He could not stand it for long in the cheerful city. He was affected by an unrest, sweet and fond, half reminiscence and half expectancy; and along with this came a yearning to be lying quietly somewhere on the beach, free from the necessity of playing the diligently inquisitive tourist. So he boarded another ship, and one dismal day (the sea had turned black) he was sailing northwards along the coast of Seeland toward Helsingör. From here he continued his journey immediately by cab along the boulevard for three-quarters of an hour, always a little above the sea, until he stopped at his real and ultimate destination: a little white beach hotel with the green shutters, standing in the middle of a colony of squat houses, and with its wood-covered tower looking out over the sand and towards the Swedish coast. Here he alighted, took possession of the bright room which was being held in readiness for him, distributed all his belongings, and prepared to live here for a while.
VIII
It was already well on into September. There were no longer many guests in Aalsgaard. At mealtimes in the large, heavy-beamed dining-hall on the ground floor, with its high windows facing the glass veranda and the sea, the proprietress sat at the head of the table. An elderly spinster with white hair, colourless eyes, pinkish cheeks, and an unsteady twittering voice, she was always careful to arrange her red hands to advantage on the tablecloth. There was also a short-necked old gentleman with a steel-grey seaman’s beard and purplish face; he was a fish dealer from the capital, and could speak German. He seemed all choked up and apoplectic, for he breathed in short irregular gasps, and from time to time raised his ringed forefinger to one of his nostrils in order to press it shut and get a little air through the other by blowing violently. Nevertheless he was continually speaking to the bottle of liquor which stood before him at breakfast as well as at dinner and supper. Then too, there were three tall American boys with their guardian or tutor, who adjusted his spectacles in silence and played football with the boys all day. They wore their reddish-yellow hair parted in the middle, and had long motionless faces. “Please give me the Wurst things there,” the one said. “That’s not Wurst, that’s Schinken,” said another; and this was all that either they or the tutor contributed to the conversation. For otherwise they sat there quietly drinking hot water.
Tonio Kröger could not have wished for different table companions. He enjoyed his peace, listened to the Danish gutturals, the sharp and melancholy vowels, in which the fish dealer and the proprietress conversed at times; occasionally he exchanged a brief word with the former over the state of the barometer; then he would rise and pass through the veranda to the beach, where he had already spent long morning hours.
Often it was quiet and summer-like there. The sea lay smooth and inactive, in blue, bottle-green, and pinkish stripes, with silverish glittering reflections of light playing over it. The seaweed was drying into hay in the sunlight, and the jellyfish were evaporating where they lay. It smelled somewhat foul and also somewhat of the tar of the fishing-smack against which Tonio Kröger was leaning as he sat on the sand, turned so that he faced the open horizon and not the Swedish coast. But the soft sea breeze blew fresh and clean across everything.
And grey stormy days came. The waves bent their heads like steers setting their horns to strike, and ran raging against the banks of sand, which were covered with wet glistening seaweed, mussels, and washed-up bits of wood. Between the tenuous wave-hills, the valleys stretched out pale green and foamy beneath the low sky; but there, where the sun stood behind the clouds, a white velvet sheen lay on the water.
Tonio Kröger stood in the wind and noise, sunk in this heavy, drugging tumult which he loved so well. If he turned and walked away, everything around him suddenly seemed quiet and warm. But he knew that behind him was the sea; it called, allured, and greeted him. And he smiled.
He went towards the interior, on meadow paths through the solitude, and soon he was swallowed up in the beach woods which stretched far out over the neighbouring hills. He sat down on the moss, leaning against a tree in such a way that he could see a strip of the sea between the trunks. At times the wind carried to him the sound of the surf, which rang out as though boards were falling upon one another in the distance. The crows cawed above the treetops, hoarse, desolate, and forlorn. … He held a book on his knees, but he did not read a line in it. He was enjoying a profound forgetfulness, an untrammelled soaring beyond space and time; and only now and then it seemed as though his heart would be shot through with misery, a brief, piercing sensation of melancholy or remorse which he was too far sunk in indolence to examine for its name and origin.
So passed many a day, he could not have said how many, and he had no desire to know. But there came one on which something happened; it happened while the sun was standing in the sky and people were present, and Tonio Kröger was not so unusually astonished by it.
This day also began with delightful splendour. Tonio Kröger awakened very early and quite suddenly, leaped from his sleep with a faint and indeterminate terror, and thought that he
