They all sat down, and the Consul and the broker talked by turns for

the next few minutes. Herr Gosch’s voice was offensively obsequious as

he begged them to pardon the intrusion on their privacy--you could hear

a malign undercurrent in it none the less--but Herr Consul Hagenström

was anxious to go through the house with a view to possible purchase.

And the Consul, in a voice that again called up visions of lemon-bun

and goose-liver, said the same thing in different words. Yes, in

fact, this was the idea he had in mind and hoped to be able to carry

out--provided the broker did not try to drive too hard a bargain with

him, ha, ha! He did not doubt but the matter could be settled to the

satisfaction of everybody concerned.

His manner was free and easy and like a man of the world’s, which did

not fail to make a certain impression on Madame Permaneder; the more so

that he nearly always turned to her as he spoke. His tone was almost

apologetic when he went into detail upon the grounds for his desire

to purchase. “Room!” he said. “We need more room. My house in Sand

Street--you wouldn’t believe it, my dear madam, nor you, Herr Senator,

but in fact, it is getting so small we can’t turn round in it. I’m not

speaking of company. It only takes the family, and the Huneus, and the

Möllendorpfs and my brother Moritz’s family, and there we are--in fact,

packed in like sardines. So, then--well, why should we, you know!”

He spoke in an almost fretful tone, while manner and gestures

expressed: “You see for yourselves, there’s no reason why I should put

up with that sort of thing, when there is plenty of money to do what we

like!”

“I thought of waiting,” he went on, “till Zerline and Bob should want a

house. Then they could take mine, and I could find something larger for

myself. But in fact--you know,” he interrupted himself, “my daughter

Zerline has been engaged to Bob, my brother the attorney’s eldest, for

years. The wedding won’t be put off much longer--two years at most.

They are young--so much the better. Well--in fact--why should I wait

for them and let slip a good chance when it offers? There would be no

sense in that.”

Everybody agreed. The conversation paused for a while on the subject

of the approaching wedding. Marriages--advantageous marriages--between

first cousins were not uncommon in the town, and this one excited no

disapproval. The plans of the young pair were inquired into--with

reference to the wedding journey. They thought of going to the Riviera,

to Nice and so on. That was what they seemed to want to do--and why

shouldn’t they, you know? The younger children were mentioned, and the

Consul spoke of them with easy satisfaction, shrugging his shoulders.

He himself had five children, and his brother Moritz had four sons and

daughters. Yes, they were all flourishing, thanks. Why shouldn’t they

be,--you know? In fact, they were all very well. And he came back to

the growing up of the family, and to their narrow quarters. “Yes, this

is something else entirely,” he said. “I’ve seen that already, on the

way upstairs. This house is a pearl, certainly a pearl--if you can

compare anything so large with anything so small, ha, ha! Why, even the

hangings here--I own up to having had my eye on the hangings all the

time I’ve been talking. A most charming room--in fact. When I think

that you have passed all your life in these surroundings--in fact--”

“With some interruptions,” said Frau Permaneder, in that

extraordinarily throaty voice of which she sometimes availed herself.

“Oh, yes, interruptions,” repeated the Consul, with a civil smile.

Then he glanced at Senator Buddenbrook and the broker; and, as those

gentlemen were in conversation together, he drew up his chair to Frau

Permaneder’s sofa and leaned toward her, so that she felt his heavy

breathing close under her nose. Being too polite to turn away, she

sat as stiff and erect as possible and looked down at him under her

drooping lids. But he was quite unconscious of her discomfort.

“Let me see, my dear Madame Permaneder,” he said. “Seems to me we’ve

done business together before now. In fact--what was it we were

dickering over then? Sweetmeats, wasn’t it, or tit-bits of some

sort--and now a whole house!”

“I don’t remember,” said Frau Permaneder. She held her neck as stiff as

she could, for his face was really disgustingly, indecently near.

“You don’t remember?”

“No, really, I don’t remember anything at all about sweetmeats. I have

a sort of hazy recollection of lemon-buns, with sausage on top--some

disgusting sort of school luncheon--I don’t know whether it was yours

or mine. We were all children then.--But this matter of the house is

entirely Herr Gosch’s affair. I have nothing to do with it.”

She gave her brother a quick, grateful look, for he had seen her need

and come to her rescue by asking if the gentlemen were ready to make

the round of the house. They were quite ready, and took temporary

leave of Frau Permaneder, expressing the hope of seeing her again when

they had finished. The Senator led the two gentlemen out through the

dining-room.

He took them upstairs and down, and showed them the rooms in the second

storey as well as those on the corridor of the first, and the ground

floor, including the kitchen and cellars. As the visit fell in business

hours, they refrained from visiting the offices of the Insurance

Company. But the new Director was mentioned, and Consul Hagenström

declared him to be a very honest chap--a remark which was received by

the Senator in silence.

They went through the garden, lying bare and wretched under

half-melting snow, looked at the Portal, and returned to the laundry,

in the front courtyard; and thence by the narrow paved walk that

led between walls to the back courtyard with the oak-tree, and the

“back-building.” Here there was nothing but old age, neglect, and

dilapidation. Grass and moss grew between the paving-stones, the steps

were in a state of advanced decay, and they could only look into the

billiard-room without entering,--the floor was so bad--so the family of

cats that lived there rent-free was not disturbed.

Consul Hagenström said very little--he was obviously planning. “Well,

yes,” he kept saying, as he looked and turned away, suggesting by his

manner that in case he bought the house all this would of course be

different. He stood, with the same air, on the ground floor of the back

building and looked up at the empty attic. “Yes, well,” he repeated,

and set in motion the thick, rotting cable with a rusty iron hook on

the end that had been hanging there for years. Then he turned on his

heel.

“Best thanks for your trouble, Herr Senator,” he said. “We’re at the

end, I suppose.” He scarcely uttered a word on the rapid return to the

front building, or later when the two gentlemen paid their respects to

Frau Permaneder in the landscape-room and the Senator accompanied them

down the steps and across the entry. But hardly had they said good-bye

and Consul Hagenström turned with his companion to walk down the

street, when it was seen that a very lively conversation began at once

between the two.

The Senator returned to the room where Frau Permaneder, with her

severest manner, sat bolt upright in the window, knitting with two huge

wooden needles a black worsted frock for her granddaughter Elisabeth,

and now and then casting a glance into the gossip’s glass. Thomas

walked up and down a while in silence, with his hands in his trousers

pockets.

“Yes, we have put it in the broker’s hands,” he said at length. “We

must wait and see what comes of it. My opinion is that he will buy the

whole property, live here in the front, and utilize the back part in

some other way.”

She did not look at him, or change her position, or cease to knit. On

the contrary, the needles flew back and forth faster than ever.

“Oh, certainly--of course he’ll buy it. He’ll buy the whole thing,”

she said, and it was her throaty voice she used. “Why shouldn’t he buy

it--you know? In fact, there would be no sense in that at all!”

She raised her eyebrows and looked severely through her

pince-nez--which she now used for sewing, but never managed to put on

straight--at her knitting-needles. They flew like lightning round and

round each other, clacking all the while.

* * * * *

Christmas came: the first Christmas without the Frau Consul. They spent

the evening of the twenty-fourth at the Senator’s house, without the

old Krögers and without the Misses Buddenbrook; for the old children’s

day had now ceased to exist, and Thomas Buddenbrook did not feel like

making presents to everybody who used to attend the Frau Consul’s

celebration. Only Frau Permaneder and Erica, with little Elisabeth,

Christian, Clothilde, and Mademoiselle Weichbrodt, were invited.

The latter insisted on holding the customary present-giving on the

twenty-fifth, in her own stuffy little rooms, where it was attended

with the usual mishap.

There was no troop of poor retainers to receive shoes and woollen

underwear, and there were no choir-boys, when they assembled in

Fishers’ Lane on the twenty-fourth. They joined quite simply together

in “Holy Night,” and Therese Weichbrodt read the Christmas chapter

instead of the Frau Senator, who did not particularly care for such

things. Then they went through the suite of rooms into the hall,

singing in a subdued way the first stanza of “O Evergreen.”

There was no special ground for rejoicing. Nobody’s face was beaming

with joy, there was no lively conversation. What was there to talk

about? They thought of the departed mother, discussed the sale of the

house and the well-lighted apartment which Frau Permaneder had rented

in a pleasant house outside Holsten Gate, with a view on the green

square of Linden Place, and what would happen when Hugo Weinschenk came

out of prison. At intervals little Johann played on the piano something

which he had been learning with Herr Pfühl, or accompanied his mother,

not faultlessly, but with a lovely singing tone, in a Mozart sonata. He

was praised and kissed, but had to be taken off to bed by Ida Jungmann,

for he was pale and tired on account of a recent stomach upset.

Even Christian was disinclined to talk or joke. After the violent

altercation in the breakfast-room he had not let fall another syllable

about getting married. He lived on in the old way, on terms with his

brother which were not very honourable to himself. He made a brief

effort, rolling his eyes about, to awaken sympathy in the company

for the misery in his side; went early to the club; and came back to

supper, which was held after the prescribed traditions. And then the

Buddenbrooks had this Christmas too behind them, and were glad of it.

In the beginning of the year 1872, the household of the deceased Frau

Consul was broken up. The servants went, and Frau Permaneder thanked

God to see the last of Mamsell Severin, who had continued to question

her authority in the most unpleasant manner, and now departed with the

silk gowns and linen which she had accumulated. Furniture wagons stood

before the door, and the old house was emptied of its contents. The

great carved chest, the gilt candelabra, and the other things that had

fallen to his share, the Senator took to his house in Fishers’ Lane;

Christian moved with his into a three-room bachelor apartment near the

club; and the little Permaneder-Weinschenk family took possession with

theirs of the well-lighted flat in Linden Place, which was after all

not without some claims to elegance. It was a pretty little apartment,

and the front door of it had a bright copper plate with the name A.

Permaneder-Buddenbrook, Widow, in ornamental lettering.

The house in Meng Street was hardly emptied when a host of workmen

appeared and began to tear down the back-building; the dust from the

old mortar darkened the air. The property had passed into the hands

of Consul Hermann Hagenström. He had set his heart upon it, and had

outbid an offer which Sigmund Gosch received for it from Bremen. He

immediately began to turn it to the best advantage, in the ingenious

way for which he had been so long admired. In the spring he moved

with his family into the front house, where he left everything almost

untouched, save for the necessary renovations and certain very modern

improvements. For instance, he had the old bell-pulls taken out and

the house fitted throughout with electric bells. And hardly had the

back-building been demolished when a new, neat, and airy structure rose

in its place, which fronted on Bakers’ Alley and was intended for shops

and warehouses.

Frau Permaneder had frequently sworn to her brother that no power on

earth could bring her ever to look at the parental home again. But

it was hardly possible to carry out this threat. Her way sometimes

led her of necessity past the shops which had been quickly and

advantageously rented, and past the show-windows of the back-building,

or the dignified gable front on the other side, where now, beneath

the “Dominus Providebit,” was to be read the name of Consul Hermann

Hagenström. When she saw that, Frau Permaneder, on the open street,

before ever so many people, simply began to weep aloud. She put back

her head like a bird beginning to sing, pressed her handkerchief to her

eyes, uttered a wail of mingled protest and lament, and, giving no

heed to the passers-by or to the remonstrances of her daughter, gave

her tears free vent.

They were the unashamed, refreshing tears of her childhood, which she

still retained despite all the storms and shipwrecks of her life.

PART TEN

CHAPTER I

Often, in an hour of depression, Thomas Buddenbrook asked himself what

he was, or what there was about him to make him think even a little

better of himself than he did of his honest, limited, provincial

fellow-burghers. The imaginative grasp, the brave idealism of his youth

was gone. To work at his play, to play at his work, to bend an ambition

that was half-earnest, half-whimsical, toward the accomplishment of

aims that even to himself possessed but a symbolic value--for such

blithe scepticism and such an enlightened spirit of compromise, a great

deal of vitality is necessary, as well as a sense of humour. And Thomas

Buddenbrook felt inexpressibly weary and disgusted.

What there was in life for him to reach, he had reached. He was well

aware that the high-water mark of his life--if that were a possible way

to speak of such a commonplace, humdrum sort of existence--had long

since passed.

As for money matters, his estate was much reduced and the business,

in general, on the decline. Counting his mother’s inheritance and his

share of the Meng Street property, he was still worth more than six

hundred thousand marks. But the working capital of the firm had lain

fallow for years, under the pennywise policies of which the Senator

had complained at the time of the affair of the Pöppenrade harvest.

Since the blow he had then received, they had grown worse instead

of better; until now, at a time when prospects were brighter than

ever--when everybody was flushed with victory, the city had at last

joined the Customs Union, and small retail firms all over the country

were growing within a few years into large wholesale ones--the firm of

Johann Buddenbrook rested on its oars and reaped no advantage from

the favourable time. If the head of the firm were asked after his

business, he would answer, with a deprecating wave of the hand, “Oh,

it’s not much good, these days.” As a lively rival, a close friend of

the Hagenströms, once put it, Thomas Buddenbrook’s function on ’Change

was now largely decorative! The jest had for its point a jeer at the

Senator’s carefully preserved and faultless exterior--and it was

received as a masterpiece of wit by his fellow-citizens.

Thus the Senator’s services to the old firm were no longer what they

had been in the time of his strength and enthusiasm; while his labours

for the good of the community had at the same time reached a point

where they were circumscribed by limitations from without. When he

was elected to the Senate, in fact, he had reached those limitations.

There were thereafter only places to keep, offices to hold, but nothing

further that he could achieve: nothing but the present, the narrow

reality; never any grandiose plans to be carried out in the future. He

had, indeed, known how to make his position and his power mean more

than others had made them mean in his place: even his enemies did

not deny that he was “the Burgomaster’s right hand.” But Burgomaster

himself Thomas Buddenbrook could never become. He was a merchant,

not a professional man; he had not taken the classical course at the

gymnasium, he was not a lawyer. He had always done a great deal of

historical and literary reading in his spare time, and he was conscious

of being superior to his circle in mind and understanding, in inward

as well as outward culture; so he did not waste much time in lamenting

the lack of external qualifications which made it impossible for him

to succeed to the first place in his little community. “How foolish we

were,” he said to Stephan Kistenmaker--but he really only meant himself

by “we”--“that we went into the office so young, and did not finish our

schooling instead.” And Stephan Kistenmaker answered: “You’re right

there. But how do you mean?”

The Senator now chiefly worked alone at the great mahogany writing-desk

in his private office. No one could see him there when he leaned his

head on his hand and brooded, with his eyes closed. But he preferred

it, also, because the hair-splitting pedantries of Herr Marcus had

become unendurable to him. The way the man for ever straightened his

writing-materials and stroked his beard would in itself have driven

Thomas Buddenbrook from his seat in the counting-room. The fussiness of

the old man had increased with the years to a positive mania; but what

made it intolerable to the Senator was the fact that of late he had

begun to notice something of the same sort in himself. He, who had once

so hated all smallness and pettiness, was developing a pedantry which

seemed to him the outgrowth of anybody else’s character rather than his

own.

He was empty within. There was no stimulus, no absorbing task into

which he could throw himself. But his nervous activity, his inability

to be quiet, which was something entirely different from his father’s

natural and permanent fondness for work, had not lessened, but

increased--it had indeed taken the upper hand and become his master.

It was something artificial, a pressure on the nerves, a depressant,

in fact, like the pungent little Russian cigarettes which he was

perpetually smoking. This craving for activity had become a martyrdom;

but it was dissipated in a host of trivialities. He was harassed by a

thousand trifles, most of which had actually to do with the upkeep of

his house and his wardrobe; small matters which he could not keep in

his head, over which he procrastinated out of disgust, and upon which

he spent an utterly disproportionate amount of time and thought.

What outsiders called his vanity had lately increased in a way of

which he was himself ashamed, though he was without the power to shake

off the habits he had formed. Nowadays it was nine o’clock before he

appeared to Herr Wenzel, in his nightshirt, after hours of heavy,

unrefreshing sleep; and quite an hour and a half later before he felt

himself ready and panoplied to begin the day, and could descend to

drink his tea in the first storey. His toilette was a ritual consisting

of a succession of countless details which drove him half mad: from the

cold douche in the bathroom to the last brushing of the last speck of

dust off his coat, and the last pressure of the tongs on his moustache.

But it would have been impossible for him to leave his dressing-room

with the consciousness of having neglected a single one of these

details, for fear he might lose thereby his sense of immaculate

integrity--which, however, would be dissipated in the course of the

next hour and have to be renewed again.

He saved in everything, so far as he could--without subjecting himself

to gossip. But he did not save where his clothes were concerned--he

still had them made by the best Hamburg tailor, and spared no expense

in the care and replenishing of his wardrobe. A spacious cabinet, like

another room, was built into the wall of his dressing-room; and here,

on long rows of hooks, on wooden hangers, were coats, smoking jackets,

frock-coats, evening clothes, clothes for all occasions, all seasons,

and all grades of formality; the carefully creased trousers were

arranged on chairs beneath. The top of his chest of drawers was covered

with combs, brushes, and toilet preparations for hair and beard; while

within it was the supply of body linen of all possible kinds, which was

constantly changed, washed, worn out, and renewed.

He spent in this dressing-room not only the early hours of each

morning, but also a long time before every dinner, every sitting of

the Senate, every public appearance--in short, before every occasion

on which he had to show himself among his fellow men--even before the

daily dinner with his wife, little Johann, and Ida Jungmann. And when

he left it, the fresh underwear on his body, the faultless elegance of

his clothing, the smell of the brilliantine on his moustache, and the

cool, astringent taste of the mouth-wash he used--all this gave him a

feeling of satisfaction and adequacy, like that of an actor who has

adjusted every detail of his costume and make-up and now steps out

upon the stage. And, in truth, Thomas Buddenbrook’s existence was no

different from that of an actor--an actor whose whole life has become

one long production, which, but for a few brief hours for relaxation,

consumes him unceasingly. In the absence of any ardent objective

interest, his inward impoverishment oppressed him almost without any

relief, with a constant, dull chagrin; while he stubbornly clung to

the determination to be worthily representative, to conceal his inward

decline, and to preserve “the _dehors_” whatever it cost him. All

this made of his life, his every word, his every motion, a constant

irritating pretence.

And this state of things showed itself by peculiar symptoms and strange

whims, which he observed with surprise and disgust. People who have

no rôle to perform before the public, who do not conceive themselves

as acting a part, but as standing unobserved to watch the performance

of others, like to stand with the light at their backs. But Thomas

Buddenbrook could not endure the feeling of standing in the shadow

while the light streamed full upon the faces of those whom he wished to

impress. He wanted his audience, before whom he was to act the rôle of

a social light, a public orator, or a representative business man, to

stand before him in a confused and shadowy mass while a blinding light

played upon his own face. Only this gave him a feeling of separation

and safety, an intoxicating sense of self-production, which was the

atmosphere in which he achieved success. It had come to be the case

that precisely this intoxication was the most bearable condition he

knew. When he stood up at table, wine-glass in hand, to reply to a

toast, with his charming manner, easy gestures, and witty turns of

phrase, which struck unerringly home and released waves of merriment

down the length of the table, then he might feel, as well as seem,

the Thomas Buddenbrook of former days. It was much harder to keep the

mastery over himself when he was sitting idle. For then his weariness

and disgust rose up within him, clouded his eyes, relaxed his bearing

and his facial muscles. At such times, he was possessed by one desire:

to steal away, to be alone, to lie in silence, with his head resting on

a cool pillow.

* * * * *

Frau Permaneder had dined that evening in Fishers’ Lane. She was the

only guest, for her daughter, who was to have gone, had visited her

husband that afternoon in the prison, and felt, as she usually did,

exhausted and incapable of further effort. So she had stayed at home.

Frau Antonie had spoken at table of the mental condition of her

son-in-law, which, it appeared, was very bad; and the question arose

whether one might not, with some hope of success, petition the Senate

for a pardon. After dinner the three relatives sat in the living-room,

at the round table beneath the great gas-lamp. The Frau Senator bent

her lovely face over some embroidery, and the gas-light lit up gleams

in her dark hair; Frau Permaneder, with careful fingers, fastened

an enormous red satin bow on to a tiny yellow basket, intended as a

birthday present for a friend. Her glasses were stuck absolutely awry

and useless on her nose. The Senator sat with his legs crossed, partly

turned away from the table, in a large upholstered easy-chair, reading

the paper; he drew in the smoke of his Russian cigarette and let it out

again in a light grey stream between his moustaches.

It was a warm summer Sunday evening. The lofty window was open, and the

lifeless, rather damp air flowed into the room. From where they sat at

the table they could look between the grey gables of intervening houses

at the stars and the slowly moving clouds. There was still light in

Iwersen’s little flower-shop across the way. Further on in the quiet

street a concertina was being played with a good many false notes,

probably by the son of Dankwart the driver. But sometimes the street

was noisy with a troop of sailors, singing, smoking, arm in arm,

going, no doubt, from one doubtful waterside public-house to another

still more doubtful one, and obviously in a jovial mood. Their rough

voices and swinging tread would die off down a cross-street.

The Senator laid down his newspaper, put his glasses in his waistcoat

pocket, and rubbed his hand over his eyes and forehead.

“Feeble--very feeble indeed, this paper,” he said. “I always think when

I read it of what Grandfather used to say about a dish that had no

particular taste or consistency: it tastes as if you were hanging your

tongue out of the window. One, two, three, and you’ve finished with the

whole stupid thing.”

“You are certainly right about that, Tom,” said Frau Permaneder,

letting fall her work and looking at her brother sidewise, past her

glasses but not through them. “What is there in it? I’ve always said,

ever since I was a mere slip of a girl, that this town paper is a

wretched sheet! I read it too, of course, for want of a better one;

but it isn’t so very thrilling to hear that wholesale dealer Consul

So-and-so is going to celebrate his silver wedding! We ought to read

other papers: the _Königsberg Gazette_, or the _Rhenish Gazette_; then

we’d--”

She interrupted herself. She had taken up the paper as she spoke,

and let her eye run contemptuously down the columns. But her glance

was arrested by a short notice of four or five lines, which she read

through, clutching her eye-glasses, her mouth slowly opening. Then she

uttered two shrieks, with the palms of her hands pressed against her

cheeks, and her elbows held out straight.

“Oh, impossible--impossible! Imagine your not seeing that at all. It is

frightful! Oh, _poor_ Armgard! It had to come to her like that!”

Gerda had lifted her head from her work, and Thomas, startled, looked

at his sister. Much upset, Frau Permaneder read the notice aloud, in a

guttural, portentous tone. It came from Rostock, and it said that, the

night before, Herr Ralf von Maiboom, owner of the Pöppenrade estate,

had committed suicide by shooting himself with a revolver, in the study

of the manor-house. “Pecuniary difficulties seem to have been the cause

of the act. Herr von Maiboom leaves a wife and three children.” She

finished and let the paper fall in her lap, then leaned back and looked

at her brother and sister with wide, piteous eyes.

Thomas Buddenbrook had turned away while he listened, and looked past

his sister between the portières, into the dark salon.

“With a revolver?” he asked, after silence had reigned some two

minutes. And then, after another pause, he said in a low voice, slowly

and mockingly: “That is the nobility for you!”

Then he fell again to musing, and the rapidity with which he drew the

ends of his moustaches through his fingers was in remarkable contrast

to the vacant fixity of his gaze. He did not listen to the lamentations

of his sister, or to her speculations on what poor Armgard would do

now. Nor did he notice that Gerda, without turning her head in his

direction, was fixing him with a searching and steady gaze from her

close-set, blue-shadowed eyes.

CHAPTER II

Thomas Buddenbrook did not contemplate the future of little Johann with

the weary dejection which was now his settled mood when he thought

about his own life and his own end. The family feeling which led him

to cherish the past history of his house extended itself even more

strongly into its future; and he was influenced, too, by the loving

and expectant curiosity concentrated upon his son by his family and

his friends and acquaintances, even by the Buddenbrook ladies in Broad

Street. He said to himself that, however hopeless and thwarted he

himself felt, he was still, wherever his son was concerned, capable of

inexhaustible streams of energy, endurance, achievement, success--yes,

that at this one spot his chilled and artificial life could still

be warmed into a genuine and glowing warmth of hopes and fears and

affections.

Perhaps, some day, it would be granted to him to look back upon his

past from a quiet corner and watch the renascence of the old time, the

time of Hanno’s great-grandfather! Was such a hope, after all, entirely

vain? He had felt that the music was his enemy; but it had almost begun

to look as if it had no such important bearing upon the situation.

Granted that the child’s fondness for improvising, without notes, was

evidence of a not quite common gift; in the systematic lessons with

Herr Pfühl he had not showed by any means extraordinary progress. The

preoccupation with music was no doubt due to his mother’s influence;

and it was not surprising that during his early years this influence

had been preponderant. But the time was close at hand when it would be

the father’s turn to influence his son, to draw him over to his side,

to neutralize the feminine influence by introducing a masculine one in

its place. And the Senator determined not to let any such opportunities

pass without improving them.

Hanno was now eleven years old. The preceding Easter, he had, by the

skin of his teeth and by dint of two extra examinations in mathematics

and geography, been passed into the fourth form--as had likewise his

young friend Count Mölln. It had been settled that he should attend the

mercantile side of the school--for it went without saying that he would

be a merchant and take over the family business. When his father asked

him if he felt any inclination toward his future career, he answered

yes--a simple, unadorned, embarrassed “yes,” which the Senator tried to

make a little more convincing by asking leading questions, but mostly

without success.

If the Senator had had two sons, he would assuredly have allowed the

second to go through the gymnasium and study. But the firm demanded

a successor. And, besides, he was convinced he was doing the boy a

kindness in relieving him of the unnecessary Greek. He was of opinion

that the mercantile course was the easier to master, and that Hanno

would therefore come through with greater credit and less strain if he

took it, considering his defects--his slowness of comprehension, his

absent, dreaming ways, and his physical delicacy, which often obliged

him to be absent from school. If little Johann Buddenbrook were to

achieve the position in life to which he was called, they must be

mindful before everything else, by care and cherishing on the one hand,

by sensible toughening on the other, to strengthen his far from robust

constitution.

Hanno had grown sturdier in the past year; but, despite his blue sailor

suit, he still looked a little strange in the playground of the school,

by contrast with the blond Scandinavian type that predominated there.

He now wore his brown hair parted on the side and brushed away from his

white forehead. But it still inclined to fall in soft ringlets over

the temples; and his eyes were as golden-brown as ever, and as veiled

with their brown lashes. His legs, in long black stockings, and his

arms, in the loose quilted blue sleeves of his suit, were small and

soft like a girl’s, and he had, like his mother, the blue shadows under

his eyes. And still, in those eyes, especially when they gave a side

glance, as they often did, there was that timid and defensive look;

while the mouth closed with the old, woebegone expression which he

had had even as a baby, or went slightly crooked when he explored the

recesses of his mouth for a defective tooth. And there would come upon

his face when he did this a look as if he were cold.

Dr. Langhals had now entirely taken over Dr. Grabow’s practice and had

become the Buddenbrook family physician. From him they learned the

reason why the child’s skin was so pale and his strength so inadequate.

It seemed that Hanno’s organism did not produce red corpuscles in

sufficient number. But there was a remedy for this defect: cod-liver

oil, which, accordingly, Dr. Langhals prescribed in great quantities:

good, thick, greasy, yellow cod-liver oil, to be taken from a porcelain

spoon twice a day. The Senator gave the order, and Ida Jungmann, with

stern affection, saw it carried out. In the beginning, to be sure,

Hanno threw up after each spoonful. His stomach seemed to have a

prejudice against the good cod-liver oil. But he got used to it in

the end--and if you held your breath and chewed a piece of rye bread

immediately after, the nausea was not so severe.

His other troubles were all consequent upon this lack of red

corpuscles, it appeared: secondary phenomena, Dr. Langhals called them,

looking at his fingernails. But it was necessary to attack these other

enemies ruthlessly. As for the teeth, for these Herr Brecht and his

Josephus lived in Mill Street: to take care of them, to fill them; when

necessary, to extract them. And for the digestion there was castor-oil,

thick, clear castor-oil that slipped down your throat like a lizard,

after which you smelled and tasted it for three days, sleeping and

waking. Oh, why were all these remedies of such surpassing nastiness?

One single time--Hanno had been rather ill, and his heart action had

shown unusual irregularity--Dr. Langhals had with some misgiving

prescribed a remedy which little Hanno had actually enjoyed, and which

had done him a world of good. These were arsenic pills. But however

much he asked to have the dose repeated--for he felt almost a yearning

for these sweet, soothing little pills--Dr. Langhals never prescribed

them again.

Castor-oil and cod-liver oil were excellent things. But Dr. Langhals

was quite at one with the Senator in the view that they could not of

themselves make a sound and sturdy citizen of little Johann if he

did not do his part. There was gymnasium drill once a week in the

summer, out on the Castle Field, where the youth of the city were

given the opportunity to develop their strength and courage, their

skill and presence of mind, under the guidance of Herr Fritsche, the

drill-master. But to his father’s annoyance, Hanno showed a distinct

distaste for the manly sports--a silent, pronounced, almost haughty

opposition. Why was it that he cared so little for playmates of his

own class and age, with whom he would have to live, and was for ever

sticking about with this little unwashed Kai, who was a good child, of

course, but not precisely a proper friend for the future? Somehow or

other a boy must know from the beginning how to gain the confidence

and respect of his comrades, upon whose good opinion of him he will

be dependent for the rest of his life! There were, on the other hand,

the two sons of Consul Hagenström, two fine strapping boys, twelve

and fourteen years old, strong and full of spirits, who instituted

prize-fights in the neighbouring woods, were the best gymnasts in

the school, swam like otters, smoked cigars, and were ready for any

deviltry. They were popular, feared, and respected. Their cousins,

the two sons of Dr. Moritz Hagenström, the State Attorney, were of a

more delicate build, and gentler ways. They distinguished themselves

in scholarship, and were model pupils: zealous, industrious, quiet,

attentive, devoured by the ambition to bring home a report card marked

“Number 1.” They achieved their ambition, and were respected by their

stupider and lazier colleagues. But--not to speak of his masters--what

must his fellow-pupils think of Hanno, who was not only a very mediocre

scholar, but a weakling into the bargain; who tried to get out of

everything for which a scrap of courage, strength, skill, and energy

were needed? When Senator Buddenbrook passed the little balcony on his

way to his dressing-room, he would hear from Hanno’s room, which was

the middle one of the three on that floor since he had grown too large

to sleep with Ida Jungmann, the notes of the harmonium, or the hushed

and mysterious voice of Kai, Count Mölln telling a story.

Kai avoided the drill classes, because he detested the discipline

which had to be observed there. “No, Hanno,” he said, “I’m not going.

Are you? Deuce take it! Anything that would be any fun is forbidden.”

Expressions like “deuce take it” he got from his father. Hanno

answered: “If Herr Fritsche ever one single day smelled of anything but

beer and sweat, I might consider it. Don’t talk about it, Kai. Go on.

Tell that one about the ring you got out of the bog--you didn’t finish

it.” “Very good,” said Kai. “But when I nod, then you must play.” And

he went on with his story.

If he was to be believed, he had once, on a warm evening, in a strange,

unrecognizable region, slid down a slippery, immeasurable cliff, at the

foot of which, by the flickering, livid light from will-o’-the-wisps,

he saw a black marsh, from which silvery bubbles mounted with a hollow

gurgling sound. One of these bubbles, which kept coming up near the

bank, took the form of a ring when it burst; and he had succeeded in

seizing it, after long and dangerous efforts--after which it burst no

more, but remained in his grasp, a firm and solid ring, which he put

on his finger. He rightly ascribed unusual powers to this ring; for by

its help he climbed up the slippery cliff and saw, a little way off

in the rosy mist, a black castle. It was guarded to the teeth, but he

had forced an entrance, always by the help of the ring, and performed

miracles of rescue and deliverance. All this Hanno accompanied with

sweet chords on his harmonium. Sometimes, if the difficulties were

not too great, these stories were acted in the marionette theatre, to

musical accompaniment. But Hanno attended the drill class only on his

father’s express command--and then Kai went too.

It was the same with the skating in the wintertime, and with the

bathing in summer at the wooden bathing establishment of Herr Asmussen,

down on the river. “Bathing and swimming--let the boy have bathing

and swimming--he must bathe and swim,” Dr. Langhals had said. And the

Senator was entirely of the same opinion. But Hanno had a reason for

absenting himself from the bathing, as well as from the skating and the

drill class. The two sons of Consul Hagenström, who took part in all

such exercises with great skill and credit, singled Hanno out at once.

And though they lived in his own grandmother’s house, that fact did not

prevent them from making his life miserable. They lost no opportunity

of tormenting him. At drill they pinched him and derided him. They

rolled him in the dirty snow at the ice-rink; and in the water they

came up to him with horrid noises. Hanno did not try to escape. It

would have been useless anyhow. He stood, with his girlish arms, up to

his middle in the turbid water of the pool, which had large patches of

duck-weed growing on it, and awaited his tormentors with a scowl--a

dark look and twisted lips. They, sure of their prey, came on with long

splashing strides. They had muscular arms, these two young Hagenströms,

and they clutched him round his body and ducked him--ducked him a good

long time, so that he swallowed rather a lot of the dirty water and

gasped for breath a long time after. One single time he was a little

avenged. One afternoon the two Hagenströms were holding him down under

the water, when one of them suddenly gave a shriek of pain and fury

and lifted his plump leg, from which drops of blood were oozing. Beside

him rose the head of Kai, Count Mölln, who had somehow got hold of the

price of admission, swum up invisible in the water, and bitten young

Hagenström--bitten with all his teeth into his leg, like a furious

little dog. His blue eyes flashed through the red-blond hair that hung

down wet all over his face. He paid richly for the deed, did the little

Count, and left the swimming-pool much the worse for the encounter. But

Consul Hagenström’s son limped perceptibly when he went home.

Nourishing remedies and physical exercise were the basis of the

treatment calculated to turn Senator Buddenbrook’s son into a strong

and healthy lad. But no less painstakingly did the Senator strive to

influence his mind and give him lively impressions of the practical

world in which he was to live.

He began gradually to introduce him into the sphere of his future

activities. He took him on business expeditions down to the harbour

and let him stand by on the quay while he spoke to the dockers in

a mixture of Danish and dialect or gave orders to the men who with

hollow, long-drawn cries were hauling up the sacks to the granary

floor. He took him into dark little warehouse offices to confer with

superintendents. All this life of the harbours, ships, sheds, and

granaries, where it smelled of butter, fish, sea-water, tar, and

greasy iron, had been to Thomas Buddenbrook from childhood up the

most fascinating thing on earth. But his son gave no spontaneous

expression of his own enchantment with the sight; and so the father

was fain to arouse it in him. “What are the names of the boats that

ply to Copenhagen? The _Naiad_, the _Halmstadt_, the _Friederike

Överdieck_--why, if you know those, my son, at least that’s something!

You’ll soon learn the others. Some of those people over there hauling

up the grain have the same name as you--they were named after your

grandfather, as you were. And their children are often named after

me--or Mamma. We give them little presents every year.--Now this next

granary--we don’t stop at it; we go past and don’t talk to the men; it

is a rival business.”

“Should you like to come, Hanno?” he said another time. “There is a

ship of our line being launched to-day, and I shall christen it. Do you

want to go?” And Hanno signified that he wanted to go. He went with his

father, listened to his speech, and saw him break a bottle of champagne

on the prow of the ship; saw how she glided down the ways, which had

been smeared with green soap, and into the water.

On certain days of the year, as New Year’s and Palm Sunday, when

there were confirmations, Senator Buddenbrook drove out on a round

of visits to particular houses in which he had social relations. His

wife did not like these visits, and excused herself on the ground of

headache and nervousness, so Hanno would be asked to go along in her

place; and here, too, he signified his desire to go. He climbed into

the carriage beside his father, and sat silent by his side in the

reception-rooms, watching his easy, tactful, assured, and carefully

graduated manner toward their hosts. He heard District Commander

Colonel Herr von Rinnlingen tell his father how greatly he appreciated

the honour of his visit, and saw how his father, in reply, put on an

air of amiable depreciation and laid his arm an instant across the

Colonel’s shoulders. In another place the same remark was made, and he

received it with quiet seriousness, and in a third with an ironically

exaggerated compliment in return. All this with a floridity of speech

and gesture which he obviously liked to produce for the admiration of

his son, and from which he promised himself the most edifying results.

But the little boy saw more than he should have seen; the shy,

gold-brown, blue-shadowy eyes observed too well. He saw not only the

unerring charm which his father exercised upon everybody: he saw as

well, with strange and anguished penetration, how cruelly hard it

was upon him. He saw how his father, paler and more silent after each

visit, would lean back in his corner of the carriage with closed

eyes and reddened eyelids; he realized with a sort of horror that on

the threshold of the next house a mask would glide over his face, a

galvanized activity take hold of the weary frame. Thus the visits, the

social intercourse with one’s kind, instead of giving little Johann,

quite simply, the idea that one has practical interests in common with

one’s fellow men, which one looks after oneself, expecting others to

do the same, appeared to him like an end in themselves; instead of

straightforward and single-minded participation in the common business,

he saw his father perform an artificial and complicated part, by dint

of a fearful effort and an exaggerated, consuming virtuosity. And when

he thought that some day he should be expected to perform the same

part, under the gaze of the whole community, Hanno shut his eyes and

shivered with rebellion and disgust.

Ah, that was not the effect Thomas Buddenbrook looked for from the

influence of his own personality upon his son’s! What he had hoped to

do was to stimulate self-confidence in the boy, and a sense of the

practical side of life. This was what he had in mind--and nothing else.

“You seem to enjoy good living, my boy,” said he, when Hanno asked for

a second portion of the sweet or a half-cup of coffee after dinner.

“Well, then, you must become a merchant and earn a lot of money. Should

you like to do that?” Little Johann said he would.

Sometimes when the family were invited to dinner, Aunt Antonie or Uncle

Christian would begin to tease Aunt Clothilde and imitate her meek,

drawling accents. Then little Johann, stimulated by the heavy red wine

which they gave him, would ape his elders and make some remarks to

Aunt Clothilde in the same vein. And then how Thomas Buddenbrook would

laugh! He would give a loud, hearty, jovial roar, like a man put in

high spirits by some unexpected piece of good luck, and join in on

his son’s side against poor Aunt Clothilde, though for his own part he

had long since given up these witticisms at the expense of his poor

relative. It was so easy, so safe, to tease poor, limited, modest,

lean and hungry Clothilde, that, harmless though it was, he felt it

rather beneath him. But he wished he did not, for it was the same story

over again: too many considerations, too many scruples. Why must he be

for ever opposing these scruples against the hard, practical affairs

of life? Why could he never learn that it was possible to grasp a

situation, to see around it, as it were, and still to turn it to one’s

own advantage without any feeling of shame? For precisely this, he said

to himself, is the essence of a capacity for practical life!

And thus, how happy, how delighted, how hopeful he felt whenever he saw

even the least small sign in little Johann of a capacity for practical

life!

CHAPTER III

The extended summer trip which had once been customary with the

Buddenbrooks had now been given up for some years. Indeed, when the

Frau Senator, in the previous spring, had wished to make her old father

in Amsterdam a visit and play a few duets with him, the Senator had

given his consent rather curtly. But it had become the rule for Gerda,

little Johann, and Fräulein Jungmann to spend the holidays at the

Kurhouse, in Travemünde, for the sake of Hanno’s health.

Summer holidays at the seashore! Did anybody really understand the joy

of that? After the dragging monotony and worry of the endless school

terms came four weeks of peaceful, care-free seclusion, full of the

good smell of seaweed and the whispering of the gentle surf. Four

weeks! At the beginning it seemed endless; you could not believe that

it would end; it was almost indelicate to suggest such a thing! Little

Johann could not comprehend the crudity of a master who could say:

“After the holidays we shall take up our work at--” this or that point!

After the holidays! He appeared to be already rejoicing in the thought,

this strange man in the shiny worsted suit! After the holidays! What a

thought! And how far, far off in the grey distance lay everything that

was on the other side of the holidays, on the other side of those four

weeks!

The inspection of the school report, with its record of examinations

well or badly got through, would be at last over, and the journey in

the overcrowded carriage. Hanno would wake the first morning in his

room at the Kurhouse, in one of the Swiss cottages that were united

by a small gallery to the main building and the pastry-shop. He would

have a vague feeling of happiness that mounted in his brain and made

his heart contract. He would open his eyes and look with eager pleasure

at the old-fashioned furniture of the cleanly little room. A moment

of dazed and sleepy bliss: then he would be conscious that he was in

Travemünde--for four immeasurable weeks in Travemünde. He did not stir.

He lay on his back in the narrow yellow wooden bed, the linen of which

was extremely thin and soft with age. He even shut his eyes again and

felt his chest rising in deep, slow breaths of happy anticipation.

The room lay in yellow daylight that came in through the striped blind.

Everything was still--Mamma and Ida Jungmann were asleep. Nothing was

to be heard but a measured, peaceful sound which meant that the boy was

raking the gravelled paths of the Kurgarden below, and the buzzing of

a fly that had got between the blind and the window and was storming

the pane--you could see his shadow shooting about in long zigzag lines.

Peace! Only the sound of the rake and the dull buzzing noise. This

gently animated quiet filled little Johann with a priceless sensation:

the feeling of quiet, well-cared-for, elegant repose which was the

atmosphere of the resort, and which he loved better than anything

else. Thank God, none of the shiny worsted-coats who were the chosen

representatives of grammar and the rule of three on this earth was in

the least likely to come here--for here it was rather exclusive and

expensive.

An access of joy made him spring up and run barefoot to the window. He

put up the blind and unfastened the white-painted hook of the window;

and as he opened it the fly escaped and flew away over the flower-beds

and the gravelled paths. The music pavilion, standing in a half-circle

of beech-trees opposite the main building, was still empty and quiet.

The Leuchtenfield, which took its name from the lighthouse that stood

on it, somewhere off to the right, stretched its extent of short sparse

grass under the pale sky, to a point where the grass passed into a

growth of tall, coarse water-plants; and then came the sand, with its

rows of little wooden huts and tall wicker beach-chairs looking out to

the sea. It lay there, the sea, in peaceful morning light, striped blue

and green; and a steamer came in from Copenhagen, between the two red

buoys that marked its course, and one did not need to know whether it

was the _Naiad_ or the _Friederike Överdieck_. Hanno Buddenbrook drew

in a deep, quiet, blissful breath of the spicy air from the sea and

greeted her tenderly, with a loving, speechless, grateful look.

Then the day began, the first of those paltry twenty-eight days,

which seemed in the beginning like an eternity of bliss, and which

flew by with such desperate haste after the first two or three. They

breakfasted on the balcony or under the great chestnut tree near the

children’s playground, where the swing hung. Everything--the smell of

the freshly washed table-cloth when the waiter shook it out, the tissue

paper serviettes, the unaccustomed bread, the eggs they ate out of

little metal cups, with ordinary spoons instead of bone ones like those

at home--all this, and everything, enchanted little Johann.

And all that followed was so easy and care-free--such a wonderfully

idle and protected life. There was the forenoon on the beach, while

the Kurhouse band gave its morning programme; the lying and resting at

the foot of the beach-chair, the delicious, dreamy play with the soft

sand that did not make you dirty, while you let your eyes rove idly

and lose themselves in the green and blue infinity beyond. There was

the air that swept in from that infinity--strong, free, wild, gently

sighing and deliciously scented; it seemed to enfold you round, to veil

your hearing and make you pleasantly giddy, and blessedly submerge all

consciousness of time and space. And the bathing here was a different

affair altogether from that in Herr Asmussen’s establishment. There was

no duck-weed here, and the light green water foamed away in crystalline

clearness when you stirred it up. Instead of a slimy wooden floor there

was soft sand to caress the foot--and Consul Hagenström’s sons were

far away, in Norway or the Tyrol. The Consul loved to make an extended

journey in the holidays, and--why shouldn’t he?

A walk followed, to warm oneself up, along the beach to Sea-gull Rock

or Ocean Temple, a little lunch by the beach-chair; then the time came

to go up to one’s room for an hour’s rest, before making a toilette

for the table-d’hôte. The table-d’hôte was very gay, for this was a

good season at the baths, and the great dining-room was filled with

acquaintances of the Buddenbrooks, Hamburg families, and even some

Russians and English people. A black-clad gentleman sat at a tiny table

and served the soup out of a silver tureen. There were four courses,

and the food tasted nicer and more seasoned than that at home, and

many people drank champagne. These were the single gentlemen who did

not allow their business to keep them chained in town all the week,

and who got up some little games of roulette after dinner: Consul

Peter Döhlmann, who had left his daughter at home, and told such

extremely funny stories that the ladies from Hamburg laughed till

their sides ached and they begged him for mercy; Senator Dr. Cremer,

the old Superintendent of Police; Uncle Christian, and his friend Dr.

Gieseke, who was also without his family, and paid everything for

Uncle Christian. After dinner, the grown-ups drank coffee under the

awnings of the pastry-shop, and the band played, and Hanno sat on a

chair close to the steps of the pavilion and listened unwearied. He

was settled for the afternoon. There was a shooting-gallery in the

Kurgarden, and at the right of the Swiss cottage were the stables,

with horses and donkeys, and the cows whose foaming, fragrant milk one

drank warm every evening. One could go walking in the little town or

along the front; one could go out to the Prival in a boat and look for

amber on the beach, or play croquet in the children’s playground, or

listen to Ida Jungmann reading aloud, sitting on a bench on the wooded

hillside where hung the great bell for the table-d’hôte. But best of

all was it to go back to the beach and sit in the twilight on the end

of the breakwater, with your face turned to the open horizon. Great

ships passed by, and you signalled them with your handkerchief; and you

listened to the little waves slapping softly against the stones; and

the whole space about you was filled with a soft and mighty sighing.

It spoke so benignly to little Johann! it bade him close his eyes, it

told him that all was well. But just then Ida would say, “Come, little

Hanno. It’s supper-time. We must go. If you were to sit here and go to

sleep, you’d die.” How calm his heart felt, how evenly it beat, after

a visit to the sea! Then he had his supper in his room--for his mother

ate later, down in the glass verandah--and drank milk or malt extract,

and lay down in his little bed, between the soft old linen sheets, and

almost at once sleep overcame him, and he slept, to the subdued rhythm

of the evening concert and the regular pulsations of his quiet heart.

On Sunday the Senator appeared, with the other gentlemen who had

stopped in town during the week, and remained until Monday morning.

Ices and champagne were served at the table-d’hôte, and there were

donkey-rides and sailing-parties out to the open sea. Still, little

Johann did not care much for these Sundays. The peaceful isolation

of the bathing-place was broken in upon. A crowd of townsfolk--good

middle-class trippers, Ida Jungmann called them--populated the

Kurgarden and crowded the beach, drank coffee and listened to the

music. Hanno would have liked to stay in his room until these

kill-joys in their Sunday clothes went away again. No, he was glad

when everything returned to its regular course on Monday--and he felt

relieved to feel his father’s eyes no more upon him.

Two weeks had passed; and Hanno said to himself, and to every one

who would listen to him, that there was still as much time left as

the whole of the Michaelmas holidays amounted to. It consoled him to

say this, but after all it was a specious consolation, for the crest

of the holidays had been reached, and from now on they were going

downhill--so quickly, so frightfully quickly, that he would have liked

to cling to every moment, not to let it escape; to lengthen every

breath he drew of the sea air; to taste every second of his joy.

But the time went on, relentless: in rain and sun, sea-wind and

land-wind, long spells of brooding warmth and endless noisy storms

that could not get away out to sea and went on for ever so long. There

were days on which the north-east wind filled the bay with dark green

floods, covered the beach with seaweed, mussels, and jelly-fish, and

threatened the bathing-huts. The turbid, heavy sea was covered far

and wide with foam. The mighty waves came on in awful, awe-inspiring

calm, and the under side of each was a sharp metallic green; then they

crashed with an ear-splitting roar, hissing and thundering along the

sand. There were other days when the west wind drove back the sea for

a long distance, exposing a gently rolling beach and naked sand-banks

everywhere, while the rain came down in torrents. Heaven, earth, and

sea flowed into each other, and the driving wind carried the rain

against the panes so that not drops but rivers flowed down, and made

them impossible to see through. Then Hanno stayed in the salon of the

Kurhouse and played on the little piano that was used to play waltzes

and schottisches for the balls and was not so good for improvising on

as the piano at home: still one could sometimes get amusing effects

out of its muffled and clacking keys. And there were still other days,

dreamy, blue, windless, broodingly warm, when the blue flies buzzed

in the sun above the Leuchtenfield, and the sea lay silent and like a

mirror, without stir or breath. When there were only three days left

Hanno said to himself, and to everybody else, that the time remaining

was just as long as a Whitsuntide holiday; but, incontestable as this

reckoning was, it did not convince even himself. He knew now that the

man in the worsted coat was right, and that they would, in very truth,

begin again where they had left off, and go on to this and that.

The laden carriage stood before the door. The day had come. Early in

the morning Hanno had said good-bye to sea and strand. Now he said it

to the waiters as they received their fees, to the music pavilion, the

rose-beds, and the whole long summer as well. And amid the bows of the

hotel servants the carriage drove off.

They passed the avenue that led to the little town, and rolled along

the front. Ida Jungmann sat, white-haired, bright-eyed, and angular,

opposite Hanno on the back seat, and he squeezed his head into the

corner and looked past her out of the window. The morning sky was

overcast; the Trave was full of little waves that hurried before the

wind. Now and then rain-drops spattered the pane. At the farther end

of the front, people sat before their house doors and mended nets;

barefoot children ran past, and stared inquisitively at the occupants

of the carriage. _They_ did not need to go away!

As they left the last houses behind, Hanno bent forward once more to

look after the lighthouse; then he leaned back and closed his eyes.

“We’ll come back again next year, darling,” Ida Jungmann said in her

grave, soothing voice. It needed only that to make Hanno’s chin tremble

and the tears run down beneath his long dark lashes.

His face and hands were brown from the sea air. But if his stay at the

baths had been intended to harden him, to give him more resistance,

more energy, more endurance, then it had failed of its purpose; and

Hanno himself was aware of this lamentable fact. These four weeks of

sheltered peace and adoration of the sea had not hardened him: they had

made him softer than ever, more dreamy and more sensitive. He would

be no better able to endure the rigours of Herr Tietge’s class. The

thought of the rules and history dates which he had to get by heart

had not lost its power to make him shudder; he knew the feeling too

well, and how he would fling them away in desperation and go to bed,

and suffer next day the torments of the unprepared. And he would be

exactly as much afraid of catastrophes at the recitation hour, of his

enemies the Hagenströms, and of his father’s injunctions not to be

faint-hearted whatever else he was.

But he felt cheered a little by the fresh morning drive through flooded

country roads, amid the twitterings of birds. He thought of seeing

Kai again, and Herr Pfühl; of his music lessons, the piano and his

harmonium. And as the morrow was Sunday, a whole day still intervened

between him and the first lesson-hour. He could feel a few grains

of sand from the beach, still inside his buttoned boot--how lovely!

He would ask old Grobleben to leave them there. Let it all begin

again--the worsted-coats, the Hagenströms, and the rest. He had what

he had. When the waves of tribulation went over him once more he would

think of the sea and of the Kurgarden, and of the sound made by the

little waves, coming hither out of the mysterious slumbering distance.

One single memory of the sound they made as they plashed against the

breakwater could make him oppose an invincible front to all the pains

and penalties of his life.

Then came the ferry, and Israelsdorfer Avenue, Jerusalem Hill, and the

Castle Field, on the right side of which rose the walls of the prison

where Uncle Weinschenk was. Then the carriage rolled along Castle

Street and over the Koberg, crossed Broad Street, and braked down the

steep decline of Fishers’ Lane. There was the red house-front with the

bow-window and the white caryatides; and as they went from the midday

warmth of the street into the coolness of the stone-flagged entry the

Senator, with his pen in his hand, came out of the office to greet them.

Slowly, slowly, with secret tears, little Johann learned to live

without the sea; to lead an existence that was frightened and bored by

turns; to keep out of the way of the Hagenströms; to console himself

with Kai and Herr Pfühl and his music.

The Broad Street Buddenbrooks and Aunt Clothilde, directly they saw

him again, asked him how he liked school after the holidays. They

asked it teasingly, with that curiously superior and slighting air

which grown people assume toward children, as if none of their affairs

could possibly be worthy of serious consideration; but Hanno was proof

against their questions.

Three or four days after the home-coming, Dr. Langhals, the family

physician, appeared in Fishers’ Lane to observe the results of the

cure. He had a long consultation with the Frau Senator, and then Hanno

was summoned and put, half undressed, through a long examination of

his “status praesens,” as Dr. Langhals called it, looking at his

fingernails. He tested Hanno’s heart action and measured his chest and

his lamentable muscular development. He inquired particularly after

all his functions, and lastly, with a hypodermic syringe, took a drop

of blood from Hanno’s slender arm to be tested at home. He seemed, in

general, not very well satisfied.

“We’ve got rather brown,” he said, putting his arm around Hanno as he

stood before him. He arranged his small black-felled hand upon the

boy’s shoulder, and looked up at the Frau Senator and Ida Jungmann.

“But we still look very down in the mouth.”

“He is homesick for the sea,” said Gerda Buddenbrook.

“Oh, so you like being there?” asked Dr. Langhals, looking with his

shallow eyes into Hanno’s face. Hanno coloured. What did Dr. Langhals

mean by his question, to which he plainly expected an answer? A

fantastic hope rose up in him, inspired by the belief that nothing was

impossible to God--despite all the worsted-coated men there were in the

world.

“Yes,” he brought out, with his wide eyes full upon Dr. Langhals’ face.

But after all, it seemed, the physician had nothing particular in mind

when he asked the question.

“Well, the effect of the bathing and the good air is bound to show

itself in time,” Dr. Langhals said. He tapped little Johann on the

shoulder and then put him away, with a nod toward the Frau Senator and

Ida Jungmann--a superior, benevolent nod, the nod of the omniscient

physician, used to have people hanging on his lips. He got up, and the

consultation was at an end.

It was Aunt Antonie who best understood his yearning for the sea, and

the wound in his heart that healed so slowly and was so likely to bleed

afresh under the strain of everyday life. Aunt Antonie loved to hear

him talk about Travemünde, and entered freely into his longings and

enthusiasm.

“Yes, Hanno,” she said, “the truth is the truth, and Travemünde is and

always will be a beautiful spot. Till I go down to my grave I shall

remember the weeks I spent there when I was a slip of a girl--and such

a silly young girl! I lived with people I was fond of, and who seemed

to care for me; I was a pretty young thing in those days,--though

I’m an old woman now--and full of life and high spirits. They were

splendid people, I can tell you, respectable and kind-hearted and

straight-thinking; and they were cleverer and better educated, too,

than any I’ve known since, and they had more enthusiasm. Yes, my life

seemed very full when I lived with them, and I learned a great deal

which I’ve never forgotten--information, beliefs, opinions, ways of

looking at things. If other things hadn’t interfered--as all sorts

of things did, the way life does, you know--I might have learned a

great deal more from them. Shall I tell you how silly I was in those

days? I thought I could get the pretty star out of the jelly-fish, and

I carried a quantity home with me and spread them in the sun on the

balcony to dry. But when I looked at them again, of course there was

nothing but a big wet spot, and a smell of rotten seaweed.”

CHAPTER IV

In the beginning of the year 1873 the Senate pardoned Hugo Weinschenk,

and the former Director left prison, six months before his time was up.

Frau Permaneder, if she had told the truth, would have admitted that

she was not so very glad. She had been living peacefully with her

daughter and granddaughter in Linden Place, and had for society the

house in Fishers’ Lane and her friend Armgard von Maiboom, who had

lived in the town since her husband’s death. Frau Antonie had long

been aware that there was no place for her outside the walls of her

native city. She had her Munich memories, her weak digestion, and

an increasing need of quiet and repose; and she felt not the least

inclination to move to a large city of the united Fatherland, still

less to migrate to another country.

“My dear child,” she said to her daughter, “I must ask you something

very serious. Do you still love your husband with your whole heart?

Would you follow him with your child wherever he went in the wide

world--as, unfortunately, it is not possible for him to remain here?”

And Frau Erica Weinschenk, amid tears that might have meant anything

at all, replied just as dutifully as Tony herself, in similar

circumstances, had once replied to the same question, in the villa

outside Hamburg. So it was necessary to contemplate a parting in the

near future.

On a day almost as dreadful as the day when he had been arrested,

Frau Permaneder brought her son-in-law from the prison, in a closed

carriage, to her house in Linden Place. And there he stayed, after he

had greeted his wife and child in a dazed, helpless way, in the room

that had been prepared for him, smoking from early to late, without

going out, without even taking his meals with his family--a broken

grey-haired man.

He had always had a very strong constitution, and the prison life could

hardly have impaired his physical health. But his condition was, none

the less, pitiable in the extreme. This man had in all probability done

no more than his business colleagues did every day and thought nothing

of; if he had not been caught, he would have gone on his way with head

erect and conscience clear. Yet it was dreadful to see how his ruin as

a citizen, the judicial correction, and the three years’ imprisonment,

had operated to break down his morale. His testimony before the court

had been given with the most sincere conviction; and people who

understood the technicalities of the case supported his contention

that he had merely executed a bold manœuvre for the credit of his firm

and himself--a manœuvre known in the business world as usance. The

lawyers who had convicted him knew, in his opinion, nothing whatever

about such things and lived in quite a different world. But their

conviction, endorsed by the governing power of the state, had shattered

his self-esteem to such a degree that he could not look anybody in the

face. Gone was his elastic tread, the way he had of wriggling at the

waist of his frock-coat and balancing with his fists and rolling his

eyes about. Gone was the ignorant self-assurance with which he had

delivered his uninformed opinions and put his questions. The change was

such that his family shuddered at it--and indeed it was frightful to

see such cowardice, dejection, and lack of self-respect.

Herr Hugo Weinschenk spent eight or ten days doing nothing but smoking:

then he began to read the papers and write letters. The consequence

of the letters was that after another eight or ten days he explained

vaguely that there seemed to be a position for him in London, whither

he wished to travel alone to arrange matters personally, and then to

send for wife and child.

Accompanied by Erica, he drove to the station in a closed carriage and

departed without having once seen any other members of the family.

Some days later a letter addressed to his wife arrived from Hamburg.

It said that he had made up his mind not to send for his wife and

child, or even to communicate with them, until such time as he could

offer them a life fitting for them to live. And this letter was

the very last sign of life from Hugo Weinschenk. No one from then

henceforward heard anything from him. The experienced Frau Permaneder

made several energetic attempts to get into touch with him, in order,

as she importantly explained, to get evidence upon which to sue him for

divorce on the ground of wilful desertion. But he was, and remained,

missing. And thus it came about that Erica Weinschenk and her small

daughter Elisabeth remained now, as before, with Erica’s mother, in the

light and airy apartment in Linden Place.

CHAPTER V

The marriage of which little Johann had been the issue had never lost

charm in the town as a subject for conversation. Since both of the

parties to it were still felt to have something queer about them,

the union itself must partake of that character of the strange and

uncanny which they each possessed. To get behind it even a little, to

look beneath the scanty outward facts to the bottom of this relation,

seemed a difficult, but certainly a stimulating task. And in bedrooms

and sitting-rooms, in clubs and casinos, yes, even on ’Change itself,

people still talked about Gerda and Thomas Buddenbrook.

How had these two come to marry, and what sort of relationship was

theirs? Everybody remembered the sudden resolve of Thomas Buddenbrook

eighteen years ago, when he was thirty years old. “This one or no

one,” he had said. It must have been something of the same sort with

Gerda, for it was well known that she had refused everybody up to her

twenty-seventh year, and then forthwith lent an ear to this particular

wooer. It must have been a love match, people said: they granted that

the three hundred thousand thaler had probably not played much of a

rôle. But of that which any ordinary person would call love, there was

very little to be seen between the pair. They had displayed from the

very beginning a correct, respectful politeness, quite extraordinary

between husband and wife. And what was still more odd it seemed not to

proceed out of any inner estrangement, but out of a peculiar, silent,

deep mutual knowledge. This had not at all altered with the years. The

one change due to the passage of time was an outward one. It was only

this: that the difference in years began to make itself plainly visible.

When you saw them together you felt that here was a rapidly aging

man, already a little heavy, with his young wife at his side. Thomas

Buddenbrook was going off very much, and this despite the now almost

laughable vanity by which he kept himself up. On the other hand, Gerda

had scarcely altered in these eighteen years. She seemed to be, as it

were, conserved in the nervous coldness which was the essence of her

being. Her lovely dark-red hair had kept its colour, the white skin

its smooth texture, the figure its lofty aristocratic slimness. In the

corners of her rather too small and close-set brown eyes were the same

blue shadows. You could not trust those eyes. Their look was strange,

and what was written in it impossible to decipher. This woman’s

personality was so cool, so reserved, so repressed, so distant, she

showed so little human warmth for anything but her music--how could one

help feeling a vague mistrust? People unearthed wise old saws on the

subject of human nature and applied them to Senator Buddenbrook’s wife.

Still waters were known to run deep. Some people were slyer than foxes.

And as they searched for an explanation, their limited imaginations

soon led them to the theory that the lovely Gerda was deceiving her

aging husband.

They watched, and before long they felt sure that Gerda’s conduct, to

put it mildly, passed the bounds of propriety in her relations with

Herr Lieutenant von Throta.

Renée Maria von Throta came from the Rhineland. He was second

lieutenant of one of the infantry battalions quartered in the town.

The red collar went well with his black hair, which he wore parted on

the side and combed back in a high, thick curling crest from his white

forehead. He looked big and strong enough, but was most unmilitary in

speech and manner. He had a way of running one hand in between the

buttons of his half-open undress coat and of sitting with his head

supported on the back of his hand. His bows were devoid of military

stiffness, and you could not hear his heels click together as he made

them. And he had no more respect for his uniform than for ordinary

clothes. Even the slim youthful moustaches that ran slantwise down to

the corners of his mouth had neither point nor consistency; they only

confirmed the unmartial impression he gave. The most remarkable thing

about him was his eyes, so large, black, and extraordinarily brilliant

that they seemed like glowing bottomless depths when he visited

anything or anybody with his glance which was sparkling, ardent, or

languishing by turns.

He had probably gone into the army against his will, or at least

without any inclination for it; and despite his physique he was no

good in the service. He was unregarded by his comrades, and shared

but little in their interests--the interests and pleasures of young

officers lately back from a victorious campaign. And they found him a

disagreeable oddity, who did not care for horses or hunting or play

or women. All his thoughts were bent on music. He was to be seen at

all the concerts, with his languishing eyes and his lax, unmilitary,

theatrical attitudes; on the other hand he despised the club and the

casino and never went near them.

He made the duty calls which his position demanded; but the Buddenbrook

house was the only one at which he visited--too much, people thought,

and the Senator himself thought so too.

No one dreamed what went on in Thomas Buddenbrook. No one must

guess. But it was just this keeping everybody in ignorance of his

mortification, his hatred, his powerlessness, that was so cruelly hard!

People were beginning to find him a little ludicrous; but perhaps their

laugh would have turned to pity if they had even dimly suspected how

much he was on his guard against their laughter! He had seen it coming

long before, he had felt it beforehand, before any one else had such

an idea in his head. His much-carped-at vanity had its source largely

in this fear. He had been first to see, with dismay, the growing

disparity between himself and his lovely wife, on whom the years had

not laid a finger. And now, since the advent of Herr von Throta, he had

to fight with the last remnant of his strength to dissimulate his own

misgivings, in order that they might not make him a laughing-stock in

the eyes of the community.

Gerda Buddenbrook and the eccentric young officer met each other,

naturally, in the world of music. Herr von Throta played the piano,

violin, viola, cello, and flute, and played them all unusually well.

Often the Senator became aware of an impending visit when Herr von

Throta’s man passed the office-door with his master’s cello-case on his

back. Thomas Buddenbrook would sit at his desk and watch until he saw

his wife’s friend enter the house. Then, overhead in the salon, the

harmonies would rise and surge like waves, with singing, lamenting,

unearthly jubilation; would lift like clasped hands outstretched toward

Heaven; would float in vague ecstasies; would sink and die away into

sobbing, into night and silence. But they might roll and seethe, weep

and exult, foam up and enfold each other, as unnaturally as they liked!

They were not the worst. The worst, the actually torturing thing,

was the silence. It would sometimes reign so long, so long, and so

profoundly, above there in the salon, that it was impossible not to

feel afraid of it. There would be no tread upon the ceiling, not even a

chair would move--simply a soundless, speechless, deceiving, _secret_

silence. Thomas Buddenbrook would sit there, and the torture was such

that he sometimes softly groaned.

What was it that he feared? Once more people had seen Herr von Throta

enter his house. And with their eyes he beheld the picture just as

they saw it: Below, an aging man, worn out and crotchety, sat at his

window in the office; above, his beautiful wife made music with her

lover. _And not that alone._ Yes, that was the way the thing looked

to them. He knew it. He was aware, too, that the word “lover” was not

really descriptive of Herr von Throta. It would have been almost a

relief if it were. If he could have understood and despised him as an

empty-headed, ordinary youth who worked off his average endowment of

high spirits in a little music, and thus beguiled the feminine heart!

He tried to think of him like that. He tried to summon up the instincts

of his father to meet the case: the instincts of the thrifty merchant

against the frivolous, adventurous, unreliable military caste. He

called Herr von Throta “the lieutenant,” and tried to think of him as

that; but in his heart he was conscious that the name was inappropriate.

What was it that Thomas Buddenbrook feared? Nothing--nothing to put

a name to. If there had only been something tangible, some simple,

brutal fact, something to defend himself against! He envied people the

simplicity of their conceptions. For while he sat there in torments,

with his head in his hands, he knew all too well that “betrayal,”

“adultery,” were not words to describe the singing things, the

abysmally silent things, that were happening up there.

He looked up sometimes at the grey gables, at the people passing by,

at the jubilee present hanging above his desk with the portraits of

his forefathers: he thought of the history of his house, and said to

himself that this was all that was wanting: that his person should

become a byword, his name and family life a scandal among the people.

This was all that was lacking to set the crown upon the whole. And

the thought, again, almost did him good, because it was a simple,

comprehensible, normal thought, that one could think and express--quite

another matter from this brooding over a mysterious disgrace, a blot

upon his family ’scutcheon.

He could bear it no more. He shoved back his chair, left the office,

and went upstairs. Whither should he go? Into the salon, to be greeted

with unembarrassed slight condescension by Herr von Throta, to ask him

to supper and be refused? For one of the worst features of the case was

that the lieutenant avoided him, refused all official invitations from

the head of the house, and confined himself to the free and private

intercourse with its mistress.

Should he wait? Sit down somewhere, perhaps in the smoking-room,

until the lieutenant went, and then go to Gerda and speak out, and

call her to account? Ah, one did not speak out with Gerda, one did

not call her to account. Why should one? Their alliance was based on

mutual consideration, tact, and silence. To become a laughing-stock

before her, too--no, surely he was not called upon to do that. To

play the jealous husband would be to grant that outsiders were right,

to proclaim a scandal, to cry it aloud. Was he jealous? Of whom? Of

what? Alas, no! Jealousy--the word meant action: mistaken, crazy,

wrong action, perhaps, but at least action, energetic, fearless, and

conclusive. No, he only felt a slight anxiety, a harassing worry, over

the whole thing.

He went into his dressing-room and bathed his face with eau-de-cologne.

Then he descended to the music-room, determined to break the silence

there, cost what it would. He laid his hand on the door-knob--but now

the music struck up again with a stormy outburst of sound, and he

shrank back.

One day in such an hour, he was leaning over the balcony of the second

floor, looking down the well of the staircase. Everything was quite

still. Little Johann came out of his room, down the gallery steps, and

across the corridor, on his way to Ida Jungmann’s room. He slipped

along the wall with his book, and would have passed his father with

lowered eyes, and a murmured greeting; but the Senator spoke to him.

“Well, Hanno, and what are you doing?”

“Studying my lessons, Papa. I am going to Ida, to have her hear my

translation--”

“Well, and what do you have to-morrow?”

Hanno, still looking down, made an obvious effort to give a prompt,

alert, and correct answer to the question. He swallowed once and said,

“We have Cornelius Nepos, some accounts to copy, French grammar, the

rivers of North America, German theme-correcting--”

He stopped and felt provoked with himself; he could not remember any

more, and wished he had said _and_ and let his voice fall, it sounded

so abrupt and unfinished. “Nothing else,” he said as decidedly as he

could, without looking up. But his father did not seem to be listening.

He held Hanno’s free hand and played with it absently, unconsciously

fingering the slim fingers.

And then Hanno heard something that had nothing to do with the lessons

at all: his father’s voice, in a tone he had never heard before, low,

distressed, almost imploring: “Hanno--the lieutenant has been more than

two hours with Mamma--”

Little Hanno opened wide his gold-brown eyes at the sound: and they

looked, as never before, clear, large, and loving, straight into his

father’s face, with its reddened eyelids under the light brows, its

white puffy cheeks and long stiff moustaches. God knows how much he

understood. But one thing they both felt: in the long second when their

eyes met, all constraint, coldness, and misunderstanding melted away.

Hanno might fail his father in all that demanded vitality, energy and

strength. But where fear and suffering were in question, there Thomas

Buddenbrook could count on the devotion of his son. On that common

ground they met as one.

He did not realize this--he tried not to realize it. In the days

that followed, he urged Hanno on more sternly than ever to practical

preparations for his future career. He tested his mental powers,

pressed him to commit himself upon the subject of his calling, and grew

irritated at every sign of rebellion or fatigue. For the truth was that

Thomas Buddenbrook, at the age of forty-eight, began to feel that his

days were numbered, and to reckon with his own approaching death.

His health had failed. Loss of appetite, sleeplessness, dizziness,

and the chills to which he had always been subject forced him several

times to call in Dr. Langhals. But he did not follow the doctor’s

orders. His will-power had grown flabby in these years of idleness or

petty activity. He slept late in the morning, though every evening

he made an angry resolve to rise early and take the prescribed walk

before breakfast. Only two or three times did he actually carry out the

resolve; and it was the same with everything else. And the constant

effort to spur on his will, with the constant failure to do so,

consumed his self-respect and made him a prey to despair. He never even

tried to give up his cigarettes; he could not do without the pleasant

narcotic effect; he had smoked them from his youth up. He told Dr.

Langhals to his vapid face: “You see, Doctor, it is your duty to forbid

me cigarettes--a very easy and agreeable duty. But I have to obey the

order--that is my share, and you can look on at it. No, we will work

together over my health; but I find the work unevenly divided--too much

of yours falls to me. Don’t laugh; it is no joke. One is so frightfully

alone--well, I smoke. Will you have one?” He offered his case.

All his powers were on the decline. What strengthened in him was the

conviction that it could not last long, that the end was close at hand.

He suffered from strange apprehensive fancies. Sometimes at table

it seemed to him that he was no longer sitting with his family, but

hovering above them somewhere and looking down upon them from a great

distance. “I am going to die,” he said to himself. And he would call

Hanno to him repeatedly and say: “My son, I may be taken away from you

sooner than you think. And then you will be called upon to take my

place. I was called upon very young myself. Can you understand that I

am troubled by your indifference? Are you now resolved in your mind?

Yes? Oh, ‘yes’ is no answer! Again you won’t answer me! What I ask you

is, have you resolved, bravely and joyfully, to take up your burden?

Do you imagine that you won’t have to work, that you will have enough

money without? You will have nothing, or very, very little; you will be

thrown upon your own resources. If you want to live, and live well, you

will have to work hard, harder even than I did.”

But this was not all. It was not only the burden of his son’s future,

the future of his house, that weighed him down. There was another

thought that took command, that mastered him and spurred on his weary

thoughts. And it was this: As soon as he began to think of his mortal

end not as an indefinite remote event, almost a contingency, but as

something near and tangible for which it behoved him to prepare, he

began to investigate himself, to examine his relations to death and

questions of another world. And his earliest researches in this kind

discovered in himself an irremediable unpreparedness.

His father had united with his hard practical sense a literal faith,

a fanatic Bible-Christianity which his mother, in her latter years,

had adhered to as well; but to himself it had always been rather

repellant. The worldly scepticism of his grandfather had been more

nearly his own attitude. But the comfortable superficiality of old

Johann could not satisfy his metaphysical and spiritual needs, and he

ended by finding in evolution the answer to all his questions about

eternity and immortality. He said to himself that he had lived in his

forbears and would live on in his descendants. And this line which he

had taken coincided not only with his sense of family, his patrician

self-consciousness, his ancestor-worship, as it were; it had also

strengthened his ambitions and through them the whole course of his

existence. But now, before the near and penetrating eye of death, it

fell away; it was nothing, it gave him not one single hour of calm, of

readiness for the end.

Thomas Buddenbrook had played now and then throughout his life with an

inclination to Catholicism. But he was at bottom, none the less, the

born Protestant: full of the true Protestant’s passionate, relentless

sense of personal responsibility. No, in the ultimate things there

was, there could be, no help from outside, no mediation, no absolution,

no soothing-syrup, no panacea. Each one of us, alone, unaided, of his

own powers, must unravel the riddle before it was too late, must wring

for himself a pious readiness before the hour of death, or else part in

despair. Thomas Buddenbrook turned away, desperate and hopeless, from

his only son, in whom he had once hoped to live on, renewed and strong,

and began in fear and haste to seek for the truth which must somewhere

exist for him.

It was high summer of the year 1874. Silvery, high-piled clouds drifted

across the deep blue sky above the garden’s dainty symmetry. The birds

twittered in the boughs of the walnut tree, the fountain splashed

among the irises, and the scent of the lilacs floated on the breeze,

mingled, alas, with the smell of hot syrup from a sugar-factory nearby.

To the astonishment of the staff, the Senator now often left his work

during office hours, to pace up and down in the garden with his hands

behind his back, or to work about, raking the gravel paths, tying up

the rose-bushes, or dredging mud out of the fountain. His face, with

its light eyebrows, seemed serious and attentive as he worked; but his

thoughts travelled far away in the dark on their lonely, painful path.

Sometimes he seated himself on the little terrace, in the pavilion now

entirely overgrown with green, and stared across the garden at the red

brick rear wall of the house. The air was warm and sweet; it seemed as

though the peaceful sounds about him strove to lull him to sleep. Weary

of loneliness and silence and staring into space, he would close his

eyes now and then, only to snatch them open and harshly frighten peace

away. “I must think,” he said, almost aloud. “I must arrange everything

before it is too late.”

He sat here one day, in the pavilion, in the little reed rocking-chair,

and read for four hours, with growing absorption, in a book which

had, partly by chance, come into his hands. After second breakfast,

cigarette in mouth, he had unearthed it in the smoking-room, from

behind some stately volumes in the corner of a bookcase, and recalled

that he had bought it at a bargain one day years ago. It was a large

volume, poorly printed on cheap paper and poorly sewed; the second

part, only, of a famous philosophical system. He had brought it out

with him into the garden, and now he turned the pages, profoundly

interested.

He was filled with a great, surpassing satisfaction. It soothed

him to see how a master-mind could lay hold on this strong, cruel,

mocking thing called life and enforce it and condemn it. His

was the gratification of the sufferer who has always had a bad

conscience about his sufferings and concealed them from the gaze of

a harsh, unsympathetic world, until suddenly, from the hand of an

authority, he receives, as it were, justification and license for his

suffering--justification before the world, this best of all possible

worlds which the master-mind scornfully demonstrates to be the worst of

all possible ones!

He did not understand it all. Principles and premises remained unclear,

and his mind, unpractised in such readings, was not able to follow

certain trains of thought. But this very alternation of vagueness and

clarity, of dull incomprehension with sudden bursts of light, kept him

enthralled and breathless, and the hours vanished without his looking

up from his book or changing his position in his chair.

He had left some pages unread in the beginning of the book, and hurried

on, clutching rapidly after the main thesis, reading only this or that

section which held his attention. Then he struck on a comprehensive

chapter and read it from beginning to end, his lips tightly closed

and his brows drawn together with a concentration which had long

been strange to him, completely withdrawn from the life about him.

The chapter was called “On Death, and its Relation to our Personal

Immortality.”

Only a few lines remained when the servant came through the garden at

four o’clock to call him to dinner. He nodded, read the remaining

sentences, closed the book, and looked about him. He felt that his

whole being had unaccountably expanded, and at the same time there

clung about his senses a profound intoxication, a strange, sweet, vague

allurement which somehow resembled the feelings of early love and

longing. He put away the book in the drawer of the garden table. His

hands were cold and unsteady, his head was burning, and he felt in it a

strange pressure and strain, as though something were about to snap. He

was not capable of consecutive thought.

What was this? He asked himself the question as he mounted the stairs

and sat down to table with his family. What is it? Have I had a

revelation? What has happened to me, Thomas Buddenbrook, Councillor of

this government, head of the grain firm of Johann Buddenbrook? Was this

message meant for me? Can I bear it? I don’t know what it was: I only

know it is too much for my poor brain.

He remained the rest of the day in this condition, this heavy lethargy

and intoxication, overpowered by the heady draught he had drunk,

incapable of thought. Evening came. His head was heavy, and since

he could hold it up no longer, he went early to bed. He slept for

three hours, more profoundly than ever before in his life. And, then,

suddenly, abruptly, with a start, he awoke and felt as one feels on

realizing, suddenly, a budding love in the heart.

He was alone in the large sleeping chamber; for Gerda slept now in Ida

Jungmann’s room, and the latter had moved into one of the three balcony

rooms to be nearer little Johann. It was dark, for the curtains of

both high windows were tightly closed. He lay on his back, feeling the

oppression of the stillness and of the heavy, warm air, and looked up

into the darkness.

And behold, it was as though the darkness were rent from before his

eyes, as if the whole wall of the night parted wide and disclosed

an immeasurable, boundless prospect of light. “I shall live!” said

Thomas Buddenbrook, almost aloud, and felt his breast shaken with

inward sobs. “This is the revelation: that I shall live! For _it_

will live--and that this _it_ is not I is only an illusion, an error

which death will make plain. This is it, this is it! Why?” But at

this question the night closed in again upon him. He saw, he knew, he

understood, no least particle more; he let himself sink deep in the

pillows, quite blinded and exhausted by the morsel of truth which had

been vouchsafed.

He lay still and waited fervently, feeling himself tempted to pray

that it would come again and irradiate his darkness. And it came. With

folded hands, not daring to move, he lay and looked.

What _was_ Death? The answer came, not in poor, large-sounding words:

he felt it within him, he possessed it. Death was a joy, so great, so

deep that it could be dreamed of only in moments of revelation like the

present. It was the return from an unspeakably painful wandering, the

correction of a grave mistake, the loosening of chains, the opening of

doors--it put right again a lamentable mischance.

End, dissolution! These were pitiable words, and thrice pitiable he who

used them! What would end, what would dissolve? Why, this his body,

this heavy, faulty, hateful incumbrance, which _prevented him from

being something other and better_.

Was not every human being a mistake and a blunder? Was he not in

painful arrest from the hour of his birth? Prison, prison, bonds and

limitations everywhere! The human being stares hopelessly through

the barred window of his personality at the high walls of outward

circumstance, till Death comes and calls him home to freedom!

Individuality?--All, all that one is, can, and has, seems poor, grey,

inadequate, wearisome; what one is not, can not, has not, that is what

one looks at with a longing desire that becomes love because it fears

to become hate.

I bear in myself the seed, the tendency, the possibility of all

capacity and all achievement. Where should I be were I not here? Who,

what, how could I be, if I were not I--if this my external self, my

consciousness, did not cut me off from those who are not I? Organism!

Blind, thoughtless, pitiful eruption of the urging will! Better,

indeed, for the will to float free in spaceless, timeless night than

for it to languish in prison, illumined by the feeble, flickering light

of the intellect!