CHAPTER V

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 Föhring,

he waited at the North Cemetery for the tram which would take him

directly back to the city.

It happened that he found no one in the station or its vicinity. There

was not a vehicle to be seen, either on the paved Ungererstrasse, with

its solitary glistening rails stretching out towards Schwabing, or on

the Föhringer Chaussee. Behind the fences of the stone-masons'

establishments, where the crosses, memorial tablets, and monuments

standing for sale formed a second, uninhabited burial ground, there was

no sign of life; and opposite him the Byzantine structure of the Funeral

Hall lay silent in the reflection of the departing day; its façade,

ornamented in luminous colours with Greek crosses and hieratic

paintings, above which were displayed inscriptions symmetrically

arranged in gold letters, and texts chosen to bear on the life beyond;

such as, "They enter into the dwelling of the Lord," or, "The light of

eternity shall shine upon them." And for some time as he stood waiting

he found a grave diversion in spelling out the formulas and letting his

mind's eye lose itself in their transparent mysticism, when, returning

from his reveries, he noticed in the portico, above the two apocalyptic

animals guarding the steps, a man whose somewhat unusual appearance gave

his thoughts an entirely new direction.

Whether he had just now come out from the inside through the bronze

door, or had approached and mounted from the outside unobserved,

remained uncertain. Aschenbach, without applying himself especially to

the matter, was inclined to believe the former. Of medium height, thin,

smooth-shaven, and noticeably pug-nosed, the man belonged to the

red-haired type and possessed the appropriate fresh milky complexion.

Obviously, he was not of Bavarian extraction, since at least the white

and straight-brimmed straw hat that covered his head gave his appearance

the stamp of a foreigner, of someone who had come from a long distance.

To be sure, he was wearing the customary knapsack strapped across his

shoulders, and a belted suit of rough yellow wool; his left arm was

resting on his thigh, and his grey storm cape was thrown across it. In

his right hand he held a cane with an iron ferrule, which he had stuck

diagonally into the ground, and, with his feet crossed, was leaning his

hip against the crook. His head was raised so that the Adam's-apple

protruded hard and bare on a scrawny neck emerging from a loose

sport-shirt. And he was staring sharply off into the distance, with

colourless, red-lidded eyes between which stood two strong, vertical

wrinkles peculiarly suited to his short, turned-up nose. Thus--and

perhaps his elevated position helped to give the impression--his bearing

had something majestic and commanding about it, something bold, or even

savage. For whether he was grimacing because he was blinded by the

setting sun, or whether it was a case of a permanent distortion of the

physiognomy, his lips seemed too short, they were so completely pulled

back from his teeth that these were exposed even to the gums, and stood

out white and long.

It is quite possible that Aschenbach, in his half-distracted,

half-inquisitive examination of the stranger, had been somewhat

inconsiderate, for he suddenly became aware that his look was being

answered, and indeed so militantly, so straight in the eye, so plainly

with the intention of driving the thing through to the very end and

compelling him to capitulate, that he turned away uncomfortably and

began walking along by the fences, deciding casually that he would pay

no further attention to the man. The next minute he had forgotten him.

But perhaps the exotic element in the stranger's appearance had worked

on his imagination; or a new physical or spiritual influence of some

sort had come into play. He was quite astonished to note a peculiar

inner expansion, a kind of roving unrest, a youthful longing after

far-off places: a feeling so vivid, so new, or so long dormant and

neglected, that, with his hands behind his back and his eyes on the

ground, he came to a sudden stop, and examined into the nature and

purport of this emotion.

It was the desire for travel, nothing more; although, to be sure, it had

attacked him violently, and was heightened to a passion, even to the

point of an hallucination. His yearnings crystallized; his imagination,

still in ferment from his hours of work, actually pictured all the

marvels and terrors of a manifold world which it was suddenly struggling

to conceive. He saw a landscape, a tropical swampland under a heavy,

murky sky, damp, luxuriant, and enormous, a kind of prehistoric

wilderness of islands, bogs, and arms of water, sluggish with mud; he

saw, near him and in the distance, the hairy shafts of palms rising out

of a rank lecherous thicket, out of places where the plant-life was fat,

swollen, and blossoming exorbitantly; he saw strangely misshapen trees

sending their roots into the ground, into stagnant pools with greenish

reflections; and here, between floating flowers which were milk-white

and large as dishes, birds of a strange nature, high-shouldered, with

crooked bills, were standing in the muck, and looking motionlessly to

one side; between dense, knotted stalks of bamboo he saw the glint from

the eyes of a crouching tiger--and he felt his heart knocking with fear

and with puzzling desires. Then the image disappeared; and with a shake

of his head Aschenbach resumed his walk along past the fences of the

stone-masons' establishments.

Since the time, at least, when he could command the means to enjoy the

advantages of moving about the world as he pleased, he had considered

travelling simply as an hygienic precaution which must be complied with

now and then despite one's feelings and one's preferences. Too busy with

the tasks arranged for him by his interest in his own ego and in the

problems of Europe, too burdened with the onus of production, too little

prone to diversion, and in no sense an amateur of the varied amusements

of the great world, he had been thoroughly satisfied with such knowledge

of the earth's surface as any one can get without moving far out of his

own circle; and he had never even been tempted to leave Europe.

Especially now that his life was slowly on the decline, and that the

artist's fear of not having finished--this uneasiness lest the clock run

down before he had done his part and given himself completely--could no

longer be waived aside as a mere whim, he had confined his outer

existence almost exclusively to the beautiful city which had become his

home and to the rough country house which he had built in the mountains

and where he spent the rainy summers.

Further, this thing which had laid hold of him so belatedly, but with

such suddenness, was very readily moderated and adjusted by the force of

his reason and of a discipline which he had practised since youth. He

had intended carrying his life work forward to a certain point before

removing to the country. And the thought of knocking about the world for

months and neglecting his work during this time, seemed much too lax and

contrary to his plans; it really could not be considered seriously. Yet

he knew only too well what the reasons were for this unexpected

temptation. It was the urge to escape--he admitted to himself--this

yearning for the new and the remote, this appetite for freedom, for

unburdening, for forgetfulness; it was a pressure away from his work,

from the steady drudgery of a coldly passionate service. To be sure, he

loved this work and almost loved the enervating battle that was fought

daily between a proud tenacious will--so often tested--and this growing

weariness which no one was to suspect and which must not betray itself

in his productions by any sign of weakness or negligence. But it seemed

wise not to draw the bow overtightly, and not to strangle by sheer

obstinacy so strongly persistent an appetite. He thought of his work,

thought of the place at which yesterday and now again to-day he had been

forced to leave off, and which, it seemed, would yield neither to

patience and coaxing nor to a definite attack. He examined it again,

trying to break through or to circumvent the deadlock, but he gave up

with a shudder of repugnance. There was no unusual difficulty here; what

balked him were the scruples of aversion, which took the form of a

fastidious insatiability. Even as a young man this insatiability had

meant to him the very nature, the fullest essence, of talent; and for

that reason he had restrained and chilled his emotions, since he was

aware that they incline to content themselves with a happy

approximation, a state of semi-completion. Were these enslaved emotions

now taking their vengeance on him, by leaving him in the lurch, by

refusing to forward and lubricate his art; and were they bearing off

with them every enjoyment, every live interest in form and expression?

Not that he was producing anything bad; his years gave him at least this

advantage, that he felt himself at all times in full and easy possession

of his craftsmanship. But while the nation honoured him for this, he

himself was not content; and it seemed to him that his work lacked the

marks of that fiery and fluctuating emotionalism which is an enormous

thing in one's favour, and which, while it argues an enjoyment on the

part of the author, also constitutes, more than any depth of content,

the enjoyment of the amateur. He feared the summer in the country, alone

in the little house with the maid who prepared his meals, and the

servant who brought them to him. He feared the familiar view of the

mountain peaks and the slopes which would stand about him in his boredom

and his discontent. Consequently there was need of a break in some new

direction. If the summer was to be endurable and productive, he must

attempt something out of his usual orbit; he must relax, get a change of

air, bring an element of freshness into the blood. To travel, then--that

much was settled. Not far, not all the way to the tigers. But one night

on the sleeper, and a rest of three or four weeks at some pleasant

popular resort in the South. . . .

He thought this out while the noise of the electric tram came nearer

along the Ungererstrasse; and as he boarded it he decided to devote the

evening to the study of maps and time-tables. On the platform it

occurred to him to look around for the man in the straw hat, his

companion during that most significant time spent waiting at the

station. But his whereabouts remained uncertain, as he was not to be

seen either at the place where he was formerly standing, or anywhere

else in the vicinity of the station, or on the car itself.

II

The author of that lucid and powerful prose epic built around the life

of Frederick of Prussia; the tenacious artist who, after long

application, wove rich, varied strands of human destiny together under

one single predominating theme in the fictional tapestry known as Maya;

the creator of that stark tale which is called The Wretch and which

pointed out for an entire oncoming generation the possibility of some

moral certainty beyond pure knowledge; finally, the writer (and this

sums up briefly the works of his mature period) of the impassioned

treatise on Art and the Spirit, whose capacity for mustering facts, and,

further, whose fluency in their presentation, led cautious judges to

place this treatise alongside Schiller's conclusions on naïve and

sentimental poetry--Gustav Aschenbach, then, was the son of a higher law

official, and was born in L----, a leading city in the Province of

Silesia. His forbears had been officers, magistrates, government

functionaries, men who had led severe, steady lives serving their king,

their state. A deeper strain of spirituality had been manifest in them

once, in the person of a preacher; the preceding generation had brought

a brisker, more sensuous blood into the family through the author's

mother, daughter of a Bohemian band-master. The traces of foreignness in

his features came from her. A marriage of sober painstaking

conscientiousness with impulses of a darker, more fiery nature had had

an artist as its result, and this particular artist.

Since his whole nature was centred around acquiring a reputation, he

showed himself, if not exactly precocious, at least (thanks to the

firmness and pithiness of his personality, his accent) ripened and

adjusted to the public at an early age. Almost as a schoolboy he had

made a name for himself. Within ten years he had learned to face the

world through the medium of his writing-table, to discharge the

obligations of his fame in a correspondence which (since many claims are

pressed on the successful, the trustworthy) had to be brief as well as

pleasant and to the point. At forty, wearied by the vicissitudes and the

exertion of his own work, he had to manage a daily mail which bore the

postmarks of countries in all parts of the world.

Equally removed from the banal and the eccentric, his talents were so

constituted as to gain both the confidence of the general public and the

stable admiration and sympathy of the critical. Thus even as a young man

continually devoted to the pursuit of craftsmanship--and that of no

ordinary kind--he had never known the careless freedom of youth. When,

around thirty-five years of age, he had been taken ill in Vienna, one

sharp observer said of him in company, "You see, Aschenbach has always

lived like this," and the speaker contracted the fingers of his left

hand into a fist; "never like this," and he let his open hand droop

comfortably from the arm of his chair. That hit the mark; and the

heroic, the ethical about it all was that he was not of a strong

constitution, and though he was pledged by his nature to these steady

efforts, he was not really born to them.

Considerations of ill-health had kept him from attending school as a

boy, and had compelled him to receive instruction at home. He had grown

up alone, without comrades--and he was forced to realize soon enough

that he belonged to a race which often lacked, not talent, but that

physical substructure which talent relies on for its fullest fruition: a

race accustomed to giving its best early, and seldom extending its

faculties over the years. But his favourite phrase was "carrying

through"; in his novel on Frederick he saw the pure apotheosis of this

command, which struck him as the essential concept of the virtuous in

action and passion. Also, he wished earnestly to grow old, since he had

always maintained that the only artistry which can be called truly

great, comprehensive, yes even truly admirable, is that which is

permitted to bear fruits characteristic of each stage in human

development.

Since he must carry the responsibilities of his talent on frail

shoulders, and wanted to go a long way, the primary requirement was

discipline--and fortunately discipline was his direct inheritance from

his father's side. By forty, fifty, or at an earlier age when others are

still slashing about with enthusiasm, and are contentedly putting off to

some later date the execution of plans on a large scale, he would start

the day early, dashing cold water over his chest and back, and then with

a couple of tall wax candles in silver candlesticks at the head of his

manuscript, he would pay out to his art, in two or three eager,

scrupulous morning hours, the strength which he had accumulated in

sleep. It was pardonable, indeed it was a direct tribute to the

effectiveness of his moral scheme, that the uninitiated took his Maya

world, and the massive epic machinery upon which the life of the hero

Frederick was unrolled, as evidence of long breath and sustaining power.

While actually they had been built up layer by layer, in small daily

allotments, through hundreds and hundreds of single inspirations. And if

they were so excellent in both composition and texture, it was solely

because their creator had held out for years under the strain of one

single work, with a steadiness of will and a tenacity comparable to that

which conquered his native province; and because, finally, he had turned

over his most vital and valuable hours to the problem of minute

revision.

In order that a significant work of the mind may exert immediately some

broad and deep effect, a secret relationship, or even conformity, must

exist between the personal destiny of the author and the common destiny

of his contemporaries. People do not know why they raise a work of art

to fame. Far from being connoisseurs, they believe that they see in it

hundreds of virtues which justify so much interest; but the true reason

for their applause is an unconscious sympathy. Aschenbach had once

stated quite plainly in some remote place that nearly everything great

which comes into being does so in spite of something--in spite of sorrow

or suffering, poverty, destitution, physical weakness, depravity,

passion, or a thousand other handicaps. But that was not merely an

observation; it was a discovery, the formula of his life and reputation,

the key to his work. And what wonder then that it was also the

distinguishing moral trait, the dominating gesture, of his most

characteristic figures?

Years before, one shrewd analyst had written of the new hero-type to

which this author gave preference, and which kept turning up in

variations of one sort or another: he called it the conception of "an

intellectual and youthful masculinity" which "stands motionless,

haughty, ashamed, with jaw set, while swords and spear-points beset the

body." That was beautiful and ingenious; and it was exact, although it

may have seemed to suggest too much passivity. For to be poised against

fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple

endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph--and the

figure of Sebastian is the most beautiful figure, if not of art as a

whole, at least of the art of literature. Looking into this fictional

world, one saw: a delicate self-mastery by which any inner

deterioration, any biological decay was kept concealed from the eyes of

the world; a crude, vicious sensuality capable of fanning its rising

passions into pure flame, yes, even of mounting to dominance in the

realm of beauty; a pallid weakness which draws from the glowing depths

of the soul the strength to bow whole arrogant peoples before the foot

of the cross, or before the feet of weakness itself; a charming manner

maintained in his cold, strict service to form; a false, precarious mode

of living, and the keenly enervating melancholy and artifice of the born

deceiver--to observe such trials as this was enough to make one question

whether there really was any heroism other than weakness. And in any

case, what heroism could be more in keeping with the times? Gustav

Aschenbach was the one poet among the many workers on the verge of

exhaustion: all those over-burdened, used-up, tenacious moralists of

production who, delicately built and destitute of means, can rely for a

time at least on will-power and the shrewd husbandry of their resources

to secure the effects of greatness. There are many such: they are the

heroes of the period. And they all found themselves in his works; here

they were indeed, upheld, intensified, applauded; they were grateful to

him, they acclaimed him.

In his time he had been young and raw; and misled by his age he had

blundered in public. He had stumbled, had exposed himself; both in

writing and in talk he had offended against caution and tact. But he had

acquired the dignity which, as he insisted, is the innate goad and

craving of every great talent; in fact, it could be said that his entire

development had been a conscious undeviating progression away from the

embarrassments of scepticism and irony, and towards dignity.

The general masses are satisfied by vigour and tangibility of treatment

rather than by any close intellectual processes; but youth, with its

passion for the absolute, can be arrested only by the problematical. And

Aschenbach had been absolute, problematical, as only a youth could be.

He had been a slave to the intellect, had played havoc with knowledge,

had ground up his seed crops, had divulged secrets, had discredited

talent, had betrayed art--yes, while his modellings were entertaining

the faithful votaries, filling them with enthusiasm, making their lives

more keen, this youthful artist was taking the breath away from the

generation then in its twenties by his cynicisms on the questionable

nature of art, and of artistry itself.

But it seems that nothing blunts the edge of a noble, robust mind more

quickly and more thoroughly than the sharp and bitter corrosion of

knowledge; and certainly the moody radicalism of the youth, no matter

how conscientious, was shallow in comparison with his firm determination

as an older man and a master to deny knowledge, to reject it, to pass it

with raised head, in so far as it is capable of crippling, discouraging,

or degrading to the slightest degree, our will, acts, feelings, or even

passions. How else could the famous story of The Wretch be understood

than as an outburst of repugnance against the disreputable psychologism

of the times: embodied in the figure of that soft and stupid half-clown

who pilfers a destiny for himself by guiding his wife (from

powerlessness, from lasciviousness, from ethical frailty) into the arms

of an adolescent, and believes that he may through profundity commit

vileness? The verbal pressure with which he here cast out the outcast

announced the return from every moral scepticism, from all

fellow-feeling with the engulfed: it was the counter-move to the laxity

of the sympathetic principle that to understand all is to forgive

all--and the thing that was here well begun, even nearly completed, was

that "miracle of reborn ingenuousness" which was taken up a little later

in one of the author's dialogues expressly and not without a certain

discreet emphasis. Strange coincidences! Was it as a result of this

rebirth, this new dignity and sternness, that his feeling for beauty--a

discriminating purity, simplicity, and evenness of attack which

henceforth gave his productions such an obvious, even such a deliberate

stamp of mastery and classicism--showed an almost excessive

strengthening about this time? But ethical resoluteness in the exclusion

of science, of emancipatory and restrictive knowledge--does this not in

turn signify a simplification, a reduction morally of the world to too

limited terms, and thus also a strengthened capacity for the forbidden,

the evil, the morally impossible? And does not form have two aspects? Is

it not moral and unmoral at once--moral in that it is the result and

expression of discipline, but unmoral, and even immoral, in that by

nature it contains an indifference to morality, is calculated, in fact,

to make morality bend beneath its proud and unencumbered sceptre?

Be that as it may. An evolution is a destiny; and why should his

evolution, which had been upheld by the general confidence of a vast

public, not run through a different course from one accomplished outside

the lustre and the entanglements of fame? Only chronic vagabondage will

find it tedious and be inclined to scoff when a great talent outgrows

the libertine chrysalis-stage, learns to seize upon and express the

dignity of the mind, and superimposes a formal etiquette upon a solitude

which had been filled with unchastened and rigidly isolated sufferings

and struggles and had brought all this to a point of power and honour

among men. Further, how much sport, defiance, indulgence there is in the

self-formation of a talent! Gradually something official, didactic crept

into Gustav Aschenbach's productions, his style in later life fought shy

of any abruptness and boldness, any subtle and unexpected contrasts; he

inclined towards the fixed and standardized, the conventionally elegant,

the conservative, the formal, the formulated, nearly. And, as is

traditionally said of Louis XIV, with the advancing years he came to

omit every common word from his vocabulary. At about this time it

happened that the educational authorities included selected pages by him

in their prescribed school readers. This was deeply sympathetic to his

nature, and he did not decline when a German prince who had just mounted

to the throne raised the author of the Frederick to nobility on the

occasion of his fiftieth birthday. After a few years of unrest, a few

tentative stopping-places here and there, he soon chose Munich as his

permanent home, and lived there in a state of middle-class

respectability such as fits in with the life of the mind in certain

individual instances. The marriage which, when still young, he had

contracted with a girl of an educated family came to an end with her

death after a short period of happiness. He was left with a daughter,

now married. He had never had a son.

Gustav von Aschenbach was somewhat below average height, dark, and

smooth-shaven. His head seemed a bit too large in comparison with his

almost dapper figure. His hair was brushed straight back, thinning out

towards the crown, but very full about the temples, and strongly marked

with grey; it framed a high, ridged forehead. Gold spectacles with

rimless lenses cut into the bridge of his bold, heavy nose. The mouth

was big, sometimes drooping, sometimes suddenly pinched and firm. His

cheeks were thin and wrinkled, his well-formed chin had a slight cleft.

This head, usually bent patiently to one side, seemed to have gone

through momentous experiences, and yet it was his art which had produced

those effects in his face, effects which are elsewhere the result of

hard and agitated living. Behind this brow the brilliant repartee of the

dialogue on war between Voltaire and the king had been born; these eyes,

peering steadily and wearily from behind their glasses, had seen the

bloody inferno of the lazaret in the Seven Years' War. Even as it

applies to the individual, art is a heightened mode of existence. It

gives deeper pleasures, it consumes more quickly. It carves into its

servants' faces the marks of imaginary and spiritual adventures, and

though their external activities may be as quiet as a cloister, it

produces a lasting voluptuousness, over-refinement, fatigue, and

curiosity of the nerves such as can barely result from a life filled

with illicit passions and enjoyments.

III

Various matters of a literary and social nature delayed his departure

until about two weeks after that walk in Munich. Finally he gave orders

to have his country house ready for occupancy within a month; and one

day between the middle and the end of May he took the night train for

Trieste, where he made a stop-over of only twenty-four hours, and

embarked the following morning for Pola.

What he was hunting was something foreign and unrelated to himself which

would at the same time be quickly within reach; and so he stopped at an

island in the Adriatic which had become well-known in recent years. It

lay not far off the Istrian coast, with beautifully rugged cliffs

fronting the open sea, and natives who dressed in variegated tatters and

made strange sounds when they spoke. But rain and a heavy atmosphere, a

provincial and exclusively Austrian patronage at the hotel, and the lack

of that restfully intimate association with the sea which can be gotten

only by a soft, sandy beach, irritated him, and prevented him from

feeling that he had found the place he was looking for. Something within

was disturbing him, and drawing him he was not sure where. He studied

sailing dates, he looked about him questioningly, and of a sudden, as a

thing both astounding and self-evident, his goal was before him. If you

wanted to reach over night the unique, the fabulously different, where

did you go? But that was plain. What was he doing here? He had lost the

trail. He had wanted to go there. He did not delay in giving notice of

his mistake in stopping here. In the early morning mist, a week and a

half after his arrival on the island, a fast motorboat was carrying him

and his luggage back over the water to the naval port, and he landed

there just long enough to cross the gangplank to the damp deck of a ship

which was lying under steam ready for the voyage to Venice.

It was an old hulk flying the Italian flag, decrepit, sooty, and

mournful. In a cave-like, artificially lighted inside cabin where

Aschenbach, immediately upon boarding the ship, was conducted by a dirty

hunchbacked sailor who smirked politely, there was sitting behind a

table, his hat cocked over his forehead and a cigarette stump in the

corner of his mouth, a man with a goatee, and with the face of an

old-style circus director, who was taking down the particulars of the

passengers with professional grimaces and distributing the tickets. "To

Venice!" he repeated Aschenbach's request, as he extended his arm and

plunged his pen into the pasty dregs of a precariously tilted inkwell.

"To Venice, first class! At your service, sir." And he wrote a generous

scrawl, sprinkled it with blue sand out of a box, let the sand run off

into a clay bowl, folded the paper with sallow, bony fingers, and began

writing again. "A happily chosen destination!" he chatted on. "Ah,

Venice! A splendid city! A city of irresistible attractiveness for the

educated on account of its history as well as its present-day charms!"

The smooth rapidity of his movements and the empty words accompanying

them had something anaesthetic and reassuring about them, much as though

he feared lest the traveller might still be vacillating in his decision

to go to Venice. He handled the cash briskly, and let the change fall on

the spotted table-cover with the skill of a croupier. "A pleasant

journey, sir!" he said with a theatrical bow. "Gentlemen, I have the

honour of serving you!" he called out immediately after, with his arm

upraised, and he acted as if business were in full swing, although no

one else was there to require his attention. Aschenbach returned to the

deck.

With one arm on the railing, he watched the passengers on board and the

idlers who loitered around the dock waiting for the ship to sail. The

second class passengers, men and women, were huddled together on the

foredeck, using boxes and bundles as seats. A group of young people made

up the travellers on the first deck, clerks from Pola, it seemed, who

had gathered in the greatest excitement for an excursion to Italy. They

made a considerable fuss about themselves and their enterprise,

chattered, laughed, enjoyed their own antics self-contentedly, and,

leaning over the hand-rails, shouted flippantly and mockingly at their

comrades who, with portfolios under their arms, were going up and down

the waterfront on business and kept threatening the picnickers with

their canes. One, in a bright yellow summer suit of ultra-fashionable

cut, with a red necktie, and a rakishly tilted panama, surpassed all the

others in his crowing good humour. But as soon as Aschenbach looked at

him a bit more carefully, he discovered with a kind of horror that the

youth was a cheat. He was old, that was unquestionable. There were

wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. The faint crimson of the cheeks was

paint, the hair under his brilliantly decorated straw hat was a wig; his

neck was hollow and stringy, his turned-up moustache and the imperial on

his chin were dyed; the full set of yellow teeth which he displayed when

he laughed, a cheap artificial plate; and his hands, with signet rings

on both index fingers, were those of an old man. Fascinated with

loathing, Aschenbach watched him in his intercourse with his friends.

Did they not know, did they not observe that he was old, that he was not

entitled to wear their bright, foppish clothing, that he was not

entitled to play at being one of them? Unquestioningly, and as quite the

usual thing, it seemed, they allowed him among them, treating him as one

of their own kind and returning his jovial nudges in the ribs without

repugnance. How could that be? Aschenbach laid his hand on his forehead

and closed his eyes; they were hot, since he had had too little sleep.

He felt as though everything were not quite the same as usual, as though

some dream-like estrangement, some peculiar distortion of the world,

were beginning to take possession of him, and perhaps this could be

stopped if he hid his face for a time and then looked around him again.

Yet at this moment he felt as though he were swimming; and looking up

with an unreasoned fear, he discovered that the heavy, lugubrious body

of the ship was separating slowly from the walled bank. Inch by inch,

with the driving and reversing of the engine, the strip of dirty

glistening water widened between the dock and the side of the ship; and

after cumbersome manoeuvring, the steamer finally turned its nose

towards the open sea. Aschenbach crossed to the starboard side, where

the hunchback had set up a deck-chair for him, and a steward in a

spotted dress-coat asked after his wants.

The sky was grey, the wind damp. Harbour and islands had been left

behind, and soon all land was lost in the haze. Flakes of coal dust,

bloated with moisture, fell over the washed deck, which would not dry.

After the first hour an awning was spread, since it had begun to rain.

Bundled up in his coat, a book in his lap, the traveller rested, and the

hours passed unnoticed. It stopped raining; the canvas awning was

removed. The horizon was unbroken. The sea, empty, like an enormous

disk, lay stretched under the curve of the sky. But in empty

inarticulate space our senses lose also the dimensions of time, and we

slip into the incommensurate. As he rested, strange shadowy figures, the

old dandy, the goatee from the inside cabin, passed through his mind,

with vague gestures, muddled dream-words--and he was asleep.

About noon he was called to a meal down in the corridor-like dining-hall

into which the doors opened from the sleeping-cabins; he ate near the

head of a long table, at the other end of which the clerks including the

old man had been drinking with the boisterous captain since ten o'clock.

The food was poor, and he finished rapidly. He felt driven outside to

look at the sky, to see if it showed signs of being brighter above

Venice.

He had kept thinking that this had to occur, since the city had always

received him in full blaze. But sky and sea remained dreary and leaden,

at times a misty rain fell, and here he was reaching by water a

different Venice than he had ever found when approaching on land. He

stood by the forestays, looking in the distance, waiting for land. He

thought of the heavy-hearted, enthusiastic poet for whom the domes and

bell towers of his dreams had once risen out of these waters; he relived

in silence some of that reverence, happiness, and sorrow which had been

turned then into cautious song; and easily susceptible to sensations

already moulded, he asked himself wearily and earnestly whether some new

enchantment and distraction, some belated adventure of the emotions,

might still be held in store for this idle traveller.

Then the flat coast emerged on the right; the sea was alive with fishing

smacks; the bathers' island appeared; it dropped behind to the left, the

steamer slowly entered the narrow port which is named after it; and on

the lagoon, facing gay ramshackle houses, it stopped completely, since

it had to wait for the barque of the health department.

An hour passed before it appeared. He had arrived, and yet he had not;

no one was in any hurry, no one was driven by impatience. The young men

from Pola, patriotically attracted by the military bugle calls which

rang over the water from the vicinity of the public gardens, had come on

deck, and warmed by their Asti, they burst out with cheers for the

drilling _bersagliere._ But it was repulsive to see what a state the

primped-up old man had been brought to by his comradeship with youth.

His old head was not able to resist its wine like the young and robust:

he was painfully drunk. With glazed eyes, a cigarette between his

trembling fingers, he stood in one place, swaying backwards and forwards

from giddiness, and balancing himself laboriously. Since he would have

fallen at the first step, he did not trust himself from the spot--yet he

showed a deplorable insolence, buttonholed everyone who came near him,

stammered, winked, and tittered, lifted his wrinkled, ornamented index

finger in a stupid attempt at bantering, while he licked the corers of

his mouth with his tongue in the most abominably suggestive manner.

Aschenbach observed him darkly, and a feeling of numbness came over him

again, as though the world were displaying a faint but irresistible

tendency to distort itself into the peculiar and the grotesque: a

feeling which circumstances prevented him from surrendering himself to

completely, for just then the pounding activity of the engines commenced

again, and the ship, resuming a voyage which had been interrupted so

near its completion, passed through the San Marco canal.

So he saw it again, the most remarkable of landing places, that blinding

composition of fantastic buildings which the Republic lays out before

the eyes of approaching seafarers: the soft splendour of the palace, the

Bridge of Sighs, on the bank the columns with lion and saint, the

advancing, showy flank of the enchanted temple, the glimpse through to

the archway, and the huge giant clock. And as he looked on he thought

that to reach Venice by land, on the rail-road, was like entering a

palace from the rear, and that the most unreal of cities should not be

approached except as he was now doing, by ship, over the high seas.

The engine stopped, gondolas pressed in, the gangway was let down,

customs officials climbed on board and discharged their duties

perfunctorily; the disembarking could begin. Aschenbach made it

understood that he wanted a gondola to take him and his luggage to the

dock of those little steamers which ply between the city and the Lido,

since he intended to locate near the sea. His plans were complied with,

his wants were shouted down to the water, where the gondoliers were

wrangling with one another in dialect. He was still hindered from

descending; he was hindered by his trunk, which was being pulled and

dragged with difficulty down the ladder-like steps. So that for some

minutes he was not able to avoid the importunities of the atrocious old

man, whose drunkenness gave him a sinister desire to do the foreigner

parting honours. "We wish you a very agreeable visit," he bleated as he

made an awkward bow. "We leave with pleasant recollections! _Au revoir,

excusez_, and _bon jour_, your excellency!" His mouth watered, he

pressed his eyes shut, he licked the corners of his mouth, and the dyed

imperial turned up about his senile lips. "Our compliments," he mumbled,

with two fingertips on his mouth, "our compliments to our sweetheart,

the dearest prettiest sweetheart . . ." And suddenly his false upper

teeth fell down on his lower lip. Aschenbach was able to escape. "To our

sweetheart, our handsome sweetheart," he heard the cooing, hollow,

stuttering voice behind him, while supporting himself against the

handrail, he went down the gang-way.

Who would not have to suppress a fleeting shudder, a vague timidity and

uneasiness, if it were a matter of boarding a Venetian gondola for the

first time or after several years? The strange craft, an entirely

unaltered survival from the times of balladry, with that peculiar

blackness which is found elsewhere only in coffins--it suggests silent,

criminal adventures in the rippling night, it suggests even more

strongly death itself, the bier and the mournful funeral, and the last

silent journey. And has it been observed that the seat of such a barque,

this arm-chair of coffin-black veneer and dull black upholstery, is the

softest, most luxuriant, most lulling seat in the world? Aschenbach

noted this when he had relaxed at the feet of the gondolier, opposite

his luggage, which lay neatly assembled on the prow. The rowers were

still wrangling, harshly, incomprehensibly, with threatening gestures.

But the strange silence of this canal city seemed to soften their

voices, to disembody them, and dissipate them over the water. It was

warm here in the harbour. Touched faintly by the warm breeze of the

sirocco, leaning back against the limber portions of the cushions, the

traveller closed his eyes in the enjoyment of a lassitude which was as

unusual with him as it was sweet. The trip would be short, he thought;

if only it went on for ever! He felt himself glide with a gentle motion

away from the crowd and the confusion of voices.

It became quieter and quieter around him! There was nothing to be heard

but the splashing of the oar, the hollow slapping of the waves against

the prow of the boat as it stood above the water black and bold and

armed with its halberd-like tip, and a third sound, of speaking, of

whispering--the whispering of the gondolier, who was talking to himself

between his teeth, fitfully, in words that were pressed out by the

exertion of his arms. Aschenbach looked up, and was slightly astonished

to discover that the lagoon was widening, and he was headed for the open

sea. This seemed to indicate that he ought not to rest too much, but

should see to it that his wishes were carried out.

"To the steamer dock!" he repeated, turning around completely and

looking into the face of the gondolier who stood behind on a raised

platform and towered up between him and the dun-coloured sky. He was a

man of unpleasant, even brutal, appearance, dressed in sailor blue, with

a yellow sash; a formless straw hat, its weave partially unravelled, was

tilted insolently on his head. The set of his face, the blond curly

moustache beneath a curtly turned-up nose, undoubtedly meant that he was

not Italian. Although of somewhat frail build, so that one would not

have thought him especially well suited to his trade, he handled the oar

with great energy, throwing his entire body into each stroke.

Occasionally, he drew back his lips from the exertion, and disclosed his

white teeth. Wrinkling his reddish brows, he gazed on past his

passenger, as he answered deliberately, almost gruffly: "You are going

to the Lido." Aschenbach replied: "Of course. But I have just taken the

gondola to get me across to San Marco. I want to use the _vaporetto._"

"You cannot use the _vaporetto_, sir."

"And why not?"

"Because the _vaporetto_ will not haul luggage."

That was so; Aschenbach remembered. He was silent. But the fellow's

harsh, presumptuous manner, so unusual towards a foreigner here, seemed

unbearable. He said: "That is my affair. Perhaps I want to put my things

in storage. You will turn back." There was silence. The oar splashed,

the water thudded against the bow. And the talking and whispering began

again. The gondolier was talking to himself between his teeth.

What was to be done? This man was strangely insolent, and had an uncanny

decisiveness; the traveller, alone with him on the water, saw no way of

getting what he wanted. And besides, how softly he could rest, if only

he did not become excited! Hadn't he wanted the trip to go on and on for

ever? It was wisest to let things take their course, and the main thing

was that he was comfortable. The poison of inertia seemed to be issuing

from the seat, from this low, black-upholstered arm-chair, so gently

cradled by the oar strokes of the imperious gondolier behind him. The

notion that he had fallen into the hands of a criminal passed dreamily

across Aschenbach's mind--without the ability to summon his thoughts to

an active defence. The possibility that it was all simply a plan for

cheating him seemed more abhorrent. A feeling of duty or pride, a kind

of recollection that one should prevent such things, gave him the

strength to arouse himself once more. He asked: "What are you asking for

the trip?"

Looking down upon him, the gondolier answered: "You will pay."

It was plain how this should be answered. Aschenbach said mechanically:

"I shall pay nothing, absolutely nothing, if you don't take me where I

want to go."

"You want to go to the Lido."

"But not with you."

"I am rowing you well."

That is so, Aschenbach thought, and relaxed. That is so; you are rowing

me well. Even if you do have designs on my cash, and send me down to

Pluto with a blow of your oar from behind, you will have rowed me well.

But nothing like that happened. They were even joined by others: a

boatload of musical brigands, men and women, who sang to guitar and

mandolin, riding persistently side by side with the gondola and filling

the silence over the water with their covetous foreign poetry. A hat was

held out, and Aschenbach threw in money. Then they stopped singing, and

rowed away. And again the muttering of the gondolier could be heard as

he talked fitfully and jerkily to himself.

So they arrived, tossed in the wake of a steamer plying towards the

city. Two municipal officers, their hands behind their backs, their

faces turned in the direction of the lagoon, were walking back and forth

on the bank. Aschenbach left the gondola at the dock, supported by that

old man who is stationed with his grappling hook at each one of Venice's

landing-places. And since he had no small money, he crossed over to the

hotel by the steamer wharf to get change and pay the rower what was due

him. He got what he wanted in the lobby, he returned and found his

travelling bags in a cart on the dock, and gondola and gondolier had

vanished.

"He got out in a hurry," said the old man with the grappling hook. "A

bad man, a man without a license, sir. He is the only gondolier who

doesn't have a license. The others telephoned here."

Aschenbach shrugged his shoulders.

"The gentleman rode for nothing," the old man said, and held out his

hat. Aschenbach tossed in a coin. He gave instructions to have his

luggage taken to the beach hotel, and followed the cart through the

avenue, the white-blossomed avenue which, lined on both sides with

taverns, shops, and boarding houses, runs across the island to the

shore.

He entered the spacious hotel from the rear, by the terraced garden, and

passed through the vestibule and the lobby until he reached the desk.

Since he had been announced, he was received with obliging promptness. A

manager, a small frail flatteringly polite man with a black moustache

and a French style frock coat, accompanied him to the third floor in the

lift, and showed him his room, an agreeable place furnished in cherry

wood. It was decorated with strong-smelling flowers, and its high

windows afforded a view out across the open sea. He stepped up to one of

them after the employee had left; and while his luggage was being

brought up and placed in the room behind him, he looked down on the

beach (it was comparatively deserted in the afternoon) and on the

sunless ocean which was at flood tide and was sending long low waves

against the bank in a calm regular rhythm.

The experiences of a man who lives alone and in silence are both vaguer

and more penetrating than those of people in society; his thoughts are

heavier, more odd, and touched always with melancholy. Images and

observations which could easily be disposed of by a glance, a smile, an

exchange of opinion, will occupy him unbearably, sink deep into the

silence, become full of meaning, become life, adventure, emotion.

Loneliness ripens the eccentric, the daringly and estrangingly

beautiful, the poetic. But loneliness also ripens the perverse, the

disproportionate, the absurd, and the illicit.--So, the things he had

met with on the trip, the ugly old fop with his twaddle about

sweethearts, the lawbreaking gondolier who was cheated of his pay, still

left the traveller uneasy. Without really providing any resistance to

the mind, without offering any solid stuff to think over, they were

nevertheless profoundly strange, as it seemed to him, and disturbing

precisely because of this contradiction. In the meanwhile, he greeted

the sea with his eyes, and felt pleasure at the knowledge that Venice

was so conveniently near. Finally he turned away, bathed his face, left

orders to the chambermaid for a few things he still needed done to make

his comfort complete, and let himself be taken to the ground floor by

the green-uniformed Swiss who operated the lift.

He took his tea on the terrace facing the ocean, then descended and

followed the boardwalk for quite a way in the direction of the Hotel

Excelsior. When he returned it seemed time to dress for dinner. He did

this with his usual care and slowness, since he was accustomed to

working over his toilette. And yet he came down a little early to the

lobby where he found a great many of the hotel guests assembled, mixing

distantly and with a show of mutual indifference to one another, but all

waiting for meal time. He took a paper from the table, dropped into a

leather chair, and observed the company; they differed agreeably from

the guests where he had first stopped.

A wide and tolerantly inclusive horizon was spread out before him.

Sounds of all the principal languages formed a subdued murmur. The

accepted evening dress, a uniform of good manners, brought all human

varieties into a fitting unity. There were Americans with their long wry

features, large Russian families, English ladies, German children with

French nurses. The Slavic element seemed to predominate. Polish was

being spoken nearby.

It was a group of children gathered around a little wicker table, under

the protection of a teacher or governess: three young girls, apparently

fifteen to seventeen, and a long-haired boy about fourteen years old.

With astonishment Aschenbach noted that the boy was absolutely

beautiful. His face, pale and reserved, framed with honey-coloured hair,

the straight sloping nose, the lovely mouth, the expression of sweet and

godlike seriousness, recalled Greek sculpture of the noblest period;

and the complete purity of the forms was accompanied by such a rare

personal charm that, as he watched, he felt that he had never met with

anything equally felicitous in nature or the plastic arts. He was

further struck by the obviously intentional contrast with the principles

of upbringing which showed in the sisters' attire and bearing. The three

girls, the eldest of whom could be considered grown up, were dressed

with a chasteness and severity bordering on disfigurement. Uniformly

cloister-like costumes, of medium length, slate-coloured, sober, and

deliberately unbecoming in cut, with white turned-down collars as the

only relief, suppressed every possible appeal of shapeliness. Their

hair, brushed down flat and tight against the head, gave their faces a

nunlike emptiness and lack of character. Surely this was a mother's

influence, and it had not even occurred to her to apply the pedagogical

strictness to the boy which she seemed to find necessary for her girls.

It was clear that in his existence the first factors were gentleness and

tenderness. The shears had been resolutely kept from his beautiful hair;

like a Prince Charming's, it fell in curls over his forehead, his ears,

and still deeper, across his neck. The English sailor suit, with its

braids, stitchings, and embroideries, its puffy sleeves narrowing at the

ends and fitting snugly about the fine wrists of his still childish but

slender hands, gave the delicate figure something rich and luxurious. He

was sitting, half profile to the observer, one foot in its black

patent-leather shoe placed before the other, an elbow resting on the arm

of his wicker chair, a cheek pressed against his fist, in a position of

negligent good manners, entirely free of the almost subservient

stiffness to which his sisters seemed accustomed. Did he have some

illness? For his skin stood out as white as ivory against the golden

darkness of the surrounding curls. Or was he simply a pampered favourite

child, made this way by a doting and moody love? Aschenbach inclined to

believe the latter. Almost every artist is born with a rich and

treacherous tendency to recognize injustices which have created beauty,

and to meet aristocratic distinction with sympathy and reverence.

A waiter passed through and announced in English that the meal was

ready. Gradually the guests disappeared through the glass door into the

dining hall. Stragglers crossed, coming from the entrance, or the lifts.

Inside, they had already begun serving, but the young Poles were still

waiting around the little wicker table; and Aschenbach, comfortably

propped in his deep chair, and with this beauty before his eyes, stayed

with them.

The governess, a small corpulent middle-class woman with a red face,

finally gave the sign to rise. With lifted brows, she pushed back her

chair and bowed, as a large woman dressed in grey and richly jewelled

with pearls entered the lobby. This woman was advancing with coolness

and precision; her lightly powdered hair and the lines of her dress were

arranged with the simplicity which always signifies taste in those

quarters where devoutness is taken as one element of dignity. She might

have been the wife of some high German official. Except that her

jewellery added something fantastically lavish to her appearance;

indeed, it was almost priceless, and consisted of ear pendants and a

very long triple chain of softly glowing pearls, as large as cherries.

The children had risen promptly. They bent over to kiss the hand of

their mother who, with a distant smile on her well preserved though

somewhat tired and peaked features, looked over their heads and directed

a few words to the governess in French. Then she walked to the glass

door. The children followed her: the girls in the order of their age,

after them the governess, the boy last. For some reason or other he

turned around before crossing the sill, and since no one else was in the

lobby his strange dusky eyes met those of Aschenbach who, his newspaper

on his knees, lost in thought, was gazing after the group.

What he saw had not been unusual in the slightest detail. They had not

preceded the mother to the table; they had waited, greeted her with

respect, and observed the customary forms on entering the room. But it

had taken place so pointedly, with such an accent of training, duty, and

self-respect, that Aschenbach felt peculiarly touched by it all. He

delayed for a few moments, then he too crossed into the dining-room, and

was assigned to his table, which, as he noted with a brief touch of

regret, was very far removed from that of the Polish family.

Weary, and yet intellectually active, he entertained himself during the

lengthy meal with abstract, or even transcendental things; he thought

over the secret union which the lawful must enter upon with the

individual for human beauty to result, from this he passed into general

problems of form and art, and at the end he found that his thoughts and

discoveries were like the seemingly felicitous promptings of a dream

which, when the mind is sobered, are seen to be completely empty and

unfit. After the meal, smoking, sitting, taking an occasional turn in

the park with its smell of nightfall, he went to bed early and spent the

night in a sleep deep and unbroken, but often enlivened with the

apparitions of dreams.

III (continued)

The weather did not improve any the following day. A land breeze was

blowing. Under a cloudy ashen sky, the sea lay in dull peacefulness; it

seemed shrivelled up, with a close dreary horizon, and it had retreated

from the beach, baring the long ribs of several sandbanks. As Aschenbach

opened his window he thought that he could detect the foul smell of the

lagoon.

He felt depressed. He thought already of leaving. Once, years ago, after

several weeks of spring here, this same weather had afflicted him, and

impaired his health so seriously that he had to abandon Venice like a

fugitive. Was not this old feverish unrest again setting in, the

pressure in the temples, the heaviness of the eyelids? It would be

annoying to change his residence still another time; but if the wind did

not turn, he could not stay here. To be safe, he did not unpack

completely. He breakfasted at nine in the buffet-room provided for this

purpose between the lobby and the dining-room.

That formal silence reigned here which is the ambition of large hotels.

The waiters who were serving walked about on soft soles. Nothing was

audible but the tinkling of the tea-things, a word half-whispered. In

one corner, obliquely across from the door, and two tables removed from

his own, Aschenbach observed the Polish girls with their governess.

Erect and red-eyed, their ash-blond hair freshly smoothed down, dressed

in stiff blue linen with little white cuffs and turned-down

collars--they were sitting there, handing around a glass of marmalade.

They had almost finished their breakfast. The boy was missing.

Aschenbach smiled. "Well, little Phaeacian!" he thought. "You seem to be

enjoying the pleasant privilege of having your sleep out." And suddenly

exhilarated, he recited to himself the line: "A frequent change of

dress; warm baths, and rest."

He breakfasted without haste. From the porter, who entered the hall

holding his braided cap in his hand, he received some forwarded mail;

and while he smoked a cigarette he opened a few letters. In this way it

happened that he was present at the entrance of the late sleeper who was

being waited for over yonder.

He came through the glass door and crossed the room in silence to his

sisters' table. His approach--the way he held the upper part of his

body, and bent his knees, the movement of his white-shod feet--had an

extraordinary charm; he walked very lightly, at once timid and proud,

and this became still more lovely through the childish embarrassment

with which, twice as he proceeded, he turned his face towards the centre

of the room, raising and lowering his eyes. Smiling, with something

half-muttered in his soft vague tongue, he took his place; and now, as

he turned his full profile to the observer, Aschenbach was again

astonished, terrified even, by the really godlike beauty of this human

child. To-day the boy was wearing a light blouse of blue and white

striped cotton goods, with a red silk tie in front, and closed at the

neck by a plain white high collar. This collar lacked the

distinctiveness of the blouse, but above it the flowering head was

poised with an incomparable seductiveness--the head of an Eros, in

blended yellows of Parian marble, with fine serious brows, the temples

and ears covered softly by the abrupt encroachment of his curls.

"Good, good!" Aschenbach thought, with that deliberate expert appraisal

which artists sometimes employ as a subterfuge when they have been

carried away with delight before a masterwork. And he thought further:

"Really, if the sea and the beach weren't waiting for me, I should stay

here as long as you stayed!" But he went then, passed through the lobby

under the inspection of the servants, down the wide terrace, and

straight across the boardwalk to the section of the beach reserved for

the hotel guests. The barefoot old man in dungarees and straw hat who

was functioning here as bathing master assigned him to the bath house he

had rented; a table and a seat were placed on the sandy board platform,

and he made himself comfortable in the lounge chair which he had drawn

closer to the sea, out into the waxen yellow sand.

More than ever before he was entertained and amused by the sights on the

beach, this spectacle of carefree, civilized people getting sensuous

enjoyment at the very edge of the elements. The grey flat sea was

already alive with wading children, swimmers, a motley of figures lying

on the sandbanks with arms bent behind their heads. Others were rowing

about in little red and blue striped boats without keels; they were

continually upsetting, amid laughter. Before the long stretches of

bathing houses, where people were sitting on the platforms as though on

small verandahs, there was a play of movement against the line of rest

and inertness behind--visits and chatter, fastidious morning elegance

alongside the nakedness which, boldly at ease, was enjoying the freedom

which the place afforded. Further in front, on the damp firm sand,

people were parading about in white bathing cloaks, in ample,

brilliantly coloured wrappers. An elaborate sand pile to the right,

erected by children, had flags in the colours of all nations planted

around it. Venders of shells, cakes, and fruit spread out their wares,

kneeling. To the left, before one of the bathing houses which stood at

right angles to the others and to the sea, a Russian family was

encamped: men with beards and large teeth, slow delicate women, a Baltic

girl sitting by an easel and painting the sea amidst exclamations of

despair, two ugly good-natured children, an old maid-servant who wore a

kerchief on her head and had the alert scraping manners of a slave.

Delighted and appreciative, they were living there, patiently calling

the names of the two rowdy disobedient children, using their scanty

Italian to joke with the humorous old man from whom they were buying

candy, kissing one another on the cheek, and not in the least concerned

with any one who might be observing their community.

"Yes, I shall stay," Aschenbach thought. "Where would things be better?"

And his hands folded in his lap, he let his eyes lose themselves in the

expanses of the sea, his gaze gliding, swimming, and failing in the

monotone mist of the wilderness of space. He loved the ocean for

deep-seated reasons: because of that yearning for rest, when the

hard-pressed artist hungers to shut out the exacting multiplicities of

experience and hide himself on the breast of the simple, the vast; and

because of a forbidden hankering--seductive, by virtue of its being

directly opposed to his obligations--after the incommunicable, the

incommensurate, the eternal, the non-existent. To be at rest in the face

of perfection is the hunger of everyone who is aiming at excellence; and

what is the non-existent but a form of perfection? But now, just as his

dreams were so far out in vacancy, suddenly the horizontal fringe of the

sea was broken by a human figure; and as he brought his eyes back from

the unbounded, and focussed them, it was the lovely boy who was there,

coming from the left and passing him on the sand. He was barefooted,

ready for wading, his slender legs exposed above the knees; he walked

slowly, but as lightly and proudly as though it were the customary thing

for him to move about without shoes; and he was looking around him

towards the line of bathing houses opposite. But as soon as he had

noticed the Russian family, occupied with their own harmony and

contentment, a cloud of scorn and detestation passed over his face. His

brow darkened, his mouth was compressed, he gave his lips an embittered

twist to one side so that the cheek was distorted, and the forehead

became so heavily furrowed that the eyes seemed sunken beneath its

pressure: malicious and glowering, they spoke the language of hate. He

looked down, looked back once more threateningly, then with his shoulder

made an abrupt gesture of disdain and dismissal, and left the enemy

behind him.

A kind of pudency or confusion, something like respect and shyness,

caused Aschenbach to turn away as though he had seen nothing. For the

earnest-minded who have been casual observers of some passion, struggle

against making use, even to themselves, of what they have seen. But he

was both cheered and unstrung--which is to say, he was happy. This

childish fanaticism, directed against the most good-natured possible

aspect of life--it brought the divinely arbitrary into human

relationships; it made a delightful natural picture which had appealed

only to the eye now seem worthy of a deeper sympathy; and it gave the

figure of this half-grown boy, who had already been important enough by

his sheer beauty, something to offset him still further, and to make one

take him more seriously than his years justified. Still looking away,

Aschenbach could hear the boy's voice, the shrill, somewhat weak voice

with which, in the distance now, he was trying to call hello to his

playfellows busied around the sand pile. They answered him, shouting

back his name, or some affectionate nickname; and Aschenbach listened

with a certain curiosity, without being able to catch anything more

definite than two melodic syllables like "Adgio," or still more

frequently "Adgiu," with a ringing u-sound prolonged at the end. He was

pleased with the resonance of this; he found it adequate to the subject.

He repeated it silently and, satisfied, turned to his letters and

manuscripts.

His small portable writing-desk on his knees he began writing with his

fountain pen an answer to this or that bit of correspondence. But after

the first fifteen minutes he found it a pity to abandon the

situation--the most enjoyable he could think of--in this manner and

waste it in activities which did not interest him. He tossed the writing

materials to one side, and he faced the ocean again; soon afterwards,

diverted by the childish voices around the sand heap, he revolved his

head comfortably along the back of the chair towards the right, to

discover where that excellent little Adgio might be and what he was

doing.

He was found at a glance; the red tie on his breast was not to be

overlooked. Busied with the others in laying an old plank across the

damp moat of the sand castle, he was nodding, and shouting instructions

for this work. There were about ten companions with him, boys and girls

of his age, and a few younger ones who were chattering with one another

in Polish, French, and in several Balkan tongues. But it was his name

which rang out most often. He was openly in demand, sought after,

admired. One boy especially, like him a Pole, a stocky fellow who was

called something like "Jaschu," with sleek black hair and a belted linen

coat, seemed to be his closest vassal and friend. When the work on the

sand structure was finished for the time being, they walked arm in arm

along the beach, and the boy who was called "Jaschu" kissed the beauty.

Aschenbach was half minded to raise a warning finger. "I advise you,

Cristobulus," he thought, smiling, "to travel for a year! For you need

that much time at least to get over it." And then he breakfasted on

large ripe strawberries which he got from a peddler. It had become very

warm, although the sun could no longer penetrate the blanket of mist in

the sky. Laziness clogged his brain, even while his senses delighted in

the numbing, drugging distractions of the ocean's stillness. To guess,

to puzzle out just what name it was that sounded something like "Adgio,"

seemed to the sober man an appropriate ambition, a thoroughly

comprehensive pursuit. And with the aid of a few scrappy recollections

of Polish he decided that they must mean Tadzio, the shortened form of

Tadeusz, and sounding like Tadziu when it is called.

Tadzio was bathing. Aschenbach, who had lost sight of him, spied his

head and the arm with which he was propelling himself, far out in the

water; for the sea must have been smooth for a long distance out. But

already people seemed worried about him; women's voices were calling

after him from the bathing houses, uttering this name again and again.

It almost dominated the beach like a battle-cry, and with its soft

consonants, its long drawn u-note at the end, it had something at once

sweet and wild about it: "Tadziu! Tadziu!" He turned back; beating the

resistent water into a foam with his legs he hurried, his head bent down

over the waves. And to see how this living figure, graceful and

clean-cut in its advance, with dripping curls, and lovely as some frail

god, came up out of the depths of sky and sea, rose and separated from

the elements--this spectacle aroused a sense of myth, it was like some

poet's recovery of time at its beginning, of the origin of forms and the

birth of gods. Aschenbach listened with closed eyes to this song ringing

within him, and he thought again that it was pleasant here, and that he

would like to remain.

Later Tadzio was resting from his bath; he lay in the sand, wrapped in

his white robe, which was drawn under the right shoulder, his head

supported on his bare arm. And even when Aschenbach was not observing

him, but was reading a few pages in his book, he hardly ever forgot that

this boy was lying there and that it would cost him only a slight turn

of his head to the right to behold the mystery. It seemed that he was

sitting here just to keep watch over his repose--busied with his own

concerns, and yet constantly aware of this noble picture at his right,

not far in the distance. And he was stirred by a paternal affection, the

profound leaning which those who have devoted their thoughts to the

creation of beauty feel towards those who possess beauty itself.

A little past noon he left the beach, returned to the hotel, and was

taken up to his room. He stayed there for some time in front of the

mirror, looking at his grey hair, his tired sharp features. At this

moment he thought of his reputation, and of the fact that he was often

recognized on the streets and observed with respect, thanks to the sure

aim and the appealing finish of his words. He called up all the exterior

successes of his talent which he could think of, remembering also his

elevation to the knighthood. Then he went down to the dining-hall for

lunch, and ate at his little table. As he was riding up in the lift,

after the meal was ended, a group of young people just coming from

breakfast pressed into the swaying cage after him, and Tadzio entered

too. He stood quite near to Aschenbach, for the first time so near that

Aschenbach could see him, not with the aloofness of a picture, but in

minute detail, in all his human particularities. The boy was addressed

by someone or other, and as he was answering with an indescribably

agreeable smile he stepped out again, on the second floor, walking

backwards, and with his eyes lowered. "Beauty makes modest," Aschenbach

thought, and he tried insistently to explain why this was so. But he had

noticed that Tadzio's teeth were not all they should be; they were

somewhat jagged and pale. The enamel did not look healthy; it had a

peculiar brittleness and transparency, as is often the case with

anaemics. "He is very frail, he is sickly," Aschenbach thought. "In all

probability he will not grow old." And he refused to reckon with the

feeling of gratification or reassurance which accompanied this notion.

He spent two hours in his room, and in the afternoon he rode in the

_vaporetto_ across the foul-smelling lagoon to Venice. He got off at San

Marco, took tea on the Piazza, and then, in accord with his schedule for

the day, he went for a walk through the streets. Yet it was this walk

which produced a complete reversal in his attitudes and his plans.

An offensive sultriness lay over the streets. The air was so heavy that

the smells pouring out of homes, stores, and eating houses became mixed

with oil, vapours, clouds of perfume, and still other odours--and these

would not blow away, but hung in layers. Cigarette smoke remained

suspended, disappearing very slowly. The crush of people along the

narrow streets irritated rather than entertained the walker. The farther

he went, the more he was depressed by the repulsive condition resulting

from the combination of sea air and sirocco, which was at the same time

both stimulating and enervating. He broke into an uncomfortable sweat.

His eyes failed him, his chest became tight, he had a fever, the blood

was pounding in his head. He fled from the crowded business streets

across a bridge into the walks of the poor. On a quiet square, one of

those forgotten and enchanting places which lie in the interior of

Venice, he rested at the brink of a well, dried his forehead, and

realized that he would have to leave here.

For the second and last time it had been demonstrated that this city in

this kind of weather was decidedly unhealthy for him. It seemed foolish

to attempt a stubborn resistance, while the prospects for a change of

wind were completely uncertain. A quick decision was called for. It was

not possible to go home this soon. Neither summer nor winter quarters

were prepared to receive him. But this was not the only place where

there were sea and beach; and elsewhere these could be found without the

lagoon and its malarial mists. He remembered a little watering place not

far from Trieste which had been praised to him. Why not there? And

without delay, so that this new change of location would still have time

to do him some good. He pronounced this as good as settled, and stood

up. At the next gondola station he took a boat back to San Marco, and

was led through the dreary labyrinth of canals, under fancy marble

balconies flanked with lions, around the corners of smooth walls, past

the sorrowing façades of palaces which mirrored large dilapidated

business-signs in the pulsing water. He had trouble arriving there, for

the gondolier, who was in league with lace-makers and glass-blowers, was

always trying to land him for inspections and purchases; and just as the

bizarre trip through Venice would begin to cast its spell, the greedy

business sense of the sunken Queen did all it could to destroy the

illusion.

When he had returned to the hotel he announced at the office before

dinner that unforeseen developments necessitated his departure the

following morning. He was assured of their regrets. He settled his

accounts. He dined, and spent the warm evening reading the newspapers in

a rocking-chair on the rear terrace. Before going to bed he got his

luggage all ready for departure.

He did not sleep so well as he might, since the impending break-up made

him restless. When he opened the window in the morning the sky was as

overcast as ever, but the air seemed fresher, and he was already

beginning to repent. Hadn't his decision been somewhat hasty and

uncalled for, the result of a passing diffidence and indisposition? If

he had delayed a little, if, instead of surrendering so easily, he had

made some attempt to adjust himself to the air of Venice or to wait for

an improvement in the weather, he would not be so rushed and

inconvenienced, but could anticipate another forenoon on the beach like

yesterday's. Too late. Now he would have to go on wanting what he had

wanted yesterday. He dressed, and at about eight o'clock rode down to

the ground floor for breakfast.

As he entered, the buffet-room was still empty of guests. A few came in

while he sat waiting for his order. With his tea cup to his lips, he saw

the Polish girls and their governess appear: rigid, with morning

freshness, their eyes still red, they walked across to their table in

the corner by the window. Immediately afterwards, the porter approached

him, cap in hand, and warned him that it was time to go. The automobile

is ready to take him and the other passengers to the Hotel Excelsior,

and from here the motorboat will bring the ladies and gentlemen

to the station through the company's private canal. Time is

pressing.--Aschenbach found that it was doing nothing of the sort. It

was still over an hour before his train left. He was irritated by this

hotel custom of hustling departing guests out of the house, and

indicated to the porter that he wished to finish his breakfast in peace.

The man retired hesitatingly, to appear again five minutes later. It is

impossible for the car to wait any longer. Then he would take a cab, and

carry his trunk with him, Aschenbach replied in anger. He would use the

public steamboat at the proper time, and he requested that it be left to

him personally to worry about his departure. The employee bowed himself

away. Pleased with the way he had warded off these importunate warnings,

Aschenbach finished his meal at leisure; in fact, he even let the waiter

bring him a newspaper. The time had become quite short when he finally

arose. It was fitting that at the same moment Tadzio should come through

the glass door.

On the way to his table he walked in the opposite direction to

Aschenbach, lowering his eyes modestly before the man with the grey hair

and high forehead, only to raise them again, in his delicious manner,

soft and full upon him--and he had passed. "Good-bye, Tadzio!"

Aschenbach thought. "I did not see much of you." He did what was unusual

with him, really formed the words on his lips and spoke them to himself;

then he added, "God bless you!"--After this he left, distributed tips,

was ushered out by the small gentle manager in the French frock coat,

and made off from the hotel on foot, as he had come, going along the

white blossoming avenue which crossed the island to the steamer bridge,

accompanied by the house servant carrying his hand luggage. He arrived,

took his place--and then followed a painful journey through all the

depths of regret.

It was the familiar trip across the lagoon, past San Marco, up the Grand

Canal. Aschenbach sat on the circular bench at the bow, his arm

supported against the railing, shading his eyes with his hand. The

public gardens were left behind, the Piazzetta opened up once more in

princely splendour and was gone, then came the great flock of palaces,

and as the channel made a turn the magnificently slung marble arch of

the Rialto came into view. The traveller was watching; his emotions were

in conflict. The atmosphere of the city, this slightly foul smell of sea

and swamp which he had been so anxious to avoid--he breathed it now in

deep, exquisitely painful draughts. Was it possible that he had not

known, had not considered, just how much he was attached to all this?

What had been a partial misgiving this morning, a faint doubt as to the

advisability of his move, now became a distress, a positive misery, a

spiritual hunger, and so bitter that it frequently brought tears to his

eyes, while he told himself that he could not possibly have foreseen it.

Hardest of all to bear, at times completely insufferable, was the

thought that he would never see Venice again, that this was a

leave-taking for ever. Since it had been shown for the second time that

the city affected his health, since he was compelled for the second time

to get away in all haste, from now on he would have to consider it a

place impossible and forbidden to him, a place which he was not equal

to, and which it would be foolish for him to visit again. Yes, he felt

that if he left now, he would be shamefaced and defiant enough never to

see again the beloved city which had twice caused him a physical

break-down. And of a sudden this struggle between his desires and his

physical strength seemed to the aging man so grave and important, his

physical defeat seemed so dishonourable, so much a challenge to hold out

at any cost, that he could not understand the ready submissiveness of

the day before, when he had decided to give in without attempting any

serious resistance.