24
ROBERT MUSIL
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 tum 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 hom, out
into the room, and this woman's voice that all these drunken men were
marveling 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 stream–
ing out: a voluptuous ecstasy. Homo felt it was that naked voluptuous–
ness 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,
