This manner of looking at himself and his relation to life played an important role in Tonio’s love for Hans Hansen. He loved him first because he was beautiful, but next because here was what seemed to be in every way his own counterpart and opposite. Hans Hansen was a splendid scholar, and a good fellow besides; he rode, belonged to a gymnasium, swam like a hero, and enjoyed general popularity. The teachers were almost tender in their liking for him, called him by his first name, and helped him in every way; his comrades tried to win his favour, and on the street ladies and gentlemen stopped him, grabbed him by the shock of straw-coloured hair which protruded from under his sailor cap, and said: “Good day, Hans Hansen, with your neat head of hair! Are you head of the class yet? Remember me to Papa and Mamma, my good lad. …”
Such was Hans Hansen; and ever since Tonio Kröger had known him he felt a yearning whenever he looked at him, an envious yearning which sat above the breast and burned. “Who else,” he thought, “could have such blue eyes as you, and live on such natural and intimate terms with everyone? You are always occupied with something highly proper and generally respectable. When you have finished your school assignments, then you take riding-lessons or work with the compass-saw; and even in vacations, by the sea, you are taken up with rowing, sailing, and swimming, while I lie forlorn and idle in the sand, and stare at the mysterious changes shifting across the face of the sea. But that’s why your eyes are so clear. To be like you …”
He did not make the attempt to be like Hans Hansen, and perhaps he was not even very earnest in his wish. But he hungered painfully, such as he was, to be loved by him; and he bid for his love after his fashion, a slow, thorough, and devoted fashion, passionate and melancholy, but with a melancholy that can burn deeper and more devouringly than all the abrupt passion which his appearance might have led one to expect.
And he did not bid in vain, for Hans, who respected a certain superiority in him, a trick of the lips which enabled Tonio to express difficult things, understood quite well that here was an unusually strong and tender feeling for him; he showed his gratitude and gave Tonio much happiness by his response—but also many tortures of jealousy, of disillusion, and of frustrated efforts to establish a mental union. For it was a remarkable fact that Tonio, although he envied Hans Hansen for his manner of living, was continually trying to win him over to his own—which could succeed only for moments, at best, and then only superficially. …
“I just read something wonderful, something splendid,” he said. They were walking along and both eating out of a poke of fruit candy which they had bought for ten pfennigs from Jiverrsen’s store in the Mühlenstrasse. “You must read it, Hans; it is Don Carlos, by Schiller. … I will lend it to you if you want. …”
“Ah, no,” Hans Hansen said; “forget that, Tonio; that doesn’t suit me. I’ll stick to my horse books, you know. There are some great pictures in them, I’ll tell you. Sometime when you are at our house I’ll show them to you. They are snapshots, and show the nags trotting, galloping, and vaulting, in all the positions which you are never able to see in real life because it goes too fast. …”
“In all positions?” Tonio asked politely. “Yes, that is fine. But as for Don Carlos, it beats everything imaginable. There are places in it, you’ll see, which are so beautiful that you feel a shock, a kind of explosion.”
“An explosion?” Hans Hansen asked. “How is that?”
“For example, there is the place where the king has cried because he was deceived by the marquis, but the marquis has deceived him only through love of the prince, you understand, for whom he sacrifices himself, and now the news comes from the cabinet to the antechamber that the king has cried. ‘Cried? The king cried?’ All the courtiers are frightfully affected, and it goes right through you, because he is a frightfully stern and rigid king. But it is so plain why he cried, and it really makes me sadder than it does the prince and the marquis put together. He is always so completely alone and without love, and now he believes he has found someone, and this man betrays him. …”
Hans Hansen looked sideways into Tonio’s face, and something in this face really must have won him over to the subject, for he suddenly shoved his arm back under Tonio’s again and asked:
“Just how does he betray him, Tonio?”
Tonio became agitated.
“Yes, the fact is,” he began, “that all letters to Brabant and Flanders …”
“There comes Erwin Jimmerthal,” Hans said.
Tonio was silent. “I wish the earth would swallow him up, this Jimmerthal!” he thought. “Why must he come and disturb us? If only he doesn’t walk with us the whole way and talk about his riding-lesson!” For Erwin Jimmerthal had just had a riding-lesson. He was the son of the bank-director, and lived out here beyond the Gate. With his bowed legs and narrow eyes, he was coming towards them along the avenue, his schoolbag missing already.
“Hello, Jimmerthal,” Hans cried.
