like a tired dancer through the eddies swirling persistently, unremittingly, through her rooms, to sit down beside him in a pool of quiet where he had parked himself on a little settee against the wall. It was a long time since she had done anything like it. She had avoided seeing him “off duty” ever since those drives in the country together, and as if because of them.

  From heat or fatigue, her face looked slightly blotchy.

  She propped her hands on the settee, said, “How are you?” and nothing more, even though there was clearly something more needing to be said, and stared straight ahead, with her head slightly bowed. She looked a bit groggy, to borrow a term from the boxing ring, not even bothering to smooth down her dress properly as she sat there, hunched over.

  It made her cousin think of tousled hair and bare legs under a peasant skirt. Strip away the frosting, and what was left was a handsome, sturdy creature, and he had to restrain himself from simply taking her hand in his fist, like a peasant.

  “So Arnheim isn’t making you happy,” he said evenly.

  Perhaps she should have put him in his place, but she felt strangely moved; after a while, she said: “His friendship makes me very happy.”

  “I thought his friendship distresses you a little.”

  “What nonsense!” Diotima pulled herself up and recovered her ladylike poise. “Do you know who really distresses me?” she asked, trying for an easy, chatty tone. “Your friend the General. What does that man want? Why does he keep coming here? Why is he always staring at me?”

  “He’s in love with you,” her cousin replied.

  Diotima gave a nervous laugh. She went on: “Do you realize that I shudder from head to foot when I set eyes on him? He makes me think of death.”

  “An uncommonly life-loving figure of Death, if you look at him without prejudice.”

  “Evidently I’m not unprejudiced. I don’t know why, but I go into a panic every time he comes up to me and informs me that I make ‘outstanding’ ideas ‘stand out’ on an ‘outstanding occasion.’ He makes my skin crawl with an indescribable, incomprehensible, dreamlike fear.”

  “Of him?”

  “Who else? The man’s a hyena.”

  Her cousin had to laugh. She went on with her scolding like a child out of control. “He goes creeping around, just waiting to see our best efforts come to nothing!”

  “Which is probably exactly what you are so afraid of. Dear cousin, don’t you remember that I foretold the collapse of your undertaking from the first? It can’t be helped; you simply have to face it.”

  Diotima looked at him haughtily. She remembered only too well, even to the words she had spoken to him the first time he came to see her, words that it now hurt her to think about. She had lectured him on what a privilege it was to call upon a whole nation, indeed upon the world, to take up its spiritual mission in the midst of its materialistic concerns. She had wanted nothing outworn, nothing of the old mind-sets, and yet the look she was now giving her cousin was more that of someone who had risen above all that, than of someone who had got above herself. She had considered a Year of the World, a universal rebirth, something to crown all of Western culture; there were times when she had come close, others when her goal seemed to recede from her grasp; she had gone through many ups and downs, and she had suffered. The last few months had been like a long sea voyage, first lifted up by huge waves, then dropped into deep troughs, over and over again, so that by now she could hardly tell what had come first and what later. Now she was sitting here, after her immense efforts, glad that the bench she sat on was not moving, content to do nothing but perhaps watch the smoke curling upward from a man’s pipe; so intensely did she feel this that she had, in fact, chosen the image herself—an old man’s pipe smoke in the light of the sinking sun. She seemed to herself like someone with great frenzied battles behind him. In a weary tone, she said to her cousin: “I have been through such a great deal; I have changed, I’m afraid.”

  “In my favor, I hope?”

  Diotima shook her head and smiled without looking at him.

  “In that case you should know that it’s Arnheim who’s behind the General, not me!” Ulrich said suddenly. “You’ve been putting all the blame for bringing in the General on me, all along. But don’t you remember what I told you the first time you called me on the carpet about it?”

  Diotima remembered. “Keep him away,” her cousin had said. But Arnheim had told her to make the General feel welcome. She felt something she could not put into words, as if she were sitting inside a cloud that was quickly rising above her eyes. But the next instant the settee again felt hard and solid under her body, and she said: “I don’t know how this General came to us in the first place. I never invited him. And Dr. Arnheim, whom I asked about it, naturally knows nothing about it either. Something must have gone wrong.”

  Her cousin was not very helpful. “I knew the General years ago, but this is the first time I’ve seen him in ages,” he said. “Of course, he’s probably spying here a little for the War Office, but he’s sincere about wanting to help you, too. And I have it from his own lips that Arnheim makes quite a point of being attentive to him.”

  “Because Arnheim takes an interest in everything!” Diotima retorted. “He advised me not to rebuff the General, because he believes in the man’s good faith and because he may be useful to us, in his influential position.”

  Ulrich vehemently shook his head. “Just listen to all the cackling going on around him!” he burst out so sharply that guests nearby turned their heads, to his hostess’s embarrassment. “He can take it— he’s rich! He has money, he agrees with every one of them, and he knows that they’re all acting as his unpaid press agents.”

  “Why should he bother?” Diotima asked critically.

  “Because of his vanity. He’s a monster of vanity. How can I make you see the full extent of it? I mean vanity in the biblical sense: all cymbals and sounding brass to hide a vacuum. A man is vain when he prides himself on having seen the moon rise over Asia on his left while on his right Europe fades away in the sunset—this is how he once described to me his crossing of the Sea of Marmara. The moon probably rises far more beautifully behind the flowerpot on the windowsill of a lovesick young girl than it does over Asia.”

  Diotima was thinking about where they might go to talk without being overheard. “You find his popularity irritating,” she said in a low voice as she led him away through the various rooms, all filled with guests, until she had deftly maneuvered him into the foyer. Here she resumed the conversation with: “Why are you so set against him? You make it so hard for me.”

  “I make it hard for you?” Ulrich asked with raised eyebrows.

  “How can I talk freely with you about everything, as long as you persist in this attitude?” They had come to a stop in the middle of the foyer.

  “Please feel free to tell me anything, whatever it is,” he said warmly. “You two are in love, I know that much. Will he marry you?”

  “He has asked me,” Diotima replied without regard to their exposed position as they stood there. She was overcome by her feelings and took no offense at her cousin’s bluntness.

  “And what about you?” he asked.

  She blushed like a schoolgirl. “Oh, for me it’s a heavy responsibility,” she said hesitantly. “I can’t let myself be rushed into doing something unfair. And where the really great things in life are concerned, it doesn’t matter so much what one does.”

  Ulrich was mystified by these words, since he knew nothing of the long nights in which Diotima had learned to overcome the voice of passion and attained that serene evenhandedness of the soul where love floats in the horizontal position of a seesaw equally weighted at both ends. But he sensed that for the moment it would be best to abandon the direct line of straight talk, and took a diplomatic turn: “I’d be glad
to tell you about my attitude to Arnheim, because in the circumstances I shouldn’t want you to feel that I’m against him in any way. I think I understand Arnheim quite well. You must realize that whatever is happening in your house—let’s call it a kind of synthesis—it is something he has already experienced many times before. Wherever you have intellectual ferment taking the form of convictions, it also appears almost immediately in the form of the opposing convictions. And where it is embodied in a so-called leading intellectual personality, then the moment that personality is not freely saluted on all sides, it feels as insecure as if it were in a cardboard box tossed into the water. We have a tendency in this country to fall in love with noted personalities, like the drunks who throw their arms around a stranger’s neck, only to push him away again after a while, for equally obscure reasons. So I have a vivid idea of what Arnheim must be feeling—a form of seasickness, I’d say. And when he remembers in such circumstances what money can do if you know how to use it, he feels firm ground under his feet for the first time after a long sea voyage. He is bound to notice how each suggestion, proposal, wish, service, accomplishment, struggles to enter the orbit of wealth, which is in that sense an image of the mind itself. Ideas striving for power tend to attach themselves to ideas that already have power. I hardly know how to put it to you; the difference between ideas that aim high and those that are merely ambitious is hard to pin down. But once the genuinely great, with its usual material poverty and purity of spirit, is displaced by the mere label of greatness, all sorts of spurious candidates for the label push their way in—quite understandably—and then you also get the kind of greatness that can be conferred by publicity and business acumen. And there you have your Arnheim in all his innocence and guilt.”

  “You’re being very holy all of a sudden,” Diotima said acidly.

  “You’re right, it’s none of my business, but that way he has of accepting the mixed effects of inward and outward greatness and trying to make it all look like a model of humanitarianism could in fact exasperate me to a frantic degree of holiness.”

  “Oh, you are so wrong!” Diotima broke in. “You see him only as a blasé rich man. But Arnheim sees wealth as an absolutely all-pervasive responsibility. He devotes himself to his business as another man might give himself over to a human being entrusted to his care. He deeply needs to make a real difference in the world. If he makes himself available to people, it is because, as he says, a man must keep moving if he wants to be moved. Or was it Goethe who said that? He once explained it to me at length. His point is that to do good, you must, to begin with, do something. Of course, I admit that I have also been known to feel that he sometimes mixes too freely with all sorts of people.”

  As they talked, they were walking back and forth in the empty foyer, with its mirrors and all the coats on the racks. Now Diotima stopped and put her hand on her cousin’s arm, saying:

  “This man, so highly favored by fate in every way, has the modest notion that a man alone is no stronger than a sick person left on his own. Don’t you agree with him there? To be alone is to fall prey to a thousand fantasies.” She dropped her eyes as though she were searching the floor for something, even as she felt her cousin’s eyes on her lowered eyelids.

  “Oh, I suppose I might be talking about myself. I have been so lonely of late. But so are you! I can tell. You have an embittered look; you’re not at all happy, are you? Everything you say shows that you’re on bad terms with everything in your own life. You’re jealous by nature, and you have a chip on your shoulder, you’re against everything. I don’t mind telling you that Arnheim has complained to me that you refuse to be friends with him.”

  “Has he actually told you that he wants us to be friends? If so, he’s lying!”

  Diotima looked up at him and laughed. “There you go again, making a mountain out of a molehill. We both want your friendship. Perhaps we do because you are just as you are. But I’d have to go back a bit to explain: Arnheim came up with such examples as . . .” She hesitated, then thought better of it. “No, that would take us too far afield. In brief, Arnheim says that we have to make use of whatever means our times afford us. The thing is to act on the basis of two different attitudes, never quite revolutionary and never quite antirevolutionary, never quite out of love or out of hate nor out of some particular inclination of our own, but always trying to develop every possibility one has. But that isn’t being clever, as you see it; it merely shows a simple, all-embracing character, someone with a gift for bringing disparate things together by seeing through their superficial differences—the personality of a born leader!”

  “And what has that to do with me?” Ulrich asked.

  His challenge had the effect of tearing through her reminiscences of a long conversation about scholasticism, the Church, Goethe and Napoleon, and the whole fog of cultural ambiguities that had thickened around Diotima’s head, and she suddenly saw herself clearly, sitting beside her cousin on the long shoe cupboard where, in the heat of argument, she had made him sit down with her; his back was stubbornly avoiding the coats hanging in rows behind them, which had badly mussed her hair. As she patted it in place, she replied:

  “But you’re his exact opposite! You’d like to re-create the whole world in your own image. You’re always opposing everything with that passive resistance of yours, or whatever that horrid expression is.” She was delighted to tell him just what she thought, for once. But all this while she kept thinking that they had better not stay where they were, in case other guests started leaving or coming through the foyer for some reason.

  “You’re always so hypercritical,” she went on. “I don’t recall you ever having a good word to say about anything, except to praise everything that’s intolerable nowadays, out of sheer contrariness. Every time one tries to hold on to a feeling or an intuition in the midst of this desert of our godless age, one can count on your fervent defense of specialization, disorder, all the negative side of life.” So saying, she stood up and gave him to understand, with a smile, that they must find a better place to sit. It was either rejoining the others or finding a hiding place where they could go on with their talk. The Tuzzis’ bedroom could be entered even from here, through a door covered with wallpaper, but Diotima felt it was too intimate a place to take her cousin, especially as every time the apartment was rearranged for a reception there was no telling how much of a mess the bedroom had been left in. So there was no refuge left but one of the two maids’ rooms. The thought that it would be a funny mixture of taking liberties and of her housewifely duty to subject Rachel’s room, where she never set foot, to an impromptu inspection decided her. As they went there, and even as she apologized for taking him there, and once they were inside the little room, she intently went on talking to Ulrich:

  “I get the feeling that you are always out to undermine Arnheim, every chance you get. Your opposition hurts him. He is an outstanding contemporary, which is why he is and needs to be in touch with present-day realities. While you are always on the point of taking a leap into the impossible. He is all affirmation and perfect balance; you are, frankly, asocial. He strives for unity, intent to his fingertips upon achieving some clear decision; you oppose him with nothing but your formless outlook. He has a feeling for everything that has taken a long time to become what it is; and you? What about you? You act as though the world were about to begin tomorrow. Why don’t you answer me? From the very first day, when I told you we had been given a chance to do something truly great, your attitude has been the same. And when I see this chance as a predestined moment that has brought us all together for a purpose, waiting, as it were, with an unspoken question in our eyes, for an answer, you carry on like a brat who wants only to disrupt everything.” She was choosing her words with care to gloss over their awkward situation in the maid’s room, fortifying her position by giving her cousin the most elaborate scolding.

  “If that’s how I am, how can I possibly be of any use to you?” Ulrich asked. He had sat down on
Rachel’s little iron bedstead, an arm’s length from Diotima, facing him on the little wicker chair. The answer she gave him was admirable.

  “If you ever saw me doing something horrible, something really awful,” she said unexpectedly, “I’m sure you’d be an angel about it.” She was startled to hear herself say it. She had only meant to point up his love of contradiction by joking that he could be expected to be most kind and considerate when she least deserved it; but a spring had suddenly bubbled up in her unconscious, making her say things that sounded rather silly, and yet it was amazing how they seemed to apply to her and her relationship to this cousin of hers!

  Ulrich sensed it. He looked at her without speaking; then, after a pause, he responded with a question: “Are you very much . . . are you madly in love with him?”

  Diotima looked at the floor. “What an absurd way to put it! I’m not a schoolgirl with a crush, you know.”

  But her cousin would not be put off. “I am asking you this for a reason: I am wondering whether you have already come to know that longing that we all have—including even the most detestable creatures among tonight’s guests next door—to strip off our clothes, put our arms around each other’s shoulders, and sing instead of talking; then you would have to go from one of us to the other and kiss him like a sister on the lips. If this is a bit much, I might let them wear nightshirts.”