Young Torless Read Online Free PDF Page B

did not answer. But meanwhile they had reached the little town's church square, with its cobbles, and here they parted company.
    Törless and Beineberg did not want to go back yet, but the others had no leave to stay out any longer and returned to the school.
    The two boys had gone along to the cake shop.
    Here they sat at a little round table, beside a window overlooking the garden, under a gas candelabrum with its flames buzzing softly in the milky glass globes.
    They had made themselves thoroughly comfortable, having little glasses filled up now with this liqueur, now with another, smoking cigarettes, and eating pastries between whiles, enjoying the luxury of being the only customers. Although in one of the back rooms there might still be some solitary visitor sitting over his glass of wine, at least here in front all was quiet, and even the portly, aging proprietress seemed to have dozed off behind the counter.
    Törless gazed-but vaguely-through the window, out into the empty garden, where darkness was slowly gathering.
    Beineberg was talking-about India, as usual. For his father, the general, had as a young officer been there in British service. And he had brought back not only what any other European brought back with him, carvings, textiles, and little idols manufactured for sale to tourists, but something of a feeling, which he had never lost, for the mysterious, bizarre glimmerings of esoteric Buddhism. Whatever he had picked up there, and had come to know more of from his later reading, he had passed on to his son, even from the boy's early childhood.
    For the rest, his attitude to reading was an odd one. He was a cavalry officer and was not at all fond of books in general. Novels and philosophy he despised equally. When he read, he did not want to reflect on opinions and controversies, but, from the very instant of opening the book, to enter as through a secret portal into the midst of some very exclusive knowledge. Books that he read had to be such that the mere possession of them was as it were a secret sign of initiation and a pledge of more than earthly revelations. And this he found only in books of Indian philosophy, which to him seemed to be not merely books, but revelations, something real-keys such as were the alchemical and magical books of the Middle Ages.
    With them this healthy, energetic man, who observed his duties strictly and exercised his three horses himself almost every day, would usually shut himself up for the evening.
    Then he would pick out a passage at random and meditate on it, in the hope that this time it would reveal its inmost secret meaning to him. Nor was he ever disappointed, however often he had to admit that he had not yet advanced beyond the forecourts of the sacred temple.
    Thus it was that round this sinewy, tanned, open-air man there hovered something like the nimbus of an esoteric mystery. His conviction of being daily on the eve of receiving some overpoweringly great illumination gave him an air of reserve and superiority. His eyes were not dreamy, but calm and hard. The habit of reading books in which no single word could be shifted from its place without disturbing the secret significance, the careful, scrupulous weighing of every single sentence for its meaning and counter-meaning, its possible ambiguities, had brought that look into those eyes.
    Only occasionally did his thoughts lose themselves in a twilit state of agreeable melancholy. This happened when he thought of the esoteric cult bound up with the originals of the writings open before him, of the miracles that had emanated from them, stirring thousands, thousands of human beings who now, because of the vast distance separating him from them, appeared to him like brothers, while he despised the people round about him, whom he saw in all their detail. At such hours he grew despondent. He was depressed by the thought that he was condemned to spend his life far away from the sources of those holy powers and that his