There was Christian in Hamburg. His partner, Herr Burmeester, had died quite suddenly of an apoplectic stroke, in the spring of the year 1858. His heirs drew their money out of the business, and the Consul strongly advised Christian against trying to continue it with his own means, for he knew how difficult it is to carry on a business already established on definite lines if the working capital be suddenly diminished. But Christian insisted upon the continuation of his independence. He took over the assets and the liabilities of H. C. F. Burmeester and Company, and trouble was to be looked for.

Then there was the Consul’s sister Clara in Riga. Her marriage with Pastor Tiburtius had remained unblest with children—but then, as Clara Buddenbrook she had never wanted children, and probably had very little talent for motherhood. Now her husband wrote that her health left much to be desired. The severe headaches from which she had suffered even as a girl were now recurring periodically, to an almost unbearable extent.

That was disquieting. And even here at home there was another source of worry—for, as yet, there was no certainty whatever that the family name would live. Gerda treated the subject with sovereign indifference which came very near to being repugnance. Thomas concealed his anxiety. But the old Frau Consul took the matter in hand and consulted Grabow.

“Doctor—just between ourselves—something is bound to happen sometime, isn’t it? A little mountain air at Kreuth, a little seashore at Glucksberg or Travemünde—but they don’t seem to work. What do you advise?” Dr. Grabow’s pleasant old prescription: “a nourishing diet, a little pigeon, a slice of French bread,” didn’t seem strong enough, either, to fit the case. He ordered Pyrmont and Schlangenbad.

Those were three worries. And Tony? Poor Tony!

CHAPTER VIII

She wrote: “…And when I say ‘croquettes,’ she doesn’t understand me, because here they are called ‘meaties’; and when she says ‘broccoli,’ how could any Christian know she means cauliflower? When I say ‘baked potatoes,’ she screams ‘How?’ at me, until I remember to say ‘roast potatoes,’ which is what they call them here. ‘How’ means ‘What did you say?’ And she is the second one I’ve had—I sent away the first one, named Katy, because she was so impertinent—or at least, I thought she was. I’m getting to see now that I may have been mistaken, for I’m never quite sure whether people here mean to be rude or friendly. This one’s name is Babette. She has a very pleasing exterior, with something southern, the way of some of them have here; black hair and eyes, and teeth that any one might envy. She is willing, too, and I am teaching her how to make some of our home dishes. Yesterday we had sorrel and currants, but I wish I hadn’t, for Permaneder objected so much to the sorrel—he picked the currants out with a fork—that he would not speak to me the whole afternoon, but just growled; and I can tell you, Mother, that life is not so easy.”

Alas, it was not only the sorrel and the “meaties” that were embittering Tony’s life. Before the honeymoon was over she had had a blow so unforeseen, so unexpected, so incomprehensible, that it took away all her joy in life. She could not get over it. And here it was.

Not until after the Permaneder couple had been some weeks in Munich had Consul Buddenbrook liquidated the sum fixed by his Father’s will as his sister’s second marriage portion. That sum, translated into gulden, had at last safely reached Herr Permaneder’s hands, and Herr Permaneder had invested it securely and not unprofitably. But then, what he had said, quite unblushingly and without embarrassment, to his wife, was this: “Tonerl”—he called her “Tonerl”—“Tonerl, that’s good enough for me. What do we want of more? I been working my hide off all my days; now I’d like to sit down and have a little peace and quiet, damned if I wouldn’t. Let’s rent the parterre and the second floor, and still we’ll have a good house, where we can sit and eat our bit of pig’s meat without screwing ourselves up and putting on so much lug. And in the evening I can go to the Hofbräu house. I’m no swell—I don’t care about scraping money together. I want my comfort. I quit to-morrow and go into private life.”

“Permaneder!” she had cried; and for the first time she had spoken his name with that peculiar throaty sound which her voice always had when she uttered the name of Grünlich.

“Oh, shut up! Don’t take on!” was all he answered. There had followed, thus early in their life together, a quarrel, serious and violent enough to endanger the happiness of any marriage. He came off victorious. Her passionate resistance was shattered upon his urgent longing for “peace and quiet.” It ended in Herr Permaneder’s withdrawing the capital he had in the hop business, so that now Herr Noppe, in his turn, could strike the “and Company” off his card. After which Tony’s husband, like most of the friends whom he met around the table in the Hofbräu House, to play cards and drink his regular three litres of beer, limited his activities to the raising of rents in his capacity of landlord, and to an undisturbed cutting of coupons.

The Frau Consul was notified quite simply of this fact. But Frau Permaneder’s distress was evident in the letters which she wrote to her brother. Poor Tony! Her worst fears were more than realized. She had always known that Herr Permaneder possessed none of that “resourcefulness” of which her first husband had had so much; but that he would so entirely confound the expectations she had expressed to Mamsell Jungmann on the eve of her betrothal—that he would so completely fail to recognize the duties he had taken upon himself when he married a Buddenbrook—that she had never dreamed.

But these feelings must be overcome; and her family at home saw from her letters how she resigned herself. She lived on rather monotonously with her husband and Erica, who went to school; she attended to her housekeeping, kept up friendly relations with the people who rented the parterre and the first storey and with the Niederpaur family in Marienplatz; and she wrote now and then of going to the theatre with her friend Eva. Herr Permaneder did not care for the theatre. And it came out that he had grown to more than forty years of age in his beloved Munich without ever having seen the inside of the Pinakothek.

Time passed. But Tony could feel no longer any true happiness in her new life, since the day when Herr Permaneder received her dowry and settled himself down to enjoy his ease. Hope was no more. She would never be able to write home to announce new ventures and new successes. Just as life was now—free from cares, it was true, but so limited, so lamentably “unrefined,”—just so it would remain until the end. It weighed upon her. It was plain from her letters that this very lowness of tone was making it harder for her to adapt herself to the south-German surroundings. In small matters, of course, things grew easier. She learned to make herself understood by the servants and errand-boys, to say “meaties” instead of “croquettes,” and to set no more fruit soup before her husband after the one he had called a “sickening mess.” But, in general, she remained a stranger in her new home; and she never ceased to taste the bitterness of the knowledge that to be a born Buddenbrook was not to enjoy any particular prestige in her adopted home. She once related in a letter the story of how she met in the street a mason’s apprentice, carrying a mug of beer in one hand and holding a large white radish by its tail in the other; who, waving his beer, said jovially: “Neighbour, can ye tell us the time?” She made a joke of it, in the telling; yet even so, a strong undercurrent of irritation betrayed itself. You might be quite certain that she threw back her head and vouchsafed to the poor man neither answer nor glance in his direction. But it was not alone this lack of formality and absence of distinctions that made her feel strange and unsympathetic. She did not live deeply, it is true, into the life or affairs of her new home; hut she breathed the Munich air, the air of a great city, full of artists and citizens who habitually did nothing: an air with something about it a little demoralizing, which she sometimes found it hard to take good-humouredly.

The days passed. And then it seemed that there was after all a joy in store—in fact, the very one which was longed for in vain in Broad Street and Meng Street. For not long after the New Year of 1859 Tony felt certain that she was again to become a mother.

The joy of it trembled in her letters, which were full of the old childish gaiety and sense of importance. The Frau Consul, who, with the exception of the summer holiday, confined her journeyings more and more to the Baltic coast, lamented that she could not be with her daughter at this time. Tom and Gerda made plans to go to the christening, and Tony’s head was full of giving them an elegant reception. Alas, poor Tony! The visit which took place was sad indeed, and the christening—Tony had cherished visions of a ravishing little feast, with flowers, sweetmeats, and chocolate—never took place at all. The child, a little girl, only entered into life for a tiny quarter of an hour; then, though the doctor did his best to set the pathetic little mechanism going, it faded out of being.

Consul Buddenbrook and his wife arrived in Munich to find Tony herself not out of danger. She was far more ill than before, and a nervous weakness from which she had already suffered prevented her from taking any nourishment at all for several days. Then she began to eat, and on their departure, the Buddenbrooks felt reassured as far as her health was concerned. But in other ways there was much reason for anxiety; for it had been all too plain, especially to the Consul’s observant eye, that not even their common loss would suffice to bring husband and wife together again.

There was nothing against Herr Permaneder’s good heart. He was truly shaken by the death of the child; big tears rolled down out of his bulging eyes upon his puffy cheeks and on into his frizzled beard. Many times he sighed deeply and gave vent to his favourite expression. But, after all, Tony felt that his “peace and quiet” had not suffered any long interruption. After a few evenings, he sought the Hofbräu House for consolation, and was soon, as he always said, “muddling along” again in his old, good-natured, comfortable, grumbling way, with the easy fatalism natural to him.

But from now on Tony’s letters never lost their hopeless, even complaining tone. “Oh, Mother,” she wrote, “why do I have to bear everything like this? First Grünlich and the bankruptcy, and then Permaneder going out of business—and then the baby! How have I deserved all these misfortunes?”

When the Consul read these outpourings, he could never quite forego a little smile: for, notwithstanding all the real pain they showed, he heard an undertone of almost comic pride, and he knew that Tony Buddenbrook, as Madame Grünlich or as Madame Permaneder, was and would remain a child. She bore all her mature experiences almost with a child’s unbelief in their reality, yet with a child’s seriousness, a child’s self-importance, and, above all, with a child’s power to throw them off at will.

She could not understand how she had deserved her misfortunes; for even while she mocked at her mother’s piety, she herself was so full of it that she fervently believed in justice and righteousness on this earth.

Poor Tony! The death of her second child was neither the last nor the hardest blow that fell upon her. As the year 1859 drew to a close, something frightful indeed happened.

CHAPTER IX

It was a day toward the end of November—a cold autumn day with a hazy sky. It looked almost as if there would be snow, and a mist was rising, pierced through every now and then by the sun. It was one of those days, common in a seaport town, when a sharp north-east wind whistled round the massive church corners and influenzas were to be had cheap.

Consul Thomas Buddenbrook entered the breakfast-room toward midday, to find his Mother, with her spectacles on her nose, bent over a paper on the table.

“Tom,” she said; and she looked at him, holding the paper with both hands, as if she hesitated to show it to him. “Don’t be startled. But it is not very good news. I don’t understand—It is from Berlin. Something must have happened.”

“Give it to me, please,” he said shortly. He lost colour, and the muscles stood out on his temples as he clenched his teeth. His gesture as he stretched out his hand was so full of decision that it was as if he said aloud: “Just tell me quickly. Don’t prepare me for it!”

He read the lines still standing; one of his light eyebrows went up, and he drew the long ends of his moustache through his fingers. It was a telegram, and it said: “Don’t be frightened. Am coming at once with Erica. All is over. Your unhappy Antonie.”

“ ‘At once . . . at once,’ ” he said, with irritation, looking at the Frau Consul and giving his head a quick shake. “What does she mean by ‘at once’?”

“That is just a way of putting it, Tom; it doesn’t mean anything particular. She means by the next train, or something like that.”

“And from Berlin! What is she doing in Berlin? How did she get to Berlin?”

“I don’t know, Tom; I don’t understand it. The dispatch only came ten minutes ago. But something must have happened, and we must just wait to see what it is. God in his mercy will turn it all to good. Sit down, my son, and eat your luncheon.”

“He took his chair, and mechanically he poured out a glass of porter.

“ ‘All is over,’ ” he repeated. And then “ ‘Antonie.’ How childish!”

He ate and drank in silence.

After a while the Frau Consul ventured to say: “It must be something about Permaneder, don’t you think, Tom?”

He shrugged his shoulders without looking up.

As he went away he said, with his hand on the door-knob, “Well, we must wait and see. As she is not likely to burst into the house in the middle of the night, she will probably reach here some time to-morrow. You will let me know, won't you?”

The Frau Consul waited from hour to hour. She had slept very badly, and in the night she rang for Ida Jungmann, who now slept in the back room of the entresol. She had Ida make her some eau sucrée; and she sat up in bed for a long time and embroidered. And now the forenoon passed in nervous expectancy. When the Consul came to second breakfast, he said that Tony could not arrive before the three-thirty-three train from Buchen. At that hour the Frau Consul seated herself in the landscape-room and tried to read, out of a book with a black leather cover decorated with a gold palm-leaf.

It was a day like its predecessor: cold, mist, wind. The stove crackled away behind its wrought iron screen. The old lady trembled and looked out of the window whenever she heard a wagon. At four o’clock, when she had stopped watch ing and almost stopped thinking about her daughter, there was a stir below in the house. She hastily turned toward the window and wiped away the damp with her handkerchief. Yes, a carriage had stopped below, and some one was coming up the steps.

She grasped the arms of her chair with both hands to rise. But then she thought better of it and sank back, She only turned her head as her daughter entered, and her face wore an almost defensive expression. Tony burst impetuously into the room: Erica remained outside at the glass door, with her hand in Ida Jungmann’s.

Frau Permaneder wore a fur wrap and a large felt hat with a veil. She looked very pale and ailing, and her upper lip trembled as it used to when the little Tony was about to weep. Her eyes were red. She raised her arms and let them drop, and then she fell on her knees at her Mother’s side, burying her face in the folds of her gown and sobbing bitterly. It was as though she had rushed straight hither from Munich all in one breath, and now lay there, having gained the goal of her headlong flight, exhausted but safe. The Frau Consul sat a moment quite still.

“Tony!” she said then, with gentle remonstrance. She drew the long hatpins out of Frau Permaneder’s hat and laid it on the window-seat; then she stroked gently and soothingly her daughter’s thick ash-blonde hair.

“What is it, my child? What has happened?”

But she saw that patience was her only weapon; for it was long before her question drew out any reply.

“Mother!” uttered Frau Permaneder. “Mamma!” But that was all.

The Frau Consul looked toward the glass door and, still embracing her daughter, stretched out her hand to her grandchild, who stood there shyly with her finger to her mouth.

“Come, child; come here and say how do you do. You have grown so big, and you look so strong and well, for which God be thanked. How old are you now, Erica?”

“Thirteen, Grandmamma.”

“Good gracious! A young lady!” She kissed the little maiden over Tony’s head and told her: “Go up with Ida now—we shall soon have dinner. Just now Mamma and I want to talk.”

They were alone.

“Now, my dear Tony? Can you not stop crying? When God sends us a heavy trial, we must bear it with composure. ‘Take your cross upon you,’ we are told. Would you like to go up first and rest a little and refresh yourself, and then come down to me again? Our good Jungmann has your room ready. Thanks for your telegram—of course, it shocked us a good deal—”

She stopped. For Tony’s voice came, all trembling and smothered, out of the folds of her gown: “He is a wicked man—a wicked man! Oh, he is—”

Frau Permaneder seemed not able to get away from this dreadful phrase. It possessed her altogether. She buried her face deeper and deeper in the Frau Consul’s lap and clenched her fist beside the Frau Consul’s chair.

“Do you mean your husband, my child?” asked the old lady, after a pause. “It ought not to be possible for me to have such a thought in my mind, I know; but you leave me nothing else to think, Tony. Has Herr Permaneder done you an injury? Are you making a complaint of him?”

“Babette” Frau Permaneder brought out. “Babette—”

“Babette?” repeated the Frau Consul, inquiringly. Then she leaned back in her chair, and her pale eyes wandered toward the window. She understood now. There was a pause, broken by Tony’s gradually decreasing sobs.

“Tony,” said the Frau Consul after a little space, “I see now that there has been an injury done you—that you have cause to complain. But was it necessary to give the sense of injury such violent expression? Was it necessary to travel here from Munich, with Erica, and to make it appear—for other people will not be so sensible as we are—that you have left him permanently; that you will not go back to him?”

“But I won't go back to him—never!” cried Frau Permaneder, and she lifted up her head with a jerk and looked at her Mother wildly with tear-stained eyes, and then buried her face again. The Frau Consul affected not to have heard.

“But now,” she went on, in a louder key, slowly nodding her head from one side to the other, “now that you are here, I am glad you are. For you can unburden your heart, and tell me everything, and then we shall see how we can put things right, by taking thought, and by mutual forbearance and affection.”

“Never,” Tony said again. “Never!” And then she told her story. It was not all intelligible, for she spoke into the folds of her Mother’s stuff gown, and broke into her own narrative with explosions of passionate anger. But what had happened was somewhat as follows:

On the night of the twenty-fourth of the month, Madame Permaneder had gone to sleep very late, having been disturbed during the day by the nervous digestive trouble to which she was subject. She had been awakened about midnight, out of a light slumber, by a confused and continuous noise outside on the landing—a half-suppressed, mysterious noise, in which one distinguished the creaking of the stairs, a sort of giggling cough, smothered, protesting words, and, mixed with these, the most singular snarling sounds. But there was no doubt whence they proceeded. Frau Permaneder had hardly, with her sleepy senses, taken them in before she interpreted them as well, in such a way that she felt the blood leave her cheeks and rush to her heart, which contracted and then went on beating with heavy, oppressed pulsations. For a long, dreadful minute she lay among the pillows as if stunned, as if paralysed. Then, as the shameless disturbance did not stop, she had with trembling hands kindled a light, had left her bed, thrilling with horror, repulsion, and despair, had opened the door and hurried out on to the landing in her slippers, the light in her hand—to the top of the “ladder” that went straight up from the house door to the first storey. And there, on the upper steps, in all its actuality, was indeed the very scene she had pictured in her mind’s eye as she listened to the compromising noises. It was an unseemly and indecent scuffle, a sort of wrestling match between Babette the cook and Herr Permaneder. The girl must have been busied late about the house, for she had her bunch of keys and her candle in her hand as she swayed back and forth in the effort to fend her master off. He, with his hat on the back of his head, held her round the body and kept making essays, now and then successfully, to press his face, with its great walrus moustache, against hers. As Antonie appeared, Babette exclaimed something that sounded like “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”—and “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” echoed Herr Permaneder likewise, as he let go. Almost in the same second the girl vanished, and there was Herr Permaneder left standing before his wife, with drooping head, drooping arms, drooping moustaches too; and all he could get out was some idiotic remark like “Holy Cross, what a mess!” When he ventured to lift his eyes, she was no longer there. She was in the bed-chamber, half-sitting, half-lying on the bed, repeating over and over again with frantic sobbing, “Shame, shame!” He leaned rather flabbily in the doorway and jerked his shoulder in her direction—had he been closer, the gesture would have been a nudge in the ribs. “Hey, Tonerl—don’t be a fool, you know. Say—you know Franz, the Ramsau Franz, he had his name-day to-day, and we're all half-seas over.” Strong alcoholic fumes pervaded the room as he spoke; and they brought Frau Permaneder’s excitement to a climax. She sobbed no more, she was no longer weak and faint. Carried away by frenzy, incapable of measuring her words, she poured out her disgust, her abhorrence, her complete and utter contempt and loathing of him and all his ways. Herr Permaneder did not take it meekly. His head was hot; for he had treated his friend Franz not only to many beers, but to “champagne wine” as well. He answered and answered wildly—the quarrel reached a height far greater than the one that had signalized Herr Permaneder’s retirement into private life, and it ended in Frau Antonie gathering her clothes together and withdrawing into the living-room for the night. And at the end he had flung at her a word—a word which she would not repeat—a word that should never pass her lips—a word . . .

This was the major content of the confession which Frau Permaneder had sobbed into the folds of her mother’s gown. But the “word,” the word that in that fearful night had sunk into her very depths—no, she would not repeat it; no, she would not, she asseverated,—although her mother had not in the least pressed her to do so, but only nodded her head, slowly, almost imperceptibly, as she looked down on Tony’s lovely ash-blond hair.

“Yes, yes,” she said; “this is very sad, Tony. And I understand it all, my dear little one, because I am not only your Mamma, but I am a woman like you as well. I see now how fully your grief is justified, and how completely your husband, in a moment of weakness, forgot what he owed to you and—”

“In a moment—?” cried Tony. She sprang up. She made two steps backward and feverishly dried her eyes. “A moment, Mamma! He forgot what he owed to me and to our name? He never knew it, from the very beginning! A man that quietly sits down with his wife’s dowry—a man without ambition or energy or will-power! A man that has some kind of thick soup made out of hops in his veins instead of blood—and I verily believe he has! And to let himself down to such common doings as this with Babette—and when I reproached him with his good-for-nothingness, to answer with a word that—a word—”

And, arrived once more at the word, the word she would not repeat, quite suddenly she took a step forward and said, in a completely altered, a quieter, milder, interested tone: “How perfectly sweet! Where did you get that, Mamma?” She motioned with her chin toward a little receptacle, a charming basket-work stand woven out of reeds and decorated with ribbon bows, in which the Frau Consul kept her fancy-work.

“I bought it, some time ago,” answered the old lady. “I needed it.”

“Very smart,” Tony said, looking at it with her head on one side. The Frau Consul looked at it too, but without seeing it, for she was in deep thought.

“Now, my dear daughter,” she said at last, putting out her hand again, “however things are, you are here, and welcome a hundred times to your old home. We can talk everything over when we are calmer. Take your things off in your room and make yourself comfortable. Ida!” she called into the dining-room, lifting her voice, “lay a place for Madame Permaneder, and one for Erica, my dear.”

CHAPTER X

Tony returned to her bed-chamber after dinner. During the meal her Mother had told her that Thomas was aware of her expected arrival; and she did not seem particularly anxious to meet him.

The Consul came at six o’clock. He went into the landscape-room and had a long talk with his Mother.

“How is she?” he asked. “How does she seem?”

“Oh, Tom, I am afraid she is very determined. She is terribly wrought up. And this word—if I only knew what it was he said—”

“I will go up and see her.”

“Yes, do, Tom. But knock softly, so as not to startle her, and be very calm, will you? Her nerves are upset. That is the trouble she has with her digestion—she has eaten nothing. Do talk quietly with her.”

He went up quickly, skipping a step in his usual way. He was thinking, and twisting the ends of his moustache, but as he knocked his face cleared—he was resolved to handle the situation as long as possible with humour.

A suffering voice said “Come in,” and he opened the door, to find Frau Permaneder lying on the bed fully dressed. The bed curtains were flung back, the down quilt was underneath her back, and a medicine bottle stood on the night-table. She turned round a little and propped her head on her hand, looking at him with her pouting smile. He made a deep bow and spread out his hands in a solemn gesture.

“Well, dear lady! To what are we indebted for the honour of a visit from this personage from the royal city of—?”

“Oh, give me a kiss, Tom,” she said, sat up to offer him her cheek, and then sank back again. “Well, how are you, my dear boy? Quite unchanged, I see, since I saw you in Munich.”

“You can’t tell much about it with the blinds down, my dear. And you ought not to steal my thunder like that, either. It is more suitable for me to say—” he held her hand in his, and at the same time drew up a chair beside the bed—“as I so often have, that you and Tilda—”

“Oh, for shame, Tom!—How is Tilda?”

“Well, of course. Madame Krauseminz sees she doesn’t starve. Which doesn’t prevent her eating for the week ahead when she comes here on Thursday.”

She laughed very heartily—as she had not for a long time back, in fact. Then she broke off with a sigh, and asked “And how is business?”

“Oh, we get on. Mustn’t complain.”

“Thank goodness, here everything is as it should be. Oh, Tom, I don’t feel much like chatting pleasantly about trifles!”

“Pity. One should preserve one’s sense of humour, quand même.”

“All that is at an end, Tom.—You know all?”

“ ‘You know all’!” he repeated. He dropped her hand and pushed back his chair. “Goodness gracious, how that sounds! ‘All’! What-all lies in that ‘all’? ‘My love and grief I gave thee,’ eh? No, listen!”

She was silent, She swept him with an astonished and deeply offended glance.

“Yes, I expected that look,” he said, “for without that look you would not be here. But, dear Tony, let me take the thing as much too lightly as you take it too seriously. You will see we shall complement each other very nicely—”

“Too seriously, Thomas? I take it too seriously?”

“Yes.—For heaven’s sake, don’t let’s make a tragedy of it! Let us take it in a lower key, not with ‘all is at an end’ and ‘your unhappy Antonie.’ Don’t misunderstand me, Tony. You well know that no one can be gladder than I that you have come. I have long wished you would come to us on a visit by yourself, without your husband, so that we could be en famille together once more. But to come now, like this—my dear child, I beg your pardon, but it was—foolish. Yes—let me finish! Permaneder has certainly behaved very badly, as I will give him to understand pretty clearly—don’t be afraid of that—”

“As to how he has behaved himself, Thomas,” she interrupted him, raising herself up to lay a hand upon her breast, “as far as that goes, I have already given him to understand that—and not only ‘given him to understand,’ I can tell you! I am convinced that further discussion with that man is entirely out of place.” And she let herself fall back again and looked sternly and fixedly at the ceiling.

He bowed, as if under the weight of her words, and kept on looking down at his knee and smiling.

“Well, then, I won’t send him a stiff letter. It is just as you say. In the end it is after all your affair, and it is quite enough if you put him in his place—it is your duty as his wife. After all, there are some extenuating circumstances. There was a birthday celebration, and he came home a little bit exalted, so to speak, and was guilty of a false step, an unseemly blunder—”

“Thomas,” said she, “I do not understand you. I do not understand your tone. You—a man with your principles! But you did not see him. You did not see how drunk he looked—”

“He looked ridiculous enough, I’m sure. But that is it, Tony. You will not see how comic it was—but probably that is the fault of your bad digestion. You caught your husband in a moment of weakness, and you have seen him make himself look ridiculous. But that ought not to outrage you to such an extent. It ought to amuse you a little, perhaps, but bring you closer together as human beings. I will say that I don’t mean you could have just let it pass with a laugh and said nothing about it—not at all. You left home; that was a demonstration of a rather extreme kind, perhaps—a bit too severe—but, after all, he deserved it. I imagine he is feeling pretty down in the mouth. I only mean that you must get to take the thing differently—not so insulted—a little more politic point of view. We are just between ourselves. Let me tell you something, Tony. In any marriage, the important thing is, on which side the moral ascendency lies. Understand? Your husband has laid himself open, there is no doubt of that. He compromised himself and made a laughable spectacle—laughable, precisely because what he did was actually so harmless, so impossible to take seriously. But, after all, his dignity is impaired—and the moral advantage has passed over to you. If you know how to use it wisely, your happiness is assured. If you go back, say in a couple of weeks—certainly I must insist on keeping you for ourselves as long as that—if you go back to Munich in a couple of weeks, you will see—”

“I will not go back to Munich, Thomas.”

“I beg your pardon?” he asked, putting his hand to his ear and screwing up his face as he bent forward.

She was lying on her back with her head sunk in the pillow, so that her chin stood out with an effect of severity. “Never,” she said. And she gave a long, audible outward breath and cleared her throat, also at length and deliberately. It was like a dry cough, which had of late become almost a habit with her, and had probably to do with her digestive trouble. There followed a pause.

“Tony,” he said suddenly, getting up and slapping his hand on the arm of his chair, “you aren’t going to make a scandal!”

She gave a side glance and saw him all pale, with the muscles standing out on his temples. Her position was no longer tenable. She bestirred herself and, to hide the fear she really felt of him, grew angry in her turn. She sat up quickly and put her feet to the floor. With glowing cheeks and a frowning brow, making hasty motions of the head and hands, she began: “Scandal, Thomas! You want to tell me not to make a scandal, when I have been insulted, and people spit in my face? Is that worthy of a brother, you will permit me to ask? Circumspection, tact—they are very well im their place. But there are limits, Tom—I know just as much of life as you do, and I tell you there is a point where the care for appearances leaves off, and cowardice begins! I am astonished that such a stupid goose as I am have to tell you this—yes, I am a stupid goose, and I should not be surprised if Permaneder never loved me at all, for I am an ugly old woman, very likely, and Babette is certainly prettier than I am! But did that give him a right to forget the respect he owed to my family, and my upbringing, and all my feelings? You did not see the way he forgot himself, Tom; and since you did not see it, you cannot understand, for I can never tell you how disgusting he was. You did not hear the word that he called after me, your sister, when I took my things and went out of the room, to sleep on the sofa in the living-room. But I heard it, and it was a word that—a word—Oh, it was that word, let me tell you, Thomas, that caused me, to spend the whole night packing my trunk, to wake Erica early in the morning, and to leave the place, rather than to remain in the neighbourhood of a man who could utter such words. And to such a man, as I said before, I will never, never return, not so long as I have any self-respect, or care in the least what becomes of me in my life on this earth.”

“And will you now have the goodness, to tell me what this cursed word was? Yes or no?”

“Never, Thomas! Never would I permit that word to cross my lips. I know too well what I owe to you and to myself within these walls.”

“Then it’s no use talking with you!”

“That may easily be. I am sure I do not want to discuss it any further.”

“What do you expect to do? Get a divorce?”

“Yes, Tom; such is my firm determination. I feel that I owe it to myself, my child, and my family.”

“That is all nonsense, of course,” he said in a dispassionate tone. He turned on his heel and moved away, as if his words had settled the matter. “It takes two to make a divorce, my child. Do you think Permaneder will just say yes and thank you kindly? The idea is absurd.”

“Oh, you can leave that to me,” she said, quite undismayed. “You mean he will refuse on account of the seventeen thousand marks current. But Grünlich wasn’t willing, either, and they made him. There are ways and means, I’m sure. I'll go to Dr. Gieseke. He is Christian’s friend, and he will help me. Oh, yes, of course, I know it was not the same thing then. It was ‘incapacity of the husband to provide for his family.’ You see, I know my way about in these affairs. Dear me, you act as if this were the first time in my life that I got a divorce! But even so, Tom. Perhaps there ts nothing that applies to this case. Perhaps it is impossible—you may be right. But it is all the same; my resolve is fixed. Let him keep the money. There are higher things in life. He will never see me again, either way.”

She coughed again. She had left the bed and seated herself in an easy-chair, resting one elbow on its arm. Her chin was so deeply buried in her hand that her four bent fingers clutched her under lip. She sat with her body turned to the right, staring with red, excited eyes out of the window.

The Consul walked up and down, sighed, shook his head, shrugged his shoulders. He paused in front of her, fairly wringing his hands.

“You are a child, Tony, a child,” said he in a discouraged, almost pleading tone. “Every word you have spoken is the most utter childish nonsense. Will you make an effort, now, if I beg you, to think about the thing for just one minute like a grown woman? Don’t you see that you are acting as if something very serious and dreadful had happened to you—as if your husband had cruelly betrayed you and heaped insults on you before all the world? Do try to realize that nothing of the sort has happened! Not a single soul in the world knows anything about that silly affair that happened at the top of your staircase in Kaufinger Street. Your dignity, and ours, will suffer no slightest diminution if you go calmly and composedly back to Permaneder—of course, with your nose in the air! But, on the other hand, if you don’t go back, if you give this nonsense so much importance as to make a scandal out of it, then you will be wounding our dignity indeed.”

She jerked her chin out of her hand and stared him in the face.

“That’s enough, Thomas Buddenbrook. Be quiet now; it’s my turn. Listen. So you think there is no shame and no scandal so long as people don’t get to hear it? Ah, no! The shame that gnaws at us secretly and eats away our self-respect—that is far, far worse. Are we Buddenbrooks the sort of people to be satisfied if everything looks ‘tip-top,’ as you say here, on the outside, no matter how much mortification we have to choke down, inside our four walls? I cannot help feeling astonished at you, Tom. Think of our Father and how he would act to-day—and then judge as he would! No, no! Clean and open dealings must be the rule. Why, you can open your books any day, for all the world to see, and say, ‘Here they are, look at them.’ We should all of us be just the same. I know how God has made me. I am not afraid. Let Julchen Möllendorpf pass me in the street and not speak, if she wants to. Let Pfiffi Buddenbrook sit here on Thursday afternoons and shake all over with spite, and say, ‘Well, that is the second time! But, of course, both times the men were to blame!’ I feel so far above all that now, Thomas—farther than I can tell you! I know I have done what I thought was right, But if I am to be so afraid of Julchen Möllendorpf and Pfiffi Buddenbrook as to swallow down all sorts of insults and let myself be cursed out in a drunken dialect that isn’t even grammar—to stop with a man in a town where I have to get used to that kind of language and the kind of scenes I saw that night at the top of the stairs—where I have to forget my origin and my upbringing and everything that I am, and learn to disown it altogether in order to act as if I were satisfied and happy— that is what I call undignified— that is what I call scandalous, I tell you!”

She broke off, buried her chin once more in her hand, and stared out of the window. He stood before her, his weight on one leg, his hands in his trousers pockets. His eyes rested on her unseeing, for he was in deep thought, and slowly moving his head from side to side.

“Tony,” he said. “You're telling the truth. I knew it all along; but you betrayed yourself just now. It is not the man at all. It is the place. It isn’t this other idiotic business—it is the whole thing all together. You couldn’t get used to it. Tell the truth.”

“Thomas,” she cried, “it is the truth!” She sprang up as she spoke, and pointed straight into his face with her outstretched hand. Her own face was red. She stood there in a warlike pose, one hand grasping the chair, gesticulating with the other, and made a long, agitated, passionate speech that welled up in a resistless tide. The Consul stared at her amazed. Scarcely would she pause to draw breath, when new words would come gushing and bubbling forth. Yes, she found words for everything; she gave full expression to all the accumulated disgust of her Munich years. Unassorted, confused, she poured it all out, one thing after another; she kept nothing back. It was like the bursting of a dam—an assertion of desperate integrity; something elemental, a force of nature, that brooked no restraint.

“It is the truth!” she cried. “Say it again, Thomas! Oh, I can tell you plainly, I am no stupid goose any longer; I know what I have to expect. I don’t faint away at my time of life, to hear that dirty work goes on now and then. I’ve known people like Teary Trieschke, and I was married to Bendix Grünlich, and I know the dissipated creatures there are here in this town. I am no country innocent, I tell you; and the affair with Babette wouldn’t have made me go off the handle like that, just by itself. No, Thomas, the thing was that it filled the cup to overflowing—and that didn’t take much, for it was full already, and had been for a long time—a long time. It would have taken very little to make it run over. And then this happened! The knowledge that I could not depend on Permaneder even in that way—that put the top on everything. It knocked the bottom out of the cask. It brought to a head all at once my intention to get away from Munich, that had been slowly growing in my mind a long time before that, Tom; for I cannot live down there—I swear it before God and all His heavenly hosts! How wretched I have been, Thomas, you can never know. When you were there on a visit, I concealed everything, for I am a tactful woman and do not burden others with my complainings, nor wear my heart on my sleeve on a week-day. I have always been rather reserved. But I have suffered, Tom, suffered with my entire being—with my whole personality, so to speak. Like a plant, a flower that has been transplanted into a foreign soil—if I may make such a comparison. You will probably find it a most unsuitable one, for I am really an ugly old woman—but I could not be planted in a more foreign soil than that, and I would just as lief go and live in Turkey! Oh, we should never be transplanted, we northern folk! We should stick to the shore of our own bay; we can only really thrive upon our native soil! You all used to laugh at my taste for the nobility. Yes, in these years I have often thought of what somebody said to me once, in times gone by. A very clever man. ‘Your sympathies are with the nobility,’ he said. ‘Shall I tell you why? Because you yourself belong to the nobility. Your father is a great gentleman, and you are a princess. A gulf lies between you and the rest of us who do not belong to the governing classes.’ Yes, Tom. We feel like the nobility, and we realize the difference; we should never try to live where we are not known, where no one understands our worth, for we shall have nothing but chagrin, and be laughed at for our arrogance. Yes, they all found me ridiculously arrogant. They did not say so, but I felt it every minute, and that made me suffer, too. Do you think I feel arrogant, Tom—in a place where they eat cake with a knife, and the very princes speak bad grammar, and if a gentleman picks up a lady’s fan it is supposed to be a love-affair. Get used to it? To people without dignity, morals, energy, ambition, self-respect, or good manners, lazy and frivolous, stupid and shallow at the same time?—no, never, never, as long as I am a Buddenbrook and your sister! Eva Ewers managed it—but Eva is not a Buddenbrook, and she has a husband that amounts to something. It was different with me. You think back, Tom, from the very beginning: I come from a home where people work and get things accomplished and have a purpose in life, and I go down there to Permaneder—and he sits himself down with my dowry—Oh, that was genuine enough, that was characteristic—but it was the only good thing there was about it! And then? I was going to have a baby; that would have made everything up to me. And what happens? It dies. I don’t blame Permaneder for that, of course; I don’t mean that. God forbid. He did everything he could—and he didn’t go to the café for several days. But, after all, it belonged to the same thing. It made me no happier, as you can well believe. But I didn’t give in, and I didn’t grumble. I was alone, and misunderstood, and pointed at for being arrogant; but I said to myself: ‘You yielded him your consent for life. He is lumpy and lazy, and he caused you a cruel disappointment. But his heart is pure, and he means well.’ And then I had to bear the sight of him in that last unspeakable minute.’ And I said to myself: “He understands you no better and respects you no more and no less than the others do, and he calls you names that one of our workmen up here wouldn’t throw at a dog!” I knew then that nothing bound me to him any more, and that it was an indignity for me to stay. When I was driving from the station this afternoon, I passed Nielsen the porter, and he took off his hat and made me a deep bow, and I bowed back to him—not arrogantly, not a bit—I waved my hand, just the way Father used to. And here I am. You can do what you like: you can harness up all your workhorses—but you can never drag me back to Munich again. And to-morrow I go to Gieseke!”

Thus she spoke; and, finishing, sank back exhausted in her chair and stared again out of the window.

Tom was alarmed, shaken, stupefied. He stood before her and found no words. He raised his arms up shoulder-high, drawing a long breath. Then he let them fall against his thighs.

“Well, that’s an end of it,” he said. His voice was calm, and he turned and went toward the door.

Her face wore now the same expression, the same half-pouting, half-injured smile, as when he entered.

“Tom?” she said, with a rising inflection. “Are you vexed with me?”

He held the oval doorknob in one hand and made a gesture of weary protest with the other. “Oh, no. Not at all.”

She put out her hand and tipped her head on one side. “Come here, Tom. Your poor sister has had a hard time. Life is hard on her. She has much to bear. And at this minute she has nobody, in all the world—”

He came back; he took her hand; but wearily, indifferently, not looking at her face. Suddenly her lip began to quiver.

“You must go on alone now,” she said. “There’s nothing good to be looked for from Christian, and I am finished. Failed. Gone to pieces. I can do no more. I am a poor, useless woman, dependent on you all for my living. I could never have dreamed, Tom, that I should be no help to you at all. Now you stand quite alone, and upon you it depends to keep up the honour and dignity of the family. May God help you in the task.”

Two large, clear, childish tears rolled down over her cheeks, which were beginning to show, very faintly, the first signs of age.

CHAPTER XI

Tony lost no time. She went resolutely about her affair. In the hope of quieting her, of bringing her slowly to a different frame of mind, the Consul said but little. He asked only one thing: that she should be very quiet and stop entirely in the house—and Erica as well. Perhaps it would blow over. The town did not need to know. The family Thursday afternoon was put off on some pretext.

But on the very next day she wrote to Dr. Gieseke and summoned him to Meng Street. She received him alone, in the middle corridor room on the first floor, where a fire was laid, and she had arranged a heavy table with ink and writing materials and a quantity of foolscap paper from the office. They sat down in two easy-chairs.

“Doctor Gieseke,” said Tony. She folded her arms, flung back her head, and looked at the ceiling while she spoke. “You are a man of experience, both professionally and personally. I can speak openly with you.” And thereupon she revealed to him the whole story about Babette and what had happened in her sleeping-chamber. Dr. Gieseke regretted being obliged to explain to her that neither the affair on the stairs nor the insult she had undoubtedly received, the precise nature of which she hesitated to divulge, was sufficient ground for a divorce.

“Very good,” she said. “Thank you.”

And then, at her request, he gave an exposition of the existing legal grounds for divorce, and an even longer discourse after it, which had for its subject-matter the law touching dowry rights. She listened with open mind and strained attention; and then, with cordial thanks, dismissed Dr. Gieseke for the time being.

She went downstairs and demanded audience of her brother in his private office.

“Thomas,” she said, “please write to the man at once—I do not like to mention his name. As far as the money goes, I am perfectly informed on that subject. Let him speak. Me he shall never see again, whatever he decides. If he agrees to a divorce, we will ask him to give an accounting and restore my dos. If he refuses, we need not be discouraged. For, as you probably know, Permaneder’s right to my dos, is, legally speaking a property right. We grant that. But on the other hand, thank goodness, I have certain material rights on my side—”

The Consul walked up and down with his hands behind his back, his shoulders twitching nervously, Tony’s face, as she uttered the word dos was too unutterably self-satisfied!

He had no time. Heaven knew he had no time. Let her have patience, and wait, and bethink herself a hundred times. His nearest duty was a journey to Hamburg—indeed, he must go the very next day, for the purpose of a personal interview with Christian. Christian had written for help, for money which would have to come out of the Frau Consul’s inheritance. His business was in frightful condition; he was in constant difficulties. Yet he seemed to amuse himself royally and went everywhere, to theatres, restaurants, and concert halls. To judge from the debts now coming to light, which he had been able to pile up on the credit of his family name, he had been living far, far beyond his means, And they knew in Meng Street, and at the club—yes, the whole town knew—who was responsible. It was a certain female, a certain Aline Puvogel, who lived alone with her two pretty children. Christian was not the only Hamburg business man who possessed her favours and spent money on her.

In short, Tony’s intentions in the matter of her divorce were not the only dark spot in the Consul’s sky; and the journey to Hamburg was pressing. Besides, it was altogether likely that they would hear from Herr Permaneder.

The Consul went to Hamburg, and came back angry and depressed. No word had come from Munich, and he felt obliged to take the first step. He wrote; wrote rather coldly, with curt condescension, to this effect: Antonie, during her life with Permaneder, had been subjected to great disappointments—that would not be denied. Without going into detail, it was evident that she could never find happiness in this marriage. Her wish that it should be dissolved must be justified, to the mind of any reasonable person; and her determination not to return to Munich was entirely unshakable. And he put the question as to what were Herr Permaneder’s feelings in view of the facts which he had just stated.

There were more days of suspense. And then came Herr Permaneder’s reply.

He answered as no one had expected him to answer—not Dr. Gieseke, nor the Frau Consul, not Thomas, nor Antonie herself. He agreed, quite simply, to a divorce.

He wrote that he deeply regretted what had happened, but that he respected Antonie’s wishes, as he saw that he and she had “never hit it off.” If it were true that she had suffered during those years through him, he begged her to forget and forgive. As he would probably never see her and Erica again, he sent them both his hearty good wishes for all happiness on this earth. And he signed himself, Alois Permaneder. In a postscript he offered to make immediate restitution of the dowry. He had enough without it to lead a life free from care. He did not require to have notice given, for business there was none to wind up, the house belonged to him, and the money was ready any time.

Tony felt a slight twinge of shame, and was almost inclined, for the first time, to admit that Herr Permaneder’s indifference to money matters might have something good about it.

Now it was Dr. Gieseke’s turn again. He communicated with the husband, and a plea of “mutual incompatibility” was set up as ground for the divorce. The hearing began—Tony’s second divorce case. She talked about it night and day, and the Consul lost his temper several times. Tony was in no state to share his feelings. She was entirely taken up with words like “tangibilities,” “improvabilities,” “accessions,” “productivity,” “dowry rights,” and the like, which she used in season and out of season, with marvellous fluency, her shoulders slightly raised. One point in Dr. Gieseke’s long disquisitions had made a great impression on her: it had to do with “treasure” found in any piece of property that has constituted part of a dowry, which was to be regarded as a component part of the dowry, to be liquidated if the marriage came to an end. About this “treasure?”—which was, of course, non-existent—she talked to every soul she knew: Ida Jungmann, Uncle Justus, poor Clothilde, the Broad Street Buddenbrooks—and they, when they heard how matters stood, just folded their hands in their laps and looked at each other in speechless joy that this satisfaction, too, had been vouchsafed them. Therese Weichbrodt was told of it—Erica had gone to stay at the pension again—and Madame Kethelsen too, though this last, for more than one reason, understood not a single word.

Then came the day when the divorce was pronounced; when the last formalities were gone through, and Tony asked Thomas for the family papers and set down this last event with her own hand. Yes, it was done. All that remained was to get used to it.

She did it gallantly. She bore, with unscathed dignity, the tiny dagger-thrusts of the ladies from Broad Street; she met the Hagenströms and Möllendorpfs on the street and looked with chilling indifference straight over their heads; and she quite gave up going into society—the more easily that it had for some years past forsaken her Mother’s house for her brother’s. She had her own immediate family, the Frau Consul, Tom, and Gerda; she had Ida Jungmann and her motherly friend Sesemi Weichbrodt; and she had Erica, upon whose future she probably built her own last secret hopes, and upen whose aristocratic upbringing she expended much care and thought.

Thus she lived, and thus time went on.

Later, in some way that was never quite clear, there came to certain members of the family knowledge of that “word,” the desperate word which had escaped from Herr Permaneder on that never-to-be-forgotten night.

What was it, then, that he had said?

“Go to the devil, you filthy sprat-eating slut!”

And thus Tony Buddenbrook’s second marriage came to an end.

END OF VOLUME I

CHAPTER I

A christening —a christening in Broad Street!

All, everything is there that was dreamed of by Madame Permaneder in the days of her expectancy. In the dining-room, the maid-servant, moving noiselessly so as not to disturb the services in the next room, is filling the cups with steaming hot chocolate and whipped cream. There are quantities of cups, crowded together on the great round tray with the gilded shell-shaped handles. And Anton the butler is cutting a towering layer-cake into slices, and Mamsell Jungmann is arranging flowers and sweets in silver dessert-dishes, with her head on one side, and both little fingers stuck out.

Soon the company will have seated themselves in the salon and sitting-room; and all these delicacies will be handed round. It is to be hoped they will hold out, since it is the whole family which has gathered here, in the broader, if not quite in the broadest sense of the word. For it is, through the Överdiecks, connected distantly with the Kistenmakers, and through them with the Möllendorpfs—and so on. One simply must draw the line somewhere! But the Överdiecks are represented, and, indeed, by no less a personage than the head of the family, the venerable Doctor Kaspar Överdieck, reigning Burgomaster, more than eighty years old.

He came in a carriage, and mounted the steps leaning on his staff and Thomas Buddenbrook’s arm. His presence enhances the dignity of the occasion—and, beyond a question, this occasion is worthy of every dignity!

For within, in the salon, there is a flower-decked small table, serving as an altar, with a young priest in black vestments and a stiff snowy ruff like a millstone round his neck, reciting the service; and there is a great, strapping, particularly well-nourished person, richly arrayed in red and gold, bearing upon her billowing arms a small something, half smothered in laces and satin bows: an heir—a first-born son! A Buddenbrook! Do we really grasp the meaning of the fact?

Can we realize the thrill of that first whisper, that first little hint that travelled from Broad Street to Mengstrasse? Or Frau Permaneder’s speechless ecstasy, as she embraced her mother, her brother, and—very gently—her sister-in-law? And now, with the spring—the spring of the year 1861—he has come: he, the heir of so many hopes, whom they have expected for so many years, talked of him, longed for him, prayed to God and tormented Dr. Grabow for him; at length he has come—and looks most unimposing.

His tiny hands play among the gilt trimmings of his nurse’s waist; his head, in a lace cap trimmed with pale blue ribbons, lies sidewise on the pillow, turned heedlessly away from the preacher; he stares out into the room, at all his relatives, with an old, knowing look. Those eyes, under their long-lashed lids, blend the light blue of the Father’s and the brown of the Mother’s iris into a pale, indefinite, changeful golden-brown; but bluish shadows lie in the deep corners on both sides of the nose, and these give the little face, which is hardly yet a face at all, an aged look not suited to its four weeks of existence. But, please God, they mean nothing—for has not his Mother the same? And she is in perfectly good health. And anyhow, he lives—he lives, and is a son; which was the cause, four weeks ago, for great rejoicing.

He lives—and it might have been otherwise. The Consul will never forget the grip of good Dr. Grabow’s hand, as he said to him, four weeks ago, when he could leave the mother and child: “Give thanks to God, my dear friend—there wasn’t much to spare.” The Consul has not dared to ask his meaning. He put from him in horror the thought that his son—this tiny creature, yearned for in vain so many years—had slipped into the world without breath to cry out, almost— almost —like Antonie’s second daughter. But he knows that that hour, four weeks ago, was a desperate one for mother and child; and he bends tenderly over Gerda, who reclines in an easy-chair in front of him, next his Mother, her feet, in patent-leather shoes, crossed before her on a velvet cushion.

How pale she still is! And how strangely lovely in her pallor, with that heavy dark-red hair and those mysterious eyes that rest upon the preacher in half-veiled mockery! Herr Andreas Pringsheim, pastor marianus , succeeded thus young to the headship of St. Mary’s after old Kölling’s sudden death. He holds his chin in the air and his hands prayerfully folded beneath it. He has short, curly blond hair and a smooth-shaven, bony face, with a somewhat theatrical range of expression, from fanatical zeal to an exalted serenity. He comes from Franconia, where he has been for some years, serving a small Lutheran community among Catholics; and his effort after a clear and moving delivery has resulted in exaggerated mannerisms; an r rolled upon his front teeth and long, obscure, or crudely accented vowel-sounds.

He gives thanks to God, in a voice now low and soft, now loud and swelling—and the family listen: Frau Permaneder, clothed in a dignity that hides her pride and her delight; Erica Grünlich, now almost fifteen years old, a blooming young girl with a long braid and her father’s rosy skin; and Christian, who has arrived that morning, and sits letting his deep-set eyes rove from side to side all over the room. Pastor Tiburtius and his wife have not shrunk from the long journey, but have come from Riga to be present at the ceremony. The ends of Sievert Tiburtius’ long, thin whiskers are parted over his shoulders, and his small grey eyes now and then open wider and wider, most unexpectedly, and grow larger and more prominent till they almost jump out of his head. Clara’s gaze is dark and solemn and severe, and she sometimes lifts her hand to a head that always seems to ache. But they have brought a splendid present to the Buddenbrooks: a huge brown bear stuffed in a standing position. A relative of the Pastor’s shot him somewhere in the heart of Russia, and now he stands below in the vestibule with a card-tray between his paws.