And that he found only in books of Indian philosophy, which did not seem mere books to him, but revelations, reality — key works like the alchemical texts and the magic books of the Middle Ages.

This healthy and active man, who carried out his duties to the letter and also managed to ride his three horses almost every day, locked himself in with those books, usually towards evening.

Then he would select a passage at random and ponder whether its most secret meaning might this time be revealed to him. And he had never been disappointed, however often he had to concede that he had penetrated no further than the forecourt of the consecrated temple.

So something like an aura of solemn mystery floated around this wiry, tanned, outdoor man. His conviction that he was on the threshold of a shatteringly great revelation early each evening gave him a reserved superiority. His eyes were not dreamy, but calm and hard. Their expression had been formed by his habit of reading books in which not a single word could be displaced without disturbing its esoteric significance, by carefully and attentively reading each sentence for its meaning and double meaning.

Only every now and again did his thoughts lose themselves in a half-sleep of benevolent melancholy. That happened whenever he thought of the secret cult devoted to the originals of the writings before him, and the miracles that had issued from them and moved thousands of people. And those people, because of the great distance separating him from them, now appeared to him as brothers, while he despised those who surrounded him, and whom he saw down to their smallest details. At such times he became ill-tempered. He was oppressed by the thought that his life was condemned to run its course far from the wellsprings of the holy powers, his efforts condemned perhaps to wane through adverse conditions. But when he had spent a while sitting sadly over his books, a strange thing happened to his mood. His melancholy lost nothing of its heaviness; on the contrary, its sadness intensified, but it no longer oppressed him. He felt more forlorn and isolated than ever, but in his melancholy there was a refined pleasure, a pride in doing something strange, serving a deity that no one understood. And then, even fleetingly, something might gleam in his eyes that recalled the madness of religious ecstasy.

 

Beineberg had talked himself out. The image of his eccentric father lived on in him in a kind of distorting enlargement. Each trait was preserved; but what might originally have been merely a mood in his father, one that was nurtured and intensified for the sake of its exclusiveness, had burgeoned in his son into a fantastic hope. His father’s peculiarity, which might originally have meant only the last refuge of his individuality, which each of us must create for himself even if only in his choice of clothes, so as to have something that distinguishes him from others, had, in his son, become a firm conviction that he could achieve domination through unusual spiritual powers.

Törless was familiar enough with these conversations. They passed him by and barely touched him.

He had now half turned away from the window and was studying Beineberg, who was rolling himself a cigarette. And again he felt that curious disgust for Beineberg that sometimes surged up within him. But those slender, dark hands, which were skilfully rolling the tobacco in the paper, were actually beautiful. Thin fingers, oval, beautifully arched nails: there was a certain elegance to them. And in the dark brown eyes. And there was elegance, too, in the elongated slenderness of the boy’s whole body. Of course - his ears did stick out a great deal, his face was small and irregular, and the overall impression of his head was like a bat’s. However - and Törless felt this very clearly as he weighed up the details against each other - it was not the ugly details so much as the more attractive ones that unsettled him so peculiarly.

The gauntness of his body - Beineberg himself was forever praising the steely, slim legs of Homeric athletes which he took as his model. Törless had not yet made up his mind about this, and no satisfactory comparison occurred to him now. He wanted to stare keenly at Beineberg, but Beineberg would have noticed, and he would have had to start some conversation or other. But precisely in that way — only half looking at him and half completing the picture in his imagination — the difference struck him. If he imagined the clothes away from Beineberg’s body, it was almost impossible to maintain the idea of a tranquil slenderness; instead images momentarily came to him of twisting movements, a distortion of the limbs and contortion of the spine, such as one sees in all representations of martyrdom or in the grotesque displays of fairground artistes.

Beineberg’s hands, too, which he could equally well have visualized in some shapely gesture, he could only imagine in a fiddling agitation. And it was upon those hands, actually the most beautiful thing about Beineberg, that his greatest disgust was focused. There was something indecent about them.