When you saw them together you felt that here was a rapidly aging man, already a little heavy, with his young wife at his side. Thomas Buddenbrook was going off very much, and this despite the now almost laughable vanity by which he kept himself up. On the other hand, Gerda had scarcely altered in these eighteen years. She seemed to be, as it were, conserved in the nervous coldness which was the essence of her being. Her lovely dark-red hair had kept its colour, the white skin its smooth texture, the figure its lofty aristocratic slimness. In the corners of her rather too small and close-set brown eyes were the same blue shadows. You could not trust those eyes. Their look was strange, and what was written in it impossible to decipher. This woman’s personality was so cool, so reserved, so repressed, so distant, she showed so little human warmth for anything but her music—how could one help feeling a vague mistrust? People unearthed wise old saws on the subject of human nature and applied them to Senator Buddenbrook’s wife. Still waters were known to run deep. Some people were slyer than foxes. And as they searched for an explanation, their limited imaginations soon led them to the theory that the lovely Gerda was deceiving her aging husband.
They watched, and before long they felt sure that Gerda’s conduct, to put it mildly, passed the bounds of propriety in her relations with Herr Lieutenant von Throta.
Renée Maria von Throta came from the Rhineland. He was second lieutenant of one of the infantry battalions quartered in the town. The red collar went well with his black hair, which he wore parted on the side and combed back in a high, thick curling crest from his white forehead. He looked big and strong enough, but was most unmilitary in speech and manner. He had a way of running one hand in between the buttons of his half-open undress coat and of sitting with his head supported on the back of his hand. His bows were devoid of military stiffness, and you could not hear his heels click together as he made them. And he had no more respect for his uniform than for ordinary clothes. Even the slim youthful moustaches that ran slantwise down to the corners of his mouth had neither point nor consistency; they only confirmed the unmartial impression he gave. The most remarkable thing about him was his eyes, so large, black, and extraordinarily brilliant that they seemed like glowing bottomless depths when he visited anything or anybody with his glance which was sparkling, ardent, or languishing by turns.
He had probably gone into the army against his will, or at least without any inclination for it; and despite his physique he was no good in the service. He was unregarded by his comrades, and shared but little in their interests—the interests and pleasures of young officers lately back from a victorious campaign. And they found him a disagreeable oddity, who did not care for horses or hunting or play or women. All his thoughts were bent on music. He was to be seen at all the concerts, with his languishing eyes and his lax, unmilitary, theatrical attitudes; on the other hand he despised the club and the casino and never went near them.
He made the duty calls which his position demanded; but the Buddenbrook house was the only one at which he visited—too much, people thought, and the Senator himself thought so too.
No one dreamed what went on in Thomas Buddenbrook. No one must guess. But it was just this keeping everybody in ignorance of his mortification, his hatred, his powerlessness, that was so cruelly hard! People were beginning to find him a little ludicrous; but perhaps their laugh would have turned to pity if they had even dimly suspected how much he was on his guard against their laughter! He had seen it coming long before, he had felt it beforehand, before anyone else had such an idea in his head. His much-carped-at vanity had its source largely in this fear. He had been first to see, with dismay, the growing disparity between himself and his lovely wife, on whom the years had not laid a finger. And now, since the advent of Herr von Throta, he had to fight with the last remnant of his strength to dissimulate his own misgivings, in order that they might not make him a laughingstock in the eyes of the community.
Gerda Buddenbrook and the eccentric young officer met each other, naturally, in the world of music. Herr von Throta played the piano, violin, viola, cello, and flute, and played them all unusually well. Often the Senator became aware of an impending visit when Herr von Throta’s man passed the office-door with his master’s cello-case on his back. Thomas Buddenbrook would sit at his desk and watch until he saw his wife’s friend enter the house. Then, overhead in the salon, the harmonies would rise and surge like waves, with singing, lamenting, unearthly jubilation; would lift like clasped hands outstretched toward Heaven; would float in vague ecstasies; would sink and die away into sobbing, into night and silence. But they might roll and seethe, weep and exult, foam up and enfold each other, as unnaturally as they liked! They were not the worst. The worst, the actually torturing thing, was the silence. It would sometimes reign so long, so long, and so profoundly, above there in the salon, that it was impossible not to feel afraid of it. There would be no tread upon the ceiling, not even a chair would move—simply a soundless, speechless, deceiving, secret silence. Thomas Buddenbrook would sit there, and the torture was such that he sometimes softly groaned.
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