Buddenbrooks/Volume 2/Part 7/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
Our desires and our performance are conditioned by certain needs of our nervous systems which are very hard to define in words. What people called Thomas Buddenhrook’s “vanity”—his care for his personal appearance, his extravagant dressing—was at bottom not vanity hut something else entirely. It was, originally, no more than the effort of a man of action to be certain, from head to toe, of the adequacy and correctness of his bearing. But the demands made by himself and by others upon his talents and his capacities were constantly increased. He was overwhelmed by public and private affairs. When the Senate sat to appoint its committees, one of the main departments, the administration of the taxes, fell to his lot. But tolls, railways, and other administrative business claimed his time as well; and he presided at hundreds of committees that called into play all the capacities he possessed: he had to summon every ounce of his flexibility, his foresight, his power to charm, in order not to wound the sensibilities of his elders, to defer constantly to them, and yet to keep the reins in his own hands. If his so-called vanity notably increased at the same time, if he felt a greater and greater need to refresh himself bodily, to renew himself, to change his clothing several times a day, all this meant simply that Thomas Buddenbrook, though he was barely thirty-seven years old, was losing his elasticity, was wearing himself out fast.
When good Dr. Grabow begged him to relax a little, he answered, “Oh, my dear Doctor, I haven’t reached that point yet!” By which he meant that he still had an interminable deal of work to do before he arrived at the goal and could settle back to enjoy himself. The truth was, he hardly believed himself in such a condition. Yet it drove him on, it left him no peace. Even when he seemed to rest, as he sat with the paper after dinner, a thousand ideas whirled about in his brain, while the veins stood out on his temples, and he twisted the ends of his moustaches with a certain still intensity of passion. He concentrated with equal violence whether the subject of his thought was a business manœuvre, a public speech, or a decision to renew his entire stock of body linen, in order to be sure that he had enough, for a while, at least.
If such wholesale buying afforded him passing relief and satisfaction, he could indulge himself in it without scruple, for his business at this time was as brilliant as ever it had been in his grandfather’s day. The repute of the firm grew, not only in the town but round about, and throughout the whole community he continued to be held in ever greater regard. His talents were admitted on all hands, with admiration or envy as the case might be; while he himself wrestled ceaselessly, at times despairingly, to evolve an order and method of work which should enable him to overtake the flights of his own restless imagination.
Thus, when, in the summer of 1863, Senator Buddenbrook went about with his mind full of plans for the building of a great new house, it was not arrogance which impelled him. He was driven by his own inability to be quiet—which his fellow-burghers would have been right in ascribing to his “vanity”—for it was another manifestation of the same thing. To make a new home, and a radical change in his outward life; to pack up, to re-install himself afresh, to weed out all the accumulations of bygone years and set aside everything old or superfluous: all this, even in imagination, gave him feelings of freshness, newness, spotlessness, stimulation. All of which he must have craved indeed, for he attacked the plan with great enthusiasm, and already had his eye on a suitable location.
There was a property of considerable extent at the lower end of Fishers’ Lane. The house, grey with age, in bad repair, was offered for sale on the death of its owner, an ancient spinster, the relic of a forgotten family, who had dwelt there alone. On this piece of land the Senator thought to build his house; and he surveyed it with a speculative eye when he passed the spot on his way to the harbour. The neighbourhood was pleasant enough—good burgher-houses, the most modest among them being the narrow little façade opposite, with a small flower-shop on the ground floor.
He threw himself into the affair. He made a rough estimate of the expense involved, and though the sum he fixed provisionally was by no means a small one, he felt he could compass it without undue effort. But then he would suddenly have the thought that the whole thing was a senseless folly, and confess to himself that his present house had plenty of room for himself, his wife, their child, and their servants. But the half-conscious cravings were stronger; and in the desire to have them strengthened and justified from outside, he first revealed his plan to his sister.
“Well, Tony, what do you say to it? The whole house is a sort of band-box, isn’t it?—and the winding stair is really a joke. It isn’t quite the thing, is it? and now that you’ve had me made Senator—in a word, don’t you think I owe it to myself?”
Ah, in the eyes of Madame Permaneder, what was there he did not owe to himself? She was full of practical enthusiasm. She crossed her arms on her breast and walked up and down with her shoulders raised and her head in the air.
“Of course you do, Tom; goodness gracious, yes! What possible objection could there be? And when you have married an Arnoldsen, with a hundred thousand thaler to boot—I’m very proud to be the first you’ve told it to. It was lovely of you. And if you do do it, Tom, why, you must do it well, that’s what I say. It must be grand.”
“H’m, well, yes, I agree with you. I’m willing to spend something on it. I’ll have Voigt, and we’ll go over the plans together. Voigt has a great deal of taste.”
The second opinion which Thomas called in was Gerda’s. She praised the idea unreservedly. The confusion of moving would not be pleasant, but the prospect of a large music-room with good acoustic properties impressed her most happily. As for the old Frau Consul, she was quite prepared to think of the new house as a logical consequence of all the other blessings which had fallen to her lot, and to give thanks to God therefor, accordingly. Since the birth of the heir, and the recent election, she gave freer expression to her motherly pride, and had a way of saying “my son, the Senator,” which the Broad Street Buddenbrooks found most offensive.
These aging spinsters felt that all too little shadow set off the sunshine through which Thomas's outward life ran its brilliant course. It was no great consolation—at the Thursday family gatherings—to pour contempt on poor, good-natured Clothilde. As for Christian—Christian, through the good offices of Mr. Richardson, his former chief, had found a situation in London, whence he had lately telegraphed a fantastic desire to marry Fräulein Puvogel, an idea upon which his mother had firmly set her foot—Christian now belonged, quite simply, to Jacob Kröger’s class, and was, as it were, a dead issue. They consoled themselves, to some extent, with the little weaknesses of the old Frau Consul and Frau Permaneder. They would bring the conversation round to the subject of coiffures: the Frau Consul was capable of saying, in the blandest way, that she always wore “her” hair very simply, whereas it was plain to any one gifted by God with intelligence, and certainly to the Misses Buddenbrook, that the immutable red-blonde hair under the old lady’s cap could no longer by any stretch be called “her” hair. Still more gratifying was it to get Cousin Tony started on the subject of those nefarious persons who had formerly had an influence on her life. Teary Trietschke! Grünlich! Permaneder! Hagenström!—Tony, when she was egged on to it, would utter these names into the air like so many little trumpetings of disgust, with her shoulders well up. They had a sweet sound in the ears of the daughters of Uncle Gotthold.
They could not dissimulate, and they would accept no responsibility for omitting to say that little Johann was frightfully slow about learning to walk and talk. They were really quite right: it was an admitted fact that Hanno—this was the nickname adopted by the Frau Senator for her son—at a time when he was able to call all the members of his family by name with fair correctness, was incapable of pronouncing the names Friederike, Henriette, and Pfiffi so that any one could understand what he said. And at fifteen months he had not taken a single step alone. The Misses Buddenbrook, shaking their heads pessimistically, declared that the child would be halt and tongue-tied to the end of his days.
They later admitted the error of their gloomy prophecy; but nobody, in fact, denied that Hanno was a little backward. His early infancy was a struggle for life, and his family was in constant anxiety. At birth he had been too feeble to cry out; and soon after the christening a three-day attack of cholera-infantum was almost enough to still for ever the little heart set pumping, in the first place, with such difficulty. But he survived; and good Dr. Grabow did his best, by the most painstaking care and nourishment, to strengthen him for the difficult period of teething. The first tiny white point had barely pricked through the gum, when the child was attacked by convulsions, which repeated themselves with greater and greater violence, until again the worst was to be feared. Once more the old doctor speechlessly pressed the parents’ hands. The child lay in profound exhaustion, and the vacant look in the shadowy eyes indicated an affection of the brain. The end seemed almost to be wished for.
But Hanno regained some little strength, consciousness returned; and though the crisis which he had survived greatly hindered his progress in walking and talking, there was no longer any immediate danger to be feared. The child was slender of limb, and rather tall for his age. His hair, pale brown and very soft, began to grow rapidly, and fell waving over the shoulders of his full, pinafore-like frocks. The family likenesses were abundantly clear, even now. From the first he possessed the Buddenbrook hand, broad, a little too short, but finely articulated, and his nose was precisely the nose of his father and great-grandfather, though the nostrils would probably remain more delicate. But the whole lower part of his face, longish and narrow, was neither Buddenbrook nor Kröger, but from the mother’s side of the house. This was true of the mouth in particular, which, when closed, began very early to wear an anxious, woebegone expression that later matched the look of his strange, gold-brown, blue-shadowed eyes.
So he began to live: brooded over by his father’s reserved tenderness, clothed and nurtured under his mother’s watchful eye; prayed over by Aunt Antonie, presented with tops and hobby-horses by the Frau Consul and Uncle Justus; and when his charming little perambulator appeared on the streets, it was looked after with interest and expectation. Madame Decho, the stately nurse, had attended the child up to now; but it had been settled that when they moved into the new house, not she, but Ida Jungmann, should move in with them, and the latter’s place with the old Frau Consul be filled by somebody else.
Senator Buddenbrook carried out his plans. He had no difficulty in obtaining title to the property in Fishers’ Lane. The Broad Street house was turned over to Gosch the broker, who dramatically declared himself prepared to assume the task of disposing of it. Stephan Kistenmaker, who had a growing family, and, with his brother Eduard, made good money in the wine business, bought it at once. Herr Voigt undertook the new building, and soon there was a clean plan to unroll before the eyes of the family on Thursday afternoons, when they could, in fancy, see the facade already before them: an imposing brick façade with sandstone caryatides supporting the bow-window, and a flat roof, of which Clothilde remarked, in her pleasant drawl, that one might drink afternoon coffee there. The Senator planned to transfer the business offices to his new building, which would, of course, leave empty the ground floor of the house in Meng Street. But here also things turned out well: for it appeared that the City Fire Insurance Company wanted to rent the rooms by the month for their offices—which was quickly arranged.
Autumn came, and the grey walls crumbled to heaps of rubbish, and Thomas Buddenbrook’s new house rose above its roomy cellars, while winter set in and slowly waned again. In all the town there was no pleasanter topic of conversation. It was “tip-top”—it was the finest dwelling-house far and wide. But it must cost like the deuce—the old Consul would never have spent money so recklessly. Thus the neighbours, the middle-class dwellers in the gabled houses, looking out at the workmen on the scaffoldings, enjoying the sight of the rising walls, and speculating on the date of the carpenters’ feast.
It came at length, and was celebrated with due circumstance. Up on the flat-topped roof an old master mason made the festal speech and flung the champagne bottle over his shoulder, while the tremendous wreath, woven of roses, green garlands, and gay-coloured leaves, swayed between standards, heavily in the breeze. The workmen’s feast was held at a neighbouring inn, at long tables, with beer, sandwiches, and cigars; and Senator Buddenbrook and his wife and his little son on Madame Decho’s arm, walked through the narrow space between the tables and bowed his thanks at the cheers they gave him.
When they got outside, they put little Hanno hack into his carriage, and Thomas and Gerda crossed the road to have another look at the red façade with the white caryatides. They stood before the flower-shop with the narrow door and the poor little show-window, in which only a few pots of onions stood on a green glass slab. Iwersen, the proprietor, a blond giant of a man, in a woollen jacket, was in the doorway with his wife. She was of a quite different build, slender and delicate, with a dark, southern-looking face. She held a four- or five-year-old boy by one hand, while with the other she was pushing a little carriage back and forth, in which a younger child lay asleep; and she was plainly expecting a third blessing.
Iwersen made a low, awkward bow; his wife, continuing to push the little carriage hack and forth, looked calmly and observantly at the Frau Senator with her narrow black eyes, as the lady approached them on her husband’s arm.
Thomas paused and pointed with his walking-stick at the great garland far above them.
“You did a good job, Iwersen,” said he.
“No, Herr Sen’tor. That’s the wife’s work. She’s the one fer these affairs.”
“Oh,” said the Senator, raised his head with a little jerk, and gave, for a second, a clear friendly look straight into Frau Iwersen’s face. Then, without adding a word, he courteously waved his hand, and they moved on their way.