“Yes, we have put it in the broker’s hands,” he said at length. “We must wait and see what comes of it. My opinion is that he will buy the whole property, live here in the front, and utilize the back part in some other way.”

She did not look at him, or change her position, or cease to knit. On the contrary, the needles flew back and forth faster than ever.

“Oh, certainly—of course he’ll buy it. He’ll buy the whole thing,” she said, and it was her throaty voice she used. “Why shouldn’t he buy it—you know? In fact, there would he no sense in that at all!”

She raised her eyebrows and looked severely through her pince-nez—which she now used for sewing, but never managed to put on straight—at her knitting-needles. They flew like lightning round and round each other, clacking all the while.

Christmas came: the first Christmas without the Frau Consul. They spent the evening of the twenty-fourth at the Senator’s house, without the old Krögers and without the Misses Buddenbrook; for the old children’s day had now ceased to exist, and Thomas Buddenbrook did not feel like making presents to everybody who used to attend the Frau Consul’s celebration. Only Frau Permaneder and Erica, with little Elisabeth, Christian, Clothilde, and Mademoiselle Weichbrodt, were invited. The latter insisted on holding the customary present-giving on the twenty-fifth, in her own stuffy little rooms, where it was attended with the usual mishap.

There was no troop of poor retainers to receive shoes and woollen underwear, and there were no choir-boys, when they assembled in Fishers’ Lane on the twenty-fourth. They joined quite simply together in “Holy Night,” and Therese Weichbrodt read the Christmas chapter instead of the Frau Senator, who did not particularly care for such things. Then they went through the suite of rooms into the hall, singing in a subdued way the first stanza of “O Evergreen.”

There was no special ground for rejoicing. Nobody’s face was beaming with joy, there was no lively conversation. What was there to talk about? They thought of the departed mother, discussed the sale of the house and the well-lighted apartment which Frau Permaneder had rented in a pleasant house outside Holsten Gate, with a view on the green square of Linden Place, and what would happen when Hugo Weinschenk came out of prison. At intervals little Johann played on the piano something which he had been learning with Herr Pfühl, or accompanied his mother, not faultlessly, but with a lovely singing tone, in a Mozart sonata. He was praised and kissed, but had to be taken off to bed by Ida Jungmann, for he was pale and tired on account of a recent stomach upset.

Even Christian was disinclined to talk or joke. After the violent altercation in the breakfast-room he had not let fall another syllable about getting married. He lived on in the old way, on terms with his brother which were not very honourable to himself. He made a brief effort, rolling his eyes about, to awaken sympathy in the company for the misery in his side; went early to the club; and came back to supper, which was held after the prescribed traditions. And then the Buddenbrooks had this Christmas too behind them, and were glad of it.

In the beginning of the year 1872, the household of the deceased Frau Consul was broken up. The servants went, and Frau Permaneder thanked God to see the last of Mamsell Severin, who had continued to question her authority in the most unpleasant manner, and now departed with the silk gowns and linen which she had accumulated. Furniture wagons stood before the door, and the old house was emptied of its contents. The great carved chest, the gilt candelabra, and the other things that had fallen to his share, the Senator took to his house in Fishers’ Lane; Christian moved with his into a three-room bachelor apartment near the club; and the little Permaneder-Weinschenk family took possession with theirs of the well-lighted flat in Linden Place, which was after all not without some claims to elegance. It was a pretty little apartment, and the front door of it had a bright copper plate with the name A. Permaneder-Buddenbrook, Widow, in ornamental lettering.

The house in Meng Street was hardly emptied when a host of workmen appeared and began to tear down the back-building; the dust from the old mortar darkened the air. The property had passed into the hands of Consul Hermann Hagenström. He had set his heart upon it, and had outbid an offer which Sigmund Gosch received for it from Bremen. He immediately began to turn it to the best advantage, in the ingenious way for which he had been so long admired. In the spring he moved with his family into the front house, where he left everything almost untouched, save for the necessary renovations and certain very modern improvements. For instance, he had the old bell-pulls taken out and the house fitted throughout with electric bells. And hardly had the back-building been demolished when a new, neat, and airy structure rose in its place, which fronted on Bakers’ Alley and was intended for shops and warehouses.

Frau Permaneder had frequently sworn to her brother that no power on earth could bring her ever to look at the parental home again. But it was hardly possible to carry out this threat. Her way sometimes led her of necessity past the shops which had been quickly and advantageously rented, and past the show-windows of the back-building, or the dignified gable front on the other side, where now, beneath the “Dominus Providebit,” was to be read the name of Consul Hermann Hagenström. When she saw that, Frau Permaneder, on the open street, before ever so many people, simply began to weep aloud. She put back her head like a bird beginning to sing, pressed her handkerchief to her eyes, uttered a wail of mingled protest and lament, and, giving no heed to the passers-by or to the remonstrances of her daughter, gave her tears free vent.

They were the unashamed, refreshing tears of her childhood, which she still retained despite all the storms and shipwrecks of her life.

CHAPTER 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 penny wise 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 ad vantage 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 hair-splitting pedantries of Herr Marcus had become unendurable to him. The way the man for ever straightened his writing-materials and stroked his heard 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 mouth-wash 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 make-up 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 rôle 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, wine-glass 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, wdth 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 gas-light 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 eye-glasses, 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 portieres, 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.

CHAPTER 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 renascence 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 for ever 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 m 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 duck-weed 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 hlood 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 ihim 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, sea-water, 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 to-day, 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 un expected 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 lease 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 for ever 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!

CHAPTER 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 Fraulein 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, care free 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 througn 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 flower-beds 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 Leuchenfield, 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 table-cloth 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 care-free—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 duck-weed 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 Sea-gull 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 grown-ups 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 supper-time. 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 kill-joys 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 every one 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 north-east wind filled the bay with dark green floods, covered the beach with seaweed, mussels, and jelly-fish, 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 ear-splitting 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 good-bye 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 rain-drops 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 faint-hearted 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 home-coming, Dr. Langhals, the family physician, appeared in Fishers’ Lane to observe the results of the cure. He had a long consultation with the Frau Senator, and then Hanno was summoned and put, half undressed, through a long examination of his “status praesens,” as Dr. Langhals called it, looking at his 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 jelly-fish, 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 sea-weed.”

CHAPTER 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.