She broke off, buried her chin once more in her hand, and stared out of the window. He stood before her, his weight on one leg, his hands in his trousers pockets. His eyes rested on her unseeing, for he was in deep thought, and slowly moving his head from side to side.
“Tony,” he said. “You’re telling the truth. I knew it all along; but you betrayed yourself just now. It is not the man at all. It is the place. It isn’t this other idiotic business—it is the whole thing all together. You couldn’t get used to it. Tell the truth.”
“Thomas,” she cried, “it is the truth!” She sprang up as she spoke, and pointed straight into his face with her outstretched hand. Her own face was red. She stood there in a warlike pose, one hand grasping the chair, gesticulating with the other, and made a long, agitated, passionate speech that welled up in a resistless tide. The Consul stared at her amazed. Scarcely would she pause to draw breath, when new words would come gushing and bubbling forth. Yes, she found words for everything; she gave full expression to all the accumulated disgust of her Munich years. Unassorted, confused, she poured it all out, one thing after another; she kept nothing back. It was like the bursting of a dam—an assertion of desperate integrity; something elemental, a force of nature, that brooked no restraint.
“It is the truth!” she cried. “Say it again, Thomas! Oh, I can tell you plainly, I am no stupid goose any longer; I know what I have to expect. I don’t faint away at my time of life, to hear that dirty work goes on now and then. I’ve known people like Teary Trieschke, and I was married to Bendix Grünlich, and I know the dissipated creatures there are here in this town. I am no country innocent, I tell you; and the affair with Babette wouldn’t have made me go off the handle like that, just by itself. No, Thomas, the thing was that it filled the cup to overflowing—and that didn’t take much, for it was full already, and had been for a long time—a long time. It would have taken very little to make it run over. And then this happened! The knowledge that I could not depend on Permaneder even in that way—that put the top on everything. It knocked the bottom out of the cask. It brought to a head all at once my intention to get away from Munich, that had been slowly growing in my mind a long time before that, Tom; for I cannot live down there—I swear it before God and all His heavenly hosts! How wretched I have been, Thomas, you can never know. When you were there on a visit, I concealed everything, for I am a tactful woman and do not burden others with my complainings, nor wear my heart on my sleeve on a week-day. I have always been rather reserved. But I have suffered, Tom, suffered with my entire being—with my whole personality, so to speak. Like a plant, a flower that has been transplanted into a foreign soil—if I may make such a comparison. You will probably find it a most unsuitable one, for I am really an ugly old woman—but I could not be planted in a more foreign soil than that, and I would just as lief go and live in Turkey! Oh, we should never be transplanted, we northern folk! We should stick to the shore of our own bay; we can only really thrive upon our native soil! You all used to laugh at my taste for the nobility. Yes, in these years I have often thought of what somebody said to me once, in times gone by. A very clever man. ‘Your sympathies are with the nobility,’ he said. ‘Shall I tell you why? Because you yourself belong to the nobility. Your father is a great gentleman, and you are a princess. A gulf lies between you and the rest of us who do not belong to the governing classes.’ Yes, Tom. We feel like the nobility, and we realize the difference; we should never try to live where we are not known, where no one understands our worth, for we shall have nothing but chagrin, and be laughed at for our arrogance. Yes, they all found me ridiculously arrogant. They did not say so, but I felt it every minute, and that made me suffer, too. Do you think I feel arrogant, Tom—in a place where they eat cake with a knife, and the very princes speak bad grammar, and if a gentleman picks up a lady’s fan it is supposed to be a love-affair. Get used to it? To people without dignity, morals, energy, ambition, self-respect, or good manners, lazy and frivolous, stupid and shallow at the same time?—no, never, never, as long as I am a Buddenbrook and your sister! Eva Ewers managed it—but Eva is not a Buddenbrook, and she has a husband that amounts to something. It was different with me. You think back, Tom, from the very beginning: I come from a home where people work and get things accomplished and have a purpose in life, and I go down there to Permaneder—and he sits himself down with my dowry— Oh, that was genuine enough, that was characteristic—but it was the only good thing there was about it! And then? I was going to have a baby; that would have made everything up to me. And what happens? It dies. I don’t blame Permaneder for that, of course; I don’t mean that. God forbid. He did everything he could—and he didn’t go to the café for several days. But, after all, it belonged to the same thing. It made me no happier, as you can well believe. But I didn’t give in, and I didn’t grumble. I was alone, and misunderstood, and pointed at for being arrogant; but I said to myself: ‘You yielded him your consent for life. He is lumpy and lazy, and he caused you a cruel disappointment. But his heart is pure, and he means well.’ And then I had to bear the sight of him in that last unspeakable minute. And I said to myself: ‘He understands you no better and respects you no more and no less than the others do, and he calls you names that one of our workmen up here wouldn’t throw at a dog!’ I knew then that nothing bound me to him any more, and that it was an indignity for me to stay. When I was driving from the station this afternoon, I passed Nielsen the porter, and he took off his hat and made me a deep bow, and I bowed back to him—not arrogantly, not a bit—I waved my hand, just the way Father used to. And here I am. You can do what you like: you can harness up all your work-horses—but you can never drag me back to Munich again. And to-morrow I go to Gieseke!”
Thus she spoke; and, finishing, sank back exhausted in her chair and stared again out of the window.
Tom was alarmed, shaken, stupefied. He stood before her and found no words. He raised his arms up shoulder-high, drawing a long breath. Then he let them fall against his thighs.
“Well, that’s an end of it,” he said. His voice was calm, and he turned and went toward the door.
Her face wore now the same expression, the same half-pouting, half-injured smile, as when he entered.
“Tom?” she said, with a rising inflection. “Are you vexed with me?”
He held the oval doorknob in one hand and made a gesture of weary protest with the other. “Oh, no. Not at all.”