was concerned. But in other ways there was much reason for anxiety; for it had been all too plain, especially to the Consul’s observant eye, that not even their common loss would suffice to bring husband and wife together again.
There was nothing against Herr Permaneder’s good heart. He was truly shaken by the death of the child; big tears rolled down out of his bulging eyes upon his puffy cheeks and on into his frizzled beard. Many times he sighed deeply and gave vent to his favourite expression. But, after all, Tony felt that his “peace and quiet” had not suffered any long interruption. After a few evenings, he sought the Hofbräu House for consolation, and was soon, as he always said, “muddling along” again in his old, good-natured, comfortable, grumbling way, with the easy fatalism natural to him.
But from now on Tony’s letters never lost their hopeless, even complaining tone. “Oh, Mother,” she wrote, “why do I have to bear everything like this? First Grünlich and the bankruptcy, and then Permaneder going out of business—and then the baby! How have I deserved all these misfortunes?”
When the Consul read these outpourings, he could never quite forego a little smile: for, notwithstanding all the real pain they showed, he heard an undertone of almost comic pride, and he knew that Tony Buddenbrook, as Madame Grünlich or as Madame Permaneder, was and would remain a child. She bore all her mature experiences almost with a child’s unbelief in their reality, yet with a child’s seriousness, a child’s self-importance, and, above all, with a child’s power to throw them off at will.
She could not understand how she had deserved her misfortunes; for even while she mocked at her mother’s piety, she herself was so full of it that she fervently believed in justice and righteousness on this earth.
Poor Tony! The death of her second child was neither the last nor the hardest blow that fell upon her. As the year 1859 drew to a close, something frightful indeed happened.
365
