“And so, I don’t believe!

“Above all I do not believe in the constraint of evil by good, which is the hallmark of our cultural farrago: I find this repugnant!

“So I believe and do not believe!

“But maybe I believe that in a not-too-far-off future human beings will on the one hand become highly intelligent, and on the other hand be mystics. Maybe it is already happening, and our morality is splitting into these two components. I could also say: into mathematics and mysticism. Into practical melioration and adventuring in the unknown!”

He had not been so openly excited in years. He did not notice the “maybes” in his speech; they seemed only natural to him.

Agathe meanwhile had kneeled down in front of the stove; she had placed the packet of pictures and writings on the floor beside her, looked at each object one more time, and then pushed it into the fire. She was not entirely unsusceptible to the crude sensuality of the obscenities she was looking at. She felt her body being aroused by them. It seemed to her that this was no more herself than if in some barren solitude one sees a rabbit flitting past. She did not know if she would be ashamed to tell her brother about this; but she was profoundly tired and did not want to talk. She was no longer listening to what he was saying; her heart had by now been too shaken by these ups and downs and could no longer follow. Others had always known better than she what was right; she thought of this, but because she was ashamed, she thought it with secret defiance. To walk a forbidden or secret path: in this she felt superior to Ulrich. She heard how, again and again, he took back everything he allowed himself be carried away into saying, and his words struck against her ear like big drops of happiness and grief.

12

THE WILL

Ulrich has temporarily taken leave of Agathe and gone to Vienna to take care of various business, but finds himself preoccupied with recent developments involving his sister.

Ulrich . . . no longer wanted to put off a decision and tried to recall the “incident” as precisely as he possibly could. That was his mitigating term for what had taken place during his last hours with Agathe and a few days after their big conversation.

Ulrich had packed and was ready to leave on a sleeper train that came through the town late in the evening, and the siblings had met for a final supper. They had agreed earlier that Agathe was to follow him after a short time, and they had somewhat vaguely estimated this separation at five days to two weeks.

At the table Agathe said: “But there’s something we still have to do before you leave.”

“What?” Ulrich asked.

“We have to change the will.”

Ulrich remembered looking at his sister without surprise: despite all their previous discussions he had assumed she was leading up to a joke. But Agathe was gazing down at her plate and had the familiar wrinkle above the root of her nose that always appeared when she was mulling something over. Slowly she said: “He shouldn’t keep as much of me between his fingers as would be left if a woolen thread had burnt away between them. . . !”