Then came the ferry, and Israelsdorfer Avenue, Jerusalem Hill, and the Castle Field, on the right side of which rose the walls of the prison where Uncle Weinschenk was. Then the carriage rolled along Castle Street and over the Koberg, crossed Broad Street, and braked down the steep decline of Fishers’ Lane. There was the red house-front with the bow-window and the white caryatides; and as they went from the midday warmth of the street into the coolness of the stone-flagged entry the Senator, with his pen in his hand, came out of the office to greet them.
Slowly, slowly, with secret tears, little Johann learned to live without the sea; to lead an existence that was frightened and bored by turns; to keep out of the way of the Hagenströms; to console himself with Kai and Herr Pfühl and his music.
The Broad Street Buddenbrooks and Aunt Clothilde, directly they saw him again, asked him how he liked school after the holidays. They asked it teasingly, with that curiously superior and slighting air which grown people assume toward children, as if none of their affairs could possibly be worthy of serious consideration; but Hanno was proof against their questions.
Three or four days after the homecoming, Dr. Langhals, the family physician, appeared in Fishers’ Lane to observe the results of the cure. He had a long consultation with the Frau Senator, and then Hanno was summoned and put, half undressed, through a long examination of his “status praesens,” as Dr. Langhals called it, looking at his fingernails. He tested Hanno’s heart action and measured his chest and his lamentable muscular development. He inquired particularly after all his functions, and lastly, with a hypodermic syringe, took a drop of blood from Hanno’s slender arm to be tested at home. He seemed, in general, not very well satisfied.
“We’ve got rather brown,” he said, putting his arm around Hanno as he stood before him. He arranged his small black-felled hand upon the boy’s shoulder, and looked up at the Frau Senator and Ida Jungmann. “But we still look very down in the mouth.”
“He is homesick for the sea,” said Gerda Buddenbrook.
“Oh, so you like being there?” asked Dr. Langhals, looking with his shallow eyes into Hanno’s face. Hanno coloured. What did Dr. Langhals mean by his question, to which he plainly expected an answer? A fantastic hope rose up in him, inspired by the belief that nothing was impossible to God—despite all the worsted-coated men there were in the world.
“Yes,” he brought out, with his wide eyes full upon Dr. Langhals’ face. But after all, it seemed, the physician had nothing particular in mind when he asked the question.
“Well, the effect of the bathing and the good air is bound to show itself in time,” Dr. Langhals said. He tapped little Johann on the shoulder and then put him away, with a nod toward the Frau Senator and Ida Jungmann—a superior, benevolent nod, the nod of the omniscient physician, used to have people hanging on his lips. He got up, and the consultation was at an end.
It was Aunt Antonie who best understood his yearning for the sea, and the wound in his heart that healed so slowly and was so likely to bleed afresh under the strain of everyday life. Aunt Antonie loved to hear him talk about Travemünde, and entered freely into his longings and enthusiasm.
“Yes, Hanno,” she said, “the truth is the truth, and Travemünde is and always will be a beautiful spot. Till I go down to my grave I shall remember the weeks I spent there when I was a slip of a girl—and such a silly young girl! I lived with people I was fond of, and who seemed to care for me; I was a pretty young thing in those days—though I’m an old woman now—and full of life and high spirits. They were splendid people, I can tell you, respectable and kindhearted and straight-thinking; and they were cleverer and better educated, too, than any I’ve known since, and they had more enthusiasm. Yes, my life seemed very full when I lived with them, and I learned a great deal which I’ve never forgotten—information, beliefs, opinions, ways of looking at things. If other things hadn’t interfered—as all sorts of things did, the way life does, you know—I might have learned a great deal more from them. Shall I tell you how silly I was in those days? I thought I could get the pretty star out of the jellyfish, and I carried a quantity home with me and spread them in the sun on the balcony to dry. But when I looked at them again, of course there was nothing but a big wet spot, and a smell of rotten seaweed.”
IV
In the beginning of the year the Senate pardoned Hugo Weinschenk, and the former Director left prison, six months before his time was up.
Frau Permaneder, if she had told the truth, would have admitted that she was not so very glad. She had been living peacefully with her daughter and granddaughter in Linden Place, and had for society the house in Fishers’ Lane and her friend Armgard
