Authors: Robert Musil
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, and 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, e
ven 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.