by Robert Musil
Törless felt a certain curiosity.
The lockers, which were at the back of the room, were long cupboards subdivided into compartments that could be locked, and in them the boys kept their letters, books, money, and all their little pet possessions.
For some time now various boys had been complaining that they had missed small sums of money, but none of them had anything definite to go on.
Beineberg was the first to be able to say with certainty that the previous week he had been robbed of a considerable sum of money. But only Reiting and Törless knew of it.
They suspected the servants.
“Go on, tell us!” Törless urged.
But Reiting made a swift sign to him. “Sssh! Later. Nobody knows anything about it yet.”
“Servant?” Törless whispered.
“Well, give us some idea, anyway. Who?”
Reiting turned away from the others and said in a low voice: “B.” No one else had heard anything of this whispered conversation. Törless was thunderstruck at what he had learnt. B.? That could only be Basini. And surely that wasn't possible! His mother was a wealthy woman, and his guardian an 'Excellency'. Törless could not bring himself to believe it, and yet time and again the story Bozena had told came to his mind.
He could scarcely wait for the moment when the others went in to supper. Beineberg and Reiting remained behind, on the pretext of having had so much to eat that afternoon.
Reiting suggested that it would be better to go 'upstairs' and talk about it there.
They went out into the corridor, which stretched endlessly in each direction outside the classroom. The flickering gaslight lit it only in patches, and their footsteps echoed from recess to recess, however lightly they walked.
About fifty yards from the door there was a staircase leading up to the second floor, where the natural science 'specimen room was, and other collections that were used in teaching. There were also a large number of empty rooms.
From there on the stairs became narrow and went up, in short flights at right-angles to each other, to the attics. And-as old buildings are often whimsical in plan, with an abundance of nooks and crannies and unmotivated steps-this staircase actually went a considerable way above the level of the attics, so that on the other side of the heavy, iron, locked door, which blocked the way further, it was necessary to go down again, by a flight of wooden steps, in order to reach the floor of the attic.
What this meant was that on this side of the attic door was waste space some yards high, reaching up into the rafters. In this place, which hardly anybody ever entered, old stage-scenery had been stored, dating from school theatricals in the remote past.
Even at brightest noon the daylight on this staircase was reduced
to a twilight, which was choked with dust, for this way into the attic, lying as it did in a remote wing of the enormous building, was almost never used.
From the top landing Beineberg swung himself over the bannister and, still holding on to the bars, let himself drop between the pieces of scenery. Reiting and Törless followed him. There they got a footing on a crate that had been specially dragged along for that purpose, and from there jumped to the floor.
Even if the eye of someone standing on the stairs had become accustomed to the darkness, that person could not possibly have seen anything there but an irregular and indistinct jumble of variously shaped pieces of stage-scenery all piled up together.
But when Beineberg shifted one of these pieces of scenery slightly to one side, a narrow tunnel opened up before the boys.
They hid the crate that had aided them in their descent, and entered the tunnel.
Here it became completely dark, and one had to know one's way very well in order to make progress. Now and then one of the big pieces of canvas scenery rustled, when they brushed against it; there was a scurrying on the floors as of startled mice; and their nostrils were filled with a musty smell as though from long-unopened trunks.
The three boys, who knew the way well, nevertheless went along very cautiously, step for step, careful to avoid tripping on any of the ropes pulled tight across the floor as traps and alarm-signals.
It was some time before they reached a little door on their right, only a short distance from the wall separating this place from the attic.
When Beineberg opened this door they found themselves in a narrow room under the top landing. It looked fantastic enough in the light of a small, flickering oil-lamp, which Beineberg had lit.
The ceiling was horizontal only where it was directly under the landing, and even here only just high enough for one to be able to stand upright. Towards the back it sloped away, following the line of the stairs, until it ended in an acute angle. The thin partition wall at the opposite side of the room divided the attic from the staircase, and the third wall was formed by the brickwork on which the stairs rested. It was only the fourth wall, in which the door was, that seemed to have been added specially. Doubtless it had been built with the intention of making a small room here to keep tools in, unless perhaps it owed its existence only to a whim on the part of the architect, in whom this dark nook had inspired the medieval notion of walling it up to make a hiding-place.
However that might be, apart from these three boys there was doubtless scarcely anyone in the whole school who knew of its existence, and still less anyone who thought of putting it to any use.
And so they had been free to furnish it entirely according to their own fantastic notions.
The walls were completely draped with some blood-red bunting that Reiting and Beineberg had purloined from one of the store-rooms, and the floor was covered with a double layer of thick woolly horse-blanket, of the kind that was used in the dormitories as an extra blanket in winter. In the front part of the room stood some low boxes, covered with material, which served as seats; at the back, in the acute angle formed by the sloping ceiling and the floor, a sort of bed had been made, large enough for three or four people, and this part could be darkened by the drawing of a curtain, separating it from the rest of the room.
On the wall by the door hung a loaded revolver.
Törless did not like this room. True, the constriction and isolation it afforded appealed to him; it was like being deep inside a mountain, and the smell of the dusty old stage-scenery gave rise to all sorts of vague sensations in him. But the concealment, those trip-ropes to give the alert, and this revolver, which was meant to provide the utmost illusion of defiance and secrecy, struck him as ridiculous. It was as though they were trying to pretend they were leading the life of bandits.
Actually the only reason why Törless joined in was that he did not want to lag behind the other two. Beineberg and Reiting themselves took the whole thing very seriously indeed. Törless knew that. He also knew that Beineberg had skeleton keys that would open the doors of all the cellars and attics in the school building, and that he often slipped away from lessons for several hours in order to sit somewhere-high up in the rafters of the roof, or underground in one of the many semiruinous, labyrinthine vaults-by the light of a little lamp, which he always carried about with him, reading adventure stories or thinking his thoughts about supernatural things.
He knew similar things of Reiting, who also had his hidden retreats, where he kept secret diaries; and these diaries were filled with audacious plans for the future and with exact records of the staging, and course of the numerous intrigues that he instituted among the other boys. For Reiting knew no greater pleasure than to set people against each other, subduing one with the aid of each other and revelling in favours and flatteries obtained by extortion, in which he could still sense the resistance of his victim's hate.
“I'm practising,” was the only excuse he gave, and he gave it with an affable laugh. It was also by way of practising that almost daily he would box in some out-of-the-way place, against a wall, 3 tree, or a table, to strengthen his arms and harden his hands with callouses.
Törless knew about all this, but he could understa
nd it only up to a certain point. He had several times accompanied both Reiting and Beineberg on their singular paths. The fantastic element in it all did in fact appeal to him. And what he also liked was afterwards coming back into the daylight, walking among the other boys, and being back in the midst of their jollity, while he could still feel the excitements of solitude and the hallucinations of darkness trembling his eyes and ears. But when Beineberg or Reiting, for the sake of having someone to talk to about themselves, on such occasions expounded what impelled them to all this, his understanding failed. He even considered Reiting somewhat overstrung. For Reiting was particularly fond of talking about how his father, who had one day disappeared, had been a strangely unsettled person. His name was, as a matter of fact, supposed to be only an incognito, concealing that of a very exalted family. He expected that his mother would make him acquainted with far-reaching claims that be would in due course put forward; he had day-dreams of coups d'etat and high politics, and hence intended to be an officer.
Törless simply could not take such ambitions seriously. The centuries of revolutions seemed to him past and gone once and for all. Nevertheless Reiting was quite capable of putting his ideas into practice, though for the present only on a small scale. He was a tyrant, inexorable in his treatment of anyone who opposed him. His supporters changed from day to day, but he always managed to have the majority on his side. This was his great gift. A couple of years earlier he had waged a great war against Beineberg, which ended in the defeat of the latter. Finally Beineberg had been pretty well isolated, and this although in his judgment of people, his coolness and his capacity for arousing antipathy against those who incurred his disfavour, he was scarcely less formidable than his opponent. But he lacked Reiting's charm and winning ways. His composure and his unctuous philosophic pose filled almost everyone with mistrust. One could not help suspecting something excessive and unsavoury at the bottom of his personality. Nevertheless he had caused Reiting great difficulties, and Reiting's victory had been little more than a matter of luck. Since that time they found it profitable to combine forces.
Törless, by contrast, remained indifferent to these things. Hence also he had no skill in them. Nevertheless he too was enclosed in this world and every day could see for himself what it meant to play the leading part in a State-for in such a school each class constituted a small State in itself. Thus he had a certain diffident respect for his two friends. The urge he sometimes felt to emulate them, however, always remained a matter of dilettante experiment. Hence, and also because he was the younger, his relationship to them was that of a disciple or assistant. He enjoyed their protection, and they for their part would gladly listen to his advice. For Törless's mind was the most subtle. Once he was set on a trail, he was extremely ingenious in thinking of the most abstruse combinations. Nor was anyone else so exact as he in foreseeing the various possible reactions to be expected of a person in a given situation. Only when it was a matter of reaching a decision, of accepting one of these psychological possibilities as the definite probability and taking the risk of acting on it, did he fail, losing both interest and energy. Still, he enjoyed his role of secret chief of staff, and this all the more since it was practically the only thing that set him going, stirring him out of his state of deep inner boredom.
Sometimes, however, he did realise how much he was losing as a result of this psychological dependence. He was aware that everything he did was merely a game, merely something to help him over this time at school, this larval period of his existence. It was without relation to his real personality, which would emerge only later, at some time still a long way off in the future.
For when on certain occasions he saw how very seriously his two friends took these things, he felt quite unable to understand them.
He would have liked to make fun of them, but still he could not help being afraid that there might be more truth behind their fantastic notions than he was capable of admitting to himself. He felt 25 though torn between two worlds: one was the solid everyday world of respectable citizens, in which all that went on was well regulated and rational, and which he knew from home, and the other was a world of adventure, full of darkness, mystery, blood, and undreamt-of surprises. It seemed then as though one excluded the other. A mocking smile, which he would have liked to keep always on his lips, and a shudder that ran down his spine cut across each other. What came about then was an incandescent flickering of his thoughts....
Then he would yearn to feel something firm in himself at long last, to feel definite needs that would distinguish between good and bad, between what he could make use of and what was useless, and to know he himself was making the choice, even though wrongly-for even that would be better than being so excessively receptive that he simply soaked up everything. .
When he entered the little room this inner dichotomy had asserted itself in him again, as it always did here.
Meanwhile Reiting had begun telling what he had discovered. Basini had owed him money and had kept on promising to pay and putting it off, each time giving his word of honour that he was really going to pay the next time.
“Well, I didn't particularly mind that,” Reiting commented. “The longer it went on, the more he was in my power. I mean, after all, breaking one's word three or four times is no joke, is it? But in the end I needed my money myself. I pointed this out to him, and lie gave me his solemn oath. And of course didn't stick to it that time either. So then I told him I'd report him. He asked for two days' grace, as he was expecting supplies from his guardian. In the mean-time, however, I did some investigating into his circumstances. I wanted to find out if he was in anyone else's power as well. After all, one must know what one has to reckon with.
“I wasn't particularly pleased with what I discovered. He was in debt to Dschjusch and to several of the others as well. He'd paid back some of it, and of course out of the money he still owed me. It was the others he felt it most urgent to pay. That annoyed me. I wasn't going to have him thinking l was the easy-going one of the lot. I could scarcely have put up with that. But I thought to myself: 'Let's just wait and see. Sooner or later there'll be an opportunity to knock that sort of idea out of his head.' Once he mentioned the actual amount he was expecting, sort of casually, you know, to put my mind at rest by showing me it was more than what he owed me. So I checked up with the others and found out that the total amount he owed was far more than what he said he was expecting. 'Aha,' I thought to myself, 'so now I suppose he'll try it on yet once again.'
“And, sure enough, he came along to me, all confidentially, and asked me to give him a little more time, as the others were pressing him so hard. But this time I was dead cold with him. 'Beg off from the others,' I said to him, 'I'm not in the habit of taking a back seat.' So he said: 'I know you better, I trust you more.' 'You'll bring me the money tomorrow,' I said to him, 'or you'll have to comply with my terms. That's my last word.' 'What terms?' he wanted to know. Oh, you should have heard him! As if he were prepared to sell his soul. 'What terms? Oho! You'll have to act as my vassal in all my enterprises.' 'Oh, if that's all, I'll do that all right, I'm glad to be on your side.' 'Oh no, not just when you happen to like it. You'll have to do everything I tell you to do-in blind obedience!' So now he squinted at me in a way that was half grinning and half embarrassed. He didn't know how far he ought to go, what he was letting himself in for, or how serious I was. Probably he would have promised me anything, but of course he couldn't help being afraid I was only putting him to the test. So in the end he got very red and said, 'I'll bring you the money.' I was getting my fun out of him, he'd turned out to be a fellow like that and I'd never taken any notice of him before, among the fifty others. I mean, he never sort of counted at all, did he? And now suddenly he'd come so close to me that I could see right into him, down to the last detail. I knew for a certainty the fellow was ready to sell himself-and without making much fuss about it, only so long as he could keep people from finding out. It was a real surprise, and there'
s no nicer sight than that: when a fellow is suddenly laid bare before you, and suddenly his way of living, which you've never troubled to notice before, is exposed to your gaze like the worm-holes you see when a piece of timber splits open.
“Right enough, the next day he brought me the money. And that wasn't all, either. He actually invited me to have a drink with him down town. He ordered wine, cake, and cigarettes, and pressed it all on me-out of 'gratitude', because I'd been so patient. The only thing about it I didn't like was how awfully innocent and friendly he acted. Just as if there'd never been an offensive word said between us. I said as much. But that only made him more cordial than ever. It was as if he wanted to wriggle out of my grip and get on equal terms with me again. He behaved as if it were all over and done with, and every other word he uttered was to assure me of his friendship. Only there was something in his eyes that was a sort of clutching at me as though he were afraid of losing this feeling of intimacy he had artificially worked up. In the end I was revolted by him. I thought to myself: 'Does he really think I'm going to put up with this?' and I began to think how I could take him down a peg or two. What I wanted was something that would really get under his skin. So then it struck me Beineberg had told me that morning that some of his money had been stolen. It lust occurred to me by the way. But it kept coming back into my mind. And it made me feel quite tight about the throat. 'It would turn out wonderfully handy,' I thought to myself, and in a casual way I asked him how much money he had left. When he told me, I added it up and got the right answer. I laughed and asked him: 'Who on earth was so stupid as to lend you money again after all this?' 'Hofmeier,' he said.
“I simply shook with joy. The fact is, Hofmeier had come to me two hours before that, asking me to lend him some money. So what had shot into my head a few minutes ago suddenly turned out to be true. Just the way you think to yourself, merely as a joke: 'Now that house over there ought to go on fire,' and the next moment there are flames shooting out of it, yards high. .