YOUNG TÖRLESS
“Young Törless,” from Selected
Writings, by
Publishing Company
Reprinted with permission
“In some strange way we
devalue things as soon as we give utterance to them. We believe we have dived to
the uttermost depths of the abyss, and yet when we return to the surface the
drop of water on our pallid finger-tips no longer resembles the sea from which
it came. We think we have discovered a hoard of wonderful treasure-trove, yet
when we emerge again into the light of day we see that all we have brought back
with us is false stones and chips of glass. But for all this, the treasure goes
on glimmering in the darkness, unchanged.”
MAETERLINCK
It was a small station on the
long railroad to Russia. Four parallel lines of iron rails extended endlessly
in each direction, on the yellow gravel of the broad track-each fringed, as
with a dirty shadow, with the dark strip burnt into the ground by steam and
fumes. Behind the station, a low
oil-painted building, there was a broad, worn dirt-road leading up to the
railway embankment. It merged into the trampled ground, its edges indicated
only by the two rows of acacia trees that flanked it drearily, their thirsty
leaves suffocated by dust and soot.
Perhaps it was these sad
colours, or perhaps it was the wan, exhausted light of the afternoon sun,
drained of its strength by the haze: there was something indifferent, lifeless,
and mechanical about objects and human beings here, as though they were all
part of a scene in a puppet-theatre. From time to time, at regular intervals,
the station-master stepped out of his office and, always with the same turn of
his head, glanced up the long line towards the signal-box, where the signals
still failed to indicate the approach of the express each time, which had been
delayed for a long time at the frontier; then, always with the very same
movement of his arm, he would pull out his pocket-watch and, then, shaking his
head, he would disappear again: lust so do the figures on ancient towerclock
appear and disappear again with the striking of the hour.
On the broad, well-trodden
strip of ground between the railwayline and the station building a gay company
of young men was strolling up and down, walking to right and to left of a
middle-aged couple who were the centre of the somewhat noisy conversation. But
even the blitheness of this group did not ring quite true; it was as if their
merry laughter fell into silence only a few paces away, almost as if it had run
into some invisible but solid obstacle and there sunk to the ground.
Frau Hofrat Törless-this was
the lady, perhaps forty years of age-wore a thick veil concealing her sad eyes,
which were a little reddened from weeping. This was a leave-taking. And she
found it hard, yet once again, having to leave her only child among strangers
for so long a period, without any chance to watch protectively over her
darling.
For the little town lay far
away from the capital, in the eastern territories of the empire, in thinly
populated, dry arable country.
The reason why Frau Törless
had to leave her boy in this remote and inhospitable outlandish district was
that in this town there was a celebrated boarding-school, which in the previous
century had developed out of a religious foundation and had since remained
where it was, doubtless in order to safeguard the young generation, in its
years of awakening, from the corrupting influences of a large city.
It was here that the sons of
the best families in the country received their education, going on then to the
university, or into the army or the service of the State; in all such careers,
as well as for general social reasons, it was a particular advantage to have
been educated at W.
Four years previously this
consideration had caused Hofrat and Frau Törless to yield to their son’s
ambitious plea and arrange for him to enter this school.
This decision afterwards cost
many tears. For almost from the first moment when the doors of the school
closed behind him with irrevocable finality, little Törless suffered from
frightful, agonizing homesickness. Neither lessons, nor games on the wide
luxuriant grasslands of the park, nor the other distractions that the school
offered its inmates, could hold his attention; he took almost no interest in these
things. He saw everything only as through a veil and even during the day often
had trouble in gulping down an obstinately rising sob; at night he always cried
himself to sleep.
He wrote letters home almost daily,
and he lived only in these letters; everything else he did seemed to him only a
shadowy, unmeaning string of events, indifferent stations on his way, like the
marking of the hours on a
clock-face. But when he wrote he felt within himself something that made him
distinct, that set him apart; something in him rose, like an island of
miraculous suns and flashing colours, out of the ocean of grey sensations that
lapped around him, cold and indifferent, day after day. And when by day, at
games or in class, he remembered that he would write his letter in the evening,
it was as though he were wearing, hidden on his person, fastened to an
invisible chain, a golden key with which, as soon as no one was looking, he
would open the gate leading into marvellous gardens.
The remarkable thing about it
was that this sudden consuming fondness for his parents was for himself
something new and disconcerting. He had never imagined such a thing before, he
had gone to boarding-school gladly and of his own free will, indeed he had
laughed when at their first leave-taking his mother had been unable to check
her tears; and only later, when he had been on his own for some days and been
getting on comparatively well, did it gush up in him suddenly and with
elemental force.
He took it for homesickness
and believed he was missing his parents. But it was in reality something much
more indefinable and complex. For the object of this longing, the image of his
parents, actually ceased to have any place in it at all: I mean that certain
plastic, physical memory of a loved person which is not merely remembrance but
something speaking to all the senses and preserved in all the senses, so that
one cannot do anything without feeling the other person silent and invisible at
one’s side. This soon faded out, like a resonance that vibrates only for a
while. In other words, by that time Törless could no longer conjure up before
his eyes the image of his ‘dear, dear parents’-as he usually called them in his
thoughts. If he tried to do so, what rose up in its place was the boundless
grief and longing from which he suffered so much and which yet held him in its
spell, its hot flames causing him both agony and rapture. And so the thought of
his parents more and more became a mere pretext, an external means to set going
this egoistic suffering in him, which enclosed him in his voluptuous pride as
in the seclusion of a chapel where, surrounded by hundreds of flickering
candles and hundreds of eyes gazing down from sacred images, incense was wafted
among the writhing flagellants ...
Later, as his ‘homesickness’
became less violent and gradually passed off, this, its real character, began
to show rather more clearly. For in its place there did not come the
contentment that might have been expected; on the contrary, what it left in
young Törless’s soul was a void. And this nothingness, this emptiness in
himself, made him realise that it was no mere yearning he had lost, but
something positive, a spiritual force, something that had flowered in him under
the guise of grief.
But now it was all over, and
this well-spring of a first sublime bliss had made itself known to him only by
its drying up.
At this time the passionate
evidence of the soul’s awakening vanished out of his letters, and in its place
came detailed descriptions of life at school and the new friends he had made.
He himself felt impoverished
by this change, and bare, like a little tree experiencing its first winter
after its first still fruitless blossoming.
But his parents were glad.
They loved him with strong, unthinking, animal affection. Every time after he
had been home on holiday from boarding-school, and gone away again, to the Frau
Hofrat the house once more seemed empty and deserted, and for some days after
each of these visits it was with tears in her eyes that she went through the
rooms, here and there caressing some object on which the boy’s gaze had rested
or which his fingers had held. And both parents would have let themselves be
torn to pieces for his sake.
The clumsy pathos and
passionate, mutinous sorrow of his letters had given them grievous concern and
kept them in a state of high-pitched sensitiveness; the blithe, contented
light-heartedness that followed upon it gladdened them again and, feeling that
now a crisis had been surmounted, they did all they could to encourage this new
mood.
Neither in the one phase nor
in the other did they recognise the symptoms of a definite psychological
development; on the contrary, they accepted both the anguish and its
appeasement as merely a natural consequence of the situation. It escaped them
that a young human being, all on his own, had made his first, unsuccessful attempt
to develop the forces of his inner life.
* * *
Törless, however, now felt
very dissatisfied and groped this way and that, in vain, for something new that
might serve as a support to him.
* * *
At this period there was an
episode symptomatic of something still germinating in Törless, which was to
develop significantly in him later.
What happened was this: one day
the youthful Prince H. entered the school, a scion of one of the oldest, most
influential, and most conservative noble families in the empire.
All the others thought him
boring, and found his gentle gaze affected; the manner in which he stood with
one hip jutting forward and, while talking, languidly interlocked and unlocked
his fingers, they mocked as effeminate. But what chiefly aroused their scorn
was that he had been brought to the school not by his parents but by his former
tutor, a doctor of divinity who was a member of a religious order.
On Törless, however, he made
a strong impression from the very first moment. Perhaps the fact that he was a
prince and by birth entitled to move in Court circles had something to do with
it; but however that might be, he was a different kind of person for Törless to
get to know.
The silence and tranquillity
of an ancient and noble country seat, and of devotional exercises, seemed
somehow to cling about him still. When he walked, it was with smooth, lithe
movements and with that faintly diffident attitude of withdrawal, that
contraction of the body, which comes from being accustomed to walking very
erect through a succession of vast, empty rooms, where any other sort of person
seems to bump heavily against invisible corners of the empty space around him.
And so for Törless
acquaintance with the prince became a source of exquisite psychological
enjoyment. It laid the foundations in him of that kind of knowledge of human
nature which teaches one to recognise and appreciate another person by the
cadence of his voice, by the way he picks up and handles a thing, even, indeed,
by the timbre of his silences and the expressiveness of his bodily attitude in
adjusting himself to a space, a setting-in other words, by that mobile,
scarcely tangible, and yet essential, integral way of being a human entity, a
spirit, that way of being it which encloses the core, the palpable and
debatable aspect of him, as flesh encloses the mere bones-and in so
appreciating to prefigure for oneself the mental aspect of his personality.
During this brief period
Törless lived as in an idyll. He was not put out by his new friend’s
devoutness, which was really something quite alien to him, coming as he did
from a free-thinking middle-class family. He accepted it without a qualm, going
so far as to see it, indeed, as something especially admirable in the prince,
since it intensified the essential quality of this other boy’s personality,
which he felt was so unlike his own as to be in no way comparable.
In the prince’s company he
felt rather as though he were in some little chapel far off the main road. The
thought of actually not belonging there quite vanished in the enjoyment of, for
once, seeing the daylight through stained glass; and he let his gaze glide over
the profusion of futile gilded agalma in this other person’s soul until he had
absorbed at least some sort of indistinct picture of that soul, just as though
with his finger-tips he were tracing the lines of an arabesque, not thinking
about it, merely sensing the beautiful pattern of it, which twined according
to some weird laws beyond his ken.
And then suddenly there came
the break between them.
Törless blundered badly, as
he had to admit to himself afterwards.
The fact was: on one occasion
they did suddenly find themselves arguing about religion. And as soon as that
happened, it was really all over and done with. For as though independently of
himself, Törless’s intellect lashed out, inexorably, at the sensitive young
prince; he poured out torrents of a rationalist’s scorn upon him, barbarously
desecrating the filigree habitation in which the other boy’s soul dwelt. And
they parted in anger.
After that they never spoke
to each other again. Törless was indeed obscurely aware that what he had done
was senseless, and a glimmer of intuitive insight told him that his wooden
yardstick of rationality had untimely shattered a relationship that was subtle
and full of rare fascination. But this was something he simply had not been
able to help. It left him, probably for ever, with a sort of yearning for what
had been; yet he seemed to have been caught up in another current, which was
carrying him further and further away in a different direction.
And then some time later the
prince, who had not been happy there, left the school.
* * *
Now everything around Törless
was empty and boring. But meanwhile he had been growing older, and with the
onset of adolescence something began to rise up in him, darkly and steadily.
At this stage of his development he made some new friends, of a kind
corresponding to the needs of his age, which were to be of very great
importance to him. He became friends with Beineberg and Reiting, and with Mote
and Hofmeier, the boys in whose company he was today seeing his parents off at
the railway station.
Remarkably enough, these were
the boys who counted as the worst of his year; they were gifted and, it went
without saying, of good family, but at times they were wild and reckless to the
point of brutality. And that it should be precisely their company to which
Törless now felt so strongly drawn was doubtless connected with his own lack of
self-certainty, which had become very marked in-deed since he had lost touch
with the prince. It was indeed the logical continuation of that break, for,
like the break itself, it indicated some fear of all over-subtle toyings with
emotions; and by contrast with that sort of thing the nature of these other
friends stood out as sound and sturdy, giving life its due.
Törless entirely abandoned
himself to their influence, for the situation in which his mind now found
itself was approximately this: At schools of the kind known as the Gymnasium,
at his age, one has read Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, and perhaps even
some modern writers too, and this, having been half digested, is then written
out of the system again, excreted, as it were, through the finger-tips. Roman
tragedies are written, or poems, of the most sensitive lyrical kind, that go
through their paces garbed in punctuation that is looped over whole pages at a
time, as in delicate lace: things that are in themselves ludicrous, but which
are of inestimable value in contributing to a sound development. For these
associations originating outside, and these borrowed emotions, carry young people
over the dangerously soft spiritual ground of the years in which they need to
be of some significance to themselves and nevertheless are still too incomplete
to have any real significance. Whether any residue of it is ultimately left in
the one, or nothing in the other, does not matter; later each will somehow come
to terms with himself, and the danger exists only in the stage of transition.
If at that period one could bring a boy to see the ridiculousness of himself,
the ground would give way under him, or he would plunge headlong like a
somnambulist who, suddenly awaking, sees nothing but emptiness around him.
That illusion, that conjuring
trick for the benefit of the personality’s development, was missing in this school.
For though the classics were there in the library, they were considered
‘boring’, and for the rest there were only volumes of sentimental romances and
drearily humorous tales of army life.
Young Törless had read just
about all of them in his sheer greed for books, and this or that conventionally
tender image from one story or another did sometimes linger for a while in his
mind; but none had any influence-any real influence-on his character.
At this period it seemed that
he had no character at all.
Under the influence of this
reading, he himself now and then would write a little story or begin an epic
romance, and in his excitement over the sufferings of his heroes, crossed in
love, his cheeks would flush, his pulse quicken, and his eyes shine.
But when he laid down his
pen, it was all over; his spirit lived only, as it were, while in motion. And
so too he found it possible to dash off a poem or a story at any time, whenever
it might be required of him. The doing of it excited him, yet he never took it
quite seriously, and this occupation in itself did not strike him as important.
Nothing of it was assimilated into his personality, nor did it originate within
his personality. All that happened was that under some external pressure he
underwent emotions that transcended the indifference of ordinary life, just as
an actor needs the compulsion that a role imposes on him.
These were cerebral
reactions. But what is felt to be character or soul, a person’s inner contour
or aura, that is to say, the thing in contrast with which the thoughts,
decisions, and actions appear random, lacking in characteristic quality, and
easily exchangeable for others-the thing that had, for instance, bound Törless
to the prince in a manner beyond the reach of any intellectual judgment-this
ultimate, immovable background seemed to be utterly lost to Törless at this
period.
In his friends it was
enjoyment of sport, the animal delight in being alive, that prevented them from
feeling the need for anything of this kind, just as at the Gymnasium the
want is supplied by the sport with literature.
But Törless’s constitution
was too intellectual for the one, and, as for the other, life at this school,
where one had to be in a perpetual state of readiness to settle arguments with
one’s fists, made him keenly sensitive to the absurdity of such borrowed
sentiment. So his being took on a vagueness, a sort of inner helplessness, that
made it impossible for him to be sure where he stood.
He attached himself to these
new friends because he was impressed by their wildness. Since he was
ambitious, he now and then even tried to outvie them in this. But each time he
would leave off half-way, and on this account had to put up with no small
amount of gibes, which would scare him back into himself again. At this
critical period the whole of his life really consisted in nothing but these
efforts, renewed again and again, to emulate his rough, more masculine friends
and, counterbalancing that, a deep inner indifference to all such strivings.
Now, when his parents came to
see him, so long as they were alone he was quiet and shy. Each time he dodged
his mother’s affectionate caresses under one pretext or another. He would
really have liked to yield to them, but he was ashamed, as though he were being
watched by his friends.
His parents let it pass as
the awkwardness of adolescence.
Then in the afternoon the
whole noisy crowd would come along. They played cards, ate, drank, told
anecdotes about the masters, arid smoked the cigarettes that the Hofrat had
brought from the capital.
This jollity pleased and
reassured the parents.
That there were, in between
times, hours of a different kind for Törless was something they did not know.
And recently there had been more and more of such hours. There were moments
when life at school became a matter of utter indifference to him. Then the
putty of his everyday concerns dropped out and, with nothing more to bind them
together, the hours of his life fell apart.
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.
With the breaking of the
silence the spell that had bound Törless was also broken. Casual words began to
flow over the awkward moment, blotting it out. There had been a momentary
alertness, but now the old indifference was there again. .
“How long have we still got?”
Törless asked.
“Two and a half hours.”
Suddenly shivering, Törless
hunched up his shoulders. Once again he felt the paralysing weight of the
constriction he was about to re-enter, the school time-table, the daily
companionship of his friend. Even that dislike of Beineberg would cease which
seemed, for an instant, to have created a new situation.
What’s for supper tonight?”
“I don’t know.”
“What have we got tomorrow?”
“Mathematics.”
“Oh. Was there something to
prepare?”
“Yes. A few new trigonometry
theorems. But you needn’t worry about them, they’re not difficult.”
“And what else?”
“Divinity.”
“Divinity.... Oh, well.
That’s something to look forward to... .1 think when I really get going I could
just as easily prove that twice two is five as that there can be only one God.
. .
Beineberg glanced up at
Törless mockingly. “It’s quite funny how you go on about that. It strikes me
almost as if you really enjoyed it. Anyway, there’s a positive glare of
enthusiasm in your eyes. . .
“And why not? Don’t you think it’s fun? There’s always a
point you get to where you stop knowing whether you’re just making it all up or
if what you’ve made up is truer than you are
yourself.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, I don’t mean
literally, of course. Naturally, you always know you are making it up. But
all the same, every now and then the whole thing strikes you as being so
credible that you’re brought up standing, in a way, in the grip of your own
ideas.”
“Well, but what is it about
it you enjoy, then?”
“Just that: you get a sort of
jerk in your head, a sort of dizziness, a shock...”
“Oh, I say, shut up! That’s
all foolery.”
“Well, I didn’t say it
wasn’t. But still, so far as I’m concerned, it’s more interesting than anything
else at school.”
“It’s just a way of doing
gymnastics with your brain. But it doesn’t get you anywhere, all the same.”
“No,” Törless said, looking
out into the garden again. Behind his back-as though from a long way off-he
heard the buzzing of the gas-lights. He was preoccupied by an emotion rising up
in him, mournfully and like a mist.
“It doesn’t get you anywhere.
You’re right about that. But it doesn’t do to tell yourself that. How much of
all the things we spend our whole time in school doing is really going to get
anyone anywhere? What do we get anything out of? I mean for ourselves-you see
what I mean? In the evening you know you’ve lived another day, you’ve learnt
this and that, you’ve kept up with the time-table, hut still, you’re
empty-inwardly, I mean. Right inside, you’re still hungry, so to speak. .
Beineberg muttered something
about exercising the mind by way of preparation-not yet being able to start on
anything-later on...
“Preparation? Exercise? What for?
Have you got any definite idea of it? I dare say you’re hoping for
something, but it’s just as vague to you as it is to me. It’s like this:
everlastingly waiting for something you don’t know anything about except that
you’re waiting for it. . . . It’s so boring.
“Boring. . .” Beineberg
drawled in mimicry, wagging his head.
Törless was still gazing out
into the garden. He thought he could hear the rustling of the withered leaves
being blown into drifts by the wind. Then came that moment of utter stillness
which always
occurs a little while before
the descent of complete darkness. The shapes of things, which had been sinking
ever more deeply into the dusk, and the blurring, dissolving colours of
things-for an instant it all seemed to pause, to hover, as it were with a
holding of the breath ...
“You know, Beineberg,”
Törless said, without turning round, ‘~when it’s getting dark there always seem
to be a few moments that are sort of different. Every time I watch it happening
I remember the same thing: once when I was quite small I was playing in the
woods at this time of evening. My nursemaid had wandered off somewhere. I
didn’t know she had, and so I still felt as if she were nearby. Suddenly
something made me look up. I could feel I was alone. It was suddenly all so
quiet. And when I looked around it was as though the trees were standing in a
circle round me, all silent, and looking at me. I began to cry. I felt the
grownups had deserted me and abandoned me to inanimate beings.... What is it? I
still often get it. What’s this sudden silence that’s like a language we can’t
hear?”
“I don’t know the thing you mean.
But why shouldn’t things have a language of their own? After all, there are no
definite grounds for asserting that they haven’t a soul!”
Törless did not answer. He
did not care for Beineberg’s speculative view of the matter.
But after a while Beineberg
went on: “Why do you keep on staring out of the window? What is there to be
seen?”
“I’m still wondering what it
can be.” But actually he had gone on to thinking about something else, which he
did not want to speak of. That high tension, that harkening as if some solemn
mystery might become audible, and the burden of gazing right into the midst of
the still undefined relationships of things-all this was something he had been
able to endure only for a moment. Then lie had once again been overcome by the
sense of solitude and forlornness which always followed this excessive demand
upon his resources. He felt: there’s something in this that’s still too
difficult for me. And his thoughts took refuge in something else, which was
also implicit in it all, but which, as it were, lay only in the background and
biding its time: loneliness.
From the deserted garden a
leaf now and then fluttered up against the lit window, tearing a streak of
brightness into the darkness great future ahead of them usually go through a
period abounding in humiliations.
Törless’s taste for certain
moods was the first hint of a psychological development that was later to
manifest itself as a strong sense of wonder. The fact was that later he was to
have-and indeed to be dominated by-a peculiar ability: he could not help
frequently experiencing events, people, things, and even himself, in such a way
as to feel that in it all there was at once some insoluble enigma and some
inexplicable kinship for which he could never quite produce any evidence. Then
these things would seem tangibly comprehensible, and yet he could never
entirely resolve them into words and ideas. Between events and himself, indeed
between his own feelings and some inmost self that craved understanding of
them, there always remained a dividing-line, which receded before his desire,
like a horizon, the closer he tried to come to it. Indeed, the more accurately
he circumscribed his feelings with thoughts, and the more familiar they became
to him, the stranger and more incomprehensible did they seem to become, in
equal measure; so that it no longer even seemed as though they were retreating
before him, but as though he himself were withdrawing from them, and yet
without being able to shake off the illusion of coming closer to them.
This queer antithesis, which
was so difficult for him to grasp, later occupied an important phase of his
spiritual development; it was something that tore at his soul, as though to
rend it apart, and for a long time it was his soul’s chief problem and the
chief threat to it.
For the present, however, the
severity of these struggles was indicated only by a frequent sudden lassitude,
alarming him, as it were, from a long way off, when ever some ambiguous, odd
mood such as this just now-brought him a foreboding of it. Then he would seem
to himself as powerless as a captive, as one who had been abandoned and shut
away as much from himself as from others. At such times he could have screamed
with desperation and the horror of emptiness; but instead of doing anything of
the kind he would avert himself from this solemn and expectant, tormented,
wearied being within himself and-still aghast at his abrupt renunciation-would
begin to listen, more and more enchanted by their warm, sinful breath, to the
whispering voices of his solitude.
behind it. Then the darkness
seemed to shrink and withdraw, only in the next instant to advance again and
stand motionless as a wall outside the window. This darkness was a world apart.
It had descended upon the earth like a horde of black enemies, slaughtering or
banishing human beings, or, whatever it did, blotting out all trace of them.
And it seemed to Törless that
he was glad of this. At this moment he had no liking for human beings-for all
who were adults. He never liked them when it was dark. He was in the habit then
of cancelling them out of his thoughts. After that the world seemed to him like
a sombre, empty house, and in his breast there was a sense of awe and horror,
as though he must now search room after room-dark rooms where he did not know
what the corners might conceal-groping his way across thresholds that no human
foot would ever step on again, until-until in one room the doors would suddenly
slam behind him and before him and he would stand confronting the mistress of
the black hordes herself. And at the same instant the locks would snap shut in
all the doors through which he had come; and only far beyond, outside the
walls, would the shades of darkness stand on guard like black eunuchs, warding
off any human approach.
This was his kind of
loneliness since he had been left in the lurch that time-in the woods, where he
had wept so bitterly. It held for him the lure of woman and of something
monstrous. He felt it as a woman, but its breath was only a gasping in his
chest, its face a whirling forgetfulness of all human faces, and the movements
of its hands a shuddering all through his body....
He feared this fantasy, for
he was aware of the perverted lust in the secrecy of it, and he was disturbed
by the thought that such imaginings might gain more and more power over him.
But they would overwhelm him just when he believed himself to be most serious
and most pure. It happened, perhaps, as a reaction to those moments when he had
an inkling of another emotional awareness, which, though it was already
implicit in him, was as yet beyond his years. For there is, in the development
of every fine moral energy, such an early point where it weakens the soul whose
most daring experience it will perhaps be some day-just as if it had first to
send down its roots, gropingly, to disturb the ground that they will afterwards
hold together; and it is for this reason that boys with a
* * *
Törless suddenly proposed
that they should pay and go. A look of understanding gleamed in Beineberg’s
eyes: he knew and shared the mood. Törless was revolted by this concord, and
his dislike of Beineberg quickened again; he felt himself degraded by their
having anything in common.
But that had by now
practically become part of it all. Degradation is but one solitude more and yet
another dark wall.
And so, without speaking to
each other, they set out on a certain road.
There must have been a light
shower of rain a few minutes earlier-the air was moist and heavy, a misty halo trembled
round the street-lamps, and here and there the pavement glimmered.
Törless’s sword clattered on
the stones, and he drew it closer to his side. But there was still the sound of
his heels on the pavement, and even that sent a queer shiver through him. After
a while, leaving the pavements of the town behind them, they had soft ground
underfoot and were walking along wide village streets towards the river. The
water rolled along, black and sluggish, and with deep gurgling sounds under
the wooden bridge. There was a single lamp there, with broken, dusty glass. Now
and then the gleam of the light, which was blown uneasily hither and thither by
the gusts of wind, would fall on a rippling wave below and dissolve on its
crept. The rounded foot-planks of the bridge yielded under every step . . .
revolving forward, then back again. .
Beineberg stopped. The
farther bank was thickly wooded, and along the road, which turned at a
right-angle on the other side and continued along the river, the trees had the
menacing look of a black, impenetrable wall. Only if one looked carefully did
one discover a narrow, hidden path leading straight on and into it. A~ they
went on their way through the thick, rank undergrowth, which brushed against
their clothes, they were continually showered with drops. After a while they
had to stop again and strike a match. It was very quiet now; even the gurgling
of the river could not be heard. Suddenly from the distance there came a vague,
broken sound. It was like a cry or a warning. Or perhaps it was merely like a
call from some inarticulate creature that, somewhere ahead, was breaking its
way through the bushes, like themselves. They walked on towards this sound,
stopped again, and again walked on. All in all it was perhaps a quarter of an
hour before, with a long breath of relief, they recognized loud voices and the
notes of a concertina.
Now the trees grew more
sparsely, and a few paces further they found themselves standing on the edge of
a clearing, in the midst of which there was a squat, square building, two
storeys high.
It was the old pump-room. In
former times it had been used by the people of the little town and peasants
from the neighbouring countryside for taking the waters; but for years now it
had been almost empty. Only the ground floor was still used, as a tavern, and
one that was of ill repute.
The two boys stopped for a
moment, listening.
Törless was just taking a
step forward, about to issue forth from the thicket, when there was a sound of
heavy boots tramping on the floor-boards inside the house and a drunken man
came staggering out of the door. Behind him, in the shadow of the doorway,
stood a woman, and they could hear her whispering hurriedly and angrily, as
though demanding something from the man. He merely laughed, swaying on his
feet. Then it seemed that the woman was pleading, but again the words were
indistinguishable; all that could be made out was the coaxing, cajoling tone of
the voice. Now she advanced further and laid a hand on the man’s shoulder. The
moon shone upon her, lighting up her petticoat, her jacket, her pleading smile.
The man stared straight ahead of him, shook his head, and kept his hands firmly
in his pockets. Then he spat and pushed the woman away, perhaps because of
something she had said. Now their voices were raised and what they said could
be understood.
“-so you won’t pay up, eh?
You-!”
“You just take yourself off
upstairs, you dirty slut!”
“The cheek! You peasant clod,
you!”
By way of answer the drunken
man bent down, with a clumsy movement, and picked up a stone. “If you don’t
clear off, you silly bitch, I’ll knock your block off!”, and he raised his arm,
preparing to throw the stone at her. T8rless heard the woman running up the
steps with a last cry of abuse.
The man stood still for a
moment, irresolutely holding the stone in his hand. He laughed, glanced up at
the sky, where the moon floated, wine-yellow, among black clouds, and then
stared at the dark mass of the thicket, as though he were wondering whether to
go that way. Warily Törless drew his foot back; he could feel his heart
hammering in his throat. Finally, however, the drunken man seemed to reach a
decision. The stone dropped from his hand. With a raucous, triumphant laugh he
shouted an obscenity up at the window; then he disappeared round the corner.
The two boys stood motionless
a while longer. “Did you recognise her?” Beineberg whispered. “lt was Bozena.”
Törless did not answer; he was listening, trying to make sure that the drunken
man was not coming back again. Then Beineberg gave him a push forward. In
swift, wary dashes-avoiding the wedge of light from the ground-floor
window-they crossed the clearing and entered the dark house. A wooden
staircase, narrow and twisting, led up to the first floor. Here their footsteps
must have been heard, or perhaps the clatter of their swords against the
woodwork, for the door of the tavern room opened and someone came out to see
who was in the house; at the same time the concertina ceased playing, and there
was a momentary hush in the talk, a pause of suspense.
Startled, Törless pressed
close to the staircase wall. But in spite of the darkness it seemed he had been
seen, for he heard the barmaid’s jeering voice as the door was shut again, and whatever
she said was followed by guffaws of laughter.
On the first-floor landing it
was pitch-dark. They hardly dared to take another step for fear of knocking
something over and making a noise. Fumbling excitedly, they felt their way
along towards the door-handle.
* * *
As a peasant girl Bozena had gone to the capital, where she went into service and in time bec