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"You know I hadn’t forgotten, Tonio," said Hans, looking down at the walk before him, "but I simply thought probably nothing could come of it today, because it’s so wet and windy, you know. But that doesn’t bother me at all, and I think it’s fine that you waited for me in spite of it. I had begun to think you had gone on home, and was vexed … "

At these words Tonio’s entire being began to leap and shout.

"Why, then we’ll go over the ramparts now," he said with agitated voice. Over the Mill Rampart and the Holsten Rampart, and then I’ll take you home that way, Hans … Why no, it doesn’t matter if I go home alone then; next time you’ll go with me. "

At bottom he did not believe very completely in what Hans had said, and he felt distinctly that the latter assigned only half as much importance to this walk as he. But yet he saw that Hans regretted his forgetfulness and was making it a point to conciliate him. And he was far from wishing to impede the conciliation.

The fact was that Tonio loved Hans Hansen and had already suffered much for his sake. He who loves most is the weaker and must suffer—this simple and bitter doctrine of life his fourteen-year-old spirit had already accepted; and he was so constituted that he marked well all such experiences, and as it were jotted them down inwardly, and indeed he had a certain pleasure in them, though to be sure without ordering his conduct accordingly and so deriving practical benefit from them. Furthermore, his nature was such that he deemed such teachings much more important and interesting than the knowledge which was forced upon him in school; during the class hours in the vaulted Gothic school-rooms he applied himself mostly to tasting the sensations of such bits of insight to the lees, and thinking them out in their entirety. This occupation afforded the same kind of satisfaction as when he would walk up and down his room with his violin (for he played the violin), letting the soft tones, as soft as he could produce them, mingle with the plashing of the fountain which rose in a flickering jet under the branches of the old walnutree in the garden below.

The fountain, the old walnut, his violin, and far away the sea, the Baltic, whose summer dreams he could listen to in the long vacation—these were the things he loved, with which he encompassed himself, as it were, and among which his inward life ran its course; things whose names may be employed with good effect in verse, and which did actually ring out time and again in the verses which Tonio Kröger occasionally composed.

This fact, that he possessed a note-book with verse of his own in it, had become known through his own fault, and it injured him greatly both with his fellows and his teachers. The son of Consul Kröger thought it on the one hand stupid and base to condemn him for writing verses, and he despised on that account both fellows and teachers, whose bad manners were always repellent to him, and whose personal weaknesses he detected with strange penetration. On the other hand, he himself found it really an improper dissipation to write verse, and so had to agree to some extent with all those who regarded it as a doubtful occupation. But this could not make him give it up.

As he wasted his time at home, was slow and generally inattentive in class hours, and had a bad record with his teachers, he always brought home the most wretched reports; at which his father, a tall, carefully dressed gentleman with meditative blue eyes, who always wore a wild flower in his button-hole, showed himself both incensed and distressed. But to his mother, his beautiful mother with the black hair, whose name was Consuelo and who was altogether so different from the other ladies of the town, because Tonio’s father had once fetched her from clear down at the bottom of the map—to his mother his reports were absolutely immaterial.