With Beineberg and Reiting, with Mote and Hofmeier, the very same young people with whom he was today accompanying his parents to the railway station.

Curiously, they were the worst of his year, talented and, obviously, of good family, but sometimes wild and unruly to the point of brutality. And if it was their company that now held Törless enthralled, this was probably due to his own lack of independence, which had grown very severe since his break with the prince. It could even be seen as a direct continuation of that changed direction, because, like it, it signified a fear of excessively subtle sentimentalities; and with such feelings the nature of his other classmates formed a healthy, sturdy, life-embracing contrast.

Törless yielded entirely to their influence, because his intellectual situation was more or less this: by his age, at a Gymnasium, one will have read Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, perhaps even the modern authors. That reading re-emerges, half-digested, through the fingertips. Roman tragedies are produced, or terribly sensitive lyrical effusions which stride across whole pages, as though dressed in the finest and most delicate lace: things which are inherently ridiculous, but which have an inestimable value for the soundness of a young person’s development. For these associations and borrowed emotions, coming as they do from outside, carry young people over the dangerously spongy spiritual ground of the years during which one must signify something to oneself, while one is still too incomplete really to signify anything at all. It is of no consequence whether anything remains of this, or whether it does not; for each of us comes to terms with himself, and the only danger lies in the transitional age. If one were to make a young person aware of how ridiculous he was, the ground would swallow him up, or else he would plummet like a sleepwalker who has been awoken, and who suddenly sees nothing but the void.

That illusion, that trick favouring personal development, was missing from the institute. For although the library contained the classics, these were thought to be boring, and otherwise it held nothing but volumes of sentimental short stories and supposedly humorous tales of the military life.

Young Törless had read his way through the lot in his greed for books, and some tritely tender notion from one short story or another would sometimes linger with him for a while, but it had no influence, no real influence, on his character.

It seemed at the time as though he had no character whatsoever.

Under the influence of this reading, for example, he himself wrote the occasional little story or began the occasional romantic epic. So excited was he about the amorous sufferings of his heroes that his cheeks blushed, his pulse quickened and his eyes gleamed.

But when he set aside his pen it was all over; in a sense his mind lived only in motion. So he was also able to jot down a poem or a story at any time, in response to any stimulus. It excited him, but he never took it entirely seriously, and the activity did not strike him as important. Nothing of it entered his character, and it did not spring from it either. It was only in response to some external compulsion that he had any sensations beyond indifference, just as an actor needs the compulsion that a role imposes upon him.

These were cerebral reactions. But that which we take to be a person’s character or soul, his inner line or colour, compared to which his thoughts, decisions and actions, being of little significance, appear random and interchangeable — that which had, for example, brought Törless together with the prince in the face of all rational judgement - that fixed, final backdrop, was entirely lacking in Törless at this time.

In his classmates it was the enjoyment of sport, an animal quality, that meant they had no need of such a thing, a gap filled, in the Gymnasium, by play with literature.

But Törless was too intellectual for the former, and for the latter, life in the institute, which required that its pupils be constantly ready to engage in quarrels and fist-fights, made him too sensitive to the absurdity of such borrowed emotions. Thus his nature assumed a certain vagueness, an inner helplessness, which meant that he could not find out where he was.

He attached himself to his new friends because he was impressed by their wildness. Since he was ambitious he tried every now and again to outdo them. But each time he stopped half-way, and suffered a certain amount of ridicule as a consequence. He would then feel intimidated again. His whole life during that critical period really consisted only in his repeated attempts to emulate his rough, more masculine friends, and at the same time in a deep and inward indifference towards his own efforts.

Now, when his parents visited him, he was quiet and shy while they were on their own. He drew away from his mother’s tender caresses, always under a different pretext. He would really have loved to yield to them, but he was ashamed, as though his classmates’ eyes were upon him.

His parents took it as the awkwardness of the developing years. In the afternoon the whole noisy horde would turn up. They played cards, ate, drank, told anecdotes about the teachers and smoked the cigarettes that the Hofrat1 had brought from the capital.

This merriment pleased the couple and put their minds at rest.

They did not know that times could sometimes be different for Törless. And, recently, that was true more and more often. There were moments when life in the institute left him utterly indifferent. Then the putty of all of his day-to-day worries dissolved, and the hours of his life fell apart with no internal connection.

Often he sat for a long time - in gloomy reflection — hunched over himself, so to speak.

 

This time, as usual, the visit had lasted two days. They had eaten, smoked and gone on an outing, and now the express train was to bring the couple back to the capital.

A quiet rumble in the rails announced its approach, and the signals of the bell on the roof of the station building rang relentlessly in the ear of Frau Törless.

‘Isn’t that right, my dear Beineberg? You will look out for my boy for me?’ Hofrat Törless turned towards young Baron Beineberg, a tall, bony lad with sticking-out ears, but with expressive, clever eyes.

Little Törless pulled a face at such presumption, and Beineberg grinned, both flattered and enjoying his friend’s discomfort.

‘Generally speaking,’ — the Hofrat turned to the others — ‘I should like to ask you all to let me know if anything were to happen to my son.’

This drew from young Törless an infinitely bored: ‘But, Papa, what could happen to me?’ But he was used to letting this excess of concern wash over him every time they said goodbye.

The others, in the meantime, clicked their heels, drawing their elegant swords stiffly to their sides, and the Hofrat added, ‘You can never know what lies ahead, and the idea of being immediately informed of anything would be a great consolation to me; after all, my son, you might not be in a position to write.’

Then the train pulled in. Hofrat Törless embraced his son, Frau von Törless pressed her veil tighter to her face to hide her tears, the friends took their leave one by one, and then the guard shut the coach door.

For one last time the couple saw the high, bare rear façade of the institute building - the massive, long wall surrounding the grounds, and then on both sides there were only greyish-brown fields and the occasional solitary fruit tree.

 

In the meantime the young people had left the station and were walking two abreast on either side of the road — in that way they avoided at least the densest and harshest of the dust - towards the town, without saying a great deal to one another.

It was past five o’clock, and a cold, grave atmosphere was falling across the fields, a harbinger of evening.

Törless became very sad.

Perhaps it was down to his parents’ departure, although perhaps it might only have been the dull, chilly melancholy that now lay heavily upon the whole of the surrounding landscape, and even as little as a few paces away blurred the shapes of objects with heavy, lacklustre colours.

The same terrible apathy that had lain upon everything all afternoon now crept towards him over the plain, and behind it, like a slimy trail, the mist that clung to the newly ploughed land and lead-grey turnip fields.

Törless looked neither right nor left, but he could feel it. Step after step he placed his feet in the tracks that the boy ahead of him had made in the dust - and that was how he felt things were: as if this was how they had to be: a stony compulsion that captured and compressed the whole of his life into this movement - one step after the other — along this single line, along this narrow strip running through the dust.

When they stopped at a crossing, where a second path met their own in a circular patch of firmly trodden earth, and when a ramshackle signpost loomed crookedly into the air, that line, forming such a contrast with its surroundings, had the effect on Törless of a cry of desperation.

Again they walked on.