“Have you finished now, Tonio Kröger?”
“No. But I shall say no more.”
“And it is enough, too.—Are you waiting for an answer?”
“Do you have one?”
“I should think so.—I have listened to you carefully, Tonio, from beginning to end, and I will give you the answer which fits everything you have said to me this afternoon and which is the solution for the problem that has disturbed you so much. Now then! The solution is this: that you, as you sit there, are quite simply a bourgeois.”
“Am I?” he asked, and collapsed slightly. …
“It seems that hits you hard, and it ought to. And for that reason I shall mitigate the sentence a bit, for I can do that: you are a bourgeois on the wrong path, Tonio Kröger—a strayed bourgeois.”
—Silence. Then he stood up decisively and reached for his hat and stick. “I thank you, Lisaweta Iwanowna; now I can go home in comfort. I have been ‘discharged’!”
V
Towards fall Tonio Kröger said to Lisaweta Iwanowna:
“Yes, I am taking a trip now, Lisaweta; I must air myself a bit. I must away, I seek the open.”
“Well, what then, Little Father, does it so please you again to go to Italy?”
“God, forget about Italy, Lisaweta. I am indifferent to Italy even to the point of disdain! It has been a long time since I used to imagine that I belonged there. Art, sweet sensuality. … In short, I can’t do it. I renounce it. The whole bellezza makes me nervous. Nor can I stand all these frightfully vivacious people down there with their black animal eyes. These Romans have no conscience in their eyes. No, I’m going to Denmark for a while.”
“To Denmark?”
“Yes, and I promise myself something good from that. It happens that I have never been there, near as I was to the border all during my youth—yet I have always known and loved the country. I surely must get this northern leaning from my father, since my mother was really more for bellezza in so far as she was not indifferent to everything. But take the books that are written up there, these deep, pure, and humoristic books, Lisaweta—for me there is nothing like them, I love them. Take the Scandinavian meals, these incomparable meals which can be managed only in a strong salt air (I don’t know whether I shall still be able to manage them at all) and which I really know something about; for people eat somewhat like that where I come from. Just take the names, the Christian names, which people are graced with up there, and many of which are also used where I come from: a sound like Ingeborg, a harp stroke of the most immaculate poetry. And the sea—they have the Baltic Sea up there! … In a word, I am going up for a trip, Lisaweta. I will see the Baltic Sea again, will hear these Christian names again, will read these books on the very spot; also I will stand on the platform of Kronborg, where the ghost came to Hamlet and brought destitution and death upon the poor, noble young man. …”
“How are you going, Tonio, if I may ask? What route are you taking?”
“The usual one,” he said with a shrug, and blushed noticeably. “Yes, I shall touch on my—my point of exodus, Lisaweta, after thirteen years; and that can become somewhat comic.”
She smiled.
“That is what I wanted to hear, Tonio Kröger. And so, God be with you. And don’t neglect to write me, do you hear? I look forward to a letter rich in experience from your trip to—Denmark. …”
VI
And Tonio Kröger travelled north. He travelled with comfort (for he liked to say that anyone who was so much more disturbed internally than other people had a perfect right to a little external comfort) and he never stopped until the towers of the narrow city from which he had come rose up before him into the grey air. There he made a brief strange stopover. …
A melancholy afternoon was already passing into evening when the train pulled into the smoke-filled and wonderfully familiar station; beneath the dirty glass roof the smoke was still gathered in a mass, moving back and forth in long shreds, just as at the time when Tonio Kröger, with nothing but scorn in his heart, had travelled away from here.—He traced his baggage, gave orders to have it taken to the hotel, and left the station.
There stood the city cabs in a row, each black, unusually high and broad, and with its team of horses! He took none of them; he simply looked at them, as he looked at everything: the narrow gables and pointed towers which greeted him above the nearby roofs, the blond and portly people about him with their broad yet rapid manner of speaking—and a nervous laughter arose in him which had some mysterious kinship to a sob. He went on foot, went slowly, the ceaseless pressure of the damp wind in his face, crossed the bridge with its mythological statues standing by the handrail, and walked some distance along by the harbour.
Great God, how tiny and remote it all seemed! Had all these narrow gable-lined streets always been so funny in their steep climb toward the town? The smokestacks and masts of the ships tossed lightly on the melancholy
