Suddenly everything dropped into a wild and boisterous movement. The carrés had broken up; and everyone pushed about, leaping and sliding: the quadrille was being ended with a gallop. The couples flew past Tonio Kröger to the mad double-quick beat of the music, with short, breathless laughter, chasséing, overtaking one another. One couple came up, carried along by the general chase, circling, and racing forward. The girl had a pale, delicate face, and thin, overly high shoulders. And suddenly, close in front of him, someone tripped, slipped, and tumbled. … The pale girl had fallen down. She fell so hard and violently that it almost looked dangerous—and the cavalier along with her. He must have hurt himself so rudely that he quite forgot his partner; half raising himself, he began grimacing and rubbing his knees with his hands. And the girl, apparently completely dazed by the fall, was still lying on the floor. Then Tonio Kröger stepped forward, grasped her gently by the arms, and lifted her up. Worn out, confused, and unhappy, she looked up at him; and suddenly her delicate face coloured a dull red.
“Tak, O, mange Tak!” she said, and peered up at him with dark, swimming eyes.
“You should not dance any more, Fräulein,” he said softly. Then he looked around him once more in search of them, of Hans and Ingeborg, and went away, left the veranda and the hall, and went up to his room.
He was excited by this festival in which he had taken no part; he was tired out with envy. Like in the past—it had been just like in the past! Hot-faced, he had stood in a dark place in pain over such folk as you, all you blond, vivacious, and happy people; and then had gone off to himself. Someone must come now! Now Ingeborg must come, must notice that he was gone, must follow him stealthily, lay her hand on his shoulder, and say: “Come in with us! Be happy! I love you!” … But she did not come at all. Such things never happened. Yes, it was like then, and he was happy as he had been then. For his heart was alive. But what had taken place in the meanwhile, between then and now?—Torpor, desolation, ice, and intellect! And art! …
He undressed, lay down to rest, put out the light. He whispered two names into the pillows: these few chaste Nordic syllables which for him meant his true and original mode of love, suffering, and happiness, the deep simple feelings, the home. He looked back over the years between that time and the present. He recalled the arid adventures of sense, nerves, and thought which he had lived through; he saw himself corroded by irony and intellect, devastated and crippled by knowledge, half exhausted by the fevers and chills of creation, bandied about aimlessly, with qualms of conscience, between two crass extremes, between sanctimony and passion, overrefined, impoverished, wearied by cold and choicely aesthetic exaltations, led astray, laid waste, tormented, sick—and he sobbed with regret and melancholy.
It was quiet and dark around him. But from below, subdued and undulating, life’s sweet trivial waltz-rhythm came up to him.
IX
Tonio Kröger was sitting in the north writing to Lisaweta Iwanowna, his friend, as he had promised.
“Dear Lisaweta, down there in Arcadia, where I shall soon return,” he wrote. “This is something in the nature of a letter, but it will disappoint you, for I intend to keep it somewhat general. Not that I have so little to say, or that I haven’t experienced one thing or another after my fashion. At home, in my native city, they even wanted to arrest me … but of that you shall hear by word of mouth. Often I have days now when I prefer to say something formal and general, instead of telling stories.
“Do you still know, Lisaweta, that you once called me a bourgeois, a strayed bourgeois? You called me that at a time when, led on by other confessions which I had let out previously, I confessed my love for what I called life. And I wonder whether you really knew how close that came to the truth, how much similarity there is between my bourgeois nature and my love of life. This trip has given me occasion to think over that.
“My father, you know, was a Nordic temperament; thoughtful, thorough, puritanically correct, and inclined to melancholy; my mother, of indeterminate exotic blood, beautiful, emotional, naive, at once indolent and passionate, and of an impulsive negligence! Beyond all doubt this was a mixture which contained extraordinary possibilities—and extraordinary dangers. The result was this: a bourgeois who strayed into art, a Bohemian who yearns for the nursery, an artist with a bad conscience. For it is certainly my bourgeois conscience which permits me to see something profoundly unsteady, ambiguous, profoundly obnoxious, profoundly questionable in everything artistic, everything unusual, everything with genius; and which fills me with this fond weakness for the
