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Tonio Kroger Prodigy
by
"Good-by, Hans," said Tonio, "it was nice to go walking. "
The hands they clasped were quite wet and rusty from the garden gate. But when Hans looked into Tonio’s eyes, something like penitent reflection came into his handsome face.
"And by the way, I’m going to read Don Carlos pretty soon," he said quickly. "That about the king in his cabinet must be fine. " Then he put his school-bag under his arm and ran off through the front yard. Before he disappeared into the house he turned once more and nodded.
And Tonio Kröger went away quite transfigured and on wings. The wind was at his back, but that was not the only reason why he moved away so lightly.
Hans would read Don Carlos, and then they would have something in common, about which neither Immerthal nor any one else could talk with them. How well they understood each other. Who could tell—perhaps he might even bring him to the point of writing verses too … No, no, he did not want to do that. Hans must not become like Tonio, but remain as he was, so bright and strong, just as everybody loved him, and Tonio most of all. But to read Don Carlos wouldn’t hurt him, just the same … And Tonio went through the old, square-built gate, along the harbor, and up the steep, draughty, and wet Gable Street to the house of his parents. That was when his heart lived; there was longing in it and melancholy envy and a tiny bit of contempt, and an unalloyed chaste blissfulness.
II
Fair-haired Inga, Ingeborg Holm, daughter of Doctor Holm who lived on the market-place where the Gothic fountain stood, lofty, many-pointed, and of varied form, she it was whom Tonio Kröger loved at sixteen.
How did that happen? He had seen her a thousand times; but one evening he saw her in a certain light, saw how in conversing with a girl friend she laughingly tossed her head in a certain saucy fashion, and carried her hand, a little-girl’s hand, by no means especially slender or dainty, up to her back hair in a certain fashion, so that the white gauze sleeve slipped down from her elbow; heard how she pronounced a word, an insignificant word, in a certain fashion, with a warm ring in her voice,—and a rapture seized upon his heart, far stronger than that which he had formerly felt at times when he looked at Hans Hansen, in those days when he was a small, silly boy.
On this evening he took away with him an image of her, with the thick blond braid, the elongated, laughing blue eyes, and a delicately marked saddle of freckles on her nose, and could not sleep for hearing the ring in her voice, softly trying to imitate the intonation with which she had uttered the insignificant word, and quivering as he did so. Experience taught him that this was love. But although he knew perfectly that love must inevitably bring him much pain, affliction, and humiliation, that it moreover destroys peace and overfills the heart with sweet melodies, without giving a man peace enough to round off any one thing and calmly weld it into a unified whole, yet he entertained it with joy, surrendered wholly to it, and nursed it with all the powers of his spirit; for he knew that it gives life and riches, and he longed to be alive and rich, instead of calmly welding anything into a unified whole.
This loss of Tonio Kröger’s heart to merry Inga Holm occurred in the empty drawing-room of Mrs. Consul Husteede, whose turn it was that evening to have the dancing class; for it was a private class, to which only members of the first families belonged, and they assembled in turn in the parental houses in order to receive instruction in dancing and deportment. For this special purpose dancing-master Knaak came over every week from Hamburg.