“We can stay together, you can join me later on.”

“How do you picture that?” Agathe asked, with that pensive little frown on her forehead.

“I haven’t pictured it yet; I thought of it only just now.” He stood up and gave the sheepherders more money, “for the cuts in the table.” Through a haze Agathe saw the peasants grinning and nodding and heard them affirming some joyful sentiment in short words she could not understand. As she passed them, she felt those four hospitable eyes gazing on her face with naked emotion and realized that she and Ulrich had been taken for lovers who had quarreled and made up. “They thought we were lovers!” she said. Exuberantly she slid her arm into his, and all her joy flared into expression. “You ought to give me a kiss!” she demanded, laughing, and pressed her brother’s arm against her body as they stood on the threshold of the cottage and the low door opened into the darkness of the evening.

*Moosbrugger is a psychopath who is on trial for murdering a prostitute. His story, and Ulrich and Clarisse’s interest in his case, forms one of the major subplots of the novel.

10

HOLY CONVERSATIONS. BEGINNING

During the rest of Ulrich’s stay, little more was said about Hagauer, and a long time passed before the siblings returned to the idea of prolonging their renewed relationship by starting a life together. Nevertheless, the flame that had shot forth with Agathe’s unrestrained desire to eliminate her husband went on smoldering beneath the ashes. It spread out in conversations that reached no conclusion, then leapt up again; perhaps one should say that Agathe’s spirit was seeking another chance to burn freely.

She would usually begin such a conversation with a definite and personal question, the inner form of which was: “Am I allowed or am I not?” The lawlessness of her nature had until then lived by the sad and weary conviction: “I can do whatever I want, I just don’t care to,” and so his younger sister’s questions occasionally, and not without justification, affected Ulrich rather like the questions of a child, which are as warm as the little hands of this helpless being.

His answers were of a different kind, but no less characteristic of him: He was always glad to share with her something of the yield of his life and reflections, and, as was his custom, he expressed himself in a manner as candid as it was intellectually enterprising. He always arrived quickly at “the moral of the story” his sister was talking about, summing it up with a formula, liked to use himself for illustration, and in this way told Agathe a great deal about himself and especially about his earlier, more eventful life. Agathe told him nothing about herself, but she admired his ability to talk about his life like that, and his way of subjecting all her suggestions to moral scrutiny suited her very well. For morality is nothing other than an order of the soul and of things, encompassing both, and so it is not strange that young people whose will to live has not yet been blunted on all sides talk about it a great deal. But with a man of Ulrich’s age and experience some explanation is needed; for men talk about morality only in their working lives, if it is part of their occupational lingo; otherwise the word has been swallowed up by the activities of life and never regains its freedom. So when Ulrich spoke of morality, it signaled a deep disorder, which attracted Agathe because it resonated with something in herself. She was ashamed of her somewhat naive confession that she would like to live “in perfect accord with herself,” now that she was hearing what intricate preconditions would have to be met; yet she wished impatiently that her brother would arrive at a result more quickly, for often she felt that everything he was saying was moving in that direction, was in fact becoming more and more precise as he neared the conclusion, halting only at the last step, just before the threshold, where, each time, he would abandon the project.