The family are at table eating dessert and conversing pleasantly the while. Suddenly Christian turns pale and puts back on his plate the peach into which he has just bitten. His round, deep-set eyes, above the too-large nose, have opened wider.
“I will never eat another peach,” he says.
“Why not, Christian? What nonsense! What’s the matter?”
“Suppose I accidentally—suppose I swallowed the stone, and it stuck in my throat, so I couldn’t breathe, and I jumped up, strangling horribly—and all of you jump up— Ugh...!” and he suddenly gives a short groan, full of horror and affright, starts up in his chair, and acts as if he were trying to escape.
The Frau Consul and Ida Jungmann actually do jump up.
“Heavens, Christian!—you haven’t swallowed it, have you?” For his whole appearance suggests that he has.
“No,” says Christian slowly. “No”—he is gradually quieting down—“I only mean, suppose I actually had swallowed it!”
The Consul has been pale with fright, but he recovers and begins to scold. Old Johann bangs his fist on the table and forbids any more of these idiotic practical jokes. But Christian, for a long, long time, eats no more peaches.
CHAPTER IV
It was not simply the weakness of age that made Madame Antoinette Buddenbrook take to her lofty bed in the bed-chamber of the entresol, one cold January day after they had dwelt some six years in Meng Street. The old lady had remained hale and active, and carried her head, with its clustering white side-curls, proudly erect to the very last. She had gone with her husband and children to most of the large dinners given in the town, and presided no whit less elegantly than her daughter-in-law when the Buddenbrooks themselves entertained. But one day an indefinable malady had suddenly made itself felt—at first in the form of a slight intestinal catarrh, for which Dr. Grabow prescribed a mild diet of pigeon and French bread. This had been followed by colic and vomiting, which reduced her strength so rapidly as to bring about an alarming decline.