Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories

by Thomas Mann

  It was an unfriendly scene. Little crisping shivers ran all across the wide stretch of shallow water between the shore and the first sand-bank. The whole beach, once so full of colour and life, looked now autumnal, out of season; it was nearly deserted and not even very clean. A camera on a tripod stood at the edge of the water, apparently abandoned; its black cloth snapped in the freshening wind.

  Tadzio was there, in front of his cabin, with the three or four playfellows still left him. Aschenbach set up his chair some halfway between the cabins and the water, spread a rug over his knees, and sat looking on. The game this time was unsupervised, the elders being probably busy with their packing, and it looked rather lawless and out-of-hand. Jaschiu, the sturdy lad in the belted suit, with the black, brilliantined hair, became angry at a handful of sand thrown in his eyes; he challenged Tadzio to a fight, which quickly ended in the downfall of the weaker. And perhaps the coarser nature saw here a chance to avenge himself at last, by one cruel act, for his long weeks of subserviency: the victor would not let the vanquished get up, but remained kneeling on Tadzio’s back, pressing Tadzio’s face into the sand—for so long a time that it seemed the exhausted lad might even suffocate. He made spasmodic efforts to shake the other off, lay still, and then began a feeble twitching. Just as Aschenbach was about to spring indignantly to the rescue, Jaschiu let his victim go. Tadzio, very pale, half sat up, and remained so, leaning on one arm, for several minutes, with darkening eyes and rumpled hair. Then he rose and walked slowly away. The others called him, at first gaily, then imploringly; he would not hear. Jaschiu was evidently overtaken by swift remorse; he followed his friend and tried to make his peace, but Tadzio motioned him back with a jerk of one shoulder and went down to the water’s edge. He was barefoot and wore his striped linen suit with the red breast-knot.

  There he stayed a little, with bent head, tracing figures in the wet sand with one toe; then stepped into the shallow water, which at its deepest did not wet his knees; waded idly through it and reached the sand-bar. Now he paused again, with his face turned seaward; and next began to move slowly leftwards along the narrow strip of sand the sea left bare. He paced there, divided by an expanse of water from the shore, from his mates by his moody pride; a remote and isolated figure, with floating locks, out there in sea and wind, against the misty inane. Once more he paused to look: with a sudden recollection, or by an impulse, he turned from the waist up, in an exquisite movement, one hand resting on his hip, and looked over his shoulder at the shore. The watcher sat just as he had sat that time in the lobby of the hotel when first the twilit grey eyes had met his own. He rested his head against the chair-back and followed the movements of the figure out there, then lifted it, as it were in answer to Tadzio’s gaze. It sank on his breast, the eyes looked out beneath their lids, while his whole face took on the relaxed and brooding expression of deep slumber. It seemed to him the pale and lovely Summoner out there smiled at him and beckoned; as though, with the hand he lifted from his hip, he pointed outward as he hovered on before into an immensity of richest expectation. And, as so often before, he rose to follow.

  Some minutes passed before anyone hastened to the aid of the elderly man sitting there collapsed in his chair. They bore him to his room. And before nightfall a shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease.

  1911

  TONIO KRÖGER

  The winter sun, poor ghost of itself, hung milky and wan behind layers of cloud above the huddled roofs of the town. In the gabled streets it was wet and windy and there came in gusts a sort of soft hail, not ice, not snow.

  School was out. The hosts of the released streamed over the paved court and out at the wrought-iron gate, where they broke up and hastened off right and left. Elder pupils held their books in a strap high on the left shoulder and rowed, right arm against the wind, towards dinner. Small people trotted gaily off, splashing the slush with their feet, the tools of learning rattling amain in their walrus-skin satchels. But one and all pulled off their caps and cast down their eyes in awe before the Olympian hat and ambrosial beard of a master moving homewards with measured stride….

  “Ah, there you are at last, Hans,” said Tonio Kroger. He had been waiting a long time in the street and went up with a smile to the friend he saw coming out of the gate in talk with other boys and about to go off with them…. “What?” said Hans, and looked at Tonio. “Right-oh! We’ll take a little walk, then.”

  Tonio said nothing and his eyes were clouded. Did Hans forget, had he only just remembered that they were to take a walk together today? And he himself had looked forward to it with almost incessant joy.

  “Well, good-bye, fellows,” said Hans Hansen to his comrades. “I’m taking a walk with Kroger.” And the two turned to their left, while the others sauntered off in the opposite direction.

  Hans and Tonio had time to take a walk after school because in neither of their families was dinner served before four o’clock. Their fathers were prominent business men, who held public office and were of consequence in the town. Hans’s people had owned for some generations the big wood-yards down by the river, where powerful machine-saws hissed and spat and cut up timber; while Tonio was the son of Consul Kroger, whose grain-sacks with the firm name in great black letters you might see any day driven through the streets; his large, old ancestral home was the finest house in all the town. The two friends had to keep taking off their hats to their many acquaintances; some folk did not even wait for the fourteen-year-old lads to speak first, as by rights they should.

  Both of them carried their satchels across their shoulders and both were well and warmly dressed: Hans in a short sailor jacket, with the wide blue collar of his sailor suit turned out over shoulders and back, and Tonio in a belted grey overcoat. Hans wore a Danish sailor cap with black ribbons, beneath which streamed a shock of straw-coloured hair. He was uncommonly handsome and well built, broad in the shoulders and narrow in the hips, with keen, far-apart, steel-blue eyes; while beneath Tonio’s round fur cap was a brunette face with the finely chiselled features of the south; the dark eyes, with delicate shadows and too heavy lids, looked dreamily and a little timorously on the world. Tonio’s walk was idle and uneven, whereas the other’s slim legs in their black stockings moved with an elastic, rhythmic tread.

  Tonio did not speak. He suffered. His rather oblique brows were drawn together in a frown, his lips were rounded to whistle, he gazed into space with his head on one side. Posture and manner were habitual.

  Suddenly Hans shoved his arm into Tonio’s, with a sideways look—he knew very well what the trouble was. And Tonio, though he was silent for the next few steps, felt his heart soften.

  “I hadn’t forgotten, you see, Tonio,” Hans said, gazing at the pavement, “I only thought it wouldn’t come off today because it was so wet and windy. But I don’t mind that at all, and it’s jolly of you to have waited. I thought you had gone home, and I was cross….”

  Everything in Tonio leaped and jumped for joy at the words.

  “All right; let’s go over the wall,” he said with a quaver in his voice. “Over the Mill wall and the Holstenwall, and I’ll go as far as your house with you, Hans. Then I’ll have to walk back alone, but that doesn’t matter; next time you can go round my way.”

  At bottom he was not really convinced by what Hans said; he quite knew the other attached less importance to this walk than he did himself. Yet he saw Hans was sorry for his remissness and willing to be put in a position to ask pardon, a pardon that Tonio was far indeed from withholding.

  The truth was, Tonio loved Hans Hansen, and had already suffered much on his account. He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer; in this hard and simple fact his fourteen-year-old soul had already been instructed by life; and he was so organized that he received such experiences consciously, wrote them down as it were inwardly, and even, in a certain way, took pleasure in them, though without ever letting them mould his conduct, ind
eed, or drawing any practical advantage from them. Being what he was, he found this knowledge far more important and far more interesting than the sort they made him learn in schools; yes, during his lesson hours in the vaulted Gothic classrooms he was mainly occupied in feeling his way about among these intuitions of his and penetrating them. The process gave him the same kind of satisfaction as that he felt when he moved about in his room with his violin—for he played the violin—and made the tones, brought out as softly as ever he knew how, mingle with the plashing of the fountain that leaped and danced down there in the garden beneath the branches of the old walnut tree.

  The fountain, the old walnut tree, his fiddle, and away in the distance the North Sea, within sound of whose summer murmurings he spent his holidays—these were the things he loved, within these he enfolded his spirit, among these things his inner life took its course. And they were all things whose names were effective in verse and occurred pretty frequently in the lines Tonio Kroger sometimes wrote.

  The fact that he had a note-book full of such things, written by himself, leaked out through his own carelessness and injured him no little with the masters as well as among his fellows. On the one hand, Consul Kröger’s son found their attitude both cheap and silly, and despised his schoolmates and his masters as well, and in his turn (with extraordinary penetration) saw through and disliked their personal weaknesses and bad breeding. But then, on the other hand, he himself felt his verse-making extravagant and out of place and to a certain extent agreed with those who considered it an unpleasing occupation. But that did not enable him to leave off.

  As he wasted his time at home, was slow and absent-minded at school, and always had bad marks from the masters, he was in the habit of bringing home pitifully poor reports, which troubled and angered his father, a tall, fastidiously dressed man, with thoughtful blue eyes, and always a wild flower in his buttonhole. But for his mother, she cared nothing about the reports—Tonio’s beautiful black-haired mother, whose name was Consuelo, and who was so absolutely different from the other ladies in the town, because father had brought her long ago from some place far down on the map.

  Tonio loved his dark, fiery mother, who played the piano and mandolin so wonderfully, and he was glad his doubtful standing among men did not distress her. Though at the same time he found his father’s annoyance a more dignified and respectable attitude and despite his scoldings understood him very well, whereas his mother’s blithe indifference always seemed just a little wanton. His thoughts at times would run something like this: “It is true enough that I am what I am and will not and cannot alter: heedless, self-willed, with my mind on things nobody else thinks of. And so it is right they should scold and punish me and not smother things all up with kisses and music. After all, we are not gypsies living in a green wagon; we’re respectable people, the family of Consul Kroger.” And not seldom he would think: “Why is it I am different, why do I fight everything, why am I at odds with the masters and like a stranger among the other boys? The good scholars, and the solid majority—they don’t find the masters funny, they don’t write verses, their thoughts are all about things that people do think about and can talk about out loud. How regular and comfortable they must feel, knowing that everybody knows just where they stand! It must be nice! But what is the matter with me, and what will be the end of it all?”

  These thoughts about himself and his relation to life played an important part in Tonio’s love for Hans Hansen. He loved him in the first place because he was handsome; but in the next because he was in every respect his own opposite and foil. Hans Hansen was a capital scholar, and a jolly chap to boot, who was head at drill, rode and swam to perfection, and lived in the sunshine of popularity. The masters were almost tender with him, they called him Hans and were partial to him in every way; the other pupils curried favour with him; even grown people stopped him on the street, twiched the shock of hair beneath his Danish sailor cap, and said: “Ah, here you are, Hans Hansen, with your pretty blond hair! Still head of the school? Remember me to your father and mother, that’s a fine lad!”

  Such was Hans Hansen; and ever since Tonio Kroger had known him, from the very minute he set eyes on him, he had burned inwardly with a heavy, envious longing. “Who else has blue eyes like yours, or lives in such friendliness and harmony with all the world? You are always spending your time with some right and proper occupation. When you have done your prep you take your riding-lesson, or make things with a fret-saw; even in the holidays, at the seashore, you row and sail and swim all the time, while I wander off somewhere and lie down in the sand and stare at the strange and mysterious changes that whisk over the face of the sea. And all that is why your eyes are so clear. To be like you …”

  He made no attempt to be like Hans Hansen, and perhaps hardly even seriously wanted to. What he did ardently, painfully want was that just as he was, Hans Hansen should love him; and he wooed Hans Hansen in his own way, deeply, lingeringly, devotedly, with a melancholy that gnawed and burned more terribly than all the sudden passion one might have expected from his exotic looks.

  And he wooed not in vain. Hans respected Tonio’s superior power of putting certain difficult matters into words; moreover, he felt the lively presence of an uncommonly strong and tender feeling for himself; he was grateful for it, and his response gave Tonio much happiness—though also many pangs of jealousy and disillusion over his futile efforts to establish a communion of spirit between them. For the queer thing was that Tonio, who after all envied Hans Hansen for being what he was, still kept on trying to draw him over to his own side; though of course he could succeed in this at most only at moments and superficially….

  “I have just been reading something so wonderful and splendid …”he said. They were walking and eating together out of a bag of fruit toffees they had bought at Iverson’s sweet-shop in Mill Street for ten pfennigs. “You must read it, Hans, it is Schiller’s Don Carlos … I’ll lend it you if you like….”

  “Oh, no,” said Hans Hansen, “you needn’t, Tonio, that’s not anything for me. I’ll stick to my horse books. There are wonderful cuts in them, let me tell you. I’ll show them to you when you come to see me. They are instantaneous photography—the horse in motion; you can see him trot and canter and jump, in all positions, that you never can get to see in life, because they happen so fast….”

  “In all positions?” asked Tonio politely. “Yes, that must be great. But about Don Carlos—it is beyond anything you could possibly dream of. There are places in it that are so lovely they make you jump … as though it were an explosion—”

  “An explosion?” asked Hans Hansen. “What sort of an explosion?”

  “For instance, the place where the king has been crying because the marquis betrayed him … but the marquis did it only out of love for the prince, you see, he sacrifices himself for his sake. And the word comes out of the cabinet into the antechamber that the king has been weeping. ‘Weeping? The king been weeping?’ All the courtiers are fearfully upset, it goes through and through you, for the king has always been so frightfully stiff and stern. But it is so easy to understand why he cried, and I feel sorrier for him than for the prince and the marquis put together. He is always so alone, nobody loves him, and then he thinks he has found one man, and then he betrays him….”

  Hans Hansen looked sideways into Tonio’s face, and something in it must have won him to the subject, for suddenly he shoved his arm once more into Tonio’s and said:

  “How had he betrayed him, Tonio?”

  Tonio went on.

  “Well,” he said, “you see all the letters for Brabant and Flanders—”

  “There comes Irwin Immerthal,” said Hans.

  Tonio stopped talking. If only the earth would open and swallow Immerthal up! “Why does he have to come disturbing us? If he only doesn’t go with us all the way and talk about the riding-lessons!” For Irwin Immerthal had riding-lessons too. He was the son of the bank president
and lived close by, outside the city wall. He had already been home and left his bag, and now he walked towards them through the avenue. His legs were crooked and his eyes like slits.

  “ ’lo, Immerthal,” said Hans. I’m taking a little walk with Kröger….

  “I have to go into town on an errand,” said Immerthal. “But I’ll walk a little way with you. Are those fruit toffees you’ve got? Thanks, I’ll have couple. Tomorrow we have our next lesson, Hans.” He meant the riding-lesson.

  “What larks!” said Hans. “I’m going to get the leather gaiters for a present, because I was top lately in our papers.”

  “You don’t take riding-lessons, I suppose, Kröger?” asked Immerthal, and his eyes were only two gleaming cracks.

  “No …” answered Tonio, uncertainly.

  “You ought to ask your father,” Hans Hansen remarked, “so you could have lessons too, Kroger.”

  “Yes …” said Tonio. He spoke hastily and without interest; his throat had suddenly contracted, because Hans had called him by his last name. Hans seemed conscious of it too, for he said by way of explanation: “I call you Kroger because your first name is so crazy. Don’t mind my saying so, I can’t do with it all. Tonio—why, what sort of name is that? Though of course I know it’s not your fault in the least.”

  “No, they probably called you that because it sounds so foreign and sort of something special,” said Immerthal, obviously with intent to say just the right thing.

  Tonio’s mouth twitched. He pulled himself together and said:

  “Yes, it’s a silly name—Lord knows I’d rather be called Heinrich or Wilhelm. It’s all because I’m named after my mother’s brother Antonio. She comes from down there, you know….”