Young Torless by Robert Musil Page A

with. You know that sort of thing, it happens every few years. But they went a bit too far.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “Well-how! Don't ask such silly questions! And that's what Reiting's doing with Basini!”
    Törless suddenly understood what he meant, and he felt a choking in his throat as if it were full of sand.
    “I wouldn't have thought that of Reiting.” He did not know what else to say.
    Beineberg shrugged his shoulders. “He thinks he can take us in.”
    “Is he in love with him?”
    “Not a bit of it. He's not such a fool. It amuses him; at the most he gets some sort of excitement out of it.”
    “And how about Basini?”
    “Oh, him! Hasn't it struck you how uppish he's become recently? He hardly takes anything from me at all now. It's always Reiting, Reiting, with him-as if Reiting were his private patron saint. He probably decided it was better to put up with everything from one than with a bit from everyone. And I dare say Reiting's promised to look after him as long as he does whatever Reiting wants of him. But they'll find out they've made a mistake, and I'm going to knock such ideas out of Basini's head!”
    “How did you find out?”
    “I followed them once.”
    “Where to?”
    “ I n there, in the attic. Reiting had my key to the other door. Then I came up here, carefully opened up the gap and crept up to them.”
    The fact was that in the thin partition-wall dividing the cubbyhole from the attics they had broken open a gap just wide enough to allow one to wriggle through. It was intended to serve as an emergency exit in the event of their being surprised, and it was generally kept closed with loose bricks.
    Now there was a long pause, in which all that could be heard was the faint hiss when the tips of their cigarettes glowed.
    Törless was incapable of thinking; he simply saw . . . Behind his shut eyelids there was all at once a wild vortex of happenings . . . people, people moving in a glare, with bright lights and shifting, deep-etched shadows . . . faces . . . one face . . . a smile . . . an upward look... a shivering of the skin. .. He saw people in a way he had never seen them before, never felt them before. But he saw them without seeing, without images, without forms, as if only his soul saw them; and yet they were so distinct that he was pierced through and through by their intensity. Only, as though they halted at a threshold they could not cross, they escaped him the moment he sought for words to grasp them with.
    He could not stop himself from asking more. His voice shook. “And-did you see?”
    “Yes.”
    “And-did Basini-was he-?”
    But Beineberg remained silent, and once again there was nothing to be heard but, now and then, the vaguely disturbing hiss of the cigarettes. Only after a long time did Beineberg begin to talk again.
    “I've considered the whole thing from all points of view, and, as you know, I have my own way of thinking about such things. First of all, as far as Basini goes, it's my view he's no loss in any case. It makes no difference whether we go and report him, or give him a beating, or even if we torture him to death, just for the fun of it. Personally, I can't imagine that a creature like that can have any meaning in the wonderful mechanism of the universe. He strikes me as being merely accidental, as it were a random creation outside the order of things. That's to say-even he must of course mean something, but certainly only something as undefined as, say, a worm or a stone on the road, the sort of things you never know whether to walk round or step on. In other words, they're practically nothing. For if the spirit of the universe wants one of its parts to he preserved, it manifests its will more clearly. In such a case it says 'no' and creates a resistance, it makes us walk round the worm and makes the stone so hard that we can't smash it without tools. And before we can get the tools, it has had time to interpolate resistances in the form of all sorts