“Yes, and you were always the one that got into mischief,” Julie said, joining in her laugh. They went across the beach on a foot-bridge made of a few boards, and reached the bathhouse. As they passed the boulders where Morten Schwarzkopf sat, Tony nodded to him from a distance, and somebody asked, “who is that you are bowing to, Tony?”
“That was young Schwarzkopf,” Tony answered. “He walked down here with me.”
“The son of the pilot-captain?” Julchen asked, and peered across at Morten with her staring black eyes. He on his side watched the gay troop with rather a melancholy air. Tony said in a loud voice: “What a pity August is not here. It must be stupid on the beach.”
CHAPTER VIII
And now began for Tony Buddenbrook a stretch of beautiful summer weeks, briefer, lovelier, than any she had ever spent in Travemünde. She bloomed as she felt her burden no longer upon her; her gay, pert, careless manner had come back. The Consul looked at her with satisfaction when he came on Sundays with Tom and Christian. On those days they ate at the table-d’hôte, sat under the awnings at the pastry-cook’s, drinking coffee and listening to the band, and peeped into the roulette-room at the gay folk there, like Justus Kröger and Peter Döhlmann. The Consul himself never played. Tony sunned herself, took baths, ate sausages with ginger-nut sauce, and took long walks with Morten. They went out on the high-road to the next village, or along the beach to the “ocean temple” on its height, whence a wide view was to be had over land and sea; or to the woods behind the Kurhouse, where was a great bell used to call the guests to the table-d’hôte. Sometimes they rowed across the Trave to the Prival, to look for amber.
Morten made an entertaining companion, though his opinions were often dogmatic, not to say heated. He had a severe and righteous judgment for everything, and he expressed it with finality, blushing all the time. It saddened Tony to hear him call the nobility idiots and wretches and to see the contemptuous if awkward gesture that accompanied the words. She scolded him, but she was proud to have him express so freely in her presence the views and opinions which she knew he concealed from his parents. Once he confided in her: “I’ll tell you something: I’ve a skeleton in my room at Göttingen—a whole set of bones, you know, held together by wire. I’ve put an old policeman’s uniform on it. Ha, ha! Isn’t that great? But don’t say anything to my Father about it.”
Tony was naturally often in the society of her town friends, or drawn into some assembly or boating party. Then Morten “sat on the rocks.” And after their first day this phrase became a convenient one. To “sit on the rocks” meant to feel bored and lonely. When a rainy day came and a grey mist covered the sea far and wide till it was one with the deep sky; when the beach was drenched and the roads streaming with wet, Tony would say: “To-day we shall both have to sit on the rocks—that is, in the verandah or sitting-room. There is nothing left to do but for you to play me some of your student songs, Morten—even if they do bore me horribly.”
“Yes,” Morten said, “come and sit down. But you know that when you are here, there are no rocks!” He never said such things when his father was present. His mother he did not mind.
“Well, what now?” asked the pilot-captain, as Tony and Morten both rose from table and were about to take their leave. “Where are the young folk off to?”
“I was going to take a little walk with Fräulein Antonie, as far as the temple.”