“What have you there?” the policeman asked. “There, in the valise?”
“Here? Nothing. It is some proofs,” Tonio Kröger answered.
“Proofs? How is that? Let me see once.”
And Tonio Kröger handed over his work. The policeman spread it out on the desktop and began reading. Herr Seehaase also stepped nearer and joined in the reading. Tonio Kröger looked over their shoulders and observed at what place they were. It was a good moment, a touch and effect, which he had worked out tellingly. He was content with himself.
“See!” he said. “There stands my name. I wrote this, and now it will be published, you understand.”
“Well, that is enough!” Herr Seehaase said decisively; he collected the pages, folded them, and gave them back to him. “That will do, Petersen!” he repeated curtly, shutting his eyes furtively and shaking his head in the negative. “We have no right to detain the gentleman any longer. The cab is waiting. I beg you to forgive the slight inconvenience, sir. The officer simply did his duty, but I told him at the start that he was on the wrong track …”
“So?” Tonio Kröger thought.
The policeman did not seem quite agreed. He still put in something about an “individual” and “produce.” But amid repeated expressions of regret Herr Seehaase led his guest back through the lobby, accompanied him between the two lions to the cab, and with assurances of respect shut the door behind him himself. And then the ridiculously high and broad cab rolled swaying, clattering, and banging down the steep streets to the harbour.
This was Tonio Kröger’s strange stopover in his native city.
VII
Night came on, and the moon had already risen in a swimming silver reflection, when Tonio Kröger’s ship reached the open sea. He was standing by the bowsprit, wrapped in his coat against the wind which was growing stronger and stronger; and he looked down into the dark roaming and driving of the strong smooth undulating masses which worked in among one another, slapping together, shooting apart in unexpected directions and suddenly lighting up with foam …
He was lulled by a delicious cradling movement. He had been a bit depressed when they had wanted to arrest him as a confidence man in his home town; yes, although he had in a way found it within reason. But then, after boarding the ship, he had watched the loading of the cargo as he used to do with his father during boyhood. The deep hold of the ship was filled, amid cries in a mixture of Danish and Low German. He had seen how, in addition to the bundles and chests, they had also let down in heavily barred cages a polar bear and a royal tiger, which must have come from Hamburg and were destined for a Danish menagerie. And this had distracted him. Then, as the ship was gliding between the even banks of the river, he had entirely forgotten officer Petersen’s cross-examination. And everything that had taken place before that—his sweet, melancholy, and remorseful dreams during the night, the walk he had taken, the sight of the walnut-tree—had become uppermost again in his mind. And now, as the sea was opening out, he saw from a distance the beach where, as a boy, he could hear the dreams of the sea in summer; he saw the glow from the lighthouse, and the lights of the Kurhouse, where he had lived with his parents. … The Baltic Sea! He bowed his head against the strong salt wind which came towards him freely and unimpeded, enveloping his ears and evoking a mild vertigo, a faint intoxication: the memory of all evil, of pain and error, of desires and strivings, passed lightly and easily away. And in the swishing, pattering, frothing, and groaning round about him, he seemed to hear the soughing and creaking of the old walnut-tree, the squeaking of a garden gate. … It was getting darker and darker.
“The stars, God, jes’ look at the stars!” A voice which seemed to come from the inside of a barrel spoke up suddenly with a sorrowfully chanting intonation. He knew it already. It belonged to a reddish-blond and simply dressed man with red eyelids and the cool damp appearance of a person who had just bathed. At dinner in the saloon he had been Tonio Kröger’s neighbour, and had with timid and retiring movements put away astounding quantities of lobster omelette. Now he was leaning beside him on the railing and looking up at the sky, while he held his chin between thumb and forefinger. Beyond a doubt he was in one of those extraordinary and solemnly meditative moods when the barrier between humans falls away, when the heart opens even to strangers, and the mouth speaks things to which otherwise it would be shyly closed. …
“Jes’ look, sir, at the stars. There they stand and twinkle; God knows the whole sky is full, and now I ask you, when we look up and think that many of them must be a hundred times greater than the earth, how do we feel then? We human beings have invented the telegraph and the telephone, and many other triumphs of modernity; yes, that we have. But when we look up there, then we must realize and understand that after all we are nothing but worms, miserable worms and no more—am I right or wrong, sir? Yes, we are worms!” he answered himself and nodded up at the heavens, humble and contrite.
“Oof!—no, that chap has no literature in his carcass!” Tonio Kröger thought, and immediately he recalled something which he had read recently: the essay of a famous French writer on cosmological and psychological questions; it had been a very fine
