by Robert Musil
“Isn't he just? A thorough skunk.”
“But you're going in for something a bit off-colour yourself!' And Törless smiled in a rather forced manner, for he was ashamed of not being more indignant with Reiting.
“Me?” Reiting shrugged his shoulders. “What harm does it do? One's got to have had all sorts of experiences, and if he's stupid and low enough ...”
“Have you talked to him since?” Beineberg now interposed. “Yes. He came to me yesterday evening, asking for money, because he's got into debt again and can't pay up.”
“Did you give him any?”
“No, not yet.”
“Excellent,” Beineberg commented. “Then we've got just the opportunity we want for settling his hash. You might tell him to come along somewhere tonight.”
“Where? The cubby-hole?”
“No, I don't think so. He doesn't need to know about that yet. But make him come up to the attic where you took him before.”
“What time?”
“Let's say-eleven.”
“Right.-D'you want to come for a bit of a walk now?”
“Yes. I expect Törless still has lots to do-haven't you, Törless?”
He actually had no more work to do, but he could feel that the other two were up to something together that they wanted to keep a secret from him. He was annoyed with himself for being too stiff to push his way in whether they wanted him or not.
So he watched them go, jealously, and racked his brains about what they might be planning in secret.
And as he watched them it struck him how much innocent grace and charm there was in Reiting's erect carriage and supple walk-just as there was in his way of talking. By contrast he tried to imagine what Reiting must have been like-inwardly, in his emotions-that other night. It must have been like some long, slow sinking of two souls with a mortal stranglehold on each other, and then depths as of some subterranean realm-and, in between, a moment in which the sounds of the world, far, far above, faded and died out.
Could a human being really be so gay and easy-going again after such an experience? Surely then it could not mean so much to him. Törless would have liked to ask him. And instead of that, now, in his childish timidity, he had left him with that spidery creature Beineberg!
At a quarter to eleven Törless saw Beineberg and Reiting slip out of their beds, and he also got up and began dressing. “Ssh! I say, wait, can't you? Somebody'll notice if the three of us all go out together.”
Törless got back under the bed-clothes.
A little while later they all met in the passage, and with their usual caution they went on upstairs to the attics.
“Where's Basini?” Törless asked.
“He's coming up the other way. Reiting gave him the key.”
They went all the way in darkness. Only when they reached the top, outside the big iron door, did Beineberg light his little hurricane-lamp.
The lock was stiff. It was rusty from years of disuse and would not answer to the skeleton key. Then at last it gave, with a loud snap. The heavy door scraped back reluctantly on its rusty hinges, yielding only inch by inch.
From inside the attic came a breath of warm, stale air, like that in small hothouses.
Beineberg shut the door after them.
They went down the little wooden staircase and then squatted on the floor beside a huge roof-beam.
On one side of them were some large water-tubs for use in case of fire. It was obvious that the water in them had not been changed for a very long time; it had a sweet, sickly smell.
The whole place was oppressive, with the hot, bad air under the roof and the criss-cross pattern on the huge beams and rafters, some of them vanishing into the darkness overhead, some of them reaching down to the floor, forming a ghostly network.
Beineberg shaded his lamp, and there they sat quite still in the dark, not speaking a word-for long, long minutes.
Then the door in the darkness at the other end of the attic creaked, faintly, hesitantly. It was a sound to make one's heart leap into one's mouth-the first sound of the approaching prey.
Then came some unsure footsteps, a foot stumbling against wood: dull sound as of a falling body...Silence. .. Then again hesitant footsteps . . . A pause . . . A faint voice asking: “Reiting?”
Now Beineberg removed the shade from his lamp, throwing a broad ray of light in the direction from which the voice had come.
Several immense wooden beams loomed up, casting deep shadows. Apart from that, there was nothing to be seen but the cone of light with dust whirling in it.
The footsteps grew steadier and came closer.
Then ... and this time quite near. .. a foot banged against wood again, and the next moment . . . framed in the wide base of the cone of light. . . Basini's face appeared, ash-grey in that uncertain illumination.
* * *
Basini was smiling. . . sweetly, cloyingly. It was like the fixed smile of a portrait, hanging above them there in the frame of light.
Törless sat still, pressing himself tightly against the woodwork; he felt his eyelids twitching.
Now Beineberg recited the list of Basini's infamies-monotonously, in a hoarse voice.
Then came the question: “So you're not ashamed at all?” At that Basini looked at Reiting, and his glance seemed to say: 'Now I think it's time for you to help me.' And at that moment Reiting hit him in the face so that he staggered back, tripped over a beam, and fell. Beineberg and Reiting leapt upon him.
The lamp had been kicked sideways, and now its light flowed senselessly, idly, past Törless's feet, across the floor. . .
From the sounds in the darkness Törless could tell that they were pulling Basini's clothes off and then that they were whipping him with something thin and pliant. Evidently they had had everything prepared. He heard Basini's whimpering and half-stifled cries of pain as he went on pleading for mercy; and then finally he heard nothing but a groaning, a suppressed howling, and at the same time Beineberg cursing in a low voice and his heavy, excited breathing.
Törless had not stirred from where he sat. Right at the beginning, indeed, he had been seized with a savage desire to leap up too and join in the beating; but his feeling that he would come too late and only be one too many had held him back. His limbs were encased in paralysing rigidity, as though in the grip of some great hand.
In apparent indifference he sat staring at the floor. He did not strain his ears to distinguish what the various sounds meant, and his heart beat no faster than usual. His eyes followed the light that spread out in a pool at his feet. Grains of dust gleamed in it, and one ugly little cobweb. And the light seeped further, into the darkness under the beams, and peered out in dusty, murky gloom.
Törless could have sat there like that for an hour without noticing the passing of time. He was thinking of nothing, and yet he was inwardly very much preoccupied. At the same time he was observing himself. And it was like gazing into a void and there seeing himself as if out of the corner of his eye, in a vague, shapeless glimmer. And then out of this vagueness-as though coming round the corner of his mind-slowly, but ever more distinctly, a desire advanced into clear consciousness.
Something made Törless smile at this. Then once again the desire came more strongly, trying to draw him from his squatting position down on to his knees, on to the floor. It was an urge to press his body flat against the floorboards; and even now he could feel how his eyes would grow larger, like a fish's eyes, and how through the flesh and bones of his body his heart would slam against the wood.
Now there was indeed a wild excitement raging in Törless, and he had to hold on tight to the beam beside him in an effort to fight off the dizziness that was trying to draw him downwards.
Sweat pearled on his forehead, and he wondered anxiously what all this could mean.
Startled quite out of his former indifference, he was now straining his ears again to hear what the other three were doing in the darkness.
It had grown quiet over there. Only Basini coul
d be heard groping for his clothes and moaning softly to himself.
An agreeable sensation went through Törless when he heard this whimpering. A tickling shudder, like thin spidery legs, ran up and down his spine, then contracted between his shoulder blades, pulling his scalp tight as though with faint claws. He was disconcerted to realise that he was in a state of sexual excitement. He thought back, and though he could not remember when this had begun, he knew it had already been there when he felt that peculiar desire to press himself against the floor. He was ashamed of it; but it was like a tremendous surge of blood going through him, numbing his thoughts.
Beineberg and Reiting came groping their way back and sat down in silence beside him. Beineberg looked at the lamp.
At this moment Törless again felt drawn downward. It was something that came from his eyes-he could feel that now-a sort of hypnotic rigidity spreading from the eyes to the brain. It was a question, indeed, it was-no, it was a desperation-oh, it was something he knew already-the wall, that garden outside the window, the low-ceilinged cottages, that childhood memory-it was all the same thing! all the same! He glanced at Beineberg. 'Doesn't he feel anything?' he wondered. But Beineberg was bending down, about to put the lamp straight. Törless gripped his arm to stop him.
“Isn't it like an eye?” he said, pointing to the light streaming across the floor.
“Getting poetical now, are you?”
“No. But don't you yourself say there's something special about eyes? It's all in your own favourite ideas about hyptiotism- how sometimes they send out a force different from anything we hear about in physics. And it's a fact you can often tell far more about someone from his eyes than from what he says .
“Well-what of it?”
“This light seems like an eye to me-looking into a strange world. It makes me feel as if I had to guess something. Only I can't. I only could gulp it down-drink it.”
“Well, so you really are getting poetical.”
“No. I'm perfectly serious. It simply makes me frantic. Just look at it yourself and you'll see what I mean. It makes you sort of want to wallow in the pool of it-to crawl right into that dusty corner on all fours, as if that were the way to guess it . .
“My dear chap, these are idle fancies, all nonsense. That'll be enough of that sort of thing for the moment.”
Beineberg now bent right down and restored the lamp to its former position. But Törless felt a sudden spiteful satisfaction. He realised that, with some extra faculty he had, he got more out of these happenings than his companions did.
He was now waiting for Basini to re-appear, and with a secret shudder he noticed that his scalp was again tightening under those faint claws.
After all, he knew quite well by now that there was something in store for him, and the premonition of it was coming to him at ever shorter intervals, again and again: it was a sensation of which the others knew nothing, but which must evidently be of great importance for his future life.
Only he did not know what could be the meaning of this sexual excitement that was mingled with it. He did remember, however, that it had in fact been present each time when things began to be queer-though only to him-and to torture him because he could find no reason for the queerness.
And he resolved that at the next opportunity he would think hard about this. For the moment he gave himself up entirely to the shudder of excitement with which he looked for Basini's reappearance.
Since Beineberg had replaced the lamp, the rays of light once again cut out a circle in the darkness, like an empty frame.
And all at once there was Basini's face again, just as it had been the first time, with the same fixed, sweet, cloying smile-as though nothing had happened in the meantime-only now, over his upper lip, mouth, and chin, slowly, drops of blood were making a red, wriggling line, like a worm.
* * *
“Sit down over there!” Reiting ordered, pointing to the great beam. When Basini had obeyed, Reiting launched out: “I suppose you were thinking you'd got yourself nicely out of the whole thing, eh? I suppose you thought I was going to help you? Well, that's just where you were wrong. What I've been doing with you was only to see exactly how much of a skunk you are.”
Basini made a gesture of protest, at which Reiting moved as though to leap at him again. Then Basini said: “But look, for heaven's sake, there wasn't anything else I could do!”
“Shut up!” Reiting barked at him. “We're sick and tired of your excuses! We know now, once and for all, just where we stand with you, and we shall act accordingly.”
There was a brief silence. Then suddenly Törless said quietly, almost amiably: “Come on, say 'I'm a thief'.”
Basini stared at him with wide, startled eyes. Beineberg laughed approvingly.
But Basini said nothing. Then Beineberg hit him in the ribs and ordered sharply: “Can't you hear? You've been told to say you're a thief. Get on and say it!”
Once again there was a short, scarcely perceptible pause. Then in a low voice, in a single breath, and with as little expression as possible, Basini murmured: “I'm a thief.”
Beineberg and Reiting laughed delightedly, turning to Törless:
“That was a good idea of yours, laddie.” And then to Basini: “And now get on with it and say: I'm a beast, a pilfering, dishonest beast, your pilfering, dishonest, filthy beast.”
And Basini said it, all in one breath, with his eyes shut. But Törless had leaned back into the darkness again. The scene sickened him, and he was ashamed of having delivered up his idea to the others.
During the mathematics period Törless was suddenly struck by an idea.
For some days past he had been following lessons with special interest, thinking to himself: 'If this is really supposed to be preparation for life, as they say, it must surely contain some clue to what I am looking for, too.,
It was actually of mathematics that he had been thinking, and this even before he had had those thoughts about infinity.
And now, right in the middle of the lesson, it had shot into his head with searing intensity. As soon as the class was dismissed he sat down beside Beineberg, who was the only person he could talk to about such things.
“I say, did you really understand all that stuff?”
“What stuff?”
“All that about imaginary numbers.”
“Yes. It's not particularly difficult, is it? All you have to do is remember that the square root of minus one is the basic unit you work with.”
“But that's just it. I mean, there's no such thing. The square of every number, whether it's positive or negative, produces a positive quantity. So there can't be any real number that could be the square root of a minus quantity.”
“Quite so. But why shouldn't one try to perform the operation of working out the square root of a minus quantity, all the same? Of course it can't produce any real value, and so that's why one calls the result an imaginary one. It's as though one were to say:
someone always used to sit here, so let's put a chair ready for him
today too, and even if he has died in the meantime, we shall go on behaving as if he were coming.”
“But how can you when you know with certainty, with mathematical certainty, that it's impossible?”
“Well, you lust go on behaving as if it weren't so, in spite of everything. It'll probably produce some sort of result. And after all, where is this so different from irrational numbers-division that is never finished, a fraction of which the value will never, never, never be finally arrived at, no matter how long you may go on calculating away at it? And what can you imagine from being told that parallel lines intersect at infinity? It seems to me if one were to be over-conscientious there wouldn't be any such thing as mathematics at all.”
“You're quite right about that. If one pictures it that way, it's queer enough. But what is actually so odd is that you can really go through quite ordinary operations with imaginary or other impossible quantities, all the same, and come out at t
he end with a tangible result!”
“Well, yes, the imaginary factors must cancel each other out in the course of the operation just so that does happen.”
“Yes, yes, I know all that just as well as you do. But isn't there still something very odd indeed about the whole thing? I don't quite know how to put it. Look, think of it like this: in a calculation like that you begin with ordinary solid numbers, representing measures of length or weight or something else that's quite tangible-at any rate, they're real numbers. And at the end you have real numbers. But these two lots of real numbers are connected by something that simply doesn’t exist. Isn't that like a bridge where the piles are there only at the beginning and at the end, with none in the middle, and yet one crosses it lust as surely and safely as if the whole of it were there? That sort of operation makes me feel a bit giddy, as if it led part of the way God knows where. But what I really feel is so uncanny is the force that lies in a problem like that, which keeps such a firm hold on you that in the end you land safely on the other side.”
Beineberg grinned. “You're starting to talk almost like the chaplain, aren't you? You see an apple- that's light-waves and the eye and so forth-and you stretch out your hand to steal it-that's the muscles and the nerves that set them in action-but between these two there lies something else that produces one out of the other, and that is the immortal soul, which in doing so has committed a sin... ah yes, indeed, none of your actions can be explained with-out the soul, which plays upon you as upon the keys of a piano... And he imitated the cadences in which the chaplain was in the habit of producing this old simile. “Not that I find all that stuff particularly interesting.”
“I thought you were the very person who would find it interesting. Anyway, it made me think of you at once because-if it's really impossible to explain it-it almost amounts to a piece of evidence for what you believe.”
“Why shouldn't it be impossible to explain? I'm inclined to think it's quite likely that in this case the inventors of mathematics have tripped over their own feet. Why, after all, shouldn't something that lies beyond the limits of our intellect have played a little joke on the intellect? But I'm not going to rack my brains about it: these things never get anyone anywhere.”