FullReads

"To Denmark?"

"Yes. And I promise myself benefit from it. Chance kept me from ever going there, close as I was to the boundary all through my youth, and yet I have always known and loved the place. I suppose I must have this affection for the north from my father, for my mother was really fonder of the bellezza, that is, provided she didn’t find everything utterly immaterial. But take the books that are written up there, those deep, pure, humorous books, Lisaveta—to me there is nothing like them and I love them. Take the Scandinavian meals, those incomparable meals that you can only stand in a strong salt air (I don’t know whether I can stand them at all any more), and that I’m a little familiar with from my own home, for that’s just the way we eat at home. Or just simply take the names, the personal names that adorn the people up there, and that we also had in large numbers at home, take a name like Ingeborg,—a harp-chord of the most immaculate poesy. And then the sea—they have the Baltic up there! … In short, I am going up there, Lisaveta. I wish to see the Baltic again, hear these names again, read those books on the spot; and I wish to stand on the terrace of Kronborg, where the ghost appeared to Hamlet and brought distress and death upon the poor, noble young man … "

"How are you going to go, Tonio, if I may ask? By what route?"

"The usual one," he said with a shrug of the shoulders and a visible blush. "Yes, I shall touch upon my—my point of departure, Lisaveta, after the lapse of thirteen years, and that may be rather comic.

Lisaveta smiled.

"That is what I wanted to hear, Tonio Kröger. And so, go with God. And don’t fail to write to me, too, do you hear? I promise myself an eventful letter from your trip to—Denmark. "

VI

And Tonio Kröger journeyed northward. He traveled comfortably (for he was wont to say that any one who has so much more distress of soul than other people may justly claim a little external comfort), and he did not rest until the towers of the cramped city which had been his starting-point rose before him in the gray air. There he made a brief, strange sojourn …

A dreary afternoon was already turning into evening as the train pulled into the narrow, smoke-blackened, queerly familiar train-shed; under the dirty glass roof the thick smoke still gathered into roundish clumps and floated back and forth in long ragged ribbons, just as when Tonio Kröger rode away with nothing but mockery in his heart. —He attended to his baggage, ordered it brought to the hotel, and left the station.

Those were the black, immoderately broad and high two-horse cabs of the city, standing outside in a row. He did not take one; he merely looked at them as he looked at everything: the narrow gables and pointed turrets that greeted him across the nearest roofs, the fair-haired, idly awkward people round about him, with their broad yet rapid speech—and a nervous laughter rose up in him that was secretly allied to sobbing. —He went on foot, quite slowly, with the incessant pressure of the moist wind on his face, over the bridge on whose balustrade mythological figures stood, and then along the harbor for some distance.

Good heavens, how tiny and crooked the whole place seemed! Had these narrow gable-fringed streets risen to the town in such comical steepness through all those years? The smoke-stacks and masts of the ships swayed gently in the breeze and in the twilight on the murky river. Should he go up yonder street, the one on which stood the house that he had in mind? No, tomorrow. He was so sleepy now. His head was heavy from the journey, and slow, nebulous thoughts crossed his mind.