Chapter Four

      It was not simply the weakness of age that made Madame Antoinette Buddenbrook take to her lofty bed in the bed-chamber of the entresol, one cold January day after they had dwelt some six years in Meng Street. The old lady had remained hale and active, and carried her head, with its clustering white side-curls, proudly erect to the very last. She had gone with her husband and children to most of the large dinners given in the town, and presided no whit less elegantly than her daughter-in-law when the Buddenbrooks themselves entertained. But one day an indefinable malady had suddenly made itself felt—at first in the form of a slight intestinal catarrh, for which Dr. Grabow prescribed a mild diet of pigeon and French bread. This had been followed by colic and vomiting, which reduced her strength so rapidly as to bring about an alarming decline.

      Dr. Grabow held hurried speech with the Consul, outside on the landing, and another doctor was called in consultation—a stout, black-bearded, gloomy-looking man who began going in and out with Dr. Grabow. And now the whole atmosphere of the house changed. They went about on their tip-toes and spoke in whispers. The wagons were no longer allowed to roll through the great entry-way below. The family looked in each other’s eyes and saw there something strange. It was the idea of death that had entered, and was holding silent sway in the spacious rooms.

      But there was no idle watching, for visitors came: old Senator Duchamps, the dying woman’s brother, from Hamburg, with his daughter; and a few days later, the Consul’s sister from Frankfort and her husband, who was a banker. The illness lasted fourteen or fifteen days, during which the guests lived in the house, and Ida Jungmann had her hands full attending to the bedrooms and providing heavy breakfasts, with shrimps and port wine. Much roasting and baking went on in the kitchen.

      Upstairs, Johann Buddenbrook sat by the sick-bed, his old Netta’s limp hand in his, and stared into space with his brows knitted and his lower lip hanging. A clock hung on the wall and ticked dully, with long pauses between; not so long, however, as the pauses between the dying woman’s fluttering breaths. A black-robed sister of mercy busied herself about the beef-tea which they still sought to make the patient take. Now and then some member of the family would appear at the door and disappear again.

      Perhaps the old man was thinking how he had sat at the death-bed of his first wife, forty-six years before. Perhaps he recalled his frenzy of despair and contrasted it with the gentle melancholy which he felt now, as an old man, gazing into the face of his old wife—a face so changed, so listless, so void of expression. She had never given him either a great joy or a great sorrow; but she had decorously played her part beside him for many a long year—and now her life was ebbing away.

      He was not thinking a great deal. He was only looking with fixed gaze back into his own past life and at life in general. It all seemed to him now quite strange and far away, and he shook his head a little. That empty noise and bustle, in the midst of which he had once stood, had flowed away imperceptibly and left him standing there, listening in wonder to sounds that died upon his ear. “Strange, strange,” he murmured.

      Madame Buddenbrook breathed her last brief, effortless sigh; and they prayed by her side in the dining-room, where the service was held; and the bearers lifted the flower-covered coffin to carry it away. But old Johann did not weep. He only gave the same gentle, bewildered head-shake, and said, with the same half-smiling look: “Strange, strange!” It became his most frequent expression. Plainly, the time for old Johann too was near at hand.

      He would sit silent and absent in the family circle; sometimes with little Clara on his knee, to whom he would sing one of his droll catches, like

      “The omnibus drives through the town”

      or perhaps

      “Look at the blue-fly a-buzzin’ on the wall.”

      But he might suddenly stop in the middle, like one aroused out of a train of thought, put the child down on the floor, and move away, with his little head-shake and murmur: “Strange, strange!” One day he said: “Jean—it’s about time, eh?”

      It was soon afterward that neatly printed notices signed by father and son were sent about through the town, in which Johann Buddenbrook senior respectfully begged leave to announce that his increasing years obliged him to give up his former business activities, and that in consequence the firm of Johann Buddenbrook, founded by his late father anno 1768, would as from that day be transferred, with its assets and liabilities, to his son and former partner Johann Buddenbrook as sole proprietor; for whom he solicited a continuance of the confidence so widely bestowed upon him. Signed, with deep respect, Johann Buddenbrook—who would from now on cease to append his signature to business papers.

      These announcements were no sooner sent out than the old man refused to set foot in the office; and his apathy so increased that it took only the most trifling cold to send him to bed, one March day two months after the death of his wife. One night more—then came the hour when the family gathered round his bed and he spoke to them: first to the Consul: “Good luck, Jean, and keep your courage up!” And then to Thomas: “Be a help to your Father, Tom!” And to Christian: “Be something worth while!” Then he was silent, gazing at them all; and finally, with a last murmured “Strange!” he turned his face to the wall. …

      To the very end, he did not speak of Gotthold, and the latter encountered with silence the Consul’s written summons to his father’s death-bed. But early the next morning, before the announcements were sent out,