Young Torless by Robert Musil Page B

there can be a moment of bending down, of drawing strength from deep within, of holding breath-a moment of utmost inner tension under a surface of silence. No one can say what happens in this moment. It is, as were, the shadow that coming passion casts ahead of it. This is a!) organic shadow; it is a loosening of all previous tensions and at the same time a state of sudden, new bondage in which the whole future is already implicit; it is an incubation so concentrated that it is sharp as the prick of a needle . . .And then again it is a mere nothing, a vague, dull feeling, a weakness, a faint dread .
    That was how Törless felt it all. Reiting's story seemed to him, when he put it to himself squarely, to be of no importance in itself: a reckless misdeed, a mean and cowardly act, on Basini's side, and now, without doubt, some cruel whim of Reiting's would follow. On the other hand, however, he felt something like an anxious premonition that events had now taken a quite personal turn against himself and that there was in the incident some sharp menace directed against him, like a pointed weapon.
    He could not help imagining Basini together with Bozena, and he glanced around the narrow room. The walls seemed to threaten him, to be closing in on him, to be reaching out for him with bloodstained hands, and the revolver seemed to swing to and fro where it hung....
    Now for the first time it was as though something had fallen, like a stone, into the vague solitude of his dreamy imaginings. It was there. There was nothing to be done about it. It was a reality. Yesterday Basini had been the same as himself. Now a trap-door had opened and Basini had plunged into the depths. It was precisely as Reiting had described it: a sudden change, and the person had become someone else....
    And once again this somehow linked up with Bozena. He had committed blasphemy in his thoughts. The rotten, sweet smell rising from them had made him dizzy. And this profound humiliation, this self-abandonment, this state of being covered with the heavy, pale, poisonous leaves of infamy, this state that had moved through his dreams like a bodiless, far-off reflection of himself, all this had now suddenly happened to Basini.
    So it was something one must really reckon with, something one must be on one's guard against, which could suddenly leap out of the silent mirrors in one's mind?
    But then everything else was possible too. Then Reiting and Beineberg were possible. Then this narrow little room was possible . . . Then it was also possible that from the bright diurnal world, which was all he had known hitherto, there was a door leading into another world, where all was muffled, seething, passionate, naked, and loaded with destruction-and that between those people whose lives moved in an orderly way between the office and the family, as though in a transparent and yet solid structure, a building all of glass and iron, and the others, the outcasts, the blood-stained, the debauched and filthy, those who wandered in labyrinthine passages full of roaring voices, there was some bridge-and not only that, but that the frontiers of their lives secretly marched together and the line could be crossed at any moment.
    And the only other question that remained was: how is it possible? What happens at such a moment? What then shoots screaming up into the air and is suddenly extinguished?
    These were the questions that this incident set stirring in Törless. They loomed up, obscurely, tight-lipped, cloaked in some vague, dull feeling. . . weakness . . . a faint dread.
    And yet as though from a long way off, raggedly, at random, many of their words rang out within him, filling him with anxious foreboding.
    It was at this moment that Reiting put his query.
    Törless at once began to talk. In doing so he was obeying a sudden impulse, a rush of bewildered feeling. It seemed to him that something decisive was imminent, and he was startled to the approach of it, whatever it was, and