Tonio did not speak. He was miserable. Knitting his somewhat slanting eyebrows, and with his lips rounded for whistling, he bowed his head and looked sideways into the distance. This posture and expression were peculiar to him.
Suddenly Hans thrust his arm beneath Tonio’s and gave him a side-glance, for he understood very plainly what it was all about. And although Tonio kept silent for the next few steps, yet he suddenly became very pliable.
“I didn’t forget it at all, Tonio,” Hans said, and looked down in front of him at the pavement. “But I just thought that nothing could come of it, because it is so wet and windy. But I don’t mind that in the least, and I think it was great of you to wait for me anyhow. I thought you must have gone home, and I was sorry …”
At these words Tonio became agitated and exultant.
“Yes, now let’s go over the walls,” he said with emotion. “Across the Mill-wall and the Holsten-wall, and then I’ll take you home, Hans. … No, no—it doesn’t matter at all if I have to go back alone. The next time you will come with me.”
At bottom he didn’t believe very firmly what Hans had told him; and he felt sure that Hans laid only half as much weight on their walk as he. Yet he saw that Hans regretted his forgetfulness and was doing his best to placate him. And he had little intention of refusing to be placated. …
The fact was that Tonio loved Hans Hansen and had already suffered much through him. Whoever loves the more is at a disadvantage and must suffer—his fourteen years of life had already taught him this hard simple fact. And it was like him that he should note such discoveries, should register them inside himself and get a certain pleasure from them, without really using them as defences or deriving any practical value out of them. And also it was natural with him to rate such acquisitions as far more important and more interesting than the knowledge which was forced upon him at school, and even to devote his hours of instruction in the Gothic-vaulted classroom mostly to testing out the full burden of such observations, and pondering on them. And this occupation gave him as much satisfaction as when he would go about his room with his violin (for he played the violin) and let its tones melt softly into the murmuring of the fountain which rose dancing below in the garden under the branches of the old walnut-tree. …
The fountain, the old walnut-tree, his violin, and in the distance the ocean, the Baltic whose summer dreams he was allowed to hear during vacations—it was these things that he loved; he surrounded himself with them, you might say; and his inner life took its course among them. The names of these things can be used with good effect in verse, and they actually did keep recurring in the verses which Tonio Kröger composed now and then.
This fact, that he possessed a book of verses which he had written himself, became known through his own fault; and it did him much damage with both his fellow students and the teachers. On the one hand, the Consul Kröger’s son found it stupid and vulgar of them to take offence at this, and he disrespected both students and teachers, whose bad manners alienated him besides, and whose personal weaknesses he penetrated with unusual keenness. But, on the other hand, he himself felt something illicit and improper in the writing of verses; and in a measure he must yield to all those who considered it an occupation to look askance at. Yet that did not enable him to renounce it. …
Since he wasted his time at home, was slow and poor at concentration in his studies, and was always marked down by his teachers, he was continually bringing home the wretchedest reports; whereupon his father, a tall, scrupulously dressed man with thoughtful blue eyes who always wore a wild flower in his buttonhole, would display great anger and distress. Nevertheless, Tonio’s mother, his beautiful black-haired mother whose Christian name was Consuelo and who was so totally different from the other women of the city, since his father had once gone and gotten her from away down on the map—his mother was absolutely indifferent to these reports. …
Tonio loved his dark and emotional mother, who played the piano and the mandolin so marvellously; and he was glad that she was not disturbed over his questionable status among mankind. But, on the other hand, he felt that his father’s anger was vastly more dignified and more respectable; and in spite of the scoldings, he was in perfect agreement with his father at bottom, while he found his mother’s gay indifference a little bit loose. Often his thoughts ran something like this: “It is enough that I am what I am and neither can nor will change myself—indolent, unruly, and concerned with things which nobody else thinks about. At least it is right for me to be soundly reprimanded and punished for this, and not have it all passed over with kisses and music. We aren’t gipsies in a green wagon, but respectable
