clothes, drawing a deep breath. Herr Knaak’s fragile fiction that the match had remained undecided was unanimously accepted. Jappe was congratulated, but only on the sly; others lent their handkerchiefs to Do Escobar, as his own was soon saturated with blood. “Next!” was now the cry. “Now we must have another match!”
This voiced the wish of the entire crowd. The fight between Jappe and Do Escobar had been too brief, a mere ten minutes, hardly longer. All were on hand, there was plenty of time, something ought to be undertaken! So on with the next match and let him who wished to prove that he was a real fellow enter the arena in his turn.
No one applied. But why did my heart begin to beat like a little kettledrum at this summons? What I had feared had come to pass; demands were being made upon the spectators. But why did it seem to me now almost as though I had been looking forward with a kind of terrified joy to this supreme moment; and why was I, as soon as it had come, plunged into a whirl of antagonistic emotions? I looked at Johnny; he sat there beside me in perfect serenity, without the slightest participation, turned the straw in his mouth, and looked round him with an open and curious mien, to see whether another pair of strong bullies could not be found willing to let their noses be smashed for his own private enjoyment. How did it happen that I should find this challenge directed personally at me and, in the midst of my terrible excitement, feel myself in honour pledged to overcome my shyness by some tremendous, almost dreamlike effort and to attract the attention of all to myself by entering the lists as a hero? As a matter of fact, whether from vanity or excessive shyness, I was about to raise my hand and report myself for battle when an impudent voice, somewhere from out the crowd, was heard to cry: “Now Herr Knaak ought to fight!”
All eyes were sharply turned upon Herr Knaak. Was I not right in saying that he had ventured upon dangerous ground, that he was in peril of being forced to undergo an ordeal, a test of heart, lights, and liver? But he merely replied: “Oh, thanks! I got enough lickings when I was a boy!” He was saved. With eel-like glibness he had maneuvred himself out of the snare, had hinted at his years, had given them to understand that he had not evaded an honest fight in earlier days, and in doing this he had not even boasted, but had lent his words the very cast of truth, by confessing in sympathetic mockery of himself that he had been thrashed. And so he was left alone. One could see that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to get the best of him.
“Well, then, let’s have a wrestling-match!” someone demanded. This proposal met with little favour. But in the very midst of the discussion following this suggestion Do Escobar (and I shall never forget the painful impression this made) let his hoarse Spanish voice be heard from behind his reddened handkerchief: “Wrestling is cowardly. Germans love to wrestle!”
This was an unheard-of bit of tactlessness on his part, and it was punished forthwith as it deserved to be. For Herr Knaak at once gave him this excellent answer: “Possibly. But it also seems that Germans are able at times to give Spaniards a good thrashing.”
A burst of approving laughter rewarded him; his position was greatly fortified after this encounter, and Do Escobar was finished for good that day.
And yet it was the general impression that wrestling really was more or less tiresome and so one took to killing time with all sorts of acrobatic feats—with playing leapfrog, standing on one’s head, walking on one’s hands, and the like.
“Come on, we’ll go now,” said Johnny to Brattström and me and stood up. That was just like Johnny Bishop. He had come here because something real with a sanguinary conclusion was to be offered him. But when the affair turned into mere play, he went away.
It was through him that I received my first impressions of the peculiar superiority of the national character of the English, which later on I learned so greatly to admire.
Death in Venice
I
On a spring afternoon of the year 19—, when our continent lay under such threatening weather for whole months, Gustav Aschenbach, or von Aschenbach as his name read officially after his fiftieth birthday, had left his apartment on the Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich and had gone for a long walk. Overwrought by the trying and precarious work of the forenoon—which had demanded a maximum wariness, prudence, penetration, and rigour of the will—the writer had not been able even after the noon meal to break the impetus of the productive mechanism within him, that motus animi continuus which constitutes, according to Cicero, the foundation of eloquence; and he had not attained the healing sleep which—what with the increasing exhaustion of his strength—he needed in the middle of each day. So he had gone outdoors soon after tea, in the hopes that air and movement would restore him and prepare him for a profitable evening.
It was the beginning of May, and after cold, damp weeks a false midsummer had set in. The English Gardens, although the foliage was still fresh and sparse, were as pungent as in August, and in the parts nearer the city had been full of conveyances and promenaders. At the Aumeister, which he had reached by quieter and quieter paths, Aschenbach had surveyed for a short time the Wirtsgarten with its lively crowds and its border of cabs and carriages. From here, as the sun was sinking, he had started home, outside the park, across the open fields; and since he felt tired and a storm was threatening from the direction of
