by Thomas Mann
Fräulein Weichbrodt sat atop two sofa cushions at the head of the table and reigned over the meal with vigor and discretion; she held her deformed little body rigidly erect, rapped vigilantly on the table, cried “Nally!” and “Booby!,” and with a single glance managed to shame Mademoiselle Popinet, who was about to misappropriate all the aspic served with the cold veal roast. Tony had been assigned a place between two other boarding students: Armgard von Schilling, a blond, sturdy girl, the daughter of a Mecklenburg country squire; and Gerda Arnoldsen from Amsterdam, an elegant and exotic presence with heavy chestnut hair, close-set brown eyes, and a pale, beautiful, and slightly haughty face. Chattering away across from her was the French girl, who looked like a Negress with her monstrous gold earrings. At the foot of the table sat another boarding student, Miss Brown, a haggard English girl with a sour expression.
With the aid of Sesame’s “bishop’s punch,” Tony quickly became acquainted with them all. Mademoiselle Popinet had had another nightmare last night—ah, quelle horreur! She usually screamed, “ ’elp! ’elp! Thiefs, thiefs!,” sending them all leaping from their beds. It also came out that Gerda Arnoldsen did not play the piano like the other girls, but the violin, and that her papa—her mother was no longer alive—had promised her a genuine Stradivarius. Tony had no talent for music—like most Buddenbrooks and all Krögers. She could not even identify the chorales they played at St. Mary’s.—Oh, the organ in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam had a vox humana, a human voice, that sounded simply marvelous! Armgard von Schilling talked about the cows at home.
From the first moment, it was Armgard who made the greatest impression on Tony, and that was because Armgard was the first girl she had ever actually known from a noble family. To be called von Schilling, how wonderful that must be! Her parents had the most beautiful old house in town, and her grandparents were prominent people; but their names were simply “Buddenbrook” and “Kröger,” and that was a dreadful shame. Armgard’s noble status made the granddaughter of the stylish Lebrecht Kröger flush with admiration; but secretly she sometimes thought that that splendid syllable von would actually suit her far better—because, good heavens, Armgard hadn’t the vaguest how lucky she was. She walked around with those good-natured blue eyes, that heavy braid, that broad Mecklenburg accent—and never gave it a thought. She wasn’t at all elegant, didn’t make the slightest claim to be, hadn’t any notion what elegance was. But the word “elegant” was firmly fixed in Tony’s little head, and she was most emphatic about applying it to Gerda Arnoldsen.
Gerda was a little superior and there was something intriguing and foreign about her; despite Sesame’s objections, she liked to do up her splendid reddish tresses in striking ways, and a lot of the girls found her violin playing silly, a word that implied very severe condemnation. And yet they had to agree with Tony that Gerda Arnoldsen was an elegant young lady—the impression she made, so advanced for her age, her little habits, the things she owned, all very elegant. For example, the ivory toilet set from Paris, which Tony knew enough to admire in particular, since her home was filled with all sorts of grand treasures that her parents or grandparents had brought back from Paris.
The three young girls quickly became fast friends, they attended the same classes and lived together in the largest bedroom on the second floor. They were sent to bed at ten, and what amusing and cozy times they had chatting as they undressed—in low voices, of course, since next door Mademoiselle Popinet was already dreaming of burglars. Her roommate was little Eva Ewers, a native of Hamburg, whose father was a collector and connoisseur of the arts who had moved to Munich.
The striped brown blinds were pulled, the low lamp was burning under its red shade on the table, the faint scent of violets and freshly laundered clothes filled the room—the mood was languid and hushed, one of dreamy, carefree weariness.
“Good heavens,” Armgard said, sitting on the edge of her bed, half undressed, “Dr. Neumann is such a fine lecturer. He just walks into the classroom, stands beside the desk, and starts rattling away about Racine.”
“He has a fine high forehead,” Gerda remarked as she combed her hair by candlelight in front of the mirror between the two windows.
“Yes, he does!” Armgard quickly responded.
“And you only mentioned him, Armgard, because that’s just what you wanted to hear. You’re always gazing at him with your big blue eyes as if …”
“Are you in love with him?” Tony asked. “I simply can’t get this shoelace untied. Gerda, please. That does it! Now. Are you in love with him, Armgard? Marry him, then; it would be a very good match, he’ll be a professor someday.”
“Aren’t you horrid! I’m not in love with him at all. I’m certainly not going to marry some teacher. It has to be a country gentleman.”
“A nobleman?” Tony was holding a stocking in one hand; she let the hand fall and gazed thoughtfully and directly at Armgard.
“I don’t know yet. But he’ll have to have a large estate. Oh, you don’t know how I look forward to that, girls. I’ll be up at five, and I’ll oversee everything.” She pulled her blanket up and gazed dreamily at the ceiling.
“In her mind’s eye she can see five hundred cows,” Gerda said, staring at her friend’s reflection in the mirror.
Tony was not talked out yet; but she let her head fall back onto her pillow, laced her hands behind her neck, and pensively stared at the ceiling as well.
“I’ll marry a merchant, of course,” she said. “He’ll have to have lots of money, so that we can furnish the house elegantly. I owe that much to my family and the firm,” she added very soberly. “You’ll see, that’s exactly what I’ll do.”
Gerda had finished with her hair and was now brushing her broad, white teeth, holding her small ivory mirror in the other hand.
“In all likelihood, I shall never get married,” she said with some effort, because of the peppermint powder in her mouth. “I can’t see why I should. The idea doesn’t appeal to me at all. I’ll go back to Amsterdam and play duets with Papa, and then later I’ll live with my married sister.”
“What a shame!” Tony cried impulsively. “Really, what a shame, Gerda! You should marry someone from here and stay on forever. Why, you could marry one of my brothers, for example.”
“The one with the big nose?” Gerda asked, and yawned, releasing a dainty, casual sigh, but covering her mouth with her hand mirror.
“Or the other one, it doesn’t matter. Lord, you could decorate your house so splendidly. But you have to use Jakobs, the upholster on Fisch Strasse. He has very elegant taste. And I would visit you every day.”
But then they heard Mademoiselle Popinet’s voice: “Ah! voyons, mesdames. To bed, s’il vous plaît. It’s too late to get married tonight.”
Tony spent her Sundays and holidays on Meng Strasse or out at her grandparents’ villa. What fun it was on a lovely Easter morning to search for eggs and marzipan rabbits in the Krögers’ vast gardens. And then there were the summer vacations at the shore, staying at a resort hotel, eating at the table d’hôte, swimming, and riding donkeys. And some years, when the consul had business to attend to, they made longer journeys. But, above all, there was Christmas, with three exchanges of gifts: at home, at her grandparents’, and in the evening at Sesame’s, when the “bishop’s punch” flowed freely. The most splendid time, however, was always on Christmas Eve at home, for the consul insisted that the Holy Feast of the Christ Child be celebrated in an atmosphere of stately radiance. Once they had all solemnly gathered in the landscape room, while the servants and all sorts of poor and old people had crowded into the entrance hall downstairs to have their blue and ruddy hands shaken by the consul, the choirboys of St. Mary’s would strike up a carol in four-part harmony—it was so festive that it simply made her heart pound. Then, with the scent of fir drifting through the cracks of the closed high white doors, her mother would read the Christmas story from the old family Bible with its huge funny letters; and once the last echoes o
f a second carol had died away outside, they would begin singing “O, Tannenbaum” as they moved in solemn procession through the columned hallway and into the dining room, where the wallpaper had white statues and the radiant, fragrant tree reached to the ceiling and was decorated with white lilies and flickering candles and the table, laden with gifts, reached from the windows to the door. Meanwhile Italians were playing barrel organs outside in the snow-covered streets, and from far off you could hear the hubbub from the Christmas market in the town square. Except for little Clara, all the children joined the adults in the columned hall for a late supper at a table heaped with carp and turkey with dressing.
It should also be mentioned that Tony Buddenbrook visited two estates in Mecklenburg during these years. She spent a couple of weeks one summer at the estate of Armgard’s father, Herr von Schilling, which lay on the coast just across the bay from Travemünde. And, on a second occasion, she joined her cousin Thilda at the estate that Herr Bernhardt Buddenbrook was in charge of. The estate was called “Grudging,” and didn’t bring in a penny; but it was not to be despised as a vacation spot.
And so the years meandered along, and, all in all, Tony’s adolescence was a happy time.
PART THREE
(Dedicated to my sister Julia, in memory of our bay on the Baltic)
1
ONE JUNE AFTERNOON, shortly after five o’clock, the family was sitting in the garden in front of the “Portal,” where they had taken their coffee. They had set the light, rustic, stained-wood furniture on the lawn, because it was too warm and close inside the summerhouse, a single white room whose only decoration was a tall mirror framed by fluttering birds and two enameled French doors at the rear—which weren’t real; if you looked closely you could see that the handles were just painted on.
The sparkling coffee service was still on the table, around which they sat in a semicircle: the consul, his wife, Tony, Tom, and Klothilde—sour-faced Christian was a little off to one side, memorizing Cicero’s second oration against Catiline. The consul was busy with his cigar and the Advertiser. His wife had laid her embroidery in her lap and smiled now as she watched little Clara search the lawn for violets with Ida Jungmann, because now and then you could find them there. Her chin propped in both hands, Tony was reading Hoffmann’s Serapion Brethren, while Tom tickled the back of her neck very circumspectly with a blade of grass, which she wisely chose not to notice. And Klothilde, looking skinny and old-maidish in her flowery cotton frock, was reading a story entitled “Blind, Deaf, and Dumb—and Happy Nonetheless,” all the while scraping up cookie crumbs into little piles on the tablecloth, then transferring them carefully in a five-fingered grip to her mouth.
The sky and its few white stagnant clouds began to pale. The late-afternoon sun enhanced the color of the garden’s tidy symmetry of paths and flower beds. The fragrance of mignonettes lining the beds ebbed and flowed on the breeze.
“Well, Tom,” the consul said, taking his cigar from his mouth, “it looks as if that sale of rye to van Henkdom & Co. that I told you about is going to go through.” The consul was in a good mood.
“What’s his offer?” Thomas asked with interest and stopped teasing Tony.
“Sixty thalers a thousand kilos. Not bad, is it?”
“That’s excellent!” Tom knew that was a very good price.
“Tony, your pose is not exactly comme il faut,” Elisabeth remarked, and Tony took one elbow from the table, without raising her eyes from her book.
“It doesn’t matter,” Tom said. “She can sit however she likes, she’ll always be Tony Buddenbrook. It’s no contest—she and Thilda are the fairest in the family.”
Klothilde was embarrassed to death. “O Lord, Tom—?” she said, and it was unbelievable how she could draw out those three brief syllables. Tony endured the remark in silence—it was no use, Tom was quicker than she. He would be sure to have a comeback that would make them all laugh. She merely took a deep breath through her flared nostrils and shrugged. But when her mother began to talk about the ball coming up at Consul Huneus’s and mentioned something about new patent-leather shoes, Tony took her other elbow off the table and joined eagerly in the conversation.
“Talk, talk, talk,” Christian wailed pitifully. “I’m having a terrible time with this. I wish I were a businessman, too.”
“Right, you want to be something different every day,” Tom said. At this point Anton came across the yard; they all watched his approach expectantly—there was a calling card on the tea tray.
“Grünlich, Commercial Agent,” the consul read. “From Hamburg. A pleasant man, pastor’s son, people speak well of him. There’s some business I have with him at the moment.… Anton, ask the gentleman—is it all right with you, Bethsy?—if he would like to join us.”
A thirty-two-year-old man of medium height came across the garden, hat and cane in the same hand, his stride rather short, his head thrust forward; he wore worsted gloves and a yellow-green wool coat of long cut. Under a shock of very blond but thinning hair was a rosy, smiling face, with a conspicuous wart at one side of the nose. His chin and upper lip were clean-shaven, but, following the English fashion, he had long side-whiskers—of a striking tawny, golden color. While still at some distance, he made a sweeping gesture of courtesy with his large pale gray hat. And now, approaching with one last, long stride, he bowed to them all by executing a semicircle with his upper body.
“I am disturbing you by breaking into your family circle like this,” he said in a soft voice, both refined and reserved. “One reads good books, one converses the afternoon away pleasantly. I really must beg your pardon.”
“You’re quite welcome here, my good Herr Grünlich,” replied the consul, who along with his sons had stood up to shake their guest’s hand. “It’s a pleasure to greet you outside the office, surrounded here by my family. Bethsy, this is Herr Grünlich, a man I’m proud to do business with. My daughter, Antonie. My niece, Klothilde. You already know Thomas. This is my other son, Christian, who’s still in school.”
At each name, Herr Grünlich responded with a bow. “As I said,” he went on, “I really don’t want to intrude. I’ve a business matter to discuss, and if I might ask the good consul to join me for a walk in the garden …”
Elisabeth replied, “We would take it as a favor if you would not rush off with my husband on business and would put up with our society for a while. Please, have a seat.”
“A thousand thanks,” Herr Grünlich said, visibly touched. Tom had brought a chair over to him, and he perched himself erect on its edge, hat and cane on his knees, one hand stroking his whiskers, and he coughed a little cough that sounded like “Huh-uh-hmm!”—all of which seemed to say, “So, that’s the introduction. Now what?”
The consul’s wife began the main conversation. “You’re from Hamburg?” she asked, tilting her head to one side, her handiwork resting in her lap.
“Indeed I am, Madame Buddenbrook,” Herr Grünlich replied with another bow. “My residence is in Hamburg, but I am on the road a great deal. There’s simply so much to be done, my business is going so extremely well … ahem, very well, I must say.”
Elisabeth raised her eyebrows and shaped her mouth as if it were about to emit a respectful, “Is that right?”
“My very existence is one of unceasing activity,” Herr Grünlich added, turning halfway toward the consul and coughing another little cough, when he noticed Fräulein Antonie’s gaze resting on him, her eyes cold and measuring—the kind of look with which young ladies size up young men, but which threatens at any moment to resolve itself into disdain.
“We have relatives in Hamburg,” Tony remarked, for something to say.
“The Duchamps,” the consul explained, “my late mother’s family.”
“Oh, I’m perfectly aware of the connection,” Herr Grünlich hastened to say. “I have the honor of a slight acquaintance with the family. Excellent people, one and all, such heart, such intellect. Ahem. Indeed, it would be a better
world if all families had such qualities. One finds in that family such faith, such charity, such sincere piety, in short, the very ideal of true Christianity; and yet all of it united with a cosmopolitan refinement and brilliant elegance that I personally find quite charming, Madame Buddenbrook.”
Tony thought: How does he know my parents so well? He tells each of them exactly what they want to hear.
But the consul responded with approval: “A combination of qualities quite becoming to any gentleman.”
And his wife could not resist extending their guest her hand, her gold bracelet tinkling as she turned the palm upward as far as possible to heighten the gesture’s warmth. “You speak my deepest sentiments, Herr Grünlich,” she said.
Herr Grünlich now made another bow, settled himself in place again, stroked his whiskers, and coughed as if to say, “Let us continue.”
The consul’s wife mentioned the dreadful days Herr Grünlich’s hometown had experienced in May of ’42. “Dreadful indeed,” Herr Grünlich responded, “the fire was a terrible calamity, a heartbreaking ordeal. Damages of 135 million, and the figures are a rather precise calculation. Though, for my part, I can only express my deepest gratitude to Providence that I was not inconvenienced in the least. The principal conflagration was in the parishes of St. Peter and St. Nicholas.… What an enchanting garden,” he said, interrupting himself, while thanking the consul for an offered cigar, “and so uncommonly large for a garden in town. And what a burst of floral color. Oh, gracious, I must admit my weakness for flowers and nature in general. Those poppies there add a rare, ornamental touch.”