Buddenbrooks (49 page)

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, Jeru-salem 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 de-cline 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 Hagenstrbms; to console himself with Kai and He IT Pfiihl 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 finger-nails. 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 arouml Hanno as he stood before him. He arranged his small black felled hand upon the boy's shoulder, and looked up at thi. Frau Senator and Ida Jungmann. "Bui we still look very down in the mouth." "He is homesick for the sea," said Gerda Buddenbrook. "Dh, 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 Cod--despite all the worsted-coated men there were in the world. "Yes," he brought out, with his wide eyes full upon Dr. Langhals1 face. But after all, it seemed, the physician had 241 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 omnisrirnt physician, used to have people hanging on his lips. He got up, and the con-sultation was at an end.

CHAPTER IV

IN the beginning of the year 1873 the Senate pardoned Hugo Weinsrhenk, 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 Plarp, 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 thrrc 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 Irast inclination to move to a large city of the united Father-land, 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 Wrinschrnk, amid tears that might have mrant anything at all, replied just as dutifully as Tony her-self, in similar circumstances, had once replied to the same question, in the villa outside Hamburg. So it was necessary to cnntrniplale a parting in the near future. On a day almost as dreadful as the day when he had been arrretod, Frau Permaneder brought her son-in-law from the prison, in a closed carriage, to her house in Linden Place. And there he slayrd, after he had greeted his wife and child in a dazed, helpless way, in the room that had been pre-243 pared 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 techni-calities of the case supported his contention that he had merely executed a bold manreuvre for the credit of his firm and him-self--a manreuvre 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 differ-ent world. But their conviction, endorsed by the governing power of the state, had shattered his selfesteem to such a degree that he could not look anybody in the face. Cone 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 uniformed opinions and put his questions. The change was such that his family shuddered at it--and in-deed 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 some-thing queer about them, the union itself must partake of thai character of the strange and uncanny which they each pos-sessed. 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 re-solve 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 role. 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 ex-traordinary 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 risible. 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 un-earthed 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 imagi-nations 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. Renee Maria von Throta came from the Rhineland. He was second lieutenant of one of the infantry battalions quar-tered 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. HP 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 sit-ting with his head supported on the back of his hand. His 247 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 rem-nant 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 Heir 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 249 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 thn instincts of his father to meet the case: the instincts of the thrifty mer-chant against the frivolous, adventurous, unreliable military cast?. He called Herr von Thrnla "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 ID. If there had only been some-thing tangible, some simple, brutal fact, something to defend himself against! He envied people the simplirity 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 word? to describe the singing things, the abysmally silent things, that were happening up there. He looked up sometimes at the grey gables, at the peDple 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, berausc 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 t-ould 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 con-descension 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 Gc-rda, one did not call her to account. Why should one? Their alliance was based on mutual con-sideration, tact, and silence. To become a laughing-stock be-fore her, too--no, surely he was not called upon to do that. To play the jealous husband would be to grant that outsiders wpre right, to proclaim a scandal, to cry it aloud. Was he jealous? Df whnm? Of what? Alas, no! Jealousy--tnp word meant action: mistaken, crazy, wrong action, perhaps, but at least action, energetic, fearless, and conclusive. No, IIP nnly felt a slight anxiety, a harassing worry, over thr whole thing. He went into his dressing-room and bathed his face with eau-de-colognp. Then he descended to the music-room, de-termined 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 surh 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 lowerrd 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. HP 251 swallowed once and said, "We have Cornelius Nepos, some accounts to copy, French grammar, the rivers of North Amer-ica, 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'a 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 while puffy cheeks and long stiff mous-taches. 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 Buddrnbrook could count on the de-votion 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 Bud-denbrook, 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, diz- zin ess, 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 idlenes or petty activity. He slept late in the morning, though every evening he made an angry resold 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 un-evenly 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 appre-hensive fancies. Sometimes at table it