Hanno, still looking down, made an obvious effort to give a prompt, alert, and correct answer to the question. He swallowed once and said, “We have Cornelius Nepos, some accounts to copy, French grammar, the rivers of North America, German theme-correcting—”
He stopped and felt provoked with himself; he could not remember any more, and wished he had said and and let his voice fall, it sounded so abrupt and unfinished. “Nothing else,” he said as decidedly as he could, without looking up. But his father did not seem to be listening. He held Hanno’s free hand and played with it absently, unconsciously fingering the slim fingers.
And then Hanno heard something that had nothing to do with the lessons at all: his father’s voice, in a tone he had never heard before, low, distressed, almost imploring: “Hanno—the lieutenant has been more than two hours with Mamma—”
Little Hanno opened wide his gold-brown eyes at the sound: and they looked, as never before, clear, large, and loving, straight into his father’s face, with its reddened eyelids under the light brows, its white puffy cheeks and long stiff moustaches. God knows how much he understood. But one thing they both felt: in the long second when their eyes met, all constraint, coldness, and misunderstanding melted away. Hanno might fail his father in all that demanded vitality, energy and strength. But where fear and suffering were in question, there Thomas Buddenbrook could count on the devotion of his son. On that common ground they met as one.
He did not realize this—he tried not to realize it. In the days that followed, he urged Hanno on more sternly than ever to practical preparations for his future career. He tested his mental powers, pressed him to commit himself upon the subject of his calling, and grew irritated at every sign of rebellion or fatigue. For the truth was that Thomas Buddenbrook, at the age of forty-eight, began to feel that his days were numbered, and to reckon with his own approaching death.
His health had failed. Loss of appetite, sleeplessness, dizziness, and the chills to which he had always been subject forced him several times to call in Dr. Langhals. But he did not follow the doctor’s orders. His will-power had grown flabby in these years of idleness or petty activity. He slept late in the morning, though every evening he made an angry resolve to rise early and take the prescribed walk before breakfast. Only two or three times did he actually carry out the resolve; and it was the same with everything else. And the constant effort to spur on his will, with the constant failure to do so, consumed his self-respect and made him a prey to despair. He never even tried to give up his cigarettes; he could not do without the pleasant narcotic effect; he had smoked them from his youth up. He told Dr. Langhals to his vapid face: “You see, Doctor, it is your duty to forbid me cigarettes—a very easy and agreeable duty. But I have to obey the order—that is my share, and you can look on at it. No, we will work together over my health; but I find the work unevenly divided—too much of yours falls to me. Don’t laugh; it is no joke. One is so frightfully alone—well, I smoke. Will you have one?” He offered his case.
All his powers were on the decline. What strengthened in him was the conviction that it could not last long, that the end was close at hand. He suffered from strange apprehensive fancies. Sometimes at table it seemed to him that he was no longer sitting with his family, but hovering above them somewhere and looking down upon them from a great distance. “I am going to die,” he said to himself. And he would call Hanno to him repeatedly and say: “My son, I may be taken away from you sooner than you think. And then you will be called upon to take my place. I was called upon very young myself. Can you understand that I am troubled by your indifference? Are you now resolved in your mind? Yes? Oh, ‘yes’ is no answer! Again you won’t answer me! What I ask you is, have you resolved, bravely and joyfully, to take up your burden? Do you imagine that you won’t have to work, that you will have enough money without? You will have nothing, or very, very little; you will be thrown upon your own resources. If you want to live, and live well, you will have to work hard, harder even than I did.”
But this was not all. It was not only the burden of his son’s future, the future of his house, that weighed him down. There was another thought that took command, that mastered him and spurred on his weary thoughts. And it was this: As soon as he began to think of his mortal end not as an indefinite remote event, almost a contingency, but as something near and tangible for which it behoved him to prepare, he began to investigate himself, to examine his relations to death and questions of another world. And his earliest researches in this kind discovered in himself an irremediable unpreparedness.
His father had united with his hard practical sense a literal faith, a fanatic Bible-Christianity which his mother, in her latter years, had adhered to as well; but to himself it had always been rather repellant. The worldly scepticism of his grandfather had been more nearly his own attitude. But the comfortable superficiality of old Johann could not satisfy his metaphysical and spiritual needs, and he ended by finding in evolution the answer to all his questions about eternity and immortality. He said to himself that he had lived in his forbears and would live on in his descendants. And this line which he had taken coincided not only with his sense of family, his patrician self-consciousness, his ancestor-worship, as it were; it had also strengthened his ambitions and through them the whole course of his existence. But now, before the near and penetrating eye of death, it fell away; it was nothing, it gave him not one single hour of calm, of readiness for the end.
Thomas Buddenbrook had played now and then throughout his life with an inclination to Catholicism. But he was at bottom, none the less, the born Protestant: full of the true Protestant’s passionate, relentless sense of personal responsibility. No, in the ultimate things there was, there could be, no help from outside, no mediation, no absolution, no soothing-syrup, no panacea. Each one of us, alone, unaided, of his own powers, must unravel the riddle before it was too late, must wring for himself a pious readiness before the hour of death, or else part in despair. Thomas Buddenbrook turned away, desperate and hopeless, from his only son, in whom he had once hoped to live on, renewed and strong, and began in fear and haste to seek for the truth which must somewhere exist for him.