He gave the young man something like an answer to his deeply felt observation, and then they continued conversing together, while they leaned on the railing and looked out into the tempestuous, turbulently brilliant evening. It turned out that his travelling companion was a young merchant from Hamburg who was spending his vacation on this pleasure trip. …
“ ‘You ought,’ he said, ‘to take a little trip on the steamer to Copenhagen,’ says I, and here I am, and so far it is very beautiful. But that about the lobster omelette, that was not right, sir; you shall see, for it will be stormy tonight, the captain told me, and with such a troublesome meal in your stomach, that is no joke.” …
Tonio Kröger listened to all this engaging nonsense with a feeling of comfort and friendliness.
“Yes,” he said, “people always eat too heavily up here. That induces laziness and melancholy.”
“Melancholy?” the young man repeated and looked at him disconcertedly. “You must be a foreigner here, sir?” he asked suddenly. …
“Oh, yes, I come from quite a distance!” Tonio Kröger answered with a vague parrying movement of his arm.
“But you are right,” the young man said. “God knows, you are right in what you say about melancholy! I am nearly always melancholy, but especially on evenings like this, when the sky is full of stars”; and again he supported his chin between his thumb and forefinger.
“He surely writes verses,” Tonio Kröger thought; “the deeply, nobly felt verses of a merchant.”
The evening was advancing, and the wind had now become so violent that it interfered with their conversation. So they decided to sleep awhile, and they wished each other good night.
Tonio Kröger stretched out on the narrow bed in his cabin, but he found no rest. The strong wind and its pungent smell had strangely aroused him; and his heart was unsteady, as though he were anxiously expecting some new sweet experience. Also he was made acutely sick by the vibration which took place when the ship dropped down the steep hill of a wave and the screw worked convulsively outside the water. He got completely dressed again and came up in the open.
Clouds were racing past the moon. The sea was dancing. No curved and regular waves were advancing in order, but for a great distance, in the pale and flickering light, the sea was lashed into a choppy turmoil; it leaped and sprang up in gigantic pointed flame-like tongues; beside foam-filled chasms it threw out strange jagged forms; and with the strength of enormous arms in mad playfulness it seemed to sling the spray into every wind. The ship was having a hard trip; pounding, tossing, and groaning, it worked its way through the tumult, and often he heard the polar bear and the tiger, who were suffering from the sea voyage, roar from below. A man in an oilskin coat, the cape over his head and a lantern strapped to his body, crossed back and forth on the foredeck, balancing himself painfully with his legs wide apart. But then behind, bent low over the rail, the young man from Hamburg was standing, and he was having a sorry time of it. “God,” he said with a trembling, hollow voice, as he saw Tonio Kröger, “jes’ see once this riot of the elements, sir!” But then he was interrupted and turned away hastily.
Tonio Kröger clung to a taut rope and looked out into this wanton turmoil. A shout pressed up within him, and he seemed as though it would be strong enough to ring out above the storm and the flood; a song to the sea, inspired by love, rang inside him. “Yes, my boyhood’s savage friend, you and I are joined again. …” But then the poem was over. It was not finished, was not well-formed, was not calmly rounded out into something solid. His heart was alive. …
He stood this way for a long while. Then he stretched out on a bench outside the cabin and looked up at the sky where the stars were flickering. He even slept a little; and when the cold spray shot into his face, it seemed to him in his half-sleep like a caress.
Vertical chalk cliffs, ghostly in the moonlight, hove into sight and came nearer. That was Möen, the island; and again sleep intervened, broken by showers of the salty spray, which hit sharply into his face and made his features stiffen. … When he became fully awake it was already day, a chilly light-grey day, and the green sea was smoother. At breakfast he saw again the young merchant, who blushed deeply, probably through shame at having uttered such poetic and unpresentable things in the darkness; he stroked out his little reddish moustache with all five fingers and called out a militarily sharp “good morning,” only to avoid him uneasily from then on.
And Tonio Kröger landed in Denmark. He put up in Copenhagen, and gave tips to everyone who looked as though he expected one. Starting from his hotel room, he wandered around the city for three days while he carried his little traveller’s guide open before him, and conducted himself just like any sightseeing foreigner of the better classes. He observed the King’s New Market and the “Horse” in the centre of it, he looked up respectfully at the columns of the Frue Kirke, he stood a long while before Thorvaldsen’s noble and lovely sculptures, he climbed the Round Tower, saw palaces, and spent two lively evenings in the Tivoli. But this was not all that he saw.
On the houses (they often looked much like the old houses of his native city with the curving fretwork gables) he saw names which were known to him from the old days, seeming to stand for something tender and precious, and always containing something like a reproach, a complaint, a hankering after what was lost. And everywhere, while he breathed in the damp sea air in slow deliberate draughts, he saw eyes as blue, hair as
