Young Torless Read Online Free PDF Page A

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, e ven 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