Death in Venice and Other Stories by Thomas Mann

insignia could be seen being transported through the streets, day in, day out, and whose large ancestral home was the most magisterial in the entire city . . . Such was the number of their family acquaintances that the two friends constantly had to doff their caps; in fact, many people rushed up to pay first respects to this pair of fourteen-year-olds.
    Both had their schoolbags slung over their shoulders, and both were warmly dressed in fine clothes: Hans in a short fisherman’s jacket with the wide blue collar of his sailor suit folded down over the shoulders and back, Tonio in a gray belted peacoat. Hans wore a Danish sailor’s cap with short ribbons from which a shock of raffia blond hair poked out. He was extraordinarily handsome and well built, broad in the shoulders, thin at the waist, with incisive steely blue eyes set wide apart. Underneath Tonio’s round fur hat, two dark, delicately shadowed eyes with heavy lids peered out drowsily and somewhat timidly from his brunet face with its sharply defined, Mediterranean-looking features . . . The cast of his mouth and chin was unusually soft. He walked listlessly and unevenly, while the Hansen boy’s trim black-stocking-clad legs marched along in nimbly unerring step.
    Tonio didn’t speak. He was in pain. Knitting his rather crooked brows, holding his lips pursed in a whistle and his head at an angle, he stared into the distance. This was his typical carriage and demeanor.
    Suddenly Hans locked arms with Tonio and looked sideways over at him, for he understood quite well what this was all about. And although Tonio said nothing as they took their next steps, his anger instantaneously melted.
    â€œI hadn’t forgotten, you know, Tonio,” said Hans, staring down at the pavement before him. “I just thought our walk today would be off because it’s so cold and windy. A bit of cold and wind doesn’t bother me, though, and I think it’s fabulous that you waited for me. I was getting annoyed because I thought you had gone home . . .”
    At these words, everything inside Tonio leapt with joy.
    â€œYes, well, then, let’s walk along the levees!” he said, emotion in his voice. “Along
Mühlenwall
and
Holstenwall
, and then I’ll walk you home . . . I don’t mind going on alone from there, not at all. Next time we can go my way.”
    At heart, he didn’t really believe what Hans had told him, and he felt quite sure that this private walk was only half so important to his companion as it was to him. But he saw too that Hans rued his forgetfulness and was trying hard to make it up to him. And the last thing he wanted was to forestall their reconciliation . . .
    The fact was that Tonio was utterly smitten with Hans Hansen and had already suffered quite a bit on his account. The one who loves most becomes subordinate and must suffer—his fourteen-year-old soul had already learned this simple yet hard lesson from life. And it was in his nature to record experiences like this, making mental notes and savoring them somewhat, although he never applied them to his own person or benefited from them in any practical way. It was also in his nature to find these sorts of lessons much more important and interesting than any of the knowledge forced on him inschool. Indeed, he spent most of his classroom hours under those vaulted Gothic arches plumbing the emotional depths of such insights, thinking them through to their logical conclusion. This pursuit gave him a feeling of satisfaction much like the one he got wandering around his room with his violin (for he played the violin), producing the softest notes he could to accompany the rippling water of the fountain, which danced its way skyward under the branches of the old walnut tree down in the garden . . .
    The fountain, the old walnut tree, his violin and the sea in the distance, the Baltic Sea, whose summer