Buddenbrooks/Volume 1/Part 5/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
Deaths in the family usually induce a religious mood. It was not surprising, after the decease of the Consul, to hear from the mouth of his widow expressions which she had not been accustomed to use.
But it was soon apparent that this was no passing phase. Even in the last years of the Consul’s life, his wife had more and more sympathized with his spiritual cravings; and it now became plain that she was determined to honour the memory of her dead by adopting as her own all his pious conceptions.
She strove to fill the great house with the spirit of the deceased that mild and Christlike spirit which yet had not excluded a certain dignified and hearty good cheer. The morning and evening prayers were continued and lengthened. The family gathered in the dining-room, and the servants in the hall, to hear the Frau Consul or Clara read a chapter out of the great family Bible with the big letters. They also sang a few verses out of the hymn-book, accompanied by the Frau Consul on the little organ. Or, often, in place of the chapter from the Bible, they had a reading from one of those edifying or devotional books with the black binding and gilt edges—those Little Treasuries, Jewel-Caskets, Holy Hours, Morning Chimes, Pilgrims’ Staffs, and the like, whose common trait was a sickly and languishing tenderness for the little Jesus, and of which there were all too many in the house.
Christian did not often appear at these devotions. Thomas once chose a favourable moment to disparage the practice, half-jestingly; but his objection met with a gentle rebuff. As for Madame Grünlich, she did not, unfortunately, always conduct herself correctly at the exercises. One morning when there was a strange clergyman stopping with the Buddenbrooks, they were invited to sing to a solemn and devout melody the following words:—
I am a reprobate,
A warped and hardened sinner;
I gobble evil down
Just like the joint for dinner.
Lord, fling thy cur a bone
Of righteousness to chew
And take my carcass home
To Heaven and to you.
Whereat Frau Grünlich threw down her book and left the room, bursting with suppressed giggles.
But the Frau Consul made more demands upon herself than upon her children. She instituted a Sunday School, and on Sunday afternoon only little board-school pupils rang at the door of the house in Meng Street. Stine Voss, who lived by the city wall, and Mike Stuht from Bell-Founders’ Street, and Fike Snut from the river-bank or Groping Alley, their straw-coloured locks smoothed back with a wet comb, crossed the entry into the garden-room, which for a long time now had not been used as an office, and in which rows of benches had been arranged and Frau Consul Buddenbrook, born Kröger, in a gown of heavy black satin, with her white refined face and still whiter lace cap, sat opposite to them at a little table with a glass of sugar-water and catechized them for an hour.
Also, she founded the “Jerusalem evenings,” which not only Clara and Clothilde but also Tony were obliged to attend, willy-nilly. Once a week they sat at the extension table in the dining-room by the light of lamps and candles. Some twenty ladies, all of an age when it is profitable to begin to look after a good place in heaven, drank tea or bishop, ate delicate sandwiches and puddings, read hymns and sermons aloud to each other, and did embroidery, which at the end of the year was sold at a bazaar and the proceeds sent to the mission in Jerusalem.
This pious society was formed in the main from ladies of the Frau Consul’s own social rank: Frau Senator Langhals, Frau Consul Möllendorpf, and old Frau Consul Kistenmaker belonged; but other, more worldly and profane old ladies, like Mme. Köppen, made fun of their friend Betsy. The wives of the clergymen of the town were all members, likewise the widowed Frau Consul Buddenbrook, born Stüwing, and Sesemi Weichbrodt and her simple sister. There is, however, no rank and no discrimination before Jesus; and so certain humble oddities were also guests at the Jerusalem evenings—for example, a little wrinkled creature, rich in the grace of God and knitting-patterns, who lived in the Holy Ghost Hospital and was named Himmelsburger. She was the last of her name—“the last Himmelsburger,” she called herself humbly, and ran her knitting-needle under her cap to scratch her head.
But far more remarkable were two other extraordinary old creatures, twins, who went about hand in hand through the town doing good deeds, in shepherdess hats out of the eighteenth century and faded clothes out of the long, long ago. They were named Gerhardt, and asserted that they descended in a direct line from Paul Gerhardt. People said they were by no means poor; but they lived wretchedly and gave away all they had. “My dears,” remarked the Frau Consul, who was sometimes rather ashamed of them, “God sees the heart, I know; but your clothes are really a little—one must take some thought for oneself.” But she could not prevent them kissing their elegant friend on the brow with the forebearing, yearning, pitying superiority of the poor in heart over the worldly great who seek salvation. They were not at all stupid. In their homely shrivelled heads—for all the world like ancient parrots—; they had bright soft brown eyes and they looked out at the world with a wonderful expression of gentleness and understanding. Their hearts were full of amazing wisdom. They knew that in the last day all our beloved gone before us to God will come with song and salvation to fetch us home. They spoke the words “the Lord” with the fluent authority of early Christians, as if they had heard out of the Master’s own mouth the words, “Yet a little while and ye shall see me.” They possessed the most remarkable theories concerning inner light and intuition and the transmission of thought. One of them, named Lea, was deaf, and yet she nearly always knew what was being talked about!
It was usually the deaf Gerhardt who read aloud at the Jerusalem evenings, and the ladies found that she read beautifully and very affectingly. She took out of her bag an old book of a very disproportionate shape, much taller than it was broad, with an inhumanly chubby presentment of her ancestor in the front. She held it in both hands and read in a tremendous voice, in order to catch a little herself of what she read. It sounded as if the wind were imprisoned in the chimney:
“If Satan me would swallow.”
“Goodness!” thought Tony Grünlich, “how could Satan want to swallow her?” But she said nothing and devoted herself to the pudding, wondering if she herself would ever become as ugly as the two Miss Gerhardts.
She was not happy. She felt bored and out of patience with all the pastors and missionaries, whose visits had increased ever since the death of the Consul. According to Tony they had too much to say in the house and received entirely too much money. But this last was Tom’s affair, and he said nothing, while his sister now and then murmured something about people who consumed widows’ homes and made long prayers.
She hated these black gentlemen bitterly. As a mature woman who knew life and was no longer a silly innocent, she found herself unable to believe in their irreproachable sanctity. “Mother,” she said, “oh dear, I know I must not speak evil of my neighbours. But one thing I must say, and I should be surprised if life had not taught you that too, and that is that not all those who wear a long coat and say ‘Lord, Lord’ are always entirely without blemish.”
History does not say what Tom thought of his sister’s opinion on this point. Christian had no opinion at all. He confined himself to watching the gentlemen with his nose wrinkled up, in order to imitate them afterward at the club or in the family circle.
But it is true that Tony was the chief sufferer from the pious visitants. One day it actually happened that a missionary named Jonathan, who had been in Arabia and Syria—a man with great, reproachful eyes and baggy cheeks was stopping in the house, and challenged her to assert that the curls she wore on her forehead were consistent with true Christian humility. He had not reckoned with Tony Grünlich’s skill at repartee. She was silent a moment, while her mind worked rapidly; and then out it came. “May I ask you, Herr Pastor, to concern yourself with your own curls?” With that she rustled out, shoulders up, head back, and chin well tucked in. Pastor Jonathan had very few curls on his head—it would be nearer truth to say that he was quite bald.
And once she had an even greater triumph. There was a certain Pastor Trieschke from Berlin. His nickname was Teary Trieschke, because every Sunday he began to weep at an appropriate place in his sermon. Teary Trieschke had a pale face, red eyes, and cheek-bones like a horse’s. He had been stopping for eight or ten days with the Buddenbrooks, conducting devotions and holding eating contests with poor Clothilde, turn about. He happened to fall in love with Tony—not with her immortal soul, oh no, but with her upper lip, her thick hair, her pretty eyes and charming figure. And the man of God, who had a wife and numerous children in Berlin, was not ashamed to have Anton leave a letter in Madame Grünlich’s bedroom in the upper storey, wherein Bible texts and a kind of fawning sentimentality were surpassingly mingled. She found it when she went to bed, read it, and went with a firm step downstairs into the Frau Consul’s bedroom, where by the candle-light she read aloud the words of the soul-saver to her Mother, quite unembarrassed and in a loud voice; so that Teary Trieschke became impossible in Meng Street.
“They are all alike,” said Madame Grünlich; “ah, they are all alike. Oh, heavens, what a goose I was once! But life has destroyed my faith in men. Most of them are scoundrels—alas, it is the truth. Grünlich—” The name was, as always, like a summons to battle. She uttered it with her shoulders lifted and her eyes rolled up.