by Thomas Mann
“Well, yes; and I assure you that the count’s behavior toward me changed from that moment on, that he offered me his hand whenever I came and invited me to sit, and that as a result we became something akin to friends. But why have I told you this? In order to ask you—would I have the heart, the self-assurance, indeed the right to teach Herr von Maiboom a similar lesson as well, if during our negotiations about a lump-sum payment for his harvest he should forget to offer me a chair?”
Frau Permaneder was silent. “Fine,” she said at last and stood up. “You may be right, Tom, and, as I already said, I don’t wish to press you. You surely know what you must do and what you must leave undone, and that’s that. If only you’ll believe that I mentioned this with the best intentions. So, then, that’s agreed. Good night, Tom. Or no—wait—I have to give Hanno a kiss first and say hello to dear Ida. I’ll look in on you again before I go.”
And with that she left.
3
TONY CLIMBED the stairs to the third floor, and, ignoring the “balcony” on her right, she moved along the white-and-gold railing of the gallery and passed through an open door into a vestibule, from which a door on the left led to the senator’s dressing room. She carefully turned the handle of the door directly ahead of her and entered.
It was an extraordinarily spacious room, its windows hidden behind the folds of heavy curtains patterned with large flowers. The walls were rather bare. Apart from a very large etching in a black frame that hung above Fräulein Jungmann’s bed—a portrait of Giacomo Meyerbeer surrounded by characters from his operas—the only decorations were a few English prints pinned to the bright wallpaper, depictions of towheaded babies in red frocks. In the middle of the room Ida Jungmann was sitting at the large extension table, darning Hanno’s stockings. The faithful Prussian was in her early fifties now, and although she had begun to turn gray at an early age, her hair was still not white, but more a kind of salt-and-pepper; she still held her large-boned, robust frame very erect, and her brown eyes were as fresh, clear, and unwearied as they had been when she was thirty.
“Good evening, Ida, you dear soul,” Frau Permaneder said in a hushed but cheery voice—her brother’s anecdote had put her in the best of moods. “How are you doing, you old so-and-so?”
“How’s that, Tony my child—old so-and-so? You’re here so late?”
“Yes, I was visiting with my brother—business matters that couldn’t be put off. Unfortunately it didn’t turn out as I’d hoped. Is he asleep?” she asked, pointing with her chin at the little bed that stood along the wall to her left, its green-upholstered headboard set close to the door leading to the master bedroom.
“Shhh,” Ida said, “yes, he’s asleep.” And Frau Permaneder tiptoed to the bed, carefully pulled aside the curtains, and bent down to gaze at the face of her sleeping nephew.
Little Johann Buddenbrook was lying on his back, but his face, framed by long, light-brown hair, was turned toward the room; he was breathing softly but audibly into his pillow. One hand lay crossed on his chest, the other was extended beside him on the quilt, just the tips of his crooked fingers peeping out from under the very long, wide sleeves of his nightshirt—they twitched slightly now and then. His half-opened lips were moving faintly, too, as if trying to form words. From time to time an almost pained expression flickered across his whole face, beginning with a trembling of the chin, then of the mouth, followed by a vibration of his delicate nostrils, and ending in a twitch of the muscles of his brow. His long lashes could not hide the bluish shadows brooding in the corners of his eyes.
“He’s dreaming,” Frau Permaneder said, touched. Then she bent down over the child, gingerly kissed his cheeks warm with sleep, carefully rearranged the curtains, and stepped back to the table, where by the yellowish lamplight Ida was pulling a new stocking over her darning egg; she first examined the hole and then began to mend it.
“You’re darning, Ida. It’s strange, I can never picture you doing anything else.”
“Yes, yes, Tony. The boy tears holes in everything these days, now that he’s going to school.”
“But he’s still the same quiet, gentle child, isn’t he?”
“Yes, yes. But all the same …”
“Does he like school?”
“No, no, Tony. He would much rather have stayed at home here with me. And I would have preferred that, too, my girl, seeing as how those gentlemen haven’t known him since he was a baby and don’t understand how to help him learn his lessons. He has trouble concentrating, and gets tired quickly.”
“Poor thing. Have they paddled him?”
“Heavens, no! My boshy kock hanna—they wouldn’t be that hardhearted. One look from the lad’s eyes and …”
“What was his first day at school like? Did he cry?”
“Yes, he certainly did. But he cries so softly—never loud, just sort of to himself. And then he tried to hold tight to your brother’s coat and kept pleading for him to stay behind.”
“I see, so my brother took him, did he? Yes, that’s a difficult moment in life, Ida, believe me. Why, I can remember it as if it were yesterday. I howled, let me tell you, howled like a mournful hound. It was terribly hard for me. And do you know why? Because I had things so good at home, just like Hanno. The children from all the finer houses were crying—I noticed that at once. But the others didn’t care much at all. They just gaped at us and grinned. Good Lord, what’s wrong with him, Ida?”
She broke off her chatter, didn’t even complete her hand gesture, and turned round to the bed, where the cry had come from—a cry of fear, which was immediately repeated, but now it sounded more anguished, more terrified, and then came a third, a fourth, a fifth, one right after another. “Oh! Oh! Oh!”—a desperate, outraged cry tinged with horror—a protest against something horrible that he was watching or that was happening to him. And in the next instant little Johann stood up in bed and stammered something unintelligible; his odd, golden-brown eyes were wide open now, staring not at the real world all around, but at some totally different world inside him.
“It’s nothing,” Ida said, “Just pavor nocturnus. Oh, sometimes it’s much worse.” And she quite calmly put down her darning, moved in long, heavy strides over to Hanno, and laid him back down under his blanket, all the while speaking in a deep, calming voice.
“Oh, I see, yes, pavor nocturnus,” Frau Permaneder repeated. “Will he wake up now?”
But Hanno showed no signs of waking, although his eyes were staring wide and his lips went on moving.
“What’s that? Well, well, let’s stop chattering away now. What did you say?” Ida asked, and Frau Permaneder came closer, too, trying to understand his troubled muttering and stammering.
“To my … garden … I will go,” Hanno mumbled, “Onions and sweet peas to sow.…”
“He’s reciting a poem,” Ida Jungmann explained, shaking her head. “Now, now, that’s enough, lad, go to sleep.”
“There a little hunchback stands … Sneezing, waving little hands,” Hanno said, and then he sighed. Suddenly his expression changed and he closed his eyes halfway. Tossing his head back and forth on his pillow, he went on now in a soft, plaintive voice:
The moon rides high,
The babe doth cry,
Twelve strikes the clock,
That God may help the poorer folk.
And with these words came a sob so deep that tears formed on his eyelashes and slowly rolled down his cheeks—and that woke him. He hugged Ida, looked around with eyes still wet with tears, contentedly murmured something about “Aunt Tony,” shifted in his bed, and then quietly fell asleep.
“How strange,” Frau Permaneder said as Ida sat back down at the table. “What sort of poems were those?”
“They’re in his reader,” Fräulein Jungmann replied, “and right underneath it says ‘The Youth’s Magic Horn.’ They’re very odd poems. He had to memorize them this week, and he’s been talking a lot about the one with the little hunchback. Do you know it?
It’s really very awful. This little hunchbacked man is everywhere, he smashes pots, eats the broth, steals the wood, keeps the spinning wheel from turning, makes fun of people—and then, at the end, he asks to be included in people’s prayers. Yes, the lad’s been fascinated by it. He’s been thinking about it all day and all night. ‘Don’t you see, Ida? He doesn’t do it because he’s wicked, not because he’s wicked! He does it because he’s sad, but that only makes him sadder. And if people pray for him, then he won’t have to do it anymore.’ And this evening, when his mama came in to say good night on her way to the concert, he asked her if he should pray for the little hunchback, too.”
“And did he?”
“Not that I could hear, but probably to himself. And there’s another poem, too, called ‘The Nursery Clock,’ and he wouldn’t even recite that one, just cried and cried. He cries so easily, the lad does, and then can’t stop crying for ever so long.”
“But what is so sad about it?”
“How do I know? He can never get past the start—the same lines he was just sobbing over in his sleep just now. And he cried over another one, too, about a wagon driver who gets up from his straw bed at three in the morning.”
Frau Permaneder was touched. She laughed, but then made a more serious face. “But I must tell you, Ida, it’s not good. I really don’t believe it’s good for him to take everything to heart so. The wagon driver gets up at three—well, good heavens, that’s what wagon drivers do. As far as I can see, the boy’s view of the world is all too intense, he lets everything affect him. And that gnaws away at him, believe me. Someone should have a serious talk with Dr. Grabow. But that’s the problem,” she continued, crossing her arms, laying her head to one side and tapping the floor crossly with her foot. “Grabow’s getting old, and, even apart from that, as kindhearted as he is, as honest and sincere a man as he is—I really don’t think much of his abilities as a doctor, Ida. And may God forgive me if I’m mistaken. Take Hanno’s nervous sleep, for example, the way he starts up and is so frightened by his dreams. Grabow knows about it, but all he does is tell us what it is, by giving it a Latin name: pavor nocturnus. Good Lord, now, isn’t that instructive! Yes, he’s a sweet man, a good friend of the family—all that. But he’s no great intellect. An important man has a different look about him. You can tell even when he’s a young man that there’s something to him. Grabow was around during the events of ’48—he was a young man then himself. But do you suppose he ever got excited about what was happening—about freedom and justice and the overthrow of privileges and arbitrary power? He’s a learned man, but I’m sure that the Confederation’s outrageous laws dealing with the universities and the press left him completely cold. He never once did anything even the least bit wild, never once kicked the traces. He always makes that same long, sympathetic face, prescribes squab and French bread and, if it’s really serious, perhaps a teaspoon of marshmallow tea.… Good night, Ida. No, no, I know there are other kinds of doctors than that. What a shame I won’t see Gerda.… Yes, thanks, there’s light in the hall. Good night.”
As she passed the dining room, Frau Permaneder opened the door to call good night to her brother in the living room. She noticed that the lights were lit in all the rooms and that Thomas was pacing back and forth, his hands behind his back.
4
ONCE HE WAS ALONE, the senator had sat down at the table again and taken out his pince-nez, intending to resume reading his paper. But after two minutes his eyes drifted up from the newsprint, and, without changing the position of his body, he gazed straight ahead into the darkened salon for a long time, his eyes fixed on the portieres.
How almost unrecognizable his face became when he was alone. The muscles of his mouth and cheeks, usually so disciplined and obedient to his will, relaxed and slackened; the alert, prudent, kind, energetic look, which he had preserved for so long now only with great effort, fell away like a mask and reverted to a state of anguished weariness; his dull, somber eyes would fix on some object without seeing it, would redden and begin to water—and, lacking the courage to deceive even himself, he could hold fast to only one of the many heavy, confused, restless thoughts that filled his mind: that, at age forty-two, Thomas Buddenbrook was an exhausted man.
He took a deep breath, letting his hand glide slowly across his brow and eyes, automatically lit another cigarette, although he knew they were not good for him, and went on gazing into the darkness through the smoke. What a contrast between the slack anguish on his face and the elegant, almost martial care he gave to how it looked—to his perfumed mustache, drawn out to long, stiff points, to his fastidiously clean-shaven cheeks and chin, to the meticulous cut of his hair and the way he made sure that the first hint of baldness on the crown was well hidden, to the two long waves that fell back from his delicate temples, to the carefully combed narrow part, to the very cropped trim above the ears that he had adopted of late in place of his old full curls, so that people could not see that his hair was graying there. He was fully aware of the contrast himself, and he knew well that the contradiction between the elastic, supple energy of his movements and the weary pallor of his face could not escape the eyes of anyone passing him on the street.
Not that he was any less of an important and indispensable person outside these walls than he had been before. Friends told him that constantly, and the people who envied him could not deny that Dr. Langhals had explicitly underscored the judgment of Mayor Oeverdieck, his predecessor: Senator Buddenbrook was the mayor’s right-hand man. Nevertheless, the firm of Johann Buddenbrook was no longer what it had once been—that, too, was such common knowledge that Herr Stuht on Glockengiesser Strasse could share it with his wife over bacon soup at lunch. And Thomas Buddenbrook could only groan in response.
He himself, however, was the chief source for this impression. He was a rich man, and none of the losses he had endured, not even the especially heavy ones of ’66, could have seriously endangered the firm’s existence. For, although he continued, of course, to play the gracious host, to give dinners with the requisite number of courses his guests had come to expect, the notion that his good luck and success itself had flown—a notion that was more an inner truth for him than one based on external facts—had so reduced him to a condition of despondent worry that he began to hold tight to his money as never before and to save in almost petty ways when it came to private expenditures. He cursed himself a hundred times for having built his extravagant new house, which, or so he felt, had brought him nothing but misfortune. There were no more summer trips, and their little garden in town had to take the place of a stay at the shore or in the mountains. At his express and repeated wish, the meals he shared with his wife and little Hanno were so simple they seemed almost a farce in contrast to the spacious, parqueted dining room with its stately high ceilings and splendid oak furniture. For some time now dessert had been served only on Sunday. He kept up his elegant external appearance; but Anton, their butler of so many years, was able to tell the kitchen staff that the senator changed his white shirt only every other day now—too-frequent washing ruined fine linen. Anton knew other things as well. He knew that he would be let go. Gerda protested—three servants were hardly enough to keep such a large house in good order. But it was to no avail. Anton, who for so many years had sat on the coachbox when Thomas Buddenbrook rode to the senate, was sent on his way—with an appropriate sum of money.
These measures were consistent with the dismal tempo at which his business had been moving. There was no trace now of the new and fresh spirit that Thomas Buddenbrook had once brought to the firm; and his partner, Herr Friedrich Wilhelm Marcus, whose invested capital was small and who therefore could never have exerted any significant influence, was by nature and temperament a man lacking in initiative. Over the years he had become increasingly pedantic, until now he was a perfect eccentric. He needed fifteen minutes—of mustache-stroking, throat-clearing, and sidelong, circumspect glances—just to trim his cigar and tuck the tip in his wallet.
When evening fell and every corner of the office was brightly lit by gas lamps, he never failed to set a burning stearin candle on his desk. Every half-hour he would get up, go to the tap, and run water over his head. One morning he found an empty gunny sack that had accidentally been left under his desk, took it for a cat, and to the great amusement of the staff tried to shoo it away with loud curses. No, despite the senator’s current lethargy, Marcus was not the man to intervene and help the firm along.
And so the senator sat staring with weary eyes into the darkness of the salon, and a familiar sense of shame and desperate impatience came over him as he pictured the fallen state of the firm of Johann Buddenbrook and all its insignificant, small-scale, pennywise transactions.
But was it not, perhaps, all for the good? Misfortune, too, he thought, has its season. Was it not wise, perhaps, to lie low as long as it held sway, not stirring, but waiting and gathering one’s inner strength? Why had they approached him with this proposal just now, prematurely rousing him from sensible resignation, filling him with doubt and indecision? Had the time come? Was this his cue? Should he take heart, stand up tall, and deliver a blow? He had rejected the proposal with all the determination he could put into his voice. But even though Tony had left, was the whole thing really decided? It appeared not—for here he sat brooding. “One only responds to an idea with anger when one is not quite sure of one’s own power to resist it.” What a damn sly person little Tony was!
What had been his objections? He recalled that he had put it very forcefully and well. “Shabby operation—fishing in troubled waters—brutal exploitation—fleecing a poor, defenseless fellow—usury”—excellent! Except that he now asked himself whether this was an occasion for loud counterarguments. Consul Hermann Hagenström would not have tried to find them, or have used them. Was Thomas Buddenbrook a businessman, a man of dispassionate deeds, or a brooder haunted by scruples?