Buddenbrooks (50 page)

seemed to him that he was no longer sitting with his family, but hovering above them somewhere and looking down upon them from a great distance. "I am going to die," he said to himself. And he would rail Hanno to him repeatedly and say: "My son, I may be taken away from you sooner than you think. And then you will be called upon to take my place. I was called upon very young myself. Can you understand that I am troubled by your indifference? Are you now resolved in your mind? Yes? Oh, 'yea* is no answer! Again you won't answer me! What I ask you is, have you resolved, bravely and joyfully, to lake up your burden? Do you im-agine that you won't have to work, that you will have enough 253 money without? You will have nothing, or very, very little; you will be thrown upon your own resources. If you want to live, and live well, you will have to work hard, harder even than I did." But this was not all. It was not only the burden of his son's future, the future of his house, that weighed him down. There was another thought that took command, that mastered him and spurred on his weary thoughts. And it was this: As soon as he began to think of his mortal end not as an in-definite remote event, almost a contingency, but as something near and tangible for which it behoved him to prepare, he began to investigate himself, to examine his relations to death and questions of another world. And his earliest researches in this kind discovered in himself an irremediable unpre-paredness. Thomas Buddenbrook had played now and then through-out his life with an inclination to Catholicism. But he was at bottom, none the less, the born Protestant: full of the true Protestant's passionate, relentless sense of personal responsi- bility. No, in the ultimate things there was, there could be, no help from outside, no mediation, no absolution, no soothing-syrup, no panacea. Each one of us, alone, unaided, of his own powers, must unravel the riddle before it was too late, must wring for himself a pious readiness before the hour of death, or else part in despair. Thomas BudJenbrook turned away, desperate and hopeless, from his only son, in whom he had once hoped to live on, renewed and strong,] and began in fear and haste to seek far the truth which must' somewhere exist for him. It was high summer of the year 1874. Silvery, high-piled clouds drifted across the deep blue sky above the garden's dainty symmetry. The birds twittered in the boughs of the walnut tree, the fountain splashed among the irises, and the scent of the lilacs floated on the breeze, mingled, alas, with the smell of hot syrup from a sugar-factory nearby. To the astonishment of the staff, the Senator now often left his work during office hours, to pace up and down in the garden with his hands behind his back, or to work about, raking the gravel paths, tying up the rose-bushes, or dredging mud out of the fountain. His face, with its light eyebrows, seemed serious and attentive as he worked; but his thoughts travelled far away in the dark on their lonely, painful path. Sometimes he sealed himself on the little terrace, in the pavilion now entirely overgrown with green, and stared across the garden at the red brick rear wall of the house. The air was warm and sweet; it seemed as though the peaceful sounds about him strove to lull him to sleep. Weary of loneliness and silence and staring into space, he would close his eyes now and then, only to snatch them open and harshly frighten peace away. "I must think," he said, almost aloud. "I must arrange everything before it is too late." He sat here one day, in the pavilion, in the little reed rocking-chair, and read for four hours, with growing absorption, in a book which had, partly by chance, come into his hands. After second breakfast, cigarette in mouth, he had 255 unearthed it in the smoking-room, from behind some stately volumes in the corner of a bookcase, and recalled that he had bought it at a bargain one day years ago. It was a large volume, poorly printed on cheap paper and poorly sewed; the second part, only, of a famous philosophical system. He had brought it out with him into the garden, and now he turned the pages, profoundly interested. He was filled with a great, surpassing satisfaction. It soothed him to see how a master-mind could lay hold on this strong, cruel, mocking thing called life and enforce it and condemn it. His was the gratification of the sufferer who has always had a bad conscience about his sufferings and con-cealed them from the gaze of a harsh, unsympathetic world, until suddenly, from the hand Df an authority, he receives, as it were, justification and license for his suffering--justi-fication before the world, this best of all possible worlds which the master-mind scornfully demonstrates to be the worst of all possible ones! He did not understand it all. Principles and premises re-mained unclear, and his mind, unpractised in such readings, was not able to follow certain trains of thought. But this very alternation of vagueness and clarity, of dull incompre-hension with sudden bursts of light, kept him enthralled and breathless, and the hours vanished without his looking up from his book or changing his position in his chair. He had left some pages unread in the beginning of the book, and hurried on, clutching rapidly after the main thesis, reading only this or that section which held his attention. Then he struck on a comprehensive chapter and read it from beginning ID end, his lips tightly closed and his brows drawn together with a concentration which had long been strange to him, completely withdrawn from the life about him. The chapter was called "On Death, and its Relation to our Per-sonal Immortality." Only a few lines remained when the servant came through the garden at four o'clock to call him to dinner. He nodded, read the remaining sentences, closed the book, and looked about him. He felt that his whole being had unaccountably expanded, and at the same time there clung about his senses a profound intoxication, a strange, sweet, vague allurement which somehow resembled the feelings of early love and longing. He put away the book in the drawer of the garden table. His hands were cold and unsteady, his head was burning, and he felt in it a strange pressure and strain, as though something were about to snap. He was not capable of consecutive thought. What was this? He asked himself the question as he mounted the stairs and sat down to table with his family. What is it? Have I had a revelation? What haa happened to me, Thomas Buddenbrook, Councillor of this government, head of the grain firm of Johann Buddenbrook? Was this message meant for me? Can I bear it? I don't know what it was: I only know it is too much for my poor brain. He remained the rest of the day in this condition, this heavy lethargy and intoxication, overpowered by the heady draught he had drunk, incapable of thought. Evening came. His head was heavy, and since he could hold it up no longer, he went early to bed. He slept for three hours, more pro-foundly than ever before in his life. And, then, suddenly, abruptly, with a start, he awoke and felt as one feels on realizing, suddenly, a budding love in the heart. He was alone in the large sleeping chamber; for Gerda slept now in Ida Jungmann's room, and the latter had moved into one of the three balcony rooms to be nearer little lohann. It was dark, for the curtains of both high windows were tightly closed. He lay on his back, feeling the oppression of the stillness and of the heavy, warm air, and looked up into the darkness. And behold, it waa^as though the darkness were rent from betore his eyee, aa if the whole wall of the night parted wide and disclosed an immeasurable, boundless prospect of light. "Pshall live!" said Thomas Buddenbrook, almost aloud, and 257 BUDDENBROOK5 felt his breast shaken with inward sobs. "This is the reve-lation: that I shall live! For it will live--and that this it is not I is only an illusion, an error which death will make plain. This is it, this is it! Why?" But at this question the night closed in again upon him. He saw, he knew, he understood, no least particle more; he let himself sink deep in the pillows, quite blinded and exhausted by the morsel of truth which had been vouchsafed. He lay still and waited fervently, feeling himself tempted to pray that it would come again and irradiate his darkness. And it came. With folded hands, not daring to move, he lay and looked. What was Death? The answer came, not in poor, large-sounding words: he felt it within him, he possessed it. Death was a joy, so great, so deep that it could be dreamed of only in momenta of revelation like the present. It was the re-turn from an unspeakably painful wandering, the correction of a grave mistake, the loosening of chains, the opening of doors--it put right again a lamentable mischance. End, dissolution! These were pitiable words, and thrice pitiable he who used them! What would end, what would dissolve? Why, this his body, this heavy, faulty, hateful incumbrance, which prevented him from being something other and better. Was not every human being a mistake and a blunder'? Was he not in painful arrest from the hour of his birth? Prison, prison, bonds and limitations everywhere! The hu-man being stares hopelessly through the barred window of bin personality at the high walls of outward circumstance, till Death comes and calls him home to freedom! Individuality?--All, all that one is, can, and has, seems poor, grey, inadequate, wearisome; what onn is not, can not, baa not, that is what one looks at with a longing desire thai becomes love because it fears to become hate. I brar in myself the seed, the tendency, the possibility of all capacity and all achievement. Where should I be were I not here? Who, what, how could I be, if I were not I--if this my external self, my consciousness, did not cut me off from those who are not I? Organism! Blind, thoughtless, pitiful eruption of the urging will! Better, indeed, for the will to float free in spaceless, timeless night than for it to languish in prison, illumined by the feeble, flickering light of the intellect! Have I hoped to live on in my son? In a personality yet more feeble, flirkering, and timorous than my own? Blind, childish folly! What can my son do for me--what need have I of a son? Where shall I be when I am dead? Ah, it is so brilliantly clear, so overwhelmingly simple! I shall be in all those who have ever, do ever, or ever shall say "I"-especially, however, in all those who say it most fully, po-tently, and gladly! Snmpwherp in the world a child is growing up, strong, well-grown, adequate, able to develop its powers, gifted, un-troubled, pure, joyous, relentless, one of those beings whose glance heightens the joy of the joyous and drives the unhappy ID despair. He is my son. He is I, myself, soon, soon; as soon as Death frees me from the wretched delusion that I am not hr as wrll as myself. Have I ever hated life--pure, strong, relentless life? Folly and misconception! I have but hated myself, because I could not bear'it. I love you, I love you all, you blessed, and soon, soon, I shall cease to be cut off from you all by the narrow bonds of myself; soon will that in me which loves you be free and be in and with you--in and with you all. He wept, hr pressed his face into the pillows and wept, shaken through and through, lifted up in transports by a joy without compare for its exquisite sweetness. This it was which since yesterday had filled him as if with a heady, in-toxicating draught, had worked in his heart in the darkness of the night and roused him like a budding love! And in so far as he could now understand and recognize--not in worda and consecutive thoughts, but in sudden rapturous illumina-259 lions of his inmost being--he was already free, already ac-tually released and free of all natural as well as artificial limitations. The walls of his native town, in which he had wilfully and consciously shut himself up, opened out; they opened and disclosed to his view the entire world, of which he had in his youth seen this or that small portion, and of which Death now promised him the whole. The deceptive perceptions of space, time and history, the preoccupation with a glorious historical continuity of life in the person of his own descendants, the dread of some future final dissolution and decomposition--all this his spirit now put aside. He was no longer prevented from grasping eternity. Nothing be-gan, nothing left off. There was only an endless present; and that power in him which loved life with a Inve so ex-quisitely swet't and yearning--the power of which his per-son was only the unsuccessful expression--that power would always know how to find acress to this present. "I shall live," he whispered into his pillow. He wept, and in the next moment knew not why. His brain stood still, the vision wag quenched. Suddenly there was nothing more--he lay in dumb darkness. "It will come bark," he as-sured himself. And before sleep inexorably wrapped him round, he swore to himself never to let go this precious treasure, but to read and study, ID learn its powers, and to make inalienably his own the whole conception of the universe out of which his vision sprang. But that could not be. Even the next day, as he woke with a faint feeling of shame at the emotional extravagances of the night, he suspected that it would be hard to put these beautiful designs into practice. He rose late and had to go at once to take part in the debate at an assembly of burgesses. Public business, the civic life lhat went on in the gabled narrow streets of this middle-sized trading city, consumed his energies once more. He still planned to take up the wonderful reading again where he had left it off. But he questioned of himself whether the events of that night had been anything firm and permanent; whether, when Death approached, they would be found to hold thrir ground. His mid rile-class instincts rose against them--and his vanity, too: the fear of being eccentric, of playing a laughable role. Had he really seen these things? And did they really become him--him, Thomas Buddenbrook, head of the firm of Johann Buddenbrook? He never succeeded in looking again into the precious volume--to say nothing of buying its other parts. His days were consumed by nervous pedantry: harassed by a thousand details, all of them unimportant, he was too weak-willed to arrive at a reasonable and fruitful arrangement of his time. \farlv two weeks after that memorable afternoon he gave it up--and ordered the maid-servant to fetch the book from the drawer in the garden table and replace it in the bookcase. And thus Thomas Buddenbrook, who had held his hands stretched imploringly upward toward the high ultimate truth, sank now weakly back to the images and conceptions of his childhood. He strove to call back that personal God. the Father of all human beings,