The faithful devotion of the good Ida could not be repaid with gold. She had been in the family now for more than thirty years. She had cared for the previous generations with self-abnegation; but Hanno she carried in her arms, lapped him in tender care, and loved him to idolatry. She had a naive, unshakable belief in his privileged station in life, which sometimes went to the length of absurdity. In whatever touched him she showed a surprising, even an unpleasant effrontery. Suppose, for instance, she took him with her to buy cakes at the pastry-shop: she would poke among the sweets on the counter and select a piece for Hanno, which she would coolly hand him without paying for it—the man should feel himself honoured, indeed! And before a crowded show-window she would ask the people in front, in her west-Prussian dialect, pleasantly enough, but with decision, to make a place for her charge. He was so uncommon in her eyes that she felt there was hardly another child in the world worthy to touch him. In little Kai’s case, the mutual preference of the two children had been too strong for her. Possibly she was a little taken by his name, too. But if other children came up to them on the Mill-wall, as she sat with Hanno on a bench, Fräulein Jungmann would get up almost at once, make some excuse or other—it was late, or there was a draught—and take her charge away. The pretexts she gave to little Johann would have led him to believe that all his contemporaries were either scrofulous of full of “evil humours,” and that he himself was a solitary exception; which did not tend to increase his already deficient confidence and ease of manner.
Senator Buddenbrook did not know all the details; but he saw enough to convince him that his son’s development was not taking the desired course. If he could only take his upbringing in his own hands, and mould his spirit by daily and hourly contact! But he had not the time. He perceived the lamentable failure of his occasional efforts: he knew they only strained the relations between father and son. In his mind was a picture which he longed to reproduce: it was a picture of Hanno’s great-grandfather, whom he himself had known as a boy: a clear-sighted man, jovial, simple, sturdy, humorous—why could not little Johann grow up like that? If only he could suppress or forbid the music, which was surely not good for the lad’s physical development, absorbed his powers, and took his mind from the practical affairs of life! That dreamy nature—did it not almost, at times, border on irresponsibility?
One day, some three quarters of an hour before dinner, Hanno had gone down alone to the first storey. He had practised for a long time on the piano, and now was idling about in the living-room. He half lay, half sat, on the chaise-longue, tying and untying his sailor’s knot, and his eyes, roving aimlessly about, caught sight of an open portfolio on his mother’s nut-wood writing-table. It was the leather case with the family papers. He rested his elbow on the sofa-cushion, and his chin in his hand, and looked at the things for a while from a distance. Papa must have had them out after second breakfast, and left them there because he was not finished with them. Some of the papers were sticking in the portfolio, some loose sheets lying outside were weighted with a metal ruler, and the large gilt-edged notebook with the motley paper lay there open.
Hanno slipped idly down from the sofa and went to the writing-table. The book was open at the Buddenbrook family tree, set forth in the hand of his various forbears, including his father; complete, with rubrics, parentheses, and plainly marked dates. Kneeling with one knee on the desk-chair, leaning his head with its soft waves of brown hair on the palm of his hand, Hanno looked at the manuscript sidewise, carelessly critical, a little contemptuous, and supremely indifferent, letting his free hand toy with Mamma’s gold-and-ebony pen. His eyes roved all over these names, masculine and feminine, some of them in queer old-fashioned writing with great flourishes, written in faded yellow or thick black ink, to which little grains of sand were sticking. At the very bottom, in Papa’s small, neat handwriting that ran so fast over the page, he read his own name, under that of his parents: Justus, Johann, Kaspar, born . He liked looking at it. He straightened up a little, and took the ruler and pen, still rather idly; let his eye travel once more over the whole genealogical host; then, with absent care, mechanically and dreamily, he made with the gold pen a beautiful, clean double line diagonally across the entire page, the upper one heavier than the lower, just as he had been taught to embellish the page of his arithmetic book. He looked at his work with his head on one side, and then moved away.
After dinner the Senator called him up and surveyed him with his eyebrows drawn together.
“What is this? Where did it come from? Did you do it?”
Hanno had to think a minute, whether he really had done it; and then he answered “Yes.”
“What for? What is the matter with you? Answer me! What possessed you, to do such a mischievous thing?” cried the Senator, and struck Hanno’s cheek lightly with the rolled-up notebook.
And little Johann stammered, retreating, with his hand to his cheek, “I thought—I thought—there was nothing else coming.”
VIII
Nowadays, when the family gathered at table on Thursdays, under the calmly smiling gaze of the immortals on the walls, they had a new and serious theme. It called out on the faces of the female Buddenbrooks, at least the Broad Street ones, an expression of cold restraint. But it highly excited Frau Permaneder, as
