Five Women by Robert Musil Read Free Book Online

quite forgot to think about Grigia. She had slipped away from him, or perhaps he from her, even though he could still feel her shoulder touching his. His whole life had slipped away from him, just so far that he could still tell it was there, but without being able to lay his hand upon it.
    For hours they did not stir. Days might have passed, and nights. Hunger and thirst lay behind them, like one eventful stage of the journey, and they grew steadily weaker, lighter, and more shut into themselves. Their half-consciousness was wide seas, their waking small islands. Once he started up, with glaring awareness, into one such small waking: Grigia was gone. Some certainty told him that it must have been only a moment earlier. He smiled ... telling him nothing of the way out ... meaning to leave him behind, as proof for her husband... ! He raised himself up on his elbow and looked about him. So he too discovered a faint, glimmering streak. He crawled a little nearer, deeper into the passage—they had always been looking in the other direction. Then he realised there was a narrow crevice there, which probably led out, obliquely, into the open air. Grigia had slender bones, yet even he, if he made an immense effort, might perhaps be able to worm his way through. It was a way out. But at this moment he was perhaps already too weak to return to life, or he had no wish to, or he had lost consciousness.
    At this same hour, all efforts having proved unavailing and the futility of the undertaking having been recognised, Mozart Amadeo Hoffingott, down in the valley, gave orders for work to cease.
     

The Lady from Portugal
     
     
    In some old charters they were called the seigniors delle Catene, in others Herren von Ketten, both of which mean: of the Chains. They had come down from the North, stopping at the very threshold of the South. They proclaimed their loyalty now to the Guelph, now to the Ghibelline cause, as it suited them, and at bottom regarded themselves as owing no allegiance to anything or anyone but themselves.
    It was to one side of the great highway leading across the Brenner Pass into Italy, somewhere between Brixen and Trent, on an almost sheer, lone crag, that their castle stood, with a wild torrent coursing five hundred feet below it, raging so deafeningly that if a man put his head out of one of the windows, he could not have heard even the pealing of church bells in the room behind him. It was an impenetrable curtain of solid noise, through which no sound of the outer world could pass into the castle of the seigniors delle Catene. Only the gaze was unimpeded and, piercing that protective curtain, plunged headlong into the deep encircling panorama.
    All the lords delle Catene or von Ketten had the reputation of being keen and alert, and there was no advantage that escaped them as far as their arm could reach. And they were cruel as knives that always cut deep. They never turned red with anger or rosy with joy: in their anger they darkened, and in their joy they shone like gold—a shining as perfect and as rare. All of them, without exception through the years and the centuries, were said also to resemble each other in this : that white threads early mingled with the brown hair of head and beard, and that every one of them died before his sixtieth year; and in this too, that the enormous strength each sometimes displayed seemed not to have its seat and origin in his body, which was slender and of medium stature, but to emanate from the eyes and forehead. This, however, was merely the legend among their overawed neighbours and their villeins. They took whatever they could get, going about it honestly or accomplishing it by violence or cunning as the case might be, but always imperturbably, inexorably. Each lived out his short life without haste, and for each the end was swift, death cutting him down when he had accomplished his task.
    It was the custom among the Kettens not to form ties of marriage with any of the