He stood beside the bier and looked at the motionless white figure stretched out there severe and solemn, amid white satin. This was not Grandmamma. There was her Sunday cap with the white silk ribbons, and her red-brown hair beneath it. But the pinched nose was not hers, nor the drawn lips, nor the sharp chin, nor the yellow, translucent hands, whose coldness and stiffness one could see. This was a wax-doll—to dress it up and lay it out like that seemed rather horrible. He looked across to the landscape-room, as though the real Grandmamma might appear there the next minute. But she did not come: she was dead. Death had turned her forever into this wax figure that kept its lids and lips so forbiddingly closed.
He stood resting on his left leg, the right knee bent, balancing lightly on the toe, and clutched his sailor knot with one hand, the other hanging down. He held his head on one side, the curly light-brown locks swaying over the temples, and looked with his gold-brown, blue-encircled eyes in brooding repugnance upon the face of the dead. His breath came long and shuddering, for he kept expecting that strange, puzzling odour which all the scent of the flowers sometimes failed to disguise. When the odour came, and he perceived it, he drew his brows still more together, his lip trembled, and the long sigh which he gave was so like a tearless sob that Frau Permaneder bent over and kissed him and took him away.
And after the Senator and his wife, and Frau Permaneder and Erica, had received for long hours the condolences of the entire town, Elisabeth Buddenbrook, born Kröger, was consigned to earth. The out-of-town families, from Hamburg and Frankfort, came to the funeral and, for the last time, received hospitality in Meng Street. And the hosts of the sympathizers filled the hall and the landscape-room, the corridor and the pillared hall; and Pastor Pringsheim of St. Mary’s, erect among burning tapers at the head of the coffin, turning his face up to heaven, his hands folded beneath his chin, preached the funeral sermon.
He praised in resounding tones the qualities of the departed: he praised her refinement and humility, her piety and cheer, her mildness and her charity. He spoke of the Jerusalem evenings and the Sunday-school; he gilded with matchless oratory the whole long rich and happy earthly course of her who had left them; and when he came to the end, since the word “end” needed some sort of qualifying adjective, he spoke of her “peaceful end.”
Frau Permaneder was quite aware of the dignity, the representative bearing, which she owed to herself and the community in this hour. She, her daughter Erica, and her granddaughter Elisabeth occupied the most conspicuous places of honour, close to the pastor at the head of the coffin; while Thomas, Gerda, Clothilde, and little Johann, as likewise old Consul Kröger, who had a chair to sit in, were content, as were the relatives of the second class, to occupy less prominent places. Frau Permaneder stood there, very erect, her shoulders elevated, her black-bordered handkerchief between her folded hands; and her pride in the chief role which it fell to her lot to perform was so great as sometimes entirely to obscure her grief. Conscious of being the focus of all eyes, she kept her own discreetly cast down; yet now and again she could not resist letting them stray over the assembly, in which she noted the presence of Julchen Möllendorpf, born Hagenström, and her husband. Yes, they had all had to come: Möllendorpfs, Kistenmakers, Langhals, Överdiecks—before Tony Buddenbrook left her parental roof forever, they had all gathered here, to offer her, despite Grünlich, despite Permaneder, despite Hugo Weinschenk, their sympathy and condolences.
Pastor Pringsheim’s sermon went on, turning the knife in the wound that death had made: he caused each person present to remember his own dead, he knew how to make tears flow where none would have flowed of themselves—and for this the weeping ones were grateful to him. When he mentioned the Jerusalem evenings, all the old friends of the dead began to sob—excepting Madame Kethelsen, who did not hear a word he said, but stared straight before her with the remote air of the deaf, and the Gerhardt sisters, the descendants of Paul, who stood hand in hand in a corner, their eyes glowing. They were glad for the death of their friend, and could have envied her but that envy and unkindness were foreign to their natures.
Poor Mademoiselle Weichbrodt blew her nose all the time, with a short, emphatic sound. The Misses Buddenbrook did not weep. It was not their habit. Their bearing, less angular than usual, expressed a mild satisfaction with the impartial justice of death.
Pastor Pringsheim’s last “amen” resounded, and the four bearers, in their black three-cornered hats, their black cloaks billowing out behind them with the swiftness of their advance, came softly in and put their hands upon the coffin. They were four lackeys, known to everybody, who were engaged to hand the heavy dishes at every large dinner in the best circles, and who drank Möllendorpf’s claret out of the carafes, between the courses. But, also, they were indispensable at every funeral of the first or second class, being of large experience in this kind of work. They knew that the harshness of this moment, when the coffin was laid hold upon by strange hands and borne away from the survivors, must be ameliorated by tact and swiftness. Their movements were quick, agile, and noiseless; hardly had anyone time to be sensible of the pain of the situation, before they had lifted the burden from the bier to their shoulders, and the flower-covered casket swayed away smoothly and with decorum through the pillared hall.
The ladies pressed tenderly about Frau Permaneder and her daughter to offer their sympathy. They took her hand and murmured, with drooping eyes, precisely no
