They played cards, ate, drank, told anecdotes about the masters, and smoked the cigarettes that the Hofrat had brought from the capital. This jollity pleased and reassured the parents.

That there were, in between times, hours of a different kind for Törless was something they did not know. And recently there had been more and more of such hours. There were moments when life at school became a matter of utter indifference to him. Then the putty of his everyday concerns dropped out and, with nothing more to bind them together, the hours of his life fell apart.

He often sat for a long time-gloomily brooding-as it were hunched over himself.

* * *

This time too his parents had stayed for two days. There had been a lunching and dining together, smoking, a drive in the country; and now the express was to carry Törless's parents back to the capital.

A faint vibration of the rails heralded the train's approach, and the bell clanging on the station roof sounded inexorably in the Frau Hofrat's ears.

“Well, my dear Beineberg, so you'll keep an eye on this lad of mine for me, won't you?” Hofrat Törless said, turning to young Baron Beineberg, a lanky, bony boy with big ears that stuck out, and eyes that were expressive and intelligent.

Törless, who was younger and smaller than the others, pulled a face at this repugnant suggestion of being given into his friend's charge; and Beineberg grinned, obviously flattered and with a shade of triumphant malice.

“Really,” the Hofrat added, turning to the rest of them, “I should like to ask you all, if there should be anything at all the matter with my son, to let me know at once.

This was going too far, and it drew from young Törless an infinitely wearied protest: “But, Father, what on earth do you think could happen to me?” although he was well used by now to having to put up with this excess of solicitude at every leave-taking.

Meanwhile the others drew themselves up, clicking their heels, each straightening the elegant sword at his side. And the Hofrat went on: “One never knows what may happen. It is a great weight off my mind to know I would be instantly informed. After all, something might prevent you from writing.”

At that moment the train drew in. Hofrat Törless embraced his son, Frau von Törless drew the veil tighter over her face to hide her tears, and one after the other the friends once more expressed their thanks for having been entertained. Then the guard slammed the door of the carriage.

Once again Hofrat and Frau von Törless saw the high, bare back of the school building and the immense, long wall surrounding the park; and then there was nothing to left and to right but grey-brown fields and an occasional fruit-tree.

* * *

Meanwhile the boys had left the railway station and were walking, in two single files, along the two edges of the road-so avoiding at least the densest and most suffocating dust-towards the town, without talking to each other much.

It was after five o'clock, and over the fields came a breath of something solemn and cold, a harbinger of evening.

Törless began to feel very mournful.

Perhaps it was because of his parents' departure, or perhaps it was caused only by the forbidding stolid melancholy that now lay like a dead weight on all the landscape, blurring the outlines of things, even a few paces away, with lack-lustre heaviness.

The same dreadful indifference that had been blanketed over the surrounding countryside all that afternoon now came creeping across the plain, and after it, like a slimy trail, came the mist, stickily clinging to the fresh-ploughed fields and the leaden-grey acres of turnips. Törless did not glance to right or to left, but he felt it. Steadily as he walked he set his feet in the tracks gaping in the dust, the prints left by the footsteps of the boy in front-and he felt it as though it must be so, as a stony compulsion catching his whole life up and compressing it into this movement-steadily plodding on along this one line, along this one small streak being drawn out through the dust.

When they came to a halt at a crossroads, where a second road and their own debouched into a round, worn patch of ground, and where a rotten timber sign-post pointed crookedly into the air, the tilted line of it, in such contrast with the surroundings, struck Törless as being like a cry of desperation.

Again they walked on. Törless thought of his parents, of people he knew, of life. At this time of day people were changing for a party or deciding they would go to the theatre. And afterwards one might go to a restaurant, hear a band playing, sit at a café table. . . . One met interesting people. A flirtation, an adventure, kept one in suspense till the morning. Life went on revolving, churning out ever new and unexpected happenings, like a strange and wonderful wheel.

Törless sighed over these thoughts, and at each step that bore him closer to the cramped narrowness of school something in him constricted, a noose was pulled tighter and tighter.

Even now the bell was ringing in his ears. And there was nothing he dreaded so much as this ringing of the bell, which cut the day short, once and for all, like the savage slash of a knife.

To be sure, there was nothing for him to experience, and his life passed along in a blur of perpetual indifference; but this ringing of the bell was an added mockery, which left him quivering with helpless rage against himself, his fate, and the day that was buried.

Now you can't experience anything more at all, for twelve hours you can't experience anything, for twelve hours you're dead. .. . That was what this bell meant.

* * *

When the little band of friends reached the first low-built wretched cottages, this mood of gloom and introspection lifted from Törless. As though seized by some sudden interest, he raised his head and glanced intently into the smoky interior of the dirty little hovels they were passing.

Outside the doors of most of them the women-folk were standing, in their wide skirts and coarse shifts, their broad feet caked with dust, their arms bare and brown.

If they were young and buxom, some crude Slav jest would be flung at them. They would nudge each other and titter at 'the young gentlemen'; sometimes, too, one would utter a shriek when her breasts were too vigorously brushed against in passing, or would answer a slap on the buttocks with an insulting epithet and a burst of laughter. There were others who merely watched the swift passersby with a grave and angry look; and the peasant himself, if he happened to come on the scene, would smile awkwardly, half unsure what to make of it, half in good humour.

Törless took no part in this display of overweening and precocious manliness.

The reason for this lay doubtless to some extent in a certain timidity about sexual matters such as is characteristic of almost all only children, but chiefly in his own peculiar kind of sensuality, which was more deeply hidden, more forceful, and of a darker hue than that of his friends and more slow and difficult in its manifestations.

While the others were making a show of shameless behaviour with the women, rather more for the sake of being 'smart' than from any lascivious urge, the taciturn little Törless's soul was in a state of upheaval, surging with real shamelessness.

He looked through the little windows and the crooked, narrow

doorways into the interior of the cottages with a gaze burning so hotly that there was all the time something like a delicate mesh dancing before his eyes.

Almost naked children tumbled about in the mud of the yards; here and there as some woman bent over her work her skirt swung high, revealing the hollows at the back of her knees, or the bulge of a heavy breast showed as the linen tightened over it. It was as though all this were going on in some quite different, animal, oppressive atmosphere, and the cottages exuded a heavy, sluggish air, which Törless eagerly breathed in.

He thought of old paintings that he had seen in museums without really understanding them.