Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

  Indeed, under the friendly, watchful eye of a humane, snuff-taking old director, the splendid scholars who did their duty beneath the Gothic arches of the Old School—a convent school in bygone years—were harmless and well-intentioned men, united in their view that science and good cheer were not mutually exclusive categories, and they set about their work with benevolence and gusto. In the middle grades there was a certain Pastor Shepherd, a retired cleric who taught Latin, a tall man with brown whiskers and merry eyes, whose greatest joy in life was that his last name and his title were synonymous and who never tired of having his charges translate the Latin word “pastor.” His favorite turn of phrase was “Inexhaustibly vacuous!,” and no one ever found out if he himself was aware of the joke. And whenever he wanted to flabbergast his students totally, he demonstrated his mastery of the art of sucking his lips into his mouth and releasing them with a sound like a popping champagne cork. He loved to pace about his classroom with long strides and grew astoundingly animated as he laid out for each student the future course of his life, always with the manifest purpose of stimulating his imagination. Then he would return to work in earnest, which is to say, he listened to their recitations of some very clever verses he had composed for explaining difficult constructions and the rules of gender—“What’s good for the goose is good for the gender,” he would say—and then repeat the verses himself, stressing each rhythm and rhyme with inexpressible triumph.

  Tom and Christian’s boyhood years—nothing significant to report there. The sun shone in the Buddenbrook house; and down in the offices, business was excellent. Sometimes there was a thunderstorm, an occasional mishap like the following:

  Herr Stuht, a tailor on Glockengiesser Strasse, whose wife bought used articles of clothing and so moved in the highest social circles—Herr Stuht, whose woolen shirt followed the contours of his astounding potbelly and fell down over his trousers—Herr Stuht had made two suits of clothes for the young Messrs. Buddenbrook, at a total cost of seventy marks courant; except that, at the express wish of the two boys, he promptly agreed to make out a bill for eighty, handing back the difference to them in cash. It was a little business deal—not exactly proper, but certainly not unusual, either. The mishap consisted in the fact that by the hand of some dark fate the entire matter came to light, so that Herr Stuht—having pulled on a black coat over his woolen shirt—had to appear in the consul’s private office while Tom and Christian were sternly interrogated in his presence. Herr Stuht stood beside the consul’s armchair, his legs spread somewhat but his head respectfully tipped to one side, and gave a speech to smooth things over, the burden of which was that this was “jist one o’ them things,” and that he would be happy to accept the seventy marks courant now that “things’d ended up in a mess.” The consul was more than a little upset by their prank. After giving it serious consideration, however, he ended up raising his sons’ allowances, for it was written: Lead us not into temptation.

  It was obvious that greater hopes were to be placed in Thomas Buddenbrook than in his brother. He conducted himself sensibly, cheerfully, even-temperedly; whereas Christian seemed moody, capable on the one hand of the silliest comedy and on the other of behavior so odd that it would terrify his entire family.

  They are sitting at the dinner table; the fruit has been served and is being enjoyed amid genial conversation. Suddenly Christian places a peach he has bitten into back on his plate, his face turns white, and his round, deep-set eyes grow larger and larger above his oversize nose.

  “I shall never eat another peach,” he says.

  “Why not, Christian? What sort of nonsense is that? What’s wrong?”

  “Just imagine what would happen if … just by accident … I swallowed this big peach pit and it got stuck in my throat … and I couldn’t get my breath … and I’d jump up and choke and die a horrible death, and then you’d all jump up …” And suddenly he adds a short groan, an “Oh!” of total terror, sits up erect in his chair, and turns to one side as if he is about to bolt.

  His mother and Mamselle Jungmann do in fact leap to their feet.

  “Good heavens—Christian, you haven’t swallowed it, have you?!” For it really does look as if that is what has happened.

  “No, no,” Christian says, gradually calming down, “but what would happen if I did?”

  The consul, who has also turned pale with fright, begins to scold him, and even his grandfather raps indignantly on the table, forbidding him any such foolish pranks. But for a long time afterward, Christian does not eat a single peach.

  4

  IT WAS NOT SIMPLY old age that caused Madame Antoinette Buddenbrook to take to her high four-poster in the bedroom on the mezzanine one cold January day, some six years after the family had moved into the house on Meng Strasse. The old woman had been hale and hearty to the end, carrying her head with its thick white curls proud and erect; she had continued to join her husband and children at all the town’s principal banquets and had been as gracious a hostess as her elegant daughter-in-law at the parties the Buddenbrooks had themselves given. One day, however, she took ill with something rather undefinable; at first it was only a slight intestinal catarrh, for which Dr. Grabow prescribed a little squab and French bread, but then a colic set in with vomiting spells, which with incredible speed led to a general enervation, a state of gentle, but quite alarming, infirmity.

  But after Dr. Grabow’s brief but serious conversation with the consul on the stairs, after consultation with a second doctor—a newcomer to town, a stout man with a black beard and a gloomy expression—who now began to arrive and leave with Grabow, the physiognomy of the household changed, so to speak. People walked on tiptoe and whispered in earnest tones, and wagons were not permitted to roll through the passageway. Some new, alien, extraordinary thing seemed to have made an appearance, a secret that they all read in each other’s eyes; the thought of death had been admitted into the house and now held silent sway in its spacious rooms.

  But that did not mean they were idle, for visitors began to arrive. The dying woman’s illness lasted fourteen or fifteen days, and after the first week her brother, old Senator Duchamps, came with his daughter; a few days later the consul’s sister and her husband, the Frankfurt banker, made their appearance. These ladies and gentlemen were put up in the house, and Ida Jungmann had her hands full tidying up the various bedrooms and tending to good breakfasts of shrimps and port wine—the kitchen was busy with baking and roasting.

  Upstairs Johann Buddenbrook sat beside her sickbed and gazed mutely into space, his brows raised, his lower lip drooping slightly, his Netty’s limp hand held in his own. The wall clock emitted its muffled ticks, with long pauses in between, but the pauses between the sick woman’s quick, shallow breaths were even longer. A nurse in black was busy at the table making the beef tea that they wanted to try to give her; now and then some member of the family entered soundlessly and then vanished again.

  Perhaps the old man was thinking about how he had sat beside the bed of a dying wife that first time, forty-six years before, and perhaps he compared the savage despair that had blazed within him then with the pensive melancholy that showed in his eyes now as he gazed, an old man himself, at the altered, expressionless, and terrifyingly indifferent face of this old woman, who had brought him neither great happiness nor great pain, but who had stood beside him with such clever, good grace over these many long years, and whose life was also now ebbing away.

  His thoughts were few; he merely looked back steadily, with a gentle shake of his head, at his life and at life in general, which suddenly seemed so distant and strange—all that unnecessary, noisy hustle and bustle, in whose midst he had stood, and which now was imperceptibly drawing away from him, a distant echo to which he turned an amazed ear. Sometimes he would say to himself in a low voice, “Curious. Curious.”

  Madame Buddenbrook had sighed her last, very brief, and peaceful sigh, the bearers had lifted her flower-bedecked coffin to carry it awkwardly from the
dining room, where the funeral service had been held—but his mood did not change, he never wept once; what remained was that gentle, perplexed shake of the head, and “curious” became his favorite word, repeated with something almost like a smile. No doubt of it, Johann Buddenbrook was also nearing his end.

  If he was sitting with the rest of the family, he was mute and seemed distracted, and if he happened to set little Clara on his knee, perhaps to sing her some old funny songs—“Let’s ride through town on the omnibus” or “Looka that horsefly on the wall,” for instance—he might suddenly fall silent, set his granddaughter back on the floor, and turn away, as if caught up in some long, half-unconscious train of thought, which ended then in “Curious!” and a shake of the head.

  One day he said, “Jean—enough, don’t you think?”

  And at once there began to circulate through the city neatly printed documents, with two signatures affixed, announcing that Johann Buddenbrook, senior, begged leave to declare publicly that his advancing years obliged him to retire from his former business activities, and that as a result the firm Johann Buddenbrook, founded by his late father anno 1768, was to be transferred as of this date and under the same name, with all assets and liabilities, to his son and previous partner, Johann Buddenbrook, as its sole proprietor, for whom he begged a continuance of the confidence shown to him from all parties, signed, your obedient servant, Johann Buddenbrook, senior, whose signature would no longer be appended to the firm’s correspondence.

  From the moment this general announcement had been made, the old man refused to set a foot in the office, and his wistful apathy increased in the most startling fashion, so that by the middle of March, only two months after the death of his wife, it took no more than a case of spring sniffles to send him to his bed. And one night, as his family was gathered about his bed, the time had come for him to say to the consul, “Good luck—you hear, Jean? And chin up, courage!”

  And to Thomas, he said, “Help your father.”

  And to Christian, “Make something of yourself!”

  And then, gazing at them all, he fell silent and turned his back on them with a final “Curious.”

  To the very end he did not mention Gotthold, and when the consul wrote to demand that he appear at the bedside of his dying father, the eldest son’s only reply was silence. Very early the next morning, however, before the death announcements had even been sent out and as the consul was on his way downstairs to take care of a few urgent matters in the office, something remarkable happened—Gotthold Buddenbrook, owner of the linen firm Siegmund Stüwing & Co. of Breite Strasse, strode rapidly into the entrance hall. His short legs were clad in baggy trousers of a rough white-checked material. He strode up the stairs toward the consul, somehow managing simultaneously to knit his eyebrows and to raise them up under the brim of his gray hat.

  “Johann,” he said in a high, pleasant voice, without extending a hand to his brother, “how is he?”

  “He passed away last night,” the consul said with emotion and grasped the hand in which his brother was holding an umbrella. “He was the best of fathers.”

  Gotthold’s brows sank so low that his eyelids closed. After a brief silence, he said with emphasis, “And nothing changed, Johann, even at the end?”

  And the consul immediately pulled his hand away—indeed, he backed up a step—and his round, deep-set eyes flashed as he said, “Nothing.”

  Gotthold’s eyebrows wandered back up under the brim of his hat, and with some exertion he focused his eyes on his brother. “And may I expect any justice from you?” he asked in a low voice.

  The consul’s gaze fell now; but then, without lifting his eyes, he lowered his hand in a decisive gesture and softly replied, “In this sad and solemn moment I gave you my hand as a brother. As for business matters, I have no choice but to respond as the director of a respected firm, whose owner, sole owner, I have become today. You can expect nothing from me that would contradict the duties incumbent upon me in that position. Any other feelings I may have must be left unstated.”

  Gotthold departed. But when it came time for the funeral—when the whole crowd of relatives, acquaintances, business friends, delegations of grain haulers, office personnel, and warehouse workers filled the rooms, stairwells, and corridors, and every hired carriage in the city stood below on Meng Strasse—he reappeared, to the genuine delight of the consul, even bringing along his wife and his three grown daughters: Friederike and Henriette, both very tall and very lanky, and Pfiffi, the youngest at eighteen, who was very short and very plump.

  And after they had arrived at the grave, the Buddenbrook family plot at the edge of a little wood in the cemetery beyond the Burg Gate, and after the Reverend Kölling, pastor of St. Mary’s, a robust man with a bulldog head and a rough manner of speaking, had praised the temperate life led by the deceased, a life pleasing to God, unlike that of “debauchers, gluttons, and drunkards”—an expression that caused many heads to shake among those who recalled the discretion displayed by old Pastor Wunderlich, only recently deceased—after all the solemnities and formalities had been completed and the seventy or eighty hired carriages began to roll back into town, Gotthold Buddenbrook offered to accompany the consul, because there was something he would like to say to him, man to man. And what do you know: sitting there next to his stepbrother in the back seat of the high, wide, overstuffed carriage, he crossed one short leg over the other, and proved quite conciliatory and cordial. He had come more and more to the realization, he said, that the consul had to proceed in this fashion, and that he did not wish to have hateful memories of his father. He would renounce his claims, all the more so since it was his intention to retire from business and live out his life quietly on his inheritance and whatever profits he might realize from the sale of his linen business, which no longer provided him any pleasure and was indeed not doing well enough for him to bring himself to invest in it any further.

  And, with a pious inward glance to heaven, the consul thought, “His rebuke of his father hath brought him no blessing”; and Gotthold probably thought much the same thing.

  On arriving at Meng Strasse, Gotthold went upstairs with his brother to the breakfast room, where both gentlemen, chilled from standing out in the spring air so long in only their dress coats, drank a cognac together. And, having exchanged a few polite and sober words with his sister-in-law and having given the children a pat on the head, Gotthold departed and was not seen again until the next “children’s day” at the Krögers’ country villa. He was already busy settling his affairs.

  5

  THERE WAS ONE THING that the consul regretted: that his father had not lived to see his eldest grandson join the firm, an event that occurred at Easter that same year.

  Thomas was sixteen years old when he left school. He had grown a great deal in the last few years, and ever since his confirmation by Pastor Kölling, who had strongly urged him to be “temperate in all things,” he had worn men’s clothes, which made him look even taller. Around his neck hung the long gold watch chain that his grandfather had promised him, its fob a medallion that displayed the rather mournful family coat-of-arms: an irregularly hatched background, a bleak moor landscape, and a solitary, leafless willow beside a marsh. The signet ring with a green gemstone was even older, had presumably been worn by the very well-situated merchant tailor from Rostock, and the consul had inherited it along with the large Bible.

  Thomas’s resemblance to his grandfather had grown quite strong with time, as had Christian’s to his father; most noticeably, he had the old man’s round, firm chin and straight, well-chiseled nose. His light brown hair was parted on one side and fell back in two waves from his narrow, finely veined temples; in contrast, his long eyelashes and brows, one of which he liked to raise just the least bit, were unusually fair and colorless. He was composed and prudent in his gestures, in his manner of speech, even in his laugh, which revealed his rather bad teeth. He felt both excited and serious about his future profession.
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  Right after breakfast, the consul took him down to the offices. The day’s solemn ceremonies began with a formal introduction to Herr Marcus, the chief clerk, to Herr Havermann, the cashier, and to the other personnel as well, although he had long been friends with them all. For the first time, he sat in his swivel chair, diligently stamping, copying, and filing, and that afternoon his father also took him down to the Trave for a tour of the warehouses—the “Linden,” the “Oak,” the “Lion,” and the “Whale”—and although Thomas had long been perfectly at home here, too, he was now presented as a co-worker.

  He set to work with total devotion, imitating the quiet style and dogged industry of his father, who would often grind his teeth as he worked—and enter prayers for help in his diary. The task before them was to recover the considerable losses that the old man’s death had meant for the “firm”—the very word was cloaked in a certain divinity. Late one evening, in the landscape room, the consul laid out a rather detailed account of their finances for his wife.

  It was indeed very late, half past eleven, and the children, even Mamselle Jungmann, were asleep in their rooms down the hall; the third floor stood empty now and was used only occasionally for guests. The consul’s wife was sitting on the yellow sofa, next to her husband, who was smoking a cigar and scanning the market quotations in the Advertiser. She was bent down over her silk embroidery, her lips moving slightly as she counted a row of stitches with her needle. Six candles were burning in the candelabrum on the dainty, gold-detailed sewing table beside her; the chandelier was not in use.