The Confusions of Young Torless E-Book

Robert Musil

• Herausgeber: Lebooks Editora
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 308

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The Confusions Young Törless by Robert Musil is a psychologically intense novel that delves into the complexities of adolescence, morality, and authority within the confines of a rigid boarding school. Set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the story follows Törless, a young student who becomes increasingly aware of the moral ambiguities and darker impulses of human behavior as he witnesses — and passively participates in — the cruel treatment of a fellow student by his peers. Through Törless's internal conflict and philosophical reflections, Musil explores themes of power, conformity, identity, and the loss of innocence. The novel challenges traditional notions of right and wrong, capturing the unsettling transition between childhood and adulthood, where reason and instinct often collide. Since its publication, Young Törless has been recognized as a significant precursor to modernist literature and a powerful examination of psychological and social tensions. Its portrayal of institutional repression and the formation of authoritarian tendencies has led many to interpret it as a chilling foreshadowing of the rise of totalitarianism in 20th-century Europe. The novel's lasting relevance lies in its unflinching look at the origins of cruelty and the fragility of moral boundaries. The Confusions Young Törless remains a thought-provoking exploration of the human psyche and the formative experiences that shape our ethical and emotional lives.

Leseprobe

Robert Musil

THE CONFUSIONS OF YOUNG TORLESS

Original Title:

“Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß”

Contents

INTRODUCTION

THE CONFUSIONS YOUNG TÖRLESS

INTRODUCTION

Robert Musil

1880 – 1942

Robert Musilwas an Austrian writer of the German language, widely recognized as one of the most influential figures in 20th-century European literature. Born in Klagenfurt, in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, Musil is best known for his unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities, in which he explores the complexity of the modern individual, extreme rationality, and the crisis of values in contemporary society. Although his work received limited attention during his lifetime, today he is considered one of the great masters of modernist thought and narrative.

Early Life and Education

Robert Musil was born into a well-off middle-class family and received both technical and humanistic education. He began his studies at a military academy but soon turned to engineering and philosophy, disciplines that would profoundly influence his literary work. Musil studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University in Brno and later pursued philosophy and psychology in Berlin. His scientific and rationalist background would deeply inform his writing, characterized by a constant reflection on reason, morality, and identity.

Career and Contributions

Musil’s work is complex, dense, and intellectually demanding. His most famous novel, The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), begun in 1921 and published in parts in 1930 and 1932, stands as one of the pinnacles of modernist literature. Set in the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I, the novel follows the life of Ulrich, a character who embodies the fragmentation of the self and the individual’s struggle to find meaning in a world saturated with contradictory ideologies.

Musil employed irony, psychological insight, and a reflective prose style to portray the collapse of Enlightenment ideals and the rise of spiritual emptiness in interwar Europe. His narrative defies traditional conventions and is marked by long philosophical digressions that delve into logic, ethics, and the modern self.

Impact and Legacy

Though largely overlooked during his lifetime, Musil’s work has since been recognized as one of the most incisive expressions of 20th-century European thought. He was a fierce critic of blind scientism, nationalism, and ideological systems that depersonalize the individual. In The Man Without Qualities, he anticipated many of the key concerns of postmodernity, including the crisis of the subject, the loss of certainty, and the fragmentation of human experience.

Musil deeply influenced later generations of writers and thinkers, including Thomas Bernhard and W. G. Sebald. His ability to merge literature, philosophy, and social analysis places him among the essential figures of European cultural history. While his work presents significant challenges to readers, its richness offers profound rewards and invites continuous reinterpretation.

Robert Musil died in exile in Geneva in 1942, in relative poverty and without having completed his masterpiece. His death went largely unnoticed at the time, but the literary and philosophical value of his work has since been widely recognized. Today, Musil is regarded as a key author for understanding the tensions of modern thought and the existential dilemmas of the 20th century.

His writing represents a deep inquiry into human psychology, the power of rationality, and the limits of knowledge. Through his critical and rigorous lens, Musil left behind a body of work that, though unfinished, remains one of the most ambitious and intellectually powerful in Western literature

About the work

The Confusions Young Törless by Robert Musil is a psychologically intense novel that delves into the complexities of adolescence, morality, and authority within the confines of a rigid boarding school. Set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the story follows Törless, a young student who becomes increasingly aware of the moral ambiguities and darker impulses of human behavior as he witnesses — and passively participates in — the cruel treatment of a fellow student by his peers.

Through Törless’s internal conflict and philosophical reflections, Musil explores themes of power, conformity, identity, and the loss of innocence. The novel challenges traditional notions of right and wrong, capturing the unsettling transition between childhood and adulthood, where reason and instinct often collide.

Since its publication, Young Törless has been recognized as a significant precursor to modernist literature and a powerful examination of psychological and social tensions. Its portrayal of institutional repression and the formation of authoritarian tendencies has led many to interpret it as a chilling foreshadowing of the rise of totalitarianism in 20th-century Europe.

The novel's lasting relevance lies in its unflinching look at the origins of cruelty and the fragility of moral boundaries. The Confusions Young Törless remains a thought-provoking exploration of the human psyche and the formative experiences that shape our ethical and emotional lives.

“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

THE CONFUSIONS YOUNG TÖRLESS

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: just so do the figures on ancient towerclocks 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, 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, even a few paces away, with lacklustre 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 signpost 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.