20
ROBERT MUSIL
thing 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 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 realize 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 mold 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 tum
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 heings?-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,
