28
ROBERT MUSIL
and smiled for the last time when she bent to the hem of her
skirt like a lady adjusting her garter.
It was all just as simple and just as magical as the thing about
the horses, the cows, and the dead pig. When they were behind the
beam, and heavy boots came thumping along the stony path outside,
pounding hy and fading into the distance, his blood pulsed in his
throat; but Grigia seemed to know even at the third footstep whether
the footsteps were coming this way or not. And she talked a magical
language. A nose she called a neb, and legs she called shanks.
An
apron was for her a napron. Once when he threatened not to come
again, she laughed and said: "I'll bell thee!" And he did not know
whether he was disconcerted or glad of it. She must have noticed
that, for she asked: "Does it rue thee? Does it rue thee much?"
Such words were like the patterns of the aprons and kerchiefs and
the colored ,bOrder at the top of the stocking, already somewhat as–
similated to the present because of having come so far, but still
mysterious visitants. Her mouth was full of them, and when he kissed
it he never knew whether he loved this woman or whether a miracle
was being worked upon him and Grigia was only part of a mission
linking him ever more closely with his beloved in eternity. Once Grigia
said outright: "Thou'rt thinking other things, I can tell by thy look,"
and when he tried to pretend it was not so, she said: "Ah, all that's
but glozing." He asked her what that meant, but she would not
explain, and he racked his brains over it for a long time before it
occurred to
him
that she meant he was glossing something over.
Or did she mean something still more mysterious?
One may feel such things intensely or not. One may have prin–
ciples, in which case it is all only an esthetic joke that one accepts
in passing. Or one has no principles, or perhaps they have slackened
somewhat, as was the case with Homo when he set out on his journey,
and then it may happen that these manifestations of an alien life
take possession of whatever has become masterless. Yet they did not
give him a new self, a self for sheer happiness become ambitious and
earthbound; they merely lodged, in irrelevantly lovely patches, within
the airy outlines of his body. Something about it all made Homo
sure that he was soon to die, only he did not yet know how or when.
His old life had lost all strength; it was like a butterfly growing
feebler as autumn draws on.
