Another time, his life had been saved from danger by water, when he had gone to Bergen, as a young man. The account read:
“At high water, when the freight boats of the Northern Line are in, we have great difficulty getting through the press to our landing. I was standing on the edge of the scow, with my feet on the tholepins, leaning my back against the sailboat, trying to get the scow nearer in, when, as luck would have it, the oak tholepins broke, and I went head over heels into the water. The first time I came up, nobody was near enough to get hold of me; the second time, the scow went over my head. There were plenty of people there anxious to save me, but they had to keep the sailboat and the scow off, so that I should not come up under them; and all their shoving would probably have been in vain if a rope had not suddenly broken on one of the sailboats belonging to the Line, so that she swung further out; and this, by the grace of God, gave me room enough to come up in free water. It was only the top of my head, with the hair, that they saw; but it was enough, for they were all lying on their stomachs with their heads sticking out over the scow, and the man at the bow grabbed me by the hair, and I got hold of his arm. He was in an unsafe position himself and could not hold me, but he gave a yell, and they all took hold of him around the waist and pulled. I hung on, though he bit me to make me let go. So they got me in at last.” There followed a long prayer of thanksgiving, which the Consul reread with tear-wet eyes.
On another page he had said: “I could write much more, were I minded to reveal the passions of my youth. …” The Consul passed over this, and began to read here and there from the period of his marriage and the birth of his first child. The union, to be frank, could hardly be called a love-match. His father had tapped him on the shoulder and pointed out to him the daughter of the wealthy Kröger, who could bring the firm a splendid marriage portion. He had accepted the situation with alacrity; and from the first moment had honoured his wife as the mate entrusted to him by God.
After all, his father’s second marriage had been of much the same kind.
“ ‘A kind Papa, a worthy man.’ ”
He could still hear old Johann softly humming in the bedroom. What a pity he had so little taste for those old records! He stood with both feet firmly planted in the present, and concerned himself seldom with the past of his family. Yet in times gone by he too had made a few entries in the gilt-edged book. The Consul turned to those pages, written in a florid hand on rather coarse paper that was already yellowing with age. They were chiefly about his first marriage. Ah, Johann Buddenbrook must have adored his first wife, the daughter of a Bremen merchant! The one brief year it had been granted him to live with her was the happiest of his life—“l’année la plus heureuse de ma vie,” he had written there. The words were underlined with a wavy line, for all the world, even Madame Antoinette, to see.
Then Gotthold had come, and Josephine had died. And here some strange things had been written on the rough paper. Johann Buddenbrook must have openly and bitterly hated his child, even when, while still in the womb, it had caused its mother to faint and agonize under the lusty burden. It was born strong and active, while Josephine buried her bloodless face deeper in the pillows and passed away. Johann never forgave the ruthless intruder. He grew up vigorous and pushing, and Johann thought of him as his mother’s murderer. This was, to the Consul’s mind, incomprehensible. She had died, he thought, fulfilling the holy duty of a woman: “the love I bore to her would have passed over in all its tenderness to her child,” he said to himself. It had not been so. Later the father married again, his bride being Antoinette Duchamps, the daughter of a rich and much-esteemed Hamburg family, and the two had dwelt together with mutual respect and deference.
The Consul went on turning over the pages. There at the end were written the small histories of his own children: how Tom had had the measles, and Antonie jaundice, and Christian chickenpox. There were accounts of various journeys he had taken with his wife, to Paris, Switzerland, Marienbad. Then the Consul turned back to the front of the book, to some pages written in bluish ink, in a hand full of flourishes, on paper that was like parchment, but tattered and spotted with age. Here his grandfather Johann had set down the genealogy of the main branch of the Buddenbrooks. At the end of the sixteenth century, the first Buddenbrook of whom they had knowledge lived in Parchim, and his son had been a Senator of Grabau. Another Buddenbrook, a tailor by trade, and
