Dr. Grabow held hurried speech with the Consul, outside on the landing, and another doctor was called in consultation—a stout, black-bearded, gloomy-looking man who began going in and out with Dr. Grabow. And now the whole atmosphere of the house changed. They went about on their tip-toes and spoke in whispers. The wagons were no longer allowed to roll through the great entry-way below. They looked in each others’ eyes and saw there something strange. It was the idea of death that had entered, and was holding silent sway in the spacious rooms.
But there was no idle watching, for visitors came: old Senator Duchamps, the dying woman’s brother, from Hamburg, with his daughter; and a few days later, the Consul’s sister from Frankfort and her husband, who was a banker. The illness lasted fourteen or fifteen days, during which the guests lived in the house, and Ida Jungmann had her hands full attending to the bedrooms and providing heavy breakfasts, with shrimps and port wine. Much roasting and baking went on in the kitchen.
Upstairs, Johann Buddenbrook sat by the sick-bed, his old Netta’s limp hand in his, and stared into space with his brows knitted and his lower lip hanging. A clock hung on the wall and ticked dully, with long pauses between; not so long, however, as the pauses between the dying woman’s fluttering breaths. A black-robed sister of mercy busied herself about the beef-tea which they still sought to make the patient take. Now and then some member of the family would appear at the door and disappear again.
Perhaps the old man was thinking how he had sat at the death-bed of his first wife, forty-six years before. Perhaps he recalled his frenzy of despair and contrasted it with the gentle melancholy which he felt now, as an old man, gazing into the face of his old wife—a face so changed, so listless, so void of expression. She had never given him either a great joy or a great sorrow; but she had decorously played her part beside him for many a long year—and now her life was ebbing away.
He was not thinking a great deal. He was only looking with fixed gaze back into his own past life and at life in general. It all seemed to him now quite strange and far away, and he shook his head a little. That empty noise and bustle, in the midst of which he had once stood, had flowed away imperceptibly and left him standing there, listening in wonder to sounds that died upon his ear. “Strange, strange,” he murmured.
Madame Buddenbrook breathed her last brief, effortless sigh; and they prayed by her side in the dining-room, where the service was held; and the bearers lifted the flower-covered coffin to carry it away. But old Johann did not weep. He only gave the same gentle, bewildered head-shake, and said, with the same half-smiling look: “Strange, strange!” It became his most frequent expression. Plainly, the time for old Johann too was near at hand.
He would sit silent and absent in the family circle; sometimes with little Clara on his knee, to whom he would sing one of his droll catches, like
“The omnibus drives through the town”
or perhaps
“Look at the blue-fly a-buzzin’ on the wall.”