Eager though he was to be off, Aschenbach was kept in Munich by affairs both literary and practical for some two weeks after that walk of his.  But at length he ordered his country home put ready against his return within the next few weeks, and on a day between the middle and the end of May took the evening train to Trieste, where he stopped only twenty-four hours, embarking for Pola the next morning but one.

      What he sought was a fresh scene, without associations, which should yet be not too out-of-the-way; and accordingly he chose an island in the Adriatic, not far off the Istrian coast.  It had been well known some years for its splendidly rugged cliff formations on the side next to the open sea, and its population, clad in a bright flutter of rags and speaking an outlandish tongue.  But there was rain and heavy air; the society at the hotel was provincial Austrian, and limited; besides, it annoyed him not to be able to get at the sea - he missed the close and soothing contact which only a gentle sandy slope affords.  He could not feel this was the place he sought; an inner impulse made him wretched, urging him on he knew not wither; he racked his brains, he looked up boats, than all at once his god stood plain before his eyes.  But of course!  When one wanted to arrive overnight at the incomparable, the fabulous, the like-nothing-else-in-the-world, where was it one went?  Why, obviously; he had intended to go there, what ever was he doing here?  A blunder.  He made all haste to correct it, announcing his departure at once.  Ten days after his arrival on the island a swift motorboat bore him and his luggage in the misty dawning back across the water to the naval station, where he landed only to pass over the landing-stage and on to the wet decks of a ship lying there with steam up for the passage to Venice.

      It was an ancient hulk belonging to an Italian line, obsolete, dingy, grimed with soot.  A dirty hunchbacked sailor, smirking polite, conducted him at once belowships to a cavernous, lamplit cabin.  There behind a table sat a man with a beard like a goat's; he had his hat on the back of his head, a cigar-stump in the corner of his mouth; he reminded Aschenbach of an old-fashioned circus director.  This person put the usual questions and wrote out a ticket to Venice, which he issued to the traveller with many commercial flourishes.

      'A ticket for Venice,' he repeated, stretching out his arm to dip the pen into the thick ink in a tilted ink-stand.  'One first-class to Venice!  Here you are, signore mio.' He made some scrawls on the paper, strewed bluish sand on it out of a box, thereafter letting the sand run off into an earthen vessel, folded the paper with bony yellow fingers, and wrote on the outside.  'An excellent choice,' he rattled on.  'Ah, Venice!  What a glorious city!  Irresistibly attractive to the cultured man for her past history as well as her present charm.'  His copious gesturings and empty phrases gave the odd impression that he feared the traveller might alter his mind.  He changed Aschenbach's note, laying the money on the spotted table-cover with the glibness of a crupier.  'A pleasant visit to you, signore,' he said, with a melodramatic bow.  'Delighted to serve you.'  Then he beckoned and called out: 'Next' as though a stream of passengers stood waiting to be served, though in point of fact there was not one.  Aschenbach returned to the upper deck.

      He leaned an arm on the railing and looked at the idlers lounging along the quay to watch the boat go out.  Then he turned his attention to his fellow-passengers.  Those of the second class, both men and women, were squatted on their bundles of luggage on the forward deck.  The first cabin consisted of a group of lively youths, clerks from Pola, evidently, who had made up a pleasure excursion to Italy and were not a little thrilled at the prospect, bustling about and laughing with satisfaction at the stir they made.  They leaned over the railings and shouted, with a glib command of epithet, derisory remarks at such of their fellow-clerks as they saw going to business along the quay; and these in turn shook their sticks and shouted as good back again.  One of the party, in a dandified buff suit, a rakish panama with a coloured scarf, and a red cravat, was loudest of the loud: he outcrowed all the rest.  Aschenbach's eye dwelt on him, and he was shocked to see that the apparent youth was no youth at all.  He was an old man, beyond a doubt, with wrinkles and crow's-feet round eyes and mouth; the dull carmine of the cheeks was rouge, the brown hair a wig.  His neck was shrunken and sinewy, his turned-up moustaches and small imperial were dyed, and the unbroken double row of yellow teeth he showed when he laughed were but too obviously a cheapish false set.  He wore a seal ring on each forefinger, but the hands were those of an old man.  Aschenbach was moved to shudder as he watched the creature and his association with the rest of the group.  Could they not see he was old, that he had no right to wear the clothes they wore or pretend to be one of them?  But they were used to him, it seemed; they suffered him among them, they paid back his jokes in kind and the playful pokes in the ribs he gave them.  How could they?  Aschenbach put his hand to his brow, he covered his eyes, for he had slept little, and they smarted.  He felt not quite canny, as though the world were suffering a dreamlike distortion of perspective which he might arrest by shutting it all out for a few minutes and then looking at it afresh.  But instead he felt a floating sensation, and opened his eyes with unreasoning alarm to find that the ship's dark sluggish bulk was slowly leaving the jetty.  Inch by inch, with the to-and-fro motion of her machinery, the strip of iridescent dirty water widened, the boat manoeuvred clumsily and turned her bow to the open sea.  Aschenbach moved over to the starboard side, where the hunchbacked sailor had set up a deckchair for him, and a steward in a greasy dresscoat asked for orders.

      The sky was grey, the wind humid.  Harbour and island dropped behind, all sight of land soon vanished in mist.  Flakes of sodden, clammy soot fell upon the still undried deck.  Before the boat was an hour out a canvas had to be spread as a shelter from the rain.

      Wrapped in his cloak, a book in his lap, our traveller rested; the hours slipped by unawares.  It stopped raining, the canvas was taken down.  The horizon was visible right round: beneath the sombre dome of the sky stretched the vast plain of empty sea.  But immeasurable unarticulated space weakens our power to measure time as well: the time-sense falters and grows dim.  Strange, shadowy figures passed and repassed - the elderly coxcomb, the goat-bearded man from the bowels of the ship - with vague gesturings and mutterings through the traveller's mind as he lay.  He fell asleep.

      At midday he was summoned to luncheon in a corridor-like saloon with the sleeping-cabins giving off it.  He ate at the head of a long table; the party of clerks, including the old man, sat with the jolly captain at the other end, where they had been carousing since ten o'clock.  The meal was wretched, and soon done.  Aschenbach was driven to seek the open and look at the sky - perhaps it would lighten presently above Venice.

      He had not dreamed it could be otherwise, for the city had ever given him a brilliant welcome.  But sky and sea remained leaden, with spurts of fine, mistlike rain; he reconciled himself to the idea of seeing a different Venice from that he had always approached on the landward side.  He stood by the foremast, his gaze on the distance, alert for the first glimpse of the coast.  And he thought of the melancholy and susceptible poet who had once seen the towers and turrets of his dreams rise out of these waves; repeated the rhythms born of his awe, his mingled emotions of joy and suffering - and easily susceptible to a prescience already shaped with him, he asked his own sober, weary heart if a new enthusiasm, a new preoccupation, some late adventure of the feelings could still be in store for the idle traveller.

      The flat coast showed on the right, the sea was soon populous with fishing-boats.  The Lido appeared and was left behind as the ship guided at half speed through the narrow harbour of the same name, coming to a full stop on the lagoon in sight of garish, badly built houses.  Here it waited for the boat bringing the sanitary inspector.

      An hour passed.  One had arrived - and yet not.  There was no conceivable haste - yet one felt harried.  The youths from Pola were on deck, drawn hither by the martial sound of horns coming across the water from the direction of the Public Gardens.  They had drunk a good deal of Asti and were moved to shout and hurrah at the drilling bersaglieri.  But the young-old man was a truly repulsive sight in the condition to which his company with youth had brought him.  He could not carry his wine like them: he was pitiably drunk.  He swayed as he stood - watery-eyed, a cigarette between his shaking fingers, keeping upright with difficulty.  He could not have taken a step without falling and knew better than to stir, but his spirits were deplorably high.  He buttonholed anyone who came within reach, he stuttered, he giggled, he leered, he fatuously shook his beringed old forefinger; his tongue kept seeking the corner of his mouth in a suggestive motion ugly to behold.  Aschenbach's brow darkened as he looked, and there came over him once more a dazed sense, as though things about him were just slightly losing their ordinary perspective, beginning to show a distortion that might merge into the grotesque.  He was prevented from dwelling on the feeling, for now the machinery began to thud again, and the ship took up its passage through the Canal di San Marco which had been interrupted so near the goal.

      He saw it once more, that landing-place that takes the breath away, that amazing group of incredible structures the Republic set up to meet the awe-struck eye of the approaching seafarer: the airy splendour of the palace and Bridge of Sighs, the columns of lion and saint on the shore, the glory of the projecting flank of the fairy temple, the vista of gateway and clock.  Looking, he thought that to come to Venice by the station is like entering a palace by the back door.  No-one should approach, save by the high seas as he was doing now, this most improbable of cities.

      The engines stopped.  Gondolas pressed alongside, the landing-stairs were let down, customs officials came on board and did their office, people began to go ashore.  Aschenbach ordered a gondola.  He meant to take up his abode by the sea and needed to be conveyed with his luggage to the landing-stage of the little steamers that ply between the city and the Lido.  They called down his order to the surface of the water where the gondoliers were quarrelling in dialect.  Then came another delay while his trunk was worried down the ladder-like stairs.  Thus he was forced to endure the importunities of the ghastly young-old man, whose drunken state obscurely urged him to pay the stranger the honour of a formal farewell.  'We wish you a very pleasant sojourn,' he babbled, bowing and scraping.  'Pray keep us in mind.  Au revoir, excusez et bon jour, votre Excellence.'  He drooled, he blinked, he licked the corner of his mouth, the little imperial bristled on his elderly chin.  He put the tips of two fingers to his mouth and said thickly: 'Give her our love, will you, the p-pretty little dear' - here his upper plate came away and fell down on the lower one.... Aschenbach escaped.  'Little sweety-sweety-sweetheart' he heard behind him, gurgled and stuttered, as he climbed down the rope stair into the boat.

      Is there anyone but must repress a secret thrill, on arriving in Venice for the first time - or returning thither after long absence - and stepping into a Venetian gondola?  That singular conveyance, come down unchanged from ballad times, black as nothing else on earth except a coffin - what pictures it calls up of lawless, silent adventures in the plashing night; or even more, what visions of death itself, the bier and solemn rites and last soundless voyage!  And has anyone remarked that the seat is such a bark, the armchair lacquered in coffin-black, and dully black-upholstered, is the softest, most luxurious, most relaxing seat in the world?  Aschenbach realized it when he had let himself down at the gondolier's feet, opposite his luggage, which lay neatly composed on the vessel's beak.  The rowers still gestured fiercely; he heard their harsh, incoherent tones.  But the strange stillness of the water-city seemed to take up their voices gently, to disembody and scatter them over the sea.  It was warm here in the harbour.  The lukewarm air of the sirocco breathed upon him, he leaned back among his cushions and gave himself to the yielding element, closing his eyes for very pleasure in an indolence as unaccustomed as sweet.  'The trip will be short,' he thought, and wished it might last forever.  They gently swayed away from the boat with its bustle and clamour of voices.

      It grew still and stiller all about.  No sound but the splash of the oars, the hollow slap of the wave against the steep, black, halberd-shaped beak of the vessel, and one sound more - a muttering by fits and starts, expressed as it were by the motion of his arms, from the lips of the gondolier.  He was talking to himself, between his teeth.  Aschenbach glanced up and saw with surprise that the lagoon was widening, his vessel was headed for the open sea.  Evidently it would not do to give himself up to sweet far niente; he must see his wishes carried out.

      'You are to take me to the steamboat landing, you know,' he said, half turning round towards it.  The muttering stopped.  There was no reply.

      'Take me to the steamboat landing,' he repeated, and this time turned quite round and looked up into the face of the gondolier as he stood there on his little elevated deck, high against the pale grey sky.  The man had an unpleasing, even brutish face, and wore blue clothes like a sailor's, with a yellow sash; a shapeless straw hat with the braid torn at the brim perched rakishly on his head.  His facial structure, as well as the curling blond moustache under the short snub nose, showed him to be of non-Italian stock.  Physically rather undersized, so that one would not have expected him to be very muscular, he pulled vigorously at the oar, putting all his body-weight behind each stroke.  Now and then the effort he made curled back his lips and bared his white teeth to the gums.  He spoke in a decided, almost curt voice, looking out to sea over his fare's head: 'The signore is going to the Lido.'

      Aschenbach answered: 'Yes, I am.  But I only took the gondola to cross over to San Marco.  I am using the vaporetto from there.'

      'But the signore cannot use the vaporetto.'

      'And why not?'

      'Because the vaporetto does not take luggage.'

      It was true.  Aschenbach remembered it.  He made no answer.  But the man's gruff, overbearing manner, so unlike the usual courtesy of his countrymen towards the stranger, was intolerable.  Aschenbach spoke again: 'That is my own affair.  I may want to give my luggage in deposit.  You will turn round.'

      No answer.  The oar splashed, the wave struck dull against the prow.  And the muttering began anew, the gondolier talked to himself, between his teeth.

      What should the traveller do?  Alone on the water with this tongue-tied, obstinate, uncanny man, he saw no way of enforcing his will.  And if only he did not excite himself, how pleasantly he might rest!  Had he not wished the voyage might last forever?  The wisest thing - and how much the pleasantest! - was to let matters take their own course.  A spell of indolence was upon him; it came from the chair he sat in - this low, black-upholstered armchair, so gently rocked at the hands of the despotic boatman in his rear.  The thoughts passed dreamily through Aschenbach's brain that perhaps he had fallen into the clutches of a criminal; it had not power to rouse him to action.  More annoying was the simpler explanation: that the man was only trying to extort money.  A sense of duty, a recollection, as it were, that this ought to be prevented, made him collect himself to say:

      'How much do you ask for the trip?'

      And the gondolier, gazing out over his head, replied: 'The signore will pay.'

      There was an established reply to this; Aschenbach made it, mechanically:

      'I will pay nothing whatever if you do not take me where I want to go.'

      'The signore wants to go to the Lido.'

      'But not with you.'

      'I am a good rower, signore, I will row you well.'

      'So much is true,' thought Aschenbach, and again he relaxed.  'That is true, you row me well.  Even if you mean to rob me, even if you hit me in the back with your oar and send me down to the kingdom of Hades, even then you will have rowed me well.'

      But nothing of the sort happened.  Instead, they fell in with company: a boat came alongside and waylaid them, full of men and women singing to guitar and mandolin.  They rowed persistently bow to bow with the gondola and filled the silence that had rested on the waters with their lyric love of gain.  Aschenbach tossed money into the hat they held out.  The music stopped at once, they rowed away.  And once more the gondolier's mutter became audible as he talked to himself in fits and snatches.

      Thus they rowed on, rocked by the wash of a steamer returning citywards.  At the landing two municipal officials were walking up and down with their hands behind their backs and their faces turned towards the lagoon.  Aschenbach was helped on shore by the old man with a boathook who is the permanent feature of every landing-stage in Venice; and having no small change to pay the boatman, crossed over into the hotel opposite.  His wants were supplied in the lobby, but when he came back his possessions were already on a hand-car on the quay, and gondola and gondolier were gone.

      'He ran away, signore,' said the old boatman.  'A bad lot, a man without a licence.  He is the only gondolier without one.  The others telephoned over, and he knew we were on the look-out, so he made off.'

      Aschenbach shrugged.

      'The signore has had a ride for nothing,' said the old man, and held out his hat.  Aschenbach dropped some coins.  He directed that his luggage be taken to the Hôtel des Bains and followed the hand-car through the avenue, that white-blossoming avenue with taverns, booths, and pensions on either side of it, which runs across the island diagonally to the beach.

      He entered the hotel from the garden terrace at the back and passed through the vestibule and hall into the office.  His arrival was expected, and he was served with courtesy and dispatch.  The manager, a small soft dapper man with a black moustache and a caressing way with him, wearing a French frock-coat, himself took him up in the lift and showed him his room.  It was a pleasant chamber, furnished in cherrywood, with lofty windows looking out to sea.  It was decorated with strong-scented flowers.  Aschenbach, as soon as he was alone, and while they brought in his trunk and bags and disposed them in the room, went up to one of the windows and stood looking out upon the beach in its afternoon emptiness, and at the sunless sea, now full and sending long, low waves with rhythmic beat upon the sand.

      A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.  They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge.  Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure.  Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry.  But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.  Thus the traveller's mind still dwelt with disquiet on the episodes of his journey hither: on the horrible old fop with his drivel about a mistress, on the outlaw boatman and his lost tip.  They did not offend his reason, they hardly afforded food for thought; yet they seemed by their very nature fundamentally strange, and thereby vaguely disquieting.  Yet here was the sea; even in the midst of such thoughts he saluted it with his eyes, exulting that Venice was near and accessible.  At length he turned round, disposed his personal belongings and made certain arrangements with the chambermaid for his comfort, washed, and was conveyed to the ground floor by the green-uniformed Swiss who ran the lift.

      He took tea on the terrace facing the sea and afterwards went down and walked some distance along the shore promenade in the direction of the Hôtel Excelsior.  When he came back it seemed to be time to change for dinner.  He did so, slowly and methodically as his way was, for he was accustomed to work while he dressed; but even so he found himself a little early when he entered the hall, where a large number of guests had collected - strangers to each other and affecting mutual indifference, yet united in expectancy of the meal.  He picked up a paper, sat down in a leather armchair, and took stock of the company, which compared most favourably with that he had just left.

      This was a broad and tolerant atmosphere, of wide horizons.  Subdued voices were speaking most of the principal European tongues.  That uniform of civilization, the conventional evening dress, gave outward conformity to the varied types.  There were long, dry Americans, large-familied Russians, English ladies, German children with French bonnes.  The Slavic element predominated, it seemed.  In Aschenbach's neighbourhood Polish was being spoken.

      Round a wicker table next to him was gathered a group of young folk in the charge of a governess or companion - three young girls, perhaps fifteen to seventeen years old, and a long-haired boy of about fourteen.  Aschenbach noticed with astonishment the lad's perfect beauty.  His face recalled the noblest moment of Greek sculpture - pale, with a sweet reserve, with clustering honey-coloured ringlets, the brow and nose descending in one line, the winning mouth, the expression of pure and godlike serenity.  Yet with all this chaste perfection of form it was of such unique personal charm that the observer thought he had never seen, either in nature or art, anything so utterly happy and consummate.  What struck him further was the strange contrast the group afforded, a difference in educational method, so to speak, shown in the way the brother and sisters were clothed and treated.  The girls, the eldest of whom was practically grown up, were dressed with an almost disfiguring austerity.  All three wore half-length slate-coloured frocks of cloister-like plainness, arbitrarily unbecoming in cut, with white turn-over collars as their only adornment.  Every grace of outline was wilfully suppressed; their hair lay smoothly plastered to their heads, giving them a vacant expression, like a nun's.  All this could only be by the mother's orders; but there was no trace of the same pedagogic severity in the case of the boy.  Tenderness and softness, it was plain, conditioned his existence.  No scissors had been put to the lovely hair that (like the Spinnario's) curled about his brows, above his ears, longer still in the neck.  He wore an English sailor suit, with quilted sleeves that narrowed round the delicate wrists of his long and slender though still childish hands.  And the suit, with its breastknot, lacings, and embroideries, lent the slight figure something 'rich and strange', a spoilt, exquisite air.  The observer saw him in half profile, with one foot in its black patent leather advanced, one elbow resting on the arm of his basketchair, the cheek nestled into the closed hand in a pose of easy grace, quite unlike the stiff subservient mien which was evidently habitual to his sisters.  Was he delicate?  His facial tint was ivory-white against the golden darkness of his clustering locks.  Or was he simply a pampered darling, the object of a self-willed and partial love?  Aschenbach inclined to think the latter.  For in almost every artistic nature in inborn a wanton and treacherous proneness to side with the beauty that breaks hearts, to single out aristocratic pretensions and pay them homage.

      A waiter announced, in English, that dinner was served.  Gradually the company dispersed through the glass doors into the dining-room.  Late-comers entered from the vestibule or the lifts.  Inside, dinner was being served; but the young Poles still sat and waited about their wicker table.  Aschenbach felt comfortable in his deep armchair, he enjoyed the beauty before his eyes, he waited with them.

      The governess, a short stout red-faced person, at length gave the signal.  With lifted brows she pushed back her chair and made a bow to the tall woman, dressed in palest grey, who now entered the hall.  This lady's abundant jewels were pearls, her manner was cool and measured; the fashion of her gown and the arrangement of her lightly powdered hair had the simplicity prescribed in certain circles whose piety and aristocracy are equally marked.  She might have been, in Germany, the wife of some high official.  But there was something faintly fabulous, after all, in her appearance, though lent it solely by the pearls she wore: they were well-nigh priceless, and consisted of earrings and a three-stranded necklace, very long, with gems the size of cherries.

      The brother and sisters had risen briskly.  They bowed over their mother's hand to kiss it, she turning away from them with a slight smile on her face, which was carefully preserved but rather sharp-nosed and worn.  She addressed a few words in French to the governess, then moved towards the glass door.  The children followed, the girls in order of age, then the governess, and last the boy.  He chanced to turn before he crossed the threshold, and as there was no-one else in the room his strange twilight grey eyes met Aschenbach's, as our traveller sat there with the paper on his knee, absorbed in looking after the group.

      There was nothing singular, of course, in what he had seen. They had not gone in to dinner before their mother, they had waited, given her a respectful salute, and but observed the right and proper forms on entering the room.  Yet they had done all this so expressly, with such self-respecting dignity, discipline, and sense of duty that Aschenbach was impressed.  He lingered still a few minutes, then he, too, went into the dining-room, where he was shown to a table far off from the Polish family, as he noted at once, with a stirring of regret.

      Tired, yet mentally alert, he beguiled the long, tedious meal with abstract, even with transcendent matters: pondered the mysterious harmony that must come to subsist between the individual human being and the universal law, in order that human beauty may result; passed on to general problems of form and art, and came at length to the conclusion that what seemed to him fresh and happy thoughts were like the flattering inventions of a dream, which the waking sense proves worthless and insubstantial.  He spent the evening in the park, that was sweet with the odours of evening - sitting, smoking, wandering about; went to bed betimes, and passed the night in deep unbroken sleep, visited, however, by varied and lively dreams.

      The weather next day was no more promising.  A land breeze blew.  Beneath a colourless, overcast sky the sea lay sluggish and as it were shrunken, so far withdrawn as to leave bare several rows of long sandbanks.  The horizon looked close and prosaic.  When Aschenbach opened his window he thought he smelt the stagnant odour of the lagoons.

      He felt suddenly out of sorts and already began to think of leaving.  Once, years before, after weeks of bright spring weather, this wind had found him out; it had been so bad as to force him to flee from the city like a fugitive.  And now it seemed beginning again - the same feverish distaste, the pressure on his temples, the heavy eyelids.  It would be a nuisance to change again; but if the wind did not turn, this was no place for him.  To be on the safe side he did not entirely unpack.  At nine o'clock he went down to the buffet, which lay between the hall and the dining-room and served as breakfast-room.

      A solemn stillness reigned here, such as it is the ambition of all large hotels to achieve.  The waiters moved on noiseless feet.  A rattling of tea-things, a whispered word - and no other sounds.  In a corner diagonally to the door, two tables off his own, Aschenbach saw the Polish girls with their governess.  They sat there very straight, in their stiff blue linen frocks with little turn-over collars and cuffs, their ash-blond hair newly brushed flat, their eyelids red from sleep, and handed each other the marmalade.  They had nearly finished their meal.  The boy was not there.

      Aschenbach smiled.  'Aha, little Phaeax,' he thought.  'It seems you are privileged to sleep yourself out.'  With sudden gaiety he quoted:

 

                                             'Oft veränderten Schmuck und warme Bäder und Ruhe.''

 

      He took a leisurely breakfast.  The porter came up with his braided cap in his hand to deliver some letters that had been sent on.  Aschenbach lighted a cigarette and opened a few letters, and thus was still seated to witness the arrival of the sluggard.

      He entered through the glass doors and walked diagonally across the room to his sisters at their table.  He walked with extraordinary grace - the carriage of the body, the action of the knee, the way he set down his foot in its white shoe - it was all so light, it was at once dainty and proud, it wore an added charm in the childish shyness which made him twice turn his head as he crossed the room, made him give a quick glance and then drop his eyes.  He took his seat, with a smile and a murmured word in his soft and blurry tongue; and Aschenbach, sitting so that he could see him in profile, was astonished anew, yes, startled, at the godlike beauty of the human being.  The lad had on a light sailor suit of blue and white striped cotton, with a red silk breastknot and a simple white standing collar round the neck - a not very elegant effect - yet above this collar the head was poised like a flower, in incomparable loveliness.  It was the head of Eros, with the yellowish bloom of Parian marble, with fine serious brows, and dusky clustering ringlets standing out in soft plenteousness over temples and ears.

      'Good, oh, very good indeed!' thought Aschenbach, assuming the patronizing air of the connoisseur to hide, as artists will, their ravishment over a masterpiece.  'Yes,' he went on to himself, 'if it were not that sea and beach were waiting for me, I should sit here as long as you do.'  But he went out on that, passing through the hall, beneath the watchful eye of the functionaries, down the steps and directly across the boardwalk to the section of the beach reserved for the guests of the hotel.  The bathing-master, a barefoot old man in linen trousers and sailor blouse, with a straw hat, showed him the cabin that had been rented for him, and Aschenbach had him set up table and chair on the sandy platform before it.  Then he dragged the reclining-chair through the pale yellow sand, closer to the sea, sat down, and composed himself.

      He delighted, as always, in the scene on the beach, the sight of sophisticated society giving itself over to a simple life at the edge of the element.  The shallow grey sea was already gay with children wading, with swimmers, with figures in bright colours lying on the sandbanks with arms behind their heads.  Some were rowing in little keelless boats painted red and blue, and laughing when they capsized.  A long row of capanne ran down the beach, with platforms, where people sat as on verandas, and there was social life, with bustle and with indolent repose; visits were paid, amid much chatter, punctilious morning toilettes hobnobbed with comfortable and privileged dishabille.  On the hard wet sand close to the sea figures in white bathrobes or loose wrappings in garish colours strolled up and down.  A mammoth sand-hill had been built up on Aschenbach's right, the work of children, who had stuck it full of tiny flags.  Vendors of seashells, fruit, and cakes knelt beside their wares spread out on the sand.  A row of cabins on the left stood obliquely to the others and to the sea, thus forming the boundary of the enclosure on this side; and on the little veranda in front of one of these a Russian family was encamped; bearded men with strong white teeth, ripe, indolent women, a Fräulein from the Baltic provinces, who sat at an easel painting the sea and tearing her hair in despair; two ugly but good-natured children and an old maidservant in a headcloth, with the caressing, servile manner of the born dependent.  There they sat together in grateful enjoyment of their blessings: constantly shouting at their romping children, who paid not the slightest heed; making jokes in broken Italian to the funny old man who sold them sweetmeats, kissing each other on the cheeks - not a jot concerned that their domesticity was overlooked.

      'I'll stop,’ thought Aschenbach.  'Where could it be better than here?'  With his hands clasped in his lap he let his eyes swim in the wideness of the sea, his gaze lose focus, blur, and grow vague in the misty immensity of space.  His love of the ocean had profound sources: the hard-worked artist's longing for rest, his yearning to seek refuge from the thronging manifold shapes of his fancy in the bosom of the simple and vast; and another yearning, opposed to his art and perhaps for that very reason a lure, for the unorganized, the immeasurable, the eternal - in short, for nothingness.  He whose preoccupation is with excellence longs fervently to find rest in perfection; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?  As he sat there dreaming thus, deep, deep into the void, suddenly the margin line of the shore was cut by a human form.  He gathered up his gaze and withdrew it from the illimitable, and lo, it was the lovely boy who crossed his vision coming from the left along the sand.  He was barefoot, ready for wading, the slender legs uncovered above the knee, and moved slowly, yet with such a proud, light tread as to make it seem he had never worn shoes.  He looked towards the diagonal row of cabins; and the sight of the Russian family, leading their lives there in joyous simplicity, distorted his features in a spasm of angry disgust.  His brow darkened, his lips curled, one corner of the mouth was drawn down in a harsh line that marred the curve of the cheek, his frown was so heavy that the eyes seemed to sink in as they uttered beneath the black and vicious language of hate.  He looked down, looked threateningly back once more; then giving it up with a violent and contemptuous shoulder-shrug, he left his enemies in the rear.

      A feeling of delicacy, a qualm, almost like a sense of shame, made Aschenbach turn away as though he had not seen; he felt unwilling to take advantage of having been, by chance, privy to this passionate reaction.  But he was in troth both moved and exhilarated - that is to say, he was delighted.  This childish exhibition of fanaticism, directed against the good-natured simplicity in the world - it gave to the godlike and inexpressive the final human touch.  The figure of the half-grown lad, a masterpiece from nature's own hand, had been significant enough when it gratified the eye alone; and now it evoked sympathy as well - the little episode had set it off, lent it a dignity in the onlooker's eyes that was beyond its years.

      Aschenbach listened with still averted head to the boy's voice announcing his coming to his companions at the sand-heap.  The voice was clear, though a little weak, but they answered, shouting his name - or his nickname - again and again.  Aschenbach was not without curiosity to learn it, but could make out nothing more exact than two musical syllables, something like Adgio - or, often still, Adjiu, with a long drawn-out u at the end.  He liked the melodious sound, and found it fitting; said it over to himself a few times and turned back with satisfaction to his papers.

      Holding his travelling-pad on his knees, he took his fountain-pen and began to answer various items of his correspondence.  But presently he found it too great a pity to turn his back, and the eyes of his mind, for the sake of mere commonplace correspondence, to this scene which was, after all, the most rewarding one he knew.  He put aside his papers and swung round to the sea; in no long time, beguiled by the voices of the children at play, he had turned his head and sat resting it against the chair-back, while he gave himself up to contemplating the activities of the exquisite Adgio.

      His eye found him at once, the red breastknot was unmistakable.  With some nine or ten companions, boys and girls of his own age and younger, he was busy putting in place an old plank to serve as a bridge across the ditches between the sandpiles.  He directed the work by shouting and motioning with his head, and they were all chattering in many tongues - French, Polish, and even some of the Balkan languages.  But his was the name oftenest on their lips, he was plainly sought after, wooed, admired.  One lad in particular, a Pole like himself, with a name that sounded something like Jaschiu, a sturdy lad with brilliantined black hair, in a belted linen suit, was his particular liegeman and friend.  Operations at the sandpile being ended for the time, they two walked away along the beach, with their arms round each other's waists, and once the lad Jaschiu gave Adgio a kiss.

      Aschenbach felt like shaking a finger at him.  'But you, Critobulus,' he thought with a smile, 'you I advise to take a year's leave.  That long, at least, you will need for complete recovery.'  A vendor came by with strawberries, and Aschenbach made his second breakfast of the great luscious, dead-ripe fruit.  It had grown very warm, although the sun had not availed to pierce the heavy layer of mist.  His mind felt relaxed, his senses revelled in this vast and soothing communion with the silence of the sea.  The grave and serious man found sufficient occupation in speculating what name it could be that sounded like Adgio.  And with the help of a few Polish memories he at length fixed on Tadzio, a shortened form of Thaddeus, which sounded, when called, like Tadziu or Adziu.

      Tadzio was bathing.  Aschenbach had lost sight of him for a moment, then descried him far out in the water, which was shallow a very long way - saw his head, and his arm striking out like an oar.  But his watchful family were already on the alert; the mother and governess called from the veranda in front of their bathing-cabin, until the lad's name, with its softened consonants and long-drawn u sound, seemed to possess the beach like a rallying-cry; the cadence had something sweet and wild: 'Tadziu! Tadziu!'  He turned and ran back against the water, churning the waves to a foam, his had flung high.  The sight of this living figure, virginally pure and austere, with dripping locks, beautiful as a tender young god, emerging from the depths of sea and sky, outrunning the element - it conjured up mythologies, it was like a primeval legend, handed down from the beginning of time, of the birth of form, of the origin of the gods.  With closed lids Aschenbach listened to this poesy hymning itself silently within him, and anon he thought it was good to be here and that he would stop awhile.

      Afterwards Tadzio lay on the sand and rested from his bathe, wrapped in his white sheet, which he wore drawn underneath the right shoulder, so that his head was cradled on his bare right arm.  And even when Aschenbach read, without looking up, he was conscious that the lad was there; that it would cost him but the slightest turn of the head to have the rewarding vision once more in his purview.  Indeed, it was almost as though he sat there to guard the youth's repose; occupied, of course, with his own affairs, yet alive to the presence of that noble human creature close at hand.  And his heart was stirred, it felt a father's kindness: such an emotion as the possessor of beauty can inspire in one who has offered himself up in spirit to create beauty.

      At midday he left the beach, returned to the hotel, and was carried up in the lift to his room.  There he lingered a little time before the glass and looked at his own grey hair, his keen and weary face.  And he thought of his fame, and how people gazed respectfully at him in the streets, on account of his unerring gift of words and their power to charm.  He called up all the worldly successes his genius had reaped, all he could remember, even his patent of nobility.  Then went to luncheon down in the dining-room, sat at his little table and ate.  Afterwards he mounted again in the lift, and a group of young folk, Tadzio among them, pressed with him into the little compartment.  It was the first time Aschenbach had seen him close at hand, not merely in perspective, and could see and take account of the details of his humanity.  Someone spoke to the lad, and he, answering, with an indescribably lovely smile, stepped out again, as they had come to the first floor, backwards, with his eyes cast down.  'Beauty makes people self-conscious,' Aschenbach thought, and considered within himself imperatively why this should be.  He had noted, further, that Tadzio's teeth were imperfect, rather jagged and bluish, without a healthy glaze, and of that peculiar brittle transparency which the teeth of chlorotic people often show.  'He is delicate, he is sickly,' Aschenbach thought.  'He will most likely not live to grow old.'  He did not try to account for the pleasure the idea gave him.

      In the afternoon he spent two hours in his room, then took the vaporetto to Venice, across the foul-smelling lagoon.  He got out at San Marco, had his tea in the Piazza, and then, as his custom was, took a walk through the streets.  But this walk of his brought about nothing less than a revolution in his mood and an entire change in all his plans.

      There was a hateful sultriness in the narrow streets.  The air was so heavy that all the manifold smells wafted out of houses, shops, and cook-shops - smells of oil, perfumery, and so forth - hung low, like exhalations, not dissipating.  Cigarette smoke seemed to stand in the air, it drifted so slowly away.  Today the crowd in these narrow lanes oppressed the stroller instead of diverting him.  The longer he walked, the more was he in tortures under that state, which is the product of the sea air and the sirocco and which excites and enervates at once.  He perspired painfully.  His eyes rebelled, his chest was heavy, he felt feverish, the blood throbbed in his temples.  He fled from the huddled, narrow streets of the commercial city, crossed many bridges, and came into the poor quarter of Venice.  Beggars waylaid him, the canals sickened him with their evil exhalations.  He reached a quiet square, one of those that exist at the city's heart, forsaken of God and man; there he rested awhile on the margin of a fountain, wiped his brow, and admitted to himself that he must be gone.

      For the second time, and now quite definitely, the city proved that in certain weathers it could be directly inimical to his health.  Nothing but sheer unreasoning obstinacy would linger on, hoping for an unprophesiable change in the wind.  A quick decision was in place.  He could not go home at this stage, neither summer nor winter quarters would be ready.  But Venice had not a monopoly of sea and shore: there were other spots where these were to be had without the evil concomitants of lagoon and fever-breeding vapours.  He remembered a little bathing-place not far from Trieste of which he had had a good report. Why not go thither?  At once, of course, in order that his second change might be worth the making.  He resolved, he rose to his feet and sought the nearest gondola-landing, where he took a boat and was conveyed to San Marco through the gloomy windings of many canals, beneath balconies of delicate marble traceries flanked by carven lions; round slippery corners of wall, past melancholy façades with ancient business shields reflected in the rocking water.  It was not too easy to arrive at his destination, for his gondolier, being in league with various lace-makers and glass-blowers, did his best to persuade his fare to pause, look, and be tempted to buy.  Thus the charm of this bizarre passage through the heart of Venice, even while it played upon his spirit, yet was sensibly cooled by the predatory commercial spirit of the fallen queen of the seas.

      Once back in his hotel, he announced at the office, even before dinner, that circumstances unforeseen obliged him to leave early next morning.  The management expressed its regret, it changed his money and receipted his bill.  He dined, and spent the lukewarm evening in a rocking-chair on the rear terrace, reading the newspapers.  Before he went to bed, he made his luggage ready against the morning.

      His sleep was not of the best, for the prospect of another journey made him restless.  When he opened his window next morning, the sky was still overcast, but the air seemed fresher - and there and then his rue began.  Had he not given notice too soon?  Had he not let himself be swayed by and slight and momentary indisposition?  If he had only been patient, not lost heart so quickly, tried to adapt himself to the climate, or even waited for a change in the weather before deciding!  Then, instead of a hurry and flurry of departure, he would have before him now a morning like yesterday's on the beach.  Too late!  He must go on wanting what he had wanted yesterday.  He dressed and at eight o'clock went down to breakfast.

      When he entered the breakfast-room it was empty.  Guests came in while he sat waiting for his order to be filled.  As he sipped his tea he saw the Polish girls enter with their governess, chaste and morning-fresh, with sleep-reddened eyelids.  They crossed the room and sat down at their table in the window.  Behind them came the porter, cap in hand, to announce that it was time for him to go.  The car was waiting to convey him and other travellers to the Hôtel Excelsior, whence they could go by motorboat through the company's private canal to the station.  Time pressed.  But Aschenbach found it did nothing of the sort.  There still lacked more than an hour of train-time.  He felt irritated at the hotel habit of getting the guests out of the house earlier than necessary; and requested the porter to let him breakfast in peace.  The man hesitated and withdrew, only to come back again five minutes later.  The car could wait no longer.  Good, then it might go, and take his trunk with it, Aschenbach answered with some heat.  He would use the public conveyance, in his own time; he begged them to leave the choice of it to him.  The functionary bowed.  Aschenbach, pleased to be rid of him, made a leisurely meal, and even had a newspaper off the waiter.  When at length he rose, the time was grown very short.  And it so happened that at that moment Tadzio came through the glass doors into the room.

      To reach his own table he crossed the traveller's path, and modestly cast down his eyes before the grey-haired man of the lofty brows - only to lift them again in that sweet way he had and direct his full soft gaze upon Aschenbach's face.  Then he was past.  'For the last time, Tadzio,' thought the elder man.  'It was all too brief!'  Quite unusually for him, he shaped a farewell with his lips, he actually uttered it, and added: 'May God bless you!'  Then he went out, distributed tips, exchanged farewells with the mild little manager in the frock-coat, and, followed by the porter with his hand-luggage, left the hotel.  On foot as he had come, he passed through the white-blossoming avenue, diagonally across the island to the boat-landing.  He went on board at once - but the tale of his journey across the lagoon was a tale of woe, a passage through the very valley of regrets.

      It was the well-known route: through the lagoon, past San Marco, up the Grand Canal.  Aschenbach sat on the circular bench in the bows, with his elbow on the railing, one hand shading his eyes.  They passed the Public Gardens, once more the princely charm of the Piazzetta rose up before him and then dropped behind, next came the great row of palaces, the canal curved, and the splendid marble arches of the Rialto came in sight.  The traveller gazed - and his bosom was torn.  The atmosphere of the city, the faintly rotten scent of swamp and sea, which had driven him to leave - in what deep, tender, almost painful draughts he breathed it in!  How was it he had not known, had not thought, how much his heart was set upon it all!  What this morning had been slight regret, some little doubt of his own wisdom, turned now to grief, to actual wretchedness, a mental agony so sharp that it repeatedly brought tears to his eyes, while he questioned himself how he could have foreseen it.  The hardest part, the part that more than once it seemed he could not bear, was the thought that he should never more see Venice again.  Since now for the second time the place had made him ill, since for the second time he had had to flee for his life, he must henceforth regard it as a forbidden spot, to be forever shunned; senseless to try it again, after he had proved himself unfit.  Yes, if he fled it now, he felt that wounded pride must prevent his return to this spot where twice he had made actual bodily surrender. And this conflict between inclination and capacity all at once assumed, in this middle-aged man's mind, immense weight and importance; the physical defeat seemed a shameful thing, to be avoided at whatever cost; and he stood amazed at the ease with which on the day before he had yielded to it.

      Meanwhile the steamer neared the station landing; his anguish of irresolution amounted almost to panic.  To leave seemed to the sufferer impossible, to remain not less so.  Torn thus between two alternatives, he entered the station.  It was very late, he had not a moment to lose.  Time pressed, it scourged him onward.  He hastened to buy his ticket and looked round in the crowd to find the hotel porter.  The man appeared and said that the trunk had already gone off.  'Gone already?'  'Yes, it has gone to Como.'  'To Como?'  A hasty exchange of words - angry questions from Aschenbach, and puzzled replies from the porter - at length made it clear that the trunk had been put with the wrong luggage even before leaving the hotel, and in company with other trunks was now well on its way in precisely the wrong direction.

      Aschenbach found it hard to wear the right expression as he heard this news.  A reckless joy, a deep incredible mirthfulness shook him almost as with a spasm.  The porter dashed off after the lost trunk, returning very soon, of course, to announce that his efforts were unavailing.  Aschenbach said he would not travel without his luggage; that he would go back and wait at the Hôtel des Bains until it turned up.  Was the company's motorboat still outside?  The man said yes, it was at the door.  With his native eloquence he prevailed upon the ticket-agent to take back the ticket already purchased; he swore that he would wire, that no pains should be spared, that the trunk would be restored in the twinkling of an eye.  And the unbelievable thing came to pass; the traveller, twenty minutes after he had reached the station, found himself once more on the Grand Canal on his way back to the Lido.

      What a strange adventure indeed, this right-about face of destiny - incredible, humiliating, whimsical as any dream!  To be passing again, within the hour, these scenes from which in profoundest grief he had but now taken leave forever!  The little swift-moving vessel, a furrow of foam at its prow, tacking with droll agility between steamboats and gondolas, went like a shot to its goal; and he, its sole passenger, sat hiding the panic and thrills of a truant schoolboy beneath a mask of forced resignation.  His breast still heaved from time to time with a burst of laughter over the contretemps.  Things could not, he told himself, have fallen out more luckily.  There would be the necessary explanations, a few astonished faces - then all would be well once more, a mischance prevented, a grievous error set right; and all he had thought to have left forever was his own once more, his for as long as he liked.... And did the boat's swift motion deceive him, or was the wind now coming from the sea?

      The waves struck against the tiled sides of the narrow canal.  At Hôtel Excelsior the automobile omnibus awaited the returned traveller and bore him along by the crisping waves back to the Hôtel des Bains.  The little moustachioed manager in the frock-coat came down the steps to greet him.

      In dulcet tones he deplored the mistake, said how painful it was to the management and himself; applauded Aschenbach's resolve to stop on until the errant trunk came back; his former room, alas, was already taken, but another as good awaited his approval.  'Pas de chance, monsieur,' said the Swiss lift-porter, with a smile, as he conveyed him upstairs.  And the fugitive was soon quartered in another room which in situation and furnishings almost precisely resembled the first.

      He laid out the contents of his hand-bag in their wonted places; then, tired out, dazed by the whirl of the extraordinary forenoon, subsided into the armchair by the open window.  The sea wore a pale-green cast, the air felt thinner and purer, the beach with its cabins and boats had more colour, notwithstanding the sky was still grey.  Aschenbach, his hands folded in his lap, looked out.  He felt rejoiced to be back, yet displeased with his vacillating moods, his ignorance of his own real desires.  Thus for nearly an hour he sat, dreaming, resting, barely thinking.  At midday he saw Tadzio, in his stupid sailor suit with red breastknot, coming up from the sea, across the barrier and along the boardwalk to the hotel.  Aschenbach recognized him, even at this height, knew it was he before he actually saw him, had it in mind to say to himself: 'Well, Tadzio, so here you are again too!' But the casual greeting died away before it reached his lips, slain by the truth in his heart.  He felt the rapture of his blood, the poignant pleasure, and realized that it was for Tadzio's sake the leave-taking had been so hard.

      He sat quiet still, unseen at his high post, and looked within himself.  His features were lively, he lifted his brows; a smile, alert, inquiring, vivid, widened the mouth.  Then he raised his head and with both hands, hanging limp over the chair-arms, he described a slow motion, palms outward, a lifting and turning movement, as though to indicate a wide embrace.  It was a gesture of welcome, a calm and deliberate acceptance of what might come.