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, nothwithstanding 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 drew to a close, something frightful indeed happened.
IX
It was a day toward the end of —a cold autumn day with a hazy sky. It looked almost as if there would be snow, and a mist was rising, pierced through every now and then by the sun. It was one of those days, common in a seaport town, when a sharp northeast wind whistled round the massive church corners and influenzas were to be had cheap.
Consul Thomas Buddenbrook entered the breakfast-room toward midday, to find his Mother, with her spectacles on her nose, bent over a paper on the table.
“Tom,” she said; and she looked at him, holding the paper with both hands, as if she hesitated to show it to him. “Don’t be startled. But it is not very good news. I don’t understand—It is from Berlin. Something must have happened.”
“Give it to me, please,” he said shortly. He lost colour, and the muscles stood out on his temples as he clenched his teeth. His gesture as he stretched out his hand was so full of decision that it was as if he said aloud: “Just tell me quickly. Don’t prepare me for it!”
He read the lines still standing; one of his light eyebrows went up, and he drew the long ends of his moustache through his fingers. It was a telegram, and it said: “Don’t be frightened. Am coming at once with Erica. All is over. Your unhappy Antonie.”
“ ‘At once … at once,’ ” he said, with irritation, looking at the Frau Consul and giving his head a quick shake. “What does she mean by ‘at once’?”
“That is just a way of putting it, Tom; it doesn’t mean anything particular. She means by the next train, or something like that.”
“And from Berlin! What is she doing in Berlin? How did she get to Berlin?”
“I don’t know, Tom; I don’t understand it. The dispatch only came ten minutes ago. But something must have happened, and we must just wait to see what it is. God in his mercy will turn it all to good. Sit down, my son, and eat your luncheon.”
He took his chair, and mechanically he poured out a glass of porter.
“ ‘All is over,’ ” he repeated. And then “ ‘Antonie.’ How childish!”
He ate and drank in silence.
After a while the Frau Consul ventured to say: “It must be something about Permaneder, don’t you think, Tom?”
He shrugged his shoulders without looking up.
As he went away he said, with his hand on the doorknob, “Well, we must wait and see. As she is not likely to burst into the house in the middle of the night, she will probably reach here sometime tomorrow. You will let me know, won’t you?”
The Frau Consul waited from hour to hour. She had slept very badly, and in the night she rang for Ida Jungmann, who now slept in the back room of the entresol. She had Ida make her some eau sucrée; and she sat up in bed for a long time and embroidered. And now the forenoon passed in nervous expectancy. When the Consul came to second breakfast, he said that Tony could not arrive before the train from Buchen. At that hour the Frau Consul seated herself in the landscape-room and tried to read, out of a book with a black leather cover decorated with a gold palm-leaf.
It was a day like its predecessor: cold, mist, wind. The stove crackled away behind its wrought-iron screen. The old lady trembled and looked out of the window whenever she heard a wagon. At , when she had stopped watching and almost stopped thinking about her daughter, there was a stir below in the house. She hastily turned toward the window and wiped away the damp with her handkerchief. Yes, a carriage had stopped below, and someone was coming up the steps.
She grasped the arms of her chair with both hands
