Then came the ferry, and Israelsdorf Avenue, Jerusalem Hill, the Castle
Field. The wagon passed the Castle Gate, with the walls of the prison
rising on the right, and rolled along Castle Street and over the
Koberg. Tony looked at the grey gables, the oil lamps hung across the
streets, Holy Ghost Hospital with the already almost bare lindens in
front of it. Oh, how everything was exactly as it had been! It had been
standing here, in immovable dignity, while she had thought of it as a
dream worthy only to be forgotten. These grey gables were the old, the
accustomed, the traditional, to which she was returning, in the midst
of which she must live. She wept no more. She looked about curiously.
The pain of parting was almost dulled at the sight of these well-known
streets and faces. At that moment--the wagon was rolling through Broad
Street--the porter Matthiesen passed and took off his stove-pipe hat
so obsequiously that it seemed he must be thinking, “Bow, you dog of a
porter--you can’t bow low enough.”
The equipage turned into the Mengstrasse, and the fat brown horses
stood snorting and stamping before the Buddenbrook door. Tom was very
attentive in helping his sister out, while Anton and Line hastened up
to unfasten the trunk. But they had to wait before they could enter the
house. Three great lorries were being driven through, one close behind
another, piled high with full corn sacks, with the firm name written on
them in big black letters. They jolted along over the great boards and
down the shallow steps to the cart-yard with a heavy rumbling noise.
Part of the corn was evidently to be unloaded at the back of the house
and the rest taken to the “Walrus,” the “Lion,” or the “Oak.”
The Consul came out of the office with his pen behind his ear as the
brother and sister reached the entry, and stretched out his arms to his
daughter.
“Welcome home, my dear Tony!”
She kissed him, looking a little shame-faced, her eyes still red with
weeping. But he was very tactful; he made no allusions; he only said:
“It is late, but we waited with the second breakfast.”
The Frau Consul, Christian, Clothilde, Clara, and Ida Jungmann stood
above on the landing to greet her.
Tony slept soundly and well the first night in Mengstrasse. She rose
the next morning, the twenty-second of September, refreshed and calmed,
and went down into the breakfast-room. It was still quite early, hardly
seven o’clock. Only Mamsell Jungmann was there, making the morning
coffee.
“Well, well, Tony, my little child,” she said, looking round with her
small, blinking brown eyes. “Up so early?”
Tony sat down at the open desk, clasped her hands behind her head,
and looked for a while at the pavement of the court, gleaming black
with wet, and at the damp, yellow garden. Then she began to rummage
curiously among the visiting-cards and letters on the desk. Close by
the inkstand lay the well-known large copy-book with the stamped cover,
gilt edges, and leaves of various qualities and colours. It must have
been used the evening before, and it was strange that Papa had not put
it back in its leather portfolio and laid it in its special drawer.
She took it and turned over the pages, began to read, and became
absorbed. What she read were mostly simple facts well-known to her; but
each successive writer had followed his predecessor in a stately but
simple chronicle style which was no bad mirror of the family attitude,
its modest but honourable self-respect, and its reverence for tradition
and history. The book was not new to Tony; she had sometimes been
allowed to read in it. But its contents had never made the impression
upon her that they did this morning. She was thrilled by the reverent
particularity with which the simplest facts pertinent to the family
were here treated. She propped herself on her elbows and read with
growing absorption, seriousness and pride.
No point in her own tiny past was lacking. Her birth, her childish
illnesses, her first school, her boarding-school days at Mademoiselle
Weichbrodt’s, her confirmation--everything was carefully entered, with
an almost reverent observation of facts, in the Consul’s small, flowing
business hand; for was not the least of them the will and work of God,
who wonderfully guided the destinies of the family? What, she mused,
would there be entered here in the future after her name, which she
had received from her grandmother Antoinette? All that was yet to be
written there would be conned by later members of the family with a
piety equal to her own.
She leaned back sighing; her heart beat solemnly. She was filled with
reverence for herself: the familiar feeling of personal importance
possessed her, heightened by all she had been reading. She felt
thrilled and shuddery. “Like a link in a chain,” Papa had written. Yes,
yes. She was important precisely as a link in this chain. Such was her
significance and her responsibility, such her task: to share by deed
and word in the history of her family.
She turned back to the end of the great volume, where on a rough folio
page was entered the genealogy of the whole Buddenbrook family, with
parentheses and rubrics, indicated in the Consul’s hand, and all the
dates set down: from the marriage of the earliest scion of the family
with Brigitta Schuren, the pastor’s daughter, down to the wedding of
Consul Johann Buddenbrook with Elizabeth Kröger in 1825. From this
marriage, it said, four children had resulted: whereupon these were all
entered, with the days and years of their birth, and their baptismal
names, one after another. Under that of the eldest son it was recorded
that he had entered as apprentice in his father’s business in the
Easter of 1842.
Tony looked a long time at her name and at the blank space next it.
Then, suddenly, with a jerk, with a nervous, feverish accompaniment of
sobbing breaths and quick-moving lips--she clutched the pen, plunged
it rather than dipped it into the ink, and wrote, with her forefinger
crooked, her hot head bent far over on her shoulder, in her awkward
handwriting that climbed up the page from left to right: “Betrothed, on
Sept. 22, 1845, to Herr Bendix Grünlich, Merchant, of Hamburg.”