Young Torless (4 page)

* *

“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... .
I
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