Page:German Classics of The 19h and 20th C. Vol.19.djvu/277

 He went the way he had to go, a little carelessly and unevenly, whistling to himself, looking into space with head on one side; and if he went astray, that was because there simply is no right path for some individuals. If you asked him what in all the world he intended to be, he would supply varying information, for he was wont to say (and had already written it down) that he had in him the possibilities of a thousand forms of existence, together with the secret consciousness that they really were one and all impossibilities.

Even before he departed from his cramped native city, the clamps and threads with which it held him had gently loosened their hold. The old family of the Krogers had little by little begun to crumble and disintegrate, and men had reason to reckon Tonio Kröger's own existence and nature among the other features of that process. His father's mother had died, the head of the family, and not long afterward his father, the tall, meditative, carefully dressed gentleman with the wild flower in his buttonhole, had followed her in death. The big Kröger house together with its honorable history was for sale, and the firm went out of business. Tonio's mother, however, his beautiful, passionate mother, who played the piano and the mandolin so wonderfully, and to whom everything was quite immaterial, married anew after the lapse of a year, this time a musician, a virtuoso with an Italian name whom she followed to faraway lands. Tonio Kröger found this a trifle unprincipled; but was he called upon to prevent her? He who wrote verses and could not even answer the question what in all the world he intended to become &hellip;

And he forsook his zigzagging native city, around whose gables the damp winds whistled, forsook the fountain and the old walnut-tree in the garden, the familiars of his youth, forsook also the sea that he loved so dearly, and felt no pain in so doing. For he had grown mature and shrewd,