What was it that Thomas Buddenbrook feared? Nothing—nothing to put a name to. If there had only been something tangible, some simple, brutal fact, something to defend himself against! He envied people the simplicity of their conceptions. For while he sat there in torments, with his head in his hands, he knew all too well that “betrayal,” “adultery,” were not words to describe the singing things, the abysmally silent things, that were happening up there.
He looked up sometimes at the grey gables, at the people passing by, at the jubilee present hanging above his desk with the portraits of his forefathers: he thought of the history of his house, and said to himself that this was all that was wanting: that his person should become a byword, his name and family life a scandal among the people. This was all that was lacking to set the crown upon the whole. And the thought, again, almost did him good, because it was a simple, comprehensible, normal thought, that one could think and express—quite another matter from this brooding over a mysterious disgrace, a blot upon his family ’scutcheon.
He could bear it no more. He shoved back his chair, left the office, and went upstairs. Whither should he go? Into the salon, to be greeted with unembarrassed slight condescension by Herr von Throta, to ask him to supper and be refused? For one of the worst features of the case was that the lieutenant avoided him, refused all official invitations from the head of the house, and confined himself to the free and private intercourse with its mistress.
Should he wait? Sit down somewhere, perhaps in the smoking-room, until the lieutenant went, and then go to Gerda and speak out, and call her to account? Ah, one did not speak out with Gerda, one did not call her to account. Why should one? Their alliance was based on mutual consideration, tact, and silence. To become a laughingstock before her, too—no, surely he was not called upon to do that. To play the jealous husband would be to grant that outsiders were right, to proclaim a scandal, to cry it aloud. Was he jealous? Of whom? Of what? Alas, no! Jealousy—the word meant action: mistaken, crazy, wrong action, perhaps, but at least action, energetic, fearless, and conclusive. No, he only felt a slight anxiety, a harassing worry, over the whole thing.
He went into his dressing-room and bathed his face with eau-de-cologne. Then he descended to the music-room, determined to break the silence there, cost what it would. He laid his hand on the doorknob—but now the music struck up again with a stormy outburst of sound, and he shrank back.
One day in such an hour, he was leaning over the balcony of the second floor, looking down the well of the staircase. Everything was quite still. Little Johann came out of his room, down the gallery steps, and across the corridor, on his way to Ida Jungmann’s room. He slipped along the wall with his book, and would have passed his father with lowered eyes, and a murmured greeting; but the Senator spoke to him.
“Well, Hanno, and what are you doing?”
“Studying my lessons, Papa. I am going to Ida, to have her hear my translation—”
“Well, and what do you have tomorrow?”
Hanno, still looking down, made an obvious effort to give a prompt, alert, and correct answer to the question. He swallowed once and said, “We have Cornelius Nepos, some accounts to copy, French grammar, the rivers of North America, German theme-correcting—”
He stopped and felt provoked with himself; he could not remember any more, and wished he had said and and let his voice fall, it sounded so abrupt and unfinished. “Nothing else,” he said as decidedly as he could, without looking up. But his father did not seem to be listening. He held Hanno’s free hand and played with it absently, unconsciously fingering the slim fingers.
And then Hanno heard something that had nothing to do with the lessons at all: his father’s voice, in a tone he had never heard before, low, distressed, almost imploring: “Hanno—the lieutenant has been more than two hours with Mamma—”
Little Hanno opened wide his gold-brown eyes at the sound: and they looked, as never before, clear, large, and loving, straight into his father’s face, with its reddened eyelids under the light brows, its white puffy cheeks and long stiff moustaches. God knows how much he understood. But one thing they both felt: in the long second when their eyes met, all constraint, coldness, and misunderstanding melted away. Hanno might fail his father in all that demanded vitality, energy and strength. But where fear and suffering were in question, there Thomas Buddenbrook could count on the devotion of his son. On that common ground they met as one.
He did not realize this—he tried not to realize it. In the days that
