The Sleepwalkers (97 page)

No need to worry about the Commandant, said Huguenau, he himself had got him in safe keeping; and the Major had been in a pretty tight corner too, really he himself deserved a medal for lifesaving, for now the old man was being well looked after, and as he said before, quite safe.

He raised his fingers to his hat in salute, turned back the way he had come, and set out at a trot for the hospital. The dawn was already breaking.

Kühlenbeck was not to be found at first, but presently he appeared, and when he caught sight of Huguenau, bawled at him: “What do you want here, you clown?” Huguenau put on his most offended expression: “Herr Doctor Kühlenbeck, I have to report to you that Herr Esch and myself had to hide the Herr Town Commandant, who is gravely wounded, in our premises all night … will you be so good
as to give instructions for him to be removed at once.” Kühlenbeck rushed to the door:

“Doctor Flurschütz,” he thundered down the corridor. Flurschütz came. “Take a car—the cars have returned now, haven’t they?—and drive to the newspaper place, take two attendants with you … you know where it is, I suppose … but it’s all one,” he barked at Huguenau, “for you’re going with them.” Then he seemed to soften: he actually gave Huguenau his hand and said: “Come, it was very nice of you both to look after him.…”

When they reached the cellar the Major was still peacefully sleeping on his heap of potatoes, and still asleep he was carried out. Meanwhile Huguenau had run across to the editorial office. There wasn’t much ready cash in the place, it was true, only the petty cash and some stamps; the rest he carried upon him, except for what he had sent to Cologne and put in the bank; but it would be a pity to leave the stamps … one never knew what might happen … perhaps there might be some more looting after all! When he returned the Major was already installed in the car, a few people were standing round it asking what had happened, and Flurschütz was preparing to drive off. It was like a blow in the face to Huguenau; they were about to take the Major away without him. And suddenly he saw clearly that he himself dared not in any circumstances stay behind, he hadn’t the slightest wish to be present when Esch’s body was brought home.

“Wait for me, I’m coming immediately, Doctor,” he cried, “immediately!”

“How? Do you want to come with us, Herr Huguenau?”

“But of course! I’ve got to give my report on the whole business … just one minute, please.”

He rushed upstairs. Frau Esch was praying on her knees in the kitchen. When Huguenau appeared in the doorway she made towards him, still on her knees. He did not listen to her appeals, but dashed past her into his room, seized such of his possessions as he could lay hands on-—and he did not possess much—rammed them into his fibre suitcase, sat upon it until the lock snapped to, and then flew back. “Ready,” he shouted to the chauffeur, and they drove off.

At the hospital Kühlenbeck was standing in front of the door, his watch in his hand:

“Well, what’s the matter with him?”

Flurschütz, who had got out first, gazed across at the Major with his somewhat inflamed eyes:

“Perhaps concussion … perhaps something more serious.…”

Kühlenbeck said:

“This place is a pure madhouse already … and it calls itself a hospital … well, we’ll see.…”

The Major, who during the drive had begun to blink up at the pallid morning sky, was now wide awake. As he was being lifted out of the car he became excited; he flung himself about, and it was obvious that he was looking for something. Kühlenbeck stepped across and bent over him:

“Come, this is a nice way to behave, Herr Major!”

But at that the Major became quite furious. Whether it was that he recognized Kühlenbeck, or that he did not recognize him, at any rate he seized him by the beard, tugged at it fiercely, gnashing his teeth, and only with difficulty could be got under control. But he became peaceable and docile at once as soon as Huguenau stepped up to the stretcher. He took hold of Huguenau’s finger again, Huguenau had to walk alongside the stretcher, and he would only submit to be examined so long as Huguenau sat by his side.

Kühlenbeck, however, broke off his examination very soon:

“It has no object,” he said, “we’ll give him an injection and then we’ll just have to send him away … this place will have to be evacuated in any case … so get him off to Cologne as quickly as possible … but how? I can’t spare anybody here, the order to evacuate the hospital may arrive at any moment.…

Huguenau stepped forward:

“Perhaps I could take the Herr Major to Cologne … as a voluntary ambulance attendant, if I may put it like that … the gentlemen can see for themselves that the Herr Major is satisfied with my attendance.”

Kühlenbeck reflected:

“With the afternoon train? … no, that’s far too uncertain now.…”

Flurschütz had an idea:

“But there must be a motor-van going to Cologne to-day … couldn’t one arrange somehow or other for it to take him?”

“To-day anything can be arranged,” said Kühlenbeck.

“Then may I ask you to give me a permit to proceed to Cologne?” said Huguenau.

And so it happened that Huguenau, furnished with authentic military documents, on his sleeve a red-cross armlet which he had extracted from Sister Mathilde, was given official charge of the Major, and conducted him to Cologne. They fixed up the stretcher in the van, Huguenau took up his post beside it on his fibre case, and the Major seized his hand and did not let it go again. After a while Huguenau too was overcome by fatigue. He settled himself as well as he could beside the stretcher, pushed his case under his head, and lying side by side, hand in hand, they slept like two friends. And so they arrived at Cologne.

Huguenau delivered the Major at the hospital according to orders, waited patiently by his bed until an injection had banished all danger of a new outbreak, and then he was able to steal away. From the hospital authorities he actually engineered a permit to return to his Colmar home, whereupon he lifted from the bank the remainder of the balance credited to the
Kur-Trier Herald
, and next day he departed. His war Odyssey, his lovely holiday was at an end. It was the 5th of November.

Who can be more light-hearted than an invalid? there is nothing to force him into the struggle for life, he is quite at liberty even to die if he likes. He is not obliged to draw inductive conclusions from the events of the day in order to orient his behaviour; he can remain wrapped in the cocoon of his own thoughts,—wrapped in the autonomy of his own knowledge he is free to think deductively, to think theologically. Who can be happier than the man who is at freedom to think out his religion!

Sometimes I go out by myself. I walk along slowly, my hands in my pockets, and gaze into the faces of the passers-by. They are finite faces, but often, indeed always, I can manage to discover the infinite behind them. These are, so to speak, my inductive escapades. The fact that during these roving expeditions, which certainly never take me very far—only once did I get as far as Schöneberg, and that made me very tired—I have never encountered Marie, that among all the faces hers has never
emerged, that she has so completely vanished from my ken, hardly even disappoints me, for the times are uncertain, and she was always expecting to be sent away on foreign missionary service. I am quite happy without her, as it is.

The days have grown short. And as electric current is expensive and a man wrapped in the cocoon of his own autonomy can easily dispense with light, I have long nights. Nuchem often sits with me. Sits in the darkness and says little. His thoughts no doubt are with Marie, but he has never mentioned her.

Once he said:

“The war will stop now.”

“Indeed,” I said.

“Then there will be a revolution,” he went on.

I saw a chance of pouncing upon him:

“Then they will put an end to religion.”

I heard him laughing silently in the darkness:

“Is that said in your books?”

“Hegel says: it is infinite love that makes God identify Himself with what is alien to Him so as to annihilate it. So Hegel says … and then the absolute religion will come.”

He laughed again, a vague shadow in the darkness:

“The law remains,” he said.

His obduracy was unshakable: I said:

“Yes, yes, I know, you’re the eternal Jew.”

He said softly:

“We’ll go back to Jerusalem now.”

I had talked too much in any case and let the matter drop there.

Epilogue.

All was well.

And Huguenau, furnished with an authentic military permit, had returned to his home in Colmar at the army’s expense.

Had he committed a murder? had he done a revolutionary deed? he had no need to reflect upon it, nor did he do so. Had he done so, however, he might simply have said that his procedure had been quite reasonable and that any one of the town’s prominent citizens, among whom, after all, he had a right to range himself, would have done exactly the same. For there was a firm line of demarcation between what was reasonable and what was unreasonable, between reality and unreality, and Huguenau would have conceded at most that in less warlike or less revolutionary times he would have left the deed undone, which would have been a pity. And he would probably have added judiciously: “There’s a time for everything.” But the opportunity did not arise, for he never gave a thought to that deed, nor was he ever to think of it again.

Huguenau did not think of what he had done, and still less did he recognize the irrationality that had pervaded his actions, pervaded them indeed to such an extent that one could have said the irrational had burst its bounds; a man never knows anything about the irrationality that informs his wordless actions; he knows nothing of “the invasion from below” to which he is subject, he cannot know anything about it, since at every moment he is ruled by some system of values that has no other aim but to conceal and control all the irrationality on which his earth-bound empirical life is based. The irrational, as well as consciousness, is, in the Kantian sense, a vehicle that accompanies all categories—it is the absolute of Life, running parallel, with all its instincts, conations and
emotions, to the other absolute of Thought: irrationality not only supports every value-system—for the spontaneous act of positing a value, on which the value-system is based, is an irrational act—but it informs the whole general feeling of every age, the feeling which assures the prevalence of the value-system, and which both in its origin and in its nature is insusceptible to rational evidence. And the powerful apparatus of cognitive interpretation which is erected around all atomic facts to make their content plausible has the same function as that other and not less powerful apparatus of ethical interpretation which makes human conduct plausible; both of them consist of bridges thrown out by reason, crossing and recrossing at different levels, for the sole purpose of leading earthly existence out of its essential irrationality, out of “evil,” by way of a higher and “reasonable” meaning up to that ultimate metaphysical value which by its deductive structure helps man to assign a fitting relevance to his own actions, to all things and to the world, but at the same time enables him to find himself again so that his vision ceases to be erratic and transient. In circumstances like these it is not surprising that Huguenau knew nothing about his own irrationality.

Every system of values springs from irrational impulses, and to transform those irrational, ethically invalid contacts with the world into something absolutely rational becomes the aim of every super-personal system of values—an essential and radical task of “formation.” And every system of values comes to grief in the endeavour. For the only method that the rational can follow is that of approximation, an encircling method that seeks to reach the irrational by describing smaller and smaller arcs around it, yet never in fact reaches it, whether the irrational appears as an irrationality of one’s inner feelings, an unconsciousness of what is actually being lived and experienced, or as an irrationality of world conditions and of the infinitely complex nature of the universe—all that the rational can do is to atomize it. And when people say that “a man without feelings is no man at all,” they say so out of some perception of the truth that no system of values can exist without an irreducible residue of the irrational which preserves the rational itself from a literally suicidal autonomy, from a “super rationality” that is, if anything, still more objectionable, still more “evil” and “sinful” from the standpoint of the value-system, than the irrational: for, in contradistinction to the plastic irrational, the pure Ratio, arising through dialectic and deduction, becomes set and incapable of further formation when it grows autonomous, and this
rigidity annuls its own logicality and brings it up against its logical limit of infinity,—when reason becomes autonomous it is thus radically evil, for in annulling the logicality of the value-system it destroys the system itself; it inaugurates the system’s disintegration and ultimate collapse.

There is a stage in the development of every system of values during which the mutual interpenetration of the rational and the irrational reaches its maximum, a kind of saturated condition of equilibrium in which the elements of evil on both sides become ineffective, invisible and harmless—and these are the times of culminating achievement and of perfect style! for the style of an epoch could almost be defined in terms of this interpénétration: when such a stage of culminating achievement is reached the rational may penetrate through countless pores into life, but it remains subject to life and to the central will to value; and the irrational may flow through countless veins of the value-system, but is as it were canalized, and even in its most minute ramifications subserves and assists the central will to value,—the irrational by itself has no style, the rational by itself has no style, or rather they are both liberated from style, the one in the freedom of Nature, the other in the freedom of mathematics; but when they are combined, when they mutually restrain each other, the result of this restrained and rational life of the irrational is the phenomenon that may be described as the peculiar style of a value-system.