Herr Kistenmaker also arranged for the purchase of the new house, a pleasant little villa for which he paid rather too high a price, but which was about what Gerda Buddenbrook wanted. It lay outside the Castle Gate, on a chestnut-bordered avenue; and thither, in the autumn of the year 1876, the Frau Senator moved with her son, her servants, and a part of her household goods—the remainder, to Frau Permaneder’s great distress, being left behind to pass into the possession of the elderly gentlewoman.
As if these were not changes enough, Mamsell Jungmann, after forty years in the service of the Buddenbrook family, left it to return to her native West Prussia to live out the evening of her life. To tell the truth, she was dismissed by the Frau Senator. This good soul had taken up with little Johann when the previous generation had outgrown her. She had cherished him fondly, read him fairy stories, and told him about the uncle who died of hiccoughs. But now little Johann was no longer small. He was a lad of fifteen years, to whom, despite his lack of strength, she could no longer be of much service; and with his mother her relations had not for a long time been on a very comfortable footing. She had never been able to think of this lady, who had entered the family so much later than herself, as a proper Buddenbrook; and of late she had begun, with the freedom of an old servant, to arrogate to herself exaggerated authority. She stirred up dissension in the household by this or that encroachment; the position became untenable; there were disagreements—and though Frau Permaneder made an impassioned plea in her behalf, as for the old house and the furniture, old Ida had to go.
She wept bitterly when the hour came to bid little Johann farewell. He put his arms about her and embraced her. Then, with his hands behind his back, resting his weight on one leg while the other poised on the tips of the toes, he watched her out of sight; his face wore the same brooding, introspective look with which he had stood at his father’s death-bed, and his grandmother’s bier, witnessed the breaking-up of the great household, and shared in so many events of the same kind, though of lesser outward significance. The departure of old Ida belonged to the same category as other events with which he was already familiar: breakings-up, closings, endings, disintegrations—he had seen them all. Such events did not disturb him—they had never disturbed him. But he would lift his head, with the curling light-brown hair, inflate one delicate nostril, and it was as if he cautiously sniffed the air about him, expecting to perceive that odour, that strange and yet familiar odour which, at his grandmother’s bier, not all the scent of the flowers had been able to disguise.
When Frau Permaneder visited her sister-in-law, she would draw her nephew to her and tell him of the Buddenbrook family past, and of that future for which, next to the mercy of God, they would have to thank little Johann. The more depressing the present appeared, the more she strove to depict the elegance of the life that went on in the houses of her parents and grandparents; and she would tell Hanno how his great-grandfather had driven all over the country with his carriage and four horses. One day she had a severe attack of cramps in the stomach because Friederike, Henriette, and Pfiffi had asserted that the Hagenströms were the crême de la crême of town society.
Bad news came of Christian. His marriage seemed not to have improved his health. He had become more and more subject to uncanny delusions and morbid hallucinations, until finally his wife had acted upon the advice of a physician and had him put into an institution. He was unhappy there, and wrote pathetic letters to his relatives, expressive of a fervent desire to leave the establishment, where, it seemed, he was none too well treated. But they kept him shut up, and it was probably the best thing for him. It also put his wife in a position to continue her former independent existence without prejudice to her status as a married woman or to the practical advantages accruing from her marriage.
CHAPTER II
The alarm-clock went off with cruel alacrity. It was a hoarse rattling and clattering that it made, rather than a ringing, for it was old and worn out; but it kept on for a painfully long time, for it had been thoroughly wound up.
Hanno Buddenbrook was startled to his inmost depths. It was like this every morning. His very entrails rebelled, in rage, protest, and despair, at the onslaught of this at once cruel and faithful monitor standing on the bedside table close to his ear. However, he did not get up, or even change his position in the bed; he only wrenched himself away from some blurred dream of the early morning and opened his eyes.
It was perfectly dark in the wintry room. He could distinguish nothing, not even the hands on the clock. But he knew it was six o’clock, because last night he had set his alarm for six. Last night— And as he lay on his back, with his nerves rasped by the shock of waking, struggling for sufficient resolution to make a light and jump out of bed, everything that had filled his mind yesterday came gradually back into his consciousness.
It was Sunday evening; and after having been maltreated by Herr Brecht for several days on end, he had been taken as a reward to a performance of Lohengrin. He had looked forward for a whole week to this evening with a joy which absorbed his entire existence. Only, it was a pity that on such occasions the full pleasure of the anticipation had to be marred by disagreeable commonplaces that went on up to the very last minute. But at length Saturday came, school was over for the week, and Herr Brecht’s little drill had bored and buzzed away in the mouth for the last time. Now everything was out of the way and done with—for he had obstinately put off his preparation for Monday until after the opera. What was Monday to him? Was it likely it would ever dawn? Who believes in Monday, when he is to hear Lohengrin on Sunday evening? He would get up early on Monday and get the wretched stuff done—and that was all there was to it. Thus he went about free from care, fondled the coming joy in his heart, dreamed at his piano, and forgot all unpleasantness to come.