BUDDENBROOKS
so quickly, so frightfully quickly, that he would have liked to cling to every moment, not to let it escape; to lengthen every breath he drew of the sea-air; to taste every second of his joy.
But the time went on, relentless: in rain and sun, sea-wind and land-wind, long spells of brooding warmth and endless noisy storms that could not get away out to sea and went on for ever so long. There were days on which the north-east wind filled the bay with dark green floods, covered the beach with seaweed, mussels, and jelly-fish, and threatened the bathing-huts. The turbid, heavy sea was covered far and wide with foam. The mighty waves came on in awful, awe-inspiring calm, and the under side of each was a sharp metallic green; then they crashed with an ear-splitting roar, hissing and thundering along the sand. There were other days when the west wind drove back the sea for a long distance, exposing a gently rolling beach and naked sandbanks everywhere, while the rain came down in torrents. Heaven, earth, and sea flowed into each other, and the driving wind carried the rain against the panes so that not drops but rivers flowed down, and made them impossible to see through. Then Hanno stayed in the salon of the Kurhouse and played on the little piano that was used to play waltzes and schottisches for the balls and was not so good for improvising on as the piano at home: still one could sometimes get amusing effects out of its muffled and clacking keys. And there were still other days, dreamy, blue, windless, broodingly warm, when the blue flies buzzed in the sun above the Leuchtenfield, and the sea lay silent and like a mirror, without stir or breath. When there were only three days left Hanno said to himself, and to everybody else, that the time remaining was just as long as a Whitsuntide holiday; but, incontestable as this reckoning was, it did not convince even himself. He knew now that the man in the worsted coat was right, and that they would, in very truth,
