In the fourth week of his stay at the Lido, Gustave von Aschenbach made certain singular observations touching the world about him.  He noticed, in the first place, that though the season was approaching its height, yet the number of guests declined and, in particular, that the German tongue had suffered a rout, being scarcely or never heard in the land.  At table and on the beach he caught nothing but foreign words.  One day at the barber's - where he was now a frequent visitor - he heard something rather startling.  The barber mentioned a German family who had just left the Lido after a brief stay, and rattled on in his obsequious way: 'The signore is not leaving - he has no fear of the sickness, has he?'  Aschenbach looked at him.  'The sickness?' he repeated.  Whereat the prattler fell silent, became very busy all at once, affected not to hear.  When Aschenbach persisted he said he really knew nothing at all about it, and tried in a fresh burst of eloquence to drown the embarrassing subject.

      That was one forenoon.  After luncheon Aschenbach had himself ferried across to Venice, in a dead calm, under a burning sun; driven by his mania he was following the Polish young folk, whom he had seen with their companion, taking the way to the landing-stage.  He did not find his idol on the Piazza.  But as he sat there at tea, at a little round table on the shady side, suddenly he noticed a peculiar odour, which, it now seemed to him, had been in the air for days without his being aware: a sweetish, medicinal smell, associated with wounds and disease and suspect cleanliness.  He sniffed and pondered and at length recognized it; finished his tea and left the square at the end facing the cathedral.  In the narrow space the stench grew stronger.  At the street corners placards were stuck up, in which the city authorities warned the population against the danger of certain infections of the gastric system, prevalent during the hot season; advising them not to eat oysters or other shellfish and not to use the canal waters.  The ordinance showed every sign of minimizing an existing situation.  Little groups of people stood about silently in the squares and on the bridges; the traveller moved among them, watched and listened and thought.

      He spoke to a shopkeeper lounging at his door among dangling coral necklaces and trinkets of artificial amethyst, and asked him about the disagreeable odour.  The man looked at him, heavy-eyed, and hastily pulled himself together.  'Just a formal precaution, signore,' he said, with a gesture.  'A police regulation we have to put up with.  The air is sultry - the sirocco is not wholesome, as the signore knows.  Just a precautionary measure, you understand - probably unnecessary....'  Aschenbach thanked him and passed on.  And on the boat that bore him back to the Lido he smelt the germicide again.

      On reaching his hotel he sought the table in the lobby and buried himself in the newspapers.  The foreign-language sheets had nothing.  But in the German papers certain rumours were mentioned, statistics given, then officially denied, then the good faith of the denials called in question.  The departure of the German and Austrian contingent was thus made plain.  As for other nationals, they knew or suspected nothing - they were still undisturbed.  Aschenbach tossed the newspapers back on the table..  'It ought to be kept quiet,' he thought, aroused.  'It should not be talked about.'  And he felt in his heart a curious elation at these events impending in the world about him.  Passion is like crime: it does not thrive on the established order and the common round; it welcomes every blow dealt the bourgeois structure, every weakening of the social fabric, because therein it feels a sure hope of its own advantage.  Those things that were going on in the unclean alleys of Venice, under cover of an official hushing-up policy - they gave Aschenbach a dark satisfaction.  The city's evil secret mingled with the one in the depths of his heart - and he would have staked all he possessed to keep it, since in his infatuation he cared for nothing but to keep Tadzio here, and owned to himself, not without horror, that he could not exist were the lad to pass from his sight.

      He was no longer satisfied to owe his communion with his charmer to chance and the routine of hotel life; he had begun to follow and waylay him.  On Sundays, for example, the Polish family never appeared on the beach.  Aschenbach guessed they went to mass at San Marco and pursued them thither.  He passed from the glare of the Piazza into the golden twilight of the holy place and found him he sought bowed in worship over a prie-dieu.  He kept in the background, standing on the fissured mosaic pavement among the devout populace, that knelt and muttered and made the sign of the cross; and the crowded splendour of the oriental temple weighed voluptuously on his sense.  A heavily ornate priest intoned and gesticulated before the altar, where little candle flames flickered helplessly in the reek of incense-breathing smoke; and with that cloying sacrificial smell another seemed to mingle - the odour of the sickened city.  But through all the glamour and glitter, Aschenbach saw the exquisite creature there in front turn his head, seek out and meet his lover's eyes.

      The crowd streamed out through the portals into the brilliant square thick with fluttering doves, and the fond fool stood aside in the vestibule on the watch.  He saw the Polish family leave the church.  The children took ceremonial leave of their mother, and she turned towards the Piazzetta on her way home, while his charmer and the cloistered sisters, with their governess, passed beneath the clock tower into the Merceria.  When they were a few paces on, he followed - he stole behind them on their walk through the city.  When they paused, he did so too; when they turned round, he fled into inns and courtyards to let them pass.  Once he lost them from view, hunted feverishly over bridges and in filthy cul-de--sacs, only to confront them suddenly in a narrow passage whence there was no escape, and experience a moment of panic fear.  Yet it would be untrue to say he suffered.  Mind and heart were drunk with passion, his footsteps guided by the daemonic power whose pastime it is to trample on human reason and dignity.

      Tadzio and his sisters at length took a gondola.  Aschenbach hid behind a portico or fountain while they embarked and directly they pushed off did the same.  In a furtive whisper he told the boatman he would tip him well to follow at a little distance the other gondola, just rounding a corner, and fairly sickened at the man's quick, sly grasp and ready acceptance of the go-between's role.

      Leaning back among soft, black cushions he swayed gently in the wake of the other black-snouted bark, to which the strength of his passion chained him.  Sometimes it passed from his view, and then he was assailed by an anguish of unrest.  But his guide appeared to have long practice in affairs like these; always, by dint of shortcuts or deft manoeuvres, he contrived to overtake the coveted sight.  The air was heavy and foul, the sun burnt down through a slate-coloured haze.  Water slapped gurgling against wood and stone.  The gondolier's cry, half warning, half salute, was answered with singular accord from far within the silence of the labyrinth.  They passed little gardens high up the crumbling wall, hung with clustering white and purple flowers that sent down an odour of almonds.  Moorish lattices showed shadowy in the gloom.  The marble steps of a church descended into the canal, and on them a beggar squatted, displaying his misery to view, showing the whites of his eyes, holding out his hat for alms.  Farther on a dealer in antiquities cringed before his lair, inviting the passer-by to enter and be duped.  Yes, this was Venice, this the fair frailty that fawned and that betrayed, half fairytale, half snare; the city in whose stagnating air the art of painting once put forth so lusty a growth, and where musicians were moved to accords so weirdly lulling and lascivious.  Our adventurer felt his senses wooed by this voluptuousness of sight and sound, tasted his secret knowledge that the city sickened and his its sickness for love of gain, and bent an ever more unbridled leer on the gondola that glided on before him.

      It came at last to this - that his frenzy left him capacity for nothing else but to pursue his flame; to dream of him absent, to lavish, loverlike, endearing terms on his mere shadow.  He was alone, he was a foreigner, he was sunk deep in this belated bliss of his - all which enabled him to pass unblushing through experiences well-nigh unbelievable.  One night, returning late from Venice, he paused by his beloved's chamber door in the second storey, leaned his head against the panel, and remained there long, in utter drunkenness, powerless to tear himself away, blind to the danger of being caught in so mad an attitude.

      And yet there were not wholly lacking moments when he paused and reflected, when in consternation he asked himself what path was this on which he had set his foot.  Like most other men of parts and attainments, he had an aristocratic interest in his forbears, and when he achieved a success he liked to think he had gratified them, compelled their admiration and regard.  He thought of them now, involved as he was in this illicit adventure, seized of these exotic excesses of feeling; thought of their stern self-command and decent manliness, and gave a melancholy smile.  What would they have said?  What, indeed, would they have said to his entire life, that varied to the point of degeneracy from theirs?  This life in the bonds of art, had not he himself, in the days of his youth and in the very spirit of those bourgeois forefathers, pronounced mocking judgement upon it?  And yet, at bottom, it had been so like their own!  It had been a service, and he a soldier, like some of them; and art was war - a grilling, exhausting struggle that nowadays wore one out before one could grow old.  It had been a life of self-conquest, a life against odds, dour, steadfast, abstinent; he had made it symbolical of the kind of over-strained heroism the time admired, and he was entitled to call it manly, even courageous.  He wondered if such a life might not be somehow specially pleasing in the eyes of the god who had him in his power.  For Eros had received most countenance among the most valiant nations - yes, were we not told that in their cities prowess made him flourish exceedingly?  And many heroes of olden time had willingly borne his yoke, not counting any humiliation such as if it happened by the god's decree; vows, prostrations, self-abasements, these were no source of shame to the lover; rather they reaped him praise and honour.

      Thus did the fond man's folly condition his thoughts; thus did he seek to hold his dignity upright in his own eyes.  And all the while he kept doggedly on the traces of the disreputable secret the city kept hidden at its heart, just as he kept his own - and all that he learned fed his passion with vague, lawless hopes.  He turned over newspapers at cafés, bent on finding a report on the progress of the disease; and in the German sheets, which had ceased to appear on the hotel table, he found a series of contradictory statements.  The deaths, it was variously asserted, ran to twenty, to forty, to a hundred or more; yet in the next day's issue the existence of the pestilence was, if not roundly denied, reported as a matter of a few sporadic cases such as might be brought into a seaport town.  After that the warnings would break out again, and the protests against the unscrupulous game the authorities were playing.  No definite information was to be had.

      And yet our solitary felt he had a sort of first claim on a share in the unwholesome secret; he took a fantastic satisfaction in putting leading questions to such persons as were interested to conceal it, and forcing them to explicit untruths by way of denial.  One day he attacked the manager, that small, soft-stepping man in the French frock-coat, who was moving about among the guests at luncheon, supervising the service and making himself socially agreeable.  He paused at Aschenbach's table to exchange a greeting, and the guest put a question, with a negligent, casual air: 'Why in the world are they forever disinfecting the city of Venice?'  'A police regulation,' the adroit one replied; 'a precautionary measure, intended to protect the health of the public during this unseasonably warm and sultry weather.'  'Very praiseworthy of the police,' Aschenbach gravely responded.  After a further exchange of meteorological commonplaces the manager passed on.

      It happened that a band of street musicians came to perform in the hotel gardens that evening after dinner.  They grouped themselves beneath an iron stanchion supporting an arc-light, two women and two men, and turned their faces, that shone white in the glare, up towards the guests who sat on the hotel terrace enjoying this popular entertainment along with their coffee and iced drinks.  The hotel lift-boys, waiters, and office staff stood in the doorway and listened; the Russian family displayed the usual Russian absorption in their enjoyment - they had their chairs put down into the garden to be nearer the singers and sat there in a half-circle with gratitude painted on their features, the old serf in her turban erect behind their chairs.

      These strolling players were adepts at mandolin, guitar, harmonica, even compassing a reedy violin.  Vocal members alternated with instrumental, the younger woman, who had a high shrill voice, joining in a love-duet with the sweetly falsettoing tenor.  The actual head of the company, however, and incontestably its most gifted member, was the other man, who played the guitar.  He was a sort of baritone buffo; with no voice to speak of, but possessed of a pantomimic gift and remarkable burlesque élan.  Often he stepped out of the group and advanced towards the terrace, guitar in hand, and his audience rewarded his sallies with bursts of laughter.  The Russians in their parterre seats were beside themselves with delight over this display of southern vivacity; their shouts and screams of applause encouraged him to bolder and bolder flights.

      Aschenbach sat near the balustrade, a glass of pomegranate-juice and soda-water sparkling ruby-red before him, with which he now and then moistened his lips.  His nerves drank in thirstily the unlovely sounds, the vulgar and sentimental tunes, for passion paralyses good taste and makes its victim accept with rapture what a man in his senses would either laugh at or turn from with disgust.  Idly he sat and watched the antics of the buffoon with his face set in a fixed and painful smile, while inwardly his whole being was rigid with the intensity of the regard he bent on Tadzio, leaning over the railing six paces off.

      He lounged there, in the white-belted suit he sometimes wore at dinner, in all his innate, inevitable grace, with his left arm on the balustrade, his legs crossed, the right hand on the supporting hip; and looked down on the strolling singers with an expression that was hardly a smile, but rather a distant curiosity and polite toleration.  Now and then he straightened himself and with a charming movement of both arms drew down his white blouse through his leather belt, throwing out his chest.  And sometimes - Aschenbach saw it with triumph, with horror, and a sense that his reason was tottering - the lad would cast a glance, that might be slow and cautious, or might be sudden and swift, as though to take him by surprise, to the place where his lover sat.  Aschenbach did not meet the glance.  An ignoble caution made him keep his eyes in leash.  For in the rear of the terrace sat Tadzio's mother and governess; and matters had gone so far that he feared to make himself conspicuous.  Several times, on the beach, in the hotel lobby, on the Piazza, he had seen, with a stealing numbness, that they called Tadzio away from his neighbourhood.  And his pride revolted at the affront, even while conscience told him it was deserved.

      The performer below presently began a solo, with guitar accompaniment, a street song in several stanzas, just then the rage all over Italy.  He delivered it in a striking and dramatic recitative, and his company joined in the refrain.  He was a man of slight build, with a thin, undernourished face; his shabby felt hat rested on the back of his neck, a great mop of red hair sticking out in front; and he stood there on the gravel in advance of his troupe, in an impudent, swaggering posture, twanging the strings of his instrument and flinging a witty and rollicking recitative up to the terrace, while the veins on his forehead swelled with the violence of his effort.  He was scarcely a Venetian type, belonging rather to the race of Neopolitan jesters, half bully, half comedian, brutal, blustering, an unpleasant customer, and entertaining to the last degree.  The words of his song were trivial and silly, but on his lips, accompanied with gestures of head, hands, arms, and body, with leers and winks and the loose play of the tongue in the corner of his mouth, they took on meaning; an equivocal meaning, yet vaguely offensive.  He wore a white sports shirt with a suit of ordinary clothes, and a strikingly large and naked-looking Adam's apple rose out of the open collar.  From the pale, snub-nosed face it was hard to judge of his age; vice sat on it, it was furrowed with grimacing, and two deep wrinkles of defiance and self-will, almost of desperation, stood oddly between the red brows, above the grinning mobile mouth.  But what more than all drew upon him the profound scrutiny of our solitary watcher was that this suspicious figure seemed to carry with it its own suspicious odour.  For whenever the refrain occurred and the singer, with waving arms and antic gestures, passed in his grotesque march immediately beneath Aschenbach's seat, a strong smell of carbolic was wafted up to the terrace.

      After the song he began to take up money, beginning with the Russian family, who gave liberally, and then mounting the steps to the terrace.  But here he became as cringing as he had before been forward.  He glided between the tables, bowing and scraping, showing his strong white teeth in a servile smile, though the two deep furrows on the brow were still very marked.  His audience looked at the strange creature as he went about collecting his livelihood, and their curiosity was not unmixed with disfavour.  They tossed coins with their fingertips into his hat and took care not to touch it.  Let the enjoyment be never so great, a sort of embarrassment always comes when the comedian oversteps the physical distance between himself and respectable people.  This man felt it and sought to make his peace by fawning.  He came along the railing to Aschenbach, and with him came that smell no-one else seemed to notice.

      'Listen!' said the solitary, in a low voice, almost mechanically; 'they are disinfecting Venice - why?'  The mountebank answered hoarsely: 'Because of the police.  Orders, signore.  On account of the heat and the sirocco.  The sirocco is oppressive.  Not good for the health.'  He spoke as though surprised that anyone could ask, and with the flat of his hand he demonstrated how oppressive the sirocco was.  'So there is no plague in Venice?'  Aschenbach asked the question between his teeth, very low.  The man's expressive face fell, he put on a look of comical innocence.  'A plague?  What sort of plague?  Is the sirocco a plague?  Or perhaps our police are a plague!  You are making fun of us, signore!  A plague!  Why should there be?  The police make regulations on account of the heat and the weather....' He gestured.  'Quite,' said Aschenbach, once more, soft and low; and dropping an unduly large coin into the man's hat dismissed him with a sign.  He bowed very low and left.  But he had not reached the steps when two of the hotel servants flung themselves on him and began to whisper, their faces close to his.  He shrugged, seemed to be giving assurances, to be swearing he had said nothing.  It was not hard to guess the import of his words.  They let him go at last and he went back into the garden, where he conferred briefly with his troupe and then stepped forward for a farewell song.

      It was one Aschenbach had never to his knowledge heard before, a rowdy air, with words in impossible dialect.  It had a laughing-refrain in which the other three artists joined at the top of their lungs.  The refrain had neither words nor accompaniment, it was nothing but rhythmical, modulated, natural laughter, which the soloist in particular knew how to render with most deceptive realism.  Now that he was farther off his audience, his self-assurance had come back, and this laughter of his rang with a mocking note.  He would be overtaken, before he reached the end of the last line of each stanza; he would catch his breath, lay his hand over his mouth, his voice would quaver and his shoulders shake, he would lose power to contain himself longer.  Just as the right moment each time., it came whooping, bawling, crashing out of him, with a verisimilitude that never failed to set his audience off in profuse and unpremeditated mirth that seemed to add gusto to his own.  He bent his knees, he clapped his thigh, he held his sides, he looked ripe for bursting.  He no longer laughed, but yelled, pointing his finger at the company there above as though there could be in all the world nothing so comic as they; until at last they laughed in hotel, terrace, and garden, down to the waiters, lift-boys, and servants - laughed as though possessed.

      Aschenbach could no longer rest in his chair, he sat poised for flight.  But the combined effect of the laughing, the hospital odour in his nostrils, and the nearness of the beloved was to hold him in a spell; he felt unable to stir.  Under cover of the general commotion he looked across at Tadzio and saw that the lovely boy returned his gaze with a seriousness that seemed the copy of his own; the general hilarity, it seemed to say, had no power over him, he kept aloof.  The grey-haired man was overpowered, disarmed by this docile, childlike deference; with difficulty he refrained from hiding his face in his hands.  Tadzio's habit, too, of drawing himself up and taking a deep sighing breath struck him as being due to an oppression of the chest.  'He is sickly, he will never live to grow up,' he thought once again, with that dispassionate vision to which his madness of desire sometimes so strangely gave way.  And compassion struggled with the reckless exultation of his heart.

      The players, meanwhile, had finished and gone; their leader bowing and scraping, kissing his hands and adorning his leave-taking with antics that grew madder with the applause they evoked.  After all the others were outside, he pretended to run backwards full-tilt against a lamppost and slunk to the gate apparently doubled over with pain.  But there he threw off his buffoon's mask, stood erect, with an elastic straightening of his whole figure, ran out his tongue impudently at the guests on the terrace, and vanished in the night.  The company dispersed.  Tadzio had long since left the balustrade.  But he, the lonely man, sat for long, to the waiters' great annoyance, before the dregs of pomegranate-juice in his glass.  Time passed, the night went on.  Long ago, in his parental home, he had watched the sand filter through an hourglass - he could still see, as though it stood before him, the fragile, pregnant little toy.  Soundless and fine the rust-red streamlet ran through the narrow neck and made, as it declined in the upper cavity, an exquisite little vortex.

      The very next afternoon the solitary took another step in pursuit of his fixed policy of baiting the outer world.  This time he had all possible success.  He went, that is, into the English travel bureau in the Piazza, changed some money at the desk and, posing as the suspicious foreigner, put his fateful question.  The clerk was a tweed-clad young Britisher, with his eyes set close together, his hair parted in the middle, and radiating that steady reliability which makes his like so strange a phenomenon in the gamin, agile-witted south.  He began: 'No ground for alarm, sir.  A mere formality.  Quite regular in view of the unhealthy climatic conditions.'  But then, looking up, he chanced to meet with his own blue eyes the stranger's weary, melancholy gaze, fixed on his face.  The Englishman coloured.  He continued in a lower voice, rather confused: 'At least, that is the official explanation, which they see fit to stick to.  I may tell you there's a bit more to it than that.'  And then, in his good straightforward way, he told the truth.

      For the past several years Asiatic cholera had shown a strong tendency to spread.  Its source was the hot, moist swamps of the delta of the Ganges, where it bred in the mephitic air of that primeval island-jungle, among whose bamboo thickets the tiger crouches, where life of every sort flourishes in rankest abundance, and only man avoids the spot.  Thence the pestilence had spread throughout Hindustan, ranging with great violence; moved eastwards to China, westward to Afghanistan and Persia [Iran]; following the great caravan routes, it brought terror to Astrakhan, terror to Moscow.  Even while Europe trembled lest the spectre be seen striding westward across country, it was carried by sea from Syrian ports and appeared simultaneously at several points on the Mediterranean littoral; raised its head in Toulon and Malaga, Palermo and Naples, and soon got a firm hold in Calabria and Apulia.  Northern Italy had been spared - so far.  But in May the horrible vibrios were found on the same day in two bodies: the emaciated, blackened corpses of a bargee and a woman who kept a greengrocer's shop.  Both cases were hushed up.  But in a week there were ten more - twenty, thirty in different quarters of the town.  An Austrian provincial, having come to Venice on a few days' pleasure trip, went home and died with all the symptoms of the plague.  Thus was explained the fact that the German-language papers were the first to print the news of the Venetian outbreak.  The Venetian authorities published in reply a statement to the effect that the state of the city's health had never been better; at the same time instituting the most necessary precautions.  But by that time the food supplies - milk, meat, or vegetables - had probably been contaminated, for death unseen and unacknowledged was devouring and laying waste in the narrow streets, while a brooding, unseasonable heat warmed the waters of the canals and encouraged the spread of the pestilence.  Yes, the disease seemed to flourish and wax strong, to redouble its generative powers.  Recoveries were rare.  Eighty out of a hundred died, and horribly, for the onslaught was of the extremest violence, and not infrequently of the 'dry' type, the most malignant form of the contagion.  In this form the victim's body loses power to expel the water secreted by the blood-vessels, it shrivels up, he passes with hoarse cries from convulsion to convulsion, his blood grows thick like pitch and he suffocates in a few hours.  He is fortunate indeed if, as sometimes happens, the disease, after a slight malaise, takes the form of a profound unconsciousness, from which the sufferer seldom or never rouses.  By the beginning of June the quarantine buildings of the ospedale civico had quietly filled up, the two orphan asylums were entirely occupied, and there was a hideously brisk traffic between the Nuovo Fundamento and the island of San Michele, where the cemetery was.  But the city was not swayed by high-minded motives or regard for international agreements.  The authorities were more actuated by fear of being out of pocket, by regard for the new exhibition of paintings just opened in the Public Gardens, or by apprehension of the large losses the hotels and the shops that catered to foreigners would suffer in case of panic and blockade.  And the fears of the people supported the persistent official policy of silence and denial.  The city's first medical officer, an honest and competent man, had indignantly resigned his office and been privily replaced by a more compliant person.  The fact was known; and this corruption in high places played its part, together with the suspense as to where the walking terror might strike next, to demoralize the baser elements in the city and encourage those antisocial forces which shun the light of day.  There was intemperance, indecency, increase of crime.  Evenings one saw many drunken people, which was unusual.  Gangs of men in surly mood made the streets unsafe, theft and assault were said to be frequent, even murder; for in two cases persons supposedly victims of the plague were proved to have been poisoned by their own families.  And professional vice was rampant, displaying excesses heretofore unknown and only at home much farther south and in the east.

      Such was the substance of the Englishman's tale.  'You would do well,' he concluded, 'to leave today instead of tomorrow.  The blockade cannot be more than a few days off.'

      'Thank you,' said Aschenbach, and left the office.

      The Piazza lay in sweltering sunshine.  Innocent foreigners sat before the cafés or stood in front of the cathedral, the centre of clouds of doves that, with fluttering wings, tried to shoulder each other away and pick the kernels of maize from the extended hand.  Aschenbach strode up and down the spacious flags, feverishly excited, triumphant in possession of the truth at last, but with a sickening taste in his mouth and a fantastic horror at his heart.  One decent, expiatory course lay open to him; he considered it.  Tonight, after dinner, he might approach the lady of the pearls and address her in words which he precisely formulated in his mind: 'Madame, will you permit an entire stranger to serve you with a word of advice and warning which self-interest prevents others from uttering?  Go away.  Leave here at once, without delay, with Tadzio and your daughters.  Venice is in the grip of pestilence.'  Then might he lay his hand in farewell upon the head of that instrument of a mocking deity; and thereafter himself flee the accursed morass.  But he knew that he was far indeed from any serious desire to take such a step.  It would restore him, would give him back himself once more; but he who is beside himself revolts at the idea of self-possession.  There crossed his mind the vision of a white building with inscriptions on it, glittering in the sinking sun - he recalled how his mind had dreamed away into their transparent mysticism; recalled the strange pilgrim apparition that had wakened in the ageing man a lust for strange countries and fresh sights.  And these memories again brought in their train the thought of returning home, returning to reason, self-mastery, an ordered existence, to the old life of effort.  Alas! the bare thought made him wince with a revulsion that was like physical nausea.  'It must be kept quiet,' he whispered fiercely.  'I will not speak!'  The knowledge that he shared the city's secret, the city's guilt - it put him beside himself, intoxicated him as a small quantity of wine will a man suffering from brain-fag.  His thoughts dwelt upon the image of the desolate and calamitous city, and he was giddy with fugitive, mad, unreasoning hopes and visions of a monstrous sweetness.  That tender sentiment he had a moment ago evoked, what was it compared with such images as these?  His art, his moral sense, what were they in the balance beside the boons that chaos might confer?  He kept silence, he stopped on.

      That night he had a fearful dream - if dream be the right word for a mental and physical experience which did indeed befall him in deep sleep, as a thing quite apart and real to his senses, yet without his seeing himself as present in it.  Rather its theatre seemed to be his own soul, and the events burst in from outside, violently overcoming the profound resistance of his spirit; passed him through and left him, left the whole cultural structure of a life-time trampled on, ravaged, and destroyed.

      The beginning was fear; fear and desire, with a shuddering curiosity.  Night reigned, and his senses were on the alert; he heard loud, confused noises from far away, clamour and hubbub.  There was a rattling, a crashing, a low dull thunder; shrill halloos and a kind of howl with a long-drawn u--sound at the end.  And with all these, dominating them all, flute-notes of the cruellest sweetness, deep and cooing, keeping shamelessly on until the listener felt his very entrails bewitched.  He heard a voice, naming, though darkly, that which was to come: 'The stranger god!'  A glow lighted up the surrounding mist and by it he recognized a mountain scene like that about his country home.  From the wooded heights, from among the tree-trunks and crumbling moss-covered rocks, a troop came tumbling and raging down, a whirling rout of men and animals, and overflowed the hillside with flames and human forms, with clamour and the reeling dance.  The females stumbled over the long, hairy pelts that dangled from their girdles; with heads flung back they uttered loud hoarse cries and shook their tambourines high in air; brandished naked daggers or torches vomiting trails of sparks.  They shrieked, holding their breasts in both hands; coiling snakes with quivering tongues they clutched about their waists.  Horned and hairy males, girt about the loins with hides, dropped heads and lifted arms and thighs in unison, as they beat on brazen vessels that gave out droning thunder, or thumped madly on drums.  There were troops of beardless youths armed with garlanded staves; these ran after goats and thrust their staves against the creatures' flanks, then clung to the plunging horns and let themselves be borne off with triumphant shouts.  And one and all the mad rout yelled that cry, composed of soft consonants with a long-drawn u--sound at the end, so sweet and wild it was together, and like nothing ever heard before!  It would ring through the air like the bellow of a challenging stag, and be given back many-tongued; or they would use it to goad each other on to dance with wild excess of tossing limbs - they never let it die.  But the deep, beguiling notes of the flute wove in and out and over all.  Beguiling, too, it was to him who struggled in the grip of these sights and sounds, shamelessly awaiting the coming feast and the uttermost surrender.  He trembled, he shrank, his will was steadfast to preserve and uphold his own god against this stranger who was sworn enemy to dignity and self-control.  But the mountain wall took up the noise and howling and gave it back manifold; it rose high, swelled to a madness that carried him away.  His senses reeled in the steam of panting bodies, the acrid stench from the goats, the odour as of stagnant waters - and another, too familiar smell - of wounds, uncleanliness, and disease.  His heart throbbed to the drums, his brain reeled, a blind rage seized him, a whirling lust, he craved with all his soul to join the ring that formed about the obscene symbol of the godhead, which they were unveiling and elevating, monstrous and wooden, while from full throats they yelled their rallying-cry.  Foam dipped from their lips, they drove each other on with lewd gesturings and beckoning hands.  They laughed, their howled, they thrust their pointed staves into each other's flesh and licked the blood as it ran down.  But now the dreamer was in them and of them, the stranger god was his own.  Yes, it was he who was flinging himself upon the animals, who bit and tore and swallowed smoking goblets of flesh - while on the trampled moss there now began the rites in honour of the god, an orgy of promiscuous embraces - and in his very soul he tasted the bestial degradation of his fall.

      The unhappy man woke from this dream shattered, unhinged, powerless in the demon's grip.  He no longer avoided men's eyes now cared whether he exposed himself to suspicion.  And anyhow, people were leaving; many of the bathing-cabins stood empty, there were many vacant places in the dining-room, scarcely any foreigners were seen in the streets.  The truth seemed to have leaked out; despite all efforts to the contrary, panic was in the air.  But the lady of the pearls stopped on with her family; whether because the rumours had not reached her or because she was too proud and fearless to heed them.  Tadzio remained; and it seemed at times to Aschenbach, in his obsessed state, that death and fear together might clear the island of all other souls and leave him there alone with him he coveted.  In the long mornings on the beach his heavy gaze would rest, a fixed and reckless stare, upon the lad; towards nightfall, lost to shame, he would follow him through the city's narrow streets where horrid death stalked too, and at such time it seemed to him as though the moral law were fallen in ruins and only the monstrous and perverse held out a hope.

      Like any lover, he desired to please; suffered agonies at the thought of failure, and brightened his dress with smart ties and handkerchiefs and other youthful touches.  He added jewellery and perfumes and spent hours each day over his toilette, appearing at dinner elaborately arrayed and tensely excited.  The presence of the youthful beauty that had bewitched him filled him with disgust of his own ageing body; the sight of his own sharp features and grey hair plunged him in hopeless mortification; he made desperate efforts to recover the appearance and freshness of his youth and began paying frequent visits to the hotel barber.  Enveloped in the white sheet, beneath the hands of that garrulous personage, he would lean back in the chair and look at himself in the glass with misgiving.

      'Grey,' he said, with a grimace.

      'Slightly,' answered the man.  'Entirely due to neglect, to a lack of regard for appearances.  Very natural, of course, in men of affairs, but, after all, not very sensible, for it is just such people who ought to be above vulgar prejudice in matters like these.  Some folk have very struck ideas about the use of cosmetics; but they never extend them to the teeth, as they logically should.  And very disgusted other people would be if they did.  No, we are all as old as we feel, but no older, and grey hair can misrepresent a man worse than dyed.  You, for instance, signore, have a right to your natural colour.  Surely you will permit me to restore what belongs to you?'

      'How?' asked Aschenbach.

      For answer the oily one washed his client's hair in two waters, one clear and one dark, and lo, it was as black as in the days of his youth.  He waved it with the tongues in wide, flat undulations, and stepped back to admire the effect.

      'Now if we were just to freshen up the skin a little,' he said.

      And with that he went on from one thing to another, his enthusiasm waxing with each new idea.  Aschenbach sat there comfortably; he was incapable of objecting to the process - rather as it went forward it roused his hopes.  He watched it in the mirror and saw his eyebrows grow more even and arching, the eyes gain in size and brilliance, by dint of a little application below the lids.  A delicate carmine glowed on his cheeks where the skin had been so brown and leathery.  The dry, anaemic lips grew full, they turned the colour of ripe strawberries, the lines round eyes and mouth were treated with a facial cream and gave place to youthful bloom.  It was a young man who looked back at him from the glass - Aschenbach's heart leaped at the sight.  The artist in cosmetics at last professed himself satisfied; after the manner of such people, he thanked his client profusely for what he had done himself.  'The merest trifle, the merest, signore,' he said as he added the final touches.  'Now the signore can fall in love as soon as he likes.'  Aschenbach went off as in a dream, dazed between joy and fear, in his red necktie and broad straw hat with its gay striped band.

      A lukewarm storm-wind had come up.  It rained a little now and then, the air was heavy and turbid and smelt of decay.  Aschenbach, with fevered cheeks beneath the rouge, seemed to hear rushing and flapping sounds in his ears, as though storm-spirits were abroad - unhallowed ocean harpies who follow those devoted to destruction, snatch away and defile their viands.  For the heat took away his appetite and thus he was haunted with the idea that his food was infected.

      One afternoon he pursued his charmer deep into the stricken city's huddled heart.  The labyrinthine little streets, squares, canals, and bridges, each one so like the next, at length quite made him lose his bearings.  He did not even know the points of the compass; all his care was not to lose sight of the figure after which his eyes thirsted.  He slunk under walls, he lurked behind buildings or people's backs; and the sustained tension of his senses and emotions exhausted him more and more, though for a long time he was unconscious of fatigue.  Tadzio walked behind the others, he let them pass ahead in the narrow alleys, and as he sauntered slowly after, he would turn his head and assure himself with a glance of his strange, twilit grey eyes that his lover was still following.  He saw him - and he did not betray him.  The knowledge enraptured Aschenbach.  Lured by those eyes, led on the leading-string of his own passion and folly, utterly lovesick, he stole upon the footsteps of his unseemly hope - and at the end found himself cheated.  The Polish family crossed a small vaulted bridge, the height of whose archway hid them from his sight, and when he climbed it himself they were nowhere to be seen.  He hunted in three directions - straight ahead and on both sides of the narrow, dirty quay - in vain.  Worn quite out and unnerved, he had to give over the search.

      His head burned, his body was wet with clammy sweat, he was plagued by intolerable thirst.  He looked about for refreshment, of whatever sort, and found a little fruit-shop where he bought some strawberries.  They were overripe and soft; he ate them as he went.  The street he was on opened out into a little square, one of those charmed, forsaken spots he liked; he recognized it as the very one where he had sat weeks ago and conceived his abortive plan of flight.  He sank down on the steps of the well and leaned his head against its stone rim.  It was quiet here.  Grass grew between the stones and rubbish lay about.  Tall, weather-beaten houses bordered the square, one of them rather palatial, with vaulted windows, gaping now, and little lion balconies.  In the ground floor of another was an apothecary's shop.  A waft of carbolic acid was borne on a warm gust of wind.

      There he sat, the master: this was he who had found a way to reconcile art and honours; who had written The Abject, and in a style of classic purity renounced bohemianism and all its works, all sympathy with the abyss and the troubled depths of the outcast human soul.  This was he who had put knowledge underfoot to climb so high; who had outgrown the ironic pose and adjusted himself to the burdens and obligations of fame; whose renown had been officially recognized and his name ennobled, whose style was set for a model in the schools.  There he sat.  His eyelids were closed, there was only a swift, sidelong glint of the eyeballs now and again, something between a question and a leer; while the rouged and flabby mouth uttered single words of the sentences shaped in his disordered brain by the fantastic logic that governs our dreams.

      'For mark you, Phaedrus, beauty alone is both divine and visible; and so it is the sense's way, the artist's way, little Phaedrus, to the spirit.  But, now tell me, my dear boy, do you believe that such a man can ever attain wisdom and true manly worth, for whom the path to the spirit must lead through the senses?  Or do you rather think - for I leave the point to you - that it is a path of perilous sweetness, a way of transgression, and must surely lead him who walks in it astray?  For you know that we poets cannot walk the way of beauty without Eros as our companion and guide.  We may be heroic after our fashion, disciplined warriors after our craft, yet we are all like women, for we exult in passion, and love is still our desire - our craving and our shame.  And from this you will perceive that we poets can be neither wise nor worthy citizens.  We must needs be wanton, must needs rove at large in the realm of feeling.  Our magisterial style is all folly and pretence, our honourable repute a farce, the crowd's belief in us is merely laughable.  And to teach youth, or the populace, by means of art is a dangerous practice and ought to be forbidden.  For what good can an artist be as a teacher, when from his birth up he is headed direct for the pit?  We may want to shun it and attain to honour in the world; but however we turn, it draws us still.  So, then, since knowledge might destroy us, we will have none of it.  For knowledge, Phaedrus, does not make him who possesses it dignified or austere.  Knowledge is all-knowing, understanding, forgiving; it takes up no position, sets no store by form.  It has compassion with the abyss - it is the abyss.  So we reject it, firmly, and henceforward our concern shall be with beauty only.  And by beauty we mean simplicity, largeness, and renewed severity of discipline; we mean a return to detachment and to form.  But detachment, Phaedrus, and preoccupation with form lead to intoxication and desire, they may lead the noblest among us to frightful emotional excesses, which his own stern cult of the beautiful would make him the first to condemn.  So they too, they too, lead to the bottomless pit.  Yes, they lead us thither, I say, us who are poets - who by our natures are prone not to excellence but to excess.  And now, Phaedrus, I will go.  Remain here; and only when you can no longer see me, then do you depart also.'

      A few days later, Gustave Aschenbach left his hotel rather later than usual in the morning.  He was not feeling well and had to struggle against spells of giddiness only half physical in their nature, accompanied by a swiftly mounting dread, a sense of futility and hopelessness - but whether this referred to himself or to the other world he could not tell.  In the lobby he saw a quantity of luggage lying strapped and ready; asked the porter whose it was, and received in answer the name he already knew he should hear - that of the Polish family.  The expression of his ravaged features did not change; he only gave that quick lift of the head with which we sometimes receive the uninteresting answer to a casual query.  But he put another: 'When?'  'After luncheon,' the man replied.  He nodded, and went down to the beach.

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

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

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

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

 

            1911

 

 

 

The Politics of Sexuality PREVIEW