Buddenbrooks (5 page)

PART TWO

CHAPTER I

IT was mid-April, two and a half years later. The spring was more advanced than usual, and with the spring had come ID the Buddenbrook family a joy that made old Johann sing about the house and moved his Son to the depths of his heart. The Consul sat at the big roll-top writing-desk in the win-dow of the breakfast-room, at nine o'clock one Sunday morning. He had before him a stout leather portfolio stuffed with papers, from among which he had drawn a giltedged note-book with an embossed cover, and was busily writing in it in his small, thin, flowing script. His hand hurried over the paper, never pausing except to dip his quill in the ink. Both the windows were open, and the spring breeze wafted delicate odours into the room, lifting the curtains gently. The garden was full of young buds and bathed in tender sun-shine; a pair of birds called and answered each other pertly. The sunshine was strong, too, on the white linen of the break-fast-table and the gilt-borders of the old china. The folding doors into the bed-room were open, and the voice of old Johann could be heard inside, singing softly to a quaint and ancient tune: A kind papa, a worthy man, He rocks the baby in the cradle, He feeds the children sugar-plums And stirs the porridge with a ladle. He sat beside the little green-curtained cradle, close to the Frau Consul's lofty bed, and rocked it softly with one hand. Madame Antoinette, in a white lace cap and an apron over 49 her striped frock, was busy with flannel and linen at the table. The old couple had given up their bedroom to the Frau Consul for the time being, to make things easier for the servants, and were sleeping in the unused room in the en-tresol. Consul Buddenbrook gave scarcely a glance at the adjoining room, so absorbed was he in his work. His face wore an expression of earnest, almost suffering piety, his mouth slightly open, the chin a little dropped; his eyes filled from time to time. He wrote: "Today, April 14, 1838, at six o'clock in the morning, my dear wife, Elizabeth Buddenbrook, born Kr�, was, by God's gracious help, happily delivered of a daughter, who will re-ceive the name of Clara in Holy Baptism. Yea, the Lord hath holpen mightily; for according to Doctor Grabow, the birth was somewhat premature, and her condition not of the best .5he suffered great pain. Oh, Lord God of Sabaoth, where is there any other God save Thee? who helpest us in all our times of need and danger, and teachest us to know Thy will aright, that we may fear Thee and obey Thy commandments! O Lord, lead us and guide us all, so long as we live upon this earth...." The pen hurried glibly over the paper, with here and there a commercial flourish, talking with God in every line. Two pages further on: "I have taken out," it said, "an insurance policy for my youngest daughter, of one hundred and fifty thaler current. Lead her, O Lord, in Thy ways, give her a pure heart, O God, that she may one day enter into the mansions of eternal peace. For inasmuch as our weak human hearts are prone to forget Thy priceless gift of the sweet, blessed Jesus..." And so on for three pages. Then he wrote "Amen." But still the faint scratching sound of the pen went on, over several more pages. It wrote of the precious spring that refreshes the tired wanderer, of the Saviour's holy wounds gushing blood, of the broad way and the narrow way, and the glory of the Eternal God. It is true that after a while the Consul began to feel that he had written enough; that he might let well enough alone, and go in to see his wife, or out to the counting-house. Oh, fie, fie! Did one so soon weary of communion with his Lord and Saviour? Was it not robbing his God to scant Him of this service? No, he would go on, as a chastisement for these unholy im-pulses. He cited whole pages of Scripture, he prayed for his parents, his wife, his children, and himself, he prayed even for his brother Gotthold. And then, with a last quotation and three final "Amens," he strewed sand on the paper and leaned back with a sigh of relief. He crossed one-leg over the other and slowly turned the pages of the notebook, reading dates and entries here and there, written in his own hand, and thanking the Lord afresh as he saw how in every time of need and danger He had stretched out His hand to aid. Once he had lain so ill of small-pox that his life had been despaired of--yet it had been saved. And once, when he was a boy, a beer-vat had fallen on him. A large quantity of beer was being brewed for a wedding, 'in the old days when the brewing was done at home; and a vat had fallen over, pinning the boy beneath it. It had taken six people to lift it up again, and his head had been crushed so that the blood ran down in streams. He was carried into a shop, and, as he still breathed, the doctor and the surgeon were sent for. They told the father to pre-pare for the worst and to bow to the will of God. But the Almighty had blessed the work of healing, and the boy was saved and restored to health. The Consul dwelt a while upon this account, re-living the accident in his mind. Then he took his pen again and wrote after his last "Amen": "Yea, O God, I will eternally praise Thee!" Another time, his life had been saved from danger by water, when he had gone to Bergen, as a young man. The account read: At high water when the freight boats of the Northern Line are in, we have great difficulty getting through the press to our landing. I was standing on the edge of the scow, with 51 my feet on the thole-pins, leaning my back against the sailboat, trying to get the scow nearer in, when, as luck would have it, the oak thole-pins broke, and I went head over heels into-the water. The first time I came up, nobody was near enough to get hold of me; the second time, the scow went over my head. There were plenty of people there anxious to save me, but they had to keep the sailboat and the scow off, so that I should not come up under them; and all their shoving would probably have been in vain if a rope had not sud-denly broken on one of the sailboats belonging to the Line, so that she swung further out; and this, by the grace of God, gave me room enough to come up in free water. It was only the top of my head, with the hair, that they saw; but it was enough, for they were all lying on their stomachs with their heads slicking out over the scow, and the man at the bow grabbed me by the hair, and I got hold of his arm. He was in an unsafe position himself and could not hold me, but he gave a yell, and they all took hold of him around the waist and pulled. I hung on, though he bit me to make me let go. So they got me in at last." There followed a long prayer of thanksgiving, which the Consul re-read with tear-wet eyes. On another page he had said: "I could write much more, were I minded to reveal the passions of my youth...." The Consul passed over this, and began to read here and there from the period of his marriage and the birth of his first child. The union, to be frank, could hardly be called a love-match. His father had tapped him on the shoulder and pointed out to him the daughter of the wealthy Kroger, who could bring the firm a splendid marriage portion. He had accepted the situation with alacrity; and from the first moment had honoured his wife as the mate entrusted to him by God. After all, his father's second marriage had been of much the same kind. " 'A kind Papa, a worthy man."' He could still hear old Johann softly humming in the bed room. What a pity he had so little taste for those old records! He stood with both feet firmly planted in the present, and concerned himself seldom with the past of his family. Yet in times gone by he too had made a few entries in the giltedged book. The Consul turned to those pages, written in a florid hand on rather coarse paper that was already yellowing with age. They were chiefly about his first marriage. Ah, Johann Buddenbrook must have adored his first wife, the daughter of a Bremen merchant! The one brief year it had been granted him to live with her was the happiest of his life--"Tannee la plus heureuse de ma vie" he had written there. The words were underlined with a wavy line, for all the world, even Madame Antoinette, to see. Then Grotthold had come, and Josephine had died. And here some strange things had been written on the rough paper. Johann Buddenbrook must have openly and bitterly hated his child, even when, while still in the womb, it had caused its mother to faint and agonize under the lusty burden. It was born strong and active, while Josephine buried her blood-less face deeper in the pillows and passed away. Johann never forgave the ruthless intruder. He grew up vigorous and pushing, and Johann thought of him as his mother's murderer. This was, to the Consul's mind, incomprehensible. She had died, he thought, fulfilling the holy duty of a woman: ' 'the love I bore to her would have passed over in all its tenderness to her child," he said to himself. It had not been so. Later the father married again, his bride being Antoinette Duchamps, the daughter of a rich and muchesteemed Ham-burg family, and the two had dwelt together with mutual respect and deference. The Consul went on turning over the pages. There at the end were written the small histories of his own children: how Tom had had the measles, and Antonie jaundice, and Christian chicken-pox. There were accounts of various jour-neys he had taken with his wife, to Paris, Switzerland, 53 Marienhad. Then the Consul turned back to the front of the book, to some pages written in bluish ink, in a hand full of flourishes, on paper that was like parchment, but tattered and spotted with age. Here his grandfather Johann had set down the genealogy of the main branch of the Buddenbrooks. At the end of the sixteenth century, the first Buddenbrook of whom they had knowledge lived in Parchirn, and his son had been a Senator of Grabau. Another Buddenbrook, a tailor by trade, and "very well-to-do" (this was underlined) had married in Rostock and begotten an extraordinary number of children, who lived or died, as the case might be. And again, another, this time a Johann, had lived in Rostock as a merchant, from whom the Consul's grandfather had descended, who had left Rostock to settle himself in this very town, and was the founder of the present grain business. There was much about him set down in detail: when he had had the purples, and when genuine small-pox; when he had fallen out of the malt-kiln and been miraculously saved, when he might have fallen against the beams and been crushed; how he had had fever and been delirious--all these events were meticu-lously described. He had also written down wise admonitions for the benefit of his descendants, like the following, which was carefully painted and framed, in a tall Gothic script set off with a border: "My son, attend with zeal to thy business by day; but do none that hinders thee from thy sleep by night." He had also stated that his old Wittenberg Bible was to descend to his eldest son, and thence from first-born to first-born in each generation. Consul Buddenbrook reached for the old leather portfolio and took out the remaining documents. There were letters, on torn and yellow paper, written by anxious mothers to their sons abroad--which the sons had docketed: "Received and contents duly noted." There were citizens' papers, with the seal and crest of the free Hansa town; insurance policies; letters inviting this or that Buddenbrook to become god-father for a colleague's child: congratulatory epistles and occasional poems. Sons travelling for the firm to Stockholm or Am-sterdam had written back, to the parent or partner at home, letters in which business was touchingly mingled with inquiries after wife and child. There was a separate diary of the Consul's journey through England and Brabant; the cover had an engraving of Edinburgh Castle and the Grass-market. Lastly, there were Cotthold's late angry letters to his father--painful documents, to offset which was the poem written by Jean Jacques Hoffstede to celebrate the. house-warming. A faint, rapid chime came from above the secretary, where there hung a dull-looking painting of an old market-square, with a church-tower that possessed a real clock of its own. It was now striking the hour, in authentic if tiny tones. The Consul closed the portfolio and stowed it away carefully in a drawer at the back of the desk. Then he went into the bed-chamber. Here the walls and the high old bed were hung with dark flowered chintz, and there was in the air a feeling of repose, of convalescence--of calm after an anxious and painful or-deal. A mingled odour of cologne and drugs hung in the mild, dim-lighted atmosphere. The old pair bent over the cradle side by side and watched the slumbering child; and the Consul's wife lay pale and happy, in an exquisite lace jacket, her hair carefully dressed. As she put out her hand to her husband, her gold bracelets tinkled slightly. She had a characteristic way of stretching out her hand with the palm upward, in a sweeping gesture that gave it added graciousness. "Well, Betsy, how are you?" "Splendid, splendid, my dear Jean." He still held her hand as he bent over and looked at the child, whose rapid little breaths were distinctly audible. For a moment he inhaled the tender warmth and the indescribable odour of well-being and cherishing care that came up from the cradle. Then he kissed the little creature on the brow 55 and said softly: "God bless you!" He noticed how like to a bird's claws were the tiny yellow, crumpled fingers. "She eats splendidly," Madame Antoinette said. "See how she has gained." "I believe, on my soul, she looks like Netta," old Johann said, beaming with pride and pleasure. "See what coal-black eyes she has!" The old lady waved him away. "How can anybody tell who she looks like yet?" she said. "Are you going to church, Jean?" "Yes, it is ten o'clock now, and high time. I am only waiting for the children." The children were already making an unseemly noise on the stairs, and Clothilde could be heard telling them to hush. They came in in their fur tippets--for it would still be wintry in St. Mary's--trying to be soft and gentle in the sick-room. They wanted to see the little sister, and then go to church. Their faces were rosy with excitement. This was a wonderful red-letter day, for the stork had brought not only the baby sister, but all sorts of presents as well. How tre-mendously strong the stork must be, to carry all that! There was a new seal-skin school-bag for Tom, a big doll for An-tonie, that had real hair--imagine that!--for Christian a com-plete toy theatre, with the Sultan, Death, and the Devil; and a book with pictures for demure Clothilde, who accepted it with thanks, but was more interested in the bag of sweeties that fell to her lot as well. They kissed their mother, and were allowed a peep under the green curtains of the baby's bed.