He thought he could hear the rustling of the faded leaves thrown together by the wind. Then came that moment of the most intense silence that always arrives shortly before complete darkness. The forms that had embedded themselves ever deeper in the dusk, and the fading colours, seemed to stand still for seconds at a time, to hold their breath ...

‘Listen, Beineberg,’ said Törless, without turning around, ‘there are always a few moments at dusk that are unlike anything else. However often I observe it, the same memory returns to me. It was once when I was very small, in the woods, at this time of day. The nursemaid had wandered off; I didn’t know, and thought I could still sense her nearby. Suddenly something forced me to look up. I felt I was alone. It was suddenly so still. And when I looked around, it was as though the trees were standing silent in a circle, watching me. I cried; I felt so abandoned by the grown-ups, at the mercy of inanimate beings ... What is that? It often comes back to me. What is that sudden silence that is like a language we can’t hear?’

‘I’m not familiar with what you’re talking about; but why shouldn’t objects have a language? We can’t even claim with any certainty that they don’t have a soul!’

Törless didn’t reply. He felt ill at ease with Beineberg’s speculative vision of things.

After a while, however, Beineberg began: ‘Why do you keep looking through the window? What’s out there?’

‘I’m still thinking about what it might have been.’ But in reality he was already thinking about something else, something that he didn’t want to admit. The great tension, the act of listening in to a solemn mystery, and the responsibility of gazing into still unfathomed relationships between things, was something that he had been able to bear only for a moment. Then that feeling of being alone and abandoned, which always followed that excessive exertion, enveloped him once again. He felt: there’s something in this that is still too hard for me, and his thoughts fled to something else that was also part of it, but to a certain extent only in the background, lying in wait: loneliness.

From the deserted garden a leaf danced every now and again to the illuminated window, cutting a bright strip into the darkness, which seemed to shrink back to avoid it, then to step forward again a moment later and stand motionless like a wall outside the windows. It was a world all to itself, the darkness. Like a black enemy horde it had fallen across the earth and killed the people or driven them out or done whatever it had done to make sure that it erased every last trace of them.

And Törless felt as though he was pleased. At that moment he did not like people, grown-ups, adults. He never liked them when it was dark. Then, he was used to imagining people away. When he had done that, the world appeared to him as a gloomy, deserted house, and a shudder ran through his breast, as though he had now to look from room to room - dark rooms, with who knows what hidden in their corners - tentatively stepping across the thresholds that no man’s foot but his would walk upon - and in one room the doors would suddenly fall open in front of him and behind him and he would stand face to face with the mistress of the black hordes. And at that moment the locks of all the doors he had passed through would also fall shut, and only far outside the walls would the shadows of darkness stand guard like black eunuchs, keeping human beings at bay.

That was his kind of loneliness, since being left on his own that time - in the wood, where he had wept so. It held for him the charm of a woman and of something monstrous. He felt that it was like a woman, but her breath was only a choking in his breast, her face a whirling oblivion of all human faces and the movements of her hands shudders running over his body ...

He was afraid of that fantasy, because he was aware of its lascivious furtiveness, and he was unsettled at the thought that such ideas might win ever greater mastery over him. But they overwhelmed him precisely when he imagined himself at his most serious and pure. As a reaction, it might be said, to the moments when he became aware of emotional realizations which were preparing themselves within him, but which were not yet appropriate to his age. For early in the development of every fine moral force there is such a point, when the soul weakens, and that will perhaps be its boldest moment - as though it must first put down searching roots in order to churn up the earth destined later to support it - which is why adolescent boys with great futures ahead of them possess a past rich in humiliations.

Törless’s love of particular moods was the first sign of a spiritual development that would later express itself as a talent for astonishment. Later, in fact, he was practically controlled by a peculiar ability.