Young Torless

by Robert Musil

  He often sat for a long time-gloomily brooding-as it were hunched over himself.

  * * *

  This time too his parents had stayed for two days. There had been a lunching and dining together, smoking, a drive in the country; and now the express was to carry Törless's parents back to the capital.

  A faint vibration of the rails heralded the train's approach, and the bell clanging on the station roof sounded inexorably in the Frau Hofrat's ears.

  “Well, my dear Beineberg, so you'll keep an eye on this lad of mine for me, won't you?” Hofrat Törless said, turning to young Baron Beineberg, a lanky, bony boy with big ears that stuck out, and eyes that were expressive and intelligent.

  Törless, who was younger and smaller than the others, pulled a face at this repugnant suggestion of being given into his friend's charge; and Beineberg grinned, obviously flattered and with a shade of triumphant malice.

  “Really,” the Hofrat added, turning to the rest of them, “I should like to ask you all, if there should be anything at all the matter with my son, to let me know at once.

  This was going too far, and it drew from young Törless an infinitely wearied protest: “But, Father, what on earth do you think could happen to me?” although he was well used by now to having to put up with this excess of solicitude at every leave-taking.

  Meanwhile the others drew themselves up, clicking their heels, each straightening the elegant sword at his side. And the Hofrat went on: “One never knows what may happen. It is a great weight off my mind to know I would be instantly informed. After all, something might prevent you from writing.”

  At that moment the train drew in. Hofrat Törless embraced his son, Frau von Törless drew the veil tighter over her face to hide her tears, and one after the other the friends once more expressed their thanks for having been entertained. Then the guard slammed the door of the carriage.

  Once again Hofrat and Frau von Törless saw the high, bare back of the school building and the immense, long wall surrounding the park; and then there was nothing to left and to right but grey-brown fields and an occasional fruit-tree.

  * * *

  Meanwhile the boys had left the railway station and were walking, in two single files, along the two edges of the road-so avoiding at least the densest and most suffocating dust-towards the town, without talking to each other much.

  It was after five o'clock, and over the fields came a breath of something solemn and cold, a harbinger of evening.

  Törless began to feel very mournful.

  Perhaps it was because of his parents' departure, or perhaps it was caused only by the forbidding stolid melancholy that now lay like a dead weight on all the landscape, blurring the outlines of things, even a few paces away, with lack-lustre heaviness.

  The same dreadful indifference that had been blanketed over the surrounding countryside all that afternoon now came creeping across the plain, and after it, like a slimy trail, came the mist, stickily clinging to the fresh-ploughed fields and the leaden-grey acres of turnips. Törless did not glance to right or to left, but he felt it. Steadily as he walked he set his feet in the tracks gaping in the dust, the prints left by the footsteps of the boy in front-and he felt it as though it must be so, as a stony compulsion catching his whole life up and compressing it into this movement-steadily plodding on along this one line, along this one small streak being drawn out through the dust.

  When they came to a halt at a crossroads, where a second road and their own debouched into a round, worn patch of ground, and where a rotten timber sign-post pointed crookedly into the air, the tilted line of it, in such contrast with the surroundings, struck Törless as being like a cry of desperation.

  Again they walked on. Törless thought of his parents, of people he knew, of life. At this time of day people were changing for a party or deciding they would go to the theatre. And afterwards one might go to a restaurant, hear a band playing, sit at a café table. . . . One met interesting people. A flirtation, an adventure, kept one in suspense till the morning. Life went on revolving, churning out ever new and unexpected happenings, like a strange and wonderful wheel.

  Törless sighed over these thoughts, and at each step that bore him closer to the cramped narrowness of school something in him constricted, a noose was pulled tighter and tighter.

  Even now the bell was ringing in his ears. And there was nothing he dreaded so much as this ringing of the bell, which cut the day short, once and for all, like the savage slash of a knife.

  To be sure, there was nothing for him to experience, and his life passed along in a blur of perpetual indifference; but this ringing of the bell was an added mockery, which left him quivering with helpless rage against himself, his fate, and the day that was buried.

  Now you can't experience anything more at all, for twelve hours you can't experience anything, for twelve hours you're dead. .. . That was what this bell meant.

  * * *

  When the little band of friends reached the first low-built wretched cottages, this mood of gloom and introspection lifted from Törless. As though seized by some sudden interest, he raised his head and glanced intently into the smoky interior of the dirty little hovels they were passing.

  Outside the doors of most of them the women-folk were standing, in their wide skirts and coarse shifts, their broad feet caked with dust, their arms bare and brown.

  If they were young and buxom, some crude Slav jest would be flung at them. They would nudge each other and titter at 'the young gentlemen'; sometimes, too, one would utter a shriek when her breasts were too vigorously brushed against in passing, or would answer a slap on the buttocks with an insulting epithet and a burst of laughter. There were others who merely watched the swift passersby with a grave and angry look; and the peasant himself, if he happened to come on the scene, would smile awkwardly, half unsure what to make of it, half in good humour.

  Törless took no part in this display of overweening and precocious manliness.

  The reason for this lay doubtless to some extent in a certain timidity about sexual matters such as is characteristic of almost all only children, but chiefly in his own peculiar kind of sensuality, which was more deeply hidden, more forceful, and of a darker hue than that of his friends and more slow and difficult in its manifestations.

  While the others were making a show of shameless behaviour with the women, rather more for the sake of being 'smart' than from any lascivious urge, the taciturn little Törless's soul was in a state of upheaval, surging with real shamelessness.

  He looked through the little windows and the crooked, narrow

  doorways into the interior of the cottages with a gaze burning so hotly that there was all the time something like a delicate mesh dancing before his eyes.

  Almost naked children tumbled about in the mud of the yards; here and there as some woman bent over her work her skirt swung high, revealing the hollows at the back of her knees, or the bulge of a heavy breast showed as the linen tightened over it. It was as though all this were going on in some quite different, animal, oppressive atmosphere, and the cottages exuded a heavy, sluggish air, which Törless eagerly breathed in.

  He thought of old paintings that he had seen in museums without really understanding them. He was waiting for something, just as, when he stood in front of those paintings, he had always been waiting for something that never happened. What was it . . . ? It must be something surprising, something never beheld before, some monstrous sight of which he could not form the lightest notion; something of a terrifying, beast-like sensuality; something that would seize him in its claws and rend him, starting with his eyes; an experience that in some still utterly obscure way seemed to be associated with these women's soiled petticoats, with their roughened hands, with the low ceilings of their little rooms, with . . . with a besmirching of himself with the filth of these yards . . . No, no . . . Now he no longer felt anything but the fiery net before his eyes; the words did not say it; for it is not nearly so bad as the words make it
seem; it is something mute-a choking in the throat, a scarcely perceptible thought, and only if one insisted on getting it to the point of words would it come out like that. And then it has ceased to be anything but faintly reminiscent of whatever it was, as under huge magnification, when one not only sees everything more distinctly but also sees things that are not there at all. . . . And yet, for all that, it was something to be ashamed of.

  * *

  “Is Baby feeling homesick?” lie was suddenly asked, in, mocking tones, by von Reiting, that tall boy two years older than himself, who had been struck by Törless's silence and the darkness over his eyes. Törless forced an artificial and rather embarrassed smile to his lips; and he felt as though the malicious Reiting had been eavesdropping on what had been going on within him.

  He did not answer. But meanwhile they had reached the little town's church square, with its cobbles, and here they parted company.

  Törless and Beineberg did not want to go back yet, but the others had no leave to stay out any longer and returned to the school.

  The two boys had gone along to the cake shop.

  Here they sat at a little round table, beside a window overlooking the garden, under a gas candelabrum with its flames buzzing softly in the milky glass globes.

  They had made themselves thoroughly comfortable, having little glasses filled up now with this liqueur, now with another, smoking cigarettes, and eating pastries between whiles, enjoying the luxury of being the only customers. Although in one of the back rooms there might still be some solitary visitor sitting over his glass of wine, at least here in front all was quiet, and even the portly, aging proprietress seemed to have dozed off behind the counter.

  Törless gazed-but vaguely-through the window, out into the empty garden, where darkness was slowly gathering.

  Beineberg was talking-about India, as usual. For his father, the general, had as a young officer been there in British service. And he had brought back not only what any other European brought back with him, carvings, textiles, and little idols manufactured for sale to tourists, but something of a feeling, which he had never lost, for the mysterious, bizarre glimmerings of esoteric Buddhism. Whatever he had picked up there, and had come to know more of from his later reading, he had passed on to his son, even from the boy's early childhood.

  For the rest, his attitude to reading was an odd one. He was a cavalry officer and was not at all fond of books in general. Novels and philosophy he despised equally. When he read, he did not want to reflect on opinions and controversies, but, from the very instant of opening the book, to enter as through a secret portal into the midst of some very exclusive knowledge. Books that he read had to be such that the mere possession of them was as it were a secret sign of initiation and a pledge of more than earthly revelations. And this he found only in books of Indian philosophy, which to him seemed to be not merely books, but revelations, something real-keys such as were the alchemical and magical books of the Middle Ages.

  With them this healthy, energetic man, who observed his duties strictly and exercised his three horses himself almost every day, would usually shut himself up for the evening.

  Then he would pick out a passage at random and meditate on it, in the hope that this time it would reveal its inmost secret meaning to him. Nor was he ever disappointed, however often he had to admit that he had not yet advanced beyond the forecourts of the sacred temple.

  Thus it was that round this sinewy, tanned, open-air man there hovered something like the nimbus of an esoteric mystery. His conviction of being daily on the eve of receiving some overpoweringly great illumination gave him an air of reserve and superiority. His eyes were not dreamy, but calm and hard. The habit of reading books in which no single word could be shifted from its place without disturbing the secret significance, the careful, scrupulous weighing of every single sentence for its meaning and counter-meaning, its possible ambiguities, had brought that look into those eyes.

  Only occasionally did his thoughts lose themselves in a twilit state of agreeable melancholy. This happened when he thought of the esoteric cult bound up with the originals of the writings open before him, of the miracles that had emanated from them, stirring thousands, thousands of human beings who now, because of the vast distance separating him from them, appeared to him like brothers, while he despised the people round about him, whom he saw in all their detail. At such hours he grew despondent. He was depressed by the thought that he was condemned to spend his life far away from the sources of those holy powers and that his efforts were perhaps doomed in the end to be frustrated by these unfavourable conditions. But then, after he had been sitting gloomily over his books for a while, he would begin to have a strange feeling. True, his melancholy lost nothing of its oppressiveness-on the contrary, the sadness of it was still further intensified-but it no longer oppressed him. He would then feel more forlorn than ever, and as though defending a lost position; but in this mournfulness there lay a subtle relish, a pride in doing something utterly alien to the people about him, serving a divinity uncomprehended by the rest. And then it was that, fleetingly, something would flare up in his eyes that was like the ravishment of religious ecstasy.

  * * *

  Beineberg had talked himself to a standstill. In him the image of his eccentric father lived on in a kind of distorted magnification. Every feature was preserved; but what in the other had originally, perhaps, been no more than a mood that was conserved and intensified for the sake of its exclusiveness had in him grown hugely into a fantastic hope. That peculiarity of his father's, which for the older man was at bottom perhaps really no more than that last refuge for individuality which every human being-and even if it is only through his choice of clothes-must provide himself with in order to have something to distinguish him from others, had in him turned into the firm belief that he could achieve dominion over people by means of more than ordinary spiritual powers.

  Törless knew this talk by heart. It passed away over him, leaving him almost quite unmoved.

  He had now turned slightly from the window and was observing Beineberg, who was rolling himself a cigarette. And again lie felt the queer repugnance, the dislike of Beineberg, that would at times rise up in him. These slim, dark hands, which were now so deftly rolling the tobacco into the paper, were really-come to think of it-beautiful. Thin fingers, oval, beautifully curved nails: there was a touch of breeding, of elegance, about them. So there was too in the dark brown eyes. It was there also in the long-drawn lankiness of the whole body. To be sure, the ears did stick out more than would quite do, the face was small and irregular, and the sum total of the head's expression was reminiscent of a bat's. Nevertheless-Törless felt this quite clearly as he weighed the details against each other in the balance-it was not the ugly, it was precisely the more attractive features that made him so peculiarly uneasy.

  The thinness of the body-Beineberg was in the habit of lauding the steely, slender legs of Homeric champion runners as the ideal-did not at all have this effect on him. Törless had never yet tried to give himself an account of this, and for the moment he could not think of any satisfactory comparison. He would have liked to scrutinise Beineberg more closely, but then Beineberg would have noticed what he was thinking and he would have had to strike up some sort of conversation. Yet it was precisely thus-half looking at him, half filling the picture out in his imagination-that he was struck by the difference. If he thought the clothes away from the body, it became quite impossible to hold on to the notion of calm slenderness; what happened then, instantly, was that in his mind's eye he saw restless, writhing movements, a twisting of limbs and a bending of the spine such as are to be found in all pictures of martyrs' deaths, or in the grotesque performances of acrobats and 'rubber men' at fairs.

  And the hands, too, which he could certainly just as well have pictured in some beautifully expressive gesture, he could not imagine otherwise than in motion, with flickering fingers. And it was precisely on these hands, which were really Beineberg's
most attractive feature, that his greatest repugnance was concentrated. There was something prurient about them. That no doubt, was, what it amounted to. And there was for him something prurient, too, about the body, which he could not help associating with dislocated movements. But it was in the hands that this seemed to accumulate, and it seemed to radiate from them like a hint of some touch that was yet to come, sending a thrill of disgust coursing over Törless's skin. He himself was astonished at the notion, and faintly shocked. For this was now the second time today that something sexual had without warning, and irrelevantly, thrust its way in among his thoughts.

  Beineberg had taken up a newspaper, and now Törless could consider him closely.

  There was in reality scarcely anything to be found in his appearance that could have even remotely justified this sudden association of ideas in Törless's mind.

  And for all that, in spite of the lack of justification for it, his sense of discomfort grew ever more intense. The silence between them had lasted scarcely ten minutes, and yet Törless felt his repugnance gradually increasing to the utmost degree. A fundamental mood, a fundamental relationship between himself and Beineberg, seemed in this way to be manifesting itself for the first time; a mistrust that had always been lurking somewhere in the depths seemed all at once to have loomed up into the realm of conscious feeling.

  The atmosphere became more and more acutely uncomfortable. Törless was invaded by an urge to utter insults, but he could find no adequate words. He was uneasy with a sort of shame, as though something had actually happened between himself and Beineberg. His fingers began to drum restlessly on the table.

  * * *

  Finally, in order to escape from this strange state of mind, he looked out of the window again.

  Now Beineberg glanced up from the newspaper. Then he read a paragraph aloud, laid the paper aside, and yawned.