VIII
Wars and rumours of war, billeting and bustle! Prussian officers tread the parquetry floors of Senator Buddenbrook’s bel-étage, kiss the hand of the lady of the house, and frequent the club with Christian, who is back from Öynhausen. In Meng Street Mamsell Severin, Riekchen Severin, the Frau Consul’s new companion, helps the maids to drag piles of mattresses into the old garden-house, which is full of soldiers.
Confusion, disorder, and suspense reign. Troops march off through the gate, new ones come in. They overrun the town; they eat, sleep, fill the ears of the citizens with the noise of rolling drums, commands, and trumpet calls—and march off again. Royal princes are fêted, entry follows entry. Then quiet again—and suspense.
In the late autumn and winter the victorious troops return. Again they are billeted in the town for a time, are mustered out and go home—to the great relief of the cheering citizens. Peace comes—the brief peace, heavy with destiny, of the year .
And between two wars, little Johann played. Unconscious and tranquil, with his soft curling hair and voluminous pinafore frocks, he played in the garden by the fountain, or in the little gallery partitioned off for his use by a pillared railing from the vestibule of the second storey—played the plays of his four and a half years—those plays whose meaning and charm no grown person can possibly grasp: which need no more than a few pebbles, or a stick of wood with a dandelion for a helmet, since they command the pure, powerful, glowing, untaught and unintimidated fancy of those blissful years before life touches us, when neither duty nor remorse dares to lay upon us a finger’s weight, when we may see, hear, laugh, dream, and feel amazement, when the world yet makes upon us not one single demand; when the impatience of those whom we should like so much to love does not yet torment us for evidence of our ability to succeed in the impending struggle. Ah, only a little while, and that struggle will be upon us—and they will do their best to bend us to their will and cut us to their pattern, to exercise us, to lengthen us, to shorten us, to corrupt us. …
Great things happened while little Hanno played. The war flamed up, and its fortunes swayed this way and that, then inclined to the side of the victors; and Hanno Buddenbrook’s native city, which had shrewdly stuck to Prussia, looked on not without satisfaction at wealthy Frankfort, which had to pay with her independence for her faith in Austria.
But with the failure in of a large firm of Frankfort wholesale dealers, immediately before the armistice, the firm of Johann Buddenbrook lost at one fell sweep the round sum of twenty thousand thaler.
Part VIII
I
When Herr Hugo Weinschenk—in his buttoned-up frock-coat, with his drooping lower lip and his narrow black moustaches, which grew, in the most masculine way imaginable, right into the corners of his mouth; with both his fists held out in front of him, and making little motions with his elbows at about the height of his waist—when Herr Hugo Weinschenk, now for some time Director of the City Fire Insurance Company, crossed the great entry in Meng Street and passed, with a swinging, pompous stride, from his front to his back office, he gave an impressive impersonation of an energetic and prosperous man.
And Erica Grünlich, on the other hand, was now twenty years old: a tall, blooming girl, fresh-coloured and pretty, full of health and strength. If chance took her up or down the stairs just as Herr Weinschenk passed that way—and chance did this not seldom—the Director took off his top-hat, displaying his short black hair, which was already greying at the temples, minced rather more than ever at the waist of his frock-coat, and greeted the young girl with an admiring glance from his bold and roving brown eye. Whereat Erica ran away, sat down somewhere in a window, and wept for hours out of sheer helpless confusion.
Fräulein Grünlich had grown up under Therese Weichbrodt’s care and correction: her thoughts did not fly far afield. She wept over Herr Weinschenk’s top-hat, the way he raised his eyebrows at sight of her and let them fall; over his regal bearing and his balancing fists. Her mother, Frau Permaneder, saw further.
Her daughter’s future had troubled her for years; for Erica was at a disadvantage compared with other young girls of her age. Frau Permaneder not only did not go into society, she was actually at war with it. The conviction that the “best people” thought slightingly of her because of her two divorces, had become almost a fixed idea; and she read contempt and aversion where probably there was only indifference. Consul Hermann Hagenström, for instance, simple and liberal-minded man that he was, would very likely have been perfectly glad to greet her on the street; his money had only increased his joviality and good nature. But she stared, with her head flung back, past his “goose-liver-paté” face, which, to use her own strong language, she “hated like the plague”—and
