Young Torless

by Robert Musil

  But now all this failed to have any effect.

  He could not help seeing that his parents were in many ways right, and he also knew that it was scarcely possible to judge quite accurately from such a distance; yet something much more important seemed to be missing from their letter.

  What was missing was an appreciation of the fact that something irrevocable had happened, something that ought never to happen among people in a certain stratum of society. What was missing was any sign of their being surprised and shocked. They treated it as though it were quite a normal thing, which must be handled with tact but without much ado, merely as a blemish, as something that was no more beautiful, but also no more avoidable, than the relief of one's natural needs. In their whole letter there was as little trace of any more personal feelings or dismay as there was in the attitude of Beineberg and Reiting.

  Törless might usefully have taken some note of this too. Instead, however, he tore the letter into shreds and burnt it. It was the first time in his life that he committed such an act of disrespect towards his parents.

  The effect on him was the opposite of what had been intended. In contrast with the plain view that had been set before him he was again suddenly filled with awareness of all that was problematic and ambiguous in Basini's crime. Shaking his head, he told himself that it still needed thinking about, although he could not give him-self any exact account of the reason for this attitude.

  It was queerest of all when he pursued the matter dreamily rather than with conscious thought. Then at one moment Basini seemed to him comprehensible, commonplace, and clear-cut, just as his parents and his friends seemed to see him: and the next moment this Basini would vanish, only to come again, and yet again, as a small and even smaller figure, tiny and sometimes luminous against a deep, very deep background....

  And then one night-it was very late and everyone was asleep-Törless was waked by someone shaking him.

  Beineberg was sitting on the edge of his bed. This was so unusual that he at once realised something extraordinary must be afoot.

  “Get up. Don't make a noise, we don't want anyone to notice. I want you to come upstairs, I've got something to tell you.”

  Törless quickly put some clothes on, got into his slippers, and threw his coat round his shoulders.

  When they were up in their lair, Beineberg put all the obstacles back in their places with special care. Then he made tea.

  Törless, who was still heavy with sleep, relaxed in enjoyment of the golden-yellow, aromatic warmth pervading him. He leaned back in a corner and curled up; he was expecting a surprise.

  At last Beineberg said: “Reiting is up to something behind our backs.”

  Törless felt no astonishment; he accepted it as a matter of course that the affair must necessarily develop in some such way, and he felt almost as though he had been waiting for this. Involuntarily he said: “I thought as much.”

  “Oh? You thought so, did you? But I don't suppose you noticed anything? That wouldn't be at all like you.

  “That's true, there wasn't anything special that struck me. And I haven't been racking my brains about the whole thing.”

  “But I've been keeping a good look-out. I didn't trust Reiting from the very beginning. I suppose you know Basini's paid me back my money. And where do you think he got it? D'you think it was his own? No.”

  'And so you think Reiting has been up to something?”

  'Definitely.”

  For a moment all Törless could imagine was that now Reiting had got entangled in a similar way himself.

  “So you think Reiting has done what -----?”

  “What an idea! Reiting simply gave Basini some of his own money, so that he could settle his debt to me.”

  “But I can't see any good reason why he should do that.”

  “Neither could I for a long time. Still, it must have struck you too how Reiting stood up for Basini right from the start. You were quite right then. It would really have been the most natural thing to have had the fellow chucked out. But I knew what I was doing. I didn't take your side at the time, because I thought to myself: I must get to the bottom of this, I must see what he's up to. Frankly, I can't say for certain whether he had it all worked out quite clearly at that stage or whether he only wanted to wait and see what would come of it once he made completely sure of Basini. Anyway, I know how things stand now.”

  “Well?”

  “Wait, the whole story isn't so simple. I take it you know about what happened in the school four years ago?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well-that affair!”

  “Vaguely. I only know there was a great row about some swinishness that had been going on, and quite a number of chaps got expelled.”

  “Yes, that's what I mean. Once in the holidays I found out sonic more about it from one of the chaps in that class. It was all because of a pretty boy there was in the class, that a lot of them were in love with. You know that sort of thing, it happens every few years. But they went a bit too far.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well-how! Don't ask such silly questions! And that's what Reiting's doing with Basini!”

  Törless suddenly understood what he meant, and he felt a choking in his throat as if it were full of sand.

  “I wouldn't have thought that of Reiting.” He did not know what else to say.

  Beineberg shrugged his shoulders. “He thinks he can take us in.”

  “Is he in love with him?”

  “Not a bit of it. He's not such a fool. It amuses him; at the most he gets some sort of excitement out of it.”

  “And how about Basini?”

  “Oh, him! Hasn't it struck you how uppish he's become recently? He hardly takes anything from me at all now. It's always Reiting, Reiting, with him-as if Reiting were his private patron saint. He probably decided it was better to put up with everything from one than with a bit from everyone. And I dare say Reiting's promised to look after him as long as he does whatever Reiting wants of him. But they'll find out they've made a mistake, and I'm going to knock such ideas out of Basini's head!”

  “How did you find out?”

  “I followed them once.”

  “Where to?”

  “In there, in the attic. Reiting had my key to the other door. Then I came up here, carefully opened up the gap and crept up to them.”

  The fact was that in the thin partition-wall dividing the cubbyhole from the attics they had broken open a gap just wide enough to allow one to wriggle through. It was intended to serve as an emergency exit in the event of their being surprised, and it was generally kept closed with loose bricks.

  Now there was a long pause, in which all that could be heard was the faint hiss when the tips of their cigarettes glowed.

  Törless was incapable of thinking; he simply saw . . . Behind his shut eyelids there was all at once a wild vortex of happenings . . . people, people moving in a glare, with bright lights and shifting, deep-etched shadows . . . faces . . . one face . . . a smile . . . an upward look... a shivering of the skin. .. He saw people in a way he had never seen them before, never felt them before. But he saw them without seeing, without images, without forms, as if only his soul saw them; and yet they were so distinct that he was pierced through and through by their intensity. Only, as though they halted at a threshold they could not cross, they escaped him the moment he sought for words to grasp them with.

  He could not stop himself from asking more. His voice shook. “And-did you see?”

  “Yes.”

  “And-did Basini-was he-?”

  But Beineberg remained silent, and once again there was nothing to be heard but, now and then, the vaguely disturbing hiss of the cigarettes. Only after a long time did Beineberg begin to talk again.

  “I've considered the whole thing from all points of view, and, as you know, I have my own way of thinking about such things. First of all, as far as Basini goes, it's my view he's no loss in any case. It makes no diffe
rence whether we go and report him, or give him a beating, or even if we torture him to death, just for the fun of it. Personally, I can't imagine that a creature like that can have any meaning in the wonderful mechanism of the universe. He strikes me as being merely accidental, as it were a random creation outside the order of things. That's to say-even he must of course mean something, but certainly only something as undefined as, say, a worm or a stone on the road, the sort of things you never know whether to walk round or step on. In other words, they're practically nothing. For if the spirit of the universe wants one of its parts to he preserved, it manifests its will more clearly. In such a case it says 'no' and creates a resistance, it makes us walk round the worm and makes the stone so hard that we can't smash it without tools. And before we can get the tools, it has had time to interpolate resistances in the form of all sorts of tough little scruples, and if we get the better of them, well, that just shows that the whole thing has had another meaning all along.

  “With a human being, it puts this hardness into his character, into his consciousness as a human being, into the sense of responsibility he has as a part of the spirit of the universe. And if a human being loses this consciousness, he loses himself. But if a human being has lost himself, abandoned himself, he has lost the special and peculiar purpose for which Nature created him as a human being. And this is the case in which one can be perfectly certain that one is dealing with something unnecessary, an empty form, something that has already long been deserted by the spirit of the universe.”

  Törless felt no inclination to argue. He was not even listening very attentively. He himself had never felt the need to go in for such a metaphysical train of thought, nor had he ever wondered how anyone of Beineberg's intellect could indulge in such notions. The whole problem had simply not yet risen over the horizon of his life.

  Thus he made no effort to enquire into the possible meaning, or lack of meaning, of Beineberg's remarks. He only half listened.

  One thing he did not understand, and that was how anyone could approach this matter in such a longwinded way. Everything in him quivered, and the elaborate formality with which Beineberg produced his ideas-wherever he got them from-seemed to him ridiculous and out of place; it irritated him.

  But Beineberg continued calmly: “Where Reiting is concerned, on the other hand, it's all very different. He has also put himself in my power by doing what he has done, but his fate is certainly not so much a matter of indifference to me as Basini's is. You know his mother is not very well off. So if he gets expelled, it'll be all up with his plans. If he stays here, he may get somewhere. If not, there's not likely to be much chance for him. And Reiting never liked me-see what I mean?-he's always hated me. He used to try to damage me wherever he could. I think he would still be glad if he could get rid of me. Now do you see what an immense amount I can make out of what I've discovered?”

  Törless was startled-and it was strangely as if Reiting's fate affected him personally, were almost his own. He looked at Beineberg in dismay. Beineberg had narrowed his eyes to a mere slit, and to Törless he looked like a great, weird spider quietly lurking in its web. His last words rang in Törless's ears with the coldness and clarity of an ultimatum.

  Törless had not been following, had only known: Beineberg is talking about his ideas again, and they have nothing at all to do with the matter in hand.. .And now all at once he did not know how it had reached this point.

  The web, which had, after all, been begun somewhere far off in a realm of abstractions, as he vaguely remembered, seemed to have contracted suddenly and with miraculous speed. For all at once it was there, concrete, real, alive, and there was a head twitching in it-choking.

  He was far from having any liking for Reiting, but he now recalled the agreeable, impudent, carefree way in which he set about all his intrigues, and in contrast Beineberg seemed infamous as he sat there, calm and grinning, pulling his many-threaded, grey, abominable web of thoughts tight around the other.

  Involuntarily Törless burst out: “You mustn't turn it to account against him!” What impelled him to the exclamation was perhaps partly his constant secret repugnance for Beineberg.

  But after a few minutes' reflection Beineberg said of his own accord: “What good would it do, anyway? Where he is concerned it would really be a pity. From now on in any case he's no danger to me, and after all he's not so worthless that one should trip him up over a silly thing of this kind.” And so that aspect of the affair was settled. But Beineberg went on talking, now again turning his attention to Basini's fate.

  “Do you still thing we ought to report Basini?”

  But Törless gave no answer. Now he wanted Beineberg to go on talking, to hear his words sounding like the hollow echoing of footsteps over a vault; he wanted to savour the situation to the full.

  Beineberg went on expounding his ideas. “I think for the present we'll keep him in our own hands and punish him ourselves. He certainly must be punished-if only for his presumption. All the school would do would be to send him home and write his uncle a long letter about it. Surely you know more or less how automatically that sort of thing works. Your Excellency, your nephew has so far forgotten himself. . - bad influence . . . restore him to our care - . - hope you will be successful . . - road towards improvement . . - for the present, however, impossible among the others... and so on and so forth. You don't suppose, do you, that such a case has any interest or value in their eyes?”

  “And what sort of value can it have for us?”

  “What sort of value? None for you, perhaps, for you're going to be a government official some day, or perhaps you'll write poems-all in all you don't need that kind of thing, and perhaps you're even frightened of it. But I picture my life rather differently.”

  Now Törless really began to listen.

  “For me Basini has some value-very great value indeed. Look, it's like this-you would simply let him go and would be quite satisfied with the thought that he was a bad person.” Here Törless suppressed a smile. “That's all it amounts to for you, because you have no talent or interest in training yourself by means of such a case. But I have that interest. Anyone with my road ahead of him must take quite a different view of human beings. That's why I want to save Basini up for myself-as something to learn from.”

  “But how do you mean to punish him?”

  Beineberg withheld his answer for a moment, as though considering the effect he expected it to have. Then he said, cautiously and with some hesitation: “You're wrong if you think I'm so very much concerned with the idea of punishment. Of course ultimately it will be possible to look at it as a punishment for him too. But to cut a long story short, I've got something different in mind, what I want to do with him is-well, let's call it tormenting him.”

  Törless took good care to say nothing. He was still far from seeing the whole thing clearly, but he could feel that it was all working out as-inwardly-it must work out for him.

  Beineberg, who could not gather what effect his words had had, continued: “You needn't be shocked, it's not as bad as all that. First of all, as I've already explained to you, there's no cause to consider Basini's feelings at all. Whether we decide to torment him or perhaps let him off depends solely on whether we feel the need of the one or the other. It depends on our own inner reasons. Have you got any? All that stuff about morality and society and the rest of it, which you brought up before, doesn't count at all, of course. I should be sorry to think you ever believed in it yourself. So I assume you to be indifferent. But however it may be, you can still withdraw from the whole affair if you don't want to take any risks.

  “My own road, however, leads not back or around, but straight ahead and through the middle of it. It has to be like that. Reiting won't leave off either, for in his case too there's a special value in having a human being in the hollow of his hand so that he can use him for the purpose of training himself, learning to handle him like a tool. He wants to exercise power, and he would treat you lust the s
ame as Basini if he ever happened to get the chance. But for me it's a matter of something more than that. It's almost a duty to myself. Now, how am I to make clear to you exactly what this difference is between him and me? You know how Reiting venerates Napoleon. Now contrast that with the fact that the sort of person who most appeals to me is more like a philosopher or a holy man in India. Reiting would sacrifice Basini and feel nothing but a certain Interest in the process. He would dissect him morally in order to find out what one has to expect from such operations. And, as I said before, it could be you or me just as well as Basini, and it would be all the same to him. On the other hand, I have this certain feeling, just as you have, that Basini is, after all, in the last resort a human being too. There's something in me too that is upset by any act of cruelty. But that's just the point! The point is the sacrifice! You see, there are two threads fastened to me too. The first is an obscure one that, in contrast with my clear conviction, ties me to the inaction that comes from pity. But there is the second, too, which leads straight to my soul, to the most profound inner knowledge, and links me to the universe. People like Basini, as I told you before, signify nothing-they are empty, accidental forms. True human beings are only those who can penetrate into themselves, cosmic beings that are capable of that meditation which reveals to them their relationship to the great universal process. These people do miracles with their eyes shut, because they know how to make use of the totality of forces in the universe, which are within them just as they are also outside them. But hitherto everyone who has followed up the second thread, has had to tear the first. I've read about appalling acts of penance done by illumined monks, and the means used by Indian ascetics are, I imagine, not entirely unknown to you either. All the cruel things that are done in this way have only one aim, to kill the miserable desires directed towards the external world, which, whether they are vanity or hunger, joy or pity, only take away something from the fire that everyone can kindle in himself.