Part + 

X + 

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 hairsplitting pedantries of Herr Marcus had become unendurable to him. The way the man forever 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 mouthwash 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 makeup 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 role 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 role 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, wineglass 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 gaslight 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 eyeglasses, 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. + 

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 renaissance 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 forever 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 prizefights 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 duckweed 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, seawater, 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 today, 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 forever 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! + 

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, carefree 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 flowerbeds 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 tablecloth 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 carefree⁠—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 duckweed 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 Seagull 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 grownups 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 suppertime. 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 killjoys 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 everyone 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 northeast wind filled the bay with dark green floods, covered the beach with seaweed, mussels, and jellyfish, 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 earsplitting 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 sandbanks 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 goodbye 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 raindrops 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 fainthearted 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 homecoming, 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 kindhearted 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 jellyfish, 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.” + 

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 manoeuvre for the credit of his firm and himself⁠—a manoeuvre 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. + 

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 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 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 anyone 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 laughingstock 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 laughingstock 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 doorknob⁠—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 tomorrow?” + 

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 willpower 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 rosebushes, 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 mastermind 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 mastermind 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! + 

Have I hoped to live on in my son? In a personality yet more feeble, flickering, and timorous than my own? Blind, childish folly! What can my son do for me⁠—what need have I of a son? Where shall I be when I am dead? Ah, it is so brilliantly clear, so overwhelmingly simple! I shall be in all those who have ever, do ever, or ever shall say “I”⁠—especially, however, in all those who say it most fully, potently, and gladly! + 

Somewhere in the world a child is growing up, strong, well-grown, adequate, able to develop its powers, gifted, untroubled, pure, joyous, relentless, one of those beings whose glance heightens the joy of the joyous and drives the unhappy to despair. He is my son. He is I, myself, soon, soon; as soon as Death frees me from the wretched delusion that I am not he as well as myself. + 

Have I ever hated life⁠—pure, strong, relentless life? Folly and misconception! I have but hated myself, because I could not bear it. I love you, I love you all, you blessed, and soon, soon, I shall cease to be cut off from you all by the narrow bonds of myself; soon will that in me which loves you be free and be in and with you⁠—in and with you all. + 

He wept, he pressed his face into the pillows and wept, shaken through and through, lifted up in transports by a joy without compare for its exquisite sweetness. This it was which since yesterday had filled him as if with a heady, intoxicating draught, had worked in his heart in the darkness of the night and roused him like a budding love! And in so far as he could now understand and recognize⁠—not in words and consecutive thoughts, but in sudden rapturous illuminations of his inmost being⁠—he was already free, already actually released and free of all natural as well as artificial limitations. The walls of his native town, in which he had wilfully and consciously shut himself up, opened out; they opened and disclosed to his view the entire world, of which he had in his youth seen this or that small portion, and of which Death now promised him the whole. The deceptive perceptions of space, time and history, the preoccupation with a glorious historical continuity of life in the person of his own descendants, the dread of some future final dissolution and decomposition⁠—all this his spirit now put aside. He was no longer prevented from grasping eternity. Nothing began, nothing left off. There was only an endless present; and that power in him which loved life with a love so exquisitely sweet and yearning⁠—the power of which his person was only the unsuccessful expression⁠—that power would always know how to find access to this present. + 

“I shall live,” he whispered into his pillow. He wept, and in the next moment knew not why. His brain stood still, the vision was quenched. Suddenly there was nothing more⁠—he lay in dumb darkness. “It will come back,” he assured himself. And before sleep inexorably wrapped him round, he swore to himself never to let go this precious treasure, but to read and study, to learn its powers, and to make inalienably his own the whole conception of the universe out of which his vision sprang. + 

But that could not be. Even the next day, as he woke with a faint feeling of shame at the emotional extravagances of the night, he suspected that it would be hard to put these beautiful designs into practice. + 

He rose late and had to go at once to take part in the debate at an assembly of burgesses. Public business, the civic life that went on in the gabled narrow streets of this middle-sized trading city, consumed his energies once more. He still planned to take up the wonderful reading again where he had left it off. But he questioned of himself whether the events of that night had been anything firm and permanent; whether, when Death approached, they would be found to hold their ground. + 

His middle-class instincts rose against them⁠—and his vanity, too: the fear of being eccentric, of playing a laughable role. Had he really seen these things? And did they really become him⁠—him, Thomas Buddenbrook, head of the firm of Johann Buddenbrook? + 

He never succeeded in looking again into the precious volume⁠—to say nothing of buying its other parts. His days were consumed by nervous pedantry: harassed by a thousand details, all of them unimportant, he was too weak-willed to arrive at a reasonable and fruitful arrangement of his time. Nearly two weeks after that memorable afternoon he gave it up⁠—and ordered the maidservant to fetch the book from the drawer in the garden table and replace it in the bookcase. + 

And thus Thomas Buddenbrook, who had held his hands stretched imploringly upward toward the high ultimate truth, sank now weakly back to the images and conceptions of his childhood. He strove to call back that personal God, the Father of all human beings, who had sent a part of Himself upon earth to suffer and bleed for our sins, and who, on the final day, would come to judge the quick and the dead; at whose feet the justified, in the course of the eternity then beginning, would be recompensed for the sorrows they had borne in this vale of tears. Yes, he strove to subscribe to the whole confused unconvincing story, which required no intelligence, only obedient credulity; and which, when the last anguish came, would sustain one in a firm and childlike faith.⁠—But would it, really? + 

Ah, even here there was no peace. This poor, well-nigh exhausted man, consumed with gnawing fears for the honour of his house, his wife, his child, his name, his family, this man who spent painful effort even to keep his body artificially erect and well-preserved⁠—this poor man tortured himself for days with thoughts upon the moment and manner of death. How would it really be? Did the soul go to Heaven immediately after death, or did bliss first begin with the resurrection of the flesh? And, if so, where did the soul stay until that time? He did not remember ever having been taught this. Why had he not been told this important fact in school or in church? How was it justifiable for them to leave people in such uncertainty? He considered visiting Pastor Pringsheim and seeking advice and counsel; but he gave it up in the end for fear of being ridiculous. + 

And finally he gave it all up⁠—he left it all to God. But having come to such an unsatisfactory ending of his attempts to set his spiritual affairs in order, he determined at least to spare no pains over his earthly ones, and to carry out a plan which he had long entertained. + 

One day little Johann heard his father tell his mother, as they drank their coffee in the living-room after the midday meal, that he expected Lawyer So-and-So to make his will. He really ought not to keep on putting it off. Later, in the afternoon, Hanno practised his music for an hour. When he went down the corridor after that, he met, coming up the stairs, his father and a gentleman in a long black overcoat. + 

“Hanno,” said the Senator, curtly. And little Johann stopped, swallowed, and said quickly and softly: “Yes, Papa.” + 

“I have some important business with this gentleman,” his father went on. “Will you stand before the door into the smoking-room and take care that nobody⁠—absolutely nobody, you understand⁠—disturbs us?” + 

“Yes, Papa,” said little Johann, and took up his post before the door, which closed after the two gentlemen. + 

He stood there, clutching his sailor’s knot with one hand, felt with his tongue for a doubtful tooth, and listened to the earnest subdued voices which could be heard from inside. His head, with the curling light-brown hair, he held on one side, and his face with the frowning brows and blue-shadowed, gold-brown eyes, wore that same displeased and brooding look with which he had inhaled the odour of the flowers, and that other strange, yet half-familiar odour, by his grandmother’s bier. + 

Ida Jungmann passed and said, “Well, little Hanno, why are you hanging about here?” + 

And the humpbacked apprentice came out of the office with a telegram, and asked for the Senator. + 

But, both times, little Johann put his arm in its blue sailor sleeve with the anchor on it horizontally across the door; both times he shook his head and said softly, after a pause, “No one may go in. Papa is making his will.” + 

VI + 

In the autumn Dr. Langhals said, making play like a woman with his beautiful eyes: “It is the nerves, Senator; the nerves are to blame for everything. And once in a while the circulation is not what it should be. May I venture to make a suggestion? You need another little rest. These few Sundays by the sea, during the summer, haven’t amounted to much, of course. It’s the end of September, Travemünde is still open, there are still a few people there. Drive over, Senator, and sit on the beach a little. Two or three weeks will do you a great deal of good.” + 

And Thomas Buddenbrook said “yes” and “amen.” But when he told his family of the arrangement, Christian suggested going with him. + 

“I’ll go with you, Thomas,” he said, quite simply. “You don’t mind, I suppose.” And the Senator, though he did mind very much, said “yes” and “amen” to this arrangement as well. + 

Christian was now more than ever master of his own time. His fluctuating health had constrained him to give up his last undertaking, the champagne and spirit agency. The man who used to come and sit on his sofa and nod at him in the twilight had happily not recurred of late. But the misery in the side had, if anything, grown worse, and added to this was a whole list of other infirmities of which Christian kept the closest watch, and which he described in all companies, with his nose wrinkled up. He often suffered from that long-standing dread of paralysis of the tongue, throat, and oesophagus, even of the extremities and of the brain⁠—of which there were no actual symptoms, but the fear in itself was almost worse. He told in detail how, one day when he was making tea, he had held the lighted match not over the spirit-lamp, but over the open bottle of methylated spirit instead; so that not only himself, but the people in his own and the adjacent buildings, nearly went up in flames. And he dwelt in particular detail, straining every resource he had at his command to make himself perfectly clear, upon a certain ghastly anomaly which he had of late observed in himself. It was this: that on certain days, i.e., under certain weather conditions, and in certain states of mind, he could not see an open window without having a horrible and inexplicable impulse to jump out. It was a mad and almost uncontrollable desire, a sort of desperate foolhardiness. The family were dining on Sunday in Fishers’ Lane, and he described how he had to summon all his powers, and crawl on hands and knees to the window to shut it. At this point everybody shrieked; his audience rebelled, and would listen no more. + 

He told these and similar things with a certain horrible satisfaction. But the thing about himself which he did not know, which he never studied and described, but which none the less grew worse and worse, was his singular lack of tact. He told in the family circle anecdotes of such a nature that the club was the only possible place for them. And even his sense of personal modesty seemed to be breaking down. He was on friendly terms with his sister-in-law, Gerda. But when he displayed to her the beautiful weave and texture of his English socks, he did not stop at that, but rolled up his wide, checkered trouser-leg to far above the knee: “Look,” he said, wrinkling his nose in distress: “Look how thin I’m getting. Isn’t it striking and unusual?” And there he sat, sadly gazing at his crooked, bony leg and the gaunt knee visible through his white woollen drawers. + 

His mercantile activity then, was a thing of the past. But such hours as he did not spend at the club he liked to fill in with one sort of occupation or another; and he would proudly point out that he had never actually ceased to work. He extended his knowledge of languages and embarked upon a study of Chinese⁠—though this was for the sake of acquiring knowledge, simply, with no practical purpose in view. He worked at it industriously for two weeks. He was also, just at this time, occupied with a project of enlarging an English-German dictionary which he had found inadequate. But he really needed a little change, and it would be better too for the Senator to have somebody with him; so he did not allow his business to keep him in town. + 

The two brothers drove out together to the sea along the turnpike, which was nothing but a puddle. The rain drummed on the carriage-top, and they hardly spoke. Christian’s eyes roved hither and yon; he was as if listening to uncanny noises. Thomas sat muffled in his cloak, shivering, gazing with bloodshot eyes, his moustaches stiffly sticking out beyond his white cheeks. They drove up to the Kurhouse in the afternoon, their wheels grating in the wet gravel. Old Broker Gosch sat in the glass verandah, drinking rum punch. He stood up, whistling through his teeth, and they all sat down together to have a little something warm while the trunks were being carried up. + 

Herr Gosch was a late guest at the cure, and there were a few other people as well: an English family, a Dutch maiden lady, and a Hamburg bachelor, all of them presumably taking their rest before table-d’hôte, for it was like the grave everywhere but for the sound of the rain. Let them sleep! As for Herr Gosch, he was not in the habit of sleeping in the daytime. He was glad enough to get a few hours’ sleep at night. He was far from well; he was taking a late cure for the benefit of this trembling which he suffered from in all his limbs. Hang it, he could hardly hold his glass of grog; and more often than not he could not write at all⁠—so that the translation of Lope da Vega got on but slowly. He was in a very low mood indeed, and even his curses lacked relish. “Let it go hang!” was his constant phrase, which he repeated on every occasion and often on none at all. + 

And the Senator? How was he feeling? How long were the gentlemen thinking of stopping? + 

Oh, Dr. Langhals had sent him out on account of his nerves. He had obeyed orders, of course, despite the frightful weather⁠—what doesn’t one do out of fear of one’s physician? He was really feeling more or less miserable, and they would probably remain till there was a little improvement. + 

“Yes, I’m pretty wretched too,” said Christian, irritated at Thomas’s speaking only of himself. He was about to fetch out his repertoire⁠—the nodding man, the spirit-bottle, the open window⁠—when the Senator interrupted him by going to engage the rooms. + 

The rain did not stop. It washed away the earth, it danced upon the sea, which was driven back by the southwest wind and left the beaches bare. Everything was shrouded in grey. The steamers went by like wraiths and vanished on the dim horizon. + 

They met the strange guests only at table. The Senator, in mackintosh and goloshes, went walking with Gosch; Christian drank Swedish punch with the barmaid in the pastry-shop. + 

Two or three times in the afternoon it looked as though the sun were coming out; and a few acquaintances from town appeared⁠—people who enjoyed a holiday away from their families: Senator Dr. Gieseke, Christian’s friend, and Consul Peter Döhlmann, who looked very ill indeed, and was killing himself with Hunyadi-Janos water. The gentlemen sat together in their overcoats, under the awnings of the pastry-shop, opposite the empty bandstand, drinking their coffee, digesting their five courses, and talking desultorily as they gazed over the empty garden. + 

The news of the town⁠—the last high water, which had gone into the cellars and been so deep that in the lower part of the town people had to go about in boats; a fire in the dockyard sheds; a senatorial election⁠—these were the topics of conversation. Alfred Lauritzen, of the firm of Stürmann & Lauritzen, tea, coffee, and spice merchants, had been elected, and Senator Buddenbrook had not approved of the choice. He sat smoking cigarettes, wrapped in his cloak, almost silent except for a few remarks on this particular subject. One thing was certain, he said, and that was that he had not voted for Herr Lauritzen. Lauritzen was an honest fellow and a good man of business. There was no doubt of that; but he was middle-class, respectable middle-class. His father had fished herrings out of the barrel and handed them across the counter to servant-maids with his own hands⁠—and now they had in the Senate the proprietor of a retail business. His, Thomas Buddenbrook’s father had disowned his eldest son for “marrying a shop”; but that was in the good old days. “The standard is being lowered,” he said. “The social level is not so high as it was; the Senate is being democratized, my dear Gieseke, and that is no good. Business ability is one thing⁠—but it is not everything. In my view we should demand something more. Alfred Lauritzen, with his big feet and his boatswain’s face⁠—it is offensive to me to think of him in the Senate-house. It offends something in me, I don’t know what. It goes against my sense of form⁠—it is a piece of bad taste, in short.” + 

Senator Gieseke demurred. He was rather piqued by this expression of opinion. After all, he himself was only the son of a Fire Commissioner. No, the labourer was worthy of his hire. That was what being a republican meant. “You ought not to smoke so much, Buddenbrook,” he ended. “You won’t get any sea air.” + 

“I’ll stop now,” said Thomas Buddenbrook, flung away the end of his cigarette, and closed his eyes. + 

The conversation dragged on; the rain set in again and veiled the prospect. They began to talk about the latest town scandal⁠—about P. Philipp Kassbaum, who had been falsifying bills of exchange and now sat behind locks and bars. No one felt outraged over the dishonesty: they spoke of it as an act of folly, laughed a bit, and shrugged their shoulders. Senator Dr. Gieseke said that the convicted man had not lost his spirits. He had asked for a mirror, it seemed, there being none in his cell. “I’ll need a looking-glass,” he was reported to have said: “I shall be here for some time.” He had been, like Christian and Dr. Gieseke, a pupil of the lamented Marcellus Stengel. + 

They all laughed again at this, through their noses, without a sign of feeling. Siegismund Gosch ordered another grog in a tone of voice that was as good as saying, “What’s the use of living?” Consul Döhlmann sent for a bottle of brandy. Christian felt inclined to more Swedish punch, so Dr. Gieseke ordered some for both of them. Before long Thomas Buddenbrook began to smoke again. + 

And the idle, cynical, indifferent talk went on, heavy with the food they had eaten, the wine they drank, and the damp that depressed their spirits. They talked about business, the business of each one of those present; but even this subject roused no great enthusiasm. + 

“Oh, there’s nothing very good about mine,” said Thomas Buddenbrook heavily, and leaned his head against the back of his chair with an air of disgust. + 

“Well, and you, Döhlmann,” asked Senator Gieseke, and yawned. “You’ve been devoting yourself entirely to brandy, eh?” + 

“The chimney can’t smoke, unless there’s a fire,” the Consul retorted. “I look into the office every few days. Short hairs are soon combed.” + 

“And Strunck and Hagenström have all the business in their hands anyhow,” the broker said morosely, with his elbows sprawled out on the table and his wicked old grey head in his hands. + 

“Oh, nothing can compete with a dung-heap, for smell,” Döhlmann said, with a deliberately coarse pronunciation, which must have depressed everybody’s spirits the more by its hopeless cynicism. “Well, and you, Buddenbrook⁠—what are you doing now? Nothing, eh?” + 

“No,” answered Christian, “I can’t, any more.” And without more ado, having perceived the mood of the hour, he proceeded to accentuate it. He began, his hat on one side, to talk about his Valparaiso office and Johnny Thunderstorm. “Well, in that heat⁠—‘Good God! Work, Sir? No, Sir. As you see, Sir.’ And they puffed their cigarette-smoke right in his face. Good God!” It was, as always, an incomparable expression of dissolute, impudent, lazy good-nature. His brother sat motionless. + 

Herr Gosch tried to lift his glass to his thin lips, put it back on the table again, cursing through his shut teeth, and struck the offending arm with his fist. Then he lifted the glass once more, and spilled half its contents, draining the remainder furiously at a gulp. + 

“Oh, you and your shaking, Gosch!” Peter Döhlmann exclaimed. “Why don’t you just let yourself go, like me? I’ll croak if I don’t drink my bottle every day⁠—I’ve got as far as that; and I’ll croak if I do. How would you feel if you couldn’t get rid of your dinner, not a single day⁠—I mean, after you’ve got it in your stomach?” And he favoured them with some repulsive details of his condition, to which Christian listened with dreadful interest, wrinkling his nose as far as it could go and countering with a brief and forcible account of his “misery.” + 

It rained harder than ever. It came straight down in sheets and filled the silence of the Kurgarden with its ceaseless, forlorn, and desolate murmur. + 

“Yes, life’s pretty rotten,” said Senator Gieseke. He had been drinking heavily. + 

“I’d just as lief quit,” said Christian. + 

“Let it go hang,” said Herr Gosch. + 

“There comes Fike Dahlbeck,” said Senator Gieseke. The proprietress of the cow-stalls, a heavy, boldfaced woman in the forties, came by with a pail of milk and smiled at the gentlemen. + 

Senator Gieseke let his eyes rove after her. + 

“What a bosom,” he said. Consul Döhlmann added a lewd witticism, with the result that all the gentlemen laughed once more, through their noses. + 

The waiter was summoned. + 

“I’ve finished the bottle, Schröder,” said Consul Döhlmann. “May as well pay⁠—we have to some time or other. You, Christian? Gieseke pays for you, eh?” + 

Senator Buddenbrook roused himself at this. He had been sitting there, hardly speaking, wrapped in his cloak, his hands in his lap and his cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Now he suddenly started up and said sharply, “Have you no money with you, Christian? Then I’ll lend it to you.” + 

They put up their umbrellas and emerged from their shelter to take a little stroll. + 

Frau Permaneder came out once in a while to see her brother. They would walk as far as Seagull Rock or the little Ocean Temple; and here Tony Buddenbrook, for some reason or other, was always seized by a mood of vague excitement and rebellion. She would repeatedly emphasize the independence and equality of all human beings, summarily repudiate all distinctions of rank or class, use some very strong language on the subject of privilege and arbitrary power, and demand in set terms that merit should receive its just reward. And then she talked about her own life. She talked well, she entertained her brother capitally. This child of fortune, so long as she walked upon this earth, had never once needed to suppress an emotion, to choke down or swallow anything she felt. She had never received in silence either the blows or the caresses of fate. And whatever she had received, of joy or sorrow, she had straightway given forth again, in a flow of childish, self-important trivialities. Her digestion was not perfect, it is true. But her heart⁠—ah, her heart was light, her spirit was free; freer than she herself comprehended. She was not consumed by the inexpressible. No sorrow weighed her down, or strove to speak but could not. And thus it was that her past left no mark upon her. She knew that she had led a troubled life⁠—she knew it, that is, but at bottom she never believed in it herself. She recognized it as a fact, since everybody else believed it⁠—and she utilized it to her own advantage, talking of it and making herself great with it in her own eyes and those of others. With outraged virtue and dignity she would call by name all those persons who had played havoc with her life and, in consequence, with the prestige of the Buddenbrook family; the list had grown long with time: Teary Trietschke! Grünlich! Permaneder! Tiburtius! Weinschenk! the Hagenströms! the State Attorney! Severin!⁠—“What filoux, all of them, Thomas! God will punish them⁠—that is my firm belief.” + 

Twilight was falling as they came up to the Ocean Temple, for the autumn was far advanced. They stood in one of the little chambers facing the bay⁠—it smelled of wood, like the bathing cabins at the Kur, and its walls were scribbled over with mottoes, initials, hearts and rhymes. They stood and looked out over the dripping slope across the narrow, stony strip of beach, out to the turbid, restless sea. + 

“Great waves,” said Thomas Buddenbrook. “How they come on and break, come on and break, one after another, endlessly, idly, empty and vast! And yet, like all the simple, inevitable things, they soothe, they console, after all. I have learned to love the sea more and more. Once, I think, I cared more for the mountains⁠—because they lay farther off. Now I do not long for them. They would only frighten and abash me. They are too capricious, too manifold, too anomalous⁠—I know I should feel myself vanquished in their presence. What sort of men prefer the monotony of the sea? Those, I think, who have looked so long and deeply into the complexities of the spirit, that they ask of outward things merely that they should possess one quality above all: simplicity. It is true that in the mountains one clambers briskly about, while beside the sea one sits quietly on the shore. This is a difference, but a superficial one. The real difference is in the look with which one pays homage to the one and to the other. It is a strong, challenging gaze, full of enterprise, that can soar from peak to peak; but the eyes that rest on the wide ocean and are soothed by the sight of its waves rolling on forever, mystically, relentlessly, are those that are already wearied by looking too deep into the solemn perplexities of life.⁠—Health and illness, that is the difference. The man whose strength is unexhausted climbs boldly up into the lofty multiplicity of the mountain heights. But it is when one is worn out with turning one’s eyes inward upon the bewildering complexity of the human heart, that one finds peace in resting them on the wideness of the sea.” + 

Frau Permaneder was silent and uncomfortable⁠—as simple people are when a profound truth is suddenly expressed in the middle of a conventional conversation. People don’t say such things, she thought to herself; and looked out to sea so as not to show her feeling by meeting his eyes. Then, in the silence, to make amends for an embarrassment which she could not help, she drew his arm through hers. + 

VII + 

Winter had come, Christmas had passed. It was January, 1875. The snow, which covered the foot-walks in a firm-trodden mass, mingled with sand and ashes, was piled on either side of the road in high mounds that were growing greyer and more porous all the time, for the temperature was rising. The pavements were wet and dirty, the grey gables dripped. But above all stretched the heavens, a cloudless tender blue, while millions of light atoms seemed to dance like crystal motes in the air. + 

It was a lively sight in the centre of the town, for this was Saturday, and market-day as well. Under the pointed arches of the Town Hall arcades the butchers had their stalls and weighed out their wares red-handed. The fish-market, however, was held around the fountain in the market-square itself. Here fat old women, with their hands in muffs from which most of the fur was worn off, warming their feet at little coal-braziers, guarded their slippery wares and tried to cajole the servants and housewives into making purchases. There was no fear of being cheated. The fish would certainly be fresh, for the most of them were still alive. The luckiest ones were even swimming about in pails of water, rather cramped for space, but perfectly lively. Others lay with dreadfully goggling eyes and labouring gills, clinging to life and slapping the marble slab desperately with their tails⁠—until such time as their fate was at hand, when somebody would seize them and cut their throats with a crunching sound. Great fat eels writhed and wreathed about in extraordinary shapes. There were deep vats full of black masses of crabs from the Baltic. Once in a while a big flounder gave such a desperate leap that he sprang right off his slab and fell down upon the slippery pavement, among all the refuse, and had to be picked up and severely admonished by his possessor. + 

Broad Street, at midday, was full of life. Schoolchildren with knapsacks on their backs came along the street, filling it with laughter and chatter, snowballing each other with the half-melting snow. Smart young apprentices passed, with Danish sailor caps or suits cut after the English model, carrying their portfolios and obviously pleased with themselves for having escaped from school. Among the crowd were settled, grey-bearded, highly respectable citizens, wearing the most irreproachable national-liberal expression on their faces, and tapping their sticks along the pavement. These looked across with interest to the glazed-brick front of the Town Hall, where the double guard was stationed; for the Senate was in session. The sentries trod their beat, wearing their cloaks, their guns on their shoulders, phlegmatically stamping their feet in the dirty half-melted snow. They met in the centre of their beat, looked at each other, exchanged a word, turned, and moved away each to his own side. Sometimes a lieutenant would pass, his coat-collar turned up, his hands in his pockets, on the track of some grisette, yet at the same time permitting himself to be admired by young ladies of good family; and then each sentry would stand at attention in front of his box, look at himself from head to foot, and present arms. It would be a little time yet before they would perform the same salute before the members of the Senate, the sitting lasted some three quarters of an hour, it would probably adjourn before that. + 

But one of the sentries suddenly heard a short, discreet whistle from within the building. At the same moment the entrance was illumined by the red uniform of Uhlefeldt the beadle, with his dress sword and cocked hat. His air of preoccupation was simply enormous as he uttered a stealthy “Look out” and hastily withdrew. At the same moment approaching steps were heard on the echoing flags within. + 

The sentries front-faced, inflated their chests, stiffened their necks, grounded their arms, and then, with a couple of rapid motions, presented arms. Between them there had appeared, lifting his top-hat, a gentleman of scarcely medium height, with one light eyebrow higher than the other and the pointed ends of his moustaches extending beyond his pallid cheeks. Senator Thomas Buddenbrook was leaving the Town Hall today long before the end of the sitting. He did not take the street to his own house, but turned to the right instead. He looked correct, spotless, and elegant as, with the rather hopping step peculiar to him, he walked along Broad Street, constantly saluting people whom he met. He wore white kid gloves, and he had his stick with the silver handle under his left arm. A white dress tie peeped forth from between the lapels of his fur coat. But his head and face, despite their careful grooming, looked rather seedy. People who passed him noticed that his eyes were watering and that he held his mouth shut in a peculiar cautious way; it was twisted a little to one side, and one could see by the muscles of his cheeks and temples that he was clenching his jaw. Sometimes he swallowed, as if a liquid kept rising in his mouth. + 

“Well, Buddenbrook, so you are cutting the session? That is something new,” somebody said unexpectedly to him at the beginning of Mill Street. It was his friend and admirer Stephan Kistenmaker, whose opinion on all subjects was the echo of his own. Stephan Kistenmaker had a full greying beard, bushy eyebrows, and a long nose full of large pores. He had retired from the wine business a few years back with a comfortable sum, and his brother Eduard carried it on by himself. He lived now the life of a private gentleman; but, being rather ashamed of the fact, he always pretended to be overwhelmed with work. “I’m wearing myself out,” he would say, stroking his grey hair, which he curled with the tongs. “But what’s a man good for, but to wear himself out?” He stood hours on ’Change, gesturing imposingly, but doing no business. He held a number of unimportant offices, the latest one being Director of the city bathing establishments; but he also functioned as juror, broker, and executor, and laboured with such zeal that the perspiration dripped from his brow. + 

“There’s a session, isn’t there, Buddenbrook⁠—and you are taking a walk?” + 

“Oh, it’s you,” said the Senator in a low voice, moving his lips cautiously. “I’m suffering frightfully⁠—I’m nearly blind with pain.” + 

“Pain? Where?” + 

“Toothache. Since yesterday. I did not close my eyes last night. I have not been to the dentist yet, because I had business in the office this morning, and then I did not like to miss the sitting. But I couldn’t stand it any longer. I’m on my way to Brecht.” + 

“Where is it?” + 

“Here on the left side, the lower jaw. A back tooth. It is decayed, of course. The pain is simply unbearable. Goodbye, Kistenmaker. You can understand that I am in a good deal of a hurry.” + 

“Yes, of course⁠—don’t you think I am, too? Awful lot to do. Goodbye. Good luck! Have it out⁠—get it over with at once⁠—always the best way.” + 

Thomas Buddenbrook went on, biting his jaws together, though it made the pain worse to do so. It was a furious burning, boring pain, starting from the infected back tooth and affecting the whole side of the jaw. The inflammation throbbed like red-hot hammers; it made his face burn and his eyes water. His nerves were terribly affected by the sleepless night he had spent. He had had to control himself just now, lest his voice break as he spoke. + 

He entered a yellow-brown house in Mill Street and went up to the first storey, where a brass plate on the door said, “Brecht, Dentist.” He did not see the servant who opened the door. The corridor was warm and smelled of beefsteak and cauliflower. Then he suddenly inhaled the sharp odour of the waiting-room into which he was ushered. “Sit down! One moment!” shrieked the voice of an old woman. It was Josephus, who sat in his shining cage at the end of the room and regarded him sidewise out of his venomous little eyes. + 

The Senator sat down at the round table and tried to read the jokes in a volume of Fliegende Blätter, flung down the book, and pressed the cool silver handle of his walking-stick against his cheek. He closed his burning eyes and groaned. There was not a sound, except for the noise made by Josephus as he bit and clawed at the bars of his cage. Herr Brecht might not be busy; but he owed it to himself to make his patient wait a little. + 

Thomas Buddenbrook stood up precipitately and drank a glass of water from the bottle on the table. It tasted and smelled of chloroform. Then he opened the door into the corridor and called out in an irritated voice: if there were nothing very important to prevent it, would Herr Brecht kindly make haste⁠—he was suffering. + 

And immediately the bald forehead, hooked nose, and grizzled moustaches of the dentist appeared in the door of the operating-room. “If you please,” he said. “If you please,” shrieked Josephus. The Senator followed on the invitation. He was not smiling. “A bad case,” thought Herr Brecht, and turned pale. + 

They passed through the large light room to the operating-chair in front of one of the two largest windows. It was an adjustable chair with an upholstered headrest and green plush arms. As he sat down, Thomas Buddenbrook briefly explained what the trouble was. Then he leaned back his head and closed his eyes. + 

Herr Brecht screwed up the chair a bit and got to work on the tooth with a tiny mirror and a pointed steel instrument. His hands smelled of almond soap, his breath of cauliflower and beefsteak. + 

“We must proceed to extraction,” he said, after a while, and turned still paler. + 

“Very well, proceed, then,” said the Senator, and shut his eyes more tightly. + 

There was a pause. Herr Brecht prepared something at his chest of drawers and got out his instruments. Then he approached the chair again. + 

“I’ll paint it a little,” he said; and began at once to apply a strong-smelling liquid in generous quantities. Then he gently implored the patient to sit very still and open his mouth very wide⁠—and then he began. + 

Thomas Buddenbrook clutched the plush armrests with both his hands. He scarcely felt the forceps close around his tooth; but from the grinding sensation in his mouth, and the increasingly painful, really agonizing pressure on his whole head, he was made amply aware that the thing was under way. Thank God, he thought, now it can’t last long. The pain grew and grew, to limitless, incredible heights; it grew to an insane, shrieking, inhuman torture, tearing his entire brain. It approached the catastrophe. “Here we are,” he thought. “Now I must just bear it.” + 

It lasted three or four seconds. Herr Brecht’s nervous exertions communicated themselves to Thomas Buddenbrook’s whole body, he was even lifted up a little on his chair, and he heard a soft, squeaking noise coming from the dentist’s throat. Suddenly there was a fearful blow, a violent shaking as if his neck were broken, accompanied by a quick cracking, crackling noise. The pressure was gone, but his head buzzed, the pain throbbed madly in the inflamed and ill-used jaw; and he had the clearest impression that the thing had not been successful: that the extraction of the tooth was not the solution of the difficulty, but merely a premature catastrophe which only made matters worse. + 

Herr Brecht had retreated. He was leaning against his instrument-cupboard, and he looked like death. He said: “The crown⁠—I thought so.” + 

Thomas Buddenbrook spat a little blood into the blue basin at his side, for the gum was lacerated. He asked, half-dazed: “What did you think? What about the crown?” + 

“The crown broke off, Herr Senator. I was afraid of it.⁠—The tooth was in very bad condition. But it was my duty to make the experiment.” + 

“What next?” + 

“Leave it to me, Herr Senator.” + 

“What will you have to do now?” + 

“Take out the roots. With a lever. There are four of them.” + 

“Four. Then you must take hold and lift four times.” + 

“Yes⁠—unfortunately.” + 

“Well, this is enough for today,” said the Senator. He started to rise, but remained seated and put his head back instead. + 

“My dear Sir, you mustn’t demand the impossible of me,” he said. “I’m not very strong on my legs, just now. I have had enough for today. Will you be so kind as to open the window a little?” + 

Herr Brecht did so. “It will be perfectly agreeable to me, Herr Senator, if you come in tomorrow or next day, at whatever hour you like, and we can go on with the operation. If you will permit me, I will just do a little more rinsing and pencilling, to reduce the pain somewhat.” + 

He did the rinsing and pencilling, and then the Senator went. Herr Brecht accompanied him to the door, pale as death, expending his last remnant of strength in sympathetic shoulder-shruggings. + 

“One moment, please!” shrieked Josephus as they passed through the waiting-room. He still shrieked as Thomas Buddenbrook went down the steps. + 

With a lever⁠—yes, yes, that was tomorrow. What should he do now? Go home and rest, sleep, if he could. The actual pain in the nerve seemed deadened; in his mouth was only a dull, heavy burning sensation. Home, then. He went slowly through the streets, mechanically exchanging greetings with those whom he met; his look was absent and wandering, as though he were absorbed in thinking how he felt. + 

He got as far as Fishers’ Lane and began to descend the left-hand sidewalk. After twenty paces he felt nauseated. “I’ll go over to the public-house and take a drink of brandy,” he thought, and began to cross the road. But just as he reached the middle, something happened to him. It was precisely as if his brain was seized and swung around, faster and faster, in circles that grew smaller and smaller, until it crashed with enormous, brutal, pitiless force against a stony centre. He performed a half-turn, fell, and struck the wet pavement, his arms outstretched. + 

As the street ran steeply downhill, his body lay much lower than his feet. He fell upon his face, beneath which, presently, a little pool of blood began to form. His hat rolled a little way off down the road; his fur coat was wet with mud and slush; his hands, in their white kid gloves, lay outstretched in a puddle. + 

Thus he lay, and thus he remained, until some people came down the street and turned him over. + 

VIII + 

Frau Permaneder mounted the main staircase, holding up her gown in front of her with one hand and with the other pressing her muff to her cheek. She tripped and stumbled more than she walked; her cheeks were flushed, her capote sat crooked on her head, and little beads stood on her upper lip.⁠ ⁠… Though she met no one, she talked continually as she hurried up, in whispers out of which now and then a word rose clear and audible and emphasized her fear. “It’s nothing,” she said. “It doesn’t mean anything. God wouldn’t let anything happen. He knows what he’s doing, I’m very sure of that.⁠ ⁠… Oh, my God, I’ll pray every day⁠—” She prattled senselessly in her fear, as she rushed up to the second storey and down the corridor. + 

The door of the antechamber opened, and her sister-in-law came toward her. Gerda Buddenbrook’s lovely white face was quite distorted with horror and disgust; and her close-set, blue-shadowed brown eyes opened and shut with a look of anger, distraction, and shrinking. As she recognized Frau Permaneder, she beckoned quickly with outstretched arms and embraced her, putting her head on her sister-in-law’s shoulder. + 

“Gerda! Gerda! What is it?” Frau Permaneder cried. “What has happened? What does it mean? They said he fell⁠—unconscious? How is he?⁠—God won’t let the worst happen, I know. Tell me, for pity’s sake!” + 

But the reply did not come at once. She only felt how Gerda’s whole form was shaken. Then she heard a whisper at her shoulder. + 

“How he looked,” she heard, “when they brought him! His whole life long, he never let anyone see even a speck of dust on him.⁠—Oh, it is insulting, it is vile, for the end to have come like that!” + 

Subdued voices came out to them. The dressing-room door opened, and Ida Jungmann stood in the doorway in a white apron, a basin in her hands. Her eyes were red. She looked at Frau Permaneder and made way, her head bent. Her chin was trembling. + 

The high flowered curtains stirred in the draught as Tony, followed by her sister-in-law, entered the chamber. The smell of carbolic, ether, and other drugs met them. In the wide mahogany bed, under the red down coverlet, lay Thomas Buddenbrook, on his back, undressed and clad in an embroidered nightshirt. His half-open eyes were rolled up; his lips were moving under the disordered moustaches, and babbling, gurgling sounds came out. Young Dr. Langhals was bending over him, changing a bloody bandage for a fresh one, which he dipped into a basin at the bedside. Then he listened at the patient’s chest and felt his pulse. + 

On the bedclothes at the foot of the bed sat little Johann, clutching his sailor’s knot and listening broodingly to the sounds behind him, which his father was making. The Senator’s bemired clothing hung over a chair. + 

Frau Permaneder cowered down at the bedside, seized one of her brother’s hands⁠—it was cold and heavy⁠—and stared wildly into his face. She began to understand that, whether God knew what he was doing or not, he was at all events bent on “the worst”! + 

“Tom!” she clamoured, “do you know me? How are you? You aren’t going to leave us? You won’t go away from us? Oh, it can’t be!” + 

Nothing answered her, that could be called an answer. She looked imploringly up at Dr. Langhals. He stood there with his beautiful eyes cast down; and his manner, not without a certain self-satisfaction, expressed the will of God. + 

Ida Jungmann came back into the room, to make herself useful if she could. Old Dr. Grabow appeared in person, looked at the patient with his long, mild face, shook his head, pressed all their hands, and then stood as Dr. Langhals stood. The news had gone like the wind through the whole town. The vestibule door rang constantly, and inquiries after the Senator’s condition came up into the sick-chamber. It was unchanged⁠—unchanged. Everyone received the same answer. + 

The two physicians were in favour of sending for a sister of charity⁠—at least for the night. They sent for Sister Leandra, and she came. There was no trace of surprise or alarm in her face as she entered. Again she laid aside her leather bag, her outer hood and cloak, and again she set to work in her gentle way. + 

Little Johann sat hour after hour on the bedclothes, watching everything and listening to the gurgling noises. He was to have gone to an arithmetic lesson; but he understood perfectly that what was happening here was something over which the worsted-coats had no jurisdiction. He thought of his lessons only for a moment, and with scorn. He wept, sometimes, when Frau Permaneder came up and pressed him to her; but mostly he sat dry-eyed, with a shrinking, brooding gaze, and his breath came irregularly and cautiously, as if he expected any moment to smell that strange and yet familiar smell. + 

Toward four o’clock Frau Permaneder took a sudden resolve. She asked Dr. Langhals to come with her into the next room; and there she folded her arms and laid back her head, with the chin dropped. + 

“Herr Doctor,” she said, “there is one thing you can do, and I beg you to do it. Tell me the truth. I am a woman steeled by adversity; I have learned to bear the truth. You may depend upon me. Please tell me plainly: Will my brother be alive tomorrow?” + 

Dr. Langhals turned his beautiful eyes aside, looked at his fingernails, and spoke of our human powerlessness, and the impossibility of knowing whether Frau Permaneder’s brother would outlive the night, or whether he would be called away the next minute. + 

“Then I know what I have to do,” said she; went out of the room; and sent for Pastor Pringsheim. + 

Pastor Pringsheim appeared, without his vestments or neck-ruff, in a long black gown. He swept Sister Leandra with an icy stare, and seated himself in the chair which they placed for him by the bedside. He asked the patient to recognize and hear him. Then, as this appeal was unsuccessful, he addressed himself at once to God and prayed in carefully modulated tones, with his Frankish pronunciation, with emphasis now solemn and now abrupt, while waves of fanaticism and sanctimony followed each other across his face. He pronounced his r in a sleek and oily way peculiar to himself alone, and little Johann received an irresistible impression that he had just been eating rolls and coffee. + 

He said that he and the family there present no longer importuned God for the life of this dear and beloved sufferer, for they saw plainly that it was God’s will to take him to Himself. They only begged Him for the mercy of a gentle death. And then he recited, appropriately and with effect, two of the prayers customary on such occasions. Then he got up. He pressed Gerda Buddenbrook’s hand, and Frau Permaneder’s, and held little Johann’s head for a moment between both his hands, regarding the drooping eyelashes with an expression of the most fervent pity. He saluted Ida Jungmann, stared again at Sister Leandra, and took his leave. + 

Dr. Langhals had gone home for a little. When he came back there had been no change. He spoke with the nurse, and went again. Dr. Grabow came once more, to see that everything was being done. Thomas Buddenbrook went on babbling and gurgling, with his eyes rolled up. Twilight was falling. There was a pale winter glow at sunset, and it shone through the window upon the soiled clothing lying across the chair. + 

At five o’clock Frau Permaneder let herself be carried away by her feelings, and committed an indiscretion. She suddenly began to sing, in her throaty voice, her hands folded before her. + 

“Come, Lord,” + 

she sang, quite loud, and they all listened without stirring. + 

“Come, Lord, receive his failing breath; + 

Strengthen his hands and feet, and lead him unto death.” + 

But in the devoutness of her prayer, she thought only of the words as they welled up from her heart, and forgot that she did not know the whole stanza; after the third line she was left hanging in the air, and had to make up for her abrupt end by the increased dignity of her manner. Everybody shivered with embarrassment. Little Johann coughed so hard that the coughs sounded like sobs. And then, in the sudden pause, there was no sound but the agonizing gurgles of Thomas Buddenbrook. + 

It was a relief when the servant announced that there was something to eat in the next room. But they had only begun, sitting in Gerda’s bedroom, to take a little soup, when Sister Leandra appeared in the doorway and quietly beckoned. + 

The Senator was dying. He hiccuped gently two or three times, was silent, and ceased to move his lips. That was the only change. His eyes had been quite dead before. + 

Dr. Langhals, who was on the spot a few minutes later, put the black stethoscope to the heart, listened, and, after this scientific test, said “Yes, it is over.” + 

And Sister Leandra, with the forefinger of her gentle white hand, softly closed the eyes of the dead. + 

Then Frau Permaneder flung herself down on her knees by the bed, pressed her face into the coverlet, and wept aloud, surrendering herself utterly and without restraint to one of those refreshing bursts of feeling which her happy nature had always at its command. Her face still streamed with tears, but she was soothed and comforted and entirely herself as she rose to her feet and began straightway to occupy her mind with the announcements of the death⁠—an enormous number of elegant cards, which must be ordered at once. + 

Christian appeared. He had heard the news of the Senator’s stroke in the club, which he had left at once. But he was so afraid of seeing some awful sight that he went instead for a long walk outside the walls, and was not to be found. Now, however, he came in, and on the threshold heard of his brother’s death. + 

“It isn’t possible,” he said, and limped up the stairs, his eyes rolling wildly. + 

He stood at the bedside between his sister and his sister-in-law; with his bald head, his sunken cheeks, his drooping moustaches, and his huge beaked nose, he stood there on his bent legs, looking a little like an interrogation-point, and gazed with his little round deep eyes into his brother’s face, as it lay so silent, so cold, so detached and inaccessible. The corners of Thomas’s mouth were drawn down in an expression almost scornful. Here he lay, at whom once Christian had flung the reproach that he was too heartless to weep at a brother’s death. He was dead now himself: he had simply withdrawn, silent, elegant, and irreproachable, into the hereafter. He had, as so often in his life, left it to others to feel put in the wrong. No matter now, whether he had been right or wrong in his cold and scornful indifference toward his brother’s afflictions, the “misery,” the nodding man, the spirit-bottle, the open window. None of that mattered now; for death, with arbitrary and incomprehensible partiality, had singled him out, and taken him up, and given him an awesome dignity and importance. And yet Death had rejected Christian, had held him off, and would not have him at any price⁠—would only keep on making game of him and mocking him with all these tricks and antics which nobody took seriously. Never in his life had Thomas Buddenbrook so impressed his brother as at this hour. Success is so definite, so conclusive! Death alone can make others respect our sufferings; and through death the most pitiable sufferings acquire dignity. “You have won⁠—I give in,” Christian thought. He knelt on one knee, with a sudden awkward gesture, and kissed the cold hand on the coverlet. Then he stepped back and moved about the room, his eyes darting back and forth. + 

Other visitors came⁠—the old Krögers, the Misses Buddenbrook, old Herr Marcus. Poor Clothilde, lean and ashen, stood by the bed; her face was apathetic, and she folded her hands in their worsted gloves. “You must not think, Tony and Gerda,” said she, and her voice dragged very much, “that I’ve no feeling because I don’t weep. The truth is, I have no more tears.” And as she stood there, incredibly dry and withered, it was evident that she spoke the truth. + 

Then they all left the room to make way for an elderly female, an unpleasant old creature with a toothless, mumbling jaw, who had come to help Sister Leandra wash and dress the corpse. + 

Gerda Buddenbrook, Frau Permaneder, Christian, and little Johann sat under the big gas-lamp around the centre-table in the living-room, and worked industriously until far on into the evening. They were addressing envelopes and making a list of people who ought to receive announcements. Now and then somebody thought of another name. Hanno had to help, too; his handwriting was plain, and there was need of haste. + 

It was still in the house and in the street. The gas-lamp made a soft hissing noise; somebody murmured a name; the papers rustled. Sometimes they looked at each other and remembered what had happened. + 

Frau Permaneder scratched busily. But regularly once every five minutes she would put down her pen, lift her clasped hands up to her mouth, and break out in lamentations. “I can’t realize it!” she would cry⁠—meaning that she was gradually beginning to realize. “It is the end of everything,” she burst out another time, in sheer despair, and flung her arms around her sister-in-law’s neck with loud weeping. After each outburst she was strengthened, and took up her work again. + 

With Christian it was as with poor Clothilde. He had not shed a tear⁠—which fact rather mortified him. It was true, too, that his constant preoccupation with his own condition had used him up emotionally and made him insensitive. Now and then he would start up, rub his hand over his bald brow, and murmur, “Yes, it’s frightfully sad.” He said it to himself, with strong self-reproach, and did his best to make his eyes water. + 

Suddenly something happened to startle them all: little Johann began to laugh. He was copying a list of names, and had found one with such a funny sound that he could not resist it. He said it aloud and snorted through his nose, bent over, sobbed, and could not control himself. The grown people looked at him in bewildered incredulity; and his mother sent him up to bed. + 

IX + 

Senator Buddenbrook had died of a bad tooth. So it was said in the town. But goodness, people don’t die of a bad tooth! He had had a toothache; Herr Brecht had broken off the crown; and thereupon the Senator had simply fallen in the street. Was ever the like heard? + 

But however it had happened, that was no longer the point. What had next to be done was to send wreaths⁠—large, expensive wreaths which would do the givers credit and be mentioned in the paper: wreaths which showed that they came from people with sympathetic hearts and long purses. They were sent. They poured in from all sides, from organizations, from families and individuals: laurel wreaths, wreaths of heavily-scented flowers, silver wreaths, wreaths with black bows or bows with the colours of the City on them, or dedications printed in heavy black type or gilt lettering. And palms⁠—simply quantities of palms. + 

The flower-shops did an enormous business, not least among them being Iwersen’s, opposite the Buddenbrook mansion. Frau Iwersen rang many times in the day at the vestibule door, and handed in arrangements in all shapes and styles, from Senator This or That, or Consul So-and-So, from office staffs and civil servants. On one of these visits she asked if she might go up and see the Senator a minute. Yes, of course, she was told; and she followed Frau Permaneder up the main staircase, gazing silently at its magnificence. + 

She went up heavily, for she was, as usual, expecting. Her looks had grown a little common with the years; but the narrow black eyes and the Malay cheekbones had not lost their charm. One could still see that she must once have been exceedingly pretty. She was admitted into the salon, where Thomas Buddenbrook lay upon his bier. + 

He lay in the centre of the large, light room, the furniture of which had been removed, amid the white silk linings of his coffin, dressed in white silk, shrouded in white silk, in a thick and stupefying mingling of odours from the tube-roses, violets, roses, and other flowers with which he was surrounded. At his head, in a half-circle of silver candelabra, stood the pedestal draped in mourning, supporting the marble copy of Thorwaldsen’s Christ. The wreaths, garlands, baskets, and bunches stood or lay along the walls, on the floor, and on the coverlet. Palms stood around the bier and drooped over the feet of the dead. The skin of his face was abraded in spots, and the nose was bruised. But his hair was dressed with the tongs, as in life, and his moustache, too, had been drawn through the tongs for the last time by old Herr Wenzel, and stuck out stiff and straight beyond his white cheeks. His head was turned a little to one side, and an ivory cross was stuck between the folded hands. + 

Frau Iwersen remained near the door, and looked thence, blinking, over to the bier. Only when Frau Permaneder, in deep black, with a cold in her head from much weeping, came from the living-room through the portières and invited Frau Iwersen to come nearer, did she dare to venture a little farther forward on the parquetry floor. She stood with her hands folded across her prominent abdomen, and looked about her with her narrow black eyes: at the plants, the candelabra, the bows and the wreaths, the white silk, and Thomas Buddenbrook’s face. It would be hard to describe the expression on the pale, blurred features of the pregnant woman. Finally she said “Yes⁠—” sobbed just once, a brief confused sound, and turned away. + 

Frau Permaneder loved these visits. She never stirred from the house, but superintended with tireless zeal the homage that pressed about the earthly husk of her departed brother. She read the newspaper articles aloud many times in her throaty voice: those same newspapers which at the time of the jubilee had paid tribute to her brother’s merits, now mourned the irreparable loss of his personality. She stood at Gerda’s side to receive the visits of condolence in the living-room and there was no end of these; their name was legion. She held conferences with various people about the funeral, which must of course be conducted in the most refined manner. She arranged farewells: she had the office staff come in a body to bid their chief goodbye. The workmen from the granaries came too. They shuffled their huge feet along the parquetry floor, drew down the corners of their mouths to show their respect, and emanated an odour of chewing tobacco, spirits, and physical exertion. They looked at the dead lying in his splendid state, twirled their caps, first admired and then grew restive, until at length one of them found courage to go, and the whole troop followed shuffling on his heels. Frau Permaneder was enchanted. She asserted that some of them had tears running down into their beards. This simply was not the fact; but she saw it, and it made her happy. + 

The day of the funeral dawned. The metal casket was hermetically sealed and covered with flowers, the candles burned in their silver holders, the house filled with people, and, surrounded by mourners from near and far, Pastor Pringsheim stood at the head of the coffin in upright majesty, his impressive head resting upon his ruff as on a dish. + 

A high-shouldered functionary, a brisk intermediate something between a waiter and a majordomo, had in charge the outward ordering of the solemnity. He ran with the softest speed down the staircase and called in a penetrating whisper across the entry, which was filled to overflowing with tax-commissioners in uniform and grain-porters in blouses, knee-breeches, and tall hats: “The rooms are full, but there is a little room left in the corridor.” + 

Then everything was hushed. Pastor Pringsheim began to speak. He filled the whole house with the rolling periods of his exquisitely modulated, sonorous voice. He stood there near the figure of Thorwaldsen’s Christ and wrung his hands before his face or spread them out in blessing; while below in the street, before the house door, beneath a white wintry sky, stood the hearse drawn by four black horses, with the other carriages in a long row behind it. A company of soldiers with grounded arms stood in two rows opposite the house door, with Lieutenant von Throta at their head. He held his drawn sword on his arm and looked up at the bow-window with his brilliant eyes. Many people were craning their necks from windows nearby or standing on the pavements to look. + 

At length there was a stir in the vestibule, the lieutenant’s muffled word of command sounded, the soldiers presented arms with a rattle of weapons, Herr von Throta let his sword sink, and the coffin appeared. It swayed cautiously forth of the house door, borne by the four men in black cloaks and cocked hats, and a gust of perfume came with it, wafted over the heads of bystanders. The breeze ruffled the black plumes on top of the hearse, tossed the manes of the horses standing in line down to the river, and dishevelled the mourning hat-scarves of the coachmen and grooms. Enormous single flakes of snow drifted down from the sky in long slanting curves. + 

The horses attached to the hearse, all in black trappings so that only their restless rolling eyeballs could be seen, now slowly got in motion. The hearse moved off, led by the four black servants. The company of soldiers fell in behind, and one after another the coaches followed on. Christian Buddenbrook and the pastor got into the first; little Johann sat in the second, with a well-fed Hamburg relative. And slowly, slowly, with mournful long-drawn pomp, Thomas Buddenbrook’s funeral train wound away, while the flags at half-mast on all the houses flapped before the wind. The office staff and the grain-porters followed on foot. + 

The casket, with the mourners behind, followed the well-known cemetery paths, past crosses and statues and chapels and bare weeping-willows, to the Buddenbrook family lot, where the military guard of honour already stood, and presented arms again. A funeral march sounded in subdued and solemn strains from behind the shrubbery. + 

Once more the heavy gravestone, with the family arms in relief, had been moved to one side; and once more the gentlemen of the town stood there, on the edge of the little grove, beside the abyss walled in with masonry into which Thomas Buddenbrook was now lowered to join his fathers. They stood there with bent heads, these worthy and well-to-do citizens: prominent among them were the Senators, in white gloves and cravats. Beyond them was the throng of officials, clerks, grain-porters, and warehouse labourers. + 

The music stopped. Pastor Pringsheim spoke. While his voice, raised in blessing, still lingered on the air, everybody pressed round to shake hands with the brother and son of the deceased. + 

The ceremony was long and tedious. Christian Buddenbrook received all the condolences with his usual absent, embarrassed air. Little Johann stood by his side, in his heavy reefer jacket with the gilt buttons, and looked at the ground with his blue-shadowed eyes. He never looked up, but bent his head against the wind with a sensitive twist of all his features. + 