He explained to Basini that he had forfeited his existence, that he should really be reported, and it was only because of a special leniency that he was temporarily escaping the punishment of expulsion.

Then he was informed of the special conditions. Reiting would ensure that they were adhered to.

During the entire performance Basini had been very pale, but he had not uttered a word in reply, and it was impossible to tell from his face what was happening within him.

Törless had found the scene alternately very tasteless and very meaningful.

Beineberg had paid more attention to Reiting than to Basini.

 

Over the next few days the matter seemed almost to have been forgotten. Except during lessons and at mealtimes Reiting was hardly in evidence, Beineberg was more silent than ever, and Törless continually put off thinking about the matter.

Basini moved around among the schoolmates as though nothing had happened.

 

He was a little taller than Törless but very puny in build, his movements were mild and languid, his features feminine. He was not intelligent, he was one of the worst at fencing and gymnastics, but he did have a pleasant kind of coquettish charm.

He had only visited Božena on that occasion to act the man. Given his retarded development, any real desire would still have been entirely alien to him. Rather he felt it merely a compulsion, something appropriate or obligatory, to have about him the aura of amatory adventures. He had been happiest when he was leaving Božena and it was all behind him, because all that concerned him was possession of the memory.

Sometimes he lied out of vanity. For example, he came back from holiday with souvenirs of his little affairs - hair-bands, curls, billets-doux. But once when he had brought back a garter in his suitcase, sweet, small, fragrant, sky-blue, and over time it had transpired that it belonged to his twelve-year-old sister, he had been roundly mocked for his ludicrous boasting.

His evident moral inferiority was of a kind with his stupidity. He could not resist any notion that occurred to him, and was always surprised by the consequences. In that he was like those women with pretty little curls over their foreheads, who give their husbands gradual doses of poison in their meals, and are then horrified by the strange, harsh words of the public prosecutor and the death sentence that they receive.

 

Törless stayed out of his way. As a result he gradually lost the profound inner anxiety which had, from the first, clutched at the roots of his thoughts and shaken him to the core. Törless’s life grew rational again; his disconcerted astonishment faded and became more unreal by the day, like the residues of a dream that cannot survive the realities of the solid, sunlit world.

To reassure himself further of this condition, he conveyed all of this in a letter to his parents. But he said nothing of what he himself had felt.

He had now come back round to the view that it was best to ensure that Basini be expelled from the school at the next opportunity. He could not imagine that his parents could think otherwise. What he expected from them was a severe and disgusted condemnation of Basini, as though they were flicking him away with their fingertips like an unclean insect that one could not bear to see near one’s son.

There was none of this in the letter that he received in reply. His parents had taken a great deal of trouble and, as rational people, weighed up all the circumstances, in so far as they were able to form an idea of them from the disjointed and fragmentary communications in that hastily written letter. In the end they advised the greatest caution and reticence, all the more so since their son’s depiction of events might well have contained a certain degree of exaggeration produced by youthful indignation. So they approved the decision to give Basini the opportunity to mend his ways, and considered that one should not drive the destiny of a human being off course for the sake of a minor error. All the more so - and they particularly stressed this as being quite obvious - since in this case the people concerned were not complete, but malleable characters grasped in the middle of their development. Certainly, Basini must be treated with all the gravity and strictness that one could muster, but he should always be approached with benevolence and attempts should be made to improve him.

They backed this up this with a series of examples with which Torless was very familiar. Because he very clearly remembered that in the lower forms, on which the authorities still liked to impose draconian moral codes, keeping pocket money within severely restricted limits, some of the little boys, greedy as they all were, could often not keep from begging the more fortunate among them for a bite of their ham sandwich, or whatever it might have been. He himself had occasionally succumbed to this, although he concealed his shame by cursing the wicked and malevolent authorities. And he thanked not only the years, but also the solemn and well-intentioned admonitions of his parents for the fact that he had gradually learned to maintain his pride and avoid such weaknesses.

But none of that had any effect today.

He had to acknowledge that his parents were correct in many respects, and he also knew that it was barely possible to judge accurately from a distance; but something of far greater importance seemed to be missing from their letter.

That was the understanding of the fact that something irrevocable had taken place, something that should never happen among people of a certain class of society. The letter lacked astonishment and shock. They spoke as though this was something normal that had to be resolved with tact, but without becoming over-excited. A stain as unlovely but as unavoidable as one’s daily call of nature. There was no more trace of a more personal, unsettled vision than there was in Beineberg and Reiting.

Törless could have taken all this on board. Instead he tore the letter into little pieces and burned it. It was the first time in his life that he was guilty of such a lack of piety.

What had been unleashed within him was the opposite effect to that intended.