Thus, when, in the summer of , 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 reinstall 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 hand-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 anyone 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
